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

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Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

JosephWongKS posted:

It seems like Eliezarry wants to write a fanfic of Ender�s Game in addition to Harry Potter.

The Pacific Ocean seems wet too.

# ? Oct 12, 2015 14:04

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# ? May 16, 2024 00:15

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

JosephWongKS posted:

I�d argue that Quirrell�s scheme seems like a good way to set the students at each others� throats, but that�s actually in keeping with canon Hogwarts, with its House points and House cup and the constant exaltations by the House-Masters and House-Mistresses to their students to beat the other Houses.

No. This is one of those ideas that are way more Less Wrongish / Techno-Libertarian and clashes very directly with the House system.

# ? Oct 12, 2015 17:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Yeah the House points thing seems to be about collective discipline and encouragement (i.e. if Ron won't stop yelling about Bitcoin he loses house points for Gryffindor until some mixture of shame and being beaten by his colleagues makes him stop) while this system seems to be about cultivating a personal army of magical schoolchildren.

Surely Harry will realize he's been irrationally tempted by the allure of a demagogue, though, right?

# ? Oct 12, 2015 19:23

Fried Chicken: Jan 9, 2011; Don't fry me, I'm no chicken!

Yeah, it was a major thing books 4-7 about how the splitting into houses had a lot of nasty side effects of setting people at each other's throats and assigning core traits when unity was what they needed

# ? Oct 12, 2015 23:27

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part Eleven

quote:

Harry twisted his wand in his right hand and said "Ma-ha-su! "

Don�t all spells in Harry Potter have Latin names and Latin incantations? �Ma-ha-su� doesn�t sound like Latin to me.

quote:

There was another high-pitched "bing" from the floating blue sphere that Professor Quirrell had assigned to Harry as his target. That particular sound meant a perfect strike, which Harry had been gotten on nine out of his last ten attempts.

Somewhere Professor Quirrell had dug up a spell that was incredibly easy to pronounce, and had a ridiculously simple wand motion, and had a tendency to hit wherever you were currently looking at. Professor Quirrell had disdainfully proclaimed that real battle magic was far more difficult than this. That the hex was entirely useless in actual combat. That it was a barely ordered burst of magic whose only real content was the aiming, and that it would produce, when it hit, a pain briefly equivalent to being punched hard in the nose. That the sole purpose of this test was to see who was a fast learner, since Professor Quirrell was certain no one would have previously encountered this hex or anything like it.

If you are going to break so many rules of the canon for your narrative convenience, why not just create a new setting altogether?

quote:

Harry didn't care about any of that.

"Ma-ha-su! "

A red bolt of energy shot out of his wand and struck the target and the blue sphere once again made the bing which meant the spell had actually worked for him.

Harry was feeling like a real wizard for the first time since he'd come to Hogwarts. He wished the target would dodge like the little spheres that Ben Kenobi had used for training Luke,

Gratuitous Star Wars reference.

quote:

but for some reason Professor Quirrell had instead lined up all the students and targets in neat orders which made sure they wouldn't fire on each other.

Good to see that Professor Quirrell does give some thought to the safety of the students under his charge.

# ? Oct 13, 2015 04:21

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

JosephWongKS posted:

If you are going to break so many rules of the canon for your narrative convenience, why not just create a new setting altogether?

Because then it wouldn't be as useful as a cult tract, because Harry Potter Fanfiction has a huge built in audience and is easy to get wide exposure with.

# ? Oct 13, 2015 04:29

blastron: Dec 11, 2007; Don't doodle on it!

I'm willing to forgive Yudowski on this one. New spells in the Potter canon were pretty much just pulled out of nowhere and were a mishmash of bad Latin, fantasy Greek, and misspelled English. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to think that other magical civilizations have their own unique spells, which may or may not be in common use, and a professor of combat magic could reasonably have tomes full of esoteric jinxes.

Fanfiction authors have gotten away with far worse, and we haven't even hit the bad parts of this chapter yet.

# ? Oct 13, 2015 06:14

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

JosephWongKS posted:

Don�t all spells in Harry Potter have Latin names and Latin incantations? �Ma-ha-su� doesn�t sound like Latin to me.

Definitely not; Avada Kedavra is one really obvious counter-example.

# ? Oct 13, 2015 07:15

Zonekeeper: Oct 27, 2007

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Definitely not; Avada Kedavra is one really obvious counter-example.

I can forgive Yud for this one if only because it suggests a worldbuilding detail Rowling left out. It wouldn't surprise me if every spell had at least one alternate incantation in an ancient empire's tongue. Since we mainly see European wizards, it makes sense that we only see incantations in the language of the biggest regional empire. It makes way more sense that asian wizards would use mangled Chinese incantations instead of Latin. Avada Kedavra is probably one of the few universal incantations used in all regions.

One of Quirrell's few established character traits was that he's studied abroad, so it would make sense for him to come back with some foreign spells.

# ? Oct 13, 2015 13:29

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Rowling was abysmal at making spell names, fanfic authors can't possibly do worse than the source material did.

# ? Oct 14, 2015 00:46

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part Twelve

quote:

So Harry lowered his wand, skipped to the right, snapped up his wand and twisted and shouted "Ma-ha-su! "

There was a lower-pitched "dong" which meant he'd gotten it almost right.

Just wanted to point out the obvious puerile joke to be made here.

quote:

Harry put his wand into his pocket, skipped back to the left and drew and fired another red bolt of energy.
The high-pitched bing which resulted was easily one of the most satisfying sounds he'd heard in his life. Harry wanted to scream in triumph at the top of his lungs. I CAN DO MAGIC! FEAR ME, LAWS OF PHYSICS, I'M COMING TO VIOLATE YOU!

Any character in this story talking about �violating� things gives me a shiver of unease, given Malfoy�s casual talk about raping Luna earlier in the story. What was once said, cannot never be unsaid.

quote:

"Ma-ha-su! " Harry's voice was loud, but hardly noticeable over the steady chant of similar cries from around the classroom platform.

"Enough," said Professor Quirrell's amplified voice. (It didn't sound loud. It sounded like normal volume, coming from just behind your left shoulder, no matter where you were standing relative to Professor Quirrell.) "I see that all of you have succeeded at least once now." The target-spheres turned red and began to drift up towards the ceiling.

Professor Quirrell was standing on the raised dais in the center of the platform, leaning slightly on his teacher's desk with one hand.

"I told you," Professor Quirrell said, "that we would play a game called Who's the Most Dangerous Student in the Classroom. There is one student in this classroom who mastered the Sumerian Simple Strike Hex faster than anyone else -"

The online Sumerian dictionary at http://tikaboo.com/library/Sumerian_Dictionary.pdf states that �Smite = MAHASU�, so this spell incantation does make sense. I take back my earlier criticism about Eliezer�s introduction of a non-Latin incantation.

quote:

Oh blah blah blah.

"- and went on to help seven other students. For which she has earned the first seven Quirrell points awarded to your year. Come forth, Hermione Granger. It is time for the next stage of the game."

Hah! Good job Hermione! Suck it Eliezarry!

# ? Oct 14, 2015 09:16

Law Cheetah: Mar 3, 2012

i81icu812 posted:

Rowling was abysmal at making spell names, fanfic authors can't possibly do worse than the source material did.

Rowling's silly spell names were another part of the whimsical nature of the world she created. Where there's places called Diagon Alley and Platform 9 3/4. Theres jelly beans that come in earwax flavors and things called bludgers and quaffles and special wizard chess. There's a sense of fun and playfulness to it all.

Its an aspect of the series that a lot of fans, and fanfic writers, don't appreciate properly. Especially when they go off on twerpy rants about how they dislike Quidditch or how a spell has a dumb name

# ? Oct 14, 2015 19:29

Curvature of Earth: Sep 9, 2011; Projected cost of
invading Canada:
$900

Law Cheetah posted:

Rowling's silly spell names were another part of the whimsical nature of the world she created. Where there's places called Diagon Alley and Platform 9 3/4. Theres jelly beans that come in earwax flavors and things called bludgers and quaffles and special wizard chess. There's a sense of fun and playfulness to it all.

Its an aspect of the series that a lot of fans, and fanfic writers, don't appreciate properly. Especially when they go off on twerpy rants about how they dislike Quidditch or how a spell has a dumb name

It's worth remembering that JK Rowling minored in the classics (as in, Greek & Roman writings) while earning her bachelor's in French. If she hosed up her Latin she probably did so on purpose. ("Does this sound good?" is sometimes a more important question in writing than "is this technically grammatically correct?" Seriously, if grammar was the most important thing in writing then every editor on earth could be fired and replaced with a dictionary-sized manual of style.)

And a small detail from the Harry Potter books: the only spells based on Greek we ever hear are medical spells. Greek was the language of medicine for a very long time in Europe. It's the sort of touch that, say, someone who studied the classics would include.

# ? Oct 14, 2015 22:56

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part Thirteen

quote:

Hermione Granger began striding forwards, a mixed look of triumph and apprehension on her face. The Ravenclaws looked on proudly, the Slytherins with glares, and Harry with frank annoyance. Harry had done fine this time. He was probably even in the upper half of the class, now that everyone had been faced with an equally unfamiliar spell and Harry had read all the way through Adalbert Waffling's Magical Theory. And yet Hermione was still doing better.

Is that how Eliezer feels all the time? Resentful that other people are �doing better� than him even though he was such an amazing �child prodigy� and has read more books than them?

quote:

Somewhere in the back of his mind was the fear that Hermione was simply smarter than him.

But for now Harry was going to pin his hopes on the known facts that (a) Hermione had read a lot more than the standard textbooks and (b) Adalbert Waffling was an uninspired sod who'd written Magical Theory to pander to a school board that didn't think much of eleven-year-olds.

Hermione reached the central dais and stepped up.

"Hermione Granger mastered a completely unfamiliar spell in two minutes, almost a full minute faster than the next runner-up." Professor Quirrell turned slowly in place to look at all the students watching them. "Could Miss Granger's intelligence make her the most dangerous student in the classroom? Well? What do you think?"

No one seemed to be thinking anything at the moment. Even Harry wasn't sure what to say.

"Let's find out, shall we?" said Professor Quirrell. He turned back to Hermione, and gestured toward the wider class. "Select any student you like and cast the Simple Strike Hex on them."

Hermione froze where she stood.

"Come now," Professor Quirrell said smoothly. "You have cast this spell perfectly over fifty times. It is not permanently harmful or even all that painful. It hurts as much as a hard punch and lasts only a few seconds." Professor Quirrell's voice grew harder. "This is a direct order from your professor, Miss Granger. Choose a target and fire a Simple Strike Hex."

This version of Quirrell is definitely still possessed by Voldemort.

quote:

Hermione's face was screwed up in horror and her wand was trembling in her hand. Harry's own fingers were clenching his own wand hard in sympathy. Even though he could see what Professor Quirrell was trying to do. Even though he could see the point Professor Quirrell was trying to make.

And the Dumbledore in this story is equally guilty of gross neglect of his supervisory duties as the canon Dumbledore.

# ? Oct 15, 2015 06:08

The Deleter: May 22, 2010

Yer a little poo poo Harry.

That's all I've got, because that keeps jumping out at me every time I read this.

# ? Oct 15, 2015 10:10

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

Tangentially, great news for Roko's Basilisk fans: the noble and magnanimous coherent extrapolated volition of MIRI has finally unbanned it from discussion, after only five and a bit years! Well done, lads.

There�s a LW Wiki page too. Includes several links to the RationalWiki article. I�ve only had to make one correction to it so far. (I have no idea why my name is in the LW announcement post, unconnected to anything else in it, apart from having personally been called evil by EY for writing it up in inarguably referenced detail.)

# ? Oct 15, 2015 17:45

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

"Well, of course she might be better than me at learning, but I can still make the Hard Choices and she can't, so I'm still the prodigy." :smuggo:

That's what I'm getting from this poo poo.

# ? Oct 15, 2015 18:12

Palisader: Mar 14, 2012; DESPAIR MORTALS, FOR I WISH TO PLAY PATTY-CAKE

I know this is from several pages back, but during that whole transmogrification lesson, did Harry never think to question how his motheraunt was permanently transformed into a hot woman? Does that ever come up again?

# ? Oct 15, 2015 18:59

Qwertycoatl: Dec 31, 2008

Palisader posted:

I know this is from several pages back, but during that whole transmogrification lesson, did Harry never think to question how his motheraunt was permanently transformed into a hot woman? Does that ever come up again?

I don't think specifically his aunt, but it's been said already that there are basically two different types of transfiguration: the useful kind, and the insanely dangerous rules-lawyer kind that Eliezer added to contrive the plot with.

# ? Oct 15, 2015 19:35

Palisader: Mar 14, 2012; DESPAIR MORTALS, FOR I WISH TO PLAY PATTY-CAKE

But I thought even that was supposed to be temporary? Bah, I'll have to read that section again.

# ? Oct 15, 2015 20:01

Huzanko: Aug 4, 2015; by FactsAreUseless

I'm legitimately curious as to why this abomination has been created and why people read it.

# ? Oct 15, 2015 21:12

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Palisader posted:

But I thought even that was supposed to be temporary? Bah, I'll have to read that section again.

IIRC it's an illusion rather than an actual transformation.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 02:46

Samog: Dec 13, 2006; At least I'm not an 07.

fantasy latin, tired as it is, is way better than yudkowsky saying "oh, you think latin is obscure? how cute" and then typing "sumerian dictionary" into google

# ? Oct 16, 2015 02:59

Curvature of Earth: Sep 9, 2011; Projected cost of
invading Canada:
$900

Samog posted:

fantasy latin, tired as it is, is way better than yudkowsky saying "oh, you think latin is obscure? how cute" and then typing "sumerian dictionary" into google

I can't believe he didn't go with Lojban. It's the perfectly logical language!

# ? Oct 16, 2015 04:59

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

He used lojban in one of his short stories, and yes, he hosed it up pretty royally. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some lojban-derived spells mangled beyond recognition buried in MoR somewhere.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 05:09

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Curvature of Earth posted:

And a small detail from the Harry Potter books: the only spells based on Greek we ever hear are medical spells. Greek was the language of medicine for a very long time in Europe. It's the sort of touch that, say, someone who studied the classics would include.

Hey, this is cool! Thanks.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 05:58

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Palisader posted:

I know this is from several pages back, but during that whole transmogrification lesson, did Harry never think to question how his motheraunt was permanently transformed into a hot woman? Does that ever come up again?

Hermione uses magic to improve her teeth in the actual books, so it's probably just like that.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 06:29

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Hermione uses magic to improve her teeth in the actual books, so it's probably just like that.

The actual books don't have all the stuff about transfiguring things being super dangerous.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 06:55

NihilCredo: Jun 6, 2011; iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

Palisader posted:

I know this is from several pages back, but during that whole transmogrification lesson, did Harry never think to question how his motheraunt was permanently transformed into a hot woman? Does that ever come up again?

Sorta. Harry will eventually have the realisation that "poo poo, my mum should be getting super-cancer any year now", but it's about eighty chapters ahead.

The real answer to that question will come from the key plot point of the ending arc, which I'm not gonna spoil here yet.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 08:20

cultureulterior: Jan 27, 2004

Noam Chomsky posted:

I'm legitimately curious as to why this abomination has been created and why people read it.

One of the reasons I like HPMOR is because there's not a lot of fiction where death is bad. The deathist arguments are not very good, but at least someone is making them, someone actually says that humanity should strive for immortality.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 11:21

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

cultureulterior posted:

One of the reasons I like HPMOR is because there's not a lot of fiction where death is bad.

I'm actually going to hold you up here because I would say that most fiction takes the perspective that death is a negative thing outside of specific circumstances such as inescapable anguish. I cannot recall a work in which a protagonist nodded and said: "Yes... death is good. Wonderful in fact. I think we need to do more murdering around here."

The two big exceptions I can think of are Lewis and Tolkien, and even in those, you are dealing, first, with people writing pretty explicitly Christian fiction, and second, with some nuance - in Tolkien for instance the idea is that everyone has a sort of natural span and that the end of that span isn't horrifying, but a gift from the creator. You may not like it but it's not exactly "pro death".

quote:

The deathist arguments are not very good, but at least someone is making them, someone actually says that humanity should strive for immortality.

I would say that the Harry Potter environment is an extremely poor environment to be making arguments for the feasibility and desirability - presumably, to the exclusion of other goals - of achieving literal immortality. (As opposed, say, to medical advances which increase the quality and duration of life.) This is for a variety of reasons, but the two large ones are that the first book specifically includes a literal immortality potion - Nicholas Flamel's "philosopher's stone" has been used by him and his wife to live six hundred years without difficulty. I believe it is destroyed by Flamel because Voldemort was going to use it to also become immortalily evil, and Dumbledore says "Yeah they're gonna put their affairs in order and peace out."

The second one, and I don't think this can be emphasized enough, is that this is a setting featuring literal magic.

# ? Oct 16, 2015 19:47

Huzanko: Aug 4, 2015; by FactsAreUseless

Nessus posted:

I'm actually going to hold you up here because I would say that most fiction takes the perspective that death is a negative thing outside of specific circumstances such as inescapable anguish. I cannot recall a work in which a protagonist nodded and said: "Yes... death is good. Wonderful in fact. I think we need to do more murdering around here."

The two big exceptions I can think of are Lewis and Tolkien, and even in those, you are dealing, first, with people writing pretty explicitly Christian fiction, and second, with some nuance - in Tolkien for instance the idea is that everyone has a sort of natural span and that the end of that span isn't horrifying, but a gift from the creator. You may not like it but it's not exactly "pro death".
I would say that the Harry Potter environment is an extremely poor environment to be making arguments for the feasibility and desirability - presumably, to the exclusion of other goals - of achieving literal immortality. (As opposed, say, to medical advances which increase the quality and duration of life.) This is for a variety of reasons, but the two large ones are that the first book specifically includes a literal immortality potion - Nicholas Flamel's "philosopher's stone" has been used by him and his wife to live six hundred years without difficulty. I believe it is destroyed by Flamel because Voldemort was going to use it to also become immortalily evil, and Dumbledore says "Yeah they're gonna put their affairs in order and peace out."

The second one, and I don't think this can be emphasized enough, is that this is a setting featuring literal magic.

Also, IIRC, in LotR, heaven is a place you can literally sail to in eleven boats - a far green country. Death loses a little of its punch when the afterlife is just a different continent.

# ? Oct 18, 2015 06:59

MikeJF: Dec 20, 2003

Noam Chomsky posted:

Also, IIRC, in LotR, heaven is a place you can literally sail to in eleven boats - a far green country. Death loses a little of its punch when the afterlife is just a different continent.

Nah, that's for the elves, they can't die and will respawn there if their bodies die. Humans are truly mortal and their souls leave this Earth when they die.

The whole 'Death is entirely awful and should be defeated forever let's all be immortal' argument really doesn't work as well when there are verified souls and an afterlife (Harry Potter amongst them). We just don't have enough information in most of those cases to judge. At least in Harry Potter there's a vague hint that the Department of Mysteries is trying to get that data.

Now if there are no souls and it's purely oblivion, then yes, but find me a fantasy world where that's the case.

MikeJF fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Oct 18, 2015

# ? Oct 18, 2015 07:05

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part Fourteen

quote:

"If you do not raise your wand and fire, Miss Granger, you will lose a Quirrell point."

Harry stared at Hermione, willing her to look in his direction. His right hand was softly tapping his own chest. Pick me, I'm not afraid...

Hermione's wand twitched in her hand; then her face relaxed, and she lowered her wand to her side.

"No," said Hermione Granger.

Her voice was calm, and even though it wasn't loud, everyone heard it in the silence.

"Then I must deduct one point from you," said Professor Quirrell. "This is a test, and you have failed it."

She passed the more important test of character though. Blind obedience to authority (e.g. the Milgram experiment) is the straightest path to perdition and Nazism.

quote:

That reached her. Harry could see it. But she kept her shoulders straight.

Professor Quirrell's voice was sympathetic and seemed to fill the whole room. "Knowing things isn't always enough, Miss Granger. If you cannot give and receive violence on the order of stubbing your toe, then you cannot defend yourself and you will not pass Defence. Please rejoin your classmates."

Bullshit. Hermione wasn�t under personal physical threat at this time, nor was anyone else in the class being endangered. Her unwillingness to commit gratuitous violence for the sake of mere �points� says nothing about her ability or willingness to defend herself or others under actual threat of physical harm.

quote:

Hermione walked back towards the Ravenclaw cluster. Her face looked peaceful and Harry, for some odd reason, wanted to start clapping. Even though Professor Quirrell had been right.

Wrong wrong wrong. Quirrell had been wrong.

quote:

"So," Professor Quirrell said. "It becomes clear that Hermione Granger is not the most dangerous student in the classroom. Who do you think might actually be the most dangerous person here? - besides me, of course."

Quirrell definitely poses the most danger to the children�s sense of right and wrong.

# ? Oct 20, 2015 07:29

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

JosephWongKS posted:

She passed the more important test of character though. Blind obedience to authority (e.g. the Milgram experiment) is the straightest path to perdition and Nazism.

Bullshit. Hermione wasn�t under personal physical threat at this time, nor was anyone else in the class being endangered. Her unwillingness to commit gratuitous violence for the sake of mere �points� says nothing about her ability or willingness to defend herself or others under actual threat of physical harm.

Wrong wrong wrong. Quirrell had been wrong.

Quirrell definitely poses the most danger to the children�s sense of right and wrong.

To be fair, I think this is actually all intentional. It just gets muddied by the way a lot of the other parts of the story want you to agree with Quirrel. Overall it really doesn't work, but this section in isolation is fine.

# ? Oct 20, 2015 08:33

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Perhaps Big Yud wants to show us how easily it is for intellectual vanity to be seduced by a cult of personality or the allure of fascism?

# ? Oct 20, 2015 08:58

anilEhilated: Feb 17, 2014; But I say fuck the rain.; Grimey Drawer

Or he's harping on education being overrated again.

# ? Oct 20, 2015 09:03

Hyper Crab Tank: Feb 10, 2014; The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation

Oh boy, welcome to Ender's Game, Hogwarts Edition. Again, the story could have been all this, and, if it had been treated better, it could at least be a reasonable premise. But, like everything else, it's largely a bloated mess. It does have its moments, though. Sadly, most of those moments are the groan-inducing kind, but there are a few slivers of interesting stuff.

Like Tiggum says, it's hard to know who Yudkowsky wants you to side with. His writing is very clumsy on that front. I do believe he didn't mean for you to agree with everything. The problem is when he does want you to agree with him, the writing is not clear about it, and since Yudkowsky's opinions range from "vaguely decent" to "batshit insane", you can never be sure what you're supposed to take away from or who to sympathize with in any particular passage on the basis of how sane it sounds, either.

# ? Oct 20, 2015 09:05

Fajita Queen: Jun 21, 2012

I think there's something to be said for that, everything being morally grey and mostly disagreeable. It's entirely up to the reader to take away from that what they agree with, though it doesn't work at all in this case. A better writer could pull it off.

# ? Oct 20, 2015 15:30

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# ? May 16, 2024 00:15

Death Bot: Mar 4, 2007; Binary killing machines, turning 1 into 0 since 0011000100111001 0011011100110110

The Shortest Path posted:

I think there's something to be said for that, everything being morally grey and mostly disagreeable. It's entirely up to the reader to take away from that what they agree with, though it doesn't work at all in this case. A better writer could pull it off.

It's less that the scene is morally grey, and more that one person is 100% right in their actions and thoughts but from outside sources we know the author is an insane person so we can't tell who HE agrees with.

# ? Oct 20, 2015 16:11

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

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