Is there any Downside to Potterverse Magic?

[K. A. Pital]

I would argue that there is a very important difference between saying "magic/technology has limitations or downsides" and saying "magic/technology has the potential for misuse."

There is no obvious 'limitation' on, for example, firearms. They are simple to use. It is possible to hurt yourself accidentally with one, but moderately careful handling prevents this. They don't eat your soul, or at least no more so than any other weapon does. And yet, they have tremendous potential for misuse.

Magic that eats your soul just makes for better stories, do admit. If the Force was not what it was, a good deal of internal conflict would be removed from the series. Evil characters would be just evil. And... And nothing.

Technology that has no obvious downsides is a bit of a cop-out as well. But let us assume, for the sake of the story, that we don't need to see many downsides (except things like the Death Star being possible and technologically advanced Empire wiping out cute cuddly savages). It does not enrich the story by itself, this simplifies the story.

Thanks to the Force and the potency of internal conflict that is generated by the Dark Side - where every character is not above suspicion and anyone could fall to the Dark Side any time - this simplification does not damage Star Wars so much.

For a different space opera setting it would be, perhaps, quite bad to have limitless technology with no downsides. Especially if it helps to resolve key plot points in a Deus Ex Machina fashion.

[Simon_Jester]

Which is why I talk about the technology not being the point of the story, simply the medium by which the characters interact and travel through the wonders around them. Something else becomes the real driver of the action- perhaps a romance, or a political drama, or an ideological dispute.

Now, these other elements may be lacking in the Harry Potter novels, but that is a critique of them as novels, not a critique of all settings with high access to magic.

[Starglider]

A typical example of Stas's condition, where he cannot avoid seeing his personal, deeply nihilistic and rather bizarre views as universal human experience and artistic standards, despite countless rebuttals.

[madd0ct0r]

The last two books, badly summarised.
Spoiler

as Simon Jester notes, harry starts the series as an 11 year old brought up in the muggle world. So the first few books is basically him growing up and learning about basic magic. By Order of the Phoenix, Harry is pretty engrossed in ptsd and is sitting on that angry cusp of adulthood. Order of the Phoenix is the thickest of the books and one of the weakest imo.
The plot of the Half - Blood Prince is basically Dumbledore setting up Harry to pursue and destroy the Horcruxes. They confirm the existence of some and figure out which have been destroyed already - the diary in the chamber of secrets was one. Harry is convinced that Malfoy is up to something, and the readers are priveleged to know that Voldemort set him a task that he is expected to die trying to do. Snape swears an unbreakable oath to malfoy's mother to help and protect him.
The climax of the book is a surprise assault by deatheaters smuggled in by Malfoy.
Malfoy disarms a passive Dumbledore, but is unable to kill him. Snape finishes the job.


The deathly harrows has the golden trio on the run. They still have a number of horcruxes to identify and destroy before Voldemort can be killed. Info smuggled to them in Dumbledores will as well as flashes of insight Harry gets from Voldemort puts them on the trail of the deathly hallows too. These are three items supposedly gifted by Death to a trio of wizards. An invisibilty cloak, a stone that brings back the dead and a wand that can beat all others. The fairytale is the latter two items always bring calamity to their user. Naturally, Voldemort dismisses the cautionary tale and spends most of the book hunting for the Elder Wand.

Harry too gets obssed by the wand, both of them convinced their confrontation will be violent and wanting the better weapon. Over the struggles over the year he learns better, choosing to disarm voldy than increase the arms race, and the trio succeed in raiding the goblin bank to destroy another horcrux. The publicity of this raid tips old voldy off and he starts circleing, checking the different horcruxes to find they are destroyed. Meanwhile, Harry has learnt rather more of wand lore.

Wands are basically semi intelligent symbiotes. They will work for any wizard, but they will only respect one wizard as their master. Defeating a wizard in a duel and taking his wand is enough to shift their allegience. Voldemort takes the elder wand from dumbledores tomb, but the wand dosent recognise him as master. Not that Voldy cares, as far as he is concerned wands are obedient tools you point at people. Arrogance is his downfall.

