1) I loved the letters to Harry from his parents. Genuinely moving, and also surprising, because generally speaking people who Harry “puts in their place” in this fic tend to stay meekly chastened. (McGonagall is a glaring example, but Dumbledore and Snape have been treated the same way.) I was very happy that Harry’s parents got a chance to respond, after all, and that they acquitted themselves so well.
1a) The difference in [s]James’[/s] Michael’s and Petunia’s letters didn’t do anything to help HPMOR’s overall treatment of gender difference, although I would be happy to stipulate that the fic has rescued the character of Petunia every bit as far as she can be rescued.
2) Moving on to the author’s self-described “rant” on anti-feminism: I do think it’s a bit odd that he holds criticism of the work at this point to be categorically unfair, since he seems perfectly happy to accept praise.
3) EY seems to believe that Chapter 93 is going to be some kind of slam-dunk answer to critics—especially since he goes so far to demonstrate/insist that nothing was changed as a response to those critics. I actually suspect that the events of this chapter—in which, Minerva McGonagall, having submissively accepted her character assassination at the hands of Harry Potter, now submits herself for public humiliation and complete self-abnegation—will be largely taken as something less than a triumph of enlightened feminism.
3a) I think the fic’s treatment of McGonagall has been one of its weakest elements throughout. This isn’t even the first time we’ve been treated to a scene where Harry delivers a righteous dressing-down of McGonagall, and she’s meekly accepted it. At this point it’s a recurring theme. (I recall first complaining about the mischaracterisation of McGonagall in early 2011.)
4) I do wonder if there’s a numerical cutoff, relating to feedback from female readers, at which EY would stop to reconsider whether—despite his egalitarian principles and best conscious intentions—his fic might not have become skewed by gender bias. Would it take a hundred discrete pieces of feedback? A thousand? Is there any such number that would actually give him pause? The Author’s Note as it stands reads as a piece of knee-jerk defensiveness—it doesn’t seem that he’s really spent any time asking himself whether the female readers might be seeing something he doesn’t.
5) Again, I thought the letter from Harry’s parents (well, from his dad) was really great, and I was truly moved by it.
Edit: 6) Also, the last line of the author’s “rant” was very funny, and I laughed.
I guess different readers see things very differently, because I thought that McGonagall was a total badass in this chapter.
When someone makes a major mistake, based on an accumulation of errors from years of acting on a distorted version of their values, it takes a high-level rationalist and an impressive level of control and insight to be able to acknowledge their mistake, clearly see the values that were distorted, and set a new course that repudiates their old ways and appropriately takes their values into account. To be able to do that within a few hours, publicly, when they learned of their mistake through a vicious, personal, inappropriate chewing-out, seems like it might require one of those rumored double rationalists.
Or, if you must view it as a Harry vs. McGonagall conflict, McGonagall kicks his ass. In precisely the way that he needed to have his ass kicked.
Minerva McGonagall, having submissively accepted her character assassination at the hands of Harry Potter, now submits herself for public humiliation and complete self-abnegation
I don’t see it like that at all—I saw McGonagall:
Trying bravely to take blame away from Harry because, in her words, if she didn’t, he would have no one to say those horrible things to, and
Bravely taking a public stand for her principles, trying to turn over a new leaf (or as she put it, “trying to do better”)
At least, those are pretty clearly how she sees herself in those situations, not as submitting to Harry.
(I interpret the discussion about House points as simply meaning she 1. doesn’t care about the points to anybody but the Weasley twins, and 2. is trying to be more inclusive and trusting of her students.)
Fundamentally, regardless of out-of-universe complaints, McGonagall was wrong in the way she dealt with this problem, and by extension in how she dealt with Gryffindor House.
She has taken the first step towards becoming a PC in this universe, which is being rational and changing yourself to fix your mistakes.
… she may also have just learned how to lose.
No, I think we’ll be seeing much more of intelligent!McGonagall starting now...
No, I think we’ll be seeing much more of intelligent!McGonagall starting now...
