But here's the thing - his portrayal has pretty much no redeeming features. He's not even "nice unless you get in the way of his ambitions", he's just low-grade nasty all the time, except when he's being blatantly patronising. Whatever the big picture view of his personality, at any given time he is either 100% unpleasant or actually redeemed.
I think that goes for most of the other characters as well. They aren't portrayed as, say, positive 10% of the time and negative 90% of the time - instead, every single thing they do conforms to the same moral level. Someone like Lockhart couldn't pet a kitten without it being a PR move (or possibly without accidentally hurting it to demonstrate his incompetence).
Granted, but it's possible to be unpleasant without being evil. In fact, that was my original point - you said "we never need to think about who's evil", and then went through my list and sorted 2/5 into the wrong box. Yes, Percy's a jerk and Slughorn's a single-minded social climber, but neither of them actually means ill any more than Hagrid does. That doesn't make them evil.
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: