An edited paste of a conversation I had with a friend
Alicorn: I'm increasingly disappointed with Hermione's character. Eliezer has never been great with female characters, and he's trying so hard with her, but he's made her so silly, so pathetically, appallingly silly. She's not stupid, she's not evil, but she's more a child than anyone else who gets character development and she is such a silly girl. I don't mean, like, she has a sense of humor, which is the other meaning of the word "silly". She is not Pinkie Pie, she's just a ninny.
Alphabeta: To be fair, all the other people her age with that much development are fucking crazy.
Alicorn: All the girls in their year are silly, though, I don't think this is just Hermione's personal character flaw that she has to have because she got developed a certain amount. It's more irritating in her, because we see more of her and it's contrasting against higher intelligence, but all the girls are silly.
Alphabeta: That sounds like something Eliezer needs to hear
Alicorn: yeah, I'm considering pasting this conversation in the LW discussion thread
Alphabeta: Also, in fairness, most of the boys are silly, and McGonagall is very good at...
Honestly, Hermione seems the least unbelievable of the major child characters. Harry is just a freak of nature - I was a gigantic multi-sigma outlier nerd at that age, and I couldn't have held a candle to Harry. There is no way any 11 year old has read and understood the entire corpus of quantum mechanics, cognitive science, science fiction, and rationalism writings, no matter how much of a bibliophile they are. Draco is less unreasonable, but he still carries himself like someone much older than 11. Hermione, on the other hand, is basically just a smart girl with a good memory, who's struggling to keep up with a force of nature and fighting with the evil chancellor's kid.
Ultimately, 11-year-old girls are supposed to be silly sometimes. Hermione still manages to be more serious than most of the actual people that age I know. I think our expectations are just skewed by the university-aged kids in middle school.
I agree with you. Hermione is a more believable child than the others. However, the way in which she achieves that is not because she is better written (she's not), but because she has different flaws, which Eliezer assigns to characters of her age and gender with overwhelming regularity, in a context of generally handling female characters clumsily.
Only if 27-year-old Luke was being a silly boy when he broke up with someone by 20-page essay with ev-psych primer. (BTW, did you intend the reference?) Stupid, but not childish.
I said to Luke when I read that, "You know, Luke, it hasn't happened yet in the story, but I'd already planned out, before I read your post, that when I want to have Harry screw up a conversation with Hermione as badly as possible, I'm going to have him start talking about evolutionary psychology. You literally did that in the way I'd imagined as the worst way possible." (Though the actual chapter didn't come out quite that way when I wrote it - there isn't anything about evolutionary psychology until the very end.)
So I thought of this as a stereotypically male-stupid thing to do, and independently Luke, who happens to be male, went and did it. Can you name a woman who's done the same?
I didn't read Harry's statements as stereotypically male-child-stupid or even stereotypically male-stupid, but stereotypically hyperintellectualist-male-stupid - as in specifically similar to behavior like Luke's, not that of any non-Internet non-rationalist man I've actually met. A male child of ordinary intellectual background, no matter how stupid, could not have made the specific mistakes Harry made here, because he drew his deemed-inappropriate ideas from "enlightened" papers.
A good example of stereotypically male-child-stupid is Ron's lines you quote here (and many of Ron's actions in general). These are stupid comments Ron was able to make in spite of not having read any papers.
Hermione's reactions are stereotypically female-child-stupid. She reacted the way she did precisely because of not reading these particular enlightened papers. This is the exact opposite of Harry's stupidity! I think I understand why you wrote the scene with these results - Harry has read lots of rationalist papers you think more people should read, while Hermione in spite of her intelligence does not have the exact same background. However, because Hermione's actions fit with "stupid f...
...do note that Hermione at one point reacts in a genre-savvy fashion by saying that it's fine for Harry to have a dark side.
Please keep in mind that a lot of this apparent problem is generated by the unalterable fact that Harry, who has Stuff Going On and has been through hell as the title character and has to grow fast enough to be competitive with people like Dumbledore and Professor Quirrell (all genders chosen by Rowling) happens to be male, whereas Hermione, who like many other characters is going to have difficulty competing with Harry at this point in the story, happens to be female. I mean, suppose Rowling had made her professionally paranoid Auror a woman. It's not unthinkable that someone might complain about how Harry, a male, managed to land a stun on Madam Moody. Symmetrically, if Draco had discovered Harry doing science with Hermione some chapters earlier, he wouldn't have had the same reaction but he would've had an equally difficult reaction for Harry to deal with, and yes I would've figured out some way to make the adultery joke there too.
The main lesson I'm learning is that there are potential Problems when you arrange the plot so that you have the main charac...
Harry was fumbling. He was not silly. He expressed reasonable propositions in clumsy ways. Hermione was silly throughout.
Most students in HPMOR are silly when not under pressure (witch counterexample: Penelope Clearwater). They're also named after fan artists with upcoming cameos. Who tend to be female.
And yes, there's a Gossipy Hens trope in HPMOR, the converse of which is the horrible dating advice dispensed by males with their parody PUA community, both of whom are there because someone has to horribly misinterpret the situation, and which are gender-correlated because... well, because that part is realistic and there are things in HPMOR that happen because that's what the prior causal forces output, not necessarily because that's how I freely decided the outcome should be.
Yes, and? The canon scene is Hermione "crying and wanting to be left alone". That is not particularly silly - it's emotional, but not even all that childish; depressed or particularly put-upon adults cry and want to be left alone. You, by contrast, have Hermione hysterically, italicizedly telling Harry that he cannot do science with two people at once, and doubling down on it even after she has a chance to realize that this is preposterous.
Erm... a basic law of MoR is that people gain maturity/competence in proportion to how much hell they've been through. This creates a power balance problem where Harry, as main character, has been to Azkaban and Hermione hasn't, and fighting bullies isn't quite enough to make up for that. However, I would indeed maintain as a literary matter that this Hermione has been through more hell than the quoted canon!Hermione and is visibly more powerful and competent. Methods!Hermione doesn't flee in tears if Ron calls her a nightmare, though she would've at the start of the year. She probably wouldn't even notice.
Erm... a basic law of MoR is that people gain maturity/competence in proportion to how much hell they've been through.
For an otherwise rational fanfic this seems oddly like a rule out of Dungeons and Dragons.
Edit:Also, it seems like at this point Hermione has gone through some pretty awful stuff also so by this logic her competence level should have gone up a lot.
It did work out that way in my own life.
There's a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert thinks he's really just been faking it since sixth grade.
At age 17 I went through a bit of hell bad enough that I don't particularly want to talk about it, and three weeks later woke up one morning and realized that I would never feel like that Dilbert cartoon again. Literally, just woke up in the morning. It wasn't the result of any epiphany, it seemed more like something biological my brain just did in response. My main reaction was, "Why couldn't my brain have done this three weeks earlier when it would've #$&%ing helped?"
Not sure how that squares with the research, and I couldn't point to anywhere in my life where it happened except that one point.
However, the actual literary logic is something more like, "Once you show Harry thinking his way out of Azkaban, it is no longer possible for him to lose an even battle to Draco - the reader won't believe it." I don't think the 'power up through trial' thing is actually unrealistic, I mean, if I come out of this planet alive I'm probably not going to be fazed by much after that. But it's the more fundamental literary reason ...
Even so, imagine Methods!Granger fleeing to the bathroom after just hearing Ron call her a nightmare. That could've happened in Ch. 9, maybe, but by this point Granger has been fighting older bullies successfully and you'd be, like, "Yeah right."
Wait wait wait. Just hearing Ron call her a nightmare? That's not at all why Hermione is crying! Hermione is crying because:
Hermione realizes that her best isn't good enough. It doesn't matter that she's good at magic; she's a muggleborn. It doesn't matter that she's helpful; other people don't like her despite her good intentions. It doesn't matter that she's hurting; other people don't care. And so a homesick little girl hides her frustration and pain in the bathroom.
In Methods, the same comment will have a different effect because the reality on the ground is different.
Beyond that, how one responds to social and combat situations is often different; one can easily develop strength in one without strength in the other.
