I don't know if our love has any magical power under your rules, but if it does, don't hesitate to call on it.
Foreshadowing alert, particularly given canon.
I found 93 incredibly refreshing-- it was good to see so much cooperation, good will, and clear communication after a tremendous amount of earned and unearned mistrust.
It can't be completely stable, of course, not least because Quirrel is around, but also because I think stories don't work to maintain high points before the end.
I wasn't horrified at McGonagle's announcement. This is a story where learning how to do better is a good thing, and I respect the idea that children need to be raised to be adults.
Undoing the problem of people who've been trained to do nothing is going to be harder than it sounds. Having rewards for doing something sounds good at the moment because very few people did anything, but all rewards are subject to Goodhart's Law. I expect to see people doing a lot of ill-thought-out somethings because the reward structure is too simplified.
Harry's father's letter is emotionally excellent, but I wonder whether the idea that adults should be protecting children rather than the other way around entirely applies to Harry's situation. On the other hand, if it's foreshadowing, that could be a relief. Arguably, Harry learning how not to be isolated is a major theme of t...
On the other hand, I'd forgotten how disappointed I was in HermioneMOR compared to canon Hermione.
I think this is because canon!Hermione plays the voice of reason and maturity to the childish Harry and Ron, whereas HPMOR!Hermione in some ways serves the opposite role, being a real (and thus immature and limited) eleven-year old girl next to super prodigy Harry and trained-to-perfection Draco. Seen in that light, the extent to which she does manage to keep up is actually pretty amazing.
Her "reason and maturity," in canon, is basically playing the role of a responsible young girl. Rowling seems to think this is impressive; obviously, Eliezer does not.
I'm not sure about that last-- remember the bit in MOR where Hermione is right to trust the adults about the dangers of transfiguration and Harry wasn't?
I kind of recently came to the realization that I think Eliezer meant Harry and Hermione's relationship to personify what he says often, which is "Utilitarianism is what is correct, virtue ethics is what works for human beings".
It's been a while since I've read canon, but I remember that Hermione as largely motivated by love of learning (with loyalty to her friends as a strong second, but we don't see the two motivations in conflict, and loyalty isn't distinctive to her-- all the good characters are loyal), and HermioneMOR as largely motivated by wanting to maintain her self-image. MORHermione isn't as awful as that might be because the self-image she wants to match is (mostly?) built around virtue ethics, not vanity or status, but the two characters are very different to me.
From my point of view (and I don't know if anyone shares it), in the early parts of MOR, Hermione was this weird brittle conglomeration of traits that didn't even seem like a human being. I blew up about it, and upset Eliezer, and he did something to how Hermione was portrayed, I don't know what, so that she didn't make me crazy even though her character wasn't drastically changed. I leave the possibility open that Eliezer being affected by what I said calmed me down rather than that he changed the character, though I certainly didn't intend to affect him that strongly.
I have to take it on faith that Eliezer and practically everyone here likes MORHermione as much as they say they do because this isn't how I react to the character.
I found 93 incredibly refreshing-- it was good to see so much cooperation, good will, and clear communication after a tremendous amount of earned and unearned mistrust.
Also, good to see Harry see it, and maybe correct his not entirely accurate assessment of other people.
I'd forgotten how disappointed I was in HermioneMOR compared to canon Hermione.
Really? I like this one so much better. Her only real failing I see is her preoccupation with feeling inferior to Harry, which should be irrelevant regardless and is inaccurate besides.
Dumbledore's Army is a good example of canon Hermione taking the initiative, Harry just went along with the idea, if I recall correctly.
Eliezer has said that Hermione hasn't been powered up as much as other characters because she was already so great in canon.
And went so far as to observe that if Hermione were to be upgraded in the same way that Harry, Quirell and Draco had been upgraded then she would surpass the intellectual capabilities of the author himself, and his ability to emulate.
It's possible to write about characters cleverer than oneself by two means I can think of.
having unlimited time to think about what your character arrives at in an instant
getting multiple people to help with the above.
As Harry himself points out, Harry is cheating, and hard. He has a dark-side, he has a time turner, he's been training his mind from birth... and Hermione is still beating him in raw intelligence, and was just starting to learn to be a hero before her death.
Aside from that, take a look at Hermione Granger and the Burden of Responsibility, which is a recursive fanfiction of HPMoR diverging during her trial. It's really only just getting started, but I have hopes.
Prediction: Snape will end up playing a crucial role in the climax of the story, similar to canon but even more satisfying. Evidence:
I believe Snape's "Sunk Costs" hangup is also alluded to in Ch 91:
"Do you intend to declare that your life is now a ruin and that there is nothing left for you but vengeance?"
