okay i'm going to reread HPMOR!!!! any thoughts or reactions on the fic that i feel are worth sharing will go in this thread, so feel free to just mute this thread if you aren't interested!

this is a charming exchange. my main issue with a lot of stuff like this is the framing of basic human emotion as inherently detrimental to being rational, so stuff like this that demonstrates he's a person and not just a yudkowsky mouthpiece is nice. also i do just like "what."

i don't know if this is a common experience, but as a kid who considered myself smart i definitely had a lot of dumb reactions to stuff that upset me that i viewed in my head as completely principled and rational responses to injustices. not to this extent, but still

this is ironic, because i remember an EY post saying as a kid, his mom took away his super soaker and he broke it in response and how it was a very principled thing to do. able to skillfully write pettiness-framed-as-logic in others without applying that critical eye to himself

it reminds me of how joss whedon is really really good at writing shitty, entitled, misogynistic nerd men who think they're oppressed for being nerds and framing them as bad people as a result of their misogyny, while also like..... doing that exact same thing himself

i remember this balances out some near the end (e.g. harry is way too taken with quirrel than he should be) but sometimes i think the story doesn't know whether it wants harry to be an actual human character capable of flawed reasoning or the author viewpoint who's always right

like, many attempts to replicate the bystander effect find this to be untrue. it could be a fictional character Being Wrong, and sometimes is, but at times harry feels less like a person capable of flawed beliefs and more like a surrogate for EY's own (often also flawed) beliefs

i will say, this isn't an unequivocal thing where harry is only a yudkowsky mouthpiece and never an actual child, hence my earlier posts. but there are definitely times where harry's beliefs are simultaneously incorrect and also framed as an absolute truth by the author

okay i do actually like this line lol

imo HPMOR's strength is its challenging/recontextualizing of HP's deeply horrific elements that went unchallenged in the books. it's great at confronting the books' normalized bigotry/horror, but is much less interesting when it challenges elements that just ""didn't make sense""

like, Azkaban Is Actually Deeply Awful Yet Normalized In The Original Books And Here's An Interrogation Of Exactly Why? fuck yes, i love this, thank you. This Magic Spell Violates Physics (which EY doesn't understand very well and just namedrops poorly used physics terms)? yawn

aw man nostalgia. i remember this from when i was like 12, reading, 'when we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behaviour, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behaviour' for the first time and being like ohhh fuck holy shit

i was saying earlier, harry isn't a great character in this because while he does have moments where he feels like an actual intelligent child, he's often just treated as a machine to exposition dump theories/ideas the author likes. but i genuinely do love mcgonagall in this.

it's too long to screenshot, but the first meeting of draco and harry in this version is..... i have never understood the appeal of why so many fans of the books/movies ship the two of them, but something about them amusedly tormenting each other here makes me get it a little

harry is sick of people fawning/asking to shake his hand. he thinks this draco kid might do that, and preemptively does it to *him* instead. as soon as draco realizes what's happening, he starts dramatically fawning over harry to annoy him. only moment so far that got a chuckle

i really don't think we need the final line in the parentheses to get the sense that this child is petty and often uses misapplied principles of logic to convince himself & others his emotional reactions are logical conclusions. see: biting the teacher who didn't know logarithms

okay this weird moment is a great example of what i mean when i say the author isn't sure whether he wants harry to be a real child or a mouthpiece. right before this, harry accidentally made an insensitive comment about war, upsetting a shop owner and earning a lecture for it. -

it's a brief early moment where harry is trying to sound intellectual and self-superior and ends up hurting someone, and he ends up feeling awful about it. good moment! and then we immediately transition into this weirdly written wall of text that doesn't sound like human speech

it's not that there's no good way to explain this principle in-universe while sounding like a gifted child. but it's not this, with memorized numbers and percentages. this doesn't read like a real (even very clever) child explaining this, it reads like the author explaining this.

it's a very dissonant mix of sometimes decently characterizing a gifted child from an academic background who has flaws and is capable of fucking up and acting petty, and sometimes just using the child character as a personality-less vessel for the author to Explain Rationalism

tbh this is my biggest problem with HPMOR. i'm still enjoying my reread of it, but a lot of my thoughts can be summed up as "HPMOR is bad, except when it's good" and as "HPMOR is good, except when it's bad"

idc that harry isn't a realistically written 11 yo: i get he's supposed to be a fringe case and virtually all stories with child protagonists require a degree of suspending disbelief. but regardless of harry's breadth of knowledge, these walls of text don't read like human speech

when it's unclear how much of a given bit is harry vs elizier, i tend to charitably default to harry

because he's missing the point: that's not why his mom said that. i hope him not getting that because he's 11 is the intended point and not EY thinking it's actual good reasoning

another whedon comparison, but harry's oscillation between Kid Who Doesn't Understand Humans and Viewpoint Character/Only Sane Man reminds me how it's often unclear if joss wants you to root for xander or billy, because they're sometimes framed as misogynists & sometimes as right

right now my thinking is: if this story is intended to be a sequences-style guide to practicing rationality, it fails, because harry is (sometimes intentionally by the author, sometimes unintentionally) often wrong about it

if, however, it's intended to be (cont)

(cont)a deconstruction of the pernicious aspects of HP's world, and a story about the actual characters within the world.. i wouldn't say it *fails*, because there are times this is legitimately done well, but attempts to do the former do hinder its ability to pull off the latter

i'm not saying this to hate on the story or say it's trash. despite the weird harry characterization and mix of decent and then sometimes atrocious dialogue, i'm having fun with this reread and enjoying the story. but it does try to do two things that are at odds with one another

its attempts to 'teach the audience about rationality' hinder its attempts to make harry a real, flawed character, and vice versa. i think of the two, it does better at actually telling a story that deconstructs and reimagines HP, though

okay. i've exhausted my thoughts on the two contradictory ways EY uses harry as a character, and the awful walls of text that falter at both explaining principles of rationality and being good dialogue. i will shut up about both these points now unless i have something new to add

i don't like this framework, because it's touted as making mathematical calculations that you can use to rationally influence your courses of action, but it just involves guessing at what the probabilities of certain events could potentially be and framing it as math

on one hand, harry often jumps to incorrect conclusions while self-assuredly framing them as rational. otoh, mcgonagall isn't only angry at his demands to be told everything because he's wrong, but also because he's a child. his righteous anger in context is about half fair here

like, in-universe harry is an extremely intelligent child, but also.. a Kid who knows very little about how this world works or how to engage with powerful enemies. mcgonagall not wanting to insta tell him about death prophecies is a decision with a child's best interests in mind

engaging with this as a story with an intentionally flawed protag interests me more than engaging with it as a manifesto. so even where EY wants us to like harry's bad ideas, i think i'll have more fun analyzing harry's flaws as harry's and not as EY's. death of the author babey!

Same Energy, down to the headband

man i'm getting the feeling the author really doesn't like ron. his first introduction and they're reeaallly trying to frame him as super stupid and useless. he was never a genius in the books but he wasn't a literal bumbling idiot either

honestly this is low hanging fruit but harry is right, quidditch is a horribly designed sport in the original books and an 11 year old doesn't even have to be a rationalistically trained kid genius to notice and point this out

i really don't understand the weird desire to depict ron as a complete idiot. besides being ~not true to canon~, making him a foil to make harry seem smarter in comparison is also just one of the least interesting things you can do with him as a character. be creative!!!

HE EXISTS IN THE ORIGINAL STORY TO BRING A SENSE OF FAMILY, LEVITY, AND EMOTIONAL SUPPORT TO A CHARACTER WHO DIDN'T GROW UP WITH ANY OF THAT ELIZIER. IF YOU SEE NO REASON FOR HIM TO EXIST AS NOTHING BUT A DUMB ASSHOLE, THEN *YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO WRITE HIM THAT WAY* ELIZIER.

i actually do like the parallels here between harry, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of processes and ideas but zero understanding of relationships and people, and draco, who brings a particular expertise harry doesn't have on relationships and people

i honestly genuinely do like the weird relationship harry has with draco in this. they should date

good god i keep forgetting that for some bizarre reason elizier felt it necessary to have draco make a rape joke in this chapter

i do like this. the insular wizarding world knowing next to nothing about the world outside it, and instead being taught to deride it at any possible opportunity, has a lot of potential. draco thinking muggles can't have landed on the moon but surely have moving photos was cute

aww that's cute. it's a shame the hermione chapter is mostly used as an opportunity to admire harry more from another perspective, because the narrator voice for hermione is actually pretty enjoyable to follow without sacrificing the story's appreciation of muggle science

this really reads to me as a kid wanting play a mean prank convincing himself he's being Ethical by 'helping neville get used to his fear'. this isn't how exposure therapy works, but it IS how kids rationalizing being shitty works. also a good example of consequentialism's limits

i do think, irrespective of my earlier criticism of his characterization, he’s characterized pretty inconsistently here. like 4 chapters ago he started crying because he accidentally made an insensitive comment to a shop assistant and now this. then again..... 11 year old boys

again: i'm going to consider harry's flaws in this story as harry's and not elizier's, even when elizier is trying to narratively frame harry's negative traits as in the right. that said, look at the 'autobiography' EY wrote. harry is such a blatant self insert at times lol

