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thomblake comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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For all those who say that the 'unconventional ship' hinted at is Hermione/Griphook, I'd just like to say that's preposterous, and there is no way Eliezer would include such a thing in the story.
The Durmstrang houseboat from Goblet of Fire, must be the unconventional ship.
*ducks*
Durmstrang houseboat/Beauxbaton carriage
Hermione/Griphook isn't completely wrong enough to qualify.
Chapter 42
Is it really Black/Pettigrew? Because I'm not sure in what sense that would be 'completely wrong'. But maybe I've just been hanging out with too many yaoi fangirls.
I told someone in advance; in particular, I told them there would be a completely wrong ship, they guessed Fred/George, I told them "not wrong enough", and then said "Sirius and Pettigrew". They said, "OH, THAT'S JUST WRONG". So I figured that, yes, that was justifiably describable as "completely wrong". Also, the fact that I googled obvious spellings of the ship and found that it only seemed to have been done once or twice (I forgot the exact number), in a fandom that has a convention for using "Snumbledore" to indicate Snape+Lupin+Dumbledore, seemed to suggest that it was pretty damned wrong.
That was me. I still agree with my earlier comment, but I must say that you carried it off in the story in a remarkably natural way. It seemed to just come out as a perfectly natural fact about the universe, not something awful as it is when informed by canon, fan fic, and the horrible depiction of Pettigrew in the films.
Really? I'm surprised that that ship is that rare. It always struck me as one of the more plausible ones. This seems to reflect a general pattern that whatever makes ships common is not very correlated with their plausibility.
Yes, this seems very consistent, except for canon ships, ships of minor characters, and MY favorite non-canon ship, which is popular and plausible :P
Which non-canon ship is that?
I was being (mostly) facetious, but Sirius/Remus.
I approve of this ship.
Are you a Shoebox fan?
Hell yes I am a Shoebox fan.
It does. None of the four possible combinations of Pettigrew, Black and Lupin seems remotely unlikely. The fact that in the Sirrius-Pettigrew case one of them killed the other doesn't particularly reduce the plausibility either (in the real world or in fiction!)
I assume you mean in MoR rather than canon?
No. Reconstructing from what I wrote way back then I seem to be referring to the fact that it is not unusual for lovers of any kind to kill each other.
--François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 72
Congratulations on a completely wrong ship done completely right.
Professor Summers/Author insert?
Can you do worse? Try harder.
In my secret SIAI slash fics, I ship you with a tsundere Nick Bostrom. Is that worse?
Maybe an acausal ship? Say, Harry / Riddle?
Sinhababu's 2008 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly article is the definitive essay on acausal ships.
Lewis may actually have heard of the physics, but Sinhababu seems to think of many worlds as a purely philosophical construct.
Only on Less Wrong does the phrase "acausal ship" make sense.
I'm not sure it even makes sense here...
Now it does.
Hedwig/Quirrelmort. Dog!Sirius/Firenze. Cat!Mcgonagall/Nagini.
But the Hedwig can never be ...
Oh yes, she can be. Even hedgehogs and porcupines can be, contrary to a somewhat popular opinion.
MoR!Harry / canon!Harry. Must be done. (Maybe a three-way with Clarence the Angel, who was clearly responsible for bringing them together.)
I think MoRDraco and canonDraco would be funnier.
The problem is 'wrong' and 'worse' here operate on multiple dimensions and are highly subjective. Fred/George is one way to go.
That can't possibly be original.
It's so, so not.
There are 252 results on FanFiction.net for Fred/George fics genre-tagged with "Romance". I'm sure that's vastly underestimating the true number of fics with Fred/George twincest.
"Misestimating" may be closer to the mark - it looks to me like there's there's a lot of threesomes in that list. That said, check out the degree of interest on Livejournal. Or, for that matter, the first bullet under "Fan Works" on the TV Tropes "Twincest" page.
But Nicolas Flamel is married!
And I'm still not sure if that's completely wrong enough to qualify. I tried to get some wrongness from the perspective of canon and some just plain squick into each of those suggestions.
I was being silly - the joke was that this was the only thing I chose to object to out of the list.
The relevant trope being I Take Offense To That Last One. Or, depending on perspective, Arson Murder And Jaywalking. Warning: TV Tropes (obviously).
At this rate, if the FAI problem isn't solved before nasty AI's arise accidentally, I think the immediate cause of failure will be TV Tropes.
Sadly, the best I can come up with is Lensman!Harry / James Randi.
No, wait. Gandalf / Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Okay, cat!McGonagall/Dobby and Crabbe/Fawkes are both completely wrong enough to be competitive.
But of course, it's more impressive if the completely wrong ship is less high-entropy - that is, if you don't have to dip so low in the search ordering to find it.
Incidentally, I tried to look it up, and as far as I can tell, this particular ship has been done exactly once before. Surprising, considering how near the characters are in canon. I suppose it's just that wrong.
What about a high-entropy but suitable ship, like Sorting Hat/Voyager Horcrux? The intelligence without sentience and non-intelligent vital spirit seem like a perfect match for each other.
Perfect. (But I note that the sorting hat doesn't have intelligence. It piggy-backs off the wearer's.)
A relationship with a non-sentience doesn't seem to me to be something I'd really call a "relationship" in that sense.
Someone really doesn't like this entire branch of conversation. Even the parent was downvoted. (I went through and removed all the -1s myself.)
The problem is that the pairings feel too reasonable higher up in the search ordering. For example, I considered Moaning Myrtle / ?, Hagrid / ?, and Trelawney / ? but couldn't find other high-search-order matches at fanfic-SL4. With students characters I found it especially difficult, as magical teenagers are just too plausibly randy + weird.
Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me...
Firenze/Hagrid?
It should feel at least somehow wrong but it actually does not. Then again, I suspect that most "happenings" that include Hagrid could pretty soon end with a grave medical emergency of some sort, generating copious amounts of squick.
Luna/Draco/Karkaroff?
(I wonder how many of those (that consist only of canon characters) have already been done. Probably all of them.)
Btw, after some complaints about suspension of disbelief, I substituted Michael Shermer for James Randi.
Aw, why? Randi looks more wizardly (and must be shipped with Dumbledore at some point, they're perfect for each other, they're both wise accomplished old white-bearded gay wizards...), and I don't see why Shermer requires less suspension of disbelief. (The main thing that made me confused there was figuring that if Randi were really a wizard but still the Randi we know, he'd probably have long ago tried to scientifically investigate magic as Harry intends to, and made some of the same discoveries and many more, and possibly become a supremely powerful and well-known wizard. Am I on the right track or have I overlooked something else implausible that people complained about?)
That was the complaint.
Personally I think a lot of people are confusing expert skepticism with expert science, but if the reader says you're messing with their suspension of disbelief, the reader is always right. Substituting Michael Shermer just makes it a Shout Out instead of an actual conspiracy theory.
Obscure technical tangent but no, they are not. The reader can be confused about the meaning of the phrase, introspectively weak, using the claim purely as a rhetorical soldier or, as is most likely to be the case, some combination thereof.
They're still right. If that's what happened to the reader and broke their suspension of disbelief, that's what happened. It doesn't matter if the reader made a mistake. Your text caused that mistake.
As Eliezer says, a lot of people confuse expert skepticism with expert science...
Randi in real life, as far as I can tell, would not "scientifically investigate magic", but instead, whenever anything happens that looks to some people like magic, he tries to cover it up and pretend it never happened.
Aww, I liked that element, and it doesn't seem that implausible as such things go; I once heard an apparently sincere conspiracy theory that holds that the reason nobody has ever won Randi's million-dollar prize is because he uses his own prodigious psychic powers to stop them from doing so.
Agreed
I did have some issues there, but I don't think it was that serious.
The $1M prize is a clever way of finding muggleborns! (though of course anyone doing real magic is whisked away and declared a failure)
Three way between Kreature, Umbrage, and Filch. Actually, make it a four way by adding a Dementor. (Since we know from book 6 that they have some means of breeding)
There, is that worse enough? :)
Hermione/Umbridge/dementor.
+Haggrid
It's true, every orgy is better with a half-giant.
And you just know that Hagrid would bring a pet or two.
Okay, I think we can end this thread now.
There were some sparks between Harry and the Sorting Hat.
Or there could be something between Fred, George, Hermione, and time-turned Hermione, which would be a completely inappropriate use of a Time-Turner, but I suspect it's been done and thus would fail the originality requirement.
Yes, it came with illustrations.
That's.. just you, right?
Where is this talk of unconventional ships?
The conversation refers to the AN for chapter 34:
I was going to say Mr. Hat and Cloak/Blaise's Mom. Except that I'm kinda hoping that Mr. Hat and Cloak IS Blaise's Mom.
My sketchy knowledge of fanfic subculture is showing. What does 'ship mean?
I thought it meant making a character more wonderful than it is in canon, but apparently not.
It's short for "relationship", but it's also used as a verb, which means to portray or want two (or more) characters to be romantically and/or sexually involved.
Examples:
"I ship the Whomping Willow and the Devil's Snare." = "I am amused by imagining those two plants in a relationship" or "in at least one derivative creative work, I have represented those two plants as being in a relationship."
"This fic contains only canon ships." = "This work of fanfiction romantically pairs characters in the same arrangements they have in the source work."
Thank you. I would have assumed that non-canon relationships were slash, which goes to show how fringy I am.
Is there a word for making a character more wonderful than they are in canon?
Some sorta Sue.
Warning: TV Tropes.
Mary Sue being the generic version. Warning: TV Tropes
Wikipedia for the TV Tropes-phobic
I think slash refers especially to non-canon gay relationships, and fiction centered around or involving such relationships. (It may actually refer to gay male relationships in particular, I'm not quite sure. I only know the basics of fanfic terminology.)
"Femslash" seems to have some currency as the lesbian equivalent of "slash". I've also seen "slash" used to refer to both types of gay relationships. I've also seen it used to refer to sexual content (straight or gay), and sometimes specifically to gay sexual content (to the point where some people say PG-rated fic with gay couples is not slash - in particular there's a tripartite division with "gen", "het", and "slash", where the first has no sex, the second has straight sex, and the third has gay sex). I don't think non-canonicity is part of any definition I've seen.
It may be just me, but I get the impression that it's not really slash if the characters in question are gay in canon, even if not for each other. I might argue that, say, Ben Bruckner / Melanie Marcus (both canon!gay, opposite sexes) would count as slash, but I expect that's a minority position.
Ahh, thanks for the explanation. It took me a few posts to become confident that A/B was referring to romance and I didn't notice the abbreviation and verbating of 'relationship' at all.
huge grin
Of course not. He would never do that. It's completely preposterous!
Just to check: Did it turn out to be Sirius/Peter, as referenced in chapter 42? I notice that the phrase "artistically complete" appeared in the notes, so I'm guessing yes.
Edit: I was initially going to suggest something involving either bestiality or Animagus-form sex; possibly Ron/Scabbers, some combination of Marauders, or Luna/Thestral. The part about only finding one prior example made me think of Hagrid/Dobby.
Yes.
Thanks.