#soft magic

Harry Potter’s vibe is immaculate.

You know what I mean, right? It’s not actually a product of any specific trope, but rather a series of aesthetic elements: The wizarding school in a grand castle, with its pointed windows and torches and suits of armor, ghosts and talking portraits and moving staircases, its Great Hall with floating candles and a ceiling that looks like the night sky, its hundreds of magically-concealed secret doorways. Dumbledore’s Office, behind the gryphon statue, with armillary spheres in every single shot. Deliberate archaisms that evoke the Middle Ages without going as far as a Ren Faire: characters wearing heavy robes, writing with quills and ink on parchment instead of paper, drinking from goblets, decorating with tapestries. Owls, cats, toads. Cauldrons simmering in a dungeon laboratory. Shelves piled with dusty tomes, scrolls, glass vials, crystal balls, hourglasses. Magical candy shaped like insects and amphibians. A library with a restricted section. A forbidden forest full of unicorns and werewolves. That is the Vibe.

There are five armillary spheres just in this shot. They are unequivocally the most Wizard of tabletop decor.

There’s more to it than just the aesthetic, though. The vibe is present in something that writers call soft worldbuilding.

There’s a phrase that writers use to describe magic systems, coined by Brandon Sanderson: hard magic and soft magic. Sanderson’s first law of magic is, “An author’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” A hard magic system has clearly-defined rules — you know where magic comes from, how it works and under which conditions, how the characters can use it, and what its limitations are. Examples of really good hard magic systems include Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist. If the audience doesn’t understand the conditions under which magic can work, then using magic to get out of any kind of scrape risks feeling like the writer pulled something out of their ass. It begs the question, “Well, if they could do that, then why didn’t they do that before?”

You may come away from that thinking that having clearly-defined rules is always better worldbuilding than not having them, but this isn’t the case. Soft magic isn’t fully explained to the audience, but that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t trying to solve problems — its purpose is to be evocative. Soft magic enhances the atmosphere of a world by creating a sense of wonder. If your everyman protagonist is constantly running into cool magical shit that they don’t understand, then the world feels like it teems with magic, magic that is greater and more powerful than they know, leaving lots of secrets to uncover. Harry Potter, at least in the early books, excels at this. The soft magic in Harry Potter is what got me hooked, and I think it’s what a lot of other people liked about it, too.

The essence of soft magic is best summed up by this scene in the fourth film, in which Harry enters the Weasleys’ tiny tent at the Quidditch World Cup, only to find that it’s much bigger on the inside. His reaction is to smile and say, “I love magic.”

That’s it. That’s the essence of it. You don’t need to know the exact spell that makes the tent bigger on the inside. You don’t need to know how Dumbledore can make the food appear on the table with a flick of a wand, or how he can make a bunch of poofy sleeping bags appear with another flick. You don’t need to know how and why the portraits or wizard cards move. You don’t need to know how wizards can appear and disappear on a whim, or what the Deluminator is, or where the Sword of Gryffindor came from. You don’t need to know how the Room of Requirement works. Knowing these things defeats the purpose. It kills the vibe, that vibe being that there is a large and wondrous magical world around you that will always have more to discover.

One of the best “soft magic” moments in the books comes early in Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry is trying to navigate Hogwarts for the first time:

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk. —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 8

Many of these details don’t come back later in the series, which is a shame, because this one paragraph is super evocative! It establishes Hogwarts as an inherently magical place, in which the very architecture doesn’t conform to normal rules. Hogwarts seems like it would be exciting to explore (assuming you weren’t late for class), and it gets even better when you learn about all the secret rooms and passages. The games capitalized on this by building all the secret rooms behind bookcases, mirrors, illusory walls, etc. into the game world, and rewarding you for finding them. The utter fascination that produces is hard to overstate.

Another one of the most evocative moments in the first book is when Harry sees Diagon Alley for the first time, after passing through the magically sealed brick wall (the mechanics of which, again, are never explained). This is your first proper glimpse at the wizarding world and what it has to offer:

Harry wished he had about eight more eyes. He turned his head in every direction as they walked up the street, trying to look at everything at once: the shops, the things outside them, the people doing their shopping. A plump woman outside an Apothecary was shaking her head as they passed, saying, “Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad....” A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eeylops Owl Emporium — Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy. Several boys of about Harry's age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it. "Look," Harry heard one of them say, "the new Nimbus Two Thousand — fastest ever —" There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels' eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon.... —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 5

What works so well here is the magical weirdness of wizardishness juxtaposed against normalcy. Eeylops Owl Emporium is just a pet shop to wizards. A woman makes a very mundane complaint about the price of goods, but the goods happen to be dragon liver. Broomsticks are treated like cars. All of these small moments contribute to the feeling of the wizarding world being alive, inhabited, and also magical. It gets you to ask the question of what your life would be like if you were a wizard. What do wizards wear? What do they eat? What do they haggle over and complain about? What do they do for fun?