harry you literally know nothing about the genetics of the magical species in this world or how genetically distinct they are from the humans you know. you have no idea what you're taking about and sometimes you just need to listen and observe, like... yknow... a scientist

i still have mixed feelings on hermione's sorting a good 15 or so years later... i'll let you have this one, elizier

okay i'm glad they addressed harry just using "exposure therapy lol" to rationalize bullying neville. too immature not to do dumb kid shit but just mature enough to know the lingo to use to rationalize it. this is a rare case where harry is actually framed as in the wrong, too

i actually appreciated the sorting hat chapter, because this is the first time so far harry has come up against a character who is both very obviously smarter than him and vocally unwilling to take his bullshit. that said, i would have liked to see the hufflepuff timeline

because while it was very satisfying to watch this kid get facts and logiced by a piece of fabric, i think some lasting consequences, putting him in a house he really did not want to be in, would have both been nice to see and would have been a fun challenge for him to overcome

i actually think the idea of a magic item that's a drink that inevitably makes you do a spit take when you drink it is kinda cute, but comed-tea is such a BAD pun name for it. if you want a phrase it's easy to pun, 'punch line' is RIGHT THERE

hot take: there are two bad ways the artemis fowl movie could have gone in terms of poorly handling the artemis character. the direction the movie went in was one of them. the other potential path was writing him like HPMOR harry.

see, small little worldbuilding details like this are things that i actually like. that's a cute idea, and would make sense in a dorm where everyone is prone to talking their heads off! also, i want one

oh no he's about to find out about time turners

for all my faults with this fic, i do enjoy this chapter and stuff like this, mostly because i, too, have read a lot of fiction where characters get their memories erased or are replaced by clones and have spent time figuring out what system you'd use to figure that out

as a kid, i hated stories where ordinary people had to forget their magical adventures at the end. my justification to myself was "it's bad storytelling", but really, *i* would've hated to forget a life-changing adventure, and thus hated it never being framed as deeply horrifying

so it's nice to have that experience represented and see other characters who made conscious efforts to find work-arounds (even if it is such a deeply unlikable character being the one to have that experience, lol)

this is fun. this is a fun chapter. i'm sorry if you're following along to hateread but credit where credit is due, i actually like this idea

... realizing i tend to only particularly like chapters where harry isn't explicitly framed as the most knowledgeable person in the room

buddy....

i still hate how elizier wrote ron in this to be a bumbling idiot when he wasn't like that in the books to make... some kind of point i guess??? but i do appreciate that hufflepuffs aren't the butt of the joke in this fic, since a lot of fan works seem to interpret them that way

COMRADE NEVILLE

bro this woman works with children as her job. i assure you she already knows what comed-tea is and will kick your ass

i wonder if the sorting hat actually does know about this spell and did this to harry on purpose when it sorted him into slytherin for two seconds, or whether it was exclusively fucking with him

the realization that i'm only on chapter 16 and there are 122 of these things is really hitting me

just cleansed myself with this fic (a little too harsh re: aang and katara's relationship but still good & it's nice to see katara Get Shit Done) and i'm ready to continue with HPMOR! not sure whether a palate cleanser makes the experience better or worse https://twitter.com/marysuewriter/status/1279616865170407424

i have such mixed feelings about time-turners from a narrative perspective, because on one hand any intelligent person probably *would* use them as the solution to most of their problems, like that's consistent and reasonable in-universe. but from an out-of-universe perspective -

- having 1 easy solution to most of one's problems (especially in conjunction with the invisibility cloak) is not that interesting to read about. the uses per day limit does help a bit, but it's hard to incorporate time turners into a story while keeping conflict interesting

this is interesting to me because the long monologues tend to be HPMOR's weakest point; 9/10 times they're just Elizier In A Harry Costume Badly Explains Rationality. but i think this, designed to set up who quirrell is as a character, works where the other monologues don't.

i think this is partly because there's reason for him to be monologuing uninterrupted; he's a professor and this is a lecture. and it's partly because elizier is actually trying to tell a *story* here and establish what the main antagonist is like, and not just Explain LessWrong

HPMOR's strongest points are the (increasingly rare) chapters where its characters are 1. actual people with goals and not just vehicles to convey exposition, & 2. *shown* utilizing principles of rational thinking to get ahead rather than us being *told* what those principles are

i think that's why i tend to like quirrell as a villain well enough, because he *does* believe things EY doesn't, which means EY has to put effort into making a character with distinct, relatively developed goals and belief systems besides Be An Infomercial Guy For The Sequences

this could literally just be the tagline for the fic