Harry Potter and the Angsty Snoggers

Just finished watching Harry Potter 6 with a group of friends.  As one person said it, "I think this is Daniel Radcliffe's best performance."
I am not completely sold on that statement, and I refuse to declare my thoughts until I see his performance in Equus.  This play, in addition to winning several awards is supposed to be rather... interesting.  Go look it up.

The movie.  Ahh the movie.  While the idea of instantaneous wish fulfillment is very appealing, I can confidently say I am thankful for a lack of magic.  There are three reasons, listed from least to most thankful:

3. There are no dark wizards trying to kill, maim, control or recruit me.  Yes, the idea of dueling across an arctic cliff I recently apparated to in order to capture a villainous wizard with dark intent is quite romantic and thrilling, but I am glad I will never have to do such a thing.  I think this idea can best be explained with a real world parallel.  I would not want drug lords to have magic.  I also would not want politicians to have magic and I especially would not want the police/military to have such a weapon.  We all do want magic though.  Unfortunately, every bit of "magic" we've created works for good and evil. It really all comes back to the classic debate of "guns don't kill people, people kill people..."

2. There is enough to learn as it is.  Okay, so this is not an entirely convincing reason at first glance... but do we really need more to learn.  We already have History, Mathematics, Language, Film, the Arts, Engineering, Science, Physics and so on.  All of these would fall to the wayside.  We would instead study charms and transfiguration and defense against the Dark Drug Lord Arts. Still, I suppose we wouldn't need engineers for cars... and we wouldn't need fossil fuels.  We could teleport nearly anywhere we wanted for free.  Bye bye airlines.  Oh the pros and cons of magic. Still, I fear we would end up with an illiterate nation doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past as we attempt to calculate (without success) the size of a tip we should leavethe waitress.  Of course it would be cheaper to say "AVADA KEDRAVA!" I suppose.

1. The thought of teenagers with wands is more terrifying to me than teenagers driving cars.   My fears in both of these areas stems from a lack of responsibility on the teenagers part.  Blimey, I don't have enough of it to handle a car half the time, or even cook dinner on the stove let alone control a limitless supply of magic.  Nothing scares me more than a teenage girl, listening to Nicki Minaj as she texts her friend driving 75 MPH down the highway... or 30 KPH down a subdivision street.  The only thing that scares me more than that (aside from dragons wearing clown paint) is a teenage girl texting a while casting a spell, or riding a broom stick, or creating a love potion so she can snog with the dreamy boy.  The same dreamy boy who is using magic for his own devious ends.  We'd have adolescent witches and wizards running around snogging a different person every weekend with no memory of who they snogged or why they wanted to snog that person in the first place... oh.  Did we already invent magic?


Harry Potter and the Angsty Snoggers is in fact Better than Nicki Minaj because it shows us, rather subtly how bad things could become if we did in fact have magic.  Also, because it gives us the word "snog."

Cheers,
Melmoth


P.S. I'm thinking of opening a cafe... "The Snog Lounge."