He was abducted by Hagrid when he turned 11 so that would place him maybe around the fifth or sixth grade.
I don’t know if canonically there are math classes at Hogwarts.
The thought came to while I was watching the anime Mashle. If you are into Harry Potter and One-Punch Man I’d recommend giving it a watch.
Someone mentioned this community below; I wanted to highlight it.
Small promotion for !harrypotter@literature.cafe
You must log in or register to comment.
Small promotion for !harrypotter@literature.cafe
Please stop.
JK sees the continued support of her work as proof that her views are supported. She is doing active harm to people lives. I know it’s common to say seperate the art from the artist, but that only applies to the dead. Rowling is alive and using her profits to write hateful proganda and restrict healthcare from an already marginalized group. I’m not ever going to tell someone what they can and can’t read, just please recognize the harm it does by promoting her. It’s the same as promoting the works of David Duke.
Thank you.
Hello,
Thank you for your comment. That’s one of our main threads, “On the sensitive topic of being a Harry Potter fan while acknowledging JKR’s transphobia” https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/9633657, quoting https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-jk-rowling-transphobia-essay-49214964
Still, there may be a way to enjoy Harry Potter as a trans person or ally. Over the years, many fans have found creative ways to engage with the series’s magic while also acknowledging its creator’s bigotry. In her paper “Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling,” Jennifer Duggan, an associate professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway — says that it’s possible to interpret the text of Harry Potter itself in ways that would certainly horrify its writer. “My central thesis—one which has also been argued by other academics like Thomas Pugh and David Wallace — is that the Harry Potter novels are deeply queer,” she tells POPSUGAR. “I mean this in both senses of the term: they champion nonnormativity through the contrast of the ‘perfectly normal’ Dursleys and Harry, and they are, at their heart, a story about a boy with an ‘abnormality’ (as the Dursleys call his magic) who comes out of his cupboard under the stairs and discovers and finds and affinity for a hidden, colourful, queer world. I take this argument further to argue that the novels are easily read through a trans lens, since there is a focus in many of the books on shapeshifting, including several cross-gendered transformations.”
Fandom, she adds, can provide spaces where Harry Potter fans can explore the series’s queer undercurrents while celebrating their own sexualities. “From what I have observed, I have concluded that for the most part, the Harry Potter fandom continues to offer queer and trans fans a positive space,” she tells POPSUGAR. “The two main trends I have seen in fan works are an ‘answer hate with love’ reaction, in which fans focus on trans positivity, and so-called ‘spitefic,’ which are works that are framed as revenge on Rowling for the hurt she has caused. These works are usually trans-positive, too. That said, I fully understand why some fans feel they can no longer engage with the texts in any way.”
Link to the research paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10583-021-09446-9
Plot twist: jk is a selfhating queer and her subconsciousness wrote Harry Potter to break free without disappointing her self hating parents.
That’s an interesting theory. He literally comes out of a closet, after all.
Thank you for the reply, but I don’t see how that is relevant, you didn’t link to a queer fan fiction community.
Linking to a cis author who said that some fan fiction theoritcally helps some queer folk instead of listening to the trans community that is actively being hurt in substative ways by the celebration of Rowlings current work, not fan fictions, is sort of indicative of how much you actually care about this topic. Your link is filled promotion for her shows, art and discussion of Rowlings work. I’m sure you have been criticized before, but I feel like you are using an one-size-fits-all copy/paste as cover instead of actually engaging with what I, and the trans community, are saying.
I’m not going to argue, this isn’t how I wish to spend my time. All I can do is please ask you to stop and hope one day you will rethink what you’re doing.
The admin of the instance we host the community on is a queer Jewish man, who expressed his feeling about having that community on his instance in this comment: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/6746512
He is still okay with us having that community over there.
I don’t really engage in this community because of the discomfort Harry Potter generally brings me. I was honestly a bit relieved when it died.
The whole thing just upsets me honestly. Seeing the conflict is painful.
I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.
there’s a big difference between consuming public domain work made by awful people who no longer receive profit whilst consuming work by a woman who is actively engaging in political campaigns to make trans peoples lives worse with the profit she still receives.