Yeah, I don’t get the complaints about “meekness” in Minerva. She showed more strength than she ever has. Some people see admission of mistakes as submission; I see it as having the strength to accept the truth, regardless of status considerations from ninnies who don’t.
I do think it’s a bit odd that he holds criticism of the work at this point to be categorically unfair, since he seems perfectly happy to accept praise.
This isn’t accurate. He says that: if, in the event that your criticism is untrue, he is still unable to defend himself; then it is unfair to make that criticism.
I believe he has noted elsewhere that authors have no appeals against reader perception—that this is in fact the author’s problem. Though I can’t find a quote.
I don’t think the chapter was supposed to be a slam-dunk answer. I thought it was supposed to be the beginning of an example (implied to be an extended process of character development) showing how reading an incomplete story can mislead you on specific points. I’m somewhat torn about this, because if everything the author writes leads you to one conclusion, he doesn’t get to complain when you believe it. This holds true even if the work is already finished, because he doesn’t get to make people finish reading. But I do tentatively expect later chapters to change the current anti-feminist message.
Quite possibly Eliezer did miss something. For example, female billionaire J.K. Rowling said, “Hermione is a caricature of what I was when I was 11”. Eliezer used her characters and world to (correctly) argue for his philosophy and against hers. He has frequently snarked at her. He made some readers ask why he was making her caricature sillier in the S.P.H.E.W. arc, and so inferior to his own altered stand-in. I don’t know if he’s thought these events through. Nor do I know what it would mean to miss this, as an author.
At the same time, I think I completely disagree about the treatment of McGonagall in this chapter. Harry is the one giving a factually incorrect apology. And I do think she’ll show more competence after this, subject to the constraint of being in a story where children save/end the world. (TV Tropes link removed for your protection.)
I really didn’t see why EY was so damn proud about it in that regard.
Because Hermione’s death was motivating a female character, not just a male one—i.e., an answer to the “fridging” complaint.
(Hence the importance of pointing out it was written that way to start with, rather than as a “half-hearted sop” to patch the fridging issue. i.e., he’s pointing out that he didn’t kill Hermione just to get a rise out of Harry—the death is going to affect the whole school, and Gryffindor in particular, through McGonagall.)
If you do something that looks just like a fridging in a story, to the point where people read it as a fridging, and it works as a fridging in the story so far … if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck then it might be a platypus but it’s not reasonable to tell people they’re wrong to feel it’s another bloody fridging. Authors don’t get to do that—even if it was a preplanned fridging in the great arc of the story—and neither do those of their fans who think they can do no wrong.
I think perhaps you’ve misread the context of my comment. The grandparent comment asked why Eliezer felt chapter 93 was an answer to the critics, and I explained why. More precisely, I explained why he was concerned that 93 might be interpreted as an attempt to fix a perception of fridging.
In a previous LW thread, someone defined fridging as killing off a female character solely to further a male character’s arc; chapter 93 demonstrates that Hermione’s death was not solely to advance Harry’s arc: many other people are affected, most notably McGonagall.
What I expect is pissing off Eliezer (or so I imagine, putting myself in his shoes) is far less the criticism of fridging per se, than the idea that he changed the story in order to avoid the accusation, when from his POV it was never a valid criticism in the first place under the given definition.
it’s not reasonable to tell people they’re wrong to feel it’s another bloody fridging
Whether people “feel” it’s a fridging is frankly irrelevant, since an author’s control over people’s feelings is rather limited. However, under the definition Eliezer’s working from, as of ch. 93, people are in fact wrong that it’s another bloody fringing. In addition to it not being solely to motivate a male character, it’s actually the direct result of Hermione’s brave stance against Quirrel—part of her arc, not Harry’s. (Something that I missed myself at first due to how long ago it was I read that chapter, plus the fact that we’re not directly shown Quirrel’s subsequent machinations to arrange her death.)
