Muggle
| Synonyms: | mundane, Normal, non-fan |
| See also: | Harry Potter, Muggle Quidditch, Muggle-born, Mundane-Mage Romance |
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In the Harry Potter books, a Muggle is a person who is not a wizard. Some Harry Potter fans also use the term to refer to non-fans.
In the Pottermore community, members would use the term "Muggle" to refer to their offline life outside of Pottermore, such as talking about their "Muggle life" or "Muggle Facebook" (their non-Pottermore Facebook identity).
Outside of Harry Potter, the term 'muggle' is used in the geocaching community - based on its meaning in the books - to refer to people who aren't cachers.
In Fanworks
The Harry Potter series has little to no muggle characters with agency and/or any important roles plot-wise, with Jacob Kowalski as a notable exception in the spin-off film series Fantastic Beasts. Some Harry Potter fans elevate the status of muggles in their fanworks, making them MC or assigning them prominent roles. Some may also present modern muggle technologies and other elements of their modern life as being superior to what wizards have, in battle situations or otherwise. Those fanworks can be described as "mugglewank" (often negatively).[1][2]
Muggle wank has two forms, I think:Firstly, the unrealistic engineering of situations to make them favour Muggles, most commonly through nerfing magic. (snip)
Secondly, Muggle wank is also the fetishisation of Muggle institutions or social norms and the blind acceptance that the wizarding world would be better if they were adopted.[deleted] on reddit [3]
Fics that convert originally wizard characters into muggles are called "Muggle AU". (See also Mundane AU.)
Resources
- Muggle POV tag at AO3
- Muggle AU tag at AO3
- Muggle Technology tag at AO3
- MugglesDoItBetter at TV Tropes