HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Eliezer and I love to talk about writing. We talk about our own current writing projects, how we’d improve the books we’re reading, and what we want to write next. Sometimes along the way I learn some amazing fact about HPMOR or Project Lawful or one of Eliezer’s other works. “Wow, you’re kidding,” I say, “do your fans know this? I think people would really be interested.”
“I can’t remember,” he usually says. “I don’t think I’ve ever explained that bit before, I’m not sure.”
I decided to interview him more formally, collect as many of those tidbits about HPMOR as I could, and share them with you. I hope you enjoy them.
It’s probably obvious, but there will be many, many spoilers for HPMOR in this article, and also very little of it will make sense if you haven’t read the book. So go read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality before you read any further.
We talk about HPMOR’s characters, including how Eliezer tried to make every single character awesome, and why Hermione gets unicorn horn teeth. We talk about the plot, and learn some secrets about Harry’s sexuality. We talk about the setting, and Eliezer explains the Nested Nerfing Hypothesis of magic in the HPMOR universe. And finally, there’s some news about the epilogues—plural!
While I’m here, I’ll also mention that Eliezer has a non-fiction book coming out on September 16th, 2025 and I personally think it would be excellent if many thousands of people pre-ordered that book.
And now, on with the lore!
Characters
Masks
Gretta: Can you please explain the “dramatic masks” idea that we’ve talked about, and how it applies to HPMOR?
Eliezer: So there’s a science fiction and or fantasy author, Stephen R. Donaldson, who made an observation in the afterword to one of his books.[1] Donaldson says that the difference between drama and melodrama[2] is that in a drama, the characters change their masks over the course of the story, and in melodrama, they wear the same masks throughout the story.[3]
And in particular, Donaldson gave an example, which was more influential on me than the underlying statement, of how in one of his stories, it starts out with a victim, a victimizer, and a rescuer. And then by the end of the story, they have all exchanged masks.
Gretta: Okay. So three people, three masks. And they rotate. And I just want to clarify, when we’re talking about masks, we’re not talking about something that a character is pretending to do or be.
Eliezer: Yeah. This is the literary sense of mask. Like a role that a person wears inside the story, whether or not they’re conscious of it.
Gretta: So harkening back to like stage plays where people would literally wear a physical mask in order to indicate what character they’re playing.
Eliezer: Right. These are the masks of the stage play, not masks inside the play. They’re masks outside the play. Denoting which character you are.
And in a drama, according to Donaldson, they rotate. Now, Donaldson’s example is literarily perfect,[4] whereas HPMOR does not quite stand up the same way. There are only two masks for three people, and the masks themselves are different.
But by the end of the story the mysterious old wizard mask has moved from Dumbledore to Harry, and Harry’s brash young hero mask has moved to Hermione. (Hermione’s mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.)
Gretta: What mask was Hermione wearing at the beginning of the story?
Eliezer: At the beginning of the story, she’s not quite asserting herself as having a mask. School know-it-all, maybe?
By the time she’s in the middle of the story, she’s got much more complicated things going on. She has multiple self concepts, plus she’s fighting against concepts imposed upon her by the school.
Gretta: What are her multiple self concepts?
Eliezer: To answer that, I need to back up a bit. This might sound initially like it’s not quite about characters. Orson Scott Card, I believe, observed that while a conflict between good and evil might hold the attention of some readers, a conflict between good and good can be much stronger than that.[5]
And why is this? Because for the same reason that a conflict between two strong forces is more literarily interesting than a conflict between a strong force and a weak force, if only one side has good arguments, that’s less of an interesting debate than if both sides have strong arguments.
And the extension of this to characters, and I don’t actually remember at this point, if this exact way of phrasing it is original to me or not, is that you might think of a three dimensional character as one who contains at least two two-dimensional characters.
Like, you just take a bunch of flat characters and put them all into the same person, and now, lo and behold, you have a three dimensional character.
The less interesting version of this is if the character has a good side and evil side, and/or a sympathetic side and an unsympathetic side. And the much stronger version of it is when they’ve got multiple sympathetic sides in conflict.
So coming back to Hermione — Hermione is, on the one hand, the hero, and on the other hand, a sensible young lady who has way too much common sense to go in for that sort of thing, both in the same person.
Gretta: Way too much common sense to go in for being a hero?
Eliezer: Yeah. At first, she’s too sensible to do all this dangerous stuff that Harry does — though later, she leans into the hero side and she goes off and does dangerous stuff too.
Gretta: I see. She knows better than that. She knows better than to take these kind of risks, or —
Eliezer: Yeah, or to get herself into this sort of trouble. She has this drive to assert her reality independently of Harry’s, despite how the lumpenproletariat of Hogwarts try to cast Hermione as Harry’s tagalong romantic interest, as a bit player in Harry’s story. Harry has a lot of sympathy for Hermione’s plight. He wouldn’t like it if someone tried to cast him as the sidekick, either, so he fights alongside her against the gossip network’s attempts to typecast her, but it doesn’t particularly work, Hogwarts continues to apply that false trope to Hermione.
And this is like a mask that she wears that is independent of her actual heroism. There’s some amount of performative heroism she’s doing to distinguish herself from Harry, but somewhat separately from whether she is an actual hero or not. Sometimes the actual heroism and the performative heroism overlap.
Gretta: What are some examples of performative heroism versus real heroism on Hermione’s part?
Eliezer: So the Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches (SPHEW) is Hermione consciously wearing the hero mask. When she asks, “How can I be a hero?” she is consciously performing the hero role, consciously wearing the mask.[6]
But also, she hears the echoing cry of the phoenix, runs into an actual instance of bullying and stops it without very much thinking about it.[7] And that’s actual heroism.
Gretta: What happens to Dumbledore when he takes off the wise old wizard mask?
Eliezer: Inside the story, when Dumbledore loses his wise old wizard mask, he gets taken off the board immediately thereafter. He’s snapped out of time, sealed inside the mirror. Dumbledore knew that something like that was going to happen. He prepared for it in advance.
But it’s also interesting to consider what we learn about Dumbledore, who he really was, underneath that wise old wizard mask, which was after all just a role he was playing, and a role that he lost at the end.
When we find out that Dumbledore has been reading prophecies, this changes his apparent role in the story even in retrospect. It’s a moment of not just changing ongoing roles but also of revealing that he had a different story role than we thought on first readthrough. Now his actions make sense in a different way. We know what he was thinking and not just what he was doing.
We also find out that he was mistaken about a few of the prophecies. He thought some of them were about himself, but they were actually about Professor Quirrell, who was also Harry’s mentor.
On the object level, though, what happens is that he’s out of the game.
Gretta: Yeah, it’s rough when there’s no mask for you anymore. It’s like playing musical chairs and, whoops, no chair for you.
Eliezer: Yeah. Dumbledore might get one back at some point. That would be a matter for the future of the story.
Imperfect Characters
Gretta: In my writing books, it says to give your characters and especially your protagonist flaws, but you write about having respect for your characters, including for your villains.
So what in your mind constitutes a respectable flaw?
Eliezer: There are many kinds of respectable flaws. But a very strong, classic pathway is to take a mistake that you made in the past and that you’re still sympathetic to yourself for having made.
You’re like, “Yeah, that was a mistake, but I had reasons for that mistake that was not just me being stupid, all of my books gave me the wrong advice, I was trying to do the right thing there. I had no way of knowing this.”
And I’m not saying to go around being sympathetic for yourself to yourself for all your mistakes. But maybe there are some that, despite your strong Irorian self-improving heart, you can still manage to find some sympathy for yourself for making. And especially, maybe you remember how at the time it didn’t seem like a flaw to you. You were not going around being like, “And today I shall be a flawed character.” You were trying to do the right thing, and not perform doing that in any flawed way. But then you made the mistake anyway.
Gretta: So does this mean that you can only write characters who are flawed in the same ways that you personally have ever been flawed? Or is that just one wellspring for it?
Eliezer: That’s one wellspring. And the thing I would say is just keep yourself to the same standards when you’re inventing whole new flaws.
The thing that you may remember about your own flaws that you’re still sympathetic about, is that you did not arrive at these flaws by wearing the flawed mask in the theater and setting out to be flawed that way, so that you could have sympathetic flaws to your reader. No. You made a mistake. You screwed up even though you were trying.
Gretta: So now let’s bring it back to HPMOR. Could you please run through some characters and tell me what their flaws are, how you conceived of them, and how you made sure that they were respectable flaws?
Eliezer: So McGonagall. Some people thought that I treated McGonagall unfairly. If so, I wasn’t trying to.
I was trying to write McGonagall as not yet up to Dumbledore’s caliber for a wise old mentor. She has the potential to become headmistress of Hogwarts and raise future generations to be people with strong integrity. But initially, she is mainly trying to keep these kids under control. That to me does not seem like an unsympathetic motivation, but it is not as large as it could be, and it leads her into some errors. In time she does come to regard it as a flaw within herself, and thereby change.
Then take Harry. Harry’s, like, gung-ho. I sometimes tell people that Harry is me at age eighteen, but with my Wisdom and Constitution scores reversed and all the brakes taken off. So one of Harry’s flaws is that he doesn’t have his brakes on.
I charged ahead more when I was young than I do now. Maybe never quite as much as Harry, but more. And when I look back at myself, I don’t see someone who made entirely defensible mistakes, knowing everything meta that I now know. I see somebody who charged ahead and made mistakes, like Harry, but also somebody who knew a bit more than usual, got some things right that others got wrong, and was trying to do the right thing. This is what I draw on to respect a character like Harry. I know what it is like to be a coherent person who is trying to reflect on himself and still misses some things.
Gretta: So by charging ahead, you mean he acts when he would benefit by instead thinking longer first?
Eliezer: Yeah. Probably not the way I would’ve phrased it, but also a thing that is occasionally true of him.
Only it’s not necessarily thinking longer. If you think the same thoughts for longer, you’re not necessarily gonna arrive at a different destination.
Gretta: Does he consider too few possibilities?
Eliezer: We all consider too few possibilities. We literally cannot fit enough possibilities in our head for the truth to reliably be inside our considered hypothesis space. Harry has just not had enough bad stuff happen to him at the start of the story.
Gretta: His priors are too optimistic.
Eliezer: Yeah.
Gretta: His parents are nice.
Eliezer: He doesn’t realize that, of course. He doesn’t know that he is in a story with a nice version of his parents. Yeah. But they are nice.
Gretta: Yeah, they are.
What about Draco? What are Draco’s flaws?
Eliezer: You might more strongly ask, what are Draco’s strengths? Or something like, how do you even set up Draco such that, in the course of being a Death Eater, he is not performing the flaws, being the character that has been handed the flaw card — but instead merely is flawed.
And my answer there is, he’s a good kid who wants to do what his father tells him to do, and live up to the morals that his father has inculcated in him and carry on the honor of House Malfoy and all that. And he doesn’t know that he’s supposed to be the villain.
And this is his strength. Nobody at any point has told Draco that he is the villain of the story and in the end that means that he’s not.
Gretta: Yeah. Cool. Who else would be a good one to touch on here?
Eliezer: Pansy Parkinson just wears her flaw mask and doesn’t know that she’s supposed to be wearing anything else.
She’s a minor character. She has like only a few lines or, like one scene. And is just straight up wrong as far as I can remember.
And this is not true of many people in HPMOR, but —
Gretta: I can’t remember what her deal was. Can you remind me?
Eliezer: I think she has a couple of unsympathetic lines here and there, and is mainly on screen at the point where Tracy Davidson deceives her into believing that she has eaten her soul.
Gretta: Got it. So for a very minor character, they can just be one-dimensionally bad, and this is fine.
Let’s go back to the general idea of character flaws. So far you mentioned one good wellspring for respectable flaws: mistakes you, the author, have made in the past. But here’s another framework, or generator for flaws.
I watched the Sanderson lectures and he talks about a few different kinds of flaws you can give your characters, and I found this helpful to think about.
Sanderson says you can give your characters a moral flaw, like being greedy. But you can also give them restrictions or limitations. A restriction is something like Superman’s moral code, where there are actions that he will not take because he has this moral code that’s more important to him. And a limitation might be something like, I don’t know, you’re missing a limb. So there’s actions that other people can take that you can’t take ’cause you don’t have the arm.
Eliezer: I don’t think of those as character flaws, per se.
Gretta: Yeah, it’s not so much that they’re categories of flaws according to Sanderson. It’s more like when you’re trying to make a character and you’d like that character, not just to be the nicest, most awesome, most powerful. It’s boring to have a character who’s just OP[8] and everything is great for them. These are some different ways you can hobble your protagonist.
Eliezer: Weaknesses, let us call them weaknesses.
Gretta: Perfect. Yes. These are different ways you can hobble or shape your protagonist so that they have a harder time accomplishing their goals, but also they are more textured, more themselves.
Do you ever think about those other kinds of restrictions and limitations as being a useful way to shape a character?
Eliezer: Sure. Harry’s Time-Turner is limited to six hours.
But overall, character weaknesses are among the relatively trickier things to navigate. It’s all too easy for weaknesses to just visibly be grafted onto a mask.
If your character is blind, there’s this whole delicate line to walk: “How do I reflect the actual magnitude of how hard this hits them without having this be all the character’s about?” Or maybe it is all the character’s about, that’s a different set of thin lines to walk.
And especially to all the beginning writers out there, before you say, “how shall I take a weakness and slap it onto this character?” First ask if there are just organic vulnerabilities in this character that you don’t need to slap on top. And even before that, ask, can you just strengthen the opposition, the problems, the environment, the antagonist.
Gretta: Okay. You made two points there. Say more about organic vulnerabilities?
Eliezer: Who needs a special vulnerability to magic when you’ve already established that this character has the kind of moral code that can get them into trouble with a more powerful opponent?
Gretta: So instead of throwing more weaknesses at them, check and see if you fully plumbed the depths of the weaknesses they’ve already got, is that close?
Eliezer: Yeah. And if you feel like a weakness is just inherently part of a character and not in a looking down on them sort of way, but, like, this delicate sculpture all fits together, then by all means have that weakness there.
But if somebody says, “Ah, your character’s too strong. You need to slap some extra weaknesses on there.” Then I’m like, “Oh, this is not about to end well, for this burgeoning young author.”
Gretta: I think I understood the other point, which is: don’t make your character weaker, make everybody else stronger, and then you have more epic battles.
Eliezer: Yeah. There’s a version of HPMOR where you can imagine some author who had received less good advice thinking, “I’ve got my very rational character. They’re very intelligent, that’s a strength. I gotta slap a weakness in there. How about if he’s totally clueless about emotions? How about if he doesn’t understand other people?”
And where HPMOR goes instead is,”Alright. Draco’s got some good training. Hermione is gonna beat the pants off of Harry in all his classes except for broomstick riding. The Defence Professor is gonna be the older, wiser, and more evil version of himself. And Dumbledore is gonna have access to all the prophecies.”
I didn’t slap a bunch of weaknesses on Harry. I just put him in an environment where the character could hold together without needing a bunch of weaknesses slapped on top, like rotten cherries on a cake.
Gretta: Gross.
Make All the Characters Awesome
Eliezer: So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?
Take Crabbe and Goyle, for instance. I had an explicit process of flipping through various ideas, like, “Okay. Can I have them be like the Secret Masterminds who are running Draco from behind the scenes? No, because then Draco’s not awesome.”
“Can they be Secret Masterminds running all of Slytherin from behind the scenes? No, because that doesn’t really fit.”
“Could they be Those Two Bad Guys, as TVTropes named the trope? I think this trope is used in Pulp Fiction and maybe in Neverwhere, if I’m remembering the correct Neil Gaiman novel. Anyway, so I’m like, “How about if there’s Those Two Bad Guys?” And I thought, “Eh, it doesn’t quite fit. It’s been done before. It’s a little arbitrary. Why is this trope showing up here?”
And then I thought, “No, no, see, Crabbe and Goyle saw plays with Those Two Bad Guys as kids, and that’s who they think they’re supposed to be!” And then I was like, “Alright, this is adequately awesome.” And then I could stop trying to figure out how to make those two characters awesome and move on to the next character.
Gretta: Let’s do one more.
Eliezer: Sure. How about Luna Lovegood?
A fundamental fact about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is, it’s not quite set in the world of canon, it’s set in the world of fan fiction. And almost every fan fiction out there makes Luna Lovegood awesome. So this wasn’t just me making every character awesome, this was a required element.
But HPMOR is set in Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, and Luna is younger than Harry, so she’s not even enrolled at Hogwarts yet.
So I put a lot of effort into figuring out any way that she could be onscreen at all and awesome.
I landed on having her write all the Quibbler headlines. Had we ever made it to the epilogue, she would’ve been onscreen and even more awesome.[9]
Hermione as Mary Sue
Eliezer: While we’re talking about characters, I want to tell you a little-known aspect of Hermione Granger. I wrote her explicitly to be a deconstruction of the Mary Sue. Some people accused J. K. Rowling of having made Hermione Granger a Mary Sue. And other people were like, how dare you? Nobody would look twice at this character if she was male.
Gretta: Please explain Mary Sue, because some people aren’t going to know what that is.
Eliezer: Ah, golly. Now I feel old.
So long ago, I believe there was a character named Mary Sue in one of the first fan fictions. It might have been a Star Trek fanfiction, I’m not sure.[10] In this story, a character named Mary Sue came along, and she was stronger and smarter and prettier than the original characters. She just took over all the story and solved all the problems. In some versions of this legend she bore a certain resemblance to the author, except of course for being prettier.
And so Mary Sue came to denote this perfect character who steps in and solves all the problems and is always right. She’s stronger and prettier and takes over the story. Sometimes she turns out to be secretly related to the original characters despite having not been in the original story.
Gretta: And so people accused Rowling of making Hermione a Mary Sue.
Eliezer: Yeah, on account of Hermione being good in class and sometimes stronger than Harry at things.
Gretta: And then other people said, “Come on, if she was a boy, it would be fine for Harry to have a rival. You’re only mad because she’s a girl.”
Eliezer: Sort of? I don’t think they were really rivals in the original Harry Potter because canon Harry Potter wasn’t that good at academics.
Anyway, I set out to make Hermione check every single box in the Mary Sue trope. But you probably don’t even notice that I did it, because the thing that actually makes a character pose the literary problems of a Mary Sue has nothing to do with whether you die three days before Easter and later come back from the dead.
(I thought about having her die on Good Friday but I thought that was just a little too unsubtle. As it turned out, I was just vastly overestimating clarity and I wish I’d straight up had her die on Good Friday.)
So yeah, I had her beat Harry at all of their classes except broomstick riding. I had her die and come back from the dead. I gave her pearly white teeth made of unicorn horn. I gave her the reputation for being the one who destroyed Voldemort, just because he dared to try to touch her.
And then there was one part that was more subtle. I think very few readers and only the most obsessive ones on Reddit even guessed at this one, but Hermione is secretly the grand-niece of Professor McGonagall. McGonagall has a dead sister who died in a war, while Hermione’s mother thinks that probably her mother died in that war.
Gretta: Okay. So a very subtle hint.
Eliezer: Yeah, very subtle hint. And also later on, you see McGonagall holding Hermione, and the text remarks as if she were holding her daughter or maybe granddaughter.[11]
Gretta: So you’re really trying to check all the boxes on the Mary Sue trope.
Eliezer: Yeah. There is no other reason for Hermione and Professor McGonagall to be related, except that I wanted Hermione to have the supposedly Mary Sue property of being secretly the relative of one of the existing characters.
Gretta: But you never hear anyone complain that Hermione just took over the story of HPMOR.
Eliezer: That’s because she didn’t! So there you go, that’s it, that’s all that a Mary Sue isn’t. Hermione didn’t get to steamroll over everything. The story didn’t reshape itself entirely around her. The other characters weren’t there just to be part of her magnificence.
And that’s all a Mary Sue really is. Who cares about a character coming back from the dead or having pearly white teeth made of unicorn horn?
Who’s the Main Character?
Gretta: Most people would probably just say that Harry is the main character of HPMOR, but you’ve told me it’s a lot more complicated than that. So how many protagonists does HPMOR have according to you, and according to the characters themselves?
Eliezer: When you’ve got something as complicated and occasionally meta as HPMOR, the concept of a protagonist does tend to blur a little bit.
There are at least three ways to look at it. One, which characters see themselves as the “main character” from their own viewpoint? Two, who is the viewpoint character? And three, who makes choices that move the story?
Almost everyone is the main character from their own perspective, at least in HPMOR. I am not sure what the ratio is in the real world.
Gretta: Is there anyone in HPMOR who is not?
Eliezer: So for example, Professor McGonagall doesn’t see the world as it relates to herself. She sees the world as it relates to Hogwarts.
But if you think about that second category, viewpoint characters, then Harry, Hermione, and Draco are the most obvious ones. Then we get into secondary viewpoint characters like Snape or McGonagall.
Gretta: Does Neville think he’s the main character?
Eliezer: No, but the story sure treats him as one whenever we take on his viewpoint.
Neville sees the parts of the world that relate to Neville. Neville thinks about how it’s his fault that Hermione got killed, or that Bellatrix Black has escaped. From Neville’s perspective, obviously these events are part of Neville’s story.
Gretta: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.
Let’s talk about the third category. There’s an awful lot of students at Hogwarts. Most of them are not actually moving and shaking, making choices that drive the story.
Eliezer: Yeah. But moving and shaking is a very distinct quality from being the main character or a viewpoint character. Dumbledore is making a fair number of choices that move the story. But the viewpoint does not tend to linger on him. And he knows perfectly well that Harry is the main character.
Gretta: So what does it mean for Dumbledore to think that Harry is the main character?
Eliezer: Dumbledore knows the plot more or less. Not in a literal sense, but Dumbledore knows the larger plot. He knows that large events are moving and Harry’s going to drive them. He’s not quite sure of the extent to which the same holds of Hermione.
And Dumbledore is pretending to be this person who believes in tropes, as opposed to a person who has read the prophecies. So he is constantly talking as if Harry is the main character as a trope, not expecting to be believed, because the people he is talking to know that they are not characters in a story. Meanwhile Dumbledore is taking great quiet amusement that Harry is the for-real main character in prophecy and not even Harry knows it.[12]
| Character | Sees self as protagonist | Viewpoint character | Makes decisions that move the story | Main character according to prophecy |
| Harry | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Quirrell | ✅ | ((✅)) | ✅ | |
| Hermione | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Draco | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Dumbledore | ((✅)) | ✅ | ||
| McGonagall | (✅) | |||
| Snape | (✅) | |||
| Neville | (✅) | |||
| Pansy (e.g.) | ✅ | ((✅)) |
Eliezer: Also worth noting and in a very similar vein, there’s a lot of Only Sane People in Hogwarts. People who are all, according to their own story viewpoint, the Only Sane Person and with considerable justification, include Harry, Quirrell, Dumbledore, Hermione, McGonagall, Susan Bones, and Amelia Bones. Draco Malfoy sure sees himself that way too. Even Daphne Greengrass, at one or two points, wonders when she became the only sane person in Hogwarts. It’s not quite the same thing as seeing yourself as the main character or protagonist, but it’s related—the sense that you’re the only one who’s not just bound up in the mad movements of the world, as the mad other people enact their play. Giving that feature to everyone’s own viewpoint is a similar sort of literary motion to making them all their own viewpoint’s protagonist.
Contrast canon Harry Potter’s Voldemort, who does treat Harry Potter as the main character. Voldemort does not seem to have much to do with his time on Earth besides being a villain over Harry Potter. His plans mainly center on Harry Potter or threatening things valuable to Harry Potter. You can tell that Voldemort is not at the center of his own story.
Plot
Characters interfering with plot
Gretta: You say that any level one intelligent character will try to toss your plot out the window. Do you remember any instances of this happening to you while you were writing HPMOR?
Eliezer: Oh, yeah. Let me think back here for a second.
So in terms of characters, like just straight up announcing that they will not cooperate with the story you have written, there is a good example in the original version of the Azkaban breakout. I had planned for Harry to transfigure the rocket for himself without any other assistance and ride that rocket out.
And I realized that this would not work and Harry was inevitably going to die. And that even if I tried to get away with ruling by authorial fiat that it worked, my readers wouldn’t believe it, and also Harry himself would just not have done that.
I think there were several points in the Azkaban arc where Harry was like, “Nope, I’m not doing that. This is suicidal. I need to invent something else.” And I was like, “Okay.”
Gretta: Alright, so you were making life too easy on yourself. You were grabbing for an easy solution and then your character was like, “I don’t buy it.”
Eliezer: The classic example, from my perspective, is when you’re trying to steer your character into trouble and your character says, “screw that.”
Gretta: What you just said was the opposite. You weren’t trying to steer Harry into trouble. You were trying to get him to escape the tower and then he wouldn’t.
Eliezer: Yes, but I was having him go down the corridor of the prison without having invented, like, a Patronus substitute or something.
This might not be the best example, but I do remember the Azkaban arc as my characters being like, “Why would I do that?” And then you have to manipulate external conditions to cause them to actually do the things you want them to do.
Oh, here’s a better example. How could the Defence Professor get Hermione into a position of conflict with Draco? In the first drafts and outlines of the story, I didn’t realize, there was no indication that he would have to go to such lengths. It turned out to be hard even to get Hermione to the point where she could be false-memory-charmed about having tried to kill Draco. It took multiple setup chapters.
The Defence Professor inside the story had to go pretty hard on setting that up, ’cause Hermione didn’t particularly want to cooperate with the Defence Professor’s first ideas and my own first draft.
Gretta: What were Hermione’s objections?
Eliezer: “That’s evil. I ain’t doing it even if somebody sets me up to think I have a reason.”
And similarly The Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches. I think there’s a bunch of things inside my first story ideas where these sensible young ladies were like, “we are not going to do that.” And I was like, “… yeah, fair.” I don’t remember the specifics, but I was like, “Yeah, okay. I will have to give you a bigger push. So… what if you got this mysterious note?”[13] Or, “what if one of your people turned out to have more firepower than you expected them to have?”[14]
I’m trying to remember whether I, at any point, had Chamber of Secrets Shenanigans Plans, which Harry derailed by just sensibly telling Professor McGonagall about it. But I just don’t remember at this point if that was ever true.
Gretta: Yeah, a major flaw in many books about young wizards or just children in general is, “Oh my god, why didn’t you just ask a grownup for help?”
Eliezer: Yep.
Gretta: And how did you deal with that in this book?
Eliezer: By giving all of the people who would otherwise have derailed the plots that way, adequate reason to suspect all of the grownups they could have potentially talked to. For example, Harry sees Dumbledore setting fire to a chicken. No way Harry’s going to Dumbledore for sane help after that.
By the time Harry’s getting himself into real trouble, I had to make sure McGonagall had acted as an obstacle to him. McGonagall has to be maneuvered into telling Harry that she doesn’t want to hear anything wrong about the Defence Professor. Yeah, it’s played for laughs at the time. But really this is me asking, “How the hell am I gonna prevent these people from being sensible?”
And the answer was: “All right. There is a curse on the Defence Professor position. There has always been a curse on the Defence Professor position. The school has adapted to it. Harry has gotten into just the right kind of shenanigan to cause McGonagall to panic about this, and give Harry the instructions he needs to hear to prevent him from just taking certain matters to McGonagall.”
Setting up Plot Twists
Gretta: Yeah. Okay. So on that note, you wrote this one chapter at a time. You knew in general where you were going the whole time, and you had some of the major building blocks in mind.
But this book is a very layered book with forward references and, like, forward references to forward references. There’s so much going on here, how did you do it?
Eliezer: In part by writing a bunch of later scenes out in some detail. They did have to be re-written when I got there.
For example, the troll killing Hermione was written out, not just in outline form, but line by line, way in advance.
Gretta: Okay. That is a more comforting answer than I actually expected to get from you. I expected you to say, “I held it all in my head because I am just that good.”
Eliezer: I held surprising amounts of it in my head because I am, or at least was at that age, just that good. But I did not hold it all in my head. There were outlines, there were places where things were going to go. And it didn’t fit together perfectly. I had to try so hard to close the parentheses. I put so much effort into, “Oh no, I opened these parentheses. Now I must close these parentheses.” I would internally scream and struggle invisibly, or even visibly, for several chapters to do that.
Gretta: Okay. Can you think of any parentheses that particularly irked you, that were very hard to close?
Eliezer: The example that leaps out in my mind is — trying to arrive at a point where would make sense to have the aurors tromp in and arrest Hermione Granger for the murder of Draco Malfoy, without that seeming to come completely out of the blue.
The entire Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches was not in the original outline. SPHEW is just me trying to set it up so that, by the time these people come in and arrest Hermione, it actually makes sense.
And her arrest had to be a consequence of her own actions, in at least some sense, for certain themes of the story to hold together. In real life, stuff happens to trash you all the time, but inside the story, this had to be, somehow and however loosely, Hermione’s knowing choice.
Gretta: So you had to do a lot of back propagation. There were many beats you were trying to hit later in the story and it just had backwards implications, layers and layers deep.
Eliezer: And that works in both directions. So many chapters, I’m trying to get this story to where it has to be in a future place. And then in so many future places, I’m doing so much work to close the parentheses that opened in an earlier chapter. That’s how I ended up writing a layered story even though I was publishing it linearly, as a serial.
Time-Turner Plots
Gretta: While we’re on the subject of plot intricacy, tell me about how you reasoned through the Time-Turner plots.
Eliezer: Someone once asked me, “What sort of note-taking or outline do you use for the Time-Turner sections? It seems hard to keep it all self-consistent.”
And this time the answer is, “I just write it.” I wrote those sections in short, connected writing sessions and published a bunch of closely related serial events that I could just hold in my head. I couldn’t hold the whole story’s plot from start to finish, but the Time-Turner sections, I could.
That person might have felt impressed, I’m not sure, but it’s not as impressive as it looks. They were trying to decode the plot I had written, and they were probably juggling multiple possibilities in their head until the evidence came in, and I only had to hold one possibility in my mind and sweep it forward.
This would actually catch me out sometimes! A lot of times my readers would see completely valid alternative interpretations that I’d never intended, and that I had arguably inadvertently foreshadowed. But because I was only holding my intended interpretation in mind, I didn’t anticipate what they would see.
So for example, some people made a very clear case that I clearly foreshadowed that Professor Quirrell was a time traveling version of Harry. Because in chapters quite close to where this sense of doom was introduced, I happen to have Harry thinking, in the course of discovering Time-Turners, that time-reversed matter looks like anti-matter and explodes when brought into contact with matter. This is obviously me telling all the attentive readers that the reason for this sense of doom is that Professor Quirrell is a time traveling version of Harry. It makes sense! It’s also false, it’s not what I meant. I wouldn’t have left that red herring if I’d thought about it. But because I knew what I meant, I didn’t realize it was a red herring.
Slashfic?
Gretta: I have two sex-related questions for you about this mostly PG-13 rated book.
My first question is about Quirrell’s humiliation of Harry at the end of chapter 19. Quirrell forces Harry to submit while several bigger students incapacitate him. He requires Harry to beg for mercy before calling the bullies off. And then when it’s over, Quirrell praises Harry and sends him to a cozy room with a light novel and some chocolate.
When I read that, I thought, “Oh, I’ve just read some slashfic,[15] how daring,” but you’ve told me that this was not at all what you intended. Say more.
Eliezer: You are not the first person to bring this up. My partner at the time I wrote HPMOR also claimed to me that Harry and Professor Quirrell had the BDSM nature. And I was like, “No, but BDSM sometimes has the Harry / Quirrell nature.”
Let’s say you subject somebody to a highly stressful experience (which you might want to do for any number of reasons). And furthermore, let’s say you are clever, as Voldemort is, and you don’t want to break them, and you want them not to resent you afterwards —
Putting them in a quiet room with some chocolate is the obvious thing to do. You don’t actually need to be in a kinky or romantic relationship with somebody to give them aftercare. You can also be Voldemort and have plots.
Gretta: Were you surprised when some people read chapters 19 and 20 and came away thinking they just read some BDSM?
Eliezer: I think that relatively few people did report that reaction to me. A much more commonly reported reaction was of immense mood whiplash. And in this, they were simply correct.
There was too much mood whiplash, too fast. And a bunch of people were like, “What the hell is going on at that school?”
And I was like, “Have you read canon? This scene would have fit right in with the stuff that teachers are doing in canon Harry Potter.”
Gretta: Yeah, Dolores Umbridge does some absolutely horrible things to the children in canon.
Eliezer: Or Snape. And I felt like this fit right into canon.
But in HPMOR, this is the first sign of things having escalated to that level. There was some amount of that from Snape earlier, but Snape’s cruelty was undercut because it was clear that Snape had cooperative reasons for pulling that particular shenanigan.[16]
Quirrell’s cruelty in chapter 19 is inadequately foreshadowed. To write it better, something like that, but less so, needed to happen to Harry earlier.
Gretta: So you have a regret as an author?
Eliezer: I have a regret as an author about the extent to which many people correctly experienced this as coming, if not out of nowhere, then out of, like, inadequately somewhere.
Gretta: Okay. So it was just too harsh, too sudden.
Eliezer: Yeah. Whiplash in that it doesn’t match with the prior tone.
Gretta: Yeah. The overpowering and the humiliation was pretty massive at that point. But the part that really surprised me was Quirrell following up with aftercare. When Snape and Umbridge are horrible to the kids in canon, there’s no chocolate and light novel afterwards.
Eliezer: Man. So the big thing to remember about all of HPMOR is that, just as in the original books, the Defence Professor was Voldemort, and I thought it would be way way more obvious than it was to the readers.
Gretta: You thought everybody was gonna know that, but in fact people had all kinds of theories.
Eliezer: Yeah. And so the intended thing you’re supposed to be feeling here is something like, “Oh, noes, Voldemort is doing all these terrible things to the protagonist, what could he possibly be planning? Oh, noes, chocolate, he is being cruel and then arranging for the protagonist to still have this very high opinion of him. What is he planning? What is he plotting? Is the Philosopher’s Stone still here? What will become of it?” And, yeah, that’s what I thought people were supposed to be feeling in that particular section. And it is utterly legitimate of them that they did not.
The number one thing HPMOR taught me as an author is that you are being so much less clear than you think you are being. You are telegraphing so much less than you think. All of the obvious reads are so much less obvious than you think. And if you try to have subtle hints and foreshadowing laced through the story, clues that will only make sense in retrospect, that’s way too subtle.
Instead, you should just write very plainly reflecting the secrets of the story. Don’t try to hide them, but don’t explicitly spell them out either. That will be just right.
Why doesn’t Harry like-like Hermione?
Gretta: Here’s another question in the sex and romance direction.
In my reading of HPMOR, it looked like Hermione is interested in Harry, at least for a while, in a romantic way, but Harry doesn’t really reciprocate. He’s very fond of Hermione, he loves her as a friend, but he’s not really interested in being with her in a dating kind of way.
When I read this, I figured that Hermione had gone through puberty and Harry hadn’t. Maybe next year Harry will have different hormones and he’ll change his mind. But when I talked to you about it, you told me something different.
And I think you’ve never gone on the record about this bit anywhere else.
Eliezer: I don’t remember going on the record about this!
I should also note that what I am about to say is merely Opinion of God here, not Word of God.[17] It doesn’t become real until the story proves it. Maybe someday I will complete the epilogue and then the story will prove it. Although also there is one part of HPMOR that sure was written straight from this model.
My model is that at some point in his past, Voldemort had sacrificed the sexuality and romance aspect of himself in a terrible, dark ritual. What did he get in exchange? No longer aging, probably, that would be the obvious thing. But it was a good sacrifice for him to make because he just wasn’t getting very much out of the sex and romance part of his life.
And thus Harry is starting from a very blank slate in the sex and romance department, until puberty kicks in and his own brain areas grow up in that particular way. He has no adult knowledge of sexuality. He has no adult knowledge of romance from his dark side.
Gretta: So, then, my reading was not incorrect, it was just incomplete. It is true that Hermione is old enough to get crushes and Harry is not, and they just have bad timing. Right?
Eliezer: Right. But there’s more! This model also explains why, when Harry faces the Dementor and is lost in his dark side, and Hermione brings him out of it with a kiss,[18] Harry’s dark side has nothing to say about that kiss, it’s at a loss. Meanwhile, the main part of Harry has a thought process activated.
Harry’s dark side, as I model it, is not actually supernatural. It is a bunch of stuff that got written into his brain and then erased by childhood amnesia. So he’s got a bunch of habits that chain into each other.