I mean, if I come out of this planet alive I'm probably not going to be fazed by much after that
My opinion of you has ebbed and flowed a lot, Eliezer, but one thing for which I doubt I will ever stop loving you is the way you can talk like a science fiction character with the most perfect nonchalance.
I usually don't respond, but I care unusually much about what the author of Luminosity thinks.
Hmm.
One of my subagents thinks for some reason that it would be helpful for me to present, instead of direct criticism, a discussion of my own writing weaknesses and what I do / want to do about them, thereby lightly grazing some fraction of what I would say directly about your writing. The subagent thinks that this will be less likely to make you defensive. Is it off-base?
Very possibly on-base. I think my brain is worried that other people will read this and say, "Ah, Eliezer is a patriarchalist writer" instead of, "Oh, well, invisibly behind the scenes Eliezer was trying to juggle this and a dozen other writing problems and desiderata simultaneously and this is what we got." Talking about your own analogous writing problems seems much more likely to lead the wider audience to the second conclusion.
I had no particular intention to talk past you; as we both know, conveying meaning using words is hard, and I might not've understood your intended main point.
Okay, here's my first pass at this.
I'm more comfortable with female characters myself. Both Luminosity and Radiance have girl protags; the Elcenia books are a mix, and of the finished ones there's two female protagonists, a male one whose girlfriend spends a lot of time in the spotlight, and an ensemble cast that only mostly belongs to the male character I think of as its center. I could make up reasons why that isn't something I did on purpose. Luminosity and Radiance are fanfiction. I didn't invent Rhysel, Julie did; Julie also invented Talyn, and his story spends more time focusing on his romance than Rhysel's did; Ilen's not a strong enough character to hold up his own entire book until the very end of the plot; Ehail hardly counts because she's so wispy and much of her book is a vehicle for plot that just happens conveniently nearby her...
But that's a cop-out. I could have written Luminosity with a rationalist Edward if that had struck my fancy, if I'd been willing to lean a little farther away from the canon conceit. I could have given Bella a son instead of a clone of Renesmee with a less silly name, that was completely open to me to have her make that choice when she ...
I've seen it mentioned elsewhere as a way of finding out what background assumptions one has about gender.
Unfortunately, I have no obvious way of tracking down the cite, but I think the author found that when the male characters were given female pronouns, the amount of agency they showed became very unattractive. I don't remember what the shift was when the male characters were given female pronouns.
On my first reading of Mieville's Embassytown, I kept getting thrown out of the story because I couldn't believe the protagonist was female. I think it's because she was more interested in travel than in people. On the second reading, it wasn't a problem.
A prominent pop-culture example is the Mass Effect sci-fi game series. Unless Commander Shepard's gender is directly relevant (such as during romantic subplots), he/she will say the exact same lines whether man or woman.
Over five years and three lengthy and ambitious games, I've probably read hundreds of pages of people discussing every aspect of the series and its narrative. The single time I can remember anyone saying that 'FemShep' felt a bit off was in direct response to the above observation; outside of that, she was wildly popular and often named as a positive model for the writing of female protagonists.
Grownup sexual issues in the sense of acquainting one's genitalia with someone else's body parts are (mostly) theoretical for (not too precocious) children! Issues of one's sex are decidedly NOT. From a very, very young age - maybe for boys it doesn't become non-theoretical until middle school, but I'd laugh at the idea that girls aren't hyperconscious of gender expectations after the age of about five. MOR!Hermione is constantly comparing her relationship with Harry to "Romances" she has read, expecting herself to fill such a role under constant societal encouragement and reinforcement of how girls just act that way and melt in a variety of creative manners whenever they so much as think momentarily of love. That's something she never ever would have been exposed to and acting upon if she hadn't needed to visit McGonagall in December.
MoR canon points out itself that Ravenclaws aren't necessarily the cleverest, they're selected mainly for the virtue of scholarship and curiosity.
Dumbledore was a Gryffindor, and Riddle and Snape, and in the present generation, Draco, are all Slytherins, and they certainly don't seem like they could be outside the top quartile.
The top quartile of 11 year olds is not really an impressive group. Even the top percentile(assuming as a handwave 100 kids per class)...well, they're still 11. I was in the top percentile at that age by most Ravenclawish metrics, and I was painfully stupid until at least my mid teens(and probably later, truth be told).