(Come to think of it… why didn’t the phoenix also come for Hermione that night? She, too, was making a choice to save another (Harry) in the face of mortal danger to herself. I suppose Eliezer would say that this is too abstract for a phoenix’s brain to process, since the danger is not immediate, and the thing to be saved too vaguely specified.)
Whether people “feel” it’s a fridging is frankly irrelevant, since an author’s control over people’s feelings is rather limited. However, under the definition Eliezer’s working from, as of ch. 93, people are in fact wrong that it’s another bloody fringing.
Eh? We’re not playing Scrabble here; anyone Eliezer’s pissed off with the last few chapters isn’t going to suddenly feel retroactively fine about them if it turns out that the events don’t count as fridging by a strict dictionary definition. Whether people feel it’s a fridging, or functionally equivalent to one, isn’t just relevant; it’s the only thing that’s relevant in this particular context.
You see an animal at a distance. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. You start to get offended by the duck. Then, you get closer and realize the duck was a platypus and not a duck at all. At this point, you realize that you were wrong, in a point of fact, to be offended. You can’t claim that anything that looks like a duck, but which later turns out not to be, is offensive. If it later turns out not to be a duck then it was never a duck, and if you haven’t been able to tell for sure yet (but will be able to in the future) then you need to suspend judgement until you can. Particularly since there is no possible defense that the thing is not a duck except to show you that it is not a duck, which will happen in time.
We’re not playing Scrabble here; anyone Eliezer’s pissed off with the last few chapters isn’t going to suddenly feel retroactively fine about them
Of course not. But that doesn’t mean they can correctly accuse Eliezer of doing what has been claimed. The moment someone pattern matches to “it’s a fridging”, confirmation bias is bound to take over, and it would be an exceptional person who could undo that matching after the fact.
Are there things Eliezer could’ve done (prior to Hermione’s death) to draw a clearer connection to her arc? Yes, plenty, and I’ve posted an idea or two myself. But the connection is there, even if lots of us missed it on first reading.
Whether people feel it’s a fridging, or functionally equivalent to one, isn’t just relevant; it’s the only thing that’s relevant in this particular context.
It’s not relevant to Eliezer, since he has not actually done what he was accused of doing: i.e., treating females in the story as if their main purpose is to provide motivation for the men.
If the accusation were reduced to “your story made me feel bad” (as you seem to be implying it should), then I doubt Eliezer would’ve bothered to respond. Just because somebody feels bad doesn’t mean Eliezer is bad or has done a bad thing.
It’s not relevant to Eliezer, since he has not actually done what he was accused of doing: i.e., treating females in the story as if their main purpose is to provide motivation for the men.
You are a writer. You’ve written a story which you believe instantiates concept P; you’re aware of a related concept Q, which is considered harmful, but you believe you’re avoiding it. On publication, an unexpectedly large group of people get upset over your plot because by their lights it’s indeed an example of concept Q, despite your precautions. Isn’t this evidence for expanding your definition of Q to include portions of P, at least for the purpose of avoiding pissed-off fans? I’ve been thinking of this as pretty basic Human’s Guide to Words stuff.
It seems to me like if people become upset in the middle of a history book, and then complain why the author let Nazis win the war. As opposed to reading the next chapter to see they actually lost.
I was not aware of Women in Refrigerators as a trope at the time I wrote that chapter, let alone at the time the outcome of Hermione’s meeting with the troll was determined as part of the plot—which was the instant I thought ‘What happens with the troll?’ back when the fic was being formed, insofar as I’d read that scene a dozen times in a dozen fanfictions and nobody ever gets hurt. That event was one of the primordial ingredients of HPMOR, and canon!Hermione is the troll’s target in canon, and that is the true causal origin, period.
With respect, I don’t think your reply actually answers the parent at all? He didn’t posit that you were aware of the WiR trope or wrote an instantiation of same deliberately.
On the contrary, he asks what it would take to make you consider that you had inadvertently conformed to “Q” [WiR], despite your intention to write “P,” something completely different.
EDITED: I’m sorry, on re-read he did posit awareness of WiR. I would suggest the point stands even if you had been unaware.
Isn’t this evidence for expanding your definition of Q to include portions of P, at least for the purpose of avoiding pissed-off fans?
It is also (similarly weak) evidence that it may be useful to update Z, the set of desired fans, such that it excludes those who execute behaviour Y. The act of using social-political attacks to attempt to modify your author-tract from one evangelising a rationality ideology to one evangelising some other ideology isn’t one that must necessarily respond to with compliance.
The act of using social-political attacks to attempt to modify your author-tract from one evangelising a rationality ideology to one evangelising some other ideology isn’t one that must necessarily respond to with compliance.
Or respond to at all, when any kind of response will further elevate the perceived importance of the issue, especially when attention to the topic is further incentivized by the author through him discouraging the reading of his response. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. Alas, there seems to be something about “PR-savvy” which bars general competency from seeping through to it. Score one for the mindkillers.
The act of using social-political attacks to attempt to modify your author-tract from one evangelising a rationality ideology to one evangelising some other ideology isn’t one that must necessarily respond to with compliance.
This presumes that the complaints and concerns in question are asking for something like “Harry Potter and the Methods of Feminism.” Having concerns about something is not the same as wanting to turn it into a feminist tract.
I do think it’s a bit odd that he holds criticism of the work at this point to be categorically unfair, since he seems perfectly happy to accept praise.
In an early author’s note that has since been removed (the one that pbasvezrq Dhveeryy vf gur ningne bs Ibyqrzbeg), EY mentioned having to be meak about accepting praise prior to revealing that there is a certain spell on the Pioneer Plaque, which seems somewhat similar to (if weaker than) what he said in the rant, about the criticism not being wholely warranted until people see where the story winds up. At the same time, he opened the rant by stating that if people overwhelmingly missed the point, it reflects on his skill as an author. (Also from the redacted author’s notes are counterpoints to this, where he shows exasperation that people fail at understanding things like “No, I do not, in fact, advocate what the villain does”.)
I believe it was stated that those notes were redacted because it was pointed out to him that readers like to self-handycap their analysis of the story for sake of suspense (aka why there are still loads of people convinced Quirrell != Voldemort), or restrict their understanding to that of the viewpoint character, etc. With this in mind, he’s kinda had to deal with it from all sides: praise/criticism/speculation/etc are all littered with people missing something crutial, and he seems to have given up on pointing this out at some point in the middle of the fic, at least until the shitstorm that spawned around these last few chapters.
I wanted to correct my post to fix the error you pointed out, but strikethroughs aren’t working as I’d expect. Can anybody tell me the right code to use?
Reax to Chapter 93:
1) I loved the letters to Harry from his parents. Genuinely moving, and also surprising, because generally speaking people who Harry “puts in their place” in this fic tend to stay meekly chastened. (McGonagall is a glaring example, but Dumbledore and Snape have been treated the same way.) I was very happy that Harry’s parents got a chance to respond, after all, and that they acquitted themselves so well.
1a) The difference in [s]James’[/s] Michael’s and Petunia’s letters didn’t do anything to help HPMOR’s overall treatment of gender difference, although I would be happy to stipulate that the fic has rescued the character of Petunia every bit as far as she can be rescued.
2) Moving on to the author’s self-described “rant” on anti-feminism: I do think it’s a bit odd that he holds criticism of the work at this point to be categorically unfair, since he seems perfectly happy to accept praise.
3) EY seems to believe that Chapter 93 is going to be some kind of slam-dunk answer to critics—especially since he goes so far to demonstrate/insist that nothing was changed as a response to those critics. I actually suspect that the events of this chapter—in which, Minerva McGonagall, having submissively accepted her character assassination at the hands of Harry Potter, now submits herself for public humiliation and complete self-abnegation—will be largely taken as something less than a triumph of enlightened feminism.