(I parenthetically mention that one of my deflationary hypotheses for why people say they get new thoughts when they’re on drugs, is just that some drugs, like psychedelics, disrupt patterned chains of thought. Normally whenever we think thought X, we then go on to think thoughts Y and Z in a familiar pattern. But taking psychedelics is one way to disrupt those patterns and think new thoughts instead. The deflationary hypothesis is that any kind of mental disruption would do it, that the results are not specific to the drug; you’d need to demonstrate some tighter correlation to get past the deflationary hypothesis for that drug.)
And that’s what I model as happening to Harry when Hermione kisses him. The main part of Harry recognizes this weird stuff going on with Hermione. It originated when they visited her parents’ house and so on.[19]
And his dark side has none of this. Hermione’s kiss is a thought, a stimulus, a thing to react to, and his dark side doesn’t latch onto it at all, but the main part of Harry latches on, and that’s why her kiss brings him out of dementation.
Dumbledore’s reaction is, “Wow, not even I would’ve expected that to actually work.” But even Dumbledore did not know that Harry’s dark side had sexuality and romance obliterated.
Gretta: Nifty. Thanks.
Setting
The Truth of Magic in HPMOR
Gretta: What is the truth of magic inside HPMOR? Where does magic come from, how does it work, what governs who is magical and who is not, and so on?
Eliezer: Well first off I need to start by saying that the only ultimate truth of magic inside HPMOR is that J. K. Rowling invented a magic system for a children’s book. (Remembering always that children’s books are harder to write than adult books.) Her magic system has the structure of a certain kind of thing that flows from a human mind. It has the structure of the sort of thing that humans make up.
This is the only truth that can compress the magic system, that can create a system of explanation that is smaller than the magic system itself.
Okay. Nonetheless, we can try to rationalize it.
Gretta: And by rationalize here, do you mean make more rationalist?
Eliezer: No. Here I am using the standard English definition, of making up reasons for things.[20] Calling that “rationalization” is like if lying were called “truthization”, but it’s the linguistic standard.
Anyway, let’s go back to making reasons up about magic in canon Harry Potter and by extension HPMOR.
Suppose you found yourself somewhere in the multiverse. Somewhere that wasn’t just a place where J. K. Rowling made up this magical system, and nobody else made it up either, but it existed anyway. What might have happened? What could possibly give rise to a universe like this?
This is still in some fundamental ways an unanswerable question. ’cause once again, the real answer is, why are you looking here? You’re looking here because it resembles something that J. K. Rowling made up.
Even so, we can try to rationalize it. Even though the only true way to make a compressible magic system is to start from some simple set of postulates and then unfold them. You can’t add on the simple postulates afterwards. It’s like trying to compress a file that was generated by a random device —
Gretta: You can’t losslessly compress a truly random file.
Eliezer: Yeah. Only structure that’s already there can be unfolded and end up not random.
That said, rationalizing it, carrying out a fundamentally invalid operation —
The story that the people inside the universe would’ve eventually come up with — Harry, Hermione, Draco et al. — Would’ve been the Nested Nerfing[21] Hypothesis.
In my private worldbuilding there is an old magical philosopher, who I never had time to reference inside the story, who asked, “Look at all the apparently non-magical stars. Look at how the Muggle world is apparently larger than the magical world. Is the true nature of the universe magical or mundane at bottom? It must be magical, I reason, because if you have a magical universe, it’s easy to cast a spell that gives rise to mundanity. But from inside a mundane universe, how can you ever get to magic?”
So the universe was magical from its very start. But to explain this further, I first need to make a digression into magical genetics.
Magical Genetics
Eliezer: Magic, in canon, seems to be mostly hereditary. Wizards mostly give birth to wizards, Muggles mostly give birth to Muggles. Then where do Muggleborns[22] come from? And for that matter, where did wizards come from in the first place?
The first idea is that perhaps you can get there via mutation. So magic would spontaneously arise, and it’s a beneficial mutation so it tends to take root once it arises.
This seems hard to justify, though. Could something as complicated as magic arise from a single mutation? And if it’s not a single mutation, then we would not expect to see it popping up as often as we see Muggleborns.
So let’s move on from that theory. Suppose the magic genetics is not a single mutation, suppose it’s more complicated than that.
Leave aside the question of where wizards come from in the first place. Suppose that wizards have complicated genes for magic. Now where do Muggleborns come from, again?
Maybe a wizard charmed a few Muggle women, impregnated them, and left them to have children and spread magical genes around? But if it takes a lot of genes like that to be a full-blown wizard, you shouldn’t often see all of those genes assembling themselves together again.
One hypothesis that Harry considers is that there’s an engineered gene complex for magic, and it’s all on one chromosome.[23] This comes closer to potentially explaining what Harry already knows about in the way of observed magical population dynamics.
Perhaps a wizard charmed a few Muggle women, impregnated them, and left them to have their children. Then those children might have single copies of the magic chromosome. They’re Muggles, but they’re magic-carriers. And then perhaps some of those children marry other children like this, and maybe their children end up as wizards.
But the true answer according to my own worldbuilding, is that there isn’t a magic chromosome. There’s a Muggle chromosome! The default is magic. The universe must be magical at its core, because there’s a spell you can cast to create the appearance of mundanity, but from pure mundanity you can’t bootstrap to magic. Similarly: Sapient beings are magical by default, unless they have the Muggle chromosome that builds a circuit in their brain that uses their own magic to cancel out all their magic.
But sometimes the Muggle chromosome gets damaged via mutation. And that’s where Muggleborns come from in the general population.
This would even explain an observation that Draco Malfoy would’ve offered, and Harry from his own assumptions would’ve initially dismissed: Wizards with recent Muggleborn ancestry are more likely to give birth to Squibs. If the Muggle gene complex is complicated and fails upon small mutations or partial damage, then chromosomal crossover might sometimes repair that gene complex—especially if it’s a gene complex with only a small bit of damage, recently precipitated out of the Muggle population and gene pool.
But now we have a new question. Where did the Muggle gene complex come from?
Perhaps wizards do not have many kids and Muggles do, so a magic-dampening gene could be beneficial from an evolutionary perspective. And we do see in canon that an awful lot of wizards appear to be only children. But then we also see the Weasleys, so over thousands of years, it does not make sense that wizards have a heritable tendency to have fewer kids than Muggles.[24]
You can keep working at it, you can keep trying to rationalize the story for how a Muggle gene complex evolves. If the gene complex is complicated, it’s hard to make it work, though. And also you’re confined to one chromosome because there’s such a clear Mendelian pattern, as Harry observes in the story.
In any case, my own mental model as an author is that the Muggle chromosome is artificial. Somebody nerfed the magic abilities that every conscious being is otherwise born with, and built brains that use their magical abilities only to nullify their own magical abilities.
An Aside: What did Harry Figure Out?
Gretta: There’s a scene at the beginning of Chapter 25 in which Harry is trying to reason about magical genetics. First he (incorrectly) convinces himself that there’s a magic chromosome (not a Muggle chromosome). And then he thinks through the various implications, touching on Atlantis and the mechanisms by which magic spells are invoked. The line of reasoning ends:
The ancient forebears of the wizards, thousands of years earlier, had told the Source of Magic to only levitate things if you said...
‘Wingardium Leviosa.’
Harry slumped over at the breakfast table, resting his forehead wearily on his right hand.
When I read this, I didn’t really know what to make of it. I came away from this chapter still believing that there was a magic chromosome but that Harry was unhappy with some aspect of how it worked, or something. What was going on here?
Eliezer: You were not the only reader who was confused! Many people were confused. This was a learning moment for me as a writer.
When I wrote “Harry slumped over,” that was supposed to indicate that Harry was rejecting his own line of reasoning. If I could add one word to HPMOR, I would add the word “Contradiction” right after “Wingardium Leviosa.”
The idea here is that the timeline just clearly does not work out. A phrase like Wingardium Leviosa sounds Latin – but not like real Latin, like some kind of adulterated Latin with some other languages mixed into it. If it were real Latin it might be a couple of thousand years old, but with the “Wing” part, it sounds several hundred years old at best.
In Harry’s theory, magic dates back to the Atlanteans. He doesn’t know when they were around – they erased themselves from history, after all – but they were ancient, much more ancient than several hundred years.
One other piece of timeline evidence is the Sumerian Simple Strike Hex from chapter 16. You could figure out a way for the Sumerians to come before the Atlanteans, maybe, but it probably makes the most sense for the Atlanteans to come first, which would make them at least four to six thousand years old.
So why would the ancient Atlanteans program magic to be responsive to phrases that would not exist for several thousand years in their future?
They wouldn’t.
Harry realizes this and slumps over. He’s reached a logical dead end. But I needed to spell that out better, because many readers didn’t see the timeline problems and also didn’t infer that there was a dead end just from Harry’s body language.
Gretta: Yeah, I was probably never going to get that. I was treating Wingardium Leviosa as if it were real Latin, and could plausibly be 2500 years old or more. In retrospect I can see that the “Wing” part of it looks suspicious but I wasn’t focused on that.
Eliezer: Again, you were not alone!
Nested Nerfing Hypothesis
Eliezer: So now we have enough of the pieces that I can explain the Nested Nerfing Hypothesis.
Take the magical genetics we discussed.
Take the old wizard-philosophy idea I didn’t have time to introduce in-story, that the universe is fundamentally magical, and that the appearance of mundanity in large sections of itself must be a magical phenomenon laid on top of that; because if you start with magic you can cast a spell to produce the appearance of mundanity, but starting from mundanity there’s no way to get magic.
Take the story of Atlantis, which is more fanon than canon,[25] but then HPMOR is set in the world of fanon rather than canon to begin with. Atlantis previously reached the height of civilization. It was a powerful ancient wizarding society, and it fell. Why was it powerful, and why did it fall?
And then take the Interdict of Merlin.[26] Merlin put that into place, says HPMOR, because there was too much powerful destructive magic getting discovered and transmitted and popularized, and civilization was starting to totter.
And you arrive at a sort of possible picture for how the universe might have worked. Maybe the truth is that magic is powerful enough that it tends to destroy a lot of things. It is hard to keep the world in equilibrium when powerful magic is unchecked.
So perhaps there is a great cycle of history where over and over, magic comes close to destroying civilization, and then powerful wizards cast spells to nerf magic and save everyone.
But the nerfing is imperfect and more magic leaks through the cracks. Later generations of wizards find exploits and loopholes and they gain in power, until again the world is threatened and destabilized and again someone casts a nerfing spell.
Under the Nested Nerfing Hypothesis, the laws of physics themselves are just a spell. If it was just magic everywhere, things would fall apart too quickly. Some little piece of magic would blow up all the rest. So some magical Entity imposed the spell we know as the Mundane Laws of Physics, or maybe even it was an emergent sort of spell that just cast itself, back when there was too much magic happening all over.
But the laws of physics have flaws. The spell is imperfect. Magic leaks in around the edges.
In particular (the author is reasoning, behind the scenes), conscious sapient beings tend to end up with their own natural magic. There’s some kind of flaw in the Laws of Physics Spell. Either conscious sapient beings automatically have magic by default, or consciousness is derived from magic.
So somebody casts the spell that creates the Muggle chromosome, an added gene complex that automatically twists your natural magic in order to cancel itself. This prevents the proliferation of magical humans doing destructive magical things.. However, the Muggle chromosome, which is complex and easy to break, ends up with some mutations, and we get Squibs and wizards again rising from the Muggle population.
Atlantis comes into existence. They grow and gain in power… and then they erase themselves completely from time.
You now have a new non-magical population, ’cause most of the magical types killed themselves. The Muggle chromosome has more mutations. You get the medieval-era wizards. Their magic again gets too powerful. Merlin creates the Interdict of Merlin, which leads to the loss of magic over a certain power threshold.
Powerful wizards find various tiny cracks and loopholes in the Interdict of Merlin, ways to pass powerful magic on to each other. For example, the Slytherin Serpent, a very long lived creature that could tell some of the ancient secrets from one living soul to another.
And this is the Nested Nerfing Hypothesis — that the very strange world Harry finds himself in is the result of a series of attempted solutions to the problem of magic being too destructive. We slap a patch on that, the patch has holes, more magic comes into existence, another event happens that doesn’t completely destroy magic, and so on. And so this is the attempt to explain why the universe has the very odd, very weird form it does.
But ultimately the real answer is: because that’s what J. K. Rowling made up. Nothing can change this being the explanation that actually compresses the observations.
Epilogues
Gretta: What can you say about the status of the epilogue(s), by the way? Will we ever see them? What are they about? Are they good? Is it worth the wait? WHEN???
Eliezer: Right, so, the issue with the first epilogue is that I wrote it before I actually finished writing HPMOR proper, and by the time I got to the end of HPMOR, some things had changed and the tone had changed and the epilogue would’ve needed rewriting. And also, go figure, I was VERY burned out, and did not want to run off and rewrite that epilogue. Every year or two I take out the epilogue and try to rewrite it and fix the jarring tone problems, and every year so far, I’ve found that’s still been hard. Is the epilogue good? I think parts of it are good. That’s why I keep going back to it. It wraps up some things. It matters to me in terms of the artistic completeness of HPMOR. But I have not yet had the time, energy, and oomph to sit down and complete it. It is hard writing rather than easy writing.
On one of those occasions I did just go write a second epilogue and fully complete that one. I feel like it would arrive better after the first epilogue, even though Epilogue #1 takes place at the start of everyone’s seventh year (except Luna Lovegood, technically in her sixth), and Epilogue #2 takes place immediately after the end of HPMOR.
Possibly I will just end up releasing Epilogue #2 first, because #2 is complete and ready to go in all aspects except my own wish that I’d been able to redo Epilogue #1 and release that one first. If so, and if we can figure out how to do that, Epilogue #2 might get released before the book comes out. If it’s not out by September 16th, 2025, you may have to wait a while.
Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue? I still have to finish that one too!
Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed this! And one final plea – please do consider pre-ordering If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Thank you!
- ^
The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict (2009)
- ^
Eliezer adds more context to the difference between drama and melodrama: “A drama is a play or a story and it can potentially be high prestige, whereas a melodrama is exaggerated, unsubtle, low status. Stephen R. Donaldson is offering a hypothesis about what distinguishes the shouty thing from the potentially subtle thing, though I do not think this is a full explanation of the difference, it’s just an aspect.”
- ^
Donaldson: “Melodrama presents a Victim, a Villain, and a Rescuer. Drama offers the same characters and then studies the process by which they change roles.”
- ^
Amusingly, if you read the afterword to Donaldson’s book, it is all about how frustrated Donaldson was with his attempts to implement the victim / villain / rescuer triangle in his writing. He wrote the story once, it came out extremely lopsided, he put it in a drawer for a few years. He rewrote it at least six times, trying to balance the triangle, but never quite got it up to his own standards. He writes, “And eventually I came to the conclusion that I was never going to be able to make it ‘aesthetically perfect.’ Judged by the standard of my original intentions, this book would always be a failure.”
- ^
Eliezer is correct that Orson Scott Card did say something like this in chapter eight of Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction:
“The most daring course, yet the one most likely to transform your audience, is to keep [the anti-hero] sympathetic throughout, while facing him with an opponent who is also sympathetic throughout the story. The audience will like both characters — a lot — and as [the anti-hero] and his opponent come into deadly conflict, your readers will be emotionally torn.
This is anguish, perhaps the strongest of emotions you can make your audience experience directly (as opposed to sympathetically mirroring what your characters feel). Neither character is at all confused about what he wants to have happen, yet your audience, emotionally involved with both of them, cannot bear to have either character lose. The emotional stakes are raised to much greater intensity, and yet the moral issues will again be removed from a matter of mere sympathy; in having to choose between characters they love, the readers will be forced to decide on the basis of the moral issues between them. Who really should prevail?”
- ^
For example, at the end of chapter 68:
”If I want to be a hero too,” said Hermione, “if I’ve decided to be a hero too, is there anything you can do to help?” - ^
This happens right after the previous citation, at the beginning of chapter 69.
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OP = gamer slang for “overpowered”
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There’s more about epilogues at the end of this article!
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Eliezer remembers correctly! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
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“Professor McGonagall was holding Hermione so firmly that you might have thought it was a mother holding her daughter, or maybe granddaughter.” – Chapter 81
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For example: “Now what?” Dumbledore echoed. “Why, now the hero wins, of course.”
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Hermione wakes up one morning in Chapter 72 and finds a “small slip of parchment” under her pillow telling her where to find a bully.
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Nymphadora Tonks is metamorphagused into Susan Bones’ form.
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Slashfic is fan-fiction jargon for a story that focuses on unconventional romantic or sexual pairings between characters, most often male-male pairings, that were not present in the original story.
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In chapter 18, we see Snape being cruel, but we also learn that Snape is working with Dumbledore and McGonagall in the conspiracy — he is, in at least some senses, one of the good guys. And Harry infers that it is necessary, according to the tropes, to have an evil-seeming Potions professor, and Dumbledore allows him to believe that. As a result, Snape’s cruelty begins to look cooperative rather than insane, and it doesn’t serve as an adequate warm-up for Quirrell’s cruelty.
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“Word of God” is fanfiction lingo for an authorial ruling on how to interpret ambiguous text; this is not Eliezer elevating himself to godhood.
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The Oxford Languages / Google definition: “attempt to explain or justify (one’s own or another’s behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.”
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Nerfing is gamer slang for taking something powerful and hobbling it to be much less powerful.
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As a reminder, some terminology:
a wizard or witch is a magical person;
a Muggle is a non-magical person;
a Muggleborn is a wizard or witch who is born to Muggle parents;
a Squib is a person with at least one magical parent but who is themselves non-magical.
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Harry tries hard to reason about this at the beginning of chapter 25. We’ll say more about what Harry figured out in the next section.
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The Weasleys falsify that there is a limit of 1-2 children per magical family. The existence of the Weasleys says: “There is variance; small wizard families are not universal.” In evolutionary biology, the rate of evolution of anything is proportional to its variance (and equal to its heritable covariance with fitness). So when I look at the Weasleys, I see variance, and of course very direct covariance with fitness, with heritability not established but usually personality traits are partially heritable; and then my evolutionary biology goggles tell me, “Well, there’s variance (and covariance via sheer identity), so probably this characteristic will not change all that slowly.” So over a timespan of thousands of years, if there are any genes that produce heritable tendencies to have lots of kids like the Weasleys despite being a wizard, and there’s otherwise enough resources around to support those kids, there will be more and more Weasleys with large wizard families. “All the wizards just decide to have very few kids even though they could easily have more” is not something that explains the persistence of low wizard populations for thousands of years, because you’d have some wizards with a heritable tendency to have more kids than that.
