Yes, this.
And the thing is that as a writer I don't think this is terrible, or fully avoidable.
Like, if the audience could suddenly see directly into the wings at a stage play, it would also change things quite a bit.
And the thing is that as a writer I don't think this is terrible, or fully avoidable.
Like, if the audience could suddenly see directly into the wings at a stage play, it would also change things quite a bit.
https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/1439952030848671747
Fiction writers will never be able to create a fully realized, fully functional, living and breathing and completely detailed world for the same reason that cartographers don't build planets. The best you can do is be aware of where the spackle is and don't make it load-bearing.
So much this. "No-Maj" is the single most tweely British thing in the books.
https://twitter.com/libraryluna/status/1439954812616028160
Given how insular and tradition-heavy the wizarding world is, and how long wizards can live, and that they had options for travel better than slow, leaky ships, I don't think there's any reason to presume that US wizarding culture would have significantly diverged from the UK one
Like, I would expect US wizards to still have British accents and still think of themselves as being British, but if we assume the weird relish for pantomiming mass culture (while remaining wildly ignorant of muggle life) extended towards becoming Panto Yanks...
...then I think we'd see "muggles" get shortened to "mugs" or dimunitized to "mugsies" or something, not replaced with a "fast-paced" abbreviation that is the same number of syllables and slower off the tongue.
The country that says "spag bol" for "spaghetti Bolognese" is the country that would have landed on "no-maj". We just say spaghetti, which means we also lost the identity of a particular sauce/serving style, making it more of a freeform, freewheeling dish.
Two different countries decided that "perambulator" was too much of a mouthful to put up with. The British grabbed an axe and chopped off syllables until they got to "pram" (p'ram___) and we grabbed a thesaurus and got "stroller". Which is shorter and easier to say.
Between those two, it's definitely the country of prams that would find no-maj a natural thing to say.
I mean, yes, but as a counterpoint: Kevin Can Fuck Himself widened the lens on a sitcom world past the point of sustainability, and it was glorious.
https://twitter.com/mostlybree/status/1439967057378938883
Thank you. For my part, I resent it, both that she didn't care enough to think about it, and that I do.
https://twitter.com/JackDeeth/status/1439967036520779779
US: Spaghetti.
Italian-Americans: Spaghetti wit gravy.
UK: Well I mean it's not really quite a proper spag bol, is it?
Italians: *seething*
Italian-Americans: Spaghetti wit gravy.
UK: Well I mean it's not really quite a proper spag bol, is it?
Italians: *seething*
https://twitter.com/tyrisstark/status/1439967676370145284
...the "wit" in the preceding tweet was a typo, not an attempt at accent transcription.
I guess the point of divergence might have come from the period of about 1776-1812, when the British government's point of contact with the Wizarding World had to explain why they couldn't be a go-between for wizarding interests in "The Colonies" anymore.
https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1439964653698813955
Now I'm stuck imagining Very Austalian Harry Potter.
"Yer a wozzer, Harry."
"He made seven horcros?"
Whole chapter about Australian Draco Malfoy getting mauled by a dropbear after ignoring Australian Hagrid's instructions not to walk under them.
"Yer a wozzer, Harry."
"He made seven horcros?"
Whole chapter about Australian Draco Malfoy getting mauled by a dropbear after ignoring Australian Hagrid's instructions not to walk under them.
https://twitter.com/geeoharee/status/1439968487628230658
Houses Gribbo, Ribbo, Slitho, and Huffpo.
Yeah, my understanding is "gravy" (an English word) in re: pasta sauce comes from how the term was used in English during the time of colonization, and became -- in isolated pockets -- another point where US held onto terminology while the UK moved on.
https://twitter.com/q_aurelius/status/1439972324636340227
So the use of "gravy" to refer to a red spaghetti sauce is a feature that is peculiar to places that had British populations in colonial times AND were primary destinations for Italian immigrants during that wave of immigration.
Also, if you want to see a thoughtful deconstructive pastiche of The Whimsically Shoddy World of Harry Potter with characters who push back on the gaping gaps and horrific subtext of it all, please do check out Misfits & Magic, a @dimension20show sidequest
"Sidequest" being what Dimension 20 calls its shorter seasons with guest casts in between the longer ones; it's not an off-shoot of another season that you'd have to watch first. It also uses a different gaming system, Kids on Brooms, as opposed to being a D&D adaptation.
And if you enjoy that cast, 60% of them return for the following (and current production), The Seven, which *is* an offshoot of the main recurring storyline of Dimension 20, but I imagine you could jump into it without prior familiarity...
...the same way you might jump into a trilogy in the middle of a long-running, sprawling fantasy series as long as you're prepared to just roll with the repeated references to things like The Dragon Emperor Kalvaxus and The Elven Nation of Fallinel and so on.
The main characters of The Seven (who were previously NPCs, many of them only tangentially involved in the main plot) are almost all given soft retcons/resets as individual player characters anyway.
And if you enjoy the idea of thoughtful deconstructive parodies in RPG form, the first @dimension20show sidequest, Escape From The Bloodkeep, basically opens with the lieutenants of Sauron reacting in realtime as the jewelry hits the lava.
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