"No. I still have -" The boy cut himself off.
"Then there is very little advice that I can give you," said Severus Snape.
Snape is in a perfect position to cleave together the cleft worlds of wizardry. If he can convince Malfoy that not Dumbledore but Voldemort threatened the life of his son, he can make these old enemies into allies against voldemort.
Disclaimer: I am thoroughly enjoying HPMOR. That said, I just don't think Eliezer is quite grokking the substance of feminist complaints.
It makes complete sense within the story for all the female characters to do what they do, given what they've defined to be and what circumstances have arisen. The death of hermione makes complete sense. But its a fridging, of course its a fridging, because you are the author. You created these characters, and put them into the situation. If you tell a Superman story where he kills, and you set up circumstances where the only thing he can do is kill, then, sure, within the story, we buy that Superman needed to kill in that circumstance. But you, the author, put him in that circumstance, made him and his opponents make choices which led to that death, because you wanted him to kill.
I don't think Eliezer necessarily intended to make the female characters in this fic weaker than the male ones, more passive, more timid, more prone to mistakes, but thats how it has turned out. And for the defence that this is what he got from canon? Well to be honest its quite clear that many of these characters aren't the characters from canon. Moody is far more compe...
I think it's a bit absurd to call something a "fridging" when the character in question has been around for 90 chapters and had their own major story arc, etc. That's really getting away from the spirit of what the "women in fridges" idea is complaining about (ie women who only serve to die in order to motivate the male characters).
While personally, I think this is a entirely legitimate direction to take with the story, I'll point out that on some level those 90 chapters of relevance can exist for the purpose of heightening the impact of the character's removal.
It's entirely possible to deliberately write a female character who exists purely for her death to motivate a male character (or vice versa, but it's likely that fewer people would complain,) who's well developed and active in the story for a long time, if the author is doing so simply to set up the extent of the motivation. And I think some people are concerned that, given that Eliezer planned Hermione's death from the very beginning, this is just what he did.
Yet Hermione and McGonnagal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.
Amelia Bones, Susan Bones, Daphne Greengrass, Padme Patil (and even more minor characters like Hannah Abbot and Tracey Davis) are all significantly stronger and more relevant characters in this one than they ever were in the Harry Potter series.
If you compare ratio of the genders of relevant characters, HPMOR is better than the original Harry Potter ever was. You say Hermione is as flawed as in the original but you forget that it was Ron who was completely downgraded to peripheral status.
And as Velorien said, fridging is defined by its narrative purpose, and we don't know its narrative purpose yet.
On the other hand, major female characters Luna and Ginny are entirely absent from HPMOR. I guess it was inevitable given the decision to make the story take place only within Harry's first year (since they are not in school yet) but I would have loved to see an HPMOR version of either of them.
Sorry, how are Hermione and McGonagall, "essentially as flawed as they were in the original text", exactly? I always saw their characters as being a step up from their original descriptions, and it's clear that the difficulties that Eliezer is having them overcome are not random things that no other characters have, but rather, the sorts of problems with thinking we see in the real world. Hermione and McGonagall have made more progress over the book than many of the other characters. You can point out that this means they started out weaker, but there are clear, justifiable reasons for this, and not simply downgrading all the females.
You have to acknowledge the backgrounds of these characters.
Moody? Dark Wizard hunter for a hundred years. You can't expect McGonagall to be able to compete with that. Quirrell? In order for the story to work, we needed a villain that would be a match for the upgraded Harry, so it's obvious why he would need to be seriously ramped up. Dumbledore? After defeating Grindlewald, he had to wage the war against Voldemort for ten years, so his character needed to be the sort that could realistically withstand that pressure.
While I can't pretend to...
If it's okay for something to fail a critique, doesn't that kind of mean there's something wrong with the critique?
And I think there is something wrong with the critique. You don't quite seem to appreciate the point Eliezer is making in his response.
I take it as a given that it is perfectly legitimate to have the main character of a story motivated by the death of his best friend. It is a premise of the whole endeavor that the main character is a super-smart Harry. So now we have to find a friend. Who could that naturally be? Well, it so happens that the smartest student in Harry's year in the original is a girl; naturally, she will now be the second-smartest student in the class, because otherwise we'd have to dumb her down. She has the brains and personality to be Harry's friend - so unless Eliezer takes additional pains to move further away from the original, she is going to be that friend. And it just so happens that she is female, which is entirely irrelevant.
