#HPMOR

[cpericardium]

please take this away from me

[okunichh]

more hpmor!tmrhp..............

[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

[hipsterexterminator27]

Stuck in the hpmor rabbit hole

[tayskitter]

Illustration for the amazing story Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[katherinakaina]

The problem with house elves in Harry Potter.

Typical argument goes as follows: it is bad and irresponsible for an author to create enslaved people who love their enslavement and love their masters because of all the real world parallels to real slavery. Similar arguments were actually made about American slavery and every other slavery before or since. In our world such rhetoric is always propaganda. But in Harry Potter it’s portrayed as genuine.

For a children’s book especially, it’s not a good look. As a children’s book, Harry Potter contains too many dark and difficult topics and without satisfying lessons or conclusions it’s tempting to say – don’t introduce slavery into your story. Don’t create willing slaves, for starters.

But the problem is in the lessons or conclusions part, not the introducing part. And even willing slaves can be explored in interesting ways and really done justice when in hands of a competent writer with good politics.

How so? Well, don’t create such creatures just because. Make them into a coherent metaphor for something. There are several possible options, starting from less fitting:

1. House elves are dogs. Or children.

You can frame dogs as voluntary slaves if you don’t know much about dogs. Unlike house elves, they are perfectly independent creatures that do not have an inborn desire to obey humans. They need to be trained and even then they can be very stubborn and do not appreciate or even tolerate abuse like house elves do. Dogs are more like children. You have the position of authority over them but that makes you responsible and it is your job to make them happy and occupied.

But if you are really committed, you can frame childhood as slavery too. Being a child or a pet is a vulnerable position to be in. Your labor is sometimes exploited and you don’t control your life much. You know how it is.

So, there are creatures who love their sometimes actually slavery-like situations because they love their "caretakers" and you cannot solve this problem by just separating the two groups. It would be doing everyone a disservice.

But in Harry Potter, Hermione decides to free elves purely on philosophical ground and in her zeal doesn’t consider the reality of their special psychology. Who would even make such a silly mistake?

2. House elves are house wives. And Hermione is a lesbian separatist.

This angle really comes into focus when we meet Winky in the fourth book. She is a female elf and a loyal supporter of her master Barty Crouch Snr. You can very easily read her as this conservative fearful simple-minded wife that just wants to keep peace and make her husband happy above all else*. The only thing that is above the “husband” is her “son", her perfect boy who can do no wrong – Barty Crouch Jnr, a death eater and the main villain for most of the book.

In the beginning of the book, Winky gets "divorced" against her will, by her “husband”, for a public transgression that made him look bad. It’s this situation that shocks Hermione to the core and makes her believe that all elves should be free. But then Winky ends up in the Hogwarts kitchens (where elves live among themselves like in a convent) and we see that she’s devastated, blames herself, becomes an addict and never fully recovers. Hermione never gets strong evidence in the opposite direction and eventually abandons her activism.

This does sound like a cautionary tale a conservative would write about marriage. How feminism is women’s main enemy and how we all are deeply unhappy without the authority of a husband. Again, actual arguments that people make about modern society TODAY.

Obviously, that’s not how the real world works. But even here separatism is a bad solution. Yes, there is a rare house elf that can handle freedom**. There are women (not quite so rare) who don’t want to engage in relations with men. But it would really be doing everyone a disservice to force apartheid between men and women. Most wives love their husbands. Even when they are abusive. Most women can stop loving a particular man, but not men in general. There’s no escape from the biological prison of heterosexuality.

Anyway, those are all bad metaphors that require a lot of stretching. House elves don't look like creatures that evolved to cooperate with humans like domesticated animals or humans themselves. They are too subservient. Such a thing wouldn't happen naturally. They seem to be created (or altered) artificially to accept humans unconditionally***.

3. House elves as perfectly aligned Artificial Intelligence.

House elves have stronger magic than wizards, they think differently from them but still are perfectly loyal and obedient to those they consider their masters.

This is the best metaphor, in my opinion. After all, science is similar to magic. They are both really powerful. And both can be used for better or worse. You don’t have to write sci-fi to talk about any futuristic concept. Those are just aesthetics, really****. And that’s a pretty cool question to ask – if people could create a house elf… would they? Not a far fetched idea at all.

So, when written well a house elf can be a perfectly good narrative device. Introduce them into your story as a metaphor for domestic servitude or AI, an enslaved god in a box. You can even mix those metaphors. Make your house elf a stand-in for a waifu simulator. Make them Joi from Blade Runner 2049. Make it real dark.

Tone it down for a YA audience, of course, but still, why not? There are real life implications here. You can even start with the SPEW plot as well. Show that brute force lesbian separatism or rewriting the code of a perfectly happy and aligned AI is stupid and, in the latter case especially, really dangerous. Don’t separate families on the basis of some abstract philosophical grievance you made up. Don’t kidnap people’s pets. Sure!

What’s next, though? What do you do with a subservient creature you cannot just free?

In the real world we have laws surrounding all of these issues, protecting all spouses, children and pets from abuse. And when sentient waifus become a thing we will have to intervene as well.

How come this point never crosses Hermione’s mind? How come she gives up on SPEW and never finds a third alternative?

