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Velorien comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I would interpret "you could take the following things out and it would make no difference" as criticism of the writing, not as praise. If a piece of information adds complexity without adding proportional value, it shouldn't be in there to begin with.
(this is a comment on your critique rather than on the quality of recent HPMOR chapters, which I am still undecided on)
Looking back, I think I could have written that more clearly.
People were complaining about the mirror, and the Riddle-curse, being deus ex machina. I'm saying they weren't, because they weren't moving the plot forward. Take them out and the overall plot remains the same. That doesn't mean those scenes served no purpose in the story.
The Riddle-curse scene in particular I thought was very good. When I was reading chapter 111, when Harry got his wand back, I got all excited. I kept thinking perhaps Harry had a chance after all. I did of course wonder why Voldemort let him keep his wand, and figured there might be a deeper reason, but seeing Harry with a wand still makes you hope. And then suddenly Harry is given an opening ... and it turns out to have been all Voldemort's plan all along, and Harry is even more thoroughly beaten then he already was before.
That serves an important function in the story. It drives home how bad Harry's situation is. It drives home that there will be no easy outs, that Voldemort really is very, very smart, and isn't going to make any easily exploitable errors. Basically, the scene is setting the background, and building up suspense, for the final confrontation.
It's perfectly fine for a scene like that to have no foreshadowing. It doesn't need foreshadowing. Nobody sane will think: "Harry totally would have won without that plot twist!".
I'd also like to point out that unexpected things were kind of expected to happen. We already knew Voldemort was playing a vastly more complex game than just "I want to grab power" or "I want to kill Harry". And we also already knew that there were unknown traps guardian the stone.