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ArisKatsaris comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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I don't know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you.
I think you're probably just mourning for the character and are angry at the cruelty of the story that depicts a cruel universe which lets people cruelly be murdered (just like our own). You're justifying your anger by talking about the particular details of the depiction -- but I think you're just bloody angry at the murder itself, like Harry is, not anything else.
If that's the case I think the story has been successful in making you feel Harry's anger, though you're misdirecting it. Authors that write honestly end up writing about the moral universe of consequences which they believe exists. An atheist like G.R.R. Martin couldn't write Lord of the Rings, and a Christian like Tolkien couldn't have written Game of Thrones. And this is the story that Eliezer Yudkowsky has to write.
Details like "in the canon the troll was much weaker" seriously shouldn't be affecting your emotional reaction, especially when it's clear that the troll has been boosted in power even in-story (so that it'd be impervious to sunlight), so it was clearly murder and targetted assassination, not just a random troll than randomly attacked Hermione.
GoT is absurdly dark, though. Things like that have happened in history, but not so compressed in time. After I found out about the Red Wedding, I gave up on the entire thing, I found myself completely losing interest.
"I don't know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you." I anticipate that I would. If I had to venture a hypothesis as to why, I'd guess that I would have shared her struggle, her despair, and her eventual acceptance of death. Part of me would have struggled, failed, and died with her. Inability to help oneself is much more acceptable than inability to help others. And, of course, seeing the fight from her perspective would have given me time to get it into my skull that she really was going to die, before she did.
This is historically inaccurate. GoT is fairly accurate for the time period depicted (it is based loosely on the War of the Roses). It is practically lighthearted compared to the vast majority of human history.
The Red Wedding, like most of GoT, is based on a historical analogy with the War of the Roses. Specifically, it is a combination of the Battle of Heworth Moor, where a wedding party was warned in advance of an ambush and managed to hire enough mercenaries to survive, and the Black Dinner, where the leaders of a clan were invited to dinner, then slaughtered.
Usually the War of the Roses isn't portrayed nearly as darkly. Hm. An interesting thing happened in my head. I imagined GoT as retold in the style of Horrible Histories, and suddenly it all became okay and tolerable. "Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, it's funny cause it's true. Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, hope next time it's not you!"
I am currently reading a history of Byzantium. In the roughly three centuries from Constantine to Justinian, a situation with someone invited with guarantees of safety but betrayed and murdered occurs about ten times.