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skeptical_lurker comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong
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Note that using the stone for human transfigureation, he can perform sex changes.
Boy-who-lived gets Draco Malfoy pregnant?
I remember I enjoyed reading Luminosity/Radiance a lot less on second reading, once I knew how it ended. The same thing was true for Friendship is Optimal.
I am starting to wonder if the same thing will happen with HPMoR, once I read the last chapters. It's like there's something about story endings written by transhumanists....
Well, to be fair to Friendship is Optimal, the ending was in no way a twist. We even get to see Hanna planning it. So I dunno, it's okay on reread for me.
Interesting. I'm waiting to go and reread all of HPMoR from the start once it is done.
But there may be a substantial issue here: once one has that sort of ending everything else in the story may feel trivial in comparison. To test this it might make sense to look at books with similar sort of endings that aren't written by transhumanists. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End might one to look at. How did people feel about rereading it?
I eventually rethought whether Childhood's End had a happy ending. It seemed as likely that the human race was eaten as that it transcended.
Some other candidates for discussion: The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon and The Persistence of Vision by John Varley.
There's actually some explicit discussion of this in Worm's epilogue. That story had a relentless ramp of challenges always getting larger and larger until they were as large as possible (and then the story ended), but it was more of nireg n artngvir fvathynevgl naq gura yvir n abezny yvsr, vafgrnq bs oevat nebhaq n cbfvgvir fvathynevgl naq gura yvir n fgenatr yvsr.
Haven't read it, putting it on my list now.
Upon some reflection, the reason I liked Luminosity less on second reading seems to be at least partly that the protagonist started as a relative underdog (sympathetic) and ended up as dominant authority, one effective in their dominance to an oppressive degree, enforcing her ideas on everything and everyone. This moved me out of "yay, rationalist fiction, let's get into it from the pov of the protagonist" into a third person view... from which I started noticing how freakin' obnoxious rationalist!Bella is. Poor Edward.