Since 27/Jan Fanfiction.net disabled every single html link from the user profile page -- which means all those fanarts, etc, the links to the ePub and MOBI versions and so forth.
Once again fanfiction.net screws its members.
Was anyone prudent enough to save all those links? We must figure out some other location to gather them all.
To start with.... I'd recommend raising every character's age by a few years. (I think this is a 'love-it-or-hate-it' idea, but I have no clue how prevalent either of these viewpoints are... How many people think that the first-years really act like eleven-year-olds? And I'm not just talking about Harry...)
And, consequently, Hogwarts now has only four years.
Also, I'm clueless about the math, but... I seem to remember reading in a discussion thread that 1000 students in Hogwarts implies a total wizarding population the size of a small town. So I'd cram in 4000 students into the 4 years of Hogwarts. (We're gonna need TAs now, but that doesn't change anything fundamental.) Unless... The population is still too small, in which case... I suppose you could keep the 1000 students and have other wizarding schools.
And I'd suggest compressing the first four chapters into one.
ETA: Also, partial transfiguration. Harry shouldn't get it right that quickly.
ETA: Also, partial transfiguration. Harry shouldn't get it right that quickly.
I think the point of that was partial transfiguration was a low hanging fruit that could be done fairly easily, but only if you had the right mindset. Other than having to hold timelessness in his head, it's not any harder than regular transfiguration.
More than removing the first 3 years of Hogwarts, the tempo of MoR could be changed so that we don't have all those events happening during Harry's first year. There is time pressure regarding the fact that DADA teachers aren't supposed to last more than one year, but something could have been done to circumvent that, and allow the events of the currently written MoR to span like 3 years of Hogwarts, with Harry being 13 or 14 when we reach the "Standfort Prison Experiment" part.
I do think that the first chapters are specially good with a young (11 yo) Harry, and that having him a teenager when he discovers about magic would ruin them. It would also make the whole Harry-Draco relationship completely different - their relationship in MoR is very interesting, but it wouldn't have felt realistic for it to happen with a teenager Draco, while it is realistic with a still childish Draco.
not as much as fitting what looks like some pretty robust commerce and a rather heavyweight bureaucracy into a population of at most thirty thousand or so
I assumed that ~ 50% of wizarding adults were employed by the Ministry alone. Sounds just like the pointless bureaucracy you'd expect wizards to create.
Commerce, yes. That's much more difficult to explain. Even more difficult to explain is the existence of specialised journals like Transfiguration Weekly. You'd need a European wizarding population of ~ a million at the very least. (And I'm probably underestimating.)
More importantly, how do you extrapolate from the class sizes? How are different age groups distributed in the population? (Not knowing the math sucks.)
ETA:
I always assumed, when reading the original books, that other British magical schools existed and Hogwarts just happened to be the best of them.
In Deathly Hallows, the Ministry made it mandatory for every wizarding child of school-going age to attend Hogwarts. IIRC, Lupin noted at the time that "Parents could always educate their children at home if they wished." Didn't say anything about other magical schools.
We probably shouldn't leap to the assumption that Transfiguration Weekly is a peer-reviewed journal with a large staff publishing results from multiple large laboratories. For all we know it's churned out in a basement by an amateur enthusiast, is only eight pages long on a good week and mostly consists of photographs of people's cats transfigured into household objects.
I think it's somewhat premature to talk about what could be done better before the story is complete. For starters, I'm not sure it psychologically counts as positive reinforcement of the writer writing more quickly, if one criticizes too much while still it's being written...
Lastly, I'd like to say, in order to partially counteract the opinion offered by others, that I found the Hermione-SPHEW chapters the best arc in the whole story -- far better than the Azkaban arc, far better than the armies arc.
I'm not sure it psychologically counts as positive reinforcement of the writer writing more quickly, if one criticizes too much while still it's being written...
Eliezer has said he doesn't mind this thread. (I PM'd him before creating it.)
Agree on bulleted points, but I thought the armies arc was the best by far. I sell HPMoR to my friends by saying "Ender Wiggin goes to Hogwarts!"
Ender Wiggin is just pretend-smart - as mentioned in Adam Cadre's review, his tactics tend to work by authorial fiat. I think HJPEV is much better written, where tactics are concerned.
(As a sidenote, I mentioned HPMOR in the comments to that review and got atleast one more enthusiastic reader for it. :-)
Draco seemed far too easily convinced by the evidence that the decline in magic wasn't caused by muggle interbreeding, especially since the largest piece of evidence presented was based on muggle knowledge of genetics that Draco was nearly completely ignorant of. You're not going to be convinced that everything you know is wrong just because an 11-year old tells you that a bunch of allegedly smart people figured out some things which conflict with what you know, in the judgment of said 11-year-old.
