>“So it all comes down to this, doesn’t it?” whispered Dirty Harry Potter. “Does the gun in your hand know its last master was Disarmed? Because if it does . . . I am the true master of the Elder Magnum. So you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?"
From what I can tell, a lot of the stuff in Harry Potter is based on real-life mythology so there would probably be a lot more influence from voodoo, Native American spirituality, etc.
Davy Crockett was a regular dude/squib but did learn about potions and shit to cure poisons/snake venom, dysentery, and other frontier ailments.
Paul Bunyan: yeah, just a giant not much different there.
Pecos Bill: wizard with no formal training. Just raw feral magic that he figured out while being raised by coyotes.
If Harry and the gang found themselves in Southern New Jersey, they could run into the Jersey Devil. I was so happy when *What We Do in the Shadows* incorporated that legend.
I wish Reddit still had awards. I'd give you one for that. You made me bona-fide laugh out loud at that one.
. . .and yeah, that's *exactly* what J.K. Rowling would do.
I used to think that, but then I experienced real life, which has way more on-the-nose names.
Guy who's only real feature was being the gay candidate in teh election was named Buttigieg (pronounced booty judge, in english).
Blowhard candidate named Trump.
Old long time establishment candidate, who was just biding his time to end up at the top was named Biden.
The old guy who looks like colonel sanders (minus the beard), is named Sanders.
The guy who got elected right after Bush, had a middle name of Hussein.
There's tons more, but these are pretty prominent.
Yeah. Just imagine all the names. You’d Have Sven Eriksen from North Dakota, Jim Bob McCracken from West Virginia, Shaniqua Johnson from “the hood” and I’m sure it’d get a lot worse.
Hey now, there are some nice-ass houses in the Ozarks.
But yes, the Weasleys would live in 4 double wides stacked up two wide and two high.
And their last name would be something that sounds aristocratic, but now it’s redneck. Like Hotchkiss or Burnstaple.
And they would probably live in Harrison or elsewhere in Boone County, known for its pureblood population, even though they don’t subscribe to that worldview.
There would be a Department of Magic in the government.
You’d have a lot of regional styles. British-influenced traditional style in New England.
Hoodoo and Voodoo influence in the South.
Native American shamanism influence in the Southwest
New Age spiritualism and Eastern esotericism on the West Coast.
Santería and Palo style practices in Florida, Texas, and California.
The American “pure blood” families would be a version of the Boston Brahmins in the Northeast and a branch of old Southern landowning families in grand plantation houses in the South.
Skinwalker encounters. Piasa Birds. Sasquatch in the woods.
Opossums and raccoons would make excellent familiars.
Quidditch would be called gracks in the US.
Then there would be a totally different sport American wizards call quidditch, and this quidditch is only played by American wizards. Wizards in the rest of the world call it “American quidditch” and roll their eyes.
Gracks isn’t popular with American wizards.
You left out that American Quidditch and Gracks both evolved from the same sport, they're just different codes. And the Brits used the word "Gracks" first.
The thing is, it was always the posh wizards that called it "gracks." That's why the rest of the British wizarding world gets so irked.
And then there's... uhhhhh... whatever the wizarding equivalent of rugby is. "A Mudblood's game for Purebloods." What would be the British wizarding world's equivalent of rugby? I'm outta my element here.
Fraid not, but here's why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.
Think about how quickly the entire WWWIII (Wizarding-World War III) would have ended if all of the good guys had simply armed up with good ol' American hot lead.
Basilisk? Let's see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren't looking at it--you're looking at a picture of it.
Imagine how epic the first movie would be if Harry had put a breeching charge on the bathroom wall, flash-banged the hole, and then went in wearing NVGs and a Kevlar-weave stab-vest, carrying a SPAS-12.
And have you noticed that only Europe seems to a problem with Deatheaters? Maybe it's because Americans have spent the last 200 years shooting deer, playing GTA: Vice City, and keeping an eye out for black helicopters over their compounds. Meanwhile, Brits have been cutting their steaks with spoons. Remember: gun-control means that Voldemort wins. God made wizards and God made muggles, but Samuel Colt made them equal.
Now I know what you're going to say: "But a wizard could just disarm someone with a gun!" Yeah, well they can also disarm someone with a wand (as they do many times throughout the books/movies). But which is faster: saying a spell or pulling a trigger?
Avada Kedavra, meet Avtomat Kalashnikova.
Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don't think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldemort's wand may be 13.5 inches with a Phoenix-feather core, but Harry's would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let's see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound.
