The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (a thread for Potterheads)

speaking of which does anyone know if the sparkledog one is still going on?

 

OH WOW that was. That was a terrible read.
The comma usage was so jarring, what the hell. Did she not have an editor look over this? JKR plz. Plz pay me, I will do editing and research for you. Plz.

Spoiler: re: Ilvermorny, got rambly, sorry

But my main beefs with the story of Ilvermorny are these:
--The transition of the house becoming a school makes no sense. Why the hell did all these Native American people spontaneously start sending their magical children to the house of a random white couple living in the woods? Why did they decide that wand-making was an important skill? Had they not made a conduit for their own magical powers yet? Why not? Are wands somehow superior to their methods? Why? How did they find out about her in the first place? How did they communicate? Was she horribly racist to all of them?? (Probably.) Did the castle they built start off more like a fort/trading village? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW

--JKR recycled so much story into this. The house format, the four houses representing their founders, the story of an Evil person hunting down someone else, the Power Of Love saving them (once again, because of babies. C'mon, JKR, why was it the babies' cries that woke the parents. Why couldn't it have been the love for their adopted children? I mean the one trying to wake them up was clearly distressed, you'd think a kid going "MOM, DAD, PLEASE WAKE UP THERE'S A SCARY LADY HERE AND SHE'S FIIGHTING MY BROTHER, YOUR OTHER SON, TO THE DEATH" would also do the trick but nope, gotta be babies.), the... everything. I'm really starting to suspect that JKR only had one good story in her and now she's just desperately trying to recolor it in a way that'll spark things up again. But it doesn't work because we want something new. And the original story only really worked because all of its individual parts fit (mostly) together with only a few hiccups--but changing one of those parts just kinda... makes the whole thing fall apart.

 

i read the novel she wrote under a different pen name and it was rather good, so i wouldn't say HP was her only good story, she's just..REALLY ovrdoing the copycat houses and not doing a whole hell of a lot of research at all. making wizarding lore worldwide would require a good team of writers. like. a team for every area. but that won't happen cause she's got it copywrited, so she is on her own making very unpleasant decisions

 

I was curious, so I ended up calculating the number of possible students at Ilvermorny. If I am doing the math right, the number is much too big for a single school, but at the same time it also keeps the option for alternate wizard high schools open. If anything, there's a big enough segment of the population to have at least four high schools, all nearly the same size as Plano East High School (largest graduating class of the year and one of the largest high schools in the country at 3000 student cap)

If a population of 61.5 million people in one country (the UK) leads to a wizarding society population of around 15,000, then it's about 4150 people per single wizards. Using that, the US (with a population of 318.9 million) has a wizarding world population of 76,800, of which 11,136 would be between the ages of 10 and 19. I prefer the idea of Ilvermorny being the wizards equivalent to Harvard, and perhaps even being several wizarding schools including the rough equivalent to college as part of the standard curriculum. If you expand the population to include those between 10 and 24, you end up with 16,281 students, give or take.

Plus this means a really easy fix for the issue about houses: schools outside of Ilvermorny either have no house structure, or have it based around the American Fraternity/Sorority structure instead of British school houses. Hell, that would be a really cool way of going about it, maybe 8 to 13 houses spread throughout half a dozen schools, the 'sorting' being a formality? It's much closer to an American system but also allows people to be excited because they are truly a member of the proud House Wolfjob.

Edit: This became a thing more out of my own curiosity than anything else at this point, after doing the math for Ilvermorny and the US Wizard population. I wanted to try and gauge the other Wizarding populations and how it would correlate to similar Wizarding schools. I am not doing Beaubaxton or Dumstrang, mostly because I am guessing their populations are probably similar to Hogwarts as seen in the books.

Japan's Wizarding population overall is 30,675, with a population under eighteen of around 4,878 or so. I ended up decreasing this to 4,000-ish for Mahoutokoro School of Magic (trying to gauge for how of the children are under the age of the required age limit of seven). This isn't... Super-unfeasible for a single school although it's extremely high. Perhaps the under-11 bracket has a separate school on campus for their lessons, if not separate schools for primary, middle school and high school students, of roughly around 1300-ish each? It's about the same rates as Hogwarts everywhere).