Indeed, one could also turn it around and point out that it's a positive thing that the person smart enough to be such good friends with Harry that their death motivates him suitably is a girl. But that would be equally b...
No, it doesn't indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don't think you'd disagree, but I imagine you'd probably not agree that we shouldn't play it.
Criticism isn't about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn't to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one's past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.
For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/tag/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don't really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn't so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione's fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
This was anything but a random death. It was foreshadowed for a long time, we knew who'd do it and why, it's an integral part of the main storyline. Part of the story worked exactly because we were expecting this, but the characters were not.
Yes, exactly. Neville's death would not have created these emotions, but the reason is not that he is male and Hermione is female. Neville should not be able to stand just as close to Harry. Neville is in no position to be anything as close to a comrade or equal as Hermione was. Neville is just someone who Harry has sympathy for and by whose development Harry was impressed. This is a very different thing from the "the two of us are different from the rest of the world" connection that he quickly developed with Hermione at the beginning (and which then faded off a bit, not least due to the questionable SPHEW arc).
I think this may be taking Harry at his word a bit too much when it comes to his views on Hermione. Just because Harry allways speaks in "rationalist" vocabulary, doesn't mean he is allways rational or free of bias. He is often unfair to people when he's emotional. And his blind spot for Quirrel is a mile wide. "It was the defense professor last year, and the year before that, and the year before that..." Someone actualy starting from priors and adjusting finds Quirrel very quickly, particularly when you factor in the sense of doom.
Harry thinks he doesn't like Hermione that way, Harry's dad is pretty sure he does. I think regarding Harry's statements as the more objective one here may be a mistake.
Harry thinks he doesn't like Hermione that way, Harry's dad is pretty sure he does.
In my experience, relatives are pretty sure the kid likes any friend of the opposite gender that way if they get brought to their attention. At least, in the culture in my general area.
Yet Hermione and McGonnogal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.
Hermione is the most admirable character in HPMOR, and it looks like McGonagal could soon join her at the top. If their portrayal is an affront to feminism, it's feminism that has the problem, not HPMOR.
I said most admirable, not most powerful.
But let's take your example as is, because it demonstrates another point. When Hermione fought bullies, that actually brought about a lasting change in Hogwarts. Compare the good of that accomplishment to the good of setting free one prisoner from Azkaban, the one most likely, capable, and intent on wreaking destruction in the world.
Who has done more good? I don't think that's a slam dunk win for Harry, and could be a devastating loss.
In a similar way, recall that Hermione won the first battle of the generals because neither Harry nor Draco knew how to effectively organize a group of people to a shared goal. Also, if Harry is supposed to learn goodness from Hermione, isn't that a rather huge power, determining whether the world gets one more Voldemort, or one more Dumbledore? Influence of others is power to do good as well. Similarly, it's McGonagall who actually runs Hogwarts and sets an example for students, not Dumbledore.
Hermione had a lasting power for good. Harry is "exceptionally good at killing things". If you want something killed, you want Harry on your side. Or Quirrell. Or Voldemort. Or Dumbledore. If you wanted a l...
To state it more explicitly problem is that this is a set of not great role models.
If the issue is the set of role models, I submit that Hermione is the best role model in the book.
You can't model yourself after Harry, redo your birth, and have a superhuman dark side to call on. Similarly, you can't choose to have a university professor as a parent, who can serve as a role model to you in scientific method, and fully support your efforts in studying science. You can't trade in your two dentist parents, who think your intelligence is "cute', for parents who will respect and support your gifts.
But you can be diligent, hard working, honest, caring, and brave. You can do what is right. Though you won't be as smart as Hermione, she is the best role model the book has to offer.
having a substantially weaker female lead is going to make it harder for them to identify with the characters,
Because it's much easier to identify with a 10 year old with a superhuman dark side who wants minions and a sparkly throne. Much healthier too.
has set Draco Malfoy on the path to redemption
That's assuming that Draco's half-year of interacting with his new friend can't be countervailed by his subsequent several years of interacting with his loving-but-evil father. I would barely rate that as a possibility, much less an obvious assumption.
The question of Draco does have interesting is-HPMOR-feminist implications, though. Suppose we swapped the genders of Draco and Hermione, both of whom just had many of their often-similar arcs cut short for very-similar reasons. Now, Herman is the one who maintains his convictions in the face of an overwhelming villainous threat, and so the villain is forced to murder him via a plot using the third most perfect killing machine in nature, properly prepared using sabotage and magical upgrades because otherwise the troll would have lost. Now, Draca is the one who gets taken out of the action by half-a-plot (a plot which depends on Draca making rash egotistical mistakes), but she survives under her father's thumb because ending her influence on Harry doesn't even take killing her. Did the story just become more gender-equal, or less?
