It's A Stupid Game

I uh... I'm a few decades late on this one, but I was thinking about it the other day and, well... I genuinely cannot think of a stupider sport than Quidditch.

Seriously though. Like, I know that in the first book the rules really are written solely to seem strange, and the game itself just doesn't come across as making any sense. That's because it's intended to seem strange to Harry, and readers by extension, because everything about the wizarding world is meant to be whimsical and bizarre to him. But even just a few minutes of pondering reveal how idiotic the entire conceit really is. And I'm not even talking about the health and safety risks inherent in setting kids loose on flying vehicles a hundred feet over a pitch, giving a few of them bats, and then siccing a couple of high-speed semi-sentient homing-missile bowling balls on them. In a world where bones can be mended with a word and deus-ex-magicae is literally a way of life, I can see how safety might get a different priority. No, I'm talking about the snitch.

And maybe the name of the thing means we really are just supposed to hate it, but given Rowling's whole deal, I feel like that's giving her far too much credit. No, the snitch was put there because Harry needed something to do on the team that wouldn't require experience, athletic ability, or really any kind of training, but could realistically allow him to be a hero and win the game. Which is also kinda stupid from a plot perspective now that I put it that way, but that's a separate post. Just focus on the snitch for now. Including a point-heavy objective like that in a game is absurd, of course; entire team compositions would be built around just looking for the snitch and never actually trying to score goals, and stupidly enough that would probably be just as valid a strategy as anything else. And yes, I'm aware that it's very small and very fast and supposedly really hard to catch.

There again we'll set aside logic and the fact that there's an entire professional league for this sport but Harry managed to catch the snitch in literally his first match. Maybe 'student model' snitches are a thing. In any case there just isn't any way to balance that thing in a way that makes for fun or satisfying play. Either it's difficult to catch but there are high odds that it will be caught by one team or the other during the course of the match and it doesn't matter what literally any of the other players do, or it's virtually impossible to catch in the course of a match and you've got two players on the pitch dedicated to literally staring into space for an hour. Neither of these methods make any sense, and there's no "happy medium" difficulty that doesn't make every other match feel like an arbitrary waste of everyone's time just because one player happened to luck into the right cubic meter of sky at some point.

Like don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's no luck in sports. Most sports are designed around tests of athleticism and skill, but sometimes you just get lucky in the way a ball rebounds off a backboard, or the direction the wind is blowing during a downfield pass. But getting lucky over your field-goal clipping a drone so it just edges through the uprights means you get 3 extra points; getting lucky over the snitch happening past your head gets you 30 points and automatically ends the game! It's virtually always the only win condition that matters! Why would anyone play this sport??

Or heck, watch it either! Because I've gotta tell you if there were any odds at all that either team could randomly end the game five minutes in, very possibly before either team had actually scored, I sure as crap would not be buying tickets to that event ever. So yeah, Quidditch is the dumbest sport I can imagine. I feel like it probably wouldn't have been that hard for Rowling to make up a sport that felt just as whimsical without also breaking every strand of suspended belief at the very suggestion that an entire school was interested in it, let alone an entire international community comprised of many cultures.

Or maybe even that is giving her too much credit.