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For example, Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time
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“which stops anyone from getting knowledge of powerful spells out of books, even if you find and read a powerful wizard’s notes they won’t make sense to you, it has to go from one living mind to another.” (Chapter 23)
While I appreciate the existence of this post, and have upvoted it, I was a bit disappointed that virtually all the questions were about “get Eliezer to explain how Deeply Awesome the story was” and none of them challenged Eliezer in any way on areas of weakness in the story (or even areas of weakness in his own responses to some of the softball questions here).
I made a partial transcript of a WWMoR podcast episode with Eliezer from 2020, which included this part:
It’s hard to say what the largest literary flaw is. The story is a big mix of good and bad sides. But the final exam in particular felt weak to me even by its own standards: it’s not a good description of a difficult final encounter.
For me, the gold standard for a final encounter is the ending to the video game Veil of Darkness (I haven’t played it, but Ross Scott’s review recounts the whole thing). Basically we’re an average guy, and we need to defeat an elder vampire who had enslaved a valley of people for a thousand years and stolen all their sunlight. And here’s how the final battle goes: 1) we steal the vampire’s box containing all the stolen sunlight 2) we nail his coffin shut 3) wear a garlic necklace 4) eat a mushroom making us temporarily blind 5) confront him directly 6) he tries to mind-control us but fails due to our blindness 7) he tries to physically attack us but fails due to the necklace 8) we open the box with stolen sunlight at him, thus hitting him with an attack proportional to his age, nice detail isn’t it? 9) he staggers, turns into a bat and flies away to rest in the coffin 10) but the coffin is shut, so we finally stake him and cut off his head. There were a few other attacks too, but these are the main ones.
See what happened? The story makes the average guy defeating a thousand-year-old vampire sound actually believable. Because that’s how much work and preparation it takes to do something difficult. And this lesson you can apply in real life, unlike the lesson from HPMOR’s final exam.
I also criticized HPMOR’s Final Exam at the time, though for reasons of story consistency, rather than narrative.
That said, I don’t think the particular kind of satisfying conclusion you wanted to see works for rationalist fiction like HPMOR. After all, the premise is that all characters, protagonists and antagonists alike, have their own spark of optimization, genre savvy, and so on. So they know how these stories are supposed to go (the Hero wins, the Dark Lord loses, etc.), imagine how they could be defeated, and preempt those scenarios as best they can.
So in a rationalist version of that game finale, the elder vampire takes precautions against having his precious box stolen; protects his coffin from tampering; has overcome his weakness to garlic, or found a workaround (like a gust of wind spell or something), or faked having the weakness in the first place; etc. etc.
The most likely way for a prepared adversary to lose in such a situation is through a surprise, an out-of-sample error. That may not be as narratively satisfying, but it makes a lot more sense than for an elder vampire to die because an average human learned about his weaknesses. As if the vampire wasn’t aware of those weaknesses himself and didn’t have ample time to compensate for them.
An instructive (and fun) example is the case of Cazador Szarr (an antagonist in Baldur’s Gate 3).
(Spoilers, though not very important ones, below for anyone who hasn’t played BG3.)
Cazador is a vampire lord—old and very powerful. Astarion (one of the companion characters in the player’s party, and himself one of Cazador’s spawn, formerly[1] in the vampire lord’s thrall), in the course of telling the player character about Cazador (and explaining why Cazador never turns his spawn into full-fledged independent vampires—despite this being possible and indeed very easy—and instead keeps them as thralls under his absolute command), says that “the biggest threat to a vampire… is another vampire”.
In the normal course of events, it would be totally unbelievable for the player character to defeat Cazador. (Indeed, you would never even learn of his existence.) What makes Cazador’s downfall possible is the introduction of an Outside Context Problem, in the form of… well, the main plot device of the game.
However, the way things proceed is not just that Cazador is happily vampire-lording along, and then one day, bam! plot device’d right in the face! No, instead what happens is that the main plot device is injected into the normal state of affairs, things get shaken up, but what this does is allow for the possibility of Cazador being defeated, by radically changing the balance of forces in a way that he could not have foreseen. Then it’s up to the good guys (i.e., the player character & friends) to take advantage of being the right people in the right place at the right time, and exploit their sudden and temporary advantage, their brief window of opportunity, to take down Cazador.
Thus we get the best of both worlds: the enemy can be powerful and intelligent, but their defeat is nevertheless believable and satisfying.
It’s complicated.
Say a 1000 year old vampire that spent the first 500 years thinking of every possible adversary. They are well defended against anything that existed in the year 1500. Too bad they haven’t really kept up to date with modern tech.
Or, well most people don’t wear a bulletproof vest every day. Often cost and convenience trumps protection when people aren’t expecting to be attacked.
If a powerful antagonist is dumb or shortsighted enough, anyone can kill them, but what stories go out of their way to claim that their Big Bad is dumb? That’s usually the role of side characters or mooks, not of the Big Bad.
Plus it takes a certain kind of survival instinct to survive for 1000 years in the first place.
I agree with the tradeoff of safety vs. convenience, but there are many types of preparation that require a one-off investment, rather than an ongoing inconvenience. Cost, though, should not matter to most antagonists, since they typically far exceed the protagonists’ resources.
Hmm… this setup seems to cheat by withholding from vampires one of their most well-known and archetypal powers, namely the ability to turn into mist. (Dracula in Bram Stoker’s depiction can do this, vampires in D&D can do this, lots and lots of other examples.)
It also cheats by making the vampire stupid:
Why is the coffin in an accessible location—rather than, say, sealed away in a secret chamber that is accessible only via a small passage that can be navigated only by a creature the size of a bat? (Or, if we let the vampire have a mist form ability, a chamber accessible only via tiny, carefully concealed air holes, through which only a gaseous entity can pass.)
Why is there only one coffin, instead of several? (Once again, this particular failure mode is completely absent from Bram Stoker’s novel, for example, where Dracula, who needs to sleep in grave soil from the place where he was buried, has fifty containers of such soil distributed throughout the city; if one is compromised, well, he’ll just use the next one! Such tricks are likewise used by e.g. Strahd von Zarovich—D&D’s most famous vampire—and by many other fictional vampires.)
A thousand years is a long time to not have thought of such things…
Yeah. There were several other attacks that I omitted—something with holy water, something with a book, something with the vampire’s true name—maybe one of them did something about the mist form, or maybe not, I don’t know the lore that well tbh. And yeah, in a thousand years a vampire could probably figure out how to protect themselves pretty well, so to write a story where the average guy wins, there must be a bit of stretch somewhere. Anyway, my point is that this is still a more realistic depiction of how hard problems get solved. Or a more actionable one, at least.
Interestingly, this is another point in which Bram Stoker’s Dracula is very well thought-out. Stoker is well aware that with his rules, Dracula ought to be invincible… But Dracula has the liability that he’s been stultified mentally by centuries of quasi-imprisonment, and so hasn’t yet understood or experiments with his powers.
He is slowly waking up, and doing so, and starting to understand that he can eg. move his coffins himself without hirelings, but only right as the protagonists hunt him down. It is only by hours or minutes do they manage to cut him off from each resource. With another day or two, Dracula would have realized he could, say, just bury a bunch of coffins deep underground in the dirt, and he would be immune from discovery or attack.
Really, the novel is shockingly rationalist, and that’s why I call it ‘the Vampire Singularity’. Dracula is undergoing a hard takeoff, as it were, which is just barely interrupted by the protagonists.
I just read the novel at your recommendation, it’s great! And your analysis of Susanne Delage is cool too. However, I just saw that you added a pretty nasty AI slop picture at the top of the article. It’s a puzzling thing about you: you have a good nose for LLM slop, and rightly hate it, but you don’t have the same reaction to slop from image models (which feels just as much a visceral turn-off to some people—for example, me).
I don’t believe it is “AI slop”, much less that it is “pretty nasty”. I consider AI slop to be low-meaning and low-effort generative media which adds little or nothing to the experience
I assume you are referring to the German Expressionism, alluding to Nosferatu (which is highly relevant for at least two reasons), image illustrating the narrator’s childhood iceskating in a New England Protestant town in decline due to Dracula taking it over; I generated it in MJ after cracking SD, to sum up the horrifying reality of my solution. I put several hours of thought and effort into the concept and creating it, and got what I wanted, so I think this is just a case of de gustibus non est disputandum. I felt it cleverly visually encapsulated the mood of the horror that Gene Wolfe meant to lurk underneath the harmless nearly-bucolic appearance of SD and enhanced the experience.
So I think it satisfies my 3 criteria: it is not low-meaning, was not low-effort, and adds something. But I don’t think this is a good place to discuss it, so I have added a more detailed discussion of that image’s process & meaning to my image slop blog post as an example of how I think I get good image samples.
EDIT: I would be curious about the disagrees. What, exactly, are you disagreeing with? Do you think I am lying about the creation process, the prompt, or the meaning? (I would point out that there was already a short version of this description in the alt text, and has been since I added it in the first place c. November 2023.) Do you disagree that the high concept reflects my SD interpretation? Or what?
People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren’t very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn’t familiar with Substack, so their brain just went “random AI slop site, ignore”.
I think that it’s a pity if people write off my SD page because they failed to understand the meaningful illustration I put effort into creating and didn’t, say, check the alt text to see if they were missing something or wonder why such an unusual website would have “AI slop”; and I agree that this may be a case of “things you can’t countersignal”.
However, I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations. I don’t usually write for such readers, and I definitely do not write my Gene Wolfe essays for them!
So unless people can point to something actually bad about the illustration, which makes it fail to satisfy my intent—as opposed to something bad about the readers like being dumb and ignorant and writing it off as “AI slop” when it’s not—then I decline to change it.
Sorry, I wrote a response and deleted it. Let me try again.
I don’t know what exactly makes AI images so off-putting to me. The bare fact is that this image to me looks obviously AI-made and really unpleasant to see. I don’t know why some people react to AI images this way and others don’t.
My best guess is that AI images would begin to look more “cursed” to you if you spent some days or weeks drawing stuff with pencil and paper, maybe starting with some Betty Edwards exercises. But that’s just a guess, and maybe you’ve done that already.
I have some of the same feeling, but internally I’ve mostly pinned it to two prongs of repetition and ~status.
ChatGPT’s writing is increasingly disliked by those who recognize it. The prose is poor in various ways, but I’ve certainly read worse and not been so off-put. Nor am I as off-put when I first use a new model, but then I increasingly notice its flaws over the next few weeks. The main aspect is that the generated prose is repetitive across the writings which ensures we can pick up on the pattern. Such as making it easy to predict flaws. Just as I avoid many generic power fantasy fiction as much of it is very predictable in how it will fall short even though many are still positive value if I didn’t have other things to do with my time.
So, I think a substantial part is that of recognizing the style, there being flaws you’ve seen in many images in the past, and then regardless of whether this specific actual image is that problematic, the mind associates it with negative instances and also being overly predictable.
Status-wise this is not entirely in a negative status game sense. A generated image is a sign that it was probably not that much effort for the person making it, and the mind has learned to associate art with effort + status to a degree, even if indirect effort + status by the original artist the article is referencing. And so it is easy to learn a negative feeling towards these, which attaches itself to the noticeable shared repetition/tone. Just like some people dislike pop in part due to status considerations like being made by celebrities or countersignaling of not wanting to go for the most popular thing, and then that feeds into an actual dislike for that style of musical art.
But this activates too easily, a misfiring set of instincts, so I’ve deliberately tamped it down on myself; because I realized that there are plenty of images which five years ago I would have been simply impressed and find them visually appealing. I think this is an instinct that is to a degree real (generated images can be poorly made), while also feeding on itself that makes it disconnected from past preferences. I don’t think that the poorly made images should notably influence my enjoyment of better quality images, even if there is a shared noticeable core. So that’s my suggestion.
‘Repetition’ is certainly a drawback to the ChatGPT style: we have lost em dashes and tricolons for a generation. But it can’t in its own right explain the reaction to the SD image, because… ‘German Expressionist linocut’ just doesn’t describe a default, or even a common, output style of any image generative model ever. (That’s part of why I like to use ‘linocut’ as a keyword, and for better or worse, people who might reach for ‘German Expressionist’ these days typically reach for Corporate Memphis instead.)
It could however be a kneejerk reaction: “oh no, this is a generated image, therefore it is exhaustingly overused and boring [even if it isn’t actually]”.
I have a bit of a problem with Graham’s argument. As you continue to design things, two different processes happen:
your mastery of the purely technical aspects of the craft improve (e.g. you learn to use more tools and use them better, you learn more techniques, etc). This makes you better at translating the image in your head into an actual material thing. It improves your agency. It does not mean your taste is better, but rather, whatever your taste is, the product will match it more closely and will be less random;
you will be subject to more aesthetics and examples of other people’s work and this will in turn affect and transform your own aesthetics. To some extent, this might mean “improving” them insofar as you yourself aren’t necessarily aware of what exactly best tickles you. So in a parallel to the first process, where the thing-outside-you better matches the thing-inside-you, you may also learn how to make the thing-inside-you better match the thing-that-gives-you-good-feelings. But also, as you get exposed to all this churn of aesthetics and of your own style, your feelings change too. And this I surmise is a purely horizontal change. It’s not about them becoming better. In fact it’s often about you becoming bored of the common, obvious thing, and moving on to the next, and then the next, in pursuit of a new dopamine kick as the old stuff is now samey and unremarkable, like a junkie. You end up with a taste that is probably unusual, extravagant, or at least much more complex than the average Joe’s.
I think 2) is what people actually mean by “good taste”. I don’t think it’s necessarily actual “good taste” in any objective sense, but rather, the taste of those who happen to all be very good at their craft and dominate the scene, so they are trend-setters. But how often have the fortunes of art turned completely? A century’s artists if presented with the works of those two hundred years later would have likely called them in horrible taste. Has taste just been improved through time, like a science? And why is it then that the present-day ultimate taste seems to often resonate less with the average person than the old one? By what metric is it precisely best?
The situation with the AI thing is actually kind of relevant. If you see it for the first time you might actually be left in awe by it. If you see it a hundred times you pick up on the patterns and the tricks. I’ve experienced the same with human authors—writers especially, you just read enough of them at you start noticing the prose tricks and style features repeating over and over again and at some point it feels like it’s stale and meaningless. But does that mean that individually each of those things are just objectively Bad in some sense? It’s not them who changed. They’re the same that impressed you the first time. You changed.
On the other hand, a vampire who had gone undefeated for a thousand years might also get overconfident and sloppy.
You are welcome to ask your own questions here and I will try to solicit answers, though I make no promises—it’s a busy time. I’m interested to hear what you want to know!
Alright. Long stream-of-consciousness comment incoming. I do apologize for my tone below a bit, but refining it to make it more neutral would have taken even more of my time than this did; unfortunately, it has ended up as less of a compilation of questions and more just bullet points where I complain about what I disliked. Many of my own criticisms of and disappointments with HPMOR reflect parts of what su3su2u1 wrote about a long time ago.[1] Unsurprisingly, HPMOR fans find it tough to read such obviously sneery commentary, so I think Alexander Wales’s excellent review of the story serves as a more than worthwhile replacement (and perhaps useful background reading for my comment here). But to write out my own thoughts explicitly and perhaps focus on what seem to me like the key topics:
In Who’s the Main Character, Eliezer repeats part of what he wrote about a long time ago, namely asserting that HPMOR is not about one person, one character, one guy against the whole world made of NPCs (even though Harry thinks of himself that way sometimes), but is instead significantly more complex and realistic. Specifically, Eliezer claims there are 4 characters which make decisions that move the story forward. Perhaps this may be what he intended in the story, but it definitely does not read that way to me as I read it. There is one character proactively moving the plot forward over the course of the events that unfold, and that character is Quirrell.
Dumbledore? He doesn’t take agency over anything for 90% of the story; he had set up the pieces well in advance, and he shows up at the end, but the actual day-to-day activities and the events that result in the ultimate confrontation between the hero and the villain unfold without his direct involvement. He is more a force of nature bringing forth Acts of God in a way even he doesn’t understand than an actual character making deliberate, reasoned decisions to influence what happens, over the course of the actual plot.
Hermione? Actually, seriously, what does Hermione do[2] that matters to the primary plot? The SPHEW arc was (rightfully IMO) seen by many readers at the time as boring; that wasn’t because fighting bullies is inherently boring,[3] or because they were all sexist misogynists, but because it has very little to do with what the story was about before, and with what the story was building to afterwards.
Harry? Harry also does very little in the story; he talks a lot, he’s the main character, he speaks about his ideals and what he wants to achieve etc, but what actual agency does he take over events that matter to the primary plot of the story? He serves as Quirrell’s puppet: Quirrell says the afterlife doesn’t exist, Harry believes him; Quirrell says we should storm Azkaban, Harry says ‘of course!’; Quirrell lies in bed sick, Harry’s thoughts are only on Quirrell; Quirrell literally casts the Avada Kadavra curse at an Auror doing his job, Harry doesn’t care one bit after hearing one line of explanation from his mentor. Harry says he wants to defeat Death, but does he do anything to bring that about?
No! Quirrell is the one who defeats death and becomes immortal, Quirrell is the one who revives Hermione, Quirrell is the one who brings Harry the Ultimate Stone to Do Everything. Harry just mopes about complaining about how unfair the world is and how bad it is that everything isn’t Optimal, and everyone else just solves all his issues for him.[4] Harry is literally fated to bring apart the very stars in heaven, and Quirrell is the one who solves this by forcing him into a carefully-constructed Unbreakable Vow that literally prevents him from saying and doing world-ending crap within days of its enactment!
For all the Trope Awareness Harry and even HPMOR itself both signal, Villains Act, Heroes Mope About is in full force here.
I recall reading somewhere (can’t recall the link off the top of my head) that the difference between a nerd reader and a “regular” reader is that a nerd reader cares most about worldbuilding, while “regular” readers care most about characters. Nerdiness aside, Eliezer obviously cares very deeply about constructing good characters (even writing advice about how to do that, and talking about this at length in this very post). So let’s talk about Harry’s character arc for a second here.
I… find it kind of difficult to do that, because there’s very little to talk about. This is deeply disappointing, given he’s the primary viewpoint character in a story totaling over 500 thousand words. Eliezer likes to talk about the fact that Harry fails a lot in HPMOR. And yes, he does fail.[5] But what’s critical is that there are almost never real consequences to him failing.
