This is a very powerful demonstration of how the sudden death of a single loved friend affects one more than the horrible, slow torture to death of a thousand strangers in Azkaban.
This applies to Harry—but I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about myself and all the readers now expressing their pain on reddit.
A single death is felt differently from a thousand deaths. At least in fiction...
Y’know, I like the new, true version of Ch. 85, the one where Harry fails to get a phoenix—but I also really liked the original version (which, remember, Eliezer wrote as a stand-in because he couldn’t get the true version finished in time), where Harry, compromising with himself, made a resolution that for now he would try to win without killing people—but if anybody died [by his opponent’s hands], not just a PC, but any arbitrary bystander (he’d been thinking about how Batman’s ethics only come off as good if you don’t care about all the NPCs the Joker kills), the gloves would come off.
I’d kind of hoped that Harry would be able to actually go through without a death, and failing that I kind of expected that it would be some random NPC’s death that would change things—but I don’t think that would actually have worked to justify Harry’s future actions to the reader. [ETA: I guess buybuydavis is right too that, even more importantly, it wouldn’t have worked as a statement against death.] It really does need to be somebody we (the readers) care about in order to carry even a fraction of the emotional impact that death should carry.
(Tangent: As a preteen, I read 2001 up to the point where HAL kills Poole, and then had to stop and had some bad nights because that was so terrible. [Actually there was a similar thing a couple of years before that with The Neverending Story and the point where Atreyu’s horse Artax dies.] And around that time, possibly a bit later, I decided that feeling that death was this bad was the appropriate emotion, and grownups and other kids who not only didn’t have that reaction but who felt that it was childish exaggeration were wrong. And when, much later, my own emotional reaction to death in fiction—and, more deplorably, reality—started to subside, I still found myself in agreement with my earlier self on the question on appropriateness.)
but I don’t think that would actually have worked to justify Harry’s future actions to the reader.
I don’t think it works if what EY is making a statement against Death, which it seems to me he is. Rationality is all fine and dandy, but I think it’s window dressing on the main theme of the value of Life and the horror of Death. The best, the brightest, the most loved, the least deserving of it will die with all the rest. So, Hermione dies.
There was one thing that annoyed me about this. Harry wasn’t just fighting Voldemort. He barely even cares about Voldemort. He’s fighting everything bad about the universe. If he was truly willing to take the gloves off after the first death, then he would have done so after about half a second.
Actually, this is the aftermath of the Taboo Tradeoffs arc (i.e., the Wizengamot trial): yes, Harry doesn’t care about Voldemort, but he does have a very specific enemy at this point—the person who tried to murder Draco and send Hermione to Azkaban (or at least the second, if it was Quirrell—of course I expect it was Quirrellmort, but Harry only thinks of Quirrell as one of a range of different suspects). And by the time of Ch. 85, to Harry’s knowledge, nobody has yet died in that particular war.
If we’re talking about the story as a whole, sure. If we’re talking specifically about the two incarnations of Ch. 85 (which I was), let me quote:
This day your war against Voldemort has begun...
Dumbledore had said that, after the Incident with Rescuing Bellatrix from Azkaban. That had been a false alarm, but the phrase expressed the sentiment well.
Two nights ago his war had begun, and Harry didn’t know with who.
[...]
Someone had declared war against Harry, their first strike had been meant to take out Draco and Hermione both, and it was only by the barest of margins that Harry had saved Hermione.
Sure, Harry doesn’t actually want to kill that unknown enemy—it is also Ch. 85 where he thinks about how killing Voldemort would make the people of a hundred million years into the future terribly sad—but he very much does think in terms of a human target at this point in time who he wants to win against.
Y’know, I like the new, true version of Ch. 85, the one where Harry fails to get a phoenix—but I also really liked the original version (which, remember, Eliezer wrote as a stand-in because he couldn’t get the true version finished in time), where Harry, compromising with himself, made a resolution that for now he would try to win without killing people—but if anybody died [by his opponent’s hands], not just a PC, but any arbitrary bystander (he’d been thinking about how Batman’s ethics only come off as good if you don’t care about all the NPCs the Joker kills), the gloves would come off.
Yup. It was, apparently, a placeholder because Eliezer didn’t manage to write the stuff about the phoenix in time for the update (and didn’t want to leave the fic hanging on that gloomy note for a long time).
Depends on the circumstances. For example, if you’re inflicting the deaths yourself; I read somewhere that the Nazis used gas chambers rather than the bullets they used at first, because killing unarmed, unresisting individuals of all ages and genders by the dozen disturbed the soldiers. Or when you don’t know the people yourself, but their disappearance impacts and cripples your world.
