Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89

Vaniver

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 — LessWrong

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1) I did not choose the sex of the characters in this story. Rowling created the roles and assigned them sexes and everything else follows from those roles. If canon!Harry was female, this story would be about Harriet.

2) Hermione is not some random girlfriend who gets stuffed into a fridge. Things that happen to main characters do not turn into fridge deaths because they are female.

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[anonymous]13y180

dthunt is right. The prominence a female character has in the storyline before her death doesn't really affect whether it is or isn't a fridging. What matters is whether her death is a narratively appropriate end to her story and character arc, or whether her death primarily serves to motivate a male hero and further his heroic journey. (See http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/04/tropes-vs-women-2-women-in-refrigerators/ for a full discussion.)

Hermione's death was a textbook fridging. That's not to say that it's automatically offensive or sexist or whate... (read more)

1JoshuaZ13y

Unfortunately, while 1 and 2 may be strictly valid responses, they come across as extremely tonedeaf given that there were already a variety of complaints about gender issues in the story. To then kill off the primary female protagonist looks pretty bad. You could have gotten almost the same result if you had killed Neville without the gender issues.

9dthunt13y

The trope requires 2 things: 1) The woman winds up in the refrigerator (check) 2) It happens because someone is explicitly trying to get at somebody else, thus disempowering the victim, or that it serves as an empty source of motivation for a character. (???). As readers, we don't necessarily have confidence in criterion #2, here. Other commentators have come up with various plausible-sounding explanations for how the deed went down (sunlight resistant troll lures Hero-Hermoine to a place where her injuries can't be detected, and systematically removes all of her defenses). So, let's posit that the troll is a weapon explicitly sent to kill Hermoine. The important question is who and why? If it's to get a rise out of Harry, that's it falls under the common heading of the trope. If it's Mr Malfoy trying to get revenge for the destroyer of his son's reputation, it doesn't. I think as readers it's difficult at this stage to be confident about these things. Let's say, however, that Hermoine is the woman in the refrigerator. The road to get there had her basically kicking ass and taking names the whole way there; I'm not inclined to necessarily cry foul because of it.

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