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:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
(This is primarily a response to the top-level comment - I'm including some comments by naraburns just to try to be complete, and to riff on thoughts that occurred to me.)
In this case I just dismissed the whole thing as SecureSignals doing his usual neo-Nazi schtick, and to the extent that Mottizens upvoted and/or nominated it as a positive contribution, I put that down mainly to the Motte having an unusually high quotient of neo-Nazis.
There might be an interesting discussion to have somewhere about heredity and children and loyalty and tradition, and I'd be on board for that, but in this case the whole discourse is so tainted as to make it not worth engaging in.
Downvote and move on. That's my advice.
The Motte unfortunately has a population - I really hope a small one - of unironic pagan neo-Nazis/white-supremacists. Every now and then they get upvotes. Again, the best I can suggest is downvote and move on. This:
Okay, that's maybe an interesting discussion. Cursed Child does raise lots of interesting issues around Draco, Astoria, reproduction, and so on. But I think you do have to make some critical judgements about where it's possible to have that discussion in an interesting way in a given context, and... it's not here. I'm sorry, but it's not here.
Is it really neo Nazi? I think the issue is that JKR made an entire universe in which bloodline = magical powers, which is different than this reality. In that universe, being in favor of high quality bloodlines is good as it ensures that magical powers will continue. That’s the world building we have. In Way of Kings, magic powers are a property of a certain kind of rock, thus if you want to preserve magical powers in Way of Kings you horde those rocks.
JKR is notoriously bad about internal consistency in her world building, and the bloodlines = magic bit is one of them. If you’re writing to make the point that everyone should be included, maybe don’t make genetics a component of your magic system. Also, maybe don’t make the gnomes working in the bank Jewish stereotypes.
The books are quite explicit that while many of the pureblood wizards believe that keeping their blood “pure” is important to retain their powers, they are in fact not correct. There is never any actual indication that being more pure makes you stronger. Of the main characters: the Potter family were a pureblood lineage but Harry’s mother was muggle-born, and he is a strong wizard; Ron is a pureblood and is a moderate-to-strong wizard; Hermione is a muggle-born and is “the finest witch of her generation”; Malfoy is a pureblood and is a mediocre wizard; even Voldemort, one of the strongest wizards ever (and leader of the wizard-supremacy movement) is himself a half-blood.
Some wizards are naturally stronger than others, it’s not only about practice, but that natural talent is not correlated to “blood purity” at all. Hermione is the obvious example for this, and it’s why Malfoy hates her so much, this is not subtle in the text.
This is true, but something that I think fandom has had a very hard time accepting? Textually, it is extremely obvious in the Potter series that there is absolutely zero relationship between blood status and magical ability. Being pureblood, halfblood, or Muggleborn has nothing to do with your magical talent whatsoever, and the believe that it does is indicated to be irrational bigotry. Most of the most powerful wizards in the series are actually not pureblood (both Dumbledore and Voldemort are half-blood, for instance), after all.
Despite an American tendency to interpret it as a metaphor for race, in its original context I think blood status is a metaphor for class. Hogwarts is an exclusive British boarding school - purebloods are aristocratic families who've been going to
HarrowHogwarts for centuries, and muggleborns are lowborn or common people who aced their admissions tests and made it in, and are now rubbing shoulders with people who considered themselves their betters. Hermione, the most prominent Muggle-born character in the books, is a picture of an aspirational lower or middle-class student who has earned her way into an elite school through sheer swottery. Just watch her cringe when asked what her family does!Anyway, that said, I think there was a fandom tendency to assume that pureblood status means something practical, and I don't think it was just far-right people. Back in the 2000s there was a noticeable trend of stories where Hermione discovers she's secretly pureblood, for instance. My guess would be that because Potter is already a series where firstly magic runs in families, and secondly people discover that they were secretly special and important all along, it's pretty intuitive to apply that same system within wizards themselves. The start of the very first book, after all, is Harry discovering that he's really a foundling prince, a special person revered in this secret world because of who his parents were. If you want to use that trope again, and the character is already a wizard, well, she-was-a-pureblood-all-along is the easiest way to do it.
Yes on talent, but where the text is silent is on the ultimate relationship between "yes magic" and "no magic" beyond being clear that some people can and most people cannot, no matter their education. There is no serious exploration of whether, or how often, non-mages are born into wizarding families, or why. While there are notable "squib" characters, none are from pureblood families, and those relatively pureblood families who are not prejudiced against Muggles (e.g. the Weasleys) have distant Muggle relatives... who they don't fraternize with. The fact that all the Weasleys can do magic strongly suggests that there is a genetic component; a family that large would presumably produce some Squibs if "yes magic" were more-or-less randomly assigned.
I agree that Rowling was more influenced by ideas about class than about race, but the text she wrote seems to draw heavily from a cultural background of genetic inheritance as well, probably unconsciously. It's hard to read her books and not suspect that there is something genetic about magic use, even if the "pureblood" story isn't the correct one, or is only partly correct. Biological reality is insistent; it intrudes even on our overt fantasies!
I suppose the way it's portrayed is that magic appears to run in families, and therefore must have a strong genetic component, but that this is just magic Y/N. Two wizarding parents will reliably produce wizarding children, and every now and then two muggle parents will throw up a wizard child, but there doesn't seem to be a difference between the overall magical potential of purebloods and muggleborn.
It does make me wonder a bit about mixed pairings. The prevalence of half-blood wizards in the series seems to suggest that wizard/muggle pairings frequently (usually?) produce wizards. I can't off the top of my head think of cases of, for example, a wizard/muggle pairing produce some wizard and some muggle children.