On what do you base this guess?
Primarily anecdotal and a function of who I know who is reading it, along with the fact that in general fanfic is a heavily female media form, with a lot of young people. From my personal sample, I'd say that about 60% of readers I know are male, but since I'm friends with substantially more men than women, that suggests that that percentage (tentatively) should be correct towards 50/50.
rescuing a prisoner from the most secure prison in the world.
demonstrating that, unlike Hermione, he can't distinguish dangerous quests with high potential pay-offs from dangerous quests that will make the world worse even if he succeeds.
It might be anti-both. If you insinuate that everyone of gender 1 is liable to become a genocidal dictator, that's an insult to people of gender 1. If you insinuate that no one of gender 2 is liable to do anything substantial, that's an insult to people of gender 2. Neither insult ceases to be insulting merely because you said something bad about the other people too.
It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.
The only time I've been (or at least noticed being) mass-downvoted, it was immediately after having some slight involvement in a discussion of feminism or PUAistry or something of the kind, and making some comments on what, for want of better terminology, I'll call the pro-women side. I just went looking to see if I could find the incident in question to check my facts; I didn't (though I didn't spend ages looking) but did turn up a remark from someone else that they'd seen that happen. I think there is very good evidence for at least one LW participant who has made a habit of punishing people for feministish opinions by this sort of mass-downvoting.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
It seems to me that this isn't "controversy" but outright abuse, and the kind of abuse that merits severe sanctions, because (1) it poisons the environment for everyone and (2) it seems like an attempt at coercive manipulation and coercive manipulation is generally harmful. I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form "so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ's recent comments?"...
I have seen many things in many years, and I'm pretty sure I 'grok the substance' of the feminist complaints. The problem is twofold:
1) Feminists pattern match for feminist issues, so they sometimes find issues even where issues don't actually exist, and
2) feminists have integrated feminism into their identity.
The end result is that even minor perceived issues can directly affect their identity, resulting in offense. It is not a good combination, making discourse difficult and littering the discussion landscape with hot-button triggers. It's a common political pattern - similar logic holds for many different 'righteous belief' systems.
Regarding your comment, "We can enjoy problematic things even while acknowledging they're problematic.", I personally feel that's more than a little unfair. In this case at least, the audience that finds it problematic is at best a vocal minority.
Perhaps "We can enjoy things that some people find problematic, while acknowledging that those people find those things problematic." While a less potent soundbite, I find it more appropriate.
Or perhaps even, "Some people will always find certain things problematic. That doesn't mean that it's anybody else's problem."
they sometimes find issues even where issues don't actually exist
Issues are subjective. Something that's not an issue for you can still be an issue for someone else.
For example, you have a problem with thakil's phrasing and have offered a "corrected" version. However, you've destroyed the point of thakil's sentence, which is that it's possible that ((Person A finds X enjoyable) AND (Person A finds X problematic)). I know from direct experience that this is true; I have been Person A in that situation.
If you have not personally been in that situation, it doesn't follow that another person has not, nor that they are somehow being "unfair".
With regards to whether an issue exists or not.. I mean if readers can perceive it, then it exists.
How certain are you of this?
If told that a particular tune is present, a significant fraction of people will report that they can hear the tune when presented with recordings of white noise.
If told that a pattern is present, a significant fraction of people will find a pattern in a random distribution of points. (Constellations, for example.)
IMO, Hermione died because she was in fact the most admirable character in the book. The stakes in our fight against death are all the things that make life worth living, not nameless drones in the security detail dressed in red.
Whether or not I agree with the conclusion, your argument here is weak.
Calling an opposing viewpoint ridiculous (with formatting for emphasis, no less) does not advance the discussion. It's just a way of saying "I disagree with you strongly enough to be rude about it".
Saying that analyses based on only part of the work are fundamentally valid doesn't automatically make it so. You have to actually justify your claim.
Popularity is no indicator of validity.
If Eliezer is indeed participating in critical discussions of unfinished works, that might make his objection to having the same done to his own hypocritical, but it still tells you nothing about whether doing so is legitimate or not.
You provide no evidence that Akin's laws of spacecraft design are relevant to this discussion. Having Googled them, I can't even imagine how most of them could be relevant here.
I do, however, agree that Michelle's argument can easily be used to shut down discussion, and that this is an issue that needs addressing.