In Book 3, Harry enjoys Diagon Alley for a few weeks when he suddenly has free time, and we get to experience the wizarding world in a state of “normalcy,” when he isn’t trying to save the world. He gets free ice creams from Florean Fortescue, gazes longingly at the Firebolt, and engages with delightfully weird people. He’s a wizard, living a (briefly) normal wizard life among other wizards in wizard-land. And that is fun. It’s so fun, that people want that experience for themselves, enough for there to be several theme parks and other immersive experiences dedicated to recreating the world of Harry Potter.

One of the greatest things about Universal was its phenomenal attention to detail. You can hear Moaning Myrtle’s voice in the women’s bathroom, and only the women’s bathroom. The walls of the Three Broomsticks have shadows of a broom sweeping by itself and an owl flying projected against the wall, so convincingly that you’ll do a double take when you see it. Knockturn Alley is down a little secret tunnel off of the main street, and that’s where you have to go to buy Dark Arts-themed stuff. It’s really well done.

Another thing that contributes to the vibe, in my opinion, is that the wizarding world is slightly macabre. They eat candy shaped like frogs, flies, mice, and so forth, and they have gross-tasting jellybeans. In the film’s version of the Diagon Alley sequence above, there’s a random shot of a pet bat available for purchase. In the third film, when Harry is practicing the Patronus Charm with Lupin, the candles are shaped like human spines. In the first book, this is Petunia’s description of Lily’s behavior after she became a witch:

Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that-that school, and came home every holiday with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was — a freak! —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 4

I remember reading this for the first time, and it just kind of made intuitive sense to me. I suppose it fits into the “eye of newt and toe of frog” association between magical people and gross things, but somehow it works. Unfortunately, this is retconned later with the knowledge that wizards can’t use magic outside school, but before that limitation gets imposed, the idea of Lily amusing herself by turning teacups into rats seems like an inherently witchy thing to do.

That association between magic and the macabre shows up elsewhere, as well. In The Owl House, Luz’s interest in gross things is one of the things that marks her as a “weirdo” in the real world. When she goes to the magical world of the Boiling Isles, weird and gross stuff is absolutely everywhere. That world’s vibe leans more towards the macabre than the whimsical, but it works because you sort of expect the gross stuff to exist alongside the concept of witches, and that they would be an intrinsic part of the world they inhabit. You don’t question it, because it’s part of the vibe.

(The Owl House is one of the few things I’ve encountered that has a similar vibe to Harry Potter, but it’s still not the same vibe. In fact, The Owl House outright mocks the expectation that magical worlds be whimsical, and directly mocks Harry Potter more than once. The overall vibe is much closer to Gravity Falls.)

The Harry Potter films utilize a lot of similar soft worldbuilding with the background details, especially in the early films that were still brightly-colored and whimsical. For example, the scene in Flourish and Blotts in the second film has impossibly-stacked piles of books and old-timey looking signs describing their subjects, which include things like “Celestial Studies” and “Unicorns.” When Harry arrives in the Burrow in the same film, one of the first things he sees is dishes washing themselves and knitting needles working by themselves, taking completely mundane things and instantly establishing them as magical. In that Patronus scene with Harry and Lupin, the spine-candles and a bunch of random orbs (and the obligatory giant armillary sphere) float around in the background. One small detail that I personally appreciate is the designs on the walls above the teacher’s table in the Great Hall, which are from an alchemical manuscript called the Ripley Scroll:

It’s all these little things that add up to produce The Vibe.

Obviously, much of the vibe is expressed very well in John Williams’ score for the first three Harry Potter films. The mystical minor key of the main theme, the tinkly glockenspiel, the strings, the rising and falling notes that mimic the fluttering of an owl, the flight of a broomstick, or the waving of a wand. That initial shot of the castle across the lake as the orchestra swells, as the children arrive at their wizarding school:

If you grew up with Harry Potter, just looking at this image gives you The Vibe. The nostalgia hit is definitely part of it, but The Vibe was already there, back when you were a child and you didn’t have nostalgia yet.