At the beginning of Chapter 25, Eliezer writes about the evidence that convinced Draco:
everything Harry presents as strong evidence is in fact strong evidence - the other possibilities are improbable
This is true... but only from Harry's perspective. Harry assigns extremely high confidence to everything that muggle geneticists have figured out, and also believes that he understands the theory well enough to have high confidence in the predictions he makes using that theory. For Draco to find the same evidence equally convincing, he would also have to assign high confidence to the theory that Harry claims muggle geneticists figured out, and high confidence to Harry's ability to use the ...
Things that I would like to see coming along with the MoRverse:
Snippets of the world-as-it-is outside of Harry's story, like Alicorn's "Flashes" after Radiance. In particular, I'd really like to see more of Cedric Diggory, Draco and Luna's childhoods, the Weasley twins' first years, and the Marauders adventures as history, as well as redeemed Slytherin house and technical magical research after real engineers get their hands on it.
These could also make the Self-Awareness arc a bit less weird by personifying the bullying infrastructure.
I like the way Eliezer handles dementors as a metaphor for death, but as I consider Rowling's intentions for them as metaphors for depression, I'm realizing that that might be even more beautiful, even if Eliezer doesn't have as much to say about it.
There's a TVTropes discussion on this: Harry Potter Headscratchers
I might as well repeat the ones I put on there.
Shouldn't it be Harry Potter-Evans-Verres and the Methods of Rationality?
Why is Harry so death averse? He claims to be a preference utilitarian, but the sorting hat had no desire to live, yet Harry didn't want it to die.
Why does Harry reject the idea of Horcruxes? You can't save more than half the population, so it's hardly a permanent solution, but you could kill half of the people right before they die, and save the other half. This would work as a hold-over until Harry becomes God. Given my understanding of canon, this wouldn't actually work, but Harry wouldn't have no that yet.
In what way can a crime that hinges on an eleven-year-old boy be considered "the perfect crime"?
According to Wikipedia, timeless physics was discovered in 1999. If this takes place in 1991-1992, how does Harry know about it? Did he work it out himself?
Edit : contains spoilers
I was a bit disappointed about the Harry-Ginny fake marriage contract story (chapter 25-26). The global plot of Harry hiring the Weasley teens to make Rita Skeeter publish something ridiculous but wrong so Rita would be fired was nice and totally in-character for all of them, but the final story was a bit "due ?" to me. I don't see how the fake marriage contract was such a big deal, enough to get Rita fired, and the length they had to go to make it sounded totally disproportionate compared to the story they ended up with. I would have expected something much more shocking and deep in political consequences than an arranged marriage.
I didn't think the marriage contract was as big a deal as the implication that, if the story were taken as something other than a complete fabrication, someone had messed with Gringott's proceedings to cover it up. I can't imagine that Rita Skeeter could keep her job after courting that kind of scandal with the goblin nation.
Why do wizards speak English?
Rather, why do wizards speak English that's so similar to Muggle English?
The wizard and muggle societies have been more or less isolated from each other for several centuries now (since 1692 in Rowling's canon, probably longer in Eliezer's). You'd expect a significant amount of linguistic drift to have taken place. I don't think a small trickle of Muggle-borns is enough to counter-act that.
I don't feel comfortable trying to pick apart Eliezer's handling of the story when I do not know where he's trying to go with it. If I do not know what a persons' goals are, how can I possibly know if they are accomplishing them optimally?
Most of the things I would complain about are things that seem irrelevant to the main story plot, but I don't yet know that they aren't relevant.
I'd have updated more frequently... [/wistful]
No, seriously. I might have dropped the Self-Actualisation arc, but then again for all I know it's setting up something Awesome later, so maybe it's necessary.
I am going to be terribly unoriginal and say that the whole Hermione bullying plot was boring to read, and should have been removed.
In chapter 2, people don't leave a room to laugh the way Harry's parents do.
Also chapter, 2, McGonagall's final statement while amusing isn't something she should have sufficient data on to say yet.
The entire SPEW thing took way too long. Moreover, it actually comes across as accidentally anti-feminist. Harry is dealing with the terrible atrocity that is Azkaban and Hermione's equivalent is fighting school bullies? And even that requires assistance from Harry?
For readers that don't know what a horcrux is since they haven't read the original books (which a...