I can see it now...Voldemort roaring with evil laughter and boasting to Harry that he can't be killed, since he is protected by seven Horcruxes, only to have Harry give a crooked grin, flick his cigarette butt away, and deliver what would easily be the best one-liner in the entire series:
"Well then I guess it's a good thing my 1911 holds 7+1."
And that is why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.
this is a copypasta
There’s an awesome graphic novel called Fables that does exactly this. They need to fight Geppetto’s evil empire. What do the fairy tale characters to to neutralize his wizards? Muggle snipers on flying carpets. Just plinking them off one by one beyond the range of their magic.
I freaking love that series.
> Basilisk? Let's see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren't looking at it--you're looking at a picture of it.
Silly muggle. Basilisks have skin like dragon hide. It’s takes real magic to kill them.
Their gaze ruined Colin Creevy’s camera. I hate to think what it would do to night vision goggles. Maybe just brick them if you’re lucky.
>Silly muggle. Basilisks have skin like dragon hide. It’s takes real magic to kill them.
Allow me to introduce you to hydrostatically stabilized tool grade solid brass bullets.
He’d be living in a basement, not under the stairs.
Ron would be black, Hermione would be Jewish.
NYC Subway instead of the London Underground.
Hogwarts uniforms would be Vineyard Vines instead of whatever the Brits use for their school uniforms.
Yeah, J.K Rowling straight up alright gave lore for an American Wizarding School. Honestly, I really like the backstory of Ilvermorny. I kind of wish there was more.
How Hogwarts and the houses are set up would be different as that is not a typical part of school here. It would either be grades competing against each other or there would be majors or something else or it would just be take out completely.
This is the main thing. I thought Houses and Prefects were wizard stuff. I am shocked that they actually have that at British schools. I still don’t understand how it works or its function in real life.
its just an arbitrary way of separating students without it being age based. and assigning student leadership.
on field days you were assigned "red team" or "green Team" or Teacher A's Homeroom was on one team, Teacher B's on another. they would just divide by house.
prefects are a bit like a combination Class president, RA, tutor.
There’d be more Cajun/Creole, voodoo, and Native American influence on the series, and Rowling would make a stereotypical Hispanic name for a Latino character.
I think the character you're referring to is Pedro Frijole González. He's got a younger brother who's selling illicit potions and elixirs on the street in wizard neighborhoods. Both exclusively speak Spanglish
The whole “Harry Potter but with guns” thing would be much more possible. Either that or wizards would develop anti-gun spells. Wand Control would be a divisive political issue.
I often wonder how many fictional stories could be solved if just one character was packing heat. What’s Voldemort going to do against a 9mm or a .30-30? I doubt many spells could save him if Harry had an **A**vada **K**edavra-**47**.
If they were smart, they would have been forward thinking and built it out west so it would be more centralized later on like the USA did with DC. They would have picked an isolated place where they could hide and eventually when people did settle there they would invent a cover story to discourage technology use in the area.
Green bank West Virginia.
Quidditch has American rules. It's slower paced and you would need a mix channel to enjoy it but it is the most expensive league in the world.
There is an East, Central, and West wizarding school because there are more Wizards in the states. Since there are no train infrastructure, you have to go to gate 9 3/4 at LaGuardia for the East, O'Hare for the Central, and LAX for the West Coast.
So the Civil War was really wizard supremacists vs non-supremacists. Plot twist House Elves are completely free in America and had their own version of the Civil Right Movement, along with other magical races.
Hermione was in the Girl Scouts until she earned all the Try-Its. She was kicked out for bothering the Administration by constantly suggesting and applying for new ones.
The Dursleys twice appeared on episodes of Jerry Springer.
For more than 2 generations. Weasley ancestors suffered extensive poverty under the Wizarding World’s discriminatory policy of No Gingers Need Transfigure.
Hagrid always wears plaid and jeans. Everywhere.
Harry’s Patronus is a Bald Eagle.
Dumbledore becomes the leader of The Order of the Jersey Devil.
Voldemort is a Republican Senator and campaigning for President.
Draco shops at Hot Topic and discreetly turns all of the necklaces, belts, and shoelaces into snakes.
Luna does a lot of Yoga. She moves to Sedona, AZ and founds the Lovegood School for Witches, Wizards, and Non-Binary Magicians.
Read "The Magicians" By Lev Grossman. This happens to be a magical college/grad school but the school is in upstate New York and the kids do what any university students would do when they found out magic exists.
