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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VirgilCaine" data-source="post: 1407060" data-attributes="member: 17083">What "bubble spell?" You mean something one of the other contestants was using?I don't remember exactly which book it was in, but this was the one with the wizards contest, the Goblet of Fire maybe, I forget.I distinctly remember Harry searching desperately for a water breathing spell and he couldn't find one, and then the elf comes up with this magic mass of worm-like things that did it. If he couldn't find one at Hogwarts, there should be some reason why there wasn't one there.Yeah, so did the Oz books, and look how many L. Frank Baum wrote. The source of my comment on it being "a rule" is from the book "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card. I guess he doesn't count, huh?Actually, you may be incorrect. I might not remember the HP books exactly, but here goes...In D&D, we know the sub-schools of spells(E.g. Pattern, Figment, Compulsion), we know what wizard magic can and cannot do (in general, it doesn't heal, it doesn't create permanent objects at low levels, it doesn't deal with alignment very much), we know who can become wizards and what they do to get their spells (Intelligent creatures, and they have to memorize spells from spellbooks), we know what graduations of power there are in spells (spell levels 0-9). If I remember correctly, which I might not be, this information isn't gone over in Rowling's books in detail. There is a small amount of information on the difference between Charms and (IIRC) Summoning spells in the Goblet of Fire (the one with the wizards contest). But none of this is made very clear to the reader. It is all mentioned in passing.Why she didn't simply say it explicitly, then I don't know. It was my impression that it didn't exist as a spell, at least at Hogwarts, NOT the apparent reality that the spells existed, but he couldn't find them because there was no index of spells.See above for Orson Scott Card's book. Some general explanation of magic would be helpful. I am not bleating for explicit treatises on magic in every novel, I am simply saying that I think Rowling should have provided more information than she gave.I read up to book five.The reason for the light detail on the magic just hit me...this isn't a story about where HP is, it's about what he does in dealing with his problems. In Card's words, this is a Character Story, about a persons changes, not an Event story about what someone does. Duh.</blockquote>

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