Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93

daenerys

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 93. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.

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, 15, 16, 17,18,19,20.

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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

I would be shocked if someone were criticizing comic books for too much planning and coherence, if the Fridge critique referred to the character as a whole rather than her death. So in part this seems like a non-sequitur.

Back to MoR, the "major story arc" could indeed lead to Hermione doing something awesome, and her apparent death might not destroy that possibility for the sake of Harry's character development. But right now, you're dismissing the criticism out of hand because of an arc that led some readers to call Hermione silly. You're talking about a story that led people to question her characterization before now.

As far as malign coherence goes, Eliezer chose to throw in a dig at some strain of feminism during "Self Actualization," which ends with Harry and some men saving Hermione and friends. Now, Eliezer has said that he made SA longer than it strictly needed to be because he didn't realize he could take a different road to setting up (an arc where Harry saves her again, and she suffers and feels incompetent and stupid before her apparent death). But in a finished work, it would look like he put all this in for a reason. And looking back from chapter 92, a lot of it does in fact look like deliberate trolling of feminists.

Were this a finished work, certain feminists reaching chapter 89-92 could reasonably delete the file. And if I told them that later chapters improve the issues in question, I would not expect to be believed without major spoilers. Because I'm more like (a dumber version of) Eliezer than they are, and I still don't know what the Hell he's doing.

You know, I thought 89 trolled feminists the most.