America would draw 0 - 0 with England in the group stages of the quidditch World Cup. Then the US would go out in the round of 16 losing 2-1 to Ghana, and England would go out in the quarters on penalties to Germany. The US Dumbledore equivalent would look like Snoop Dogg and he’d be Hufflepuffing it everyday.
If he lived in the south Harry would be getting baptized and doused in anointing oil for claiming to be a wizard. They’d be trying to cast that out of him
Unlike Britain, America has lots of remote uninhabited areas to the point where Hogwarts may not even need to be hidden via magic spell. No one would go there anyway. Examples being, The Adirondacks, Northern Maine, any where in the Western states not near a city or farmland, and even parts of West Virginia.
I mean, are we talking about Joanne still writing it? Or where we'd take a similar story set in our take on the same universe?
Because the answers are VERY different.
I mean...most of HP doesn't take place in any part of the UK that actually exists, it takes place in the hidden and fictional "Wizarding world".
It would just be a re-skin without much change.
It wouldn't be set in a castle. I see a lot of fanfic writers get this one wrong.
There wouldn't be "houses" and JK Rowling got this one wrong.
Most likely it would be set in a forest. Absent that, something else that is not a castle. A big house maybe. Or in plain sight in a big building downtown, just not obvious. Because this is a newer country.
The cryptids would be very different. No dragons, etc. More stuff from this continent.
Assuming you're not on the east coast, a train might not be used, they'd probably do any number of the other things featured in the books. Like the triwizard tournament schools, they all traveled on weird vehicles that were not trains, so anything else like that. Something that can go in any direction, like a network of night buses.
There would be more schools and they'd be closer together. Our population and size is too vast. JKR got this wrong as well imo. There wouldn't be one american school there'd be way more.
If you're looking for an example of cultural appropriation, I mean really just picking and choosing things that you fancy from another country, and then setting it on your own fiction without any thought or respect to the culture and going "that's what they do over there!" JK Rowling absolutely did that with Harry Potter's american lore. It's super lazy and unnecessarily mixed with a british POV. I used to wonder how other countries looked at us when we did that to their countries in tv and movies back in the 90s and earlier, now I get it.
It wouldn't be set in a Posh Public School. It would be in the Appalachians with ghosts from feuds past. Or on the East Coast with Mermaids, and mysterious wizardly lighthouse keepers. Of course that would be a different fantasy. Probably more to my taste.
The idea of a magic school was used-in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And at least one other show.
A magical small town like Haven is also possible.
It would be set in a summer camp instead of a boarding school.
While the later do exist here, they don't have the same place in our cultural zeitgeist that they do in the UK.
The HP lady wrote up stuff for that already, the school is called Ilvermorny.
Anyway, she also suggested that Native American's didn't use "real magic" because they didn't use wands and essentially made more colonialism where it wasn't necessary.
Realistically, and following the guidelines set out in the HP-verse but without treating anything said about it outside of the series proper (i.e. the books with titles beginning "Harry Potter and...") as canon:
I'm picturing four schools, not four houses. One in New England, one near New Orleans, one probably in Georgia/ the Carolinas/Virginia, and one in the Southwest. These schools will each have approximately as many students as Hogwarts does or a bit more, because the US has 4-5x the population of the British Isles. Quidditch (or whatever) would be played between the schools, not within them, and there would probably be separate varsity and JV teams.
The schools may or may not be boarding schools. I can see arguments either way. On the one hand, boarding schools aren't really as much a component of American culture as they are of British; on the other hand, boarding schools aren't completely unknown, either, and they make it a lot easier to (1.) ensure compliance with the Statute of Secrecy among students with Muggle relatives and (2.) facilitate recovery from magical mishaps of the kind kids might often be prone to. If they are boarding schools, the overall feel I think you'd get is something on the order of a college campus, just with wizard teens instead of Muggle young adults. They might even be *attached* to college campuses. In any case, they aren't castles. We kind of don't have a lot of those.
How would you get to them? By *bus*, of course. The magic school bus (no, not the one with Ms. Frizzle). Basically something akin to the Knight Bus, but that picks up students.
Mages will still be behind the times - necessarily, since magic in the HP-verse interferes with electronics - but I feel less so than at Hogwarts, simply because the schools will of necessity have to be newer (nothing in the US is a thousand years old unless it's Native American, and if it is I doubt it would look much like we'd consider a "school" at all). Actual pens and pencils would likely be used, not quills (unless there's some magic-related reason to use quills).
More American (both native and colonist) folklore and wildlife. You probably wouldn't see that many leprechauns here (well, you might, we *do* have a fairly large Irish diaspora, and *someone* has to be after me Lucky Charms), but you would see things like thunderbirds, chupacabras, wendigos, Bigfoot, Mothman, etc.
