This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of September 28, 2026
Contributions for the week of October 5, 2026
@kky:
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Notes -
I am disappointed that "let me assume a headcanon about a piece of fiction-> rhetorical exhortations -> therefore I present conclusions supposedly about the OG work but actually more about arguments I smuggle in as assumptions" a makes an AAQC. What is the quality, as I am not seeing it?
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In general. I know this isn't a democracy and it would be more work for the mods, but could we get perhaps fewer QCs, if they would be accompanied by more rationale on the editorial decisions why a nomination makes the cut and which nominations do not? Some users like to complain about mod bias, the mods like to claim they are unbiased, perhaps some editorial opinion on what the mod team values positively would help.
The report "showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts." I assume the people who nominated this one found it interesting.
That isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but you can safely assume that it will usually be a dealbreaker, yeah.
Nominations are the single most important factor in what makes the roundup. After that, it's down to moderator judgment. In practice, that means it's down to my judgment.
It has never helped before, so I don't have any reason to suspect it would help now. We do take time to explain things, sometimes, and our decisions are often moderated by community feedback. But first, I don't always know why a particular post gathered many AAQC nominations, so often I would not even be in a position to say anything more than "this one got a lot of nominations and it doesn't seem to be rulebreaking, so here you go." And second, we've learned over the years that there is a threshold of effort beyond which the whole AAQC report will simply fall to the wayside. Zorba's tools make it possible for me to get this done once per month, and most of the work is just whittling the list down to a manageable size. If I had to write intricate explainers for every entry in the report, that would not merely reduce the number of AAQCs, it would eliminate the report entirely. So, I'm not going to do that.
Very generally, if you think an AAQC is undeserved, you are free to say so, but you and everyone else would be better served if you spent your time writing a better post yourself, instead of a complaint about someone else's.
With specific regard to this post, it got plenty of nominations but also I did think it made an interesting point. Real people make real decisions every day concerning whether they should or should not pass along their genes, for example because they carry a serious genetic malady. If magic did exist, and it were genetic, it might be bigoted to hate Muggles, but surely it would make perfect sense to pity them--and all the more, if they were Squibs who knew about the world of magic but could never fully participate in it. This is often a difficulty in "magical realism" novels, because the most realistic thing that would ever happen in a world with hidden magic would be for that magic to be exposed and, then, for the world to be thrown into upheaval and chaos as it adjusted to the revelation. If there were a "magic gene," I am 100% confident that our existing biotechnology industry would be completely obsessed with detecting and, if possible, replicating that gene, that parents would be screening embryos for magical aptitude, that witches would sometimes abort their Squib babies, etc. I am confident of that because IQ is not even one one-millionth as interesting as magic, and humans are already obsessed with screening for intelligent children, selecting embryos based on highly tenuous polygenic scoring, aborting babies with presumed intellectual disabilities, and so forth.
You don't have to think that's interesting to think about, but if you can't even see why others might find it interesting to think about, you might consider the possibility that you have a serious blind spot (or extremely trapped priors) here.
I’m struggling with this exact problem for my own “magical realism” novel! It’s a real conundrum. I never stopped to think as a child about what a huge plot hole it was in Harry Potter (why would some wizards not just use their overwhelming strength to rob muggle banks, for example?).
There are some easy solutions that spring to mind (e.g. have all the magical weirdness sequestered in a pocket dimension that is only connected to the “real world” at a few carefully hidden locations) but nothing I’m really satisfied with yet. I intend to keep plugging away at it until I find a solution though.
How do you know they don't? It's not like the Harry Potter novels would catalogue every type of wizard-on-muggle crime that sometimes happens. If you're asking why it's not a thing that's known to happen among muggles: the criminals erase their memories, and if they don't then the Ministry finds out, erases everyone's memories and then cracks down extra hard on the criminals for breaking secrecy. CCTV was in a larval state in the beginning of the 1990s, if my google-fu is correct.
And it's a rare kind of wizard who would not only bother stealing muggle money but know where to look for it in a muggle bank.
As for the general magical realism question: the way J. McCrae's Pact does it is that there is an ancient magical working that defines most of humanity as Innocent and therefore actively shields them from seeing anything magical or comprehending it as magical, unless they opt in or get exposed too much (and in return they get protected from most Othersidely meddling).
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I think a point that's quite important to the Wizarding World is that the wizards "aren't" exactly overwhelmingly powerful compared to muggles. They seem to have a chronic lack of understanding of muggle technology, it's as if the more you get into wizarding, the less you can even understand about muggles. Arthur Weasley, ostensibly one of Wizarding Britain's foremost experts on muggles, seems almost entirely clueless about them. Sure, it's played for laughs, but we have to take it at face value, especially since on any other topic than the one he's the expert on, he's not a bumbling fool at all. Much of the "woah this is cool" stuff that makes wizarding world work is visually impressive but not any more functional than modern muggle technology. Dishes that do themselves? We have dishwashers. Moving staircases? We have escalators and elevators, what's the point? Computers, even the ones from the 90s where the books are set in, would blow a wizards' mind. Wands with deadly spells that you have to inconveniently take a second to yell an incantation for? Muggles have automatic assault rifles. Dragons? I haven't seen them do anything that would worry a nation that flys fighter jets. There's a few things that wizards do have an advantage on, like ease of travel and, you know, time travel (which has to be ignored if you want to think of that fictional universe in a consistent way as it pretty much breaks all of the stories). But there's things that muggles can do that wizards would likely have no counter to either.
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My understanding is that the wizarding world a) encourages separation from all things muggle, culturally, and b) has a massive police and surveilance org keeping track of these things and preventing them.
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I'm kind of sad that I missed all the Malfoid discussion. Glad to find it here though.
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A much better month than the last few. Maybe because there wasn't a major hot culture ware incident.
It's always a bit of a mix, I think. There were some good discussions last week, but also, I'd say, plenty of the usual.
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