I think the female sex in HPMOR comes off poorly for three reasons:
The major adults are mostly men. "Female" ends up also signifying "childlike."
The author doesn't want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don't get comic stories about Quidditch.
Hermione and McGonagall are not tragic or ambitious. Draco and Dumbledore can "level up" in HPMOR to agendas worthy of Harry's, but Hermione and McGonagall, being largely tame cooperators, are overshadowed by their even-grander-than-before comrades.
If we wanted to imagine alternate versions of the fic with less of this difficulty, some conceivable changes would be:
Give Hermione and McGonagall risk-defying agendas of their own. (Make them Aragorns or Boromirs, not Gimlis and Pippins.)
Make the boy students gossip improbably about the teachers' and students' Evil Overlord Plans just as much as the girl students gossip improbably about the teachers' and students' Romantic Entanglements. ("No way, dude! Snape's going to take out Quirrell with his Godelian Braid Potion!")
Make Harry need the help of other students more, so that we can understand the girls' gossip as how they let off steam and not as what unimportant people do.
But I think this fic is too nearly done, and too big, to contemplate such changes at this point.
This is kinda tangential, but this just now occured to me: I am male, and my too biggest hobbies are watching pro- sports and playing tabletop RPGs; while various folk ontymologies define these two activities as being on opposite ends of the jock-nerd spectrum, I have always maintained that they are actually quite similar (I am not the first person to comment on this similarity) Both fandoms have a reputation for being male dominated; my question is: is this a co-incidence, or is there something about emotionally investing in naratives that have been basically woven whole cloth from what is essentially a random number generator that is off-putting to girls?
(Possible confounding factor: I'm admittedly not your standard sports fan, though we're apparently a sizable enough minority to get our own negative stereotypes and labels as sportsnerds/statheads.)
You're right, there's nothing absurd, individually, about the mostly-male lead adults, the author's distaste for sports comedy, and having Hermione and McGonagall be far less hubristic than the men.
The author is largely following canon in each of these, except for minimizing Quidditch (for which I, for one, am heartily grateful) and for adding in shipping humor (which I also like). The trouble is the cumulative effect.
I see not the slightest evidence that the author wants Hermione and the other females to come off as narratively second-best to the men.
But in the absence of a positive force impelling Hermione et al toward narrative grandeur, they end up being defined as compliant like McGonagall, or trivial like the romantic gossipers, NPCs rather than PCs in either case.
EY observes that Hermione doesn't need more brainpower to be a force in the story. Unfortunately, since she's in a story, not a collection of biographies, she does need more narrative impetus to get her to engage in story-like behavior alongside the men.
The same is true, at a smaller scale, for Padma as versus Neville and Blaise. The boys have tolerably specific ambitions; the girls don't. Hermione wants to be "a hero"; Harry has a list of specific large problems he's aiming to solve. The narrative outcome was inevitable.
When your main characters are as aggressive and grandiose as Harry and Quirrellmort, anybody without an active force to make them narratively prominent ends up looking second-rate.
I've read through the back and forth with EY on Hermione here.
I think the criticisms of EY's treatment of Hermione's silliness share Hermione's silliness.
Hermione is all wound up with feeling not as good as Harry, with a Greater Prodigy crisis, and twists that up in gender ideology. Notice that Draco, the boy born to rule, has no problem accepting Harry's greater competence, and certainly doesn't get in a gender based tizzy over it. Who cries for Draco's unflattering portrayal?
Look at Harry, Draco, and Hermione. Who is more emotionally balanced? Who has a healthier interpersonal outlook? Who isn't going to be a Dark Lord, no matter what? Who is actually the best student? Who treats people the best?
You want to talk about silly? How about Harry's moral tizzy over sentient food. Cannibal!
Keep in mind that Hermione won the first army battle. While the other generals were busy being brilliant and ordering others about, Hermione was busy organizing her team to get the best out of them.
Yes, Hermione doesn't have the sheer power Harry does. Why does she, and apparently others, think she has to have that power or she will be less than?
