ext_13364 ([identity profile] swan-tower.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] starlady 2011-12-01 09:27 pm (UTC)

Oh, I didn't mean it wasn't an issue. (Especially how to handle indigenous non-human magical creatures; that's a question for any setting other than the canonical one, and even in Britain you can have arguments with how Rowling chose to do it. Though I'll grant her that the story acknowledged there being problems with treating non-humans as second-class citizens.)

The difference for me is that the game I want to run would deal very directly with the founding of the school (which means I need to work it out), and the historical context of that founding is one where it's implausible to say that the immigrant witches and wizards were all lovely open-minded people who worked with the local tribes etc. So what, is native magic some recently-added elective the kids can take, as a sign of the changing times? I dunno. (And of the various macro culture-complexes that make up the native United States, the northeast, where this school would be placed, is one of the ones I know the least about. So hell if I even know what that magic would look like.)

But for a law enforcement story, I don't feel the pressure to work out the last three hundred years; I can just deal with the present. And I would already be pushing back at some of Rowling's worldbuilding decisions anyway, from a non-racial angle as well as a racial one, because some of it (like wizards being pig-ignorant of basic Muggle life) makes no bloody sense, or bothers me in other ways. So I feel like I could more easily tell a story about a particular community that says "to hell with this elitist oh noes, we must hide magic from the Muggles so they don't ask us to solve all their problems bullshit; I'm going to help my people." Or whatever. I feel more flexible about how I handle the topic, is what it comes down to.

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