I’ve read the same thing about Nazi soldiers, and also that they couldn’t handle another early method of killing—driving prisoners around in closed trucks with the exhaust fed into the back compartment.
It’s not that the thousands have no impact, it’s that one person can make a much larger emotional difference.
I’ve also heard that for soldiers, seeing one more death or injury can be the tipping point into PTSD.
The thing is that PTSD is really not that binary, like many mental illnesses, it has a wide range of symptoms and severity levels. What Nancy is talking about is how one death can push one drastically over, skipping much of the middle range where it might be ambiguous if one had symptoms severe enough to be diagnoseable. (Disclaimer, while I’ve heard the same sort of things NancyLebovitz is talking about, I’m not aware of any studies actually supporting this.)
The people in Azkaban are guilty of crimes, usually pretty terrible ones. There’s a difference between the innocent and the guilty.
Edit: For clarity, I’m not saying that they deserve to be tortured to death for their crimes. Azkaban is unnecessary and wildly disproportionate. It’s an issue of priorities—I’m going to feel bad for the victims of murder and work to help them quite a lot earlier than I’ll do the same for the perpetrators of murder.
If there are thousands of inmates at Azkaban, and the wizarding justice system is not always absolutely correct, even if then are only wrong a percent or two of the time, there are tens or even maybe hundreds of innocent prisoners of Azkaban. So, “not the usual outcome”, is irrelevant, what matters is the numbers. But of course it doesn’t hit as hard, and that is precisely because of the numbers. It is a bug in the human brain that one innocent person being ripped to death in front of you hurts a lot more than tens of innocent people being tortured to death out of sight, especially surrounded by thousands more people also being tortured to death who some say have lower moral priority.
I don’t think it’s the numbers so much as it is the familiarity. Were I familiar with any one Azkaban inmate, assuming the wizarding justice system is at least decently effective, I’d probably say “Yeah, this guy is probably guilty. Sucks to be him, but he should really avoid killing people next time”. That is not what I think when I see Hermione suffering. Even knowing that there’s probably several Hermiones in there, not knowing which ones they are makes empathizing with them a lot harder.
assuming the wizarding justice system is at least decently effective
Based on how Hermione’s trial went, this probably isn’t a safe assumption. Many of the people in Azkaban may have just pissed off the wrong person (e.g. Lucius).
I doubt most trials are decided by political pressure. There’s a few, but the typical trial is done in an ordinary way, with no bias more malicious than a prosecutor wanting to avoid looking stupid and the judge wanting to get done in time for lunch.
This is a very powerful demonstration of how the sudden death of a single loved friend affects one more than the horrible, slow torture to death of a thousand strangers in Azkaban.
This applies to Harry—but I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about myself and all the readers now expressing their pain on reddit.
A single death is felt differently from a thousand deaths. At least in fiction...
Y’know, I like the new, true version of Ch. 85, the one where Harry fails to get a phoenix—but I also really liked the original version (which, remember, Eliezer wrote as a stand-in because he couldn’t get the true version finished in time), where Harry, compromising with himself, made a resolution that for now he would try to win without killing people—but if anybody died [by his opponent’s hands], not just a PC, but any arbitrary bystander (he’d been thinking about how Batman’s ethics only come off as good if you don’t care about all the NPCs the Joker kills), the gloves would come off.
I’d kind of hoped that Harry would be able to actually go through without a death, and failing that I kind of expected that it would be some random NPC’s death that would change things—but I don’t think that would actually have worked to justify Harry’s future actions to the reader. [ETA: I guess buybuydavis is right too that, even more importantly, it wouldn’t have worked as a statement against death.] It really does need to be somebody we (the readers) care about in order to carry even a fraction of the emotional impact that death should carry.
(Tangent: As a preteen, I read 2001 up to the point where HAL kills Poole, and then had to stop and had some bad nights because that was so terrible. [Actually there was a similar thing a couple of years before that with The Neverending Story and the point where Atreyu’s horse Artax dies.] And around that time, possibly a bit later, I decided that feeling that death was this bad was the appropriate emotion, and grownups and other kids who not only didn’t have that reaction but who felt that it was childish exaggeration were wrong. And when, much later, my own emotional reaction to death in fiction—and, more deplorably, reality—started to subside, I still found myself in agreement with my earlier self on the question on appropriateness.)
I don’t think it works if what EY is making a statement against Death, which it seems to me he is. Rationality is all fine and dandy, but I think it’s window dressing on the main theme of the value of Life and the horror of Death. The best, the brightest, the most loved, the least deserving of it will die with all the rest. So, Hermione dies.
There was one thing that annoyed me about this. Harry wasn’t just fighting Voldemort. He barely even cares about Voldemort. He’s fighting everything bad about the universe. If he was truly willing to take the gloves off after the first death, then he would have done so after about half a second.
