Spoiler for "Prisoner of Azkaban"











I really don't see how Harry Potter's wizards with their incantations
and wands are more limited than your guy with his cd player.  In
particular, Harry is already less so.  For example, in the book I have,
he inflates his annoying aunt without need for wand or rhyming couplets.
He just gives her a nasty look and she's a talking balloon.  Of course
Potter is _far_ more powerful than the average wizard in his world.

Some additional spoilers for book 4:

Actually, he isn't substantially more powerful than other wizards.  Power
doesn't really seem to come into play much at all during the HP series,
actually...  The only things that Harry has been able to do that are beyond
the abilities of most his age are Partronus Expilarmus (however it's
spelled--the thing used to get rid of Dementors) and the way he fought off
the Imperios charm (again, spelling is undoubtedly wrong) when it was used
on him by the fake Moody and Voldemort.  Neither of these are particularly
impressive, since in the first case he had been trained by Remus
specifically for the ability to cast that spell, and in the second, the fake
Moody wasn't too incredibly surprised by Harry's ability to resist the
spell, and Moody made a point of teaching how to do it in class (although he
admitted that not everybody has the strength of character to do so).  So
neither of these are really a big deal.

And about the way Harry is able to do magic without a wand... in book one,
when Hagrid was trying to convince Harry that he was a wizard, he asked if
Harry was sometimes able to make things happen when he got angry or upset.
The fact that he asked this is a pretty good indication that most wizards
are able to do so.  Also, another example of somebody doing wandless magic
was given when Neville talked about how his family was afraid he was a
squib, and kept doing things to try to test him for magic, eventually
resulting in him being thrown off the roof of thier house by his grandfather
and hitting the ground completely unharmed, or something along those
lines... So wandless magic is definitely possible in the HP world.  Of
course, these examples are of kids using thier powers in uncontrolled ways,
so it's fairly reasonable to guess that the wands are meant not to give
people the ability to cast magic, but rather to allow people to control
thier magical abilities and direct them as they wish to.

As a sidenote, however, I seem to remember that Dumbledore was able to see
Harry when Harry was under his invisibility cloak, which does suggest that
it is possible to view magic or see through magic without having to use a
wand to do so.  But Dumbledore IS supposed to be one of the strongest
wizards alive, so this could be almost unique to him and a very few other
people at his ability level.  The fact that the expillaramus (again,
spelling is undoubtly wrong) spell seems to get some focus when all it does
is take away somebody's wands suggests that most people aren't able to do
wandless magic with any real control, or that thier casting abilities are
severely decreased when lacking a wand.  The way Voldemort wasn't able to do
anything in the duel against Harry once thier wands started going berserk
makes me think that even he is unable to use magic without his wand,
otherwise he would have just hit Harry with another spell rather than trying
to overpower Harry's wand with his own...

What we've seen of magic in Harry Potter all seems to be rather basic,
focusing on somebody pointing thier wand at whatever they want to change and
then reciting the words to the spell.  I rather hope that there is more to
magic than this, because if that's all there is to it, it's impossible to
believe that Voldemort is really all that powerful--all it would take to
kill Voldemort is to have a few aurors who know how to cast Avadre Cadavre
(this one my be spelled correctly... ^_^; ) finding him when he's alone, and
they'd be able to hit him with it even if they lost a wizard or two in the
process.  Of course, now that Voldemort has been ressurected with Harry's
blood, the protection that Lily's love gave Harry might have passed on to
Voldemort as well, making him immune to that particular spell... :)

Anyway, I really have to wonder how J.K. Rowling is going to handle this
issue, because as it is now, Harry could probably just use his invisibility
cloak over the summer to steal a gun, then keep it under his robes until the
next time Voldemort shows up and shoot him with it, because it'd be just as
effective (and boy would Voldemort be surprised!)as Adavre Cadavre, which is
supposed to be some ultimate, unblockable spell in the wizardling world.
Not very impressive, is it?

I really don't think that canon Ranma would have any trouble fighting even
the strongest wizards in the HP series.  Magic in HP seems much too limited
to really offer a challenge.  Ranma is easily fast enough to dodge Avadre
Cadavre, even Harry was able to dodge pretty effectively at the end of book
four, and he had a number of Voldemort's followers shooting spells at him.

You don't necessarily have to agree with any of what I've said (although at
least some of it is straight out of the books, so it's probably right), but
I would keep some of this in mind when trying to make a HP/Ranma crossover,
and try to figure out ways to make the magic of HP more effective and
challenging for Ranma to fight.

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