Harry messes up and breaks his commitments and loses the Time Turner… oh wait, no problem, Quirrell (ha, of course it’s Quirrell! who else could be allowed to have real agency?) just happens to have a Time Turner himself, so none of that matters! Harry tries to blackmail and deceive McGonagall at the beginning to obtain information and enforce his will (him, a kid, entirely unfamiliar with the magical world, versus her, a witch, old, experienced, respected) - surely that will result in her losing respect for him and his reputation being dragged into the toilets… ha, just kidding, Minerva now treats him almost as an equal! Harry is thrust into a deep and important conversation with the wily and politically powerful Lucius Malfoy where he doesn’t know what’s going on… Lucius ends up confused and impressed with Harry. Harry accidentally lets his mouth speak faster than his brain can catch up and he cures Snape’s obsession with Lily Potter… no negative consequences flowing from that. Harry escalates and escalates and escalates against Snape because he thinks this is a fairy tale and he’s the hero[6] - surely now he will get the slapdown from Wise Old Wizards like Dumbledore… no, of course not, Harry outmaneuvers and outwits everyone in the story to get his way!
He doesn’t even learn any lesson from that; in the Wizengamot meeting, he does the exact same thing to protect Hermione, in front of wizards more powerful, old, and knowledgeable than he can imagine, and… he succeeds masterfully, obviously! Does he do that because of his deep understanding of wizard psychology? No, he just Plays the Game at a Different Level with his half-baked, half-forgotten first-year-undergrad-in-psych facts and logic, and the brains of all these hundred-year-old politicians and wizards are blown.
In fact, there is only one character Harry doesn’t get to outwit in the game of Levels in this story, and that character is… Quirrell (of course). Harry realizes he has a Dark Side and he needs to keep it in check… ha, just kidding, the Dark Side solves his every issue and he never faces negative consequences from employing it! Harry breaks Bellatrix out of Azkaban because Quirrell said so… and the consequences are tiny and far-off and frankly I can’t be bothered to care about them because they only appear in Chapter 110 and that chapter sucks for unrelated reasons that break my suspension of disbelief so bad I can’t even think about Flamel.[7]
Harry learns the power of Friendship and teamwork and cooperation from the Ender’s Game pastiche, and he realizes going at it alone won’t be enough… and then he kills (read: brutally and bloodily slaughters like cattle[8]) all the Death Eaters and vanquishes Voldemort through his own wand. Ironic, isn’t it?
The one action he proactively takes in this story, he does all by himself; if that’s not Aesop Amnesia, I don’t know what is.
I really can’t sum it up any better than Alexander Wales did, in explaining how Harry actually undergoes a character involution if anything:
“Harry is never given any incentive to change, and never really shows any change. The character growth arc is implied, but for the most part not actually present. 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.”
What’s worse about the brutal murder part isn’t that it happened. In fact, it’s totally ok for it to have happened; the world needs an actually good Rationalfic where the hero says “screw the Batman ethos, it’s nonsensical from a consequentialist perspective!” The problem is that, as revealed in Chapter 115, the story is embarrassed about it.
It doesn’t strike the triumphalist note of success over the enemy[9], it doesn’t backtrack and have Harry admit remorse or regret over the killing of Death Eaters, it just kind of wants us to forget about all that by just focusing on Quirrell (of course) as the one not deserving of being killed, because nobody deserves to be killed and he should instead one day live out his dream of sailing to the stars. Too bad for all the other Nameless Mooks that just got slaughtered, who may have had their own dreams…
Ironically, I guess in HPMOR one supervillain death is a tragedy and all Death Eaters dead is a statistic.
While HPMOR is realistic in a sense (I suppose), the SPHEW arc is not. It presents a cartoonish view of bullies and their psychology, and does not attempt at any point to explain why reasonable authority figures like Minerva, who obviously both care deeply about ensuring the psychological and especially physical safety of the students and also have a ton of power over and respect over the students, allow something like this to happen.
I can understand why Dumbledore didn’t step in; he believes heroes are born in Tough Times when they realize authority figures won’t save them. How about everyone else? The entire system, the oversight over Hogwarts from the rest of the magical world, the families of the students being bullied… it’s the Wild West out here and nobody is batting an eye?
Even if that can be explained in context, it needs the explanation! Otherwise it just looks and seems cartoonish and turns people off (as the SPHEW arc indeed did).
Chapter 110 has Dumbledore hold the Idiot Ball very strongly, in a way Eliezer said no major character in the story would. This unfortunately both shatters the suspension of disbelief and the reader’s immersion into the story, and also makes the chapter feel worse and worse with every re-reading.
Eliezer writes about how Orson Scott Card said “while a conflict between good and evil might hold the attention of some readers, a conflict between good and good can be much stronger than that.” The problem is that, in HPMOR itself, the grand finale, the grand conflict between Harry and Quirrell… doesn’t happen because of a conflict between good and good. It doesn’t happen because of fundamentally irreconcilable moral differences between the protagonist and the villain. It doesn’t happen because Harry and Quirrell disagree over any predictive aspect of how the world will be if certain actions are taken.
It happens because of prophecy. Quirrell would have no reason to go against Harry, and indeed did not go against Harry, until he heard Trelawney’s second prophecy. As revealed in Parseltongue, where there can be no lies, Quirrell would have loved to just play a game with Harry for the rest of time where they just keep themselves entertained and fool the masses, where he teaches Harry the secret of the new Horcrux spell and makes him immortal and keeps him as his equal for all of eternity. It is entirely an external impetus that causes them to go against one another, like the Voice of God telling them they should fight instead of there being an organic cause of their battle.
This is very much less interesting than the alternative.
I’m too tired now to keep lengthening this comment, even though I have multiple other issues with HPMOR. Perhaps I’ll expand on them some other time.
Even though I genuinely and unironically enjoyed reading the story, unlike the Sneer Club
As opposed to having stuff be done to her (being framed, being killed, being revived… notice how she is not the actor, the agent, in any of that)
But wait… more on that later!
Until Chapter 114, but wait… more on that later!
Kind of. Not really in any important ways… more on that later!
At the very least this is actually talked about in the text itself as a blunder from Harry, but ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS! Quirrell (ha, of course it was… ok, you guys get the point by now) says it was a dumb thing to do, Harry ultimately agrees, and… nothing comes of it. No lasting consequences, no real lesson
More on this later!
How’s that for a death-hating protagonist!
Except by emphasizing Sunshine and Friendship and Goodness… after dozens of wizards just got sliced
Thanks, this is great and I unironically enjoyed reading it. (I personally wasn’t following HPMOR discourse back in the day. Maybe lots of people wrote lots of great critiques, but I wasn’t there then and didn’t read them, so I don’t already know all this stuff.)
As you already admitted, there are only a few actual questions here, but there are a few. When I get a chance I will attempt to extract the questions and see if I can get a response from Eliezer for you. Please do not hold your breath, it will be at least several days and possibly longer (or forever), because as I said, it’s a busy time.
But I do appreciate you writing this up, thanks.
As a partial illustration of how HPMOR could have been improved, I want to point to Following the Phoenix as an excellent alternative ending for the story (starting at the time of Hermione’s trial at the Wizengamot).
It’s not perfect, of course; and, in particular, the lore/worldbuilding has more contradictions and problems than HPMOR’s did (unsurprising, given it’s Eliezer’s world, so he knows its internal logic best). But, without spoiling anything, it solves several of the problems I have pointed to: the Harry/Quirrell conflict is organic and not artificially constructed, nobody holds the Idiot Ball,[1] Harry and Dumbledore and Hermione and many other characters actually do relevant stuff that becomes critical for the plot, and the ending is just… so fun and interesting and exciting compared to the one-flash-of-brilliant-thinking we got in chapter 114 of HPMOR.
Not even the side that ends up losing! It’s quite remarkable in that way
HPMOR does have some problems, notably, the climax being overdetermined by the story that had it in mind but not living up to how well the story was executed; and also causing a sort of allergy in some people; but HPMOR is one of the coolest pieces of literature out there, with its ending still being great for the reasons awesome literature is great; Following the Phoenix is a nice piece of fanfiction, but it’s just that- fanfiction[1].
I think the conflict between Harry and Voldemort makes a huge ton less sense in that alternative ending. And there are straightforwardly terrible pieces of worldbuilding, characters being stupid, etc.; e.g., I don’t see how random muggles without gov authorization SENDING NUCLEAR MISSILES to Scotland could be related to the author not being aware of the internal logic of Eliezer’s world.
To be clear, it’s great if people enjoy it, but this is normal fanfiction with some fun parts; it is not on the level of interesting books, and definitely not at the level of HPMOR.
Awesome literature is typically considered great for reasons such as:
great character arcs
multiple characters having agency and changing the outcome of the story through their actions
the conflicts between characters having at their root core fundamentally incompatible approaches to life, as opposed to external events forcing them to be at each other throats (“fiction isn’t about what happened, once; fiction is about what happens)
compelling writing
powerful themes that get reflected in the logic of the world being created
HPMOR fails at the first 3 for reasons I have explained in detail in my previous comment.
The writing is sometimes compelling, in moments where the Rule of Cool applies (the Dementors = Death scene, for example) and when there are action scenes (Azkaban, Chapter 104). But for the rest of it, dialogues are George Lucas-level stilted (“General of Chaos,” “Most Ancient House,” inappropriate half-baked jargon-dense explanations of Intro to Psych experiments, etc.), and the story is extremely long and slow-moving, with a very low density of plot-relevant events per word count. HPMOR is as long as the first 5 Harry Potter books combined, but covers significantly fewer plot points, and persistently analyzes and re-analyzes every event that happens from all possible angles. It’s quantity over quality, magnified to the 3rd power.
HPMOR has interesting themes, but the way it approaches them (for reasons reflected both in my writing and in the explanations given by the two reviewers I linked in my previous comment) is badly flawed.
What the book does do right is world-building.[1] And that’s fine. Some people care a lot more about this than about all the other stuff I’ve mentioned. And as I wrote above, those people are typically considered “nerds” in pop culture. I won’t begrudge nerds for liking their nerd power fantasy, since taste is mostly subjective, but comparing it to the rest of great “literature” necessarily brings in other standards of what counts as proper fiction.
Yeah, it’s not a perfect story. But it seems to me that this type of stuff happens far less than in the original HPMOR (as I have documented in my previous comment).
So is HPMOR. Not just denotatively (obviously it’s HP fanfic), but also in the sense that Eliezer determined what he wanted to write by reading other HP fanfic, not by reading the original books. It’s doubly fanfiction, even!
At least when it comes to the impersonal rules of magic (Time-Turners, Dementors, Transfiguration, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Interdict of Merlin, etc. all make much more sense and have a significantly tighter internal logic than in other HP stories, including the originals). The societal structures and organizations that are part of HPMOR make no sense and members of them merely act as NPC foils for our protagonist
Not even arguing with these points, I am sure there is a lot of acclaimed literature that tells stories where nothing happens or characters have no agency or change little. One might enjoy the writing for many different reasons; literature can be great even if you don’t see something you enjoy in it.
The moments that stood out to me in HPMOR were not those of action. HPMOR teaches its readers to want to think better; and makes them value life. Our children’s children’s children won’t learn that Death once existed on the ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear that. That sort of thing. There are also scenes of well-crafted comedy and of stargazing and of doing the impossible; there are beautifully executed plots and more Easter eggs than you imagine.
One of the quotes I use to sell the idea of reading HPMOR to people is one of a literary critic who says she distinguishes HPMOR from all other fanfiction and thinks everyone should read it.
Literature is not often crafted the way HPMOR was crafted. There are moments of appreciation of what the author did there, which are rare in books; and HPMOR is full of that.
Even without the whole thing of making people more culturally rationalist, the book is great just because it’s an awesome piece of fiction.
What is Dumbledore doing, that carries the Idiot Ball in the Mirror scene?
It begins with him having Quirrell hostage in an inescapable trap, proceeds through a conversation in which nothing of consequence occurs (nor is anything of consequence concealed), and ends with his assumption about the trap being invalidated by a cause nothing he could have done would have affected.
Or, with foreknowledge, it begins with the appearance of a trap, which Dumbledore knows will fail because he will fall very soon and Voldemort will not be beaten by his own hand. It proceeds through a conversation that is for show for both of them, possibly directed by prophecy because Harry is a hidden audience. And it ends where Dumbledore knows it must, without any action he could have taken to affect it.
Chapter 110 Dumbledore is an over-the-top caricature of himself who has months to set up the perfect trap, while having access to both his century-old deep knowledge of magic and to some of the most powerful artifacts in the world (Elder Wand, Mirror of Erised, Line of Merlin Unbroken, etc.), but he gets wiped off the gameboard in minutes. This happens in a way that fulfills his enemy’s ideal scenario, any countermeasures destroyed immediately by the artifact he himself introduces into the plot.
Readers at the time thought this was so out of character for Dumbledore that this was likely all fake, and the Mirror was simply showing Quirrell his CEV (see also 2, 3, among others):
And before you think or say that this was intentional or designed by Eliezer to generate one more layer of mystery in the story’s final arc, note that we know it wasn’t:
Knowing what we know now, the one answer that stands out to me is that Dumbledore’s heart just wasn’t in it.
Dumbledore put together a legitimate trap, he did try to stop Voldemort all by himself, but he didn’t do his absolute best. This is why:
Dumbledore though that if he won against Voldemort, it would mean that he would go on to become the evil wizard Harry Potter would have to defeat. And it sure seems like Dumbledore spent a lot of time thinking about that.
This insecurity of his shows in his past interactions with Harry. Every time Dumbledore and Harry confront each other, Dumbledore seems to be on the back foot, a little bit too willing to question himself and his own convictions. Which doesn’t make sense for “a wise old wizard, talking to a first year”, but makes a lot of sense for “a good old wizard who knows that he may fall to darkness, talking to a young hero prophecised to end him if he does”. In every interaction, Dumbledore is asking himself—“is he just young and naive, or is he pointing out a real flaw in me that will in time become my undoing?”
I still do not know what you think he should have done, either in the scenario where he knows he will fail due to prophecy, or the one where he does not.
… almost anything but what he did? “Better than the approximately-worst option used” is a low bar to clear.
In the scenario where he knows that prophecy foretells an outcome incompatible with his success here, his major decision point is long-past; he has reason to do it anyway (presumably prophetic reason). I see nothing he could do which is obviously better, and the conversation may itself be part of the keyhole future path.
If he doesn’t, this is still far from an “approximately-worst option.” It’s still a really good trap unless Quirrell knows the Mirror is going to be the trap, knows Harry’s Cloak is the genuine article that will still hide him from the Mirror, and can trick and coerce Harry into coming with him, which is three different things Dumbledore has good reason to think he probably doesn’t know. The latter two are both achieved only through adventures Dumbledore doesn’t know about—Azkaban, and Harry using up his time-loop password on the first day. As Lucius told Draco—any plan that relies on three things going right for you is at the limit of possible plans, and the real limit is two.
I was in interesting in reading the first time to think and also haven’t thought that all the chaos is only my own stupidity. But on further rereads it seems very strange that Quirrell says “My immortal existence must depend on discovering what trap you have set, and finding a way to escape from it, as soon as possible. But let us pointlessly delay to talk of other matters first.” and Dumbledore just… goes along with that. Shouldn’t it be incredibly suspicious? Pointing out that Voldemort is completely sure that it’s safe for him.
As I guess, Voldemort is indeed just much smarter than Dumbledore. Just as Voldemort said. And Dumbledore himself said. And everyone said. Harry just didn’t believe that because why then Voldemort didn’t win in 3 days? And in previous chapters we had found the answer: Voldemort was just a role, Riddle just liked played into all that war more than wanted to win.
So I suspect that Riddle said that knowing that Dumbledore isn’t actually cunning, he pointed attention to Weasley twins etc. So Riddle sure he will not notice.
So Dumbledore is being stupid, but very predictably stupid, not suddenly stupid. So I think that is how it can be not an Idiot Ball. Though I don’t dare to actually claim that because I didn’t actually predict that in advance (in my first read, I mean).
P.S. Oh, also he should (falsely) thought that trap will work before strange Quirrell phrase because he doesn’t know that Harry leaked Resurrection Stone to Voldemort. About cloak not sure, maybe Dumbledore didn’t think about it, maybe didn’t expect that Voldemort will be able to get it, or maybe the cloak will not be able to save Voldemort and Dumbledore just didn’t want to lose Harry.
Minor comment but Quirrel doesn’t have a time turner; he just figured out a way to hack the protective shell around Harry’s (which, given it was made to protect against interference by an eleven year old, it’s pretty reasonable he can do).
Fair point!
To be fair here, there was a diegetic reason Harry couldn’t just kill him (hundreds of horcruxes in unknown locations), so really it was between crucio’ing him into insanity vs obliviating him; both are equally effective so the crucio would’ve been just torturing him for fun, which Harry didn’t want to do. (Also he did feel really bad about the Death Eaters the next day when he found out he’d killed like half the Slytherins’ parents including Draco’s, though admittedly he seemed to find Draco’s sorrow in particular the most upsetting.)
I acknowledge there is an in-universe explanation, but I have two responses.
The first is the fact that there is a reason Harry can’t just kill Quirrell doesn’t affect the overall vibe and ethos of the scene. I’m not trying to critique specific plot holes,[1] but instead to point to something different in that bullet point. It acts as a deflection and distraction, a Sunshine-glorified backtracking that’s thematically inappropriate because it doesn’t fit with the literal text of what Chapter 114 was about previously.
But secondly, and more importantly, this unfortunately just leads to the problem I mentioned in the final bullet point. Namely that it turns this entire interaction, this interpersonal conflict, this moment of narrative tension… into yet another Puzzle with External Constraints that must be Solved through Intelligence. It once again glorifies the only actual virtue worth the piece of paper it’s printed on in the world of HPMOR,[2] and once again depersonalizes the scenario and has the main character overcome something extrinsic instead of confronting his own flaws/fears/uncertainties.
It wouldn’t be particularly fun to do that, and it would come across as nitpicky. Separately, I acknowledge that HPMOR, as the nerdy story it is, tries quite hard (and generally succeeds!) to maintain good internal logic
Namely intelligence
To me it feels like the issue is just, killing someone actively threatening your life in self-defence is acceptable, and killing someone who is entirely in your power just as a means to further some other goal is not. Which is actually a fairly common moral standard (e.g.: any country that does not have the death penalty). It’s not ground breaking but neither it feels contradictory to me. Harry explicitly also feels guilty about the fact that to some extent he thinks killing the Death Eaters was also instrumentally beneficial, even though in that context it was also totally self defence. But it turns out self defence gave him a chance to do something that his darker desires wanted anyway, and he does feel guilty over that (perhaps unreasonably so).
Quirrell of course is now immortal so anyway the question of whether he should be killed or not is purely academic.
Not necessarily? “What magic can make, magic can corrupt”, also there’s no need[1] to know[2] locations of horcruxes—for all we know, a rare version of Summoning Charm could work.
“He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.”, chapter 26
“If she knew in very vague terms what the spell was supposed to do, or she was only partially wrong, then the spell would work as originally described in the book, not the way she’d been told it should.”, chapter 22
We know for certain that there are types of magic that could be used to get information about the locations of Horcruxes. Because Hermione had one.
It’s clearly not common knowledge. But if some secret spells could spot that Hermione’s soul is displaced, there is likely other magic that could be used to divine the location more precisely.
Even if reliable means of locating Horcruxes could be obtained, dismantling Voldemort’s network would still be a megaproject.
If spell returns the actual distance instead of “is the distance greater than a fixed threshold built into the spell”, then relevant technomagic already exists under name “trilateration” (what GPS does, essentially).
Totally within power of Harry’s generation, in my opinion, so they could take that option. “And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one,” as Gandalf said at the council deciding what to do with the One Ring.
Some other criticisms:
Harry talks a big game about the scientific method and how a priori reasoning doesn’t actually work for coming to grips with how reality actually works—you have to test things, and you should expect to be really confused a lot of the time. But in the actual text of the story he repeatedly encounters a situation, reasons about how the world must be (sometimes on the basis of scientific knowledge like timeless physics[1] or “astrology is fake, obviously”[2] which he should be legitimately way less certain of after chapter 1, and often via extremely flimsy lines of reasoning or speculation[3]), and comes to confident conclusions about how the world must be. And repeatedly, the story has it that his first guess/hypothesis/a priori conclusion is correct, and he either gets a new munchkin-superpower (which no one in the world had previously discovered), or impresses the other characters, and the audience with his brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like deductions.
The only only place where his a priori reasoning clearly doesn’t work, because reality is more confusing than his theories is about the nature of magic. But the after a few scenes, the story basically completely drops that thread. There’s no payoff.
Overall, the story gives lip service what real science and rationality and entails, but doesn’t reliably live up to that standard.
“Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough,” Harry said. “I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time—but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there’s not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn’t see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing.”
(https://hpmor.com/chapter/28)
“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well, project onto the night sky.”(https://hpmor.com/chapter/101)
(This one is not as bad, actually. Making an argument more than just confidently asserting a conclusion.)
“If the Dementor could not reach through your Patronus on some level, Albus Dumbledore, you would not see a naked man painful to look upon...”
″It’s not like Dementors can actually talk, or think; the structure they have is borrowed from your own mind and expectations...” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/45)
And then later...
”They had no intelligence of their own, they were just wounds in the world, their form and structure was borrowed from others’ expectations. People had been able to negotiate with them, offer them victims in exchange for cooperation, only because they believed Dementors would bargain. So if Harry believed hard enough that the voids would turn and go, they would turn and go.” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/57)
What?! Dude, what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? You literally just came up with some ideas that seem to make sense to you, and you’re confidently acting on them as if you know that they’re true.
Thank you for this description of why Hermione isn’t really a second protagonist, I was struggling to put a very similar feeling into words. She simply doesn’t resonate in the same way that Harry does, even though in various ways she is set up to do “protagonisty things” taken at face value.
Harry is proactively moving the plot forward—he decided very early on that he was going to try turn Draco to the light side and succeeds in the task.
This is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, because Draco is irrelevant to the final confrontation in HPMOR.[1] (If turning Draco to the light side counted, then Harry has done a dozen other things “moving the plot forward”—but he hasn’t! The plot doesn’t move forward unless either Quirrell sets up an adventure or Trelawney gives her second prophecy).
It does, however, accomplish something actually good, namely giving Draco an actual character arc. I’d say he’s the only character in HPMOR that gets a solid character arc. Too bad he doesn’t matter.
What in the story changes if Draco never existed? A few chats with Lucius have their lines removed, Hermione gets framed for killing another one of her acquaintances, Neville or whomever gets Legilimensed into opening the forbidden door in Chapter 104, and… what else? Harry had mostly figured out the genetic laws of magic himself already
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Draco doesn’t matter. There’s more than one plot line than the final confrontation. Also, the fact that Draco is sympathetic to Harry and got his mother back affects the valence of the ending and where we expect the story to go afterwards (compared to, e.g., if Draco still sees himself the same way he did in the beginning).
None of this affects whether Draco is one of the characters who get the check mark for “proactively moving the plot forward.”
Snape also has story threads about him, but notice that he didn’t receive a check mark in the post.
Ender’s Game battles go another way entirely. More science with Hermione instead of Draco. Hermione doesn’t get framed because the only reason she was is to remove Lucius and protect Harry from his retribution for messing with Draco. Hermione doesn’t die. Trelawney gives no prophecies as Harry is not driven to extremes this year. Final confrontation doesn’t happen at all. Harry helps Quirrell obtain the Stone to save his life, he has no reason to suspect him as nobody has died. I think Azkaban arc stays the same, the rest is completely different.
I don’t think the text as-written supports this inference at all. Harry being driven to extremes[1] is the cause of bringing apart the very stars in heaven? The latter is an extreme action and much more likely the result of his drive to fight against Death and to enact World Optimization, which he would do anyway, not because of Draco or any specific events that Hermione went through. Harry knew the magical world in HPMOR was crazy and exploitable all the way from the beginning (with his arbitrage scheme).
Except there’s also this, from Chapter 108:
“And you also thought,” Harry said, even with his dark side’s patterns he had to work to keep his voice level and cool, “that two weeks in Azkaban would improve Miss Granger’s disposition, and get her to stop being a bad influence on me. So you somehow arranged for there to be newspaper stories calling for her to be sent to Azkaban, rather than some other penalty.”
Professor Quirrell’s lips drew up in a thin smile. “Good catch, boy. Yes, I thought she might serve as your Bellatrix. That particular outcome would also have provided you with a constant reminder of how much respect was due the law, and helped you develop appropriate attitudes toward the Ministry.”
Harry holds the Idiot Ball in Chapter 86 for not putting two and two together and figuring out all the clues about Voldemort’s existence matched with Quirrell, prior to Hermione’s death. The Aura of Doom, the ‘always one level higher than you’ combined with the David Monroe persona and Moody’s Constant Vigilance, the sickly Defense Professor who is always cursed to bring doom to himself and his position… none of this has anything to do with any deaths. There are alternative HPMOR endings where this flash of idiocy is avoided.
Indeed, the reason Harry ultimately figures out it was Quirrell in Chapter 104 isn’t because he suddenly had a flash of insight about Hermione or Firenze, but because Quirrell’s explanation for why he was at the door wasn’t predictable ex ante, and it felt too storybook-y for everything to do down at that exact time, and Quirrell’s plots were too much like Harry’s dark side.
This all happened because Quirrell sought to trick Harry into helping him with the Stone; if Quirrell had simply told Harry about where the Stone is in Chapter 102 and convinced him to keep quiet by saying Dumbledore has been tricked by Flamel into hiding this artifact (as in this alternative ending), Harry very likely[2] would have said ‘yes’ to one more adventure to save his mentor’s life. For Harry, this moment would serve as a first stepping stone towards defeating Death forever. In the context of the story, Quirrell’s decision makes perfect sense,[3] but the point is that the deaths were not the trigger for Harry peering beyond the veil and seeing the truth.
By mundane-in-the-grand-scheme events
Based on the story as-written
Because Quirrell, cold-hearted as he is, lacks the necessary theory of mind to understand positive emotions like the at-the-time love and care Harry felt towards him
But, turning Draco is a part of the plot to move forward. There is a main plot-thread that things center around, but it seems odd to me to say that just because he didn’t matter for the big ending he is thus irrelevant. Stories have multiple branches.
There is a much more fundamental disagreement here between us than whether Draco is “part of the plot to move forward.” The best way I can summarize it is I disagree that there even is a “main plot-thread that things center around.” In the interest of time, I’ll quote another important part of Alexander Wales’s review:
Draco doesn’t proactively move the plot forward because he does not change the structure/environment/ethos of the story through any of his actions. Same for Harry, same for Hermione; they are reactive and go along with the flow instead of changing anything. Dumbledore changes stuff, but that’s all prior to the start of the story and it happens in a way he doesn’t himself understand (after viewing the Halls of Prophecy, he serves a conduit for Fate as opposed to an agent optimizing for his own goals). Quirrell, on the other hand, is the one that actually acts intentionally to change the structure of what’s going on.
Also note that even if I granted you everything you wrote in your comment (which I don’t), the fact that Draco would be part of the plot to move forward wouldn’t even imply Draco is a character moving the plot forward. The example you’ve given is of stuff happening to Draco, as opposed to by Draco.
I agree Draco wasn’t moving the plot forward much by himself, but I was going with the focus of the comment you were replying to, in which this is Harry moving a part of the plot forward—the plot-point being that people like Draco can have their beliefs challenged and learn, that people are products of their environment to varying degrees but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them, and also showing off the various ways people react to differences in belief.
That is, while this doesn’t have huge effects in story, though I disagree that it has none, it was a core plot point with a specific message it was trying to extol. And so Harry pushing this through does affect things.
(I’m interested in reading this but the lack of line-breaks makes it pretty hard)
Hope it’s better now!
Okay, gonna ask a hardball question.
Ch 59:
But! Back in ch 30:
How did you miss this glaring oversight?
Brooms accelerate and decelerate (until they reach cruising speed in a few seconds, or they stop). But they don’t accelerate faster down than up; in that sense, they’re don’t work on classical physics.
I always wondered why, at the before-Christmas battle, Hermione didn’t give her wish to Sunshine to incentivize them to work together instead of defecting and turning traitor (that is to say- make the wish for sunshine and announce it before the battle.) It think it was the obvious course to unite the army, and it was the obvious Hermione thing to do. Did she fail to do this just because Dumbledore got to her first, or was this a true blind spot on her part?
Eliezer says: “There are always infinite policies to consider. I didn’t consider that one and neither did young Hermione.”
Ah- thank you. In retrospect what seems like “the obvious thing” to me is not always so.
One question which this interview touches on a bit but doesn’t address directly, which I find myself curious about: what were the core elements of the story which were The Point, which the rest of the story got built around? Which is to say: some parts of the story, like the SPHEW arc, were added as setup for later parts which needed to be there. But it doesn’t make sense to write something for the sake of setting up something else, if the regress doesn’t end with something you’ve outlined for reasons other than setting up something else. The terminal story-elements, so to speak, as opposed to instrumental ones. I’d be interested to know which elements of the story were, in the relevant sense, terminal.
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
This is really complicated because there was a central plot bunny of “what if my own version of this” that burped into my head after reading a couple of million words of Harry Potter fanfiction. But the very very first version involved young Harry watching in horror as Snape crucioed into permanent insanity Voldemort’s face on the back of Quirrell’s head. The second version was more like, in Death Note metaphor and the way I phrased it inside my own head, “Light Yagami (Voldemort) is older and smarter and has 300 horcruxes, Headmaster L (Dumbledore) is pretending to be insane, and then into the middle of their duel wanders a young Miles Vorkosigan (Harry) starting his first year at Hogwarts.” This one will sound more familiar if you know Death Note and Vorkosigan.
But the things that start as bunnies in their own right, rather than things on the way to other things, have their origins in “my own take on Harry Potter fanfiction” rather than some grand scheme or ordering by importance. I knew, from the moment I first thought about “what do I do with the canon plot beat of the troll”, that Hermione was going to be eaten by the troll, because I had read six dozen fanfictions with their own take on “what happens when Harry and Ron chase after Hermione to confront the troll” and nothing serious ever, ever happened with the troll that was really bad and said something about the actual consequences of having a school that unsafe. So the primary thing was, “What if there were actual consequences of having a troll running loose in the school, unlike these hundred other fanfictions in which there are not”, and then from other considerations like, “Well, okay, but how do you do justice to Hermione’s grand character rather than having her being eaten by a troll” and from there and other constraints flows the whole character of Hermione.
So the answer to this question is a strange list of things that looks more like “which plot bunnies first leap into your mind” and not “which are the most important and indispensable qualities of the story”. If I wanted it to not be a bad story, if I wanted to do justice to the character of Hermione, she had to be eaten by the troll as a consequence of her own heroic choices. But the great story-defining archetype of Hermione as hero actually comes causally afterward, and as a rationalization of, the underlying plot bunny, of my instantly knowing the moment I contemplated “What do I do with this Station of the Canon” that in *this* fanfiction the troll was gonna actually eat Hermione for once.
What is a “plot bunny”?
(Evocative synonym for “story idea”.)
Magic-by-default has some amusing implications.
We know that, according to prophecies, the world is overwhelmingly likely to be destroyed. If wizards don’t destroy the world, then Muggles will. One obvious way for the latter to happen would be an out-of-control-AI disaster.
But if magic is the universal default, then a sufficiently advanced AI would be capable of spellcasting. Which is not a failure mode any sane AI researcher would see coming.
The question I always had here was “But what was Voldemort’s original plan for dealing with this issue when he decided to teach at Hogwarts?”
Because I don’t think he would have wanted to stake all his plans for the stone and Harry on McGonagall coincidentally saying this just in time, and Harry coincidentally being in a state where he obeys her instruction and never rethinks that decision. And Voldemort would have definitely known about the resonance problem before coming to Hogwarts. Even if he thought it would be somehow gone after ten years, he would have realised after the encounter with Harry in Diagon Alley at the very latest that that wasn’t true. So what was his original plan for making sure Harry wouldn’t talk about the resonance to anyone important? Between the vow and the resonance itself, his means of reliably controlling Harry’s actions are really very sharply limited.
Every plan I’ve managed to come up with either doesn’t fit with Voldemort’s actual actions in the story, or doesn’t seem nearly reliable enough for my mental model of Voldemort to be satisfied with the whole crazy “Let’s just walk into Hogwarts, become a teacher, and hang out there for maybe a year” idea.
I picked up on this, though my main guess was that Tom Riddle had just always been aromantic and asexual. I didn’t think any dark rituals were involved.
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
Voldemort was flatly not expecting Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. He was expecting Tom Riddle Jr. Jr. Voldemort knew how to handle Himself v2, and it at no point occurred to Voldemort that, for example, Harry would run off and tell McGonagall about the Parseltongue whisper telling him to seek out the Chamber of Secrets. It’s not like Voldemort had ever previously been a dad, and he was not calibrated on kids being surprising.
My guess was that he never considered the possibility that Harry would do something like report it to an authority figure. For example, consider this from chapter 49:
Quirrell never even pauses to consider that Dumbledore may know about it because Harry told him; it doesn’t show up in his action space at all in modelling a younger version of himself.
For me that fell under ‘My simulation of Voldemort isn’t buying that he can rely on this, not for something so crucial.’
That would depend on whether he actively considers it as something to rely on, as opposed to an assumption so baked in he forgets to question it, right? If questioned I think Quirrell would rightfully consider the Chamber to be something critical enough to be worth having other contingencies for, but he just never considered it necessary.
And the basilisk is already dead, so there’s nothing useful to find there anyway.
I figured Harry himself was just aro/ace and it was showing through even at a young age. I admit this was a bit of typical mind fallacious reasoning; people could tell I was unusual like that when I was 10.
Frankly the plot to stay undiscovered within Hogwarts stretches credulity regardless of whether Harry gets clues about Quirrel’s real identity. As readers we forgive it because 1. it’s part of the setup, where luck and coincidence are more forgivable and 2. it’s also in the canon books.
But I suppose to steelman it one might suppose that Voldemort simply accepts a high risk of being discovered, has a plan to escape if that occurs, and is fortunate to not need it. Both Harry and The Stone are in Hogwarts, there’s no risk-free method of accessing them.
If you want a retroactive justification, it would be that even if Harry did talk about the resonance, nobody other than Quirrell would know what it actually meant. And they also wanted to have a Defense Professor last to the end of the year for once...
Dumbledore likely would have known what it meant, and I think Alastor at the very least would have put together the most crucial parts as well.
But did Quirrell know that Dumbledore would have realized? (I mean, there’s also a reasonable chance that Dumbledore was already well aware that Quirrel was Voldemort when he hired him but did it anyway, not least because if Voldemort was teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts he wasn’t going around leading Death Eaters and killing people.)
I wondered about that as well. I think the answer has to be something along the lines of “He could do nothing to conceal it, he new it was a longshot, he lost nothing on the attempt, he had a backup plan he never told Harry about.”
Imagine: Harry tells Dumbledore, Dumbledore confronts Quirrell, he dramatically reveals his identity as David Monroe, as well as a lightning-shaped scar on his chest and a fantastical story about dual fates or prophecy twins or something.
Actually, do we know that McGonagall threatened to painfully kill Harry if he reveals Voldemort’s secrets? It could be a fake memory.
Woo! Curated. I got a better understanding of how I could write fiction that was great like HPMOR is great, especially don’t-give-your-characters-weaknesses, give-their-rivals-strengths, and also making sure that almost every character’s viewpoint makes sense if they’re viewing the story with them as the main character.
I also had a lot of fun learning about details of HPMOR I didn’t know about, which I am sure many HPMOR readers on this site are also interested in.
Thanks for the post, and here’s to the epilogues being published before the end of humanity!
Wow, yeah, your comment is a perfect place to reply with something that was bothering me for awhile.
I’d really like more folks on LW to write fiction, because HPMOR and other stuff was indeed a kind of writing workshop. Even if it loses much in retrospect, at the time it did show a lot of people that writing could be cool. But I very much don’t want more of the kind of sad writing that goes on on r/rational—taking the explicit lessons and striving for borrowed awesomeness and all that.
The make-or-break factor in writing (or at least, any writing that gets called “great”) is not about thinking up plot, world, or characters. It’s “liking sentences” as Annie Dillard put it. It’s voice. You cannot write with the same voice as EY, and nobody wants you to. What you can do is find your voice, your own way of liking sentences. And then all the superstructure will fit itself to that. Maybe it will ask for rational characters rationally doing rational things, but maybe it will be humor, or absurdism, or magical realism, or social commentary, or any number of things. Before you get the voice, you can’t know.
What about the mask of
captured person offstage to be rescued?
I was thinking the mask of “person who’s read more books than Harry ever will”
Excellent facilitation Gretta. There are so many times when I was confused and then you asked Eliezer to clarify the thing I was confused about. I’m writing this after encountering the following, but there were others:
“But by the end of the story the mysterious old wizard mask has moved from Dumbledore to Harry, and Harry’s brash young hero mask has moved to Hermione. (Hermione’s mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.)”
Just imagine: thousands of years later, Dumbledore is pulled out of the mirror and finds himself in a completely alien transhumanist future built by Harry. Young (only a hundred years old!), inexperienced, armed with principles and ideas about reality that are completely inappropriate for this world and society… Just like Hermione at the beginning of the story, isn’t it?
The viewpoint character table has Dumbledore with (✅) and Quirrel with ((✅)). These look to me like “rare” and “even rarer”. I’m surprised because I thought Dumbledore was approximately as rare a viewpoint character as Quirrel. (Offhand I can think of 0 and 1 examples for them, respectively, though ch 6 aftermath could be Dumbledore—I read it as McGonagall.) When was Dumbledore viewpoint?
The most likely explanation is simply that I messed up. As I was reading back the text in that section I felt a little confused and decided to make a diagram for it. I showed the diagram to Eliezer and said, “Should I include this? It’s practically begging for people to point out all the things I got wrong.” He made a few corrections of his own and then we decided to ship it.
Anyway, keep nitpicking[1], I’ll revise/fix the mistakes as a batch in a few days. (Busy this weekend.)
Where “nitpicking” here is not meant negatively, I appreciate constructive criticism a lot and prefer for my articles to be correct!
Another nitpick, but footnote 14 is wrong: Tonks was a metamorphmagus, not using polyjuice.
Fixed, thank you!
I have now fixed the chart, thanks again!
The way I read it:
“✅” is “this is a viewpoint character because they are interesting and their mental state is consistent with the Authors intended sequence of Reader revelations”.
“(✅)” is “this person isn’t interesting enough, in their mental states, choices, or whatever, for the juice to be worth the squeeze of describing their minds in detail over time”.
“((✅))” is “this person’s mental state contains spoilers, that, if leaked to the Reader, would ruin the Author’s plan for what is supposed to be a mystery, and hard to understand, vs not (probably because some more interesting viewpoint character’s lack knowledge of the mental state of the villain or whoever is actually plot critical such that the plot would just be totally over if a viewpoint character was telepathic)”.
I think your comment fixed the chart, and now it shows ((Dumbledore)) and ((Quirrel)) and I feel like this is better than before :-)
Also, I think it is kinda interesting to try to map this framework farther out, to Mysteries, or to the Romance genre (especially love triangles?) because it probably needs more levels than these three (or maybe three levels, but make it a vector of them, that do “this, but in different dimensions of knowledge the viewpoint character can, themselves, understand”?) in a super critical way?
Like something about “each character’s own interiority and self understanding” can’t be breached (differently for each character?) in some genres because in many a Romance too much (mutual?) clarity about how and why each person would react to different possible world’s they might be in, or might actualize with their choices… would mess up the Story. (This is also a sort of useful frame for Planecrash, which is a Romance of a sort.)
You could still have interesting art… if you mess up the Story too much with super high levels of insight, but then the Story won’t be inside genre conventions that tend to ensure the reader gets the payoff they expected to get, from reading something implying that it is in a certain genre. (Playing with this too much gets into accusations of unethical marketing.)
At the character level, in some sense, every personality disorder is a way of being avowedly oblivious to something important about the normal human experience, and each such obliviousness would make it harder for a character with that personality disorder to really deserve a “✅” with no parentheses at all… except you totally can do that!
Like in Herbert’s Dune, a way to describe part of how weird it is might be that sociopathy is normal to the Author’s “omniscient” viewpoint, and so sociopaths who wouldn’t normally be more than a two bit villain or side character in a character story get viewpoint attention?? And the Author doesn’t comment on it or lampshade it or anything. And in Bushnell’s Trading Up, I think Bushnell was quite purposeful in making narcissism normal to the Author’s “omniscient” viewpoint, and there’s supposed to be no viewpoint in that story to deeply admire, and its a sort of “tragedy about trashy fun” on many levels. If you empathize too much it is a deep tragedy, but if you don’t, you can “hate read it”. Or whatever.
You might call books where the viewpoint characters are almost intolerably oblivious to themselves “cringe literature” similar to “cringe comedy” like the first season (but not the third and later seasons) of Parks & Recs?
In lots of Romance (or Romance adjacent) stuff I just don’t vibe with it because it is too cringe-to-me… either the writer is really The Author and its embarrassing to see into the writer like that, or else the writer is pandering to their Reader or… anyway… its not “on purpose (in a way I like)”.
But, by contrast, I thought Bushnell was probably doing something weird on purpose, that was sort of pandering to some readers, but also saying something to some of those readers that they might not even notice that they could usefully learn, and I got artistic payoffs from reading something so spiritually alien, and yet so grounded in almost-plausibly-real ways for some women in NYC to be, and also so detailed.
Anyway. I guess I’m trying to say that I think inventing ontologies for “how much insight is communicated about someone’s viewpoint” is interesting.
And such ontologies can also slightly be applied to the Narrator, and the Expected Reader, and the Author (if different from the Narrator), and a possibly distinct writer sitting in their office, with bills to pay, and limited spoons, and aspirations to be seen by many as an Author whose Art echos in artistic history in ways they would like, and so on.
Like with HP:MoR, a lot of plot lines could be ruled out by thinking “if X happened it would be a story about Y, and a story about Y would have result Z on the Singularitarian/Rationality movement, and Eliezer doesn’t want a future like Z, so X won’t happen”.
I don’t know of any fiction by anyone except Eliezer where precisely this filter will predict a lot about what happens in the story… but also… that’s a large part of why I read it <3
What I’m looking forward to there is the Light Novel or Manga version, with tightened pacing and so on, that is setting up an Anime that will get dubs/subs in Japanese and Chinese and Korean and so on. (Or something similarly insanely full of chutzpah that could also actually work.)
Also, a re-formatting and re-editing would let me actually recommend it to other people, which I can’t do now because they bounce off of the glowfic formatting.
But then also… that story is about “corrigibility”… which is a research field that makes me un-utterably sad.
I would prefer the editing to just offer a full on “weird kind of sequel” that is ANOTHER MUCH LATER PLAY THROUGH by the player of the game, where the player of the game has learned a lot about “corrigibility” from seeing past versions of the game, and can score a lot more points against the mere god-character of a concept as half-assed as “corrigibility” ;-)
Stuff like this (aiming for TV on purpose, fixing some of the alignment-theoretic understructure, improving the marketability) could actually resonate in History in a way that moves the needle on the Singularity… which is the standard I usually hold Eliezer’s writing to because I think he, himself, tries to hold himself to that standard ;-)
An Epilogue #3 that came out in a way, and with the right timing, to build interest in such a Sequel would be great. Then again, maybe actual real world international politics is more pressing, because of p-doom and timelines and an imminent WW3 and so on?
My own belief about why so many people didn’t want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: “make every character awesome,” “give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life”).
See also: Ferrer Maillol, a guy who literally orders the main(ish) character to be tortured and was still quite likable!
Because we assume that you care more about HPMoR’s epilogue, I suspect. Also some amount of ‘nobody ever finishes promised epilogues for rationalfics’, which has not proven to be a law of nature but is certainly a strong prior.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I want the Project Lawful epilogue at least as badly as the HPMOR epilogue!
While we’re at it, I might as well wish for the “flashback: this is not a threat” lecture.
Wait, what? Project Lawful is incomplete?
I just picked it up as my big summer read. Though I probably won’t make it past part 1:MICatWoA while it is still summer.
Will I miss much when I read it as is without the missing parts you mentioned?
No, you will not miss much, carry on reading!
As an implication of magic-as-default, we can infer that
Voldemort did not figure these genetics out: in the scene of reviving Hermione, he does not know if magic would return to her or be lost forever.
> “Girl’ss body iss resstored. Ssubstance iss repaired. But not magic, or life… thiss iss body of dead Muggle.”
In foresight, there’s one more hint for magic-as-default:
Muggles have problems seeing magical things, and probably using them too.
> There were no questions about his father accompanying him to the magical side of King’s Cross Station. Dad had trouble just looking at Harry’s trunk directly.
> Wizards, Squibs, and Muggles. Two copies and you can cast spells, one copy and you can still use potions or magic devices, and zero copies means you might even have trouble looking straight at magic.
Recalling that continuing to look directly is a default action for anything alive: it means that something must disrupt the signals so that a nonmagical would look to the side. It would make sense a Muggle complex would do it, in contrast to some charm on the item itself, because the former is closer to brain architecture.
(Hiding quotes because, in most probability, these comments can get to front page and would then be spoilers.)
Thank you for making and publishing this! It’s interesting to see some more of the background and process that goes into works like HPMOR, both for the sake of appreciation of the work, and for reference in my own story-crafting.
Would someone[1] kindly hurry up and solve alignment so that Eliezer can fully turn his attention to his true vocation as an author (with a side gig as a decision theorist)?
I’ll keep working on it too, but I don’t currently have a clear line-of-sight on a robust solution.
PS—it would be phenomenal if the two of you did another one of these but for Project Lawful!
Seconded
Well that’s a good motivation if I ever saw one. Nothing I’ve read in the intervening years is as good as HPMOR. It might be the pinnacle of Western literature. It will be many years before an AI, never mind another human, can write something that is this good. (Except for the wacky names that people paid for, which I guess is on character for the civilization that spawned it.)
Wow, this is awesome, thanks for doing it!
If I understand correctly what it’s referring to, this is not relevantly true; infra-bayesianism solves non-realizability formally, and seems much closer than Bayesian agents to how humans formulate hypotheses (i.e., convex sets of probability distributions over states of the world instead of just probability distributions over states of the world; that allows us to have a hypothesis about some part of the world that we can assign probabilities to independently from other parts of the world).
I’d love an interview about Planecrash also, especially if both Eliezer and linta participated. I’ve read the whole thing twice but it’s been a while, so exact topics don’t spring readily to mind, but I recall while reading (esp. the second time) having tons of questions about the writing process.
Generally, I’m curious to know about the collaboration between the authors. Glowfic in general usually gives the vibe of being made-up-as-it-goes-along, and that each author has autonomy over their own contributions. But the sections between the gods, for example, seem to demonstrate that a plan was known to both EY and linta relatively early on. Curious to understand how premeditated the story was, how much the two of them communicated with each other while writing other than via the tags themselves, whether the overall vision was driven more by one or the other of them or was genuinely 50⁄50, etc.
Also, the idea that Everettian interp. of QM precludes total utilitarianism is one of the most interesting ideas about either physics or ethics I’ve ever encountered in fiction. Is that an original idea of Eliezer’s, or is there prior literature? I’d love a writeup of that idea I could share with people that is less high-context than a brief passage more than a million words into an obscure webfiction.
If this seems like a thing that might happen someday, I’ll reread some passages so I can write more specific questions.
I have two questions that come to mind, both about Chapter 86:
What else did the Dark Mark do? Did you work any of it out?
As many people have probably wondered since they read
and
If Harry hadn’t been interrupted by Mad-Eye arriving, would he have conceded enough of the point, and explained enough about how dangerous he would be fighting a war, to shock McGonagall and Snape into believing him? Would this have been catastrophic to the prophecy, probably via convincing Snape that Voldemort hadn’t ever been fighting to win?
Because I reread this scene a couple weeks ago, and it seemed like there were a bunch of reasons for him to find a way to elaborate on why he thought a true Dark Rationalist fighting a war against Dumbledore would win in hours rather than years, and his internal debate on this seems to be trending solidly in that direction, but then when he’s going to reach for paper, the meeting is interrupted and he never gets back to it. Which made me think that Dumbledore had arranged things for prophecy’s sake to prevent him, and consider why.
Eliezer says he doesn’t recall ever contemplating either of these questions. (Sorry!)
I would’ve never thought of it this way, but in the end, doesn’t Dumbledore reveal to himself to have been trying to complete a quest given to him by his own set of Mysterious Old Wizards, while still acting within the rules and aiming to achieve selfless and omnibenevolent ends? That’s seeing things in narrative presentation order, instead of his own subjective timeline, though.
From what I remember it was the jump to Azkaban that seemed like a jarring escalation when I read the story, more than the Quirrell thing. Felt like it should be more overwhelming to Harry, going from relatively normal magic school life to terrifying evil prison.
Seems like a fine time to share my speculations about yet unresolved easter eggs from the story. I’m not overly confident on either of those.
I present some hints first in case you want to try to think about it yourself.
The core (and power) of the Elder Wand
From chapter 122:
Previously in the Askaban arc, it was also mentioned that the sign of the Deathly Hallows on the invisibility cloak was drawn in thestral blood, binding in that part of the thestral’s power into the cloak, to make the the wearer as invisible to death’s shadow as thestrals are to the unknowing.
Suppose there’s some structure to it, try to fill out this table:
My guess
So the second power of the Elder Wand may be some divination power. That would fit well to preventing the Death of Worlds, although it’s a bit unclean to have two explanations for Dumbledore’s divination power.
The true source of Dumbledore’s power
From chapter 86 (emphasis mine):
From chapter 119:
Confusion: Accessing the Hall of Prophecy doesn’t sound like sth that happened the first time in the history of the Line of Merlin Unbroken.
Notice: Dumbledore’s letter does not strictly say that the forbidden thing Dumbledore did was listening to all the prophecies. Those statements could refer to separate events.
Another useful excerpt from ch 80 (emphasis mine):
From chapter 110:
Confusion: Dubledore seems a bit more magically powerful than Voldemort, so minus Elder Wand he should probably still be at least almost as powerful as Voldemort. Magical power comes mostly from lore, so if Dumbledore’s lore comes from Flamel, then it’s a bit surprising that Voldemort was able to just order someone to kill Flamel.
So how would you resolve those confusions given the hints I dropped here?
Last hint:
The method to trap objects or people in a timeless space in the mirror is called “Merlin’s method”.
My guess
Merlin trapped himself in the mirror. The forbidden password Dumbledore spoke allowed him to talk to Merlin through the mirror. Merlin gave Dumbledore additional lore to fight Voldemort. Voldemort has likely figured while he was trapped for 9 years.
(This also means that once Harry figures this out he can read the forbidden letter in the department of mysteries and use the technique to (at least temporarily) retrieve Dumbledore from the mirror. (Yeah I know Dumbledore said he couldn’t retrieve Voldemort, but I think that’s just because Dumbledore doesn’t want to, and wanting to is a requirement for the mirror.))
Add’l question: In the Sorting Hat chapter, there was originally an authors’s note stating that if anyone could guess what would happen at the start of the next chapter, Eliezer would tell them “the rest of the plot” (might not be the exact phrasing, can’t remember). As far as I know, that went unredeemed, but if he had needed to pay out, what would he have said? Curious to know how the “rest of the plot” was conceptualized in his head as of chapter, like, 9 or something.
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
Hard to say at this point! In my head it would’ve included breaking Black out of Azkaban, Hermione being eaten by the troll, Quirrell and Harry descending together to go after the Philosopher’s Stone, the final duel between Harry and the Death Eaters foreshadowed in Ch. 1, Dumbledore’s prophecies, and Harry’s ascent over magical Britain. I don’t know if I would’ve revealed every one of those beats to the winning reader, but those are the most central plot beats as I saw them.
Datum: I want to see a Planecrash epilogue, but after the second case of missing-epilogue I began to suspect that the “missing” part was purposeful—some combination of trolling the reader and encouraging meta-fanfiction to continue the story—and that I should treat both stories as completed.
I have no idea if others have the same impression. I didn’t read HPMOR until long after it and its discussions were done, and all Planecrash discussion happened on platforms I don’t use.
Thanks for telling us your inferences! While I can see how you got there, I believe you’re just straight-up wrong in this case. From many conversations with Eliezer about these epilogues over multiple years, I believe he absolutely does want to write and publish them and there’s basically no feinting-for-the-purpose-of-trolling or feinting-for-the-purpose-of-encouraging-fanfiction at all.
I didn’t know there was going to be any more to Planecrash/Project Lawful.
Neat! This part of it helped me get a better model of Eliezer’s model of the lowest levels of subjectively accessible and controllable thinking!
There’s that stuff in the middle of the 30ms to 300,000ms zone where a thought that takes 4 seconds to happen (and which necessarily must have some underlying neurological basis) can sometimes need 4 minutes to explain to a third party… or can’t be transmitted that fast. Or can be explained but not turned into something they could repeat in 4 seconds on their own… or whatever.
I don’t have a really strong mechanistic idea about habits, but I try to use the word “habit” in a way that is consistent with what I think I know about the basal ganglia… which controls gross motor stuff, emotion, and cognition, and is sufficient to let a de-corticated rabbit stay alive and sort of eat food (but is probably not sufficient to keep a de-corticated human alive, because (insofar as ethical experiments have been possible) it is probably the case that we and chimps and some other higher mammals are way way more “essentially corticated” than the little simple ones).
I had never previously focused on these ideas (habits vs 5-second-level) at the same time, but… it does seem like “sub five second” stuff probably sometimes involves intuitive deployment of valid reasoning leaps (like from mathematics) and this MIGHT actually be simply “based in habit”!?
In “Distinct Contributions of the Cerebellum and Basal Ganglia to Arithmetic Procedures” it looks like maybe reliable iteration (ie “counting”) leans harder on the cerebellum (as if counting was a fine motor skill) and “operational chaining” (like maybe a goto statement in a slightly conscious but still quite low level mental algorithm) leans harder on the basal ganglia, as if long division was the application of a looping habit?
So. Yeah. Maybe “sub five second stuff” just literally IS the application of acquired mental habits that are useful!?
At least this round of falsification pursuit didn’t rule out the hypothesis.
What I was expecting, naively, right after reading Eliezer’s theory, is that sub five second stuff is more “Hebbian, and neurological, in general” than “habitual (and based on the basal ganglia) as such”… which still might be true, but I’m less confident now.
Maybe 3 second rationality skills ARE just “all in fine motor skills and habits, possible directed inwardly, like in kinesthetic imagination”???