3a) I think the fic’s treatment of McGonagall has been one of its weakest elements throughout. This isn’t even the first time we’ve been treated to a scene where Harry delivers a righteous dressing-down of McGonagall, and she’s meekly accepted it. At this point it’s a recurring theme. (I recall first complaining about the mischaracterisation of McGonagall in early 2011.)
4) I do wonder if there’s a numerical cutoff, relating to feedback from female readers, at which EY would stop to reconsider whether—despite his egalitarian principles and best conscious intentions—his fic might not have become skewed by gender bias. Would it take a hundred discrete pieces of feedback? A thousand? Is there any such number that would actually give him pause? The Author’s Note as it stands reads as a piece of knee-jerk defensiveness—it doesn’t seem that he’s really spent any time asking himself whether the female readers might be seeing something he doesn’t.
5) Again, I thought the letter from Harry’s parents (well, from his dad) was really great, and I was truly moved by it.
Edit: 6) Also, the last line of the author’s “rant” was very funny, and I laughed.
I guess different readers see things very differently, because I thought that McGonagall was a total badass in this chapter.
When someone makes a major mistake, based on an accumulation of errors from years of acting on a distorted version of their values, it takes a high-level rationalist and an impressive level of control and insight to be able to acknowledge their mistake, clearly see the values that were distorted, and set a new course that repudiates their old ways and appropriately takes their values into account. To be able to do that within a few hours, publicly, when they learned of their mistake through a vicious, personal, inappropriate chewing-out, seems like it might require one of those rumored double rationalists.
Or, if you must view it as a Harry vs. McGonagall conflict, McGonagall kicks his ass. In precisely the way that he needed to have his ass kicked.
I don’t see it like that at all—I saw McGonagall:
Trying bravely to take blame away from Harry because, in her words, if she didn’t, he would have no one to say those horrible things to, and
Bravely taking a public stand for her principles, trying to turn over a new leaf (or as she put it, “trying to do better”)
At least, those are pretty clearly how she sees herself in those situations, not as submitting to Harry.
(I interpret the discussion about House points as simply meaning she 1. doesn’t care about the points to anybody but the Weasley twins, and 2. is trying to be more inclusive and trusting of her students.)
Fundamentally, regardless of out-of-universe complaints, McGonagall was wrong in the way she dealt with this problem, and by extension in how she dealt with Gryffindor House.
She has taken the first step towards becoming a PC in this universe, which is being rational and changing yourself to fix your mistakes.
… she may also have just learned how to lose.
No, I think we’ll be seeing much more of intelligent!McGonagall starting now...
Yeah, I don’t get the complaints about “meekness” in Minerva. She showed more strength than she ever has. Some people see admission of mistakes as submission; I see it as having the strength to accept the truth, regardless of status considerations from ninnies who don’t.
It’s funny that you see McGonagall’s changing her mind as a flaw, not a strength.
This isn’t accurate. He says that: if, in the event that your criticism is untrue, he is still unable to defend himself; then it is unfair to make that criticism.
I believe he has noted elsewhere that authors have no appeals against reader perception—that this is in fact the author’s problem. Though I can’t find a quote.
I don’t think the chapter was supposed to be a slam-dunk answer. I thought it was supposed to be the beginning of an example (implied to be an extended process of character development) showing how reading an incomplete story can mislead you on specific points. I’m somewhat torn about this, because if everything the author writes leads you to one conclusion, he doesn’t get to complain when you believe it. This holds true even if the work is already finished, because he doesn’t get to make people finish reading. But I do tentatively expect later chapters to change the current anti-feminist message.
Quite possibly Eliezer did miss something. For example, female billionaire J.K. Rowling said, “Hermione is a caricature of what I was when I was 11”. Eliezer used her characters and world to (correctly) argue for his philosophy and against hers. He has frequently snarked at her. He made some readers ask why he was making her caricature sillier in the S.P.H.E.W. arc, and so inferior to his own altered stand-in. I don’t know if he’s thought these events through. Nor do I know what it would mean to miss this, as an author.