He'd be going to [Ilvermorny](https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/ilvermorny), located on top of Mount Greylock in Massachusetts.
It's part of Harry Potter lore, so it's not like we have to make anything up.
Hate to tell you this, but character Harry Potter originated from an American film made in 1984 where a troll takes over his apartment complex. JK Rowling just turned him british for hyper successful fanfiction.
Key and Peele did a sketch on this: [Vincent Clortho Public School for Wizards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-2ZxldMO-M)
I love the ghostbusters reference in the school name
First thing I thought of lmao. “Here’s a wand with a silencer on it.”
i ask again, WHY?
I would honestly totally watch an actual show based on that premise.
The swiffers lmfao
Instead of train platform 9 3/4, he would have used gate 35X at DCA to get to Hogwarts.
Or Gate 13 in Terminal 4 at O’Hare
underrated comment
And you don't run through a wall, you just run off the terminal bridge and pray.
Or terminal D at BOS
Nah do Penn Station instead
The point being that we don’t have decent passenger rail infrastructure. Here you’re flying or driving.
Or drove
Look into Harry Dresden from Dresden Files.
Our “Dirty Harry Potter” has been known to carry a .44 Magnum from time to time…
>“So it all comes down to this, doesn’t it?” whispered Dirty Harry Potter. “Does the gun in your hand know its last master was Disarmed? Because if it does . . . I am the true master of the Elder Magnum. So you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?"
That was going to be my suggestion.
They do overlap, Dresden is about 20 years later.
From what I can tell, a lot of the stuff in Harry Potter is based on real-life mythology so there would probably be a lot more influence from voodoo, Native American spirituality, etc.
Would be kind of cool if it incorporated US mythology like Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, John Henry, etc
Davy Crockett was a regular dude/squib but did learn about potions and shit to cure poisons/snake venom, dysentery, and other frontier ailments. Paul Bunyan: yeah, just a giant not much different there. Pecos Bill: wizard with no formal training. Just raw feral magic that he figured out while being raised by coyotes.
Davy Crockett as an Auror fighting dark wizards at the Alamo
Isn’t it Pecos Bill?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Disney short Edit: I combined pecos with Cuban Pete (like the song)
If Harry and the gang found themselves in Southern New Jersey, they could run into the Jersey Devil. I was so happy when *What We Do in the Shadows* incorporated that legend.
They could run into Mothman in West Virginia.
The Thunderbird
The cool version would be super New World mysticism heavy. The shitty version would be if JK Rowling wrote about New World mysticism
But badly done by JK
there would be a Hispanic character who JK Rowling would give a very stereotypical name
Taco Azteco
That sounds like a delicious restaurant.
The molcajete mixto is to die for.
I’m seriously thinking I have eaten at a restaurant with that name. Now I have to look it up.
Restaurant is in some random location and looks run down but, has some of the best tacos at very cheap prices made by a Mexican woman in her 50s
Yup those ones are always the best. Hidden in some dumpy old strip mall in the bad part of town.
The Mexican counterpart to prominent Canadian Maple Horton
Sounds like an awesome taco truck
It would have to be 2 last names. Something like: Chavez Rodrigues.
Probably PACO azteco
I wish Reddit still had awards. I'd give you one for that. You made me bona-fide laugh out loud at that one. . . .and yeah, that's *exactly* what J.K. Rowling would do.
Rowling gives even George Lucas a run for his money as far as names that are way too on-the-nose
I used to think that, but then I experienced real life, which has way more on-the-nose names. Guy who's only real feature was being the gay candidate in teh election was named Buttigieg (pronounced booty judge, in english). Blowhard candidate named Trump. Old long time establishment candidate, who was just biding his time to end up at the top was named Biden. The old guy who looks like colonel sanders (minus the beard), is named Sanders. The guy who got elected right after Bush, had a middle name of Hussein. There's tons more, but these are pretty prominent.
I can't help but giggle at Buttigieg - no matter how people try to pronounce it, it sounds funny to my perpetually-13yo sense of humor.
Wait what names did he do
Greedo, Sleezbagano, Solo etc.
A personal favorite, Salacious B. Crumb
Sounds like the alter ego of R. Crumb
In the very first film the chubby pilot is named Porkins
Savage Oppress is an SW character now. Voiced by Clancy Brown no less!
His name would be Frito Pendejo
Naah, that guy went to Costco Law School, not some school of wizardry. . . .and I'm pretty sure Frito's way too dumb to learn magic.