Calling it now: Harry pulled off a double bluff. The rock is just his father's rock, and the ring is Hermione's transfigured remains. The ring (with inset diamond) registered as magical, so Dumbledore checked that the diamond was still his father's rock and not secretly Hermione's remains. But he didn't check the ring itself. This is a perfect, classic, trick. Harry is playing at just that one level higher...
Good lord, Harrys parents are very good at this parenting gig.
The combo of the intellectual and the emotional appeal, in particular is a thing of beauty.
Let us see; Quite a few options were taken off the table in this chapter in particular because noone was missing, which rules out all the "substitute someone else" gambits people kept suggesting in a really impressive display of etics fail.
So Hermione got up and left. Or her body was absconded with. Correction: if she got up under her own power, she was most likely still absconded with, as otherwise she would have let people know she was mobile. I mean, even if she wanted to keep the world thinking she was dead to avoid further attempts on her life, she would want to tell Harry.
Possibilities;
Quirrell hid the body. On the grounds that Harry would find it difficult to do anything stupid without a body to do anything stupid to.
Snape. Yes, I am still on about the oxygenating potion. Exotica in bottles is what he does, and heck, he even uses "put a stopper in death" as an example of what a master potioner can do. In which case, he is keeping her incommunicado to avoid whoever is responsible finishing the job with fiendfire.
Harry: Stasised the body, and hid it to avoid burial, autopsy, ect.
From the Author's Note One Should Not Read:
I’ll state outright that at the end of the story Hermione comes back as an alicorn princess.
Here's the thing - based on both the tendency of characters in HPMOR to state the literal truth as a "joke" to hide the truth in plain sight (when asked where the real Quirrell is, the Defense Professor says "What makes you think I did not steal his body outright using incredibly Dark magic?"), and Eliezer's own admitted reluctance to speak outright falsehoods... well... this could be a joke. But (perhaps scarily) I'm putting a high probability on this in fact being true. Like, at least 40%.
Alicorn is the author of Luminosity, the rationalist Twilight fanfic, right? Could it be that this is to imply Hermione comes back as a vampire?
[ducks from rotten tomatoes]
It wasn't until the next morning that it was discovered that Hermione Granger's body was missing.
Just wait 3 days.
From the most recent author's note:
The story of HPMOR is built around the parallel-universe versions of those roles, and those roles (with one exception) retain whichever genders they had in canon.
What is the exception?
Nicholas Flamel, who is already known to change identities frequently, is the obvious candidate.
(And Flamel could also be Quirrell; Of the canon characters, there are four people likely to be as powerful as MoR Quirrell is: Dumbledore, Grindelwald, Voldemort, and Flamel. He's not Dumbledore; Grindelwald is probably still in Nurmengard; Voldemort is a distinct possibility, but that-one-infamous-post-we-all-know-about is, in my opinion, more likely to be a red herring than truth; Flamel is most likely. If Quirrell were not Flamel, Harry would be correct in assuming that Quirrell would kidnap Flamel if the stone were genuine. Lack of access to the elixir of life would also explain Quirrell's illness and the accelerated aging that Harry observed when Quirrell was in the infirmary. It also explains why Flamel knows that the Stone is hidden in Hogwarts. And if Quirrel/Flamel is female, that would explain how an attacker managed to intercept Hermione in the girls-only staircase. This theory also explains Eliezer's hints that a future story development will make it obvious that he is in no way shortchanging the female gender.)
I suspect that, if Flamel is Quirrell, the presence of the...
If Quirrell or Voldemort is female, Baba Yaga's a good candidate for her identity. Baba Yaga has been mentioned twice for no apparent reason.
By Quirrell:
Past Professors of Defence have included not just the legendary wandering hero Harold Shea but also the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga, yes, I see some of you are still shuddering at the sound of her name even though she's been dead for six hundred years.
And by Dumbledore:
It [the sorting hat] told me that it was never again to be placed on your head under any circumstances. You're only the fourteenth student in history it's said that about, Baba Yaga was another one and I'll tell you about the other twelve when you're older.
Full disclosure: Upon first meeting Mr. Hat & Cloak I assumed he was Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga is pet theory, not a rational one.
Three times:
And I daresay that most wizards would be hard-pressed to name a single Dark Lady besides Baba Yaga.
(Chapter 70)
That said, I think Baba Yaga's just a shout out like Harold Shea, not an actual character in this story.
Can't be- Tonks is referred to as a girl twice, plus another time out of universe (by word of God).
Chapter 73:
"Ooh, great question!" said the other Susan Bones as she rapidly skinned off what was left of her borrowed clothes. A moment later the girl began to Metamorphose back into her more accustomed form of Nymphadora Tonks.
