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AdeleneDawner comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure what stereotype you're referring to, but the length of Harry's surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that's all.
I hadn't actually noticed that particular issue before, but now that it's been pointed out, it seems to me more like a LessWrong-related bias than an American one. We like to focus on big, progressive, constructive issues, and upper-class people are in a better position to do so meaningfully; stories with disenfranchised characters are more likely to deal with apartment cows like 'how can I keep my abusive stepfather from attacking me' and 'how can I afford to replace my broken wand', which we don't generally like to think about.
In countries with an aristocratic tradition, upper class people tend to have multiple middle names and surnames to better show off all the prominent families the person descends from.
This tends not to be done in Britain. (Hyphenation does appear at all social strata to some degree.)
My big problem is the amazing breadth of American idiom that somehow falls out of the mouth of a child brought up by Oxford academics. Those kids really just don't talk like that. Not even slightly. It jars every single time and gives the impression of an author who can't be bothered.
If the characters in a story are supposed to be speaking Mandarin, no one, not even bilingual Chinese Americans, will complain that the American author wrote the dialogue in American English rather than the words the characters are literally speaking. Unfortunately, it appears that British English is too close to American English for dialogue between British characters to receive the same concession.
As an American, I don't particularly mind the Americanisms. If EY tried to write in British English, it would come out stilted and sound wrong to both nationalities. If he got a Britpicker, it would take longer for new chapters to come out. I don't like either of those options. On the other hand, translations are being done into Chinese, Korean, and German. Is there anyone here willing to translate it into British?
If it helps you suspend disbelief, the early chapters gave me the impression that Harry was brought up by books, with his parents playing a supervising role at best.
There are things that assume American style systems that just don't exist over here. In the first chapter it talks about "Elementary Schools", where in the British system it would be Prep schools, probably (they tend to be classed the "best"). And Tenure doesn't exist in the same way.
It didn't jar with me too much. I just ignored the fact it was supposed to be British, to be honest.
Prep schools - as a Scot I have no idea what they are and they sound awfully posh. Are they the same thing as primary schools?
Awfully posh independent primary school is a good description. Although the sometimes go up to 13 years old as well.
Kids like that are already brought up by books. And Hermione talks like that in the story too. No, it's a common careless HP fanfic author failure mode, not anything clever or intentional.
I don't really see it as careless; it's just a work obviously written by an American.
Well, I guess I do see it as careless, in the sense that "I don't care".
This seems like something that would take some amount of work to fix in case the author did care. Problem with speech pattern differences is that you have no idea they're there if you're not familiar with the target speech pattern, so it's not like regular fact checking where you can generally tell when you're dealing with something tricky. I'm not terribly familiar with spoken English and had no idea about incongruent Americanese in the lines, though I can't think of anyone sounding very British either now that you mention it. The most straightforward fix would seem to be to run the dialogue through a native British English speaking editor, and that's a bit heavyweight for a fanfic.
In fanfiction, the problem is solved (if the writer cares) collaboratively-- American writers trying to do British English well is such a common problem that the proof-reading and copy-editing has a name: Britpicking. I assume that most of that is done by native speakers.
The problems can be subtle. I was shocked to find that modern British English doesn't include "gotten". How do they make it through the day without such a useful word?
And I'm not going to mention the book because the author's a friend, but she writes excellent British English. When she had a couple of short passages of American dialogue, the result was agonizing. She didn't make the typical error of exaggerating differences, but there was something very wrong with the rhythm.
They just use "got" - at least, that's what I was taught in school.
And I would definitely appreciate it if Eliezer had a Britpicker "fix" HP:MoR. There should be good chances of a sufficiently dedicated fan in Albion.
Preferably someone who lives in Oxford or Cambridge and knows from personal experience what the smart children of academics in those cities talk like. LessWrong would be one of the few sites where there would actually be quite a lot of people fitting that criterion ...
There are no small children in Oxford; the place is entirely populated by students, academics who used to be students, and tourists.
The surrounding villages are fairly normal though. By which I mean typical English home-county.
ETA: But Harry is in no means typical. Unless something awful happens to these kids at puberty, there just aren't enough player characters at 18 for Harry to be the norm.
However, I think they'd be good enough examples that Harry PVE could be expected not to talk in American slang.
Aside: As an American, I've often been quite surprised to find out that authors were British (if I read the books before I got background on the author.) My reaction is "British? It can't be!" This has happened with Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and Charles Stross. I wonder when my brain will figure out that not everyone who's fun to read is from my home country.
Americans who learn music from British rock bands too. The British learn it from the Americans then sell it back to them better. That's why it's always fun to see Alan Moore writing in what's quite definitely British rather than in American.
(And Neil Gaiman married an American, his children are American and he's lived in America for many years.)
It bloody does include "gotten"! It's just regarded as an "Americanism", hence evil to the purity and beauty of the sacred English tongue [*].
British writers writing 'Merkin can be painful. I'm Australian and even I can tell.
[*] may not be 100% pure nor 100% sacred. Beauty may vary. Grammar may have settled in shipping.
I did two polls because of annoying constraints. The second one has comments, the first one may eventually get comments.
The results back up what you've said.
Thanks. At this point, since I did get this confirmed by someone British, I'm going to do a livejournal survey. There may be local variation.
In fiction, it would pretty much never be wrong to remove "gotten", but it does come out of their mouths.
That's an interesting question. British people-- some of them (and not all Americans, apparently) do use 'gotten', but seeing them use it in print will destroy some readers' suspension of disbelief. Truth or plausibility?
It seems to me that it would add versimilitude to have some British characters use more Americanisms than others, but that might be too subtle.
Fair enough, this is a derivative work and shouldn't deviate from the established canon except where it needs to. I am tempted to argue for a special exemption in the case of Harry Potter fanfictions written by authors more skilled than Rowling.
I don't buy your second point here, because while in reality yes, the rich have the ability if not necessarily the inclination to deal with the world's problems, stories about those problems tend to maximise emotional impact by making their protagonists part of whatever strata of society is most affected by them. In the story of english democracy, the Chartists are much more sympathetic than Disraeli, and Christy Moore is unlikely to write a song praising John Major for his role in the peace process.
If Eliezer were writing an original story with a similar plot to MoR, he'd be well advised to amp up the prejudice against Muggle Borns and make his hero one. I suspect the narrow class focus here is an incidental result of the intersection of his interests and Rowling's, particularly her fondness for "salt of the earth" working class stereotypes. That is, Rowling made all the smart kids posh and Eliezer picked all the smart kids.
I agree with this, and I think it may also have been inspired by/intended as a parody of either:
*The fanfics where Harry finds out he's descended from Merlin or the Founders and picks up a pile of extra surnames
*The use of hyphenated titles for characters like Boy-Who-Lived or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in canon and fanfic
Even if it's not inspired by either of those, the associations made it funnier.
[edited for format issues]