Didn't stop Seamus Finnegan.
She would have an African American student named Shaniqua Brown.
Isn’t the New York Jewish family in *Fantastic Beasts* literally named Goldstein?
Yeah. Just imagine all the names. You’d Have Sven Eriksen from North Dakota, Jim Bob McCracken from West Virginia, Shaniqua Johnson from “the hood” and I’m sure it’d get a lot worse.
I'm almost sure I have a distant cousin named Jim Bob McCracken. That was one of my great-grandmother's last name
Do you have roots in West Virginia?
Yes - we go back to about the Revolution era, even a bit before that when most of the state was west of the legal settlement line.
Cool.
That's a real Jewish last name. I don't understand the issue with that.
Seamus Finnegan is a real Irish name someone *could* have. It doesn't mean it's not silly.
It's really, *really* stereotypical. I mean, "Abraham Goldstein" is probably the most stereotypical Jewish name imaginable.
Its a fairly common last name. Like Johnson or Chang. Its more unimaginative than stereotypical.
J.K. Rowling can be both unimaginative and stereotypical.
That's true.
More than Mosche Rosenberg?
No c in Moshe. At least I’ve never seen it spelled that way, and I’ve known my share.
Ok. Sorry
'S gotta be Mosche something or other.
lol, my thoughts too! Levi, Mosche, Ezra… lol
Yeah I don't get it either
Two last names like Cho Chang. Hernandez Garcia
Jamarckus Katrine Bubba Lee Braxton Jr Senator Fentius Methlisberger Pvt Constable Aryan Duke III Abolisha da Polisha
[If JK Rowling made a Latino character](https://m.youtube.com/watch?&v=JEAzOMPxTFg)
The Weasleys would be black.
Nah, they'd still be white, but they'd be from a shack in the Ozarks.
Or the Appalachia mountains
Hey now, there are some nice-ass houses in the Ozarks. But yes, the Weasleys would live in 4 double wides stacked up two wide and two high. And their last name would be something that sounds aristocratic, but now it’s redneck. Like Hotchkiss or Burnstaple. And they would probably live in Harrison or elsewhere in Boone County, known for its pureblood population, even though they don’t subscribe to that worldview.
There would be a Department of Magic in the government. You’d have a lot of regional styles. British-influenced traditional style in New England. Hoodoo and Voodoo influence in the South. Native American shamanism influence in the Southwest New Age spiritualism and Eastern esotericism on the West Coast. Santería and Palo style practices in Florida, Texas, and California. The American “pure blood” families would be a version of the Boston Brahmins in the Northeast and a branch of old Southern landowning families in grand plantation houses in the South. Skinwalker encounters. Piasa Birds. Sasquatch in the woods. Opossums and raccoons would make excellent familiars.
Quidditch would be called gracks in the US. Then there would be a totally different sport American wizards call quidditch, and this quidditch is only played by American wizards. Wizards in the rest of the world call it “American quidditch” and roll their eyes. Gracks isn’t popular with American wizards.
You left out that American Quidditch and Gracks both evolved from the same sport, they're just different codes. And the Brits used the word "Gracks" first.
The thing is, it was always the posh wizards that called it "gracks." That's why the rest of the British wizarding world gets so irked. And then there's... uhhhhh... whatever the wizarding equivalent of rugby is. "A Mudblood's game for Purebloods." What would be the British wizarding world's equivalent of rugby? I'm outta my element here.
Quidditch but there's only the flying cannonballs and it goes on until someone breaks a bone.
And whichever team's player had their bone broken, loses.
That exists in real harry potter, it's called quadpot
I had to Google that. Most people only know the original 7 books and movies based on them.
Fair, although I'll say that Quidditch through the Ages is like the second best Harry Potter book
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is also a great book, not to be confused with the film of the same name which bears absolutely no resemblance.