Chapter 29:
"Did you know there's a girl in Hufflepuff who's a Metamorphmagus?" said Hermione as they headed toward the Great Hall. "She makes her hair really red, like stopsign red not Weasley red, and when she spilled hot tea on herself she turned into a black-haired boy until she got it under control again."
I've just decided to eliminate the "fourth-year" qualifier. I'd previously meant Ranma to be separate from Tonks, but on reflection it's kind of funnier if she is Ranma.
I want to speak up in defense of McGonagall, and Eliezer's treatment of her.
One of the central conceits of HPMOR is that, basically, everyone in the wizarding world except Harry and Riddle/Voldemort/Munroe/Quirrell are stupid. Yes many Order of the Phoenix members got slight upgrades from canon, but from their point of view they were still losing and it's pretty clear Voldemort could have defeated them easily at an early point except for some reason he didn't try.
Add this to the fact that while McGonagall screwed up, a bunch of allegedly responsible adults plus Harry watched her screw up and didn't correct her. When Harry chews her out, he implicitly chews out everyone; he sees himself as the only person capable of taking responsibility for what happened.
One of the central conceits of HPMOR is that, basically, everyone in the wizarding world except Harry and Riddle/Voldemort/Munroe/Quirrell are stupid.
One of the central conceits is that the viewpoint character, Harry, comes across as believing that everyone who has not earned his respect is stupid. But it is not really in the interests of most wizards to prove the full extent of their magical or reasoning abilities to every judgmental 11-year-old who comes along.
(I commented on this back in December.)
To be more positive, I really did like the letter from Harry's parents. In the previous chapter where Harry was thinking that he had ruined his relationship with his parents, I remember thinking that it was extremely unlikely that his parents would react that way. And, indeed, it was demonstrated that Harry's beliefs were based on his emotional immaturity rather than an accurate assessment of recent events. I wonder if Harry's undervaluing of the power of emotional bonds is in part caused by Quirrel's influence.
It's interesting that chapter93 is mostly Harry being shown that he is not, in fact, the only sane person in the world; his parents, the other students, and especially Minerva Macgonnagle all completely put his Slytherin side in its place. (That's the nice reading, anyway; Dumbledore and Quirrell's interpretations are worrysome.)
In the Milgrim experiment the subject would be the first actor to defy authority, but here Harry was already pointing out the problem and asking people specifically for help.
It's worth noting that in the Milgram experiment, there is no perceived punishment for failure to participate, just a polite repetition. Further, the Milgram experiment models willingness to stop acting in accordance with orders, rather that willingness to act against orders, which, while morally fairly indistinguishable, are psychologically (and legally) substantially different.
Maybe we should try harder to decode the prophecies. For example, there was a cool theory on Reddit that "the very stars in heaven" refers to members of the Black family, who are all named after stars. In particular, Bellatrix might be feeling like she's in heaven right now.
But I'm more interested in the first prophecy. What does it mean that "these two different spirits cannot exist in the same world"? The word "cannot" seems to say it's impossible from some point of view, not just dangerous.
1) Maybe any interaction between H...
I'm having anaphor resolution problems. What does this sentence mean?
And an ancient wizard to whom that ward meant nothing gazed upon them both, the witch and the weeping young wizard.
I can't figure out what "that ward" refers to. If *that ward" meant "description", then it could refer to the adjective "ancient". But "ward" doesn't mean "description". Replace "ward" with "district", "department", "wing", "parish", "charge", "depen...
"Ward" almost certainly refers to the spells McGonagall cast to protect herself and Harry from public view.
The episodic nature of this story is wearing on me a bit. I'm not talking about wanting to know what happens and having to wait for that knowledge to be doled out bit by bit. That's pretty much fine. It's the feeling that there's a grand overarching plot that's being distracted from by Plots of the Month. Even if the PotM do contribute to the overall plot--and they probably do--it feels like they do so in a rather meandering, patchwork way. Where's my beloved "use science to figure out the nature of magic, and use that to cure death for everyone" plotline? Will we finally get back to it now that Hermione's dead?
I feel the complete opposite. I want to read the serial story of "Ender Wiggin goes to Hogwarts" and his repeated elaborate schemes of awesomeness. I'm disappointed that it looks like this fic could end soon.
Reax to Chapter 93:
1) I loved the letters to Harry from his parents. Genuinely moving, and also surprising, because generally speaking people who Harry "puts in their place" in this fic tend to stay meekly chastened. (McGonagall is a glaring example, but Dumbledore and Snape have been treated the same way.) I was very happy that Harry's parents got a chance to respond, after all, and that they acquitted themselves so well.