At the same time, I think I completely disagree about the treatment of McGonagall in this chapter. Harry is the one giving a factually incorrect apology. And I do think she’ll show more competence after this, subject to the constraint of being in a story where children save/end the world. (TV Tropes link removed for your protection.)
My thoughts exactly. When I read the chapter, I really didn’t see why EY was so damn proud about it in that regard.
Because Hermione’s death was motivating a female character, not just a male one—i.e., an answer to the “fridging” complaint.
(Hence the importance of pointing out it was written that way to start with, rather than as a “half-hearted sop” to patch the fridging issue. i.e., he’s pointing out that he didn’t kill Hermione just to get a rise out of Harry—the death is going to affect the whole school, and Gryffindor in particular, through McGonagall.)
If you do something that looks just like a fridging in a story, to the point where people read it as a fridging, and it works as a fridging in the story so far … if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck then it might be a platypus but it’s not reasonable to tell people they’re wrong to feel it’s another bloody fridging. Authors don’t get to do that—even if it was a preplanned fridging in the great arc of the story—and neither do those of their fans who think they can do no wrong.
I think perhaps you’ve misread the context of my comment. The grandparent comment asked why Eliezer felt chapter 93 was an answer to the critics, and I explained why. More precisely, I explained why he was concerned that 93 might be interpreted as an attempt to fix a perception of fridging.
In a previous LW thread, someone defined fridging as killing off a female character solely to further a male character’s arc; chapter 93 demonstrates that Hermione’s death was not solely to advance Harry’s arc: many other people are affected, most notably McGonagall.
What I expect is pissing off Eliezer (or so I imagine, putting myself in his shoes) is far less the criticism of fridging per se, than the idea that he changed the story in order to avoid the accusation, when from his POV it was never a valid criticism in the first place under the given definition.
Whether people “feel” it’s a fridging is frankly irrelevant, since an author’s control over people’s feelings is rather limited. However, under the definition Eliezer’s working from, as of ch. 93, people are in fact wrong that it’s another bloody fringing. In addition to it not being solely to motivate a male character, it’s actually the direct result of Hermione’s brave stance against Quirrel—part of her arc, not Harry’s. (Something that I missed myself at first due to how long ago it was I read that chapter, plus the fact that we’re not directly shown Quirrel’s subsequent machinations to arrange her death.)
(Come to think of it… why didn’t the phoenix also come for Hermione that night? She, too, was making a choice to save another (Harry) in the face of mortal danger to herself. I suppose Eliezer would say that this is too abstract for a phoenix’s brain to process, since the danger is not immediate, and the thing to be saved too vaguely specified.)
Eh? We’re not playing Scrabble here; anyone Eliezer’s pissed off with the last few chapters isn’t going to suddenly feel retroactively fine about them if it turns out that the events don’t count as fridging by a strict dictionary definition. Whether people feel it’s a fridging, or functionally equivalent to one, isn’t just relevant; it’s the only thing that’s relevant in this particular context.
You see an animal at a distance. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. You start to get offended by the duck. Then, you get closer and realize the duck was a platypus and not a duck at all. At this point, you realize that you were wrong, in a point of fact, to be offended. You can’t claim that anything that looks like a duck, but which later turns out not to be, is offensive. If it later turns out not to be a duck then it was never a duck, and if you haven’t been able to tell for sure yet (but will be able to in the future) then you need to suspend judgement until you can. Particularly since there is no possible defense that the thing is not a duck except to show you that it is not a duck, which will happen in time.
Of course not. But that doesn’t mean they can correctly accuse Eliezer of doing what has been claimed. The moment someone pattern matches to “it’s a fridging”, confirmation bias is bound to take over, and it would be an exceptional person who could undo that matching after the fact.
Are there things Eliezer could’ve done (prior to Hermione’s death) to draw a clearer connection to her arc? Yes, plenty, and I’ve posted an idea or two myself. But the connection is there, even if lots of us missed it on first reading.
