hi.
but tward, you remember, that in hogwarts muggles things like computers, televisions, telephones are not working.
in the sarah game they are blasting, blowing up.
kamochek.

hi,
if one considers that for a moment, that harry potter was completely blind. how would he run away from dimentors and the likes.
if it comes to use the wand on other person, it won't be actually easy as it is not necessary that a person stays wherever he stays, so it will be a bit problematic to rely upon the voice alone. suppose he heard a person speaking. how would he target that person if they silently move away from the direction harry's wand is pointed in.
plus, it should not be as easy for harry to run away, move to a new place without help etc. specially in the last book.

sure, suppose if he had some kind of psychic abilities that allows him to identify what's going around even if he can't use his sight, e.g. clairvoyance, etc. who knows how different or interesting it would turn out.

these are just my opinions, not being pecimistic in this above imaginary sinario regarding harry's inability to see.
regards
sid

Hi,
There was actually a fanfic about this, I forgot the nameof it though. In it, dumbledore showed Harry some spells that made objects in his room make sounds, until he was fully orientated. He could make the spell show where a certain object in the room was and go from there.
There are other things but I don't want to spoil anything, but remember it's just a fanfic so it might be a bit weird in some palces.

sounds like a fanfic chalenge to me. totally agree Nocturnus.

Hi,
I think the one I found, and I forgot who directed me to it, was called go with the tide or something like that.

Harry definitely needs some aura reading or other telepathic ability if he were to progress past his fifth year, because defending against nonverbal spells sounds like a pain if you can't see the jet of the spell either.

Hi,
Heh, the problem with the series is there are so much plot holes and so much non-explonations it's surprising how it selled so much. Yes, I do agree it is a good book, heck I loved it when I read it, but when I go back over it now there is so much stuff unexplained.

Hi.

I disagree personally on the plot holes, other than the age of Marcus flint (which Roling admitted herself was a genuine mistake), I didn't find that many holes in the books. For example, compared to magic in other fantasy series the magic of the Potter books is pretty limited in what it can do both by the relative skill of the witch or wizard, and by the limits of magic itself. As I've said before I see magic in the Hp books as a performance art. You learn the theory, you learn the limits, then you put it into practice. You can do this well or badly but are still limited in the scope of your performance, the same way a floutist couldn't get more than three octives out of their flute however good they were.

For instance, while I find Turtlepower's suggestion of magic to fix congitive abilities an interesting one, given how magic and the mind is treated I doubt very much that would be possible, after all what would be the point in teaching kids at hogwarts if you could just go "bing!" and turn them all into geniuses. It's actually implied that mucking about with someone's mind is a pretty serious thing and often something only done by dark wizards, eg, the Imperius curse, or the way that Voldemort's influenced (plus teenaged hormones and generally bad circumstances), affected harry's personality in the fifth book. Even the penseive is primarily an aide to memory, rather than actually messing about with someone's personality or cognitive abilities.

We do know (see Bill Weaslies scarrs), that there are wounds too serious to be cured by magic. moodies magical eye is essentially a prosthetic like an artificial limb, just like the hand Veldemort gives to Wormtale. We do know that magic allows wizards to create very functional prosthetics, perhaps with enough functionality to replace the real organ, the same way a person now born without lenses to their eyes but otherwise functional eyeballs can have an artificial lense inserted and have perfect vision assuming the operation is a success.

So, I do suspect artificial eyeballs would be the way blind wizards go in the potter universe.

As to whether Harry could've done what he did totally blind, well yes and no. Like anything else it would probably be possible but with significantly more work and occasionally some adaptations, for example a snitch that made a sound (it does in the films, but it's never mentioned as doing in the books). Similarly, when dueling Harry would need some way to A, target other wizards with spells when not speaking, B, Find out what other wizards were doing when launching spells none verbally, and C, have a very good way of learning the environment around him so that he could move very quickly and efficiently, ---- after all if he'd tripped up on the steps at the department of mysteries he'd have been in dam trouble.

I can't say I'm a fanfic fan, but one of the best blind characters' I've seen in any recent medium is Toth from the Avatar the last airbender series (there was a horrible Hollywood travesty of a film but lets forget about that).

The series takes place in a world where people learn to bend and control the four elements, fire, earth, air and water. Toth is an earth bender and she uses her conection with the ground to not only find objects and orientate herself, but also fight. Rather than chucking rocks at people like most earth benders in the series, she uses shockwaves to knock other people off their feet or grow pillers underneith them, and later on she even dones what no other earth bender in the series can and starts to bend metal by being connected enough to sense the fragments of earth within it.

An interesting fact about Toth however, is there are some situations she is amazingly vulnerable to. In fights she constantly protects herself from flying missiles with large walls of rock, and in any situation where she is not on the ground, such as on an ice bridge she has a lot of trouble.

I also like her as a person. You meet her originally at a fighting tournament where she is kicking the rear of many many large muscular earth benders in a very funny pro wrestling parody, (there is even an earth bender called the boulder who refers to himself in the third person). Then when you meet the champion it is a tiny twelve year old girl with bair feet and a white dress, ---- who is brick however is very quickly knocked out by Ang the air bender whe he flies across the ground and hits her.

