And also, if they expect to be going up against a gun, remember that Fred and George were able to enchant pre-cast Shield Charms into clothes. If a wizard can get a Shield Charm up before they’re incapacitated or killed, they suddenly have a lot more options. But it’s also usually not instantly fatal. Now, the obvious advantage of a gun is that it’s faster than a wand. Thus, it seems likely that Protego would stop bullets. The invisible shield erupted between Ron and Hermione: The force of it knocked her backward onto the floor.Īlso keep in mind that muggles had guns before the Statute of Secrecy, so wizards would have encountered them historically, even if they’re not familiar with them today. looked as though ready to wrestle out of Harry ’s hands and he reacted instinctively. There’s not much evidence in the books, but one passage shows that it can stop a fight that’s come to blows: However, there’s no indication that Protego doesn’t work on physical objects. (And being British, it’s not something that would come up as often as in America.) In the debates, some people try to claim that a gun would beat a wand because the Shield Charm ( Protego) doesn’t stop bullets. here), so it is very likely that she never actually said this. However, no one can cite an original source for this quote ( see e.g. There’s another frequently mentioned quote claimed to be from Rowling to the effect that a muggle with a gun usually (or even always) beats a wizard. If a muggle managed to film something magical today-including parents of a muggle-born child in their own home-wizards might not be able to react fast enough to keep it out of the Cloud, and from there, we know that nothing on the internet is ever really erased. In 2004, there were no smartphones, no Twitter, and not even YouTube. However, that seems a bit harder to believe today. In a 2004 interview, Rowling was asked, “Are the Muggle and Magical worlds ever going to be rejoined?” And her response was, “No, the breach was final, although as book six shows, the Muggles are noticing more and more odd happenings now that Voldemort’s back.” This suggests that muggles will never be able to expose wizards. The one point I’m aware of that Rowling definitely did say (though even then only by implication) is that wizards will always beat muggles in secrecy. TL DR: The muggles would win, unless the wizards maintain the element of surprise, but most individual wizards who want to escape the muggles will be able to.įirst off, we should consider whether the author has anything to say about this debate, but in fact J. Also, when I did that, I was quickly alerted to the fact that I should also be checking r/whowouldwin, so I read through those debates, too.Īnd the answer, it turns out, is that it’s complicated. I looked at the top hits for this debate on r/harrypotter and r/HPfanfiction, but I found r/HPfanfiction to be generally better for substantive debate. wizards” threads that have been made over the years, I could get a pretty comprehensive view of the arguments that are being made and what factors people are considering. I thought that if I looked at some of the “muggles vs. To do this, I turned to Reddit, where weird scenarios like this get debated frequently. Rather than trying to solve the whole problem from the beginning, let’s go through the different advantages and disadvantages each side has to try to building up a winning strategy they could use. However, I never forgot about it, and over the past year, I’ve thought of a different way to go about it. I thought about it for a while at the time, but I eventually dropped it because I thought it was too complicated, and the more I thought about it, the less sure I was of the answer. I teased this essay all the way back in 2018 when I reviewed The Crimes of Grindelwald. With the release of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore this week, I though I would answer the age-old question in the Harry Potter universe: who would win in a fight between the wizards and the muggles? Seeing a major war occurring in Europe has changed our perspective collectively on some of these things, but it doesn’t really change my conclusions in this essay. Note: I wrote the vast majority of this essay before the current war in Ukraine.
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