(copy-pasted from my tumblr)
The ending to HPMOR isn’t bad. It fits the story and, while open-ended still gives a lot of closure.
It just doesn’t measure up to, like, the rest of the book. Part of it is probably the hype. The final chapters probably fell a bit flat just in comparison to what people expected. But even correcting for that, I still find that it’s slightly disappointing. The best parts, for me, where the buildup to the “there is light in the world” speech and the Stanford Prisoner Experiment arc. They are both intense emotional moments. I literally cried while listening to the podcast version of Azkaban.
The other great parts are the cool, big action sequences.
The ending provides none of those. And yet it sorta promises them without ever delivering.
This is pretty exactly how I feel.
The closest I get to that emotional peak is when Hermione starts optimising, but even that feels a bit abrupt. Maybe it's because we're only seeing Hermione from the outside; my brain is not content to just interpolate her journey from being eaten by a troll to reinventing heroic responsibility in more humble language.
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 122, which is the final chapter of the story.
Happy once-in-a-century Pi Day! (3/14/15 == 3.1415)
There is 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.)