For Koldovstoretz and Russia in general, the general wizard population is around 34,578 with a student population of 5878. Even then, I do not remember if this is a population based on everyone under 18, or between 10 and 18, although I'm pretty sure it's the latter (Russia was easier to calculate than most anywhere else because of how they arranged their census info.)

In regards to Castelobruxo and Uagodou, I have not calculated the populations based around age yet, and don't intend to. Trying to find these demographics for one country is enough, but trying to find it for 14 or 58 separate countries is madness. But we do know that South America has a population of about 100,852 wizards, while Africa has 267,711. For Africa especially, there's going to be a larger percentage of that who are students since there's a massive population hike in Africa within the past two decades, so the fact there's just the one school sounds absolutely mad.

And this is ignoring things like China and India apparently not having wizarding schools, despite an estimated magical populous of 329,987 and 301,686 respectively. They each have more than both of the Americas COMBINED on students. Alternately, for some reason, these two massive countries are magical dead-zones, and there's no given reason why.

It makes most sense to just assume there's more schools than the ones listed by the International Confederation of Wizards, but they're dismissed as part of the 'correspondence courses' or 'poorly regulated and short-lived' schools that are not part of the great 11.

 

I also feel like the copycat houses are an attempt at extending the possible merch/gamefication of the Pottermore site. The thing most people really got excited about was the sorting test, and a lot of users only went there for the test+wand and nothing else. By that logic, a good way of extending that would be having 6 more tests that tell you what house you'd be wherever you might be in elsewhere, and what your house is like. And, depending on if any of the tests take off, just building up further WW adventures in whatever school got the largest amount of people taking it's test and getting it's merch besides Hogwarts.

 

@missoyashirou i think it's partially trying to hype pottermore up again and partially trying to get people excited for the american movie but its having the exact opposite effect on my tbh.

on the other hand wizard frats are a fucking hilarious concept. imagine the keggers. imagine the hazing.

and i'd totally join an american wizard school rp

 

... ? This is a strange thing to say! Owning the copyright to something doesn't mean you are the only one who can work on it, forever. You can hire people to do licensed work for that intellectual property. (See also: tie-in novels, Adventure Time comics, and the like.) Now I'm not familiar with UK copyright laws, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be so weird as to make a person lose their copyright on an IP altogether if they license a third party to do work for that IP. Case in point - Harry Potter movies made by not-Rowling exist.

 

There's already the Sage Academy RP, but if everyone's okay I could actually start developing BU College of Magic Arts or whatever I'll call it, if other people want to contribute.

Also i want to do things with Salem Witch's Institute

 

Wizard frats are the best idea because it is both believable American and so very Harry Potter. Insular communities of people with special privileges and no common sense doing incredibly stupid things because That's What We Do? So very, very Potterverse. :::PPP

 

...y'know, if Sage Academy kicks off again and BU kicks off, I bet we could do some crossovers

 

I'm into both yes plz reading the world building for SCA right now

 

Can I headcanon that american wizards utilize the compressed space thing way more?

 

I agree with this
"whoops, my locker broke, time to fit EVERYTHING I OWN in my itty bitty fancy backpack"

 

It probably gets used the most by people in high-population-density areas. Like Japanese wizards fitting a quite large apartment in a gap in brickwork in the middle of Tokyo. (And drunk Japanese wizards picking Muggles up and bringing them back to their place so the pickup-ee will be impressed at how nice of a place they can afford...)

 

american wizards in the middle of new york living in a penthouse apartment which is actually the crawl space above an office.

 

I approve

 

The dorms for the magic school are literally just... In corners.
The muggle classmates never seem to notice how these people will literally disappear behind lockers.

 

Exactly. And possibly doing the same thing while drunk. :::PPP (Is there a wizarding housing authority, I wonder?)

 

yessssssssssssssss
college students though. college students exploiting the hell out of this with "ah yes, small apartment! oh wait, HAHAHHA NOW IT'S HUGE"

or in lockers.
someone's dorm connects into a locker, they feel slightly awkward about this.
(if we play, I call that. XD)

 

Muggle student: "*stares*"
"I'm... shoving myself in the locker. You know, to save time."
Muggle student: "*still stares*"