It’s not relevant to Eliezer, since he has not actually done what he was accused of doing: i.e., treating females in the story as if their main purpose is to provide motivation for the men.
If the accusation were reduced to “your story made me feel bad” (as you seem to be implying it should), then I doubt Eliezer would’ve bothered to respond. Just because somebody feels bad doesn’t mean Eliezer is bad or has done a bad thing.
You are a writer. You’ve written a story which you believe instantiates concept P; you’re aware of a related concept Q, which is considered harmful, but you believe you’re avoiding it. On publication, an unexpectedly large group of people get upset over your plot because by their lights it’s indeed an example of concept Q, despite your precautions. Isn’t this evidence for expanding your definition of Q to include portions of P, at least for the purpose of avoiding pissed-off fans? I’ve been thinking of this as pretty basic Human’s Guide to Words stuff.
It seems to me like if people become upset in the middle of a history book, and then complain why the author let Nazis win the war. As opposed to reading the next chapter to see they actually lost.
I was not aware of Women in Refrigerators as a trope at the time I wrote that chapter, let alone at the time the outcome of Hermione’s meeting with the troll was determined as part of the plot—which was the instant I thought ‘What happens with the troll?’ back when the fic was being formed, insofar as I’d read that scene a dozen times in a dozen fanfictions and nobody ever gets hurt. That event was one of the primordial ingredients of HPMOR, and canon!Hermione is the troll’s target in canon, and that is the true causal origin, period.
With respect, I don’t think your reply actually answers the parent at all? He didn’t posit that you were aware of the WiR trope or wrote an instantiation of same deliberately.
On the contrary, he asks what it would take to make you consider that you had inadvertently conformed to “Q” [WiR], despite your intention to write “P,” something completely different.
EDITED: I’m sorry, on re-read he did posit awareness of WiR. I would suggest the point stands even if you had been unaware.
It is also (similarly weak) evidence that it may be useful to update Z, the set of desired fans, such that it excludes those who execute behaviour Y. The act of using social-political attacks to attempt to modify your author-tract from one evangelising a rationality ideology to one evangelising some other ideology isn’t one that must necessarily respond to with compliance.
Or respond to at all, when any kind of response will further elevate the perceived importance of the issue, especially when attention to the topic is further incentivized by the author through him discouraging the reading of his response. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. Alas, there seems to be something about “PR-savvy” which bars general competency from seeping through to it. Score one for the mindkillers.
This presumes that the complaints and concerns in question are asking for something like “Harry Potter and the Methods of Feminism.” Having concerns about something is not the same as wanting to turn it into a feminist tract.
In an early author’s note that has since been removed (the one that pbasvezrq Dhveeryy vf gur ningne bs Ibyqrzbeg), EY mentioned having to be meak about accepting praise prior to revealing that there is a certain spell on the Pioneer Plaque, which seems somewhat similar to (if weaker than) what he said in the rant, about the criticism not being wholely warranted until people see where the story winds up. At the same time, he opened the rant by stating that if people overwhelmingly missed the point, it reflects on his skill as an author. (Also from the redacted author’s notes are counterpoints to this, where he shows exasperation that people fail at understanding things like “No, I do not, in fact, advocate what the villain does”.)
I believe it was stated that those notes were redacted because it was pointed out to him that readers like to self-handycap their analysis of the story for sake of suspense (aka why there are still loads of people convinced Quirrell != Voldemort), or restrict their understanding to that of the viewpoint character, etc. With this in mind, he’s kinda had to deal with it from all sides: praise/criticism/speculation/etc are all littered with people missing something crutial, and he seems to have given up on pointing this out at some point in the middle of the fic, at least until the shitstorm that spawned around these last few chapters.
Nitpick: Harry’s dad’s name is Michael, not James (James is his biological father).
You are of course right, thank you!
I wanted to correct my post to fix the error you pointed out, but strikethroughs aren’t working as I’d expect. Can anybody tell me the right code to use?
There isn’t a way to do it (except for retracting your whole post). But you can use unicode strikethroughs.