Which makes it very different than Poe, Doyle or Seuess that were named in that thread. She is alive and well, and using her platform and fan base to produce more hateful texts. (Bad Blood)
The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism. His discomfort at the antisemitic tropes are entirely understandable, and while that is not something I am going to claim hurts me, it does seem to hurt Gabe.
As I said before, I’m not going to force you to do anything. Just please understand how you continued celebration of Rowling and her work is hurting others.
The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism.
That’s the first time I hear the treatment of Rita Skeeter is transphobic. James, Sirius and McGonagall are also able to shapeshift, and they are positive characters in the books.
For the house elves, the whole SPEW plot is designed to both make Ron (and the whole Wizard word as a whole) look stupid and bigoted, and Hermione a bit too self-righteous, as teenagers can be.
Relevant reference: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/122283/why-did-rowling-seemingly-make-light-of-the-house-elf-situation
I’ve seen several times that the fact that the society isn’t changed by the end of the last book as a critic, but do all work of fictions have to uphold their societies? Game of Thrones definitely isn’t becoming a democracy during the books, and Brigderton is as classist as it can be.
I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.
I reached out to him in private, I wasn’t going to copy our conversation as it is private.
I was very ready to move that community elsewhere, and I refrained from posting for a week before getting Gabe’s approval.
This response doesn’t address the legislation aspect of the critique. It’s an excellent response for if she were already dead and gone, but what about the harm that comes from supporting her now? Surely you have something to say about that, don’t you?
Hello,
You can see some initiatives that take the books away from her, such as this one
A trans artist resells Harry Potter books with new covers that omit Rowling’s name. Canadian printmaker and book artist Laur Flom, who is trans, garnered major attention when they began a project of buying secondhand Harry Potter books and replacing the covers with redesigned versions that don’t have J.K. Rowling’s name. Flom then resells the books for £140, according to Yahoo! News. In a TikTok from February 2022, Flom said, “My aim with this project is to engage critically and give an option to people who do still want to enjoy Harry Potter without supporting J.K. Rowling.”
A link to the version from this person, they look quite nice: https://laurflom.format.com/harry-potter-rebind
You mentioned legislation, I think that is an interesting point. If the books (and the HP universe in general) are so detrimental, shouldn’t they be condemned by countries court for xenophobia and transphobia? It seems strange to me that there are still 2 major amusement parks Harry Potter themed in the US, and a third one in London if you count the former shooting set, with thousands of visitors every year. That just seems so strange compared to the accusations the books face.
So that would put him only a couple years ahead of most republicans
They have arithmancy but Harry never took it AFAIK
Most of us only know 5th grade math
You don’t have to brag about it. Geez.
I thought you said Gaetz. He likes 'em at a fifth grade level.
Seems like someone reads at a 5th grade level too. :p
YEAH! Where’s the book where he just does algebra and other boring shit for 300 pages.
You don’t want to learn avada kepolynomials?
Who needs math when you have magic?
Who needs magic when we have science?
Science: Here’s why water is wet. Magic: I’m a dragon now.
Science: wow that is a nice animal you have there; have you seen out Large Hadron Collider, it accelerates clouds of particles up to close to the limit of causality and slams them into specially designed targets. We do this to probe the secrets of the universe at the edges of imagination and plausibility.
Magic: I can kill people by pointing my stick at them…
Science: yeah, we have that also…how big do yours get? We have a problem where we went too far and now can destroy the world, but because everyone has these weapons we live in an uneasy tension called mutually assured destruction, so no one uses their most powerful weapons for fear that others will also.
Magic: I can make it rain when I want.
Science: ok now that would be useful, you have to teach me how to do that.
I definitely need that magic! o.o
Imagine if scientists in-universe studied and quantified magic 🪄
If it can be studied, it’s not magic, it’s science.
Science is the process of converting magic into science
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
not to forget scientific alchemistry
Who needs ethics when you have magic?
Who needs magic when you have drugs?
“Arithmancy” is their name for math classes and is mentioned several times throughout the books. It is one of Hermione’s favorite subjects.