As for the Mars vs. Venus discussions between Harry an...
If Hermione takes down Azkaban and survives, and does so without Harry seeming to take control, that would be more amazing to read than I can possibly express.
It would also reflect terribly on Hermione. She'd be an utter fool to attempt that kind of thing without using Harry's brilliance and resourcefulness. Her influence over Harry is one of her most useful powers and killing stuff ingeniously (and surviving) is pretty much Harry's specialty. It isn't hers.
It's one thing to insist on having your own team in a school battle-games. It's quite another to waste the opportunity to accept aid (and in this case even leadership) from an ally in a situation that means the life and death of yourself and others. It'd be disgustingly immature, take 'silliness' to a whole new level and be completely irrational. Unless Hermione's goal in attacking Azkaban really is more about her ego and signalling and not about the need for Azkaban to be attacked for some direct reason... and she had some reason to be completely confident that it wouldn't kill her.
No respect points for ego when it is at the expense of shut up and multiply.
As a rule, "And what effect does this have on the protagonist?" is the most commonly answered question in narrative. That's what being the protagonist means, really.
Could you precisely state the flaw you see? You say "silly" a lot, but what specific behavior do you find objectionable, and why?
I don't see the same behavior in the silly girls and Hermione. The girls play gossiping romantic fantasy, which Hermione herself has contempt for. The closest behavior is Hermione getting emotional about her relationships with Harry and other people, and what people think of her. Is having emotions about what others think a character flaw?
I go into more detail a bit elsewhere in the thread. She becomes hysterical about Draco, indulging some bewildering sort of friend-jealousy or romantic precociousness, moralizing to an unforgiving degree that she cannot possibly endorse if she thought about it for thirty seconds, making sweeping unsupported assertions about human psychology, determining of a sudden for no reason that Harry was supposed to be Science Monogamous with her, throwing a tantrum that is not necessarily age inappropriate but is not in keeping with her typical level of personal maturity, making their genders way more salient than they needed to be (she does throughout the fic, it's weird), identifying herself for some reason as a "poor innocent little girl" victimized by a question that she just made relevant enough for Harry to ask...
No offense (and I'm a boy so quite probably biased about this, fair warning) but are you sure you know what girls are like in real life? I know in a utopian world there would be no gender stereotyping, but in my honest experience, even as someone who strongly wishes stereotypes would all burn and die, girls in schools do gossip, and stress about relationships, and quite possibly are prone to sensitivity and preoccupation about love, even if it is culturally rooted.
Just wondering I guess if you've been so successful in emancipating yourself from that stereotype (congratulations on that) that you've ended up with unrealistic expectations of what is actually normal for girls.
That said I don't know you and don't want to come across as though I'm certain of what I'm saying either, just reporting on my brain's response to your comment.
EDIT: Typo fix
Up until I was about Hermione's age, my friends were nearly all girls, and they were an even mix beyond that. I am not claiming anything so preposterous as that girls do not gossip or fixate on interpersonal matters. Of course they do; it's not even limited to children. I am saying that girls are not uniformly silly creatures, differentiated only by name, approximate g factor, and school House.
I think it would take more than 30 seconds to get over the fact that someone you rely on to be your only equal friend does not have a symmetrical relationship where you're similarly important, not to mention his OTHER close friend is the guy who has said he wants you dead.
I said it elsewhere, but I'll reiterate and expand here.
Getting emotional, crying and running off does not necessarily merit penalty points in a human interaction, and certainly not for 12 year old girls who have recently been threatened with a lengthy term of prison/torture for attempted murder of someone who she recently discovered wanted to do horrible things to her, and then finds that her best friend and savior had a hidden and close relationship with that someone. Threats to security, violation of basic trust and in group solidarity, where the stakes are a torture death for her and the allegiance of her best friend and savior, who she had recently resolved to stick by in the face of a persistent threat to her own life.
Maybe the inside view of that would be hugely emotional, and might impair dispassionate thought a tad?
Me, I think it was a narratively appropriate scene for him to reintroduce a little cliched comedy. It was a little overdone on both sides for comic effect, but that's how you make comedy. I thought it worked. I thought it was fun. I think he tends a little toward slapstick with his comedy, and it's not intended to be taken as entirely realistic character development.
