Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

Harry lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes, briefly. "Fine. How do we get Hermione off the hook, exactly? I suppose it's too much to hope that with all the lawyers gone, the judges understand the concept of 'common sense' and 'prior probability' well enough to realize that twelve-year-old girls basically never commit cold-blooded murders?"

The most hilarious thing about this part is that it's basically suggesting that we should put social and sexual profiling over what the actual evidence and perpetrator statement indicate has actually happened... and that this is also what Yudkowsky's pathetic miscomprehension of Bayesian decision theory really says is what people should be doing. The "prior probability" of twelve year old girls murdering someone is substantially more important than personally seeing a twelve year old girl murdering someone in his worldview.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2018 20:14

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 04:00

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

A quick Google search confirms that it is a term which does not exist outside of HPMOR and the surrounding sphere of awfulness. I keep getting some strange amusement from the sheer snobbishness of their refusal to acknowledge any kind of thinker that before or outside of their vaunted enlightenment, despite the fact that the ethics of pleasure were a major branch of Ancient Greek moral philosophy and have only been refined since then. Piglets of Epicurus represent.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 13:13

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Xander77 posted:

The silver outline blasted back into the world, and said in the strange outside version of Harry's own voice, "Hermione Granger says," the blazing figure's voice became higher-pitched, "AHHHHHHHHH! "

I'll admit, this part genuinely made me laugh. The idea of whatshisname, Harry Potter's actor going "aaaah!" in deadpan falsetto is exactly the kind of joke the books would have made.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 14:54

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

21 Muns posted:

Really weird in context of Hermione loving dying in the next chapter, though.

True enough. Taken by itself it's pretty funny, though. I'm reminded of that infamous "Snape in a dress" scene.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 17:03

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I'd call it pretty bad that it took only six months for him to go from bratty little poo poo to "I'll kill the loving planet because one person I actually personally care about has died." Everyone who thought Harriezer couldn't get any worse? He officially just did.

# ¿ May 2, 2018 10:13

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

It's rather amazing how that actually ends up making Voldemort the hero of the story, seeing how it has been mentioned multiple times that the end of the story apparently involves Voldie making Harriezer swear not to destroy the world. It's like this story is a deconstruction of itself and never even noticed.

# ¿ May 2, 2018 11:07

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Hey. Hey guys.

You know what's better than AIs or Harry Potter fanfiction? Harry Potter fanfiction written by an AI! I present to you: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like A Large Pile Of Ash!

(Featuring Botnik Studios)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-uDnlGJRdk

# ¿ May 3, 2018 12:54

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Tiggum posted:

This is really dumb. People know how to write. People know what it takes. There's even extensive analysis of what makes books good or bad.

He's not exactly wrong when he says that knowing all those things is not the same thing as being a good writer, though. You can know everything there is to know about writing in a technical sense and still be a garbage writer, because writing is an art, not a science. Technical competence and not having a single creative bone in your entire body is not mutually incompatible, any more than completing a Paint By Numbers picture turns you into Picasso. There's an inexpressible something required for creating true art that the philosophy of aesthetics has been arguing about for as long as the concept of art has existed.

It's not as easy as saying that if you know everything there is to know about a certain type of art then you will be a good artist as well. I think this a valid claim because art has an intrinsic human component, it doesn't exist independent from the observer. Being an artist isn't just about technical skills, it's also about creating something that an independent observer will consider artistically valuable, so there's always something fuzzy and subjective to it. For all that it sounds like a lame clich�, art genuinely is about speaking to people, and you need to understand people and what matters to people if you want to really understand or create art.

The problem here is really that Harrykowsky doesn't know whether he wants magic to work like a science or like an art, so it's a half-arsed mess in either direction. Well, he's also poo poo at the "understanding real people" part, rather than the people that exist only in his imagination, but we already knew that much.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 02:45 on May 19, 2018

# ¿ May 19, 2018 02:14

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I don't know jack about golf as a game beyond "put the ball in the hole," so I'm really not in any position to gainsay you there, but I'm still getting the impression that you're oversimplifying it for the sake of making an argument. Golf as a sport and writing as an art are simply too fundamentally different to be compared like that. They're not the same thing and shouldn't be treated as though they work the same way.

I mean, I get it, I don't want to agree with this dipshit about anything either, but where there's a point there's a point.

# ¿ May 19, 2018 03:40

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

if someone comes to you and says they wanna write a book you can point them in the right direction more than just by shrugging your shoulders and saying no one knows how books are made

True enough. What I was getting at was more that even though I could do so and even though I know more about good writing in a technical sense than most people ever will, I've still come across books that followed every rule that I knew (and some that I didn't) and still completely sucked rear end somehow, for reasons that I still can't quite figure out even years after reading them. If it was that easy, I know a lot of people who'd be rich, best-selling authors rather than amateurs struggling to make ends meet.

quote:

They're both just skills for which some people have more natural aptitude than others. There's nothing magical about either.

There's nothing magical about anything, but the idea that you could come up with a cookie-cutter Good Writing Machine that always works has more in common with how Yudkowsky thinks about things and is a large part of why I think he's so bad at it - and would never be able to so himself. He has no respect for writing as an art rather than a skill.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 04:05 on May 19, 2018

# ¿ May 19, 2018 03:58

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Can't argue with that.

# ¿ May 19, 2018 04:06

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Personally, I'd call that "bad writing," but in a sense that isn't necessarily covered by technical proficiency, which really just proves the point.

# ¿ May 19, 2018 05:36

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

What is it with seemingly half the science fiction authors of the last 30 years being Mormons, anyway? Well, not half, but is seems to be a disproportionately large number. Is this some kind of cultural thing? I'm European and I've never even met a Mormon, so I honestly wouldn't know.

# ¿ May 22, 2018 13:04

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Wikipedia says that a quarter of all Hugo awards have gone to Mormons, so I assume there would be, unless the same people got a whole ton of them over and over again. It just seems a strange number for how small of a religious minority they are, at least to my knowledge.

# ¿ May 22, 2018 13:50

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Well, I suppose that either means the Wikipedia article is misleading about what it means or it's my own fault for not being able to recognize a reference to Mormonism even when I see it. I've seen other people talk about the strange prevalence of Mormon authors in scifi and fantasy, though, even if I can't personally point a finger at very many of them in particular, so I just figured I'd ask since this thread seems like the place to do it.

# ¿ May 22, 2018 17:41

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Tiggum posted:

Somehow I doubt that torturing the people who work for you for the slightest failure is actually a great way to get them to give you their best efforts and unwavering loyalty.

Disproportionate punishment of failure is a great way to ensure that when your underlings fail, they'll never tell you about it if it can at all be avoided. Good luck running anything, whether it be a corporation or a group of magical terrorists, when you can never be sure whether any mission or work assignment you gave then was actually ever completed.

# ¿ May 30, 2018 17:16

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

Under standard literary convention... the enemy wasn't supposed to look over what you'd done, sabotage the magic items you'd handed out, and then send out a troll rendered undetectable by some means the heroes couldn't figure out even after the fact, so that you might as well have not defended yourself at all. In a book, the point-of-view usually stayed on the main characters. Having the enemy just bypass all the protagonists' work, as a result of planning and actions taken out of literary sight, would be a diabolus ex machina, and dramatically unsatisfying.

I think this may just be the smartest thing that Yudkowsky has ever written in this turd of a story, because everything about this statement is perfectly correct and good writing advice.

He just forgot about thing: doing a bad writing thing intentionally doesn't make it not be bad writing.

quote:

It's fairly reasonable, if you're going to give your protagonists powerful abilities, to give their antagonists ways of getting around them. The problem here is that these are the least creative and most stifling of potential methods. They're the sort of thing a child comes up with in a game of make-believe. "I shoot you with my freeze ray" "well I'm wearing freeze-proof armour". You can't just have the solution to every problem be "well they'd know about that possibility and just magically prevent it from working".

As a general rule, the better solution to an overwhelming power or advantage on either the protagonist's or antagonist's side is to put them in a position where that power simply isn't applicable because it can't fix the problem they're facing. If the bad/good guy has a freeze ray, don't give them a problem that is immune to freezing but rather a situation where freezing someone or something wouldn't actually make a difference at all.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2018 23:54

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Grace Baiting posted:

Honestly, it's like you're not even a self-proclaimed 140+ IQ internet MENSA member.

Of course not.

I'm way overqualified for Mensa. :smuggo:

# ¿ Jul 6, 2018 01:09

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Old Kentucky Shark posted:

Yeah I read the books. That�s still super dumb.

It makes perfect sense as the plot device to a fairy tale, which is what the early Harry Potter books did their best to emulate, at least in mood if not in general plot structure. The entire feel of "being whisked away to a strange and mystical world" isn't that different in presentation to what you might in folklore tale about the Little People. In a classical German fairy tale like that of Grandfather Death, it would make perfect sense to have a magical device that can hide you from Death, or the Devil even. In that story, Death gave a magical herb to his godson that can save even those condemned to die by fate itself.

The problem isn't that it's dumb, it's that it doesn't really fit into hackneyed "mature" tone the later books ended up aiming for. It has been over a decade since I read the last book, but the thing that I remember the most is that they ultimately didn't actually end up mattering a whole lot, for all that the book was titled after them.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2018 17:00

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

"Forty thousand Galleons. Two million Muggle pounds sterling. Your son knows some things about the size of the Muggle economy that might surprise you. They'd find it amusing, that the fate of a country was revolving around two million pounds sterling. They'd think it was cute. And I think much the same, Lord Malfoy.

Hasn't Yudkowsky been making a point, over and over, of stating that the magical economy is pretty much completely discoupled from the regular economy and there's basically no relationship at all between the posted exchange value of a Galleon and its actual buying power?

# ¿ Jul 16, 2018 20:32

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

the original books have the same issue, it's a fundamental problem with the harry potter narrative structure because it all has to culminate in teenagers killing a resurrected warlock who has lived five times as long as they have, with powers beyond those of other men, who has hidden his heart within a jar, etc. which is fundamentally implausible within the established rules of the world and causes the narrative to contort further and further as it closes in on the end

i enjoyed LA as a better version of the story than the originals but it's still a bad skeleton for a story no matter how you flesh it out

It doesn't help any that its protagonist and HPMOR's are basically the exact same character, because for the same reason HPMOR is such a trainwreck, the "super genius who solves everything by being just that clever" stock character they both use drags down pretty much anything where it is ever given a central role: if the author were actually as intelligent as their character is supposed to be, they wouldn't be writing fanfiction, so rather than a character who is actually written as intelligently as whatever they do or say is stated to be, what you get instead is its caricature as drawn from the author's own ideas about what a much more intelligent person would be like and what problems they should be able to solve, even if he has no idea of just how, exactly.

When you keep in mind that both Harriezer and Arithmione are what the author thinks they would they would sound and act like they were much more intelligent than they are, you can probably see just why the story is such a clusterfuck of intelligent-sounding nonsense justifying the just plain nonsense the plot revolves around. Intelligence is pretty much a superpower and it's not like it ever gets old to watch Superman use his heat vision to solve problems, either.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jul 20, 2018

# ¿ Jul 20, 2018 17:04

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Thinking about it in retrospect, I never really could bring myself to find Voldemort-the-villain all that terribly menacing compared to the threat the books wanted to make him out to be, because honestly, he was just kind of, well, a moron. As a character he has so little in the way of any actual complexity or depth to his personality that literally his one and only motivation, the reason he started a war of bloody insurgency on the British Governent, can be summed up as "never got over the childhood inferiority complex he developed growing up as a bastard child in an orphanage." Which he decides the best way to deal with is to start calling himself the Dark Lord Notaword and pretending really really hard he totally isn't that "that Tom Riddle kid" that his former classmates went to school with when he goes to his former classmates to recruit the most inbred and snobbish for Lord 'Totally Wizard Aryan, for reals' Voldemort's v�lkisch Society for The Preservation Of Wizard Lebensraum... except then it actually loving works and they decide he's clearly the most snobby and inbred of them all, because wizards apparently really are just that stupid.

So then he decides to conquer England with his newly minted Evil Incest Army of Doom and is actually somehow winning, which I can buy because we're shown exactly how useless the Ministry is. All in all it makes me think he really can't have been nearly as dangerous or competent as he had everyone believing. Between his reputation and what it would still actually take to conquer even the worst country in the world when all you have is Gandalf McSixfingers in a spooky Halloween costume, I think it's a fairly reasonable assumption that he keeps getting his rear end kicked by a middlingly competent high school student because that's about all he can manage and "the power he knows not" is simply having a functioning brain. There's no way anyone who could look at a plan like that and think it's is a super good idea is anything less that a complete and total idiot who certainly "knows not" quite a lot of things even a just middlingly bright teenager would.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jul 20, 2018

# ¿ Jul 20, 2018 21:35

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Added Space posted:

Well, one of the things about HP is that wizarding society secretly agrees with Voldy and would probably have elected him if he had a less bellicose approach. In this context it's hard to create a feel good people banding together ending.

Case in point, really. He could've run for office instead of starting with the open warfare and ruled as Dark Minister For Life Voldemort within months if he had ever spent a moment actually thinking about it, because if they'll elect someone like Fudge to run the nation, they'll elect literally anyone. It's not like he would've done a worse job of it.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2018 02:58

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

There being some sort of giant existential threat that's unbeatable by everybody other than the special teenage protagonist and his or her friends isn't really that uncommon in young adult books, though. That was Hunger Games, that was Divergent, that was The Lightning Thief, that was everything I read as a kid by Gordon Korman, that was William Sleator. It's not an uncommon theme you see.

No, it isn't, I just never realized until now just how much of a real problem that series has with supporting that plot structure by having a primary villain who never actually does anything smart or effective and ends up not really feeling he's really all that threatening or particularly present for what is actually a very large part of it. For all that every other character keep constantly talking about him anyway, he's certainly never as concrete of a negative or harmful presence in the character's lives as the bloody tabloid press and the associated paparazzi somehow end up being in every single book after the second one.

Voldemort spent a year literally living in the same building as Harry et al. and eating meals with them three times a day the entire time and ends up causing less harm over the course of it than Rita Skeeter does within five minutes every single time the character appears, it's kind of amazing. Something really isn't right about that.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jul 21, 2018

# ¿ Jul 21, 2018 04:29

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

The epilogue is probably the worst part of all of Harry Potter for me. Instead of talking about how Hogwarts might have changed for the better, representing a change in wizarding society at large, it's literally the exact same poo poo as when Harry went, down to Slytherin doll being the baddies. The house system should have been scrapped when the house cup broke and spilled all beads. Draco shouldn't have names his kid Evil McVillain. Things should have been...better.

I'll have you know that Scorpius is a perfectly respectable constellation and he's just keeping with the Blackk family tradition of naming kids after something vaguely astronomical if at all possible. It's also situated nowhere close to near the constellation of the dragon and that makes for an interesting statement of sorts all by itself. Draco might not be that smart, but Rowling certainly is educated enough that she could and probably did think about that as an intentional symbolic gesture that his father hopes the apple won't fall to near the tree in this case, even if he tried to hold on to a connection somehow by sticking the theme naming.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2018 09:30

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Mazerunner posted:

put a cap in that bitch

Yeah, exactly, that's just the kind of problem you get when authors start trying to be a bit too smart, but just not quite smart enough. If they had paid a bit more attention, they would have realized that would be a perfectly acceptable and realistic conclusion to that arc - in a very different kind of story, because everything about HP magic is written around the idea of being optimized for the spectacular and heroic 1 on 1 duel that the story structure relies on for its fights. It falls apart in Arithmancer because nothing about the source material offers an equivalent scene to build it on.

And yeah, I've read Natural 20 and it really does everything right that these two stories don't, including the genuine character development arc and the important side characters.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2018 12:59

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Liquid Communism posted:

Well, of Wizarding Britain anyway. Rowling never really answered much about what's up in the rest of the world. I mean, by sheer population alone China and India should have way bigger communities than the UK.

Hell, there's a fun Commonwealth question. Does Hogwarts get Canadian exchange students?

I must admit, I have wondered sometimes just how the occasional German exchange student (or merely immigrant) would feel about all those British wizard Himmlers and G�rings running around freely while their spawn can freely pontificate about the racial failings of the Unterwizard in a public schol that's purportedly equally open to everyone.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2018 17:01

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Well, the elder Malfoy was one of Voldewords right-hand men, so I'd compare it less to a bunch of Goold Ol' Boys and more literal escaped Nazis having the Bundeskanzler in their pocket. All things considered, that's a whole lot worse. Then again, Voldie was never a fraction as bad or internationally destructive as Grindelwald, so I guess it's more like voting Republican.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jul 25, 2018

# ¿ Jul 25, 2018 18:08

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

It's strongly implied he was (because Dumbledore beat him in '45)

They're very much treated as parallels to each other, but I think Rowling has better taste than to make Grindelwald literally responsible for Hitler. It's disrespectful to reduce the greatest atrocity in living human history to something the people who perpetrated it weren't even really responsible for, because wizards mind-controlled them or something.

Personally, I got the impression that Grindelwald is more an amalgamation of early 20th-century fascism as per Franco, Mussolini and Hitler in equal measure. He happened at the same time as the rest because the same social and economic issues were hitting the wizards for much the same reasons.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2018 13:36

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

I don�t think he was actively responsible, just a strong supporter. Honestly, if Rowling had ever bothered to go into it I bet there would have been things like ties to the Thule Society and existing crazy Nazi esotericism and all that.

But I don�t think your second paragraph is necessarily true. The wizard economy in modern Britain is completely decoupled from the Muggle economy. Who�s to say if the worldwide depression had any impact at all on people who can summon (though not create) food and fly across countries and so on? Wizards hardly do poo poo all day at their actual jobs that we see, maybe the unemployment rate is pushing zero even in crisis.

I can't say I have any proof for disagreeing, it just feels a bit too coincidental and with how much of a seemingly active effort Rowling seems to make towards acknowledging other civil rights and human rights issues of the 20th century, she just doesn't strike me as the type of would stoop to that. For all that I'd criticize her writing, I respect her as a well-educated writer who had her hands on the pulse of what matters to whatever minorities and affected groups might read her work at some point and who genuinely agreed with their concerns. I stick around the genre fiction circuit and people with attitudes like that tend to stay away from anything that might be read as cheapening that part of history.

Don't take that for anything more than my take on it, though. The setting is a mess and whatever makes sense to me might certainly not entirely make sense to anyone else.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2018 20:19

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Ccs posted:

Lol @ "economic issues" hitting Wizards. That's more on Rowling though since the economy in Harry Potter makes zero sense. A poor wizard may not be able to buy the newest broomstick but in terms of the basics they live in a post-scarcity economy.

For what it's worth, you're certainly right there. Our access to what we want often matters a lot more to us than our access to what we need, though - the real world is proof of that if you've ever spoken to anyone below the poverty and what they care about owning, I think.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2018 21:47

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Considering some of the poo poo I have seen fanfic writers get up to - thank this thread for telling me about a whole load of creepjobbiness I rather would never have known about - this is a rather thin line to cross.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2018 22:33

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Jazerus posted:

it's really not; it's an absolute chore to read, even setting aside that it's an ideological screed clothed in the trappings of the most popular source work for fanfiction purely to drive recruitment for yud's cult

I think that they're both kind of terrible, but I'll honestly say that of the two, HPMOR is the more readable one. Yudkowsky isn't much of a writer, but if he could just ever get off of his soapbox, there are the signs of some reasonable writing talent showing. And, for whatever else it's worth, when you ignore the godawful "Battle School" segment, there is at least always something going on in that story. Even if you utterly loathe it, for any of a number of well-deserved reasons, it's engaging enough to make you want to continue reading. There's a reason that story became a phenomenon in the HP fandom, magical robutt cult alone doesn't explain that.

That reason isn't quality by any means, but it has something to it. Arithmancer, on the other hand, is just bland. Like porridge and other terrible British foods.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2018 22:00

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

There's a fairly broad line that separates quality from reader appeal, but by the same virtue, is very possible to have either both, only one, or none of these. HPMOR isn't a well-written story by any means, but it is one that is good at grabbing and holding people's attention. Look at us still talking about it after three different people gave up on running the thread.

In a world where people can spend hours a day watching talk shows, I don't feel like I'm qualified to judge, because I certainly don't get why. I can just tell it's there.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 10:47

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Oops, sorry about that. Could've sworn I remembered someone else in there. No offense intended.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 12:12

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I think it's a fun thing to talk about. I've always had an interest in writing and the fine details of what makes one book or poem better than another and why. When both of the things being talked are very bad (as in this case), it becomes a fairly involved matter of degrees that is enjoyable to discuss.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 15:39

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Tunicate posted:

In terms of being the absolute polar opposite of HPMoR, I'm a fan of Potter Who and the Wossname's Thingummy

If watching the actual Doctor Who series is anything how reading that story is like, I can understand why people like it so much. This one is basically the whole "silly whimsiness and wonder" deal that characterized the first Harry Potter book to me back when I was ten, but about three times as much so.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 23:01

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

NihilCredo posted:

Should I keep going or are the first five chapters representative enough? If the latter, which of the above-mentioned stories are the most unlike HPTN20?

The absolutely does start as you described, but it's not really what it is about. I'd call it an intentional fake-out, really, or maybe the story just ran away with the author after a while. The thing that I personally enjoyed it for is that it's really big on character development. The protagonist becomes progressively more person-like and complex. This is a plot point. There is also, as someone mentioned up-thread, a "muggle cop adventures" side story that does a good job at putting the spotlight on people who usually really don't matter to the Harry Potter setting.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jul 31, 2018

# ¿ Jul 31, 2018 22:04

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Argue posted:

he actually managed to weave a coherent narrative with a character arc that works thematically well with D&D.

The story feels like a big, multi-layered pun on all the many possible of the term "character development" sometimes, which just works out hilariously with its D&D theme.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 10:30

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 04:00

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

I wouldn't know it, myself. For all that I'm aware, the show was never translated into my native language, so I never got the chance to watch it when I still had an interest in TV. That clip Dabir there posted gives a pretty good impression of what I think that fic might look like in action, though, so I guess it's true to type?

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 20:55

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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