At one point, the real world evil witch that is JK Rowling suggested that Arithmancy is like dviniation, but with math, saying they use numbers to predict the future. I take this to mean that the wizarding community discovered calculus independently from the rest of the world and mistook it for a new form of magic.
In the games, arithmancy is portrayed as number puzzles that need to be solved.
number puzzles that need to be solved.
In JK Rowling’s mind the number puzzles are things like “How many genders are there?”
The correct answer, of course, is “Fuck you, JK Rowling, that’s how many.”
So crazy that a woman who liberally employed the Polyjuice Potion in her novels and had ghosts who would just wander through the restrooms to talk to you would take some of the most insanely conservative positions on changing your appearance or who should be allowed in the toilet.
Remember when Hagrid assigned his dragon the wrong gender at hatching?
Had to jog my memory, because I haven’t read these books in nearly 20 years.
But yeah. I think the Rowling of the mid-90s was relatively chill and fairly progressive, given the tone of her writing. It wasn’t until she got Disney-fied (or, I guess, Warner Brothers’d) that she took a turn. The novels really take a dive in book 5 and her political opinions just get nastier and nastier after that.
The Norberta reveal actually happens in Deathly Hallows. And frankly, I don‘t see a shift that is connected to the movies. What I actually observed was the overcompensation for criticism two books after the fact (remember Winky?) that Shaun described in his video essay.
The Norberta reveal actually happens in Deathly Hallows.
No wonder I don’t remember. That book was a fat blur.
And frankly, I don‘t see a shift that is connected to the movies.
I saw it more in Book 4 and 5, when her writing style changed from something akin to Roald Dahl into a more Twilight/Hunger Games esque YA dramady. She was in the middle of writing Book 4 when the first film premiered and ended up selling the rights to the movies before the fifth was officially started.
The size the books swelled, and you could tell there was a lot more editorial/ghost-writer punch ups happening along the way. What started as these cute little Christmas-y children’s stories mutated into enormous screenplays.
What I actually observed was the overcompensation for criticism two books after the fact
Once Rowling got on social media and started yapping her yap, I think it cast a shadow on the series. The stuff about goblin bankers being a stand-in for jews and the sloppy way she fumbled through Hermonie’s SPEW plotline took on an increasingly sinister cast as she got more vocal in the wake of her movie debuts.
Also not unlike Roald Dahl, the media comments forced people to re-contextualize a bunch of these fantasy tropes as legit derogatory views.
Whether they were there early on or whether they only really found their legs once Rowling started hanging out with a bunch of rich British freaks… idk. But they definitely became more obvious as she climbed the economic ladder.
She has been outspoken on the fact that her positions are basically due to personal trauma and nothing else
Why would you encourage more people to be sexually assaulted as a response to your own history?
“Billionaire has shitty beliefs. In other news, the weather in London is still complete ass.”
I’ve been to London, sometimes it’s a little sunny with some overcast…
Divination with maths is statistics.
Jesus Christ this book series is fucking stupid
It is but I’m not sure why they called the author a witch instead of a shitty author. For whatever stupid detail you find, the writing is 5x more awkward
Even a dragon would make more sense because of the wealth hoarding
It’s just fun, it’s not serious or hard fantasy. It could be much worse, a lot of people read Ayn Rand and think its good.
Almost like it was written with kids and preteens as the intended audience …
what type of pervert writes a book like that
It’s just like an izekai but for English reading children.
Isekai is nothing new. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are all “isekai”. JK is just a special kind of bad writer.
Hermione mentioned in the first book that wizards tend to absolutely suck at things that are typically Muggle, like logic, so it follows that they probably suck at math too.
deleted by creator
Logically, that does follow, but we’re talking about wizards here.
True, but their methods of learning do not differ significantly from that of muggles. They still need to take classes the same way we do, and this would need to learn maths and logic the same way too.
Whoosh?
That’s probably why wizards don’t run the bank 😂
deleted by creator
???
Reading is very common at Hogwarts and the wider wizarding world. Hogwarts has an extensive library, and most of their communications and news media are done over written mediums.