Finally, Harry is given the final piece of information. That the backfired curse that destroyed voldemort the first time embedded a piece of voldemort's soul in harry, explaining the connection. Harry must die before voldy can. His friends who have died so far have died pointlessly.

By this point we're in the middle of the battle of hogwarts. Harry surrenders to the deatheaters, and, after some gloating, voldemort tries to kill him again. Harry wakes up in the space between the dead and the living. His sacrifice enacted the love clause for the other's protection. Voldemort's killing curse is also absorbed by his own soul fragment, destorying it as a horcrux. Harry has a nice chat with a vision of Dumbledore, who tells him about dumbledore's mistaken youth seeking power to change the world for the greater good, and how he and Grindlewald grew apart once dumbledore realised the damage the weakest take under such action.

Harry wakes up, faces Voldemort, neville destorys the final horcrux, completing the prophercy that voldy though applied to harry, and harry duels voldemort. Because of the work they've done to unravel his defences, voldy falls. The elder wand matters only as a distraction for voldy, a bauble of power compared to the actual strength of allies and love.

[K. A. Pital]

Well, the story has a better ending than expected.

Still, I've seen much better stories about magic when it carries a heavy price for its use/misuse, from LotR to Earthsea. Even Full Metal Alchemist seems better crafted.

[Zixinus]

It's not magic that has a price. It's power. You get magic, you get power. So there must be a price on that power (or so we like to think anyway). Magic is usually an allegory for power in fantasy to begin with.

The thing that people are really talking about in the price of magic is the element of sacrifice. Sacrifices are great for storytelling, they give drama and meaning.

That said, it does not have to be always a terrible, personal cost. It can be something that has down-payment or paid for in the past. Or one that is comparable to the price of other powers, like knowledge or authority.

Note that technology does have a price: infrastructure and the civilization required to make it. Lives devoted to making the components for the componenets, mining, refining, designing, making, etc.
Guns are a good example: they have mostly the attainable cost of money and training how to use it, but most of all it has the cost of ammunition. Go someplace where you can't get ammuntion and a gun is not much more than a clumsy metal-polymer club. If something broke, you need an armorer or someone equally good with mechanics to fix it. We don't usually think about that in stories because guns are common.
Which is kind of the point with Potterverse general magic: to the select that are wizards or otherwise part of the magical world, magic is common. Of course it does beg the question of where does magic come from and why are wizards what they are, but I haven't led the last two books.

[The Romulan Republic]

The origin of magic is never explained. Best guess is that its just a force that exists in nature, which some people have a genetic predisposition towards being able to manipulate.

[Elheru Aran]

Additionally, most of the HP history that we've been given so far (IIRC) doesn't go back much past the medieval period. Again IIRC, I want to say the oldest definite date we're given is roughly somewhere in the 1100s? Something like that.

Well, checking the HP wiki, Hogwarts was apparently established roughly ~993 AD. And further checking the Wiki, there frankly isn't very much there under 'first millennium AD' or 'B.C. era'. Apart from the obvious fact that Rowling wasn't interested in exploring magical prehistory exhaustively... it could be inferred that either magic was more rare and genetic in the past and thus tended to be confined to a few families, which would largely either hide within society or remove themselves from it. At some point-- probably once Hogwarts was established-- it started becoming more organized.

However we have established that witches and wizards can expect a greater lifespan in general than Muggles. As such (this is only my conjecture, I welcome opinions) it's quite possible that, aided by their magical medicine, they were capable of maintaining a lower birth rate, thus the magical population would have only grown very slowly. This would have permitted the magical community to spread their learning largely by word of mouth for centuries. However, once there got to be enough wizarding children that you could not be certain they were all learning magic properly or in a safe manner-- safety including not breaking important things like the existence of wizardry in the Muggle world-- there was a need for schools, and thus Hogwarts. It's possible that in early years, in addition to actual magical education, Hogwarts might have included basic literacy, thus beginning a 'recorded history' of the magical world after that point?

