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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
HPMOR is one of the coolest pieces of literature out there, with its ending still being great for the reasons awesome literature is great
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.
And there are straightforwardly terrible pieces of worldbuilding, characters being stupid, etc
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).
Following the Phoenix is a nice piece of fanfiction, but it’s just that- fanfiction
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):
Be very careful about trusting what you see in this particular mirror. It may be that this entire process is exactly what the Defense Professor wanted to see.
Dumbledore—brilliant Dumbledore, his one true opponent in all this time—was completely fooled. Then tried to trap him with a plan he already knew, with an obvious solution he had already forseen. Then he throws his own life away in order to save Harry, just as the Defense Professor had predicted. Without any more meddling from him everything should be easy.
Coherent extrapolated volition indeed.
Dumbledore really comes across as hamming it up in this chapter. I suspect that the entire exchange is being put on for Harry’s benefit.
The events in this chapter feel contrived. I assume the Chang’s Timeless Whatever thing is a reference to something or other, but I don’t know what it is and don’t know how I could have seen it coming. So I’m just taking everybody’s word for it as to what the hell is going on. And basically it feels like a setup designed so that Dumbledore and Quirrell can have their chat, it can seem like Dumbledore set a good trap for Voldemort, and then Quirrell can have his clever reversal of it because he saw it all coming, apparently. Yet even though Dumbledore knows Voldemort is smart and is probably aware the cloak can counter the mirror, he still goes ahead with this plan. Was it really his best option? Frankly we have no idea. What would Quirrell have done against a simple Confundus Charm instead? A hominem revelio would have found Harry (Finding Harry would have been like the first thing Dumbles did after crippling Quirrell) while Quirrell is busy thinking he’s a goat and everything could have been fine.
This chapter does not satisfy me, and everything about it feels designed to force a particular scene and the feeling of Dumbledore’s insufficiently clever plan defeated by Quirrell apparently just knowing about it ahead of time. Blehhhhhh.
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:
Me:
writes dialogue between Professor Quirrell and Dumbledore, running straightforward models of both characters
Reader reactions:
Faaaaake
Gotta be a CEV
They’re still inside the mirror
Dumbledore wouldn’t be beaten that easily, this was too easy for Quirrell, it has to be his dream.
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:
If you are reading this, Harry Potter, then I have fallen to Voldemort, and the quest now lies in your hands.
Though it may shock you to learn, this was the end that I wished in my heart would come to pass. For as I write this, it yet seems possible that Voldemort may fall by my own hand. And then, in time, I shall myself become the darkness you must overcome, to enter fully into your power. For it was said once that you might need to raise your hand against your mentor, the one who made you, who you loved; it was said that you might be my downfall. If you are reading this, then that shall never come to pass, and I am glad of it.
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.
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).
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
Ironically, I guess in HPMOR one supervillain death is a tragedy and all Death Eaters dead is a statistic.
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.
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.
“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.
There was an Unspeakable who showed up before Filius, ah, removed him. He performed certain spells he probably ought not to have known, and declared that Hermione’s soul was in healthy condition but at least a mile away from her body.
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.
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.
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).
dismantling Voldemort’s network would still be a megaproject
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.
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 iscorrect, 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.”
“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.
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).
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
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.
Trelawney gives no prophecies as Harry is not driven to extremes this year
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).
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.
“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.”
he has no reason to suspect him as nobody has died
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.
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:
The undeniable climax of Methods happens when Quirrell has been unmasked as Voldemort and gives Harry sixty seconds to surrender information prior to his death. Harry then kills the arrayed Death Eaters and incapacitates Voldemort, and everything after that is wrapping up loose threads. The climax of the work is then in Ch 113 and Ch 114.
Yet the plot of Methods is not about Quirrell as Voldemort fighting with Harry. Prior to Ch 88, Voldemort has no intentions of killing Harry. Voldemort’s plan, as laid out in a language that doesn’t allow lies, is to make Harry into the ruler of magical Britain. Harry’s plan is to figure out how science works and revolutionize magical Britain. Dumbledore has two primary plans. The first is to trap Voldemort beyond time, which Dumbledore is unsuccessful at; this happens almost entirely off-screen. The second is to thread the needle of prophecy, which Dumbledore presumably has succeeded at when the novel ends; this also happens almost entirely off-screen, and the parts of it that we do see are incomprehensible.
Do you see the problem here? Prior to Ch 88, the plot hasn’t actually begun. Harry and Voldemort share largely the same goals until that point, though they likely differ in how they would achieve them, and of course have obvious moral differences, but this is not what drives them into conflict in the climax
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.
A broomstick fell out of the sky, approaching terrifyingly fast, and spun on its end and decelerated so hard you could almost hear the air screaming in protest, and came to a halt directly beside Draco.
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.) I 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?
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.) I 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.