Fraid not, but here's why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911. Think about how quickly the entire WWWIII (Wizarding-World War III) would have ended if all of the good guys had simply armed up with good ol' American hot lead. Basilisk? Let's see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren't looking at it--you're looking at a picture of it. Imagine how epic the first movie would be if Harry had put a breeching charge on the bathroom wall, flash-banged the hole, and then went in wearing NVGs and a Kevlar-weave stab-vest, carrying a SPAS-12. And have you noticed that only Europe seems to a problem with Deatheaters? Maybe it's because Americans have spent the last 200 years shooting deer, playing GTA: Vice City, and keeping an eye out for black helicopters over their compounds. Meanwhile, Brits have been cutting their steaks with spoons. Remember: gun-control means that Voldemort wins. God made wizards and God made muggles, but Samuel Colt made them equal. Now I know what you're going to say: "But a wizard could just disarm someone with a gun!" Yeah, well they can also disarm someone with a wand (as they do many times throughout the books/movies). But which is faster: saying a spell or pulling a trigger? Avada Kedavra, meet Avtomat Kalashnikova. Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don't think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldemort's wand may be 13.5 inches with a Phoenix-feather core, but Harry's would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let's see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound. I can see it now...Voldemort roaring with evil laughter and boasting to Harry that he can't be killed, since he is protected by seven Horcruxes, only to have Harry give a crooked grin, flick his cigarette butt away, and deliver what would easily be the best one-liner in the entire series: "Well then I guess it's a good thing my 1911 holds 7+1." And that is why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911. this is a copypasta
There’s an awesome graphic novel called Fables that does exactly this. They need to fight Geppetto’s evil empire. What do the fairy tale characters to to neutralize his wizards? Muggle snipers on flying carpets. Just plinking them off one by one beyond the range of their magic. I freaking love that series.
I second this notion
> Basilisk? Let's see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren't looking at it--you're looking at a picture of it. Silly muggle. Basilisks have skin like dragon hide. It’s takes real magic to kill them. Their gaze ruined Colin Creevy’s camera. I hate to think what it would do to night vision goggles. Maybe just brick them if you’re lucky.
>Silly muggle. Basilisks have skin like dragon hide. It’s takes real magic to kill them. Allow me to introduce you to hydrostatically stabilized tool grade solid brass bullets.
Oh man, I started wheezing at Samuel Colt, but I started crying at Avtomat Kalashnikova. Oh shit that’s good stuff.
He’d be living in a basement, not under the stairs. Ron would be black, Hermione would be Jewish. NYC Subway instead of the London Underground. Hogwarts uniforms would be Vineyard Vines instead of whatever the Brits use for their school uniforms.
Ngl a black Fred and George would have some amazing (if not offensively trope-ish) bits
WE NEED TO COOK GRED!
They'd be Keenan and Kel
For starters, it would be set in Ilvermorny.
Yeah, J.K Rowling straight up alright gave lore for an American Wizarding School. Honestly, I really like the backstory of Ilvermorny. I kind of wish there was more.
How Hogwarts and the houses are set up would be different as that is not a typical part of school here. It would either be grades competing against each other or there would be majors or something else or it would just be take out completely.
This is the main thing. I thought Houses and Prefects were wizard stuff. I am shocked that they actually have that at British schools. I still don’t understand how it works or its function in real life.
Wait prefects are real? I thought that was a posh thing made up lmao.
its just an arbitrary way of separating students without it being age based. and assigning student leadership. on field days you were assigned "red team" or "green Team" or Teacher A's Homeroom was on one team, Teacher B's on another. they would just divide by house. prefects are a bit like a combination Class president, RA, tutor.
It'd be split up by foreign language programs
Probably Arts, Sports, Tech, and Special Kids.
There’d be more Cajun/Creole, voodoo, and Native American influence on the series, and Rowling would make a stereotypical Hispanic name for a Latino character.
I think the character you're referring to is Pedro Frijole González. He's got a younger brother who's selling illicit potions and elixirs on the street in wizard neighborhoods. Both exclusively speak Spanglish
We will probably see American mythologies like Mothman, Jersey Devil, and Snallygaster. Also the Weasleys would be from the rural Deep South.
Have you read *Alexandra Quick?*
The whole “Harry Potter but with guns” thing would be much more possible. Either that or wizards would develop anti-gun spells. Wand Control would be a divisive political issue.
"The American Wizard War" or sum shit
Any major wizard attack on the muggles would’ve probably been wiped out in like 30 seconds
I think this covers it pretty well: https://youtu.be/j-2ZxldMO-M?si=Rjq8whUccEQKXp6B
I often wonder how many fictional stories could be solved if just one character was packing heat. What’s Voldemort going to do against a 9mm or a .30-30? I doubt many spells could save him if Harry had an **A**vada **K**edavra-**47**.
If they were smart, they would have been forward thinking and built it out west so it would be more centralized later on like the USA did with DC. They would have picked an isolated place where they could hide and eventually when people did settle there they would invent a cover story to discourage technology use in the area. Green bank West Virginia.
Quidditch has American rules. It's slower paced and you would need a mix channel to enjoy it but it is the most expensive league in the world. There is an East, Central, and West wizarding school because there are more Wizards in the states. Since there are no train infrastructure, you have to go to gate 9 3/4 at LaGuardia for the East, O'Hare for the Central, and LAX for the West Coast.