Eliezer obviously agrees with you, but... Hermione doesn't sound silly at all to me. Okay, explicitly believing that sufficient lack of sympathy makes one an inherently bad person is silly, but no sillier than Dumbledore's deathism. And the jealousy is completely justified. Harry encouraged the rivalry, then promised they would study magic together - that they'd be the team to crack it, the only researchers in the wizarding world, not that she could lend a hand as human library. Of course they're supposed to be Science Monogamous. And it's not like he's met another great scientist; he's going out of his way to teach science to someone who hated her.
I tried to get one of my friends to read MoR and he quit after about Chapter 20 because he was getting annoyed at how the children weren't acting like children. I think from his point of view, the disparity you're identifying between Hermione and Harry, say, doesn't count as mishandling Hermione so much as mishandling Harry... as far as my friend's point of view is concerned, Hermione acting silly is a completely appropriate response to what she's been through, and there is something deeply wrong with Harry Potter.
And... this is hard to talk about because I feel like I constantly have to make sure what I'm saying doesn't count as Clueless Male Cluelessly Defending The Patriarchy. I have some small understanding of male privilege. It would be nice if I could be given the benefit of the doubt on this. (Now I'm trying to figure out if that counts as Clueless Male Cluelessly Defending The Patriarchy...)
I'm not sure I'm quite on the same wavelength here, but what I'm seeing is that the boys are mostly proto-somethings - not just the obvious ones, like Harry being on the road to being a Light Lord or Draco gearing up to be the first reasonably-enlightened Lord Malfoy, but even relatively minor characters like Neville and Ron, you can get a pretty good idea of what kinds of people they're going to be when they grow up by looking at what they're like now and extrapolating - and the question of what kinds of people they'll be is taken seriously, too, in how things are framed and how the other characters react to things. (Harry's very first interaction with Neville, for example.) The girls don't really seem to have that same quality of being adults in training; even Hermione's heroism arc was more about her reputation and ego in the here-and-now than anything I can imagine her continuing past age 16 or so, and it takes a lot more work to imagine any of them having interesting roles as adults - it feels like it really doesn't matter whether any of them do anything more interesting than being housewives.
Yes, that's it: the girls don't aim for distinctive future selves, the boys do.
Blaise and Neville are each trying to become something, and it's something different in each case. The girls? Not nearly so much.
This seems a strange comment to me. After the SPHEW arc I think I have a much better understanding of the thoughts and ambitions of e.g. Padma (doesn't want to fall back into harmony with her sister and is now seeking a non-evil way to do this), Susan (voice of caution through the influence of her Aunt, non-arrogant enough to seek out Tonks help) or Tracey (Darke Lady who'll have everyone as her husband), than e.g. the characters of Dean Thomas or Seamus Finnigan or even Blaise Zabini. Possibly even Neville Longbottom.
Padma feels to me like a much more important character than Blaise Zabini, and a more developed character too. I could go into detail but I'm not sure I should, since that sort of thing an author is supposed to communicate through story. I wonder how that perspective difference developed?
Padma had the subplot where she was mean to Hermione and Harry "reformed" her or whatever. She is put as second in command in Dragon Army and is respected enough by Draco to make him realize why his father said that Ravenclaw was an acceptable House from which to choose one's wife. She is shown to be powerful and loyal in both the armies and in SPEW (her prismatic sphere or whatever is mentioned to be particularly strong; she doesn't hesitate when Hermione tells her to go find help). Finally, she sort of kind of notices that something is wrong when interacting with Tonks!Susan while the others all think that Susan is a double witch. I'm not going to argue about whether she's more important than Blaise but she definitely does more than just switch places with her sister.
On the topic of Blaise, we can be fairly confident that almost none of what happened in the underwater battle was the result of his competence; he was just the headmaster's tool. Also, we are shown that he isn't that skillful a leader as without the advantage of the green glasses he loses his battle against (I think) Dean Thomas. On the other hand, Padma successfully leads Dragon army to victory after Draco looses his duel with Hermione.