A better written Hermione would say: “Okay, Hagrid, I concede that house elves should not be taken from their homes. Fine. But are we really also fine with families like Malfoy’s treating their elves like dirt? Elves do become distressed when it happens, we can all clearly see that. Harry was right to free Dobby, we all agree on that. But do we agree that it was Harry’s responsibility to do that? No authority had taken Dobby away from his masters even though Dobby actively wanted to be taken. No authority had permanently taken the right to own house elves from Malfoys. They can just buy a new one and abuse them as well! I know you don’t have child protective services either, so we should probably start with that but can we at least agree that it's a goal for the future? There’s a pile of clothes for elves who want freedom in the kitchens now. That’s a good thing, right?”

But such a conversation can never happen in Harry Potter, about any issue*****. Because that would imply a systemic change. It would imply that the Ministry of Magic, portrayed as useless and incompetent most of the time, has to do something. And we can’t have that.

Instead we have a toothless morality that we should just all be better as individuals. We should help victims when some injustice really stares us in the face. And we should treat our own elves better. Be nice to your wife. Be kind to your children. Don’t hit your dog. Don’t inflict pain on your waifu simulator. What happens behind the closed doors of your neighbors is really none of your business. Family is the cornerstone of society and the government should not meddle in its affairs.

This is what makes Harry Potter's house elves irredeemable. Not their existence but all the lessons we expected to not learn from them. A competent writer with good politics wouldn’t stop the conversation on “well, they enjoy slavery so we must not intervene”. In a bad situation there’s always a less ridiculous alternative to doing nothing.

_____________________

* There are no sexual relations between wizards and elves anywhere in the books as far as I know. I’m only talking about the social dynamic of traditional marriage, nothing more. (Although in real world sexual abuse does happen in all of the situations discussed here)

** The only one we see is Dobby but even he was not free from his affection for wizards. He just switched from serving his family to serving the main character, not de jure but de facto. He risks his life and suffers abuse for Harry and in the end he dies saving Harry’s life.

*** As far as I know it was never confirmed how elves came to be in Harry Potter. Which is bizarre considering this author's love for writing extra worldbuilding. That suggests to me that she was uncomfortable with the topic herself and didn’t really want to make it into a coherent metaphor. Else she could have given them any origin story she deemed fit.

****I do mean that fully. A spell that reads minds and computer chips in brains can and should serve the same narrative purpose. You can go full Black Mirror in your fantasy novel. That one episode where people’s eyes film everything they see – literally a pensieve.

*****They ponder once that they sort children into houses a bit early and even though it would be a comparatively easy fix they still do nothing. They never do anything!

[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.

[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

[moredifferentthanusual]

hello is anyone still thinking about hpmor in 2024? or is it just me and my creature

[impliedbass]

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

[doomer1994]

[a-thousand-pots]

This one is mostly an ‘in-between’ chapter, but there were some scenes I was looking forward too :)

[okunichh]

illustration to my first ever fanfic,,,,, read it here

[perse-persecution]

happy hpmor death day everyone yudkowskys left the 37 voices unexplained for 10 slutty slutty years !

[your-average-teenage-mess]

Okay so.... Does anyone else find themselves caring deeply about the hpmor marauders? Because it feels to me like they have a ton of potential. Just in terms of fanfiction

Like, think about it that way: Remus is basically the same as in the original. James was unambiguously confirmed to have been a dick as a teenager who's gotten better over time. Peter now has a FUCKTON more potential, since he was a secret metamorphemagus, canonically queer, and a SPY FOR THE LIGHT SIDE, who then spent a decade in Azkaban, GOT OUT, and rebuilt his life (presumably with Remus's help). Think of all the potential for angst! I even wrote a fic about it! (Will give the link to anyone who wants it) And Sirius was, yes, evil, but also canonically queer, and there's so much amazing stuff you could do with a teen Gryffindor dark wizard who is kinda friends with a group of bullies who want to believe he's better than his family, aka maybe an asshole, but not ACTUALLY EVIL, and can't pick up on the signs until it's too late, and who- okay, just imagine in the hpmor marauders era, hpmor Sirius manipulating hpmor Peter, who was his BOYFRIEND, who wanted to believe the best about him, who was drawn by his charisma and his charm, and the relationship slowly turning truly horrible, too slowly for Peter to be able to notice what's going on and leave, until it all blows up in everyone's face- what was the big disaster that ended it all? It's for you to decide! And that's not even talking about how hpmor Snape was just everything the fandom wanted canon Snape to be- a dark and edgy and clever and lonely asocial guy who wanted to fit in with the cool dark wizard as a teen, but who still had enough of a true moral compass to truly understand the error of his ways and really try to make amends to the world he almost destroyed, WHICH MADE HIM ALL THE MORE VULNERABLE TO MANIPULATION BY DUMBLEDORE WHO WANTED TO USE HIS GUILT TO PULL HIS STRINGS- why is no one talking about this? This is perfect fandom material!

... Okay. I'm calm now. I'm normal about this.

If you have any, by which I mean ANY hpmor marauders fanfic requests, give them to me and I'll see what I can do.

[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.