In my opinion, only Williams’ score captures this vibe — the later films, though their scores are very good, do not. But the soundtrack of the first two video games, by Jeremy Soule (the same person who did Skyrim) absolutely nails it. This, right here, is Harry Potter’s vibe, condensed and distilled:

This is why I feel invalidated by the common advice “just read another book.” I have read other books. I’ve read plenty of other books, many of which are wonderfully written and have left an impact on me. But there’s still only one Harry Potter. To date, there’s only other book that has filled me with a similarly intense longing for a fictional place, and that is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. That book deliberately prioritized atmosphere over everything else in the story, and actually lampshades this in-universe. The Night Circus has a plot and it has characters, but it’s not about its plot or characters. It’s about the setting and its atmosphere. It swallows you up and transports you to a fictional place that is so evocative and so magical that you just have to be part of it or you’ll die. And even then, The Night Circus has a different kind of vibe from Harry Potter. In this particular capacity, there’s nothing else like Harry Potter.

The thing is, I don’t think Rowling was being as deliberate as Erin Morgenstern. (In fact, given many of Rowling’s recent statements, I question how many of her creative choices were deliberated at all.) She was throwing random magical stuff into the background without thinking too hard about it, which works when you’re writing a kids’ story, but stops working when you try to age it up. Actually, scratch that — soft worldbuilding is definitely not just for kids! The Lord of the Rings has a soft magic system, for crying out loud, and Tolkien is the original archmage of worldbuilding. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that prioritizing atmosphere over meticulousness is bad worldbuilding. That is a valid way to worldbuild! Not everything needs to be clearly explained, not everything needs to make sense. The problem is that Harry Potter doesn’t balance it well. Certain things do have to be explained in order for the magic to play an active role in the story (and the setting of a magic school lends itself to that kind of explanation), but no rules are ever established for the kinds of magic that need rules. When you begin thinking about the rules, you’re no longer just enjoying the magic for what it is. At worst, you begin running up against the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

It wasn’t actually the “aging up” of the story that did it in, per se, but rather, the introduction of realism. The early books were heavily stylized, and the later books were less so. A heavily stylized story can more easily maintain the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. That’s why, for example, you don’t ask why the characters are singing in a musical — you just sort of accept the story’s outlandish internal logic, and the inherent melodrama of it doesn’t take you out of the story. Stylized stories are more concerned with being emotionally consistent over being logically consistent. The later Harry Potter books changed their emotional tone, but without changing the worldbuilding style to compensate.

In addition to the more mature themes and darker tone, Harry Potter introduced more realism as it went, but Rowling did not have the worldbuilding chops to pull this off. There’s the basic magic system stuff: When you begin thinking about it too hard, something like a Time-Turner stops being a fun magical device, and starts threatening to break the entire story. Then there’s the characters: Dumbledore leaving Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the first book is an age-old fairy tale trope that goes unquestioned, but with the introduction of realism in the later books, it suddenly becomes abandonment of a child to an abusive family. The exaggerated stereotypes of characters like the Dursleys become tone-deaf. The fun school rivalry of the House system is suddenly lacking in nuance. And then there’s the shift in tone: The wizarding world that we were introduced to as a marvellous place is revealed to be dystopian. You start thinking about how impractical things like owl messengers are, you start wondering if Slytherin is being unjustly punished, the bad history appears glaringly obvious, the quaint archaisms become dangerously regressive. Oh, and the grand feasts are made through slave labor! The wizarding world suddenly feels small and backward instead of grand and marvellous. J.K. Rowling’s bigotry throws it all into an even harsher light.

This is why I’ve always preferred the early books and films to the later ones. There’s a lot of things I like about the later ones, but they’re not as stylized — they don’t have The Vibe. Thinking about things too hard is just a necessary condition of adulthood, but it’s still possible to tell a dark, mature story that is highly stylized. I really think JKR could have better pulled off that shift if she was a more competent worldbuilder. But it is painfully obvious that she did not think things through, and probably didn’t understand why she had to. In her defense, she did not know that her story would end up being one of the most scrutinized of all time. As it stands, her strength in worldbuilding was in the softer, smaller, deliberately unexplained moments of magic that were there just to provide atmosphere. And there were less and less of those as the books went along.

Pretty much all the Harry Potter-related content released since the last film — including Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts, Hogwarts Mystery, Hogwarts Legacy, Magic Awakened, and that short-lived Pokemon Go thing — have been unsuccessful attempts at recreating The Vibe. In fact, the only piece of supplemental Potter content that I think had that Vibe down pat was the original Pottermore, back when it was more of an interactive game. And of course that got axed. That was right around the time things started going downhill.

Some of the art from Pottermore’s original Sorting quiz.

So what now? Well, that’s the question.

I think I can safely say that The Vibe was the reason I liked Harry Potter. It’s the thing I still like the most about it. I’ve spent years chasing it, like an elusive Patronus through a dark wood. If I can capture and distill that Vibe, and use drops of it in my own work, then perhaps I won’t need Harry Potter anymore.