Well here's a reminder of the SPHEW members for the benefit of all: The following is the impression I've already gotten from their personalities
From Hufflepuff:
Susan Bones - cautious, loyal, feeling they're getting into DOOM and trying to avert it.
Hannah Abbot - smaller than the rest, shy, but trying too hard sometimes in order to impress the others - and Neville
From Slytherin:
Tracey Davis - very theatrical, very very eager, getting into the Darke Lady spirit, most silly of the girls, wants Draco and Harry for her husbands
Daphne Greengrass - attempts to seem dignified and self-controlled as befits her Most Ancient House, also crushing on Neville
From Ravenclaw:
Hermione
Padma Patil - currently trying to find a non-evil way of not-falling-back-into harmony with her sister Parvati)
From Gryffindor:
Lavender Brown - most enthusiastic about the hero/superhero thing, with costumes and catchphrases and such
Parvati Patil- only one who's personality I'm not certain about.
The argument she's making is that the silliness of the girls is all uniform and dependent on them being girls, namely that they all gossip about Harry, Hermione, and Draco in a romantic context. Now this isn't true if you take the SPEW members into account, but I can sort of see it if you only consider unnamed or cameo female characters in their dining hall conversations. She's also saying that the silliness shown by the male characters isn't so obviously determined by their gender (see: lack of silly conversations about Quidditch and other suggestions mentioned in the comments of this post).
Looks like it's just because he very recently had a conversation with McGonagall where "Hey, I might turn out attracted to Snape" was relevant (to judging girls who are attracted to him), so he's primed to think of him as an example.
But only in an obviously joking way. Snape seems to be the one all the girls go for, so he assumes that he'd do the same if he were gay.
Given how anxious he is about the idea of romance I would think he would tend to shy away from anything that realistic. Snape is safe since a teacher/student relationship would be excluded on ethical grounds. Draco could actually happen, and so better not to think about.
Considering how Hermione reacted to the Science-with-Draco bit we can guess her reaction to might-marry-Draco-instead. Would totally look to her like Harry tried to keep his options open depending on how his orientation turned out after puberty.
Erm... a basic theory of MoR is that all the characters get automatic intelligence upgrades, except for Hermione who doesn't need it and starts out as exactly similar to her canon self as I could manage, thus putting everyone on an equal footing for the first time. I presume you're familiar with the literary theory which holds that Hermione is the main character of the canon Harry Potter novels?
Is that seriously what you were trying to do? I don't think canon Hermione actually has an eidetic memory, for one thing. And canon Hermione is not as silly. Even early on she has the ability to sort of... roll her eyes and move forward, when that's called for. Canon Hermione lectures but does not moralize; canon Hermione is not this romantically precocious.
I always interpreted her as exaggerating in canon
She quotes textbooks word for word, all the time. It's practically a running gag. I always assumed that Rowling thought that was a side effect of being smart.
and then the story would be Hermione Granger and How She Learned the Methods of Rationality and Became Omnipotent
Yeah, exactly. Also Equally-Upgraded!Hermione plausibly ought to be smarter than the author.
I'm referring to the competence. Canon Draco was a small-minded bully. Remember the Most Dangerous Student in the Classroom bit? Canon Draco made enemies every time he opened his mouth.
In any fic that comes out in installments, there's incentive for the author to have ever-more-gripping plot, for the sake of readers' short attention spans. I'm glad Eliezer has not fallen into this spiral, and still feels able to post a chapter in which no new plot developments happen (other than characters finding out about previous events).
So have a heart-shaped red-foil-wrapped candy.
I just had quite a dismal thought. Harry is in disbelief the entire wizarding world is not pursuing the stone as priority one, which is a reasonable enough reaction.. Except.. How many wizards actually manage to die in their beds? Given the stated lifespan, and the cultural tendency to marry young, families ought to have a lot of generations alive at the same time.. but the older generations are thin on the ground. Harry was not raised by his grandparents! none of whom ought to have passed away from natural causes. Those elders we hear about are in the main fairly high up on the "competency/scary/power" scales. The logical implication being that wizards are not overly concerned about old age, because very few of them ever die from it. Something else - A dark lord, screwing up a spell, the magical wildlife, a succession dispute.. will get you first.. This logic could well deter a lot of people from attempting alchemy ; Succeeding in making a stone without being as good a survivor as Flamel carries a significant risk of dying now to violence instead of in 90 years to natural causes.