We are told that squibs are relatively rare. They may not actually be any more rare than muggle-borns proportionally (after all, vastly more people are born to muggle parents than to wizarding parents), though. I do wonder about the statistics, and how likely wizards/muggles are to be born to mixed marriages... wiki tells me that a muggle born to one muggle parent and one wizarding parent is considered a squib, which suggests to me that wizard/muggle pairings usually produce wizarding children, but I would love better data than that.
This is getting more into worldbuilding and fanon now, but I could see a case that wizards ought to have a strong bias toward endogamy. If two wizards generally produce wizard children, but wizard/muggle pairings only sometimes produce wizard children, and the muggle population is vastly larger than the wizard population, then arguably there's a risk of wizards breeding themselves out of existence through intermarriage. Wizards might be like some minority ethnic or religious communities in prioritising endogamy, to try to preserve their own existence.
As far as I'm aware pureblood defenders in the setting don't make that argument, though. Salazar Slytherin, for example, seems to have taken the view that only purebloods are worthy of magic. If he were just concerned for maintaining the existence of the wizard population, then adopting muggle-born and convincing them to exclusively marry other wizards would seem like a higher priority than excluding them. The pureblood supremacist view is that purebloods are individually superior, and that, at least, is clearly indicated to be false.
I don't know whether you've read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but this is basically where Yudkowsky arrives on the matter.
Right--which is where we wrap back around to the OP. There is no question that Rowling presents the pureblood supremacist view as both wrong and wicked. But an in-universe steelman of pureblood politics might look something like,
That's the "love" the OP suggests Malfoid (at least potentially) brings to the source material: the love for one's children that is expressed by giving them the best available start, by choosing a high quality reproductive partner. Slytherin need not be bigots to be both proud of what they have (magic is cool!) and anxious to share that inheritance with their own children.
You have suggested that the discourse is tainted by the real-world implications that the OP probably intended for at least some readers to draw vis-a-vis race mixing or the like. Where I think those implications fail is simply that there aren't very many human traits comparable to "magic Y/N," and almost all of them are discrete, identifiable disabilities: Down Syndrome Y/N, Tay-Sachs Y/N/Carrier, Sickle Cell Y/N/Carrier, etc. At present (to the best of my non-expert understanding) the really positive stuff people want to select for in embryo screenings tend to be polygenic and tentative--height, IQ, athleticism, etc. are stochastic spectra rather than binary Y/N traits. But if I were a Wizard in Rowling's world, I think it would be very easy to regard Muggledom as an identifiable disability, at least for the child of a Wizard. In much the way that clinical words for disabilities (imbecile, retard, dumb, lame, etc.) tend to evolve into insults and epithets, I can imagine the perception of Muggledom as Disability forming the psychological foundation of anti-Muggle bigotry.
But a bigotry arising from good science is still bigotry--and good science that gives occasional cover to bigotry is still good science. I think the OP in this case too often fails to fully appreciate the former, but those complaining about the OP here do not seem to fully appreciate the latter. I guess the relevant meme is, "The worst person you know just made a great point." AAQCs are not personality awards, or endorsements, or judgments of moral character. More often than not, "death of the author" applies.
I have never done more than give it a brief glance. I can't stand Yudkowsky's prose style in general, so even if MoR were telling a story I were interested in, I think that would be an insuperable obstacle to me.
I don't think the Harry Potter comparison adds anything here, though?
The hypothetical you bring up is basically the Gattaca argument - a loving parent should want to give his/her children the best possible shot at life, that should involve the best possible genes, so therefore eugenics.
Harry Potter adds nothing to this because, as it sounds like we agree, magical talent in the Potterverse doesn't seem to work that way. Are pureblood/half-blood families particularly less likely to have wizarding children than pureblood/pureblood families? There's no specific textual evidence suggesting that, as far as I'm aware? Magical ability is a simple switch, and squibs appear to be very rare from two wizarding parents, regardless of whether the wizarding parents are from long-established magical families or not.
I suspect I'm on a different page to many on the Motte here, because I do in fact think it's immoral to abort a child due to Down Syndrome or other recognisable disabilities. If a wizarding couple proposed to identify squibs in utero and pre-emptively terminate them, I would say that couple is behaving grossly immorally. As far as canon Potter goes, I think the general direction of the text would be on my side there. Rowling is a liberal feminist and in favour of abortion rights, but the published text of Harry Potter seems like it would be against any notion that squibs are not worthy of life, and anti-squib sentiment is presented as a bigotry, albeit a common one in the wizarding world. For me I think all we need to recognise is that squibs are, like any muggle, clearly capable of living full, satisfying lives. A parent who would rather terminate a squib/muggle child and replace him/her with another one seems worthy of moral condemnation, at the very least.
Right, here. I think I stand by the idea that while it is possible to have a good conversation about reproductive ethics, it's not possible in this particular context because of the original poster. One could have a reasonable discussion of eugenics, but I think it's fair to say that if someone with a known malicious agenda brings the subject up, and sets the tone accordingly, that would make a reasonable discussion much harder to have.
Death of the Author is a good principle for literary analysis, and I think I invoked it a little myself (that is, Rowling's own views may be different to the views logically implied by texts she authored), but I don't think Death of the Author applies in every discursive context. If a person says something to invite a conversation, but through that person's identity, reputation, known other positions, visible agenda, etc., that conversation would be unlikely to be productive, I think it's fair enough to act accordingly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link