*sigh*

My observation that a significant amount of mind-killing has and is occurring in this thread has not changed, and in fact has been reinforced. In particular, I see that there's a great deal of back-and-forth happening, but very few unusually pertinent or clear-headed arguments have been put forth, by either side. I haven't seen a single argument which I would describe as "well-articulated"; it's all just anecdotal data and branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching point. (Example: Someone brought up Hermione's canonical proficiency with the Protean Charm, which realistically speaking has nothing to do with feminism.) Moreover, based on the amount of back-and-forth I've seen here I assign an extremely low probability to anyone's mind getting changed based on something said in this thread. That last point is a particularly important warning flag that some sort of mind-killing is going on, because when no updates are occurring, almost certainly some subtext is involved that's either irrelevant to or actively interferes with epistemic rationality. Further evidence in favor of mind-killing is supplied by the fact that this discussion centers around feminism, which is widely known to be a hotly controversial topic.

The reason I chose to reply to this comment in particular is because it exemplifies some of the mind-killing that I'm talking about (and most emphatically not because I'm trying to single you out; plenty of other commenters on this thread exhibit significant mind-killing--it's just that yours was the most visible example that I could see):

A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn't get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously

Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, "What does this have to do with feminism?" If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it's particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione's death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn't about that, either, I would think of something else. "Feminism" as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn't occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times. So immediately we see that this quote's relation to feminism is tenuous at best. So why bring it up? Does the fact that Hermione is a female character have more immediate relevancy to her death than the fact that, say, she was inadequately prepared? Is her gender somehow more pertinent to the fact that she didn't get an intelligence boost than the fact that she was already extremely intelligent canonically? Why connect it to gender, of all things? The relationship is minimal and forced at best! Why??

Well, from my perspective, the answer to that question is not because it's actually relevant in some deep, meaningful sense. Rather, it's because, for better or for worse, this is a discussion about feminism, a vastly polarizing and controversial topic. And when discussing vastly polarizing or controversial topics, arguments become soldiers. People search and scrabble for any piece of information they can think of that has any connection to the topic at all, no matter how weak. Hermione's lack of intelligence boost is taken and forcibly connected to her gender, as opposed to a myriad of other things that are much more relevant. Or, to use an earlier example: her skill with Protean Charms in canon is brought up as evidence of how Rowling treats her genders more fairly than does Eliezer. But when you look at it with a neutral eye...

Protean Charms? Character intelligence boosts? Seriously? Is that the best you can come up with?

Yeah. Super mind-killed.