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CellBioGuy comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong Discussion
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With good reason. Hermione was essentially stuffed into the fridge (warning: TV Tropes!) for half the story. The story is great, but there are completely legitimate feminist criticisms of how it went.
Apparently I missed the existence of an internet argument.
Good.
Can you expand on what you mean? I'm not sure I understand.
I'm glad I had zero idea about there being some kind of internet-controversy about feminism in HPMOR. I hate internet-controversies.
The fact that Harry Potter is male is an unforgivable offense, natch.
I was going to ignore this comment when it was at -5. But it is now at +7. so I'll respond (although I have to note that this is an oddly rapid change in a comment of this nature).
So to be clear: absolutely no one here has made any argument that Harry being male has anything wrong with it. That's a complete strawman which is utterly irrelevant to anything under discussion. The problem is not that Harry is male. The problem in a nutshell is the portrayal of the major female character and her role in the story. Everyone got a power boost in the story but Hermione. Major characters get to make serious novel discoveries about things, but Hermione. And when Hermione, based on her explicitly stated feminist ideals tries to be a heroine, she is ignominiously killed off. That collectively is the problem.
That's because I'm not participating in this discussion which resembles a bar-room brawl much more than a reasoned conversation. I'm just pointing a finger (well, maybe sticking it up X-D) and laughing.
Please don't deliberately damage the signal to noise ratio.
There is no signal -- other than the observation that you are wedged on Hermione in HPMOR and would much rather prefer it to be HGMOR -- so there is not much to damage. But in any case, books don't write themselves, so if you are accusing Eliezer of misogyny you might as well come out and say so directly...
Huh? No one is making that claim. That would be stupid. There's a massive difference between treating her as a stronger character and making it all about her. Draco is a much more interesting and smarter character in HPMoR than he is in canon; no one could get confused and think that this was HDMoR.
Strawman. There's a massive difference between misogyny and seeing sexist aspects in a work or seeing ways in a work suffers from residual sexist attitudes or could have been improved in those regards.
It also isn't like this hasn't had real impact. I have a friend who cosplayed with me for Vericon a few a years ago. I went as Harry dressed as the Chaos General and she went as Hermione dressed as the Sunshine general. That friend stopped recommending people read HPMoR. Similarly, there's at least one woman who is highly involved in the rationalist community (including heavy involvement in CFAR) who stopped reading HPMoR outright because of the gender issues. Now wonder how many readers had similar reactions that are less involved. How many readers do you think have been turned away from rationality by these issues in the work?