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MinibearRex comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong
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Chapter 76: "And that's why I can destroy Dementors and you can't," said the boy. "Because I believe that the darkness can be broken."
This is interesting, because it touches upon a thought I had about the Dementors back in Chapter 45. In canon, Dementors are manifestations not of death or even fear, but of despair. (I believe Rowling has said she drew upon her own experiences of depression.) That's why chocolate helps, why they generate feelings of hopelessness, why they take away happy memories and leave unhappy ones, and why their ultimate power is to put people into a coma rather than to kill them. None of this makes sense for a manifestation of death.
But Harry's response would work either way. A happy memory, a pleasant thought, can shield against despair, but it can't destroy it. Hope, on the other hand, true grim hope – the belief that things can be made better and, crucially, the unshakeable determination to make them so, not by thinking 'wouldn't it be nice if…' but by knuckling down and solving the insoluble problem – is the only true cure for despair. And that sort of hope, which Harry shows, is actually pretty hard to hold truly, which would explain why almost no-one else has found the same way that Harry has.
I don't believe this was Eliezer's intention. Harry's views on death are far too close to Eliezer's own as shown in http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified for me to feel that the Dementors are intended to be anything else. But I quite like my interpretation. Aside from anything else, since that sort of hope can be reinforced by being shared (enhancing both resolve and the feeling that the task is possible), it leaves open the possibility for a Patronus 3.0 by group-casting.
I don't know about chocolate, but bad memories are definitely scars you get from death. And what I suspect triggered the idea in Eliezer's mind to make Dementors be about death is the idea of the Dementor's kiss, because of the old metaphor "kiss of death".
That's backwards. I suppose experiencing the death of someone close to you could leave a mental scar in the form of a bad memory. But that's hardly the definition of a bad memory. Nor is a painful memory an inevitable outcome of someone's death.
Erm, I'd guess what gave my brain the idea originally was the fact that in canon they are flying corpses in grave shrouds.
In your story they are corpses. In canon, they're green humanoid monsters wearing hooded robes, that represent despair. Considering Rowling's own pro-death position, I don't think it's likely she would have deliberately created enemies that were supposed to be the physical embodiment of death (although the movies showed dementors and death as looking nearly identical). Given the changes I saw you make to them in order to make your point, I assumed it was just something you were changing completely from canon. Apparently I was wrong. Did you think of dementors as representing death while reading Prisoner of Azkaban, or is it an idea you developed later?
Um, what? Description from Prisoner of Azkaban, emphasis mine:
Nowhere does it say that they are green. The best description I can think of is "flying corpses that hide their appearances," which works pretty well as a symbol of Death.
On a tangential note, despite there being no description to that effect anywhere in them, when I read the first few books I found myself invariably imagining Snape as being purple.
So if MinnibearRex came away with the impression that some entities from the books were supposed to be some entirely different color than the author intended, he's certainly not the only one.
Snape dresses somewhat similarly to Count von Count.
Green? No. From the American edition of PoA:
And for the first appearance of a dementor Rowling talks about drowning. I don't know about the skin over the eyes, but the rest of it explicitly points to death.
Despair? I thought JKR mentioned depression, not despair. And the dementors are grey, not green.
And JKR's own experience with depression was after the death of her mother -- so the "death causes depression" is similar in content to "Dementor destroys all positive emotions". There's no reason why JKR couldn't use imagery of death in combination with her emotion.
In the books, an afterlife exists. But the soul-destruction, the true death, is what the Dementor seems to cause. Again -- if JKR's mother had just died, her most depressed thoughts about it would be the ones that involved thinking about the true death of soul-annihilation (the Dementor's kiss), not an afterlife.