1a) The difference in [s]James'[/s] Michael's and Petunia's letters didn't do anything to help HPMOR's overall treatment of ge...
I guess different readers see things very differently, because I thought that McGonagall was a total badass in this chapter.
When someone makes a major mistake, based on an accumulation of errors from years of acting on a distorted version of their values, it takes a high-level rationalist and an impressive level of control and insight to be able to acknowledge their mistake, clearly see the values that were distorted, and set a new course that repudiates their old ways and appropriately takes their values into account. To be able to do that within a few hours, publicly, when they learned of their mistake through a vicious, personal, inappropriate chewing-out, seems like it might require one of those rumored double rationalists.
Or, if you must view it as a Harry vs. McGonagall conflict, McGonagall kicks his ass. In precisely the way that he needed to have his ass kicked.
Minerva McGonagall, having submissively accepted her character assassination at the hands of Harry Potter, now submits herself for public humiliation and complete self-abnegation
I don't see it like that at all -- I saw McGonagall:
Trying bravely to take blame away from Harry because, in her words, if she didn't, he would have no one to say those horrible things to, and
Bravely taking a public stand for her principles, trying to turn over a new leaf (or as she put it, "trying to do better")
At least, those are pretty clearly how she sees herself in those situations, not as submitting to Harry.
(I interpret the discussion about House points as simply meaning she 1. doesn't care about the points to anybody but the Weasley twins, and 2. is trying to be more inclusive and trusting of her students.)
Fundamentally, regardless of out-of-universe complaints, McGonagall was wrong in the way she dealt with this problem, and by extension in how she dealt with Gryffindor House.
She has taken the first step towards becoming a PC in this universe, which is being rational and changing yourself to fix your mistakes.
... she may also have just learned how to lose.
No, I think we'll be seeing much more of intelligent!McGonagall starting now...
No, I think we'll be seeing much more of intelligent!McGonagall starting now...
Yeah, I don't get the complaints about "meekness" in Minerva. She showed more strength than she ever has. Some people see admission of mistakes as submission; I see it as having the strength to accept the truth, regardless of status considerations from ninnies who don't.
I do think it's a bit odd that he holds criticism of the work at this point to be categorically unfair, since he seems perfectly happy to accept praise.
This isn't accurate. He says that: if, in the event that your criticism is untrue, he is still unable to defend himself; then it is unfair to make that criticism.
I really didn't see why EY was so damn proud about it in that regard.
Because Hermione's death was motivating a female character, not just a male one -- i.e., an answer to the "fridging" complaint.
(Hence the importance of pointing out it was written that way to start with, rather than as a "half-hearted sop" to patch the fridging issue. i.e., he's pointing out that he didn't kill Hermione just to get a rise out of Harry -- the death is going to affect the whole school, and Gryffindor in particular, through McGonagall.)
You see an animal at a distance. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. You start to get offended by the duck. Then, you get closer and realize the duck was a platypus and not a duck at all. At this point, you realize that you were wrong, in a point of fact, to be offended. You can't claim that anything that looks like a duck, but which later turns out not to be, is offensive. If it later turns out not to be a duck then it was never a duck, and if you haven't been able to tell for sure yet (but will be able to in the future) then you need to suspend judgement until you can. Particularly since there is no possible defense that the thing is not a duck except to show you that it is not a duck, which will happen in time.
It seems to me like if people become upset in the middle of a history book, and then complain why the author let Nazis win the war. As opposed to reading the next chapter to see they actually lost.
The act of using social-political attacks to attempt to modify your author-tract from one evangelising a rationality ideology to one evangelising some other ideology isn't one that must necessarily respond to with compliance.
Or respond to at all, when any kind of response will further elevate the perceived importance of the issue, especially when attention to the topic is further incentivized by the author through him discouraging the reading of his response. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. Alas, there seems to be something about "PR-savvy" which bars general competency from seeping through to it. Score one for the mindkillers.
Calling it. Voldemort is a well-intentioned extremist who did everything that he's done for the sake of bringing a being like Harry into the world so that he can remake it into a paradise.
At the end of his rant over the anti-feminism complained Eliezer said
I’ll state outright that at the end of the story Hermione comes back as an alicorn princess.
One interpretation would be that Hermione goes FOOM.
Harry already knows how to create sentinent artificial entities. He made the hat sentinent.
He knows that trolls are magicial creates that constantly self transmute.
He likely has put hermonine's body into a safe place. At the end of chapter 91 he wants a last one and a half minutes with the body of hermoine.