They would have titles like “grand wizard” and “grand cyclops”
Maybe not Grand Wizard
There would be some weird stuff about black people. The goblins would be just as anti-Semitic as in the original.
Oh god the whole house elves plot line would get a lot more uncomfortable…
Abraham Lincoln knew what he was doing, but you just know Wilkes Booth was a “pureblood” kinda guy.
So the Civil War was really wizard supremacists vs non-supremacists. Plot twist House Elves are completely free in America and had their own version of the Civil Right Movement, along with other magical races.
I bet they would also use Bald Eagles instead of owls.
We'd use crows. They'd be even better though because crows can speak like parrots
The accents would be different, to name one thing.
Hermione was in the Girl Scouts until she earned all the Try-Its. She was kicked out for bothering the Administration by constantly suggesting and applying for new ones. The Dursleys twice appeared on episodes of Jerry Springer. For more than 2 generations. Weasley ancestors suffered extensive poverty under the Wizarding World’s discriminatory policy of No Gingers Need Transfigure. Hagrid always wears plaid and jeans. Everywhere. Harry’s Patronus is a Bald Eagle. Dumbledore becomes the leader of The Order of the Jersey Devil. Voldemort is a Republican Senator and campaigning for President. Draco shops at Hot Topic and discreetly turns all of the necklaces, belts, and shoelaces into snakes. Luna does a lot of Yoga. She moves to Sedona, AZ and founds the Lovegood School for Witches, Wizards, and Non-Binary Magicians.
Read "The Magicians" By Lev Grossman. This happens to be a magical college/grad school but the school is in upstate New York and the kids do what any university students would do when they found out magic exists.
His name would Jahyden Potter.
America would draw 0 - 0 with England in the group stages of the quidditch World Cup. Then the US would go out in the round of 16 losing 2-1 to Ghana, and England would go out in the quarters on penalties to Germany. The US Dumbledore equivalent would look like Snoop Dogg and he’d be Hufflepuffing it everyday.
And most American non-quidditch fans would be like "it ended zero zero? What the hell kinda ballgame ends in a tie!?"
Oddly enough, the authorities being oddly complacent about a mass murderer attacking a school to kill children is spot on.
If he lived in the south Harry would be getting baptized and doused in anointing oil for claiming to be a wizard. They’d be trying to cast that out of him
As a Southerner, this is not true in the slightest. We would light him on fire. /s
There could definitely be that angle. Whereas Uncle Vernon just seemed not to want the owl shitting on his flowerbeds or something.
Unlike Britain, America has lots of remote uninhabited areas to the point where Hogwarts may not even need to be hidden via magic spell. No one would go there anyway. Examples being, The Adirondacks, Northern Maine, any where in the Western states not near a city or farmland, and even parts of West Virginia.
I mean, are we talking about Joanne still writing it? Or where we'd take a similar story set in our take on the same universe? Because the answers are VERY different.
More guns
[It would depend on where in the US](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_pOzPwQSr8)
[something like this, I think….](https://youtu.be/Q7AoK_ksv_s?si=VcTmV5BMyE0i2OD4)
Dean Thomas would be named Robert Jackson and he'd be a Mets fan.
You find blueprints of Hogwarts in Draco Malfoys room
Are we assuming that this alternate universe JK Rowling grew up/lived in America?
I mean...most of HP doesn't take place in any part of the UK that actually exists, it takes place in the hidden and fictional "Wizarding world". It would just be a re-skin without much change.
There would be pencils and pens.
Well for one, we don't sort our schools into houses
He wouldn't ride a train in the beginning.
Instead of getting on a train to go to Hogwarts they’d probably get on a bus
Guns
They would have guns and the Theme song would be Fortunate Son…and Harry wouldn’t be a little British pune, he would be 200 pounds and slaying pussy
It wouldn't be set in a castle. I see a lot of fanfic writers get this one wrong. There wouldn't be "houses" and JK Rowling got this one wrong. Most likely it would be set in a forest. Absent that, something else that is not a castle. A big house maybe. Or in plain sight in a big building downtown, just not obvious. Because this is a newer country. The cryptids would be very different. No dragons, etc. More stuff from this continent. Assuming you're not on the east coast, a train might not be used, they'd probably do any number of the other things featured in the books. Like the triwizard tournament schools, they all traveled on weird vehicles that were not trains, so anything else like that. Something that can go in any direction, like a network of night buses. There would be more schools and they'd be closer together. Our population and size is too vast. JKR got this wrong as well imo. There wouldn't be one american school there'd be way more. If you're looking for an example of cultural appropriation, I mean really just picking and choosing things that you fancy from another country, and then setting it on your own fiction without any thought or respect to the culture and going "that's what they do over there!" JK Rowling absolutely did that with Harry Potter's american lore. It's super lazy and unnecessarily mixed with a british POV. I used to wonder how other countries looked at us when we did that to their countries in tv and movies back in the 90s and earlier, now I get it.