The first time I read it, which was before I had been introduced to any of the LW memes (or really, just transhumanism) I found the section on Askaban to be really... forced.
()
Specifically, I remember thinking that the idea that dementors were death was a bit cheesy. Taking a metaphor and making it corporeal seems to be a bit much to me. After I reread it a second time, I didn't have nearly as much objection to the passage, since I actually understood what he was getting at. But it still probably remains my least favorite section. But that's not really sa...
I find myself confused about how dementors can be a personification of death in the way that Harry sees it when that's not how death actually is in the HP universe. I managed to keep a hold of my suspension of disbelief with the idea that the afterlife is a magical version of a brain upload and only works when you have magic in you to record your brainstate at death. Death is still death for muggles and squibs, wizards have just figured out a clever workaround since dementors first came about.
The fridge horror of realizing that, under this theory, muggleborns and the parents of squibs would live on forever while knowing that their relatives are gone was rather enlightening. It made me realize all over again that death truly is a horrible thing that no one who had not lived with it all their lives would willingly sign up for. Who knows? Maybe magic in its entirety was just a side effect to Atlantis' solution for death.
I had great hopes. GREAT hopes.
A book of Narrative that exemplifies values makes for a religion. What I've come to realize/believe, is that you don't have to believe The Narrative is literally true for The Narrative to serve the positive purposes of a religion.
While all the rationality homilies are fine and dandy, I thought HPMOR could have been more. HPMOR was so close to a transvaluation of values.
I want to echo the comment that with a good editor, the book could easily rival some of the best fiction in quality. The main character is a bit of a Mary Sue, but that can be forgiven since most hero fiction has an element of Mary-Sueness to it.
I find it a bit weird just how many students at Hogwarts are scions of Noble and Most Ancient Houses. It seems to me as if Eliezer has equated "pure blood" from the original books with "noble house," and the resulting prevalence strikes me as demographically improbable.
Occasionally the writing and sentence structure can feel a little hurried, especially at the beginning of chapters. It's as if Eliezer starts writing at the beginning of a chapter but takes a while to fully get into his rhythm. There have also probably been a few too many tangents from the main plot, but Eliezer's latest author note seems to acknowledge this.
My meta-comment is that you should have posted this in whatever the current HPMoR discussion thread is. It's an established community norm that talk of the fanfic should be kept there. Downvoted for that reason.
My regular comment:
I would have had Eliezer spend way less time on the "Hermione fights an endless supply of bullies" subplot. I wouldn't be averse to just removing it entirely.
I would also have all these damn hints and suggestions and leads and such be made explicit or way less subtle. I'm stupid and busy; I'm not going to get them on the first read, and I'm not going to read twice.
I LIKE subtlety. It flatters my ego if I see it, and if I don't, I don't know that I'm missing it. I hate how modern cop dramas feel the need to explain the significance of every clue to the viewer as soon as a character understands it. If you miss it, you'll eventually figure it out when the plot comes around to it.
I LIKE subtlety. It flatters my ego if I see it, and if I don't, I don't know that I'm missing it.
Data point. I started this thread to complain about the blood of Atlantis. The conclusion is based on a long chain of conjunctive reasoning that basically feels like an asspull. Harry has absolutely no good reason to believe something that complex.
Then I when I went looking for the link, I realised that.... The chapter's called "Hold Off on Proposing Solutions".
The feeling of "that's epic"-ness cannot be described in words.
Warning: As per the official spoiler policy, the following discussion may contain unmarked spoilers for up to the current chapter of the Methods of Rationality. Proceed at your own risk.
Assume HPMOR was written by a super-intelligence implementing the CEV of Eliezer Yudkowsky and assorted literary critics. What would it have written differently?
... is what I want to know, but that's hard to answer. So here's an easier question:
In what ways do you think Eliezer's characterisations/world-building/plot-fu are sub-optimal? <optional> How could they be made less sub-optimal? </optional>
(My own ideas are in the comments.)
To put it another way... Assume a group of intrepid fanfic writers in the late 2020s are planning to write a reboot. What parts of Eliezer's story do you think they should tweak?
And just to make sure we're all on the same page: Eliezer isn't going to go back and change anything he's written to bring it in line with anything suggested here. This is purely an "Ah, just consider the possibilities!" thread.
... which means that we can safely suggest drastic rewrites encompassing 30 chapters or something. Or change fundamental facts about the world.
(Exercise due restraint on this one. Getting rid of the Ministry/the Noble Houses/blood purism would probably turn the story into something completely different; this isn't what we're trying to do here.)
With that, let the nit-picking begin!!