Regarding the larger set of data Eliezer talked about, from having tried a hallucinogen once (to gather subjective metaphysical data to see if “reality was really reality” when I was young and foolish)… it very much did NOT seem like the effects were localized to the basal ganglia or the cerebellum.
There was a lot of super low level visual cortex involvement, with things down in the Brodmann Areas 18 and maybe 17 and 19 (and maybe everywhere in the entire cortex?) involved as if “opponent process” processes for things like “motion vs not-motion”, and so on, were falling in and out of calibration.
As subjective data about subjectivity itself (like for trying to figure trying to figure out if Solipsism is true, or whether maybe there is only me plus some Cartesian Demon that is fucking with a hypothetical disembodied mind that is me, with all of external reality as an illusion), hallucinogens did just totally destroy the simple naive hypothesis that “cogito-ergo-sum-style subjective awareness” is independent (not caused by?) what happens in the brain’s firings...
...”the brain” just obviously does cause “the subjective mind”, it turns out...
...unless the Demon’s powers extend to inventing a complex theory of neurology, and taking into account what hallucinogens would hypothetically do to a hypothetically incarnated mind, and then the Demon fed plausible lies along these lines into some hypothetically “metaphysically disembodied awareness” that was me… lol!
((You can’ always generate “an even more paranoid hypothesis”… its just that such hypotheses almost always become negligible under pragmatic anti-paranoid normalization <3))
Anyway. I’m not sure how the idea that “3 second level stuff maybe only happens in the cerebellum and basal ganglia” could be behaviorally applied, to get profits in some way, such as to know the VoI on ruling hypotheses of that class in or out...
But that was a cool part of the interview. Thank you! <3
This seems like at least a partial explanation of why psychedelics lead to novel thoughts, but psychedelics throw you into sufficiently novel mental situations that it’s genuinely hard to replicate the effect while sober. While peaking on acid, you exist in a world of pure music, archetypes, and geometry, all derived by zooming in on and amplifying a narratively salient subset of your current set and setting. You just can’t easily access that level of novelty sober.
I had the broken tool hypothesis.
At some point, there was a non-magical universe. That universe probably didn’t have the laws of physics as we know them, but it could have had something similar maybe? The life within that universe developed technology. They made some sort of high tech omnitool (like ambient nanobots). That tool was designed to be used by sentient intelligent beings, which explains why magic focuses on sentient beings. The tool had a help function. Which explains the effect where if you think about roughly what you want to do, magic will fill in the details. (mentioned elsewhere)
At some point, something went badly wrong.
It might be as simple as everyone accidentally getting full admin privileges, followed quickly by the first nerfing. It could be all sorts of weird bugs in the code.
Now you have mentioned the nested nerfing, I think that can go after the broken tool.
A therapist once gave me the insight that character weaknesses are strengths taken too far. Harry’s energetic and clever and knowledgeable, he’s inspired and energized by competition, and he can meme people into doing things—and he can be a know-it-all who assumes first principles & cleverness trump empirics and experience, someone who’s unwilling to lose, and irresponsible or annoying in how he leads others.
I knew you had to have some kind of magic-related rationalization for the PG-motivated preemptive redaction of Quirrell’s sexuality back in 2009 before you knew ace people existed, but WoG-ing that after you learn ace people actually exist and didn’t do anything wrong to be like this, doesn’t feel like the move.
Possibly relatedly, can you speak on why you deleted your old “Headcanon accepted” comment under Harry Potter and the Methods of Catgirls?
Re ‘?’ react:
[ — Inadequate Equilibria ]
[ earlier Facebook post introducing status-blindness concept ]
Given this, Chapter 21: Rationalization section with Harry and Draco meeting is HILARIOUS!
About the magical chromosome. I once wrote a critical note about this on the Russian analogue of TVtropes (paragraphs one and three, marked 1, remark 2 from another person). I still don’t understand how the appearance of wizards from the connection of a wizard and an unambiguous Muggle should work.
“1 And again, genetics. In fact, the author’s error in the genetic part is much more critical: it follows directly from the text that a wizard is only a person who has inherited the “magic gene” from both his father and mother. That is, a wizard can only be born to the following couples: two wizards, a wizard and a squib, two squibs. A wizard and a muggle will have children who are squibs in one hundred percent of cases, because they cannot inherit the second “magic gene”. And this excludes the possibility of the existence of both Voldemort and Snape, whose fathers were muggles—or they actually turn out to be squibs (what is the probability of such a coincidence?). And many other half-bloods, in whom one of the parents was a wizard and the other was a muggle. Moreover, if wizard-Muggle marriages resulted in Squibs in 99% of cases (let’s take the probability of a Squib turning up as 1%), this would be a cast-iron foundation for the Death Eaters’ ideology—“damned Muggles are depriving us of magic, here’s the proof, here’s a bunch of examples”, and this would have been obvious to everyone many centuries ago, and the very idea of a wizard-Muggle marriage would not have been seriously considered by anyone who did not want a Squib child to be born.
Therefore, the theory of “genetic inheritance of magic” as Harry suggested it is almost completely untenable.
2 The author of the previous edit proceeds from the unproven premise that Squibs make up 1% of those who consider themselves Muggles. But this may not be true and, most likely, is not true. As far as we know from canon, Squibs are not invited to Hogwarts, and it is quite logical to assume that Squibs do not tell their descendants about magic (because there is no need, they will not be able to use it anyway), and their children grow up as Muggles, while being Squibs. Rather, 1% is the probability that a Squib will find out that he is actually a Squib, and not a Muggle, and not at all the probability that a person who considers himself a Muggle is actually a Squib. So Harry’s theory has a right to exist.
1 Clarification from the author of the previous edit: the mass birth of Squib children by wizard-Muggle couples would be noticeable and obvious to everyone (and, I repeat, there were MANY such couples in canon), which would give a cast-iron argument to the propaganda of the advocates of “blood purity” (they would simply be 100% right). But this is not observed. Somehow you are reading very inattentively. If Squibs were really extremely common, then the number of Muggle-borns would be orders of magnitude higher. In fact, even if Squibs are only 1%, then we get that every ten-thousandth couple in Muggle Britain is a Squib + Squib couple. That is, out of about 750 thousand births per year at that time in Britain, we get about 75 children born in a Squib + Squib couple, and if Harry’s theory is correct, then they will have an average of 18.75 Muggle-borns annually (which is even slightly more than observed—about ten per year). And even with such a number, the probability that a wizard and a Muggle will have a wizard tends to zero (about 0.5%, or more precisely − 1%, that a Squib will be found, and 50% of a percent that the right chromosome will turn up). It would be impossible not to notice this.”
(translated from Russian by Google Translate)
This is probably pretty close to a bookkeeping request, but I visited https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThoseTwoBadGuys and the page at the bottom says “If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.”
I could use some sort of correction because there are a bunch of Those Two Bad Guys types listed on the page and I’m not sure which one Eliezer is pointing at.
It’s the one for Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neverwhere, for example, or Guido and Nunzio from Myth Adventures. I think TV Tropes used to be plainer about this being the meaning of the Those Two Bad Guys trope, but now the page redirects to somewhere else? Consider it a dead link to a trope that apparently got renamed to I-don’t-know-what.
Early 2021 version of the page that didn’t redirect yet.
I think it’s this.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BanteringBaddieBuddies
Croup and Vandemar, where one is a talky weasel and the other is a simple-minded bruiser, seem to be the Evil Duo subtype.
I was briefly disoriented but it seemed fairly obviously Bumbling Henchmen Duo.
I didn’t know there was (going to be?) an epilogue to planecrash, but it didn’t leave me nearly as thirsty for more as hpmor did. With hpmor, I wanted to see what everyone would do next, as they’re still pretty young, whereas with planecrash, it felt like everything I was curious about was explored to my satisfaction. Sure, we don’t get a lot of specifics on the new society(s) on golarion, but that’s pretty fine with me. It would be interesting to see maybe what The Future holds, or where the language guy ends up, but the former feels right as a mystery, while the latter seemed pretty well foreshadowed
I know it’s probably rebuilding an audio file that already exists, but I absorb information better through audio, so I’ve created a multi-voice AI podcast version of this (fantastic) interview: https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/hpmor-the-probably-untold-lore-by
My guess is that they saw into the future, or at least some parts of the future. Maybe directly, maybe via prophecies. So their language (or the language they designed for spells) actually pulls on all the languages that existed and will exist on the planet.
There are some story hints that imply spells are not discovered, but invented.
Quirrell at one point tries to make sure Harry cannot read any books about how spells are made (because he is scared he will attempt it and accidentally destroy the world).
He also brags about having created a dark ritual, with saying he had to spend a lot of time envisioning it mentally and implying that the act of creation was very dangerous.
“I kept that ritual burning in my mind for years, perfecting it in imagination, pondering its meaning and making fine adjustments, waiting for the intention to stabilise. At last I dared to invoke my ritual, an invented sacrificial ritual, based on a principle untested by all known magic. And I lived, and yet live.”
Later: “Liked falsse desscription of previousss horcrux sspell sso much, sso dissappointed when realissed truth of it, thoughtss of improved verssion came out in that sshape.”
My conclusion: Wizards invent spells through some process, tying a particular outcome with a particular action (waving a wand just so, saying the right words, performing a ritual). This process is, however, incredibly dangerous and most people who try to do this—and in particular people who try to create powerful spells—end up dead or worse. (This is how Luna’s mother dies.)
Most likely it involves an act of mental concentration where you have to very precisely envision the outcome you desire—and if you slip, the spell comes out wrong or you die. The act of creation rewrites the universe, adding the spell as a new “law of magic” that can be invoked consistently and safely—by you or anyone else who knows the procedure. My guess is this envisioning works best if the spell “makes sense to you”—i.e. most people who try to make a stunning spell using random words (lemondroptriangle) are less successful than those who use something that “sounds like a stunning spell” (stupefy).
So Wingardium Leviosa is weird because someone chose those faux Latin words for their levitation spell, not because of anything innate about the universe. The Atlanteans were not involved (besides possibly nerfing magic by setting up the spell creation process in the first place).
Hm, so, how many spells are there that don’t seem to be drawn from any known language?
If the answer is none, while there are several drawn from modern languages… that’s a little ominous.
My headcanon is that the words for certain things came from spells, rather than the other way around
I not-super-confidently think this is compatible with canon, but not explicit or even particularly hinted at in canon. My memory is that the squibs we see in canon are Filch and the neighbor, and we don’t know either of their ancestry.
Iirc when they discover filch is a squib Ron explicitly says this is what a squib is (“like muggle born wizards, but in reverse and much rarer”).
Oh, I apparently wasn’t paying attention to the words I quoted. I thought they were saying a squib is born to a muggle and a wizard.
Sort of question: I have read once about some drafts of “Not your usual Riddle fic” or something like that which iirc EY had written and was going to publish as well as epilogue. When I heard about it I became really interested about those, what it was exactly about, are they finished, can we see finished of those, can we see just drafts? I just hope to ever read them (as well as epilogues) before we all will die.
And also I am interested about other works, esp Well Bound Demons. What is with them? Is there some central page with info on such questions?
I am one of those people who are really interested in hpmor epilogue, but not in planecrash’s. That’s because I liked hpmor much, much more than planecrash. I am actually more interested about continuation of… I never can recall the name, the story about Oliver Greenfield, than in planecrash.
I suspect I have lots of questions about hpmor, but now can only recall that:
Were Harry’s… I don’t know how to say, let it be… Quirks. Like his stories about being afraid of mugging, biting a teacher, hitting for a ball, his strong privacy feeling etc. Were they somehow aimed? Do I at all see any real pattern here or just faces in the clouds or maybe it’s a part of some bigger pattern, including eg later explained story with scientific project? Actually, what at all was part of Secret Plans in hpmor writing and what was just things of moment (like want to make Hermione be eaten by a troll)?
In one interview I have heard that EY was going to write something completely goofy and was somewhat surprised by reaction. And I hadn’t understood at all what that means at the moment. I don’t quiet understand how something as rational as hpmor and goofyness may be in one sentence. After all this time, I have some ideas, like trolls suddenly having transfiguration ability from nowhere just for funny plot. Or that Harry both mentions Raistlin Majere as story characters and somebody Dulak as real spell. And yet.
I am also interested what exactly didn’t fit, wasn’t assembling to close the brackets? I can’t quite imagine an example.
Also, what happened in SPHEW Arc? Even I considered it boring despite how much I liked approximately everything else about hpmor not from first chapter, not even from first lines, but I may say, from negative lines, because I really liked it already because of all the meta. Which i am actually also interested about, was that intended from the beginning? Because I never saw something like that before, and even after I have seen something resembling only once, in Thinking Physics. (I actually really regret that just because there were no similar warnings before planecrash, I assumed that there will be no riddles, foreshadowing etc, so I wasn’t trying to solve any riddles, I’d really wanted all this meta to be here, including eg “I know you often seen disclaimers before things just because they mention death of something, but it’s not one of those, and also the author is incredibly smart and creative, so, really, be careful”)
One of the things I most liked in hpmor is… I am not quite sure how to describe it, but I ever got some close feeling only from Oliver Greenfild’s story. I am interested to know is there actually some cluster of traits or is that something that only aligns with my personal distribution of preferences.
I didn’r know that was planned! Or maybe I heard it and forgot. Now I’m looking forward to it
I don’t think this is strictly true. You can’t a priori build a compression scheme that will work for an arbitrary random file (No Free Lunch Theorem). But you can ex post identify the particular patterns in a particular random file, and pick a compression scheme that picks up on those patterns. You probably end up with a pretty ugly scheme that doesn’t generalize, and so is unsatisfactory in some aesthetic sense. Especially if you’re going for lossless compression, since there’s probably a ton of noise that’s just very hard to compress in an elegant / generalizable way.
I guess the problem with allowing ex post scheme choices is you can get extreme overfitting—e.g. the compressor is just a full representation of the pattern. Useless! But if you allow lossiness, you can probably get something that looks okay on some “elegance” prior—e.g. try a Fourier series, a Taylor series, and N other “natural” decompositions and pick the one that requires the fewest bits to store.
Analogously: you need a bunch of goofy epicycles to explain canon HP magic, and especially if you’re really trying hard for an exact match maybe you just end up with something extremely unaesthetic (a ton of random bits at the end that you just have to fiat in). In the degenerate case you get Eliezer’s “we’re selecting a universe that matches what JKR wrote.” But if you’re willing to take some predictive loss in return for a simple/elegant model, you can get something like “nested nerfing” that’s decent at prediction and at elegance.
The code of the compressor counts against your message length if you didn’t pick the compressor before seeing the message. (In standard epistemology about compression and simplicity priors. See eg Minimum Message Length.)
It’s still true that a posteriori you can compress random files. For example, if I randomly get the file “all zeros”, it’s a very compressible file, even if I have to write the program.
It’s just that on average a priori you can’t do better than just writing out the file.
In context, I guess your claim is: “if the ‘compressor’ is post-hoc trying a bunch of algorithms and picking the best one, the full complexity of that process should count against the compressor.” Totally agree with that as far as epistemology is concerned!
But I don’t think the epistemological point carries over to the realm of rational-fic.
In part that’s because I think of JKR-magic as in fact having a bunch of structure that makes it much easier to explain than it would be to explain a truly randomly-generated set of spells and effects (e.g. the pseudo-Latin stuff; the fact that wands are typically used). So I expect an retrofitted explanation wouldn’t be crazy tortured (wouldn’t require having a compression process that tests a ridiculous number N of patterns, or incorporates a ridiculous amount of fiat random bits).
In part I’m just making a tedious “nerds have different aesthetic intuitions about stuff” point, where I think a reasonably simple well-retrofitted explanation is aesthetically very cool even if it’s clearly not the actual thing used to generate the system (and maybe required a bunch of search to find).
With regards of the call to preorder the new book, here, once again, is the question if it will be available DRM free in any way.
The stores listed on the website are DRMed and at least two of them don’t even have a download option.
Nate, Elizier, any hope for that?
Per Nate’s best guess without re-reviewing the contract: unfortunately, you’ll have to take it up with the publisher; they own the relevant copyrights (as is standard in any trad publishing deal). [Note: I originally overstated Nate’s confidence here; the error was mine.]
I can add that at least in the US, I wouldn’t hold my breath; Little, Brown is a division/imprint of Hachette, which is famous for supporting DRM.
this sounds like either you dropped a “not” or is sarcastic (in a way it otherwise didn’t quite vibe)
… I don’t think so?
Urs wants DRM-free.
Hachette likes DRM.
We’re working with Hachette.
Therefore Urs shouldn’t hold their breath.
I think that all just straightforwardly adds up? I certainly wasn’t aiming to be sarcastic.
Oh, my bad. I saw the word “support” and my brain silly-ly classified it as “Hatchet wants to do the nice thing” when the thing they were supporting was DRM.
Thanks, Gretta, that’s good to know even though I would have preferred another answer.
IIRC, it’s just the epilogue that’s missing. So it’s about as incomplete as HPMOR is. Personally, I didn’t even notice the lack of an epilogue whilst reading. The ending basically stands on its own IMO.
My open question is: how did Dumbledore know Voldemort was Tom Riddle? When he set himself up as dark Lord he presumably didn’t intend to leave a trace (he didn’t with his David Monroe persona). Did Dumbledore discover it in some plot? Did he conclude it because Voldemort openly use parseltongue somewhere? Was it in the prophecies?
Actually now I want to write a spin off short story about this. It always bothered me that hpmor Dumbledore didn’t really get any onscreen moments of awesome, I want to write a story set early in the Voldemort war where, for the first time, a relatively young inexperienced Voldemort has someone pull a successful plot against him by being proactive and he barely escapes (and rewrites some of his list with lessons).
Eliezer’s reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:
Riddle having set up Hagrid, having asked Dumbledore for an introduction to Flamel, and his general demeanor etc, was more than sufficient info for Dumbledore. There were not two candidates for who Voldemort could possibly be.
After thinking about this a bit more, this says something about Voldemort’s perfect occlumancy in that while he could convincingly become a lot of different characters, there were still parts of his underlying person (CEV?) that genuinely were so unlike other people he couldn’t easily fake not having them.
(Which I guess is semi-confirmed in-story in that it says occlumancy and veritaserum enters the mind through specific surfaces that can be defended, but powerful methods like unbreakable vows/parseltongue/the mirror can’t be blocked with it)