Contrast that to maths where the hardest thing most wizards would realistically have to do is basic money operations. Made even harder by their bonkers monetary system.
I think the OP meant that if they all stopped learning maths at 10, and there was no English class at Hogwarts, they probably stopped learning to read at 10 as well (well, the Muggles anyway, there’s no mention of how the Wizards learn anything before 11 I don’t think?).
There wouldn’t be additional English literature classes, sure, but by age 11 it’s mostly just practice and looking up words you don’t know anyway.
I think that’s a bit over simplified. Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare? There’s a reason we continue to teach English until a child leaves secondary/high school.
Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare?
The bigger question is, do they need to understand Shakespeare?
Shakespeare is important in UK Muggle culture, not so much elsewhere, including the wizarding world which very much has their own cultural icons.
They probably aren’t getting their spells from books that old either. The reason we don’t transpose Shakespeare to modern language is the loss of artistic intent in the process. Something that wouldn’t apply to purely factual books like a spell book.
Besides, they are expected to learn Latin; that’s where their spells come from.
She successfully brewed a complicated polyjuice potion that took months to make by just reading and following the instructions in the book when she was 12. She reads just fine.
But all wizard books are scribbled in crayon
lol. I don’t remember a single math, English or any other class mentioned.
There was Arithmancy, the Harry Potter wiki says that it was using numbers to predict the future. It was an elective and Harry didn’t take it.
The only other class that would have had math would be Astronomy, which was a required class for all students. The students are required to make star charts and such… Seems like rote memorization was the only thing taught. The wink says that the end of year 5 tests was filling in a blank star chart from memory.
They might get some English pointers in the dozens of essays they wrote, but since essays are graded on the length of the scroll… it becomes questionable.
I think everyone hated alchemy not because of Snape alone, but because it involves math too. Scaling the resulting doze of a potion, balancing it’s effects, predicting chemi-magical reactions of ingredients - it’s all math. And Severus was portrayed just like an average techie teaching a class of humame arts students.
arithmancy - which is pseudomaths in a sense…
I think you’re right. They probably don’t know math. I mean, what would they need it for? They probably don’t have to follow the laws of physics for the most part. If math is done it’s probably 100% recreational.
Around that age kids learn what negative numbers are. I feel like some of it might be important
According to the British government 5th grade math includes interpret negative numbers in context, count forwards and backwards with positive and negative whole numbers, including through 0.
Something like increasing quantites for lake more potions .
They just cast calcularmis.
My wife, who is a big potter fan, told me they take traditional classes as well, but they are shown off screen as they aren’t interesting to the story.
Using OP logic, none of these kids ever go to the bathroom either.
They do in the Chamber of Secrets.
“Arithmancy” is what they call their math disciplines and it’s mentioned a fair bit in the books, though understandably never really shown in the movies.
Pretty sure they explicitly talk about those kind of classes in the books. They don’t have scenes in them, but I remember Ron and Harry complaining about arithmetic, or mathematics, or something like that.
Isn’t arithmetic a class in Hogwarts and just a fancy word for maths (not a native speaker)? I think only Hermione takes it though and it’s only mentioned in the books.
arithmeticarithmancy
source :
Arithmancy | Harry Potter Wiki
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Arithmancy
Okay dude… Because of YOU I started watching Mashle and I’m not even big into anime. I’ve watched a few and like some occasionally…
Mashle is awesome. Damn/thank you.
That makes me glad I included that with the post
I’m just over here chuckling at your casual statement that Hagrid abducted Harry.
He broke down his door, mutilated his cousin, threatened his uncle, then lured Harry away with cake (which was eaten by said cousin).
I would trade maths knowledge for actual magic every single time. Maths basically was invented because of money & land, and that’s basically irrelevant with magic. Don’t need acres of land if you can have multiple wildlife reservations inside of a suitcase.
It’s honestly one of the best things about Harry Potter series: it leaves as much muggle crap out of it as possible.
Maths is the language of the universe. Show some god damned respect.
The universe has its language, and maths are the captions we can read not the true language. So no, you have some respect.
Oh dear, no. Not at all. No, not in the slightest. No. That’s not…
No.