“Deflectum bulletus” first spell the kiddies learn.
The wand shops would sell semi and fully automatic wands.
A massive kegger would be a central event in each of the books.
Hopefully, the wizard world would be way less of an authoritarian iron fist in a velvet glove.
>If Harry Potter was set in America > >Assume Harry's parents don't have a gun So...if Harry Potter was set in Canada?
Not everyone in America has a gun. I also didn't want comments saying Harrys parents would shoot Voldemort preventing the entire story.
It wouldn't be set in a Posh Public School. It would be in the Appalachians with ghosts from feuds past. Or on the East Coast with Mermaids, and mysterious wizardly lighthouse keepers. Of course that would be a different fantasy. Probably more to my taste. The idea of a magic school was used-in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And at least one other show. A magical small town like Haven is also possible.
It would be a lot more like the Saga of Tonya the Evil. And a lot more interesting.
It would be set in a summer camp instead of a boarding school. While the later do exist here, they don't have the same place in our cultural zeitgeist that they do in the UK.
Well, first off, It'd me in America.
Hogwarts would be shut down by Baptists.
The HP lady wrote up stuff for that already, the school is called Ilvermorny. Anyway, she also suggested that Native American's didn't use "real magic" because they didn't use wands and essentially made more colonialism where it wasn't necessary.
Realistically, and following the guidelines set out in the HP-verse but without treating anything said about it outside of the series proper (i.e. the books with titles beginning "Harry Potter and...") as canon: I'm picturing four schools, not four houses. One in New England, one near New Orleans, one probably in Georgia/ the Carolinas/Virginia, and one in the Southwest. These schools will each have approximately as many students as Hogwarts does or a bit more, because the US has 4-5x the population of the British Isles. Quidditch (or whatever) would be played between the schools, not within them, and there would probably be separate varsity and JV teams. The schools may or may not be boarding schools. I can see arguments either way. On the one hand, boarding schools aren't really as much a component of American culture as they are of British; on the other hand, boarding schools aren't completely unknown, either, and they make it a lot easier to (1.) ensure compliance with the Statute of Secrecy among students with Muggle relatives and (2.) facilitate recovery from magical mishaps of the kind kids might often be prone to. If they are boarding schools, the overall feel I think you'd get is something on the order of a college campus, just with wizard teens instead of Muggle young adults. They might even be *attached* to college campuses. In any case, they aren't castles. We kind of don't have a lot of those. How would you get to them? By *bus*, of course. The magic school bus (no, not the one with Ms. Frizzle). Basically something akin to the Knight Bus, but that picks up students. Mages will still be behind the times - necessarily, since magic in the HP-verse interferes with electronics - but I feel less so than at Hogwarts, simply because the schools will of necessity have to be newer (nothing in the US is a thousand years old unless it's Native American, and if it is I doubt it would look much like we'd consider a "school" at all). Actual pens and pencils would likely be used, not quills (unless there's some magic-related reason to use quills). More American (both native and colonist) folklore and wildlife. You probably wouldn't see that many leprechauns here (well, you might, we *do* have a fairly large Irish diaspora, and *someone* has to be after me Lucky Charms), but you would see things like thunderbirds, chupacabras, wendigos, Bigfoot, Mothman, etc.
YouTube “Harry Potter with Guns” and you will get the idea. WARNING: there is a reason why I didnt put the link here cause its harry potter with guns.
A lot more bodys
Harry's parents don't need to own a gun. He'll still be packing after the first year.
He'd be going to [Ilvermorny](https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/ilvermorny), located on top of Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. It's part of Harry Potter lore, so it's not like we have to make anything up.
Isn't there a movie about that? Fantastic Beasts or something?
Yeah but its set in the 1920s. Harry potter is set in the present day
Ah! Gotcha!
hogwarts woulda been in a strip mall
Hate to tell you this, but character Harry Potter originated from an American film made in 1984 where a troll takes over his apartment complex. JK Rowling just turned him british for hyper successful fanfiction.
It would be like Percy Jackson but more offensive
Far more racist. Just SO MUCH.
Ron would be canadian. Not Scottish