Of course, this also means that Flamel might not be very unique at all. If the stone is widely regarded as a nuisance magnet, successful crafters may be keeping a low profile.
Given the stated lifespan, and the cultural tendency to marry young, families ought to have a lot of generations alive at the same time.. but the older generations are thin on the ground.
They just had a magical war in which pretty much everyone lost a lot of their family, as noted in the earlier chapters.
Couple of options:
1: They do. Once a decade or so, someone succeeds and promptly takes full advantage of the fact that nobody is going to connect the youth of 16 they now have the look of with the magus of 160 they were, assume a new identity and keep their gob shut. For maximal hilarity, this could explain the rumor about double witches - there is no such thing, but youthful witches and wizards with absurd powerlevels? Real, if rare.
2: The rite does not work well, or at all, for the old. Several options:
2a: The muggle mythos about the stone is not entirely off base. The creation of the stone requires a level or type of virtue exceedingly rare in people who have survived 150 +years in the wizarding culture.
2b: "Alchemy" is wizarding euphemism for "Tantric Magic", which is why all the books are restricted and while the spirit may be willing... >,) This also explains why Flamel only shares the stone with his wife - You can only help people you sleep with. This, of course, also rather nixes any of our heroes doing it anytime the next 5 years or so.
2c: For reasons similar to potions, the rite just does nothing for a caster over the age of 15.
3: Merlins interdict is screwing with the recipe- anyone wishing to make a stone has to do the research from scratch, and without an extant community of alchemical researchers, that is a project beyond the capability of any intellect ever born. - Flamels success happened in a context that no longer exists.
Harry is missing a point, tough. Flamel is 600 years old, and started out powerful. Presumably, "trying to blackmail / kidnap Flamel" has been the endpoint of the careers of enough dark lords that they do not attempt this anymore.
,,, Wait. alchemical diagrams need to be drawn "to the fineness of a child's hair"? ... ... Eh,, I think it entirely possible that Flamel is the only wizard to ever manage to make a stone because he is the only wizard to ever try it while young enough to use his own hair. In which case, Hermione is going to show up with a working stone shortly.
Harry's failing pretty badly to update sufficiently on available evidence. He already knows that there are a lot of aspects of magic that seemed nonsensical to him: McGonagall turning into a cat, the way broomsticks work, etc. Harry's dominant hypothesis about this is that magic was intelligently designed (by the Atlanteans?) and so he should expect magic to work the way neurotypical humans expect it to work, not the way he expects it to work.
In particular his estimate of the likelihood of a story like Flamel's is way off. Moreover, the value of additional relevant information seems extremely high to me, so he really should ask Dumbledore about it as soon as possible. Horcruxes too.
Edit: And then he learns that Dumbledore is keeping a Philosopher's Stone in Hogwarts without using it and promptly attempts a citizen's arrest on him for both child endangerment and genocide...
No, I am thinking that the process of making the stone may simply not work for wizards that have begun to age. - That the crafting process draws on the youth of the wizard or witch crafting the stone, - the hair of a child. And it has to be the hair of the crafter - Everyone after Flamel have substituted the hair of some random kid, which just does not work. it is a spell that can only be done at all by a child prodigy, Which explains why it has not been duplicated - Very, very few teenagers and below would try it. This would also explain why he has not mass produced it - He can not make it again.
Also, there is the point that Hermione knocking off a philosophers stone out of the blue would derail everyone's plots in the most hilarious fashion. Flamel's Stone locked away behind insane security? Too bad Dumbledore, there is a second one in a students trunk. Heck, she would probably start selling the darn things.
Shaving doesn't actually make hair thicker and stubbier, it just takes off a hair's tapered point and exposes a cross section.
"owner of a transportation company that won the 19th-century shipping wars... monopoly on oh-tee-threes"
I literally facepalmed.
Also, wow, Harry must absolutely love the taste of foot.
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 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now 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.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
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