...When the door opened again, Ha
What if Harry transfigured the bedsheet to look like Hermione, and the transfiguration wore off some time later?
" I’ll state outright that at the end of the story Hermione comes back as an alicorn princess."
Was this meant as an omake at the end of HPMoR? What is the appropriate reaction to this?
It's a joke, yes. MoR has been known to be hilarious at time, although not so much recently.
Given Eliezer's commitment to truth, however, I'd say there's about a 30% chance he was telling the explicit truth, though I wouldn't think she'll stay that way.
The plot of HPMOR was planned from the start and Eliezer started writing it before FiM premiered. What reason would he have back then to consider putting horned, winged horses into the story? And I think that if Hermione does return, it won't be in a way allowing for some sort of cross-fandom referential side-joke added as an afterthought. I wouldn't give it 30%.
Which is all a great shame, because everything is better with ponies. ;)
Or Professor Quarrel saves Harry from a horde of yaoi fangirls and there's a reasonable explanation.
... Unicorn blood is known to be useful in life extension.
Alternatively, Harry sadly fails at resurrection and memorializes her in the wildly successful edutainment cartoon My Little Pony: Rationality is Magic.
While Harry is embroiled at Hogwarts, unbeknownst to the wizarding world, a muggle named Hanna is building an artificial intelligence to run a My Little Pony MMO, which will discover magic, hack time travel, and bring Hermione back to satisfy her values through friendship and ponies.
Sorry in advance for the giant comment. But this
"Albus Dumbledore was smiling with a strange sad look in his eyes, like someone who has taken one more step toward a foreseen destination."
makes sense of this
"And Minerva made it clear to me that Hogwarts required a competent Defense Professor this year, even if I had to haul Grindelwald out of Nurmengard and prevail on old affections to persuade him to take the position."
which looked like a type 3 foreshadowing. I think Dumbledore expects and intends to die soon. Certainly we're m...
Just a small note: If you plan to be reusing your "type 3"-style numberings regarding types of foreshadowing, I suggest that you not only include a link to your old comment, but also edit the old comment to make it have clear "type 1: " "type 2: " "type 3: " headings at the relevant paragraphs in question, because I barely had the patience to read through that whole thing too -- it'd be much better if I knew where in the comment to look at.
Somehow this troll succeeded in injuring a student, without alarm from the wards until the point of her death.
So someone tricked those wards, wards that were apparently working when Draco Malfoy was attacked. (Someone tricked them before, but that was by killing him so slowly the wards didn't notice, not by disabling them so no one noticed a student was in mortal peril.)
Of course, the attacker could also have chosen to kill Draco slowly in order for the ward circumventions to go unnoticed...
Ch 94 - I notice I'm confused. In many ways. Which each confuses me even more.
Why don't anyone take seriously the hypothesis that Quirrel did it ? That he could trick the wards, but only to a point, and he had to use the fact he was a teacher to do it, which somehow make the wards point at him. And assuming everyone will think it can't be that straight-forward, they'll think Quirrel was framed.
It really seems like Harry didn't do anything special with Hermione's body, that he didn't do anything in the many hours since Hermione's death until the night,
Ch: 94 I'm confused. If no one directly attacked Hermione, why did the wards single out Quirrell?
Also, here's an interesting question: I wonder how Harry would react if Hermione left a ghost? Surely he would still want the real Hermione back, but how would he deal with the ghost, especially is she thought of him as the original Hermione did?
I can't wait to see Hermione resurrected as the first p-zombie.
How would we ever find out she was a Philosophical Zombie?
Read a chapter explicitly labeled as Hermione's POV, and have the chapter be blank?
Maybe using Leglimency would give a blank answer? Assuming consciousness is non-physical, magic might be able to detect its absence directly even if physical behavior is unchanged.
Everyone is aware of Eliezer's P-Zombie Apocalypse film script, right? http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/
I am here hoping Albus faked the whole thing since only he can sense if a student had passed away in Hogwarts right? He was the one who said he felt a student die and he could be lying and put up this whole elaborate show to protect Hermione (the enemy would think she is dead and therefore stop targeting her) and teach Harry (even brought him his parents), Mcgonagall and all of Hogwarts the lessons the past couple of chapters teached us without the actual consequence of a student dying. Does it make sense or is it really just my wishful thinking?
(Ch. 94) Wow. That discussion we got after the meeting was the first legitimately silly theory we've heard from Harry, and I'm astonished that the Professor humored him. Hopefully this is a symptom of sleep deprivation.
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: