#HPMOR

[katherinakaina]

Every Daniil Dankovsky fan out there has to read 'Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality'.

It's Daniil Dankovsky power fantasy. It's as if Daniil Dankovsky was blessed by the narrative. It's like if Daniil Dankovsky had a story of Artemy Burakh (struggles and learns lessons but ultimately succeeds). Panacea? Last season. How about philosopher's stone?

It's generally very satisfying if since 2020 you've come to realize that the original Harry Potter is a deeply flawed piece of literature and all around problematic. HPMOR was very ahead of its time in that regard and hence received a pushback from hp fans. People felt like it was making fun of them for loving the original (it wasn't). The same effect is rather cathartic nowadays instead of challenging.

[fipindustries]

this is another aspect in which i feel hpmor is genuenly superior to harry potter, it banks itself as being "more logical" or "more rational" but, honestly, the things that it challenges best of all from the original series are its moral assumptions. It does way more to show how irrelevant the sorting of the houses is, it presents every character as far more complicated and nuanced than rowling ever could, from the get go it assumes that the wizarding world is an intolerably traditionalist and backwards world, from the very beggining it makes it clear the statue of secrecy and the refusal of wizards to help muggles is abominable.

[akudollie]

Stuck in the hpmor rabbit hole

[shaymcsudonim]

"If the Defense Professor wanted to make some use of Harry Potter, it was a use that required a strengthened Harry Potter, not a weakened one. That was what it meant to be used by a friend, that they would want the use to make you stronger instead of weaker." -Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 51. (emphasis mine)

So, the best description I've seen of the relationship between Hazbin Hotel Charlie & Alastor comes from a Harry Potter fanfic that, spoilers, didn't end particularly well for Harry.

Hopefully things go better for Charlie, but I'm still kind of worried.

Here's to a year or two of theorizing until season 2 comes out.

[thirsty-ikea-bug]

Shout out to any other autists who read "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" in their teans and were... Altered.

[innominaterifter]

I realized that essentially all of my favorite book characters have autistic or ADHD traits. Taylor Hebert (Worm) and she's the same from the funfic "A Wand for Skitter", Murderbot ("The Murderbot Diaries" by Martha Wells; there is also a coincidence in my agenderness and grey/asexuality), Lenie Clarke and Ken Lubin (Peter Watts' rifter book series), Harry Potter and Hermione from HPMOR ("Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" by Eliezer Yudkowsky), Miles Vorkosigan ("The Vorkosigan Saga" by Bujold), Ciaphas Cain and his loyal assistant Ferik Jurgen (Warhammer 40,000, Sandy Mitchell).

Overall, this is not surprising given my personal history of ADHD and autism. The funny thing is that I began to reflect on the topic of my own autism precisely after I read the Murderbot Diaries and came across a discussion of the character’s autistic traits. I was undermined from within by the thought, “What if all this bunch of coincidences are not just coincidences?”

Much was the same, but some things were not characteristic of autistic people, but at the same time, they were clearly not characteristic of the majority of people around me. I don’t remember the first time I heard about ADHD, but I immediately recognized some of my traits. When I read that ADHD and autism are often combined, I decided to take tests online first... and got high scores on both topics. Then, the doctor officially confirmed it for me. Bingo.

[a-thousand-pots]

Chapter 20, and almost a year of writing so far. Time moves on and so do our characters. I hope people like this - I felt a lot of emotions while writing it.

[circuitfurscaleandvines2]

[soupexpertt]

Recently I got recommended a lot of videos criticizing Harry Potter and no videos talking about how great Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is instead. Like, if you want a better version of the story, just read this fanfiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In his AU:

-Harry gets adopted by Petunia and an Oxford professor and is homeschooled in science

-When he gets into the wizarding world he is irritated by the society’s bigotry and backwardness and wants to change the world by fusing magic and science

-He is accepted into Ravenclaw and so is Hermione

-He befriends Draco instead of Ron and slowly makes him question his beliefs and actually become a better person

-Hermione has a lot of screen time and her own arcs including the one where she fights against misogyny in heroism

-there’s a homestuck reference

-there’s a death note reference

-at some point Harry bullies the sorting hat

-Voldemort (or rather his actual identity) is a well-written character with interesting backstory and goals

- the plot point where Harry is Voldemort’s horcrux plays a big role in this

-at some point Voldemort uses a gun

-there’s a scientific explanation to how spirits and patronus work

-there’s an mlp reference

-one of the hocruxes is in space

-the Philosopher’s stone is canonically created by two lesbians and one of them is baba yaga

[alexanderwales]

Disclaimer: this is a very long ask. Please feel free to ignore it if you're busy, or for any other reason - 'I love your work!' is a decent summary. Hello Mr. Wales! And belated welcome to tumblr from someone else who also spent years seeing tumblr screenshots on reddit and twitter before joining.

I read Significant Digits a while back (immediately after reading HPMoR) and enjoyed it a lot, so thank you for that! More recently, I've tried doing some writing myself, with middling success (a HPMoR, Delve, Mother of Learning and Mage Errant crossover).

One of my readers left a long and fascinating comment on my fic, in which they quoted your review of HPMoR at length: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/a-call-to-the-dark-city-delve-mother-of-learning-hpmor-mage-errant-multicross.127432/post-30801851

I found that I disagreed with your thoughts quite a bit, which surprised me! My response is in the next post in that chain, but the gist (ignoring context specific to my fic) is this exchange:

Harry does not win the climax of the fic by having overcome his flaws, he wins it through brutal murder. The biggest organic change he undergoes is from believing in the value of truth to advocating for multiple conspiracies against both the wizarding and muggle worlds, and if that's character growth, I find it ugly.

My (shortened) response:

As Alexander Wales notes, Harry *does* change in HPMOR: he becomes less open, less willing to share information widely, and shifts focus from local issues (people and ethics near him) to what he considers global risks and outcomes. As a reader, I'm not too interested in whether or not the change in Harry's character is in a 'good' direction, or whether or not he becomes a better person, or whether or not his views over time gradually approach my own. For me, the most important thing in a story is that it is *interesting* - and I find Harry's arc in HPMOR very interesting.

I'm curious about if you have thoughts on the general debate there - to what extent do you think writers should prioritise faithful simulation of characters and setting vs. giving the characters an arc with an emotionally satisfying conclusion? Or is deciding initial conditions such that accurate simulation leads to a satisfying character arc and emotional conclusion *the real puzzle*?

Thanks again - I've enjoyed your writing a lot over the years, and expect to enjoy it more soon! (About 10 of my readers have independently recommended that I read Worth the Candle based on the stories I've included in my fic, so it's pretty close to the top of my reading list :p )

(I am obligated to point out that Significant Digits was not mine. I wrote a very short epilogue here, but nothing of the length or complexity of any of the notable fan sequels.)

I've been thinking about how to answer this for a bit, but I think what it comes down to for me is that I want a story to have a clear thematic, emotional, or intellectual through line. I want a story to be about some specific thing, and then take that thing through its paces, and to have us come out the other end having explored that thing in its fullness.

To some extent, I like stories best when they're driving at some singular vision, which I know as a sprawling webfic author probably seems insane. So if the ultimate conclusion is "yes, we should commit conspiracies against people for their own good" then I would like for the early parts of the story to show us why that's the case, ideally by having some truth be put out into the world that causes damage, or by showing how a lesser conspiracy worked to protect something, or whatever else. Or contrarily, if it's the work's position that conspiracies are bad things, then it should show us how and why they're bad, and why this character is making that decision anyway. Or if the work isn't sure how it feels about this thing, I still want them to explore it, to see the different scenarios and thoughts.

I'm an avowed fan of HPMOR, and I am unfortunately the sort of fan that has a lot of critical takes about the things that I enjoy. My biggest problem with HPMOR is that it's not thematically "whole": the individual parts don't feel like they mesh that well together (in my opinion). With that said, I haven't reread HPMOR in a very long time, and my arguments are rusty, so I don't want to give them here.

I think my desire for thematic cohesion is probably work-dependent, but even so, is also probably at the far end of reader preferences. Some people are perfectly happy to read things that are more simulationist in nature: a character does things because that's what they would do, and if this doesn't build up to some grand theme or climactic showdown, so be it. I do think a lot of the trick of writing is making character stuff work in harmony with plot stuff, because you don't want people to feel like "oh, he just did that because the plot demanded it" (though they will say that about almost anything, in my experience).

