Supplemental worldbuilding questions

[Moriwen]

Fair enough. :)

[DanielH]

Are Harry Potter spell categories (charm, jinx, hex, etc.) natural or artificial categories? They way they were talking on the train, “technically Divination” seemed to be a thing somebody might care about, which is not at all how I ever read the series.

[Alicorn]

My instinct is natural-ish. Sort of like "herptile", which is not a monophyletic clade but is still a group with meaningful shared properties that makes sense to think about together.

[DanielH]

And will you acknowledge nominative determinism in any of the Harry Potter boxes? You do for MLP and Elves, but I would have expected it to come up by now (in Lumos or Bluebell Flames; probably not in Effulgence or Silmaril) if you were going to there. I wouldn’t expect almost anybody in-universe to notice Snape’s name meaning something (for those who don’t know, Severus Snape is an anagram of Persues Evans, which is a valid archaic spelling), but Sprout and Vector are obvious, with Sirius and Lupin only slightly less so.

[Alicorn]

I haven't given much thought to HP nominative determinism.

[DanielH]

I believe you said you didn’t know what you’d planned for why Phix passed out twice on her first day as a sphinx. What was the big magic event about? Presumably that doesn’t happen every time somebody gets a medallion.

Also, her second time passing out was right after she tripped, before she hit the ground. The most reasonable in-story hypothesis seems to be that she just hurt herself really badly while doing that; it is not impossible to break your ankle tripping.

[Alicorn]

The big magic event was about fairly naive content-agnostic ripoffs from Skin Deep canon.

Sounds reasonable.

[DanielH]

Do many countries in Alethia/Chamomile have laws relating to settling age? For example, age of consent is when you settle, or you can drink two years after settling, or you can vote at age 18 or settling whichever is later?

[Alicorn]

...they do now.

[Marri]

...or you can vote at age 18 or settling whichever is later?

And that'll be Kas NOPEing right out out.