Re: blind harry potter, lets think and imagine
Hi.
I disagree personally on the plot holes, other than the age of Marcus flint (which Roling admitted herself was a genuine mistake), I didn't find that many holes in the books. For example, compared to magic in other fantasy series the magic of the Potter books is pretty limited in what it can do both by the relative skill of the witch or wizard, and by the limits of magic itself. As I've said before I see magic in the Hp books as a performance art. You learn the theory, you learn the limits, then you put it into practice. You can do this well or badly but are still limited in the scope of your performance, the same way a floutist couldn't get more than three octives out of their flute however good they were.
For instance, while I find Turtlepower's suggestion of magic to fix congitive abilities an interesting one, given how magic and the mind is treated I doubt very much that would be possible, after all what would be the point in teaching kids at hogwarts if you could just go "bing!" and turn them all into geniuses. It's actually implied that mucking about with someone's mind is a pretty serious thing and often something only done by dark wizards, eg, the Imperius curse, or the way that Voldemort's influenced (plus teenaged hormones and generally bad circumstances), affected harry's personality in the fifth book. Even the penseive is primarily an aide to memory, rather than actually messing about with someone's personality or cognitive abilities.
We do know (see Bill Weaslies scarrs), that there are wounds too serious to be cured by magic. moodies magical eye is essentially a prosthetic like an artificial limb, just like the hand Veldemort gives to Wormtale. We do know that magic allows wizards to create very functional prosthetics, perhaps with enough functionality to replace the real organ, the same way a person now born without lenses to their eyes but otherwise functional eyeb alls can have an artificial lense inserted and have perfect vision assuming the operation is a success.
So, I do suspect artificial eyeballs would be the way blind wizards go in the potter universe.
As to whether Harry could've done what he did totally blind, well yes and no. Like anything else it would probably be possible but with significantly more work and occasionally some adaptations, for example a snitch that made a sound (it does in the films, but it's never mentioned as doing in the books). Similarly, when dueling Harry would need some way to A, target other wizards with spells when not speaking, B, Find out what other wizards were doing when launching spells none verbally, and C, have a very good way of learning the environment around him so that he could move very quickly and efficiently, ---- after all if he'd tripped up on the steps at the department of mysteries he'd have been in dam trouble.
I can't say I'm a fanfic f an, but one of the best blind characters' I've seen in any recent medium is Toth from the Avatar the last airbender series (there was a horrible Hollywood travesty of a film but lets forget about that).
The series takes place in a world where people learn to bend and control the four elements, fire, earth, air and water. Toth is an earth bender and she uses her conection with the ground to not only find objects and orientate herself, but also fight. Rather than chucking rocks at people like most earth benders in the series, she uses shockwaves to knock other people off their feet or grow pillers underneith them, and later on she even dones what no other earth bender in the series can and starts to bend metal by being connected enough to sense the fragments of earth within it.
An interesting fact about Toth however, is there are some situations she is amazingly vulnerable to. In fights she constantly protects herself from flying missiles with large walls of ro ck, and in any situation where she is not on the ground, such as on an ice bridge she has a lot of trouble.
I also like her as a person. You meet her originally at a fighting tournament where she is kicking the rear of many many large muscular earth benders in a very funny pro wrestling parody, (there is even an earth bender called the boulder who refers to himself in the third person). Then when you meet the champion it is a tiny twelve year old girl with bair feet and a white dress, ---- who is brick however is very quickly knocked out by Ang the air bender whe he flies across the ground and hits her.
Ang is however looking for an earth bending teacher (he being the Avatar has to learn all four elements), so he goes to see her at home, to find that her parents have no idea she's not only an earth bender but dam good at it, and believe she's tiny and helpless. This situation finishes with Toth running away from home to train Ang, ---- then later in the serie s actually having to confess the truth to her parents.
As a person Toth is great too, sinse she's extremely cocky, self reliant and overbaring, and indeed has something of an enmity with one of the other female characters, Katara, again something she makes up during the series. There are some very gentle occasional reminders that Toth does perceive the world differently and there are things she can't do (like sticking up posters), and yet points when Toth is pretty much indispensible, ---- for example when breaking out of metal prison cells, (she even later learns to tell when people are lying by their heartbeat).
I actually wish there were more blind characters like Toth in tv or literature sinse it's really bnice to see a blind person be a normal person with a lot of faults, with a lot of faults and personality. I also like the fact that Toth's ability with vibrations is not some sort of mystical "oh their blind but amazing!" sense, but s omething that has both an up side and a down side, and has vulnerabilities as well as strengths to it.
Indeed it's nice to see someone who is blind who is neither super human nor sub human just human! it's happened with characters in wheel chairs and artificial limbs, ---- why the hell people don't manage it with blind characters I don't know.
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