I don't think that HPMOR is fatally flawed for its thematic wanderings, and I do think there's some sense in which it's best read as a you'd read a TV show with multiple "seasons" which are individually about something but don't necessarily have as solid of a through line. It's just a personal preference thing, I guess.

[thriveonanonymity]

I think i need a separate blog just to shit talk Eliezer Yudkowsky for torturing hermione

[hieronymus-botch]

The twist at the end of HPMOR is so fucking funny when you consider how quirrel was in the early chapters tho. Imagine if at at the end of Dead Poets Society Robin Williams took off his rubber mask to reveal he was Saddam Hussein the whole time doing an elaborate bit and also he never even believed in Islam and just liked killing people and giving the US military a hard time

[katherinakaina]

It always baffled me why being 'preachy' is a bad thing for a story to be. And I don't mean just a list of rules, I mean an actual story but the one that wears its themes on its sleeve, the one that has a moral paragon character, the one that actually makes strong arguments in favor of its position. Many people like such stories when the theme speaks to them but even among those who would normally agree with it the most common critique is that the story is 'preachy'.

And... Alright, it is. Why is that a bad thing? Just calling a trope or a type of story by its name is not enough. You need to explain what's wrong with it. And i don't see a convincing argument here except that some people find it annoying.

And, okay, whatever. Most people would just move on at this point. Except I can't, because I need to understand. Because I fucking love preachy stories, those are my favorite. And in things I otherwise adore my main complaint is that they're not preachy enough, they're too vague. They make the themes easy to ignore or even miss completely. That's how you get 'the red pill' being coopted by fascists. That's how you get right wing fans of ASOIAF. And that's how you get most people preferring the Termite ending in Pathologic.

So I was thinking about it while casually rewatching 'Why are you so angry?' by @innuendostudios . And this video perfectly sums up what I think is going on here. Go watch it, it's short and excellent. In a nutshell, people feel strong irrational resentment when others do... for lack of a better term, virtue signaling in front of them. They are not necessarily trying to look better than you, they are just stating their position without being ashamed of it... as if... it's a good position worth having... and they seem to imply that you are a bad person for not sharing it... Are they judging you?

I think people react the same way to themes in stories. They just want to enjoy their escapism without trying to become a better person and that's how they approach all art. Not like a message but like entertainment. So if an author wants both success and getting their message out there the message has to be hidden, to exist as a euphemism, so only those who really want to see it can decode it. Strong moral arguments exist in modern media like queer coding. For us sickos to enjoy but not for the general audience.

I am fully opposed to that. Let them have their Marvel movies or whatever but we don't have to surrender to the same standard.

Subtlety is overrated.

Hiding your themes like it's something to be ashamed of is overrated.

It can only be a good strategy if luring in people who are not fully on board with your message to then convert them is your goal. But for that you'll have to reveal your true face sooner or later and not be frightened when a surprising number of right wing fans you acquired start catching up and expressing confusion. You will have to double down and not back down. Something large media companies aren't good at. But you can be!

Remember that the frontier of art is everywhere. And even the smallest act of speaking your truth pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The corporate need to make art palatable to the general audience is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Refusal to take sides requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Subtlety is brittle. Demand for neutrality is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these on the nose parallels and in your face pompous heroic monologues, this moments of speaking directly to the audience, will have flooded the banks of 'nuanced storytelling' and then there will be one too many. One single bold statement will break the siege.

Remember this. Preach.

[okunichh]

i'll leave the tag only if someone wans to find it but they are basically my ocs by know i guess. i draw them only when i'm hypermanic, but this picture is actually nice i think.

[f1rewalk3r]

hpmor becomes infinitely more entertaining to read if you start imagining the narrator to be a child version of harrier du bois instead of an alien wearing the skin of 11 year old harry potter

[recordcrash]

Long ago, I started maintaining a fiction recommendation list at the Homestuck Discord, after the original comic ended in 2016. We were all desperately looking for more stories like it, because with that awful ending, it hardly felt like we had finished anything. [...]

There’s an interesting disconnect between it and this blog. I’ve reviewed some of its featured works upon reread, but the vast majority remains untouched, to the point I highly doubt many of you know it exists. This post will bridge that gap: I’m going to write at least one short review per work in every category of the list.

Read the full post here.