With brooms between their legs at all times
More from the Let’s everybody shun JK Rowling file:
The real-life sport of quidditch will be known as something to be determined once it changes its name and distances itself from author J.K. Rowling, who created the game in her best-selling Harry Potter book series.
Because she has cooties.
US Quidditch and Major League Quidditch announced on Thursday that they have started the process of changing their names because of financial limitations and because they want to “distance” themselves from Rowling “who has increasingly come under scrutiny for her anti-trans positions in recent years.”
And by “distance themselves” they mean “show off how sensitive and correct we are.” There’s no objective need to “distance themselves” and no objective payoff for doing so, it’s just a bit of showing off – virtue signaling, as they say. Nobody on the planet gives a fuck what they call their stupid game, but somehow they got the Washington Post to report on it.
Two teams have seven players each on the field, with brooms between their legs at all times. Players score points by throwing a volleyball through three hoops fixed at either end of the field as dodgeballs are used to take players out of the game temporarily. In the books, the players fly on broomsticks; in the real iteration, they run.
On account of how they can’t fly. Pardon me while I collapse in hysterical laughter.
Ice hockey players are taught to always hold their stick with the end pointing to the side, and not directly at their body, because some day they are going to skate into the boards and their stick is going to stop and they aren’t and if their stick is pointing right at them they are going to come to a bad end (heh…)
I picture 14 people running around playing a complicated field hockey/basket ball/dodge ball game with broomsticks stuck between their legs, and I foresee many such bad ends.
The game in the book also has a magic ball called the Golden Snitch that flies around, and one player from each team called the Seeker goes to find and catch it, which marks the end of the game. Harry Potter played Seeker. I don’t know what this contrived earthbound version does for a Golden Snitch.
Why bother playing such a bizarrely contrived game of it has no connection to Harry Potter? Why not go play team handball or something? Why not just disband the sport?
Everything about gender ideology is ultimately Calvinball…
Looking up some information: the earthbound version of the sport has been around for some 16 years. It developed in the US, and went international nine years ago. I don’t see any specific information about common injuries.
The sport has a reputation of being very “progressive” and “inclusive”, allowing a maximum of four players on a team with the same “gender identity”. This strong attachment to gender ideology likely figured in their decision.
I still think they should just disband, if they feel so strongly about it.
@Sackbut,
The snitch is “a tennis ball inside a long sock hanging from the shorts of an impartial official dressed in yellow.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quidditch_(real-life_sport)
And the score is 13 – J.
There has been co-ed softball forever, with mandated male/female mixes, so aside from the addition of “new” genders that aspect is nothing new.
Wikipedia says teams are a minimum of 7 and a maximum of 21. So with the max of 4 per gender can you actually get an advantage by making the largest possible team if you come up with 6 genders? I started to look into this but then decided it was so hilarious I couldn’t bear to find out it’s not true.
Offhand this alleged Quidditch game sounds kind of dumb. As others have said, there are similar-ish real sports with established rules that would almost surely be better to play (probably some that were the basis for Quidditch). But whatever. Enjoy your non-magical Sport That Cannot Be Named, silly larpers.
What a Maroon…
I can’t help thinking that for trans-Quidditch , it should be two tennis balls in a sock dangling from the shorts of the referee, that they’re all trying to snatch away.
I might have been wandering around mumsnet when I first read about this and there was mention about a possible legal kerfuffle with Warner Brothers over the use of the name Quidditch being the real motivation behind this. But hey, never miss an opportunity to slag off JKR.
Peter N,
Or they could just snatch the broomstick from between the legs of one of the opponents.
I went to the WaPo article in the OP (I had originally seen a different story about it, so hadn’t bothered before), and found this:
But yeah, they’re doing it to distance themselves from JKR, not from trademark restrictions, suuuuure.
Wait, they run around the field holding broomsticks between their legs?!
Haaaa-hahaha!
Actually PVC tubes but yes – I had the same collapse in laughter when I first saw it the other day.
I just checked and while my GiveAshitOmeter 3000 is totally quiescent, I do have a thought or two – was quidditch, invented by the evil JK Rowling? if so, then they should disband straight away and come up with their own woke sport. Perhaps it could be something like quibbleitch where teams take penalty kicks for misgendering. It should be designated a women’s sport so anyone can compete since that apparently encompasses everything anyway.
Also maybe all the young actors who made names for themselves from the HP movies can give all the money they made to some appropriate charity.
I was eating tortilla chips as I read and had to work hard for a second not to spray the screen when I got to “quibbleitch.”