Ang is however looking for an earth bending teacher (he being the Avatar has to learn all four elements), so he goes to see her at home, to find that her parents have no idea she's not only an earth bender but dam good at it, and believe she's tiny and helpless. This situation finishes with Toth running away from home to train Ang, ---- then later in the series actually having to confess the truth to her parents.

As a person Toth is great too, sinse she's extremely cocky, self reliant and overbaring, and indeed has something of an enmity with one of the other female characters, Katara, again something she makes up during the series. There are some very gentle occasional reminders that Toth does perceive the world differently and there are things she can't do (like sticking up posters), and yet points when Toth is pretty much indispensible, ---- for example when breaking out of metal prison cells, (she even later learns to tell when people are lying by their heartbeat).

I actually wish there were more blind characters like Toth in tv or literature sinse it's really bnice to see a blind person be a normal person with a lot of faults, with a lot of faults and personality. I also like the fact that Toth's ability with vibrations is not some sort of mystical "oh their blind but amazing!" sense, but something that has both an up side and a down side, and has vulnerabilities as well as strengths to it.

Indeed it's nice to see someone who is blind who is neither super human nor sub human just human! it's happened with characters in wheel chairs and artificial limbs, ---- why the hell people don't manage it with blind characters I don't know.

Well we've seen the blind sowrdsman, maybe it's time for someone to make a game about a blind wizard?

Actually, I always got the idea that Sarah in the game from pcs was supposed to be blind and the various navaides in the game along with the voice were helpful spells she was using to orientate herself around the castle.

@Guitaran, hope you enjoy Memory sorrow and thorn it's one of my favourite seriesand one I've read twice, I'm actually reading Tad williams other fantasy series, Shadowmarch at the moment. The first book was unusually slow but the series really! kicks off after that.

Actually bringing up  memory sorrow and thorn is later in the series there are some relevant comments about blindness, but I'll not say anything else about that as the bits I'm thinking of occur in the third and fourth books of the series so would  probably be major spoilers according to where you are currently.

I'll also note that  otherland interestingly enough, Tad williams series about virtual reality does feature a character  who is blind, and her own version of access technology which has some quite interesting consequences when in a virtual reality environment which is so perfect it's indistinguishable from reality.

I'd actually be hard put to decide whether you would count Martine in Otherland as one of those super human characters or not, sinse on the one hand she does have some very strange abilities. On the other, she has her own history and personality, and very much as many faults and strengths as anyone else, (she  even has a romantic attraction to someone else)., like Toth in Avatar, though in a very different way her ways of accessing the environment give her as much trouble as they do unusual abilities, for example when  the main cast first enter the Otherland network, a virtual reality simulation which is as perfect as reality,  Martine is at first over whelmed by the amount of sense data as compared to what she'd normally gets in standard virtual reality networks such as those which (in the series), replace the internet.

On propper blind characters, now I think about it Justin Cronin in the passage had both a totally blind character, and a character with severe visual deterioration (he actually had glaucoma as I do, though of course the drugs that preserve my vision weren't available in a post zomobocalypse world), he was pretty much just a guy.

The totally blind man who was their main radio operator and was very good with signals was something of an egotystical arse and a letcher, ---- but in a way I approve of that, sinse hay, blind people can be unpleasant too just like anyone else.

And of course we can't forget when talking about blind characters Jordi la forge from startrek tng, even though he probably got least development out of all the regular cast.

Then again, these are still exceptions rather than the rule. The only blind person to appear in the doctor who bf audios was of course an old man taking care of an audio archive, who of course is old and doddery and just knows about sound.

This is compared to at least five wheel chair bound  characters I can think of, which range from investigative jernalists, to professors, to Davros creator of the Daleks!

I remember my specialist school proudly  pushing a book to us that some local author had written a few years before I arrived there. It was  about the  wonderful mystical blind girl and her friend the unicorn! supposedly this author had been into the school and talked to the nice little blind kids (which is probably why the blind girl in her book is so dam useless and the biggest and most pathetic damsel you could imagine). This isn't to say  all blind characters or indeed all female characters need to be brick,  the girl's basic function in the plot was getting kidnapped, winjing about wanting to go home and  being completely useless about basic things like getting around, indeed even her supposedly mystical powers basically  came down to being friends with a large  talking horse with extra pointy bits.

The book was called Spellhorn  and thinking about it now makes me cringe!

I can think of some very interesting places said unicorn could stick his oh so magical spellhorn .

Regarding Avatar the last air bender, I'd highly recommend it. Sadly it was hit a little by the 2009 writers strike, so the ending wasn't as planned, but the majority is awsome! Great characters and a unique world.   There is a second series set 100 years or so later called Avatar the legend of Kora, which I've not seen yet, though I do have it on dvd and  will probably watch it when I get to a break in ds9.

Another  fact about the series is of course the very cool magical elemental powered martial arts. I don't know if an audio description is available, but there are some very good episode transcripts which  describe all the  martial arts in very epic  detail on http://www.avatarspiritmedia.net/index.php which I'd recommend checking just to get the full experience (I found those useful myself).

Hi,
Wait, there's a sequel to go with the tide? I didn't know that! I know what I'll be doing for a while assuming it's complete of course. If not I'll be left hanging lol!