Actually, this is the aftermath of the Taboo Tradeoffs arc (i.e., the Wizengamot trial): yes, Harry doesn’t care about Voldemort, but he does have a very specific enemy at this point—the person who tried to murder Draco and send Hermione to Azkaban (or at least the second, if it was Quirrell—of course I expect it was Quirrellmort, but Harry only thinks of Quirrell as one of a range of different suspects). And by the time of Ch. 85, to Harry’s knowledge, nobody has yet died in that particular war.
I don’t think Harry’s target is a person at all, but Death itself. That’s the enemy. Harry would actually save Voldemort from Death if he could.
If we’re talking about the story as a whole, sure. If we’re talking specifically about the two incarnations of Ch. 85 (which I was), let me quote:
Sure, Harry doesn’t actually want to kill that unknown enemy—it is also Ch. 85 where he thinks about how killing Voldemort would make the people of a hundred million years into the future terribly sad—but he very much does think in terms of a human target at this point in time who he wants to win against.
Per chapter 90, I don’t see him thinking about his human enemy, I see him obsessing about defeating Death to save Hermione.
Wait, that got replaced?
Yup. It was, apparently, a placeholder because Eliezer didn’t manage to write the stuff about the phoenix in time for the update (and didn’t want to leave the fic hanging on that gloomy note for a long time).
Great, now I have to go re-read it. Shame, I quite liked that chapter, actually.
Depends on the circumstances. For example, if you’re inflicting the deaths yourself; I read somewhere that the Nazis used gas chambers rather than the bullets they used at first, because killing unarmed, unresisting individuals of all ages and genders by the dozen disturbed the soldiers. Or when you don’t know the people yourself, but their disappearance impacts and cripples your world.
I’ve read the same thing about Nazi soldiers, and also that they couldn’t handle another early method of killing—driving prisoners around in closed trucks with the exhaust fed into the back compartment.
It’s not that the thousands have no impact, it’s that one person can make a much larger emotional difference.
I’ve also heard that for soldiers, seeing one more death or injury can be the tipping point into PTSD.
Am I missing something, or does this follow trivially from PTSD being binary and the set of possible body counts being the natural numbers?
The thing is that PTSD is really not that binary, like many mental illnesses, it has a wide range of symptoms and severity levels. What Nancy is talking about is how one death can push one drastically over, skipping much of the middle range where it might be ambiguous if one had symptoms severe enough to be diagnoseable. (Disclaimer, while I’ve heard the same sort of things NancyLebovitz is talking about, I’m not aware of any studies actually supporting this.)
Got it. I was previously having difficulty making that belief pay rent.
The people in Azkaban are guilty of crimes, usually pretty terrible ones. There’s a difference between the innocent and the guilty.
Edit: For clarity, I’m not saying that they deserve to be tortured to death for their crimes. Azkaban is unnecessary and wildly disproportionate. It’s an issue of priorities—I’m going to feel bad for the victims of murder and work to help them quite a lot earlier than I’ll do the same for the perpetrators of murder.
From canon, and from what nearly happened to Hermione, it is clear that one can be sent to Azkaban while innocent.
Of course. However, it’s not the usual outcome.
Even given that, Azkaban is certainly worse than Hermione’s death, speaking intellectually. But it doesn’t hit as hard emotionally.
If there are thousands of inmates at Azkaban, and the wizarding justice system is not always absolutely correct, even if then are only wrong a percent or two of the time, there are tens or even maybe hundreds of innocent prisoners of Azkaban. So, “not the usual outcome”, is irrelevant, what matters is the numbers. But of course it doesn’t hit as hard, and that is precisely because of the numbers. It is a bug in the human brain that one innocent person being ripped to death in front of you hurts a lot more than tens of innocent people being tortured to death out of sight, especially surrounded by thousands more people also being tortured to death who some say have lower moral priority.
I don’t think it’s the numbers so much as it is the familiarity. Were I familiar with any one Azkaban inmate, assuming the wizarding justice system is at least decently effective, I’d probably say “Yeah, this guy is probably guilty. Sucks to be him, but he should really avoid killing people next time”. That is not what I think when I see Hermione suffering. Even knowing that there’s probably several Hermiones in there, not knowing which ones they are makes empathizing with them a lot harder.
Based on how Hermione’s trial went, this probably isn’t a safe assumption. Many of the people in Azkaban may have just pissed off the wrong person (e.g. Lucius).
I doubt most trials are decided by political pressure. There’s a few, but the typical trial is done in an ordinary way, with no bias more malicious than a prosecutor wanting to avoid looking stupid and the judge wanting to get done in time for lunch.