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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   3295 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is the reason Quiddich in Harry Potter is a stupid idea from someone who probably doesn't understand sports as a concept.

I recall that JKR intended the snitch as a satire of this exact problem with penalties in Soccer, which have such outsize impacts on the game that you can play the entire game and have it all be irrelevant because of a single play.

And then people unfamiliar with sports tried to make quidditch real, giving ammunition to ‘JKR made a fictional sport, not a real one’.

College Quidditch teams are just the latest in a long line of "upper class white kids invent a new sport because they like playing sports but aren't very good at the existing ones." This is essentially the entire history of most modern organized sport, actually. Soccer, college football, marquess of quensbury boxing rules, BJJ, Rugby, marathon running. All originate in their modern form in the search by upper class white kids for an athletic outlet that isn't already dominated by the lower classes.

This seems off. Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes, to support organised inter-school play, and the The Marquess of Queensbury is obviously trying to do the same thing for a different pre-existing sport.

Marathon running was invented by a French academic in order to provide an on-theme marquee event for the first modern Olympics.

Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes,

All the forms of football (Association, Rugby, Gridiron) were originally called "football" because they were played on foot rather than because you kick the ball. ((Hence the stupidity of the "handegg" sneer))

Prior to the emergence and dominance of the various Footballs, when we talked about sport and sportsmanship, we were largely talking about aristocratic pastimes: horses, hunting, hunting on horses. Football was played on foot, as opposed to the Sport of Kings, Polo. Horse sports require both a lot of money, for the horses, and access to a lot of land. They're unavailable to the urban professional class.

The urban professional classes had a rising sense of their own importance and wanted to demonstrate their athleticism, but they didn't have horse-and-land money, they needed something accessible. This shows us the contrast that they were part of building: the upper class students at British boarding schools or American colleges were upper class, but not Aristocrats, they weren't as capable of participating in the existing cultures of sportsmanship at the time, which were oriented around horsemanship and hunting. So they elevated these townsfolk games, codified them, and made them into something socially valuable in which they could participate.

For Soccer in America, the same dynamic actually recurs in the 90s, when Soccer emerges in America as an athletic alternative to the dominance of football and basketball. The "Soccer-mom" term of the 90s didn't just refer to a mom, it referred to a suburban upper-middle class white mom. Why did her kid play soccer and not football or basketball? Football was too violent, basketball too "urban," (I mean everyone knows white men can't jump). Soccer emerged as a youth sports alternative that was less violent, classier, more European, but most importantly it was just a sport that poor kids and black kids didn't play. This is reflected in the fan dynamic, being a fan of European soccer leagues has long been a blue-tribe coded kind of sports fandom, a sports hipsterdom that allowed not just the players but the fans could sneer at American sports. This dynamic is how we wound up with the "pay-to-play" model that everyone involved with American Soccer has been kvetching about since the World Cup, but people don't understand how it came to be.

Marathon running, long distance running, jogging, are all popular in America primarily as and because they are upper-middle class pastimes. It's got huge advantages as a status-class marker: no contact, solo, primarily about discipline and determination rather than talent, historically finishing is the primary status symbol rather than winning. No large law firm or investment bank lacks a Marathon-Guy since the jogging craze of the 80s; while historically few law firms have a powerlifter or a wrestler (though Crossfit and BJJ might have changed this by now). You can't walk through an office in Boston leading up to April and not hear about someone training for the Marathon, I've never walked through a law firm in Boston and heard about partners training for the Mass state USAPL. You can see this dynamic in long distance running continue as the popular distances have extended, ultramarathons are the new marathons, because the ultras are still competitive for upper-class white boys with discipline and character, rather than the province of professional Kenyans. Finishing an ultra is still worth more than comparing times because so few people run them at all. Sport exists, is popularized by upper-middle class whites, comes to be dominated by other groups as the prestige of the event grows, upper-middle class whites move on to a new sport to enjoy as a pastime.

Jogging craze among yuppies => NYC and Boston Marathons become prestige events => Kenyans come to dominate the major marathons because prestige means monetary reward => yuppies start talking about ultramarathons.

White kids at old Ivy League schools invent modern football(s) as an interscholastic pastime => football becomes a national professional sport with teams at every high school and a path to riches => poor kids dominate the sport because they see it as a path to scholarships and money => white kids at old ivy league schools discover Soccer, Lacrosse, etc and develop those into interscholastic pastimes

This is too long already, so I'll just cede that the Marquess of Queensbury was a slightly different dynamic and I'm a little wrong on that one.

If they aren’t good at playing sports I don’t believe it’s because upper class kids are worse at playing sports than lower class kids. But you have a lot more lower class kids so even if the lower class on average produces half as many great athletes per capita their share numbers mean they will dominate.

I think it’s likely true that on average upper class kids are taller than lower class kids and intellect does matter more than people like to admit in sports so upper class kids should be producing at a higher % athletes.

But true elite athletes are still a small % of elites that you would still want to create new games you can be the best at.

It's not that upper class kids are, on an individual basis, bad at sports, that's neither necessary nor sufficient for the argument.

It's that people recognize, implicitly, the various advantages from playing sports, but individual kids aren't all good enough to play at a high level. Playing sports in an academic setting is good, has numerous social and physical and credentialist benefits. It's good for your body, your mind, your ego, your social life. But if you can't make the team in high school or college, you often don't even get to play, and even if you do play casually you're strictly inferior to the players on the varsity squad.

College quidditch (and rock climbing and historically lacrosse and ultimate frisbee etc...) is the lindy form of college athletics: a bunch of students forming a club and creating rules to hang out and play sports, and eventually organizing games against other schools until it builds enough to be a real tournament sport.

It's finding an outlet to express your athleticism when the ordinary forms of athletics that already exist are closed to you.

Agreed. The first wording could be taken as rich kids are bad at sports. But it’s more like rich kids just invent new games when their not in the 1% good enough to play the big games.

College quidditch is also notable for being ridiculous and inane as a sport. They run around with brooms held between their legs, even.

Like ultimate frisbee is not that.

Yes but the inanity is what keeps athletic kids who can play a different sport out of it. It's similar to the comment I've seen that Juggalo culture is one of the last real subcultures remaining because it is so off-putting that it is difficult for the Sociopaths to push out the Geeks and the MOPs aren't interested.

Unfortunately the readers seemed not to notice, tried to implement it as literally as possible, and the grouching comes from HPMOR!Harry and his big flashing BUY A CLOCK sign.

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