[Vendetta]

Magic that eats your soul just makes for better stories, do admit. If the Force was not what it was, a good deal of internal conflict would be removed from the series. Evil characters would be just evil. And... And nothing.

The price of power is the temptation to use it.

The Dark Side doesn't actually need to be a reified concept in Star Wars for the internal conflicts to be there. It's just a helpful allegorical tool which allows the film to express the internal conflict of the ways the Force can be misused, how tempting it is to do so, and how hard it is to stop once started.


In Harry Potter the downside to magic is that the ease of life it grants wizards in many ways (which are matched or exceeded in modern society but wouldn't have been even 60 years ago) has made wizarding society insular and vulnerable. A relatively small organisation of Death Eaters was able to completely upend the entire social structure and the wizards were unable to even think of reaching outside their own actually quite small circle of resources for help. As even Rowling said, gun beats wand most of the time, but the wizards were too stuck in their own ways to get some training and kit from SO19 that could have let them comprehensively shut down Voldemort's little game.

[The Romulan Republic]

Hmm...

Another way to put it might be...

Remember Hermione's line in the first book about how Snape's obstacle was brilliant because it relied on logic, and a lot of the most powerful wizards have no logic?

Of course, that's true of the populace in general, but the thing about magic is that you don't have to put any great intelligence or reason into it to be powerful. To invent new magic, probably, but not to master existing spells.

[Murazor]

As even Rowling said, gun beats wand most of the time

Bit off-topic, but I'd like to comment that the source of the "muggle with a shotgun" quote is the goddamn unicorn of Potter versus debating. Everyone knows the quote, but no one seems to know where it comes from.

[madd0ct0r]

just spent 15min on Pottermore. Didn't find it, but had it confirmed there's a Japanese school of wizardy, which is nice.

[The Romulan Republic]

As even Rowling said, gun beats wand most of the time

Bit off-topic, but I'd like to comment that the source of the "muggle with a shotgun" quote is the goddamn unicorn of Potter versus debating. Everyone knows the quote, but no one seems to know where it comes from.

This. This quote, or similar, has been cited ad nauseum, yet I do not recall ever once seeing a specific source for it.

I strongly suspect it is another fandom myth that has become so widely repeated that it is often conflated (either dishonestly or out of genuine ignorance) with canon.

[The_Saint]

I apologise if I ramble off topic but...

To paraphrase what the last few people have pointed out (and use a relevant quote), "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" and it is magic/the force/technology that grants this power. (This all corresponds nicely with the discussions and quotes elsewhere of "terrorists/freedom fighters" seeing themselves as the plucky heroes vs the evil empire/USA)

It is interesting that some of Tolkien's tales refer to the one ring as inherently evil and in other tales as the ring being utterly neutral but as a vessel or conduit for Sauron's evil. In a similar vein there are numerous Star Wars EU stories where people try and reconcile the light and dark sides into a Unifying Force. The writing theory as I see it being some writers trying to decide whether it's the force that corrupts the person, the person who corrupts the (use of the) force ... or unwritten (at least I don't remember it being said as such) the power given by the force that corrupts the person.


tldr; I prefer the theory of magic and/or technology being neutral and the power derived from using such is what corrupts. The fact that numerous authors try to shoehorn 'neutral' theories into classic good/evil theories makes me believe there is something plausible in this.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, you get two very different kinds of story depending on whether there is an aware force of evil and corruption that actively seeks to subvert people, or whether it's simply a case of a lot of people becoming evil when given power. Both types of story can be very, very good, though.

[Zixinus]

It can also be a case of both: the bad magic can be corrupting but it is manageable and still the character's choice to keep using it that really makes a problem.

Magic in stories is really a metaphor. The lure of abandoning morality in favor of revenge, practicality or necessity is always there. If morality was easy it wouldn't be so important.