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blacktrance comments on Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Because most fiction (including fanfics) doesn't include such explicit teachings that are applicable to one's life. Usually it's found in non-fiction, and didactic works of fiction usually must be subtle lest they be labeled "preachy".
The themes in and lessons of HPMOR are relatively uncommon in fiction.
Didactic fiction is a rarity in modern times, and writings that are both didactic and tell a story well are rarer still.
I just made the point on the /r/HPMOR subreddit that with most fiction, the author wants to share a story with you, but with some authors (for example, Yudkowsky or Stephenson), they have knowledge they want to share with you and their way of sharing is through story.
I'm sure their are other authors who also do this, but they seem to be few and far between, making HPMOR one of the first works of that kind people may encounter.
Also, most authors who do want to show or teach something through their story tend to do it subtly and non-explicitly, perhaps because being open and explicit about a message is low-status.
I thought about it before I typed it out and I found that most authors do want to show or teach something, but that this is often something obvious. Harry Potter (canon) teaches us that Nazis are bad, that you shouldn't trust an oppressive government, that bureaucracies can be dangerous, that you shouldn't torture people... but when I read the novels (at the appropriate age, I grew up with them) I had already learned those lessons.
What Anathem, Snow Crash and HPMOR taught me were things I wouldn't have picked up on my own.
It's interesting to note that HP canon is aimed at children/teens, and that books aimed at those demographics tend to be more open about teaching something. It would be interesting to consider how often fiction aimed at adults is didactic, and how open adult didactic fiction is about its message.
I'm not so sure about this. Didactic and polemic works are uncommon (though not unknown) in genre fiction, but they seem less so in literary fiction; George Orwell is the first writer that comes to mind, but he's by no means the last. I've even heard didactic content described as a prerequisite of literary quality, though I can't remember where at the moment.
It's been a while but why do you consider Orwell to be didactic. He makes political points but from what I remember from 1984 it's not really about decisions are made in daily life.
A work doesn't need to inform daily life in order to be didactic. 1984 is about the dynamics of totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a thinly fictionalized Russian Revolution, Down and Out in London and Paris is about class relations in Western Europe, and so forth -- but practically everything Orwell wrote was primarily meant to be instructive in some way.
Maybe I have too precise a definition, but I think "didactic" should mean giving advice, and not just information. Almost all fiction is about psychological insight, but that isn't directly practical. And I don't mean "practical" in a daily life way: the reason I don't count Animal Farm as didactic isn't because I'm not a Bolshevik, but because even if I were, it still wouldn't tell me how to change the course of the revolution.
By that definition nearly all serious fiction is didactic and there are plenty of people in the English department who find didactic elements in the rest.
blacktrance used didactic to mean "teachings that are applicable to one's life". I don't think Orwell fits.
I wouldn't say "nearly all", but quite a lot of it, yes, and probably a larger fraction since 1945. That's the point.
I don't think we should restrict the word to everyday living, but if we did, I could point to Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, and plenty of others.