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bramflakes comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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Well, forgive me for overstating my point in a state of emotional frustration, anguish, anger, disappointment, and just plain loathing. No, it is technically not correct to call this Fridge Stuffing. Nevertheless, the fact is that my willing suspension of disbelief is broken, and that I find that my anger is directed at you rather than at the Universe or the Rules or Fate or whatever forces make the death of a beloved main character acceptable. My brain rejects this. I've never, in my life, until now, felt like declaring a piece of fiction DisContinuity, but this is exactly how I'm feeling now. If she had died in Azkaban or from a Kiss or from a Malfoy-funded assassination, that would have perhaps felt better. But the lamest warmup boss of the canon? Offscreen? And making Harry arrive just too late? Not minutes too late, mind you, but right after the troll grabbed and crushed her?
What, would just a few paragraphs of seeing the fight from her perspective have hurt? A sense of closure, perhaps, at least on her side?
I'm feeling really confused at this comment. When I read the chapter I thought to myself
"Oh. Hermione died. Big plot twist, what will the characters do next?"
And not much more than that. I don't know whether I'm emotionally stunted but I find it extremely difficult to conceive of someone having such a visceral emotional reaction to a fictional character's death.
I was wondering whether a lot of exposure to superhero comics could have that effect, since very little (nothing at all?) is permanent in them.
I also lacked any strong emotional reaction to Hermione's death and I have never read a superhero comic in my life. I fact, I've never had such a reaction to a fictional character's death in books, movies or games. While I do get immense enjoyment out of absorbing works of fiction, I never get 'caught up' in them to such a degree that the emotional part of my brain starts treating characters as real people.
I've never been into superhero comics so that can't be the explanation in my case. In fact I often get annoyed when an official writer mistreats the canon they have been entrusted with, or fails to follow up on important plot points.
I can get emotionally invested, but to me (it appears, upon internal reflection) it is the loss of potential and further interaction with the character that gets to me.
For instance, I really like the scenes including X, and I thought that X could have grown and done so much more, and now none of it will happen. Completely different feeling from when RL people die.
Likewise, I find myself shocked when I meet people who don't care about fictional characters the way I do.
I've been really shocked by the super-emotional-effects from fiction that you seen in Tumblr fandom and the like. On the other hand, I get extremely emotionally affected by opera, so I don't know. This chapter was certainly a punch in the gut though, but I came out of it feeling more 'victory - whatever the cost' than you.
Wow, there's really no escaping the Typical Mind Fallacy. I find it very hard to connect to what's going on in an opera.
As for Victory At All Costs, this isn't Star Trek or a shounen anime; the amount of willpower and smarts you put into things increases your base rate of success, but there are some tasks that are just plain too hard, and sometimes you're just unlucky and roll a Critical Fail.
Although I do tend to come out of cathartic tragic operas, plays, etc with a kind of transhumanist "look upon the tragedies I avert and despair" bent. But seeking, for example, how the Universe still manages to kill Gilda is a lot different from this sort of thing.
Of course. But that still is pretty close to Ardent Harry's actual resolve.
After decades of constant fiction consumption, I've just stopped taking it very seriously at object level. I imagine I used to be much more responsive to what storytelling beats the narrator pulls instead of how they pull them back when my brain wasn't hypersaturated with familiar fiction schema most anything will fit into.
I'm a poor visual imager, so perhaps I find it more difficult to empathize with characters when my experience of them is words on a screen (interspersed with blurry outlines of what I imagine is happening in the scene). I notice that I get more emotional reactions when I'm watching a movie, for example.
Is there any research investigating this sort of thing?