Nice well-groomed boys get girls, and Dark Wizards also get girls, but nice well-groomed boys suspected of being secretly Dark get more girls than you can imagine—”
I do think that there is a serious problem with the scale of the problems that Harry is dealing with as opposed to those Hermione is dealing with it. It almost comes across as token feminism. The actual books have been criticized for that same thing but at least there Hermione got to actually deal with the same life-threatening issues that Harry did. I’m not sure what to think about this.
ETA: Is Harry’s comments about asking for Hermione’s permission supposed to be an implicit argument about whether a Friendly AI should ask us before it implements what it thinks our CEV is?
I’ve been pondering this. I was really glad when Hermione started getting to take the spotlight, and a lot of my appreciation was from a straight-forwardly-feminist perspective. I posted a mini review talking about how Hermione had been lacking as a character, the hints Eliezer had dropped about her future development, and my appreciation for the way he eventually handled it. Apparently this comment played a role in Eliezer coming up with the SPHEW acryonym. I’m not sure if it ended up otherwise shaping the arc. He also noted that the initial setup (where Dumbledore basically tells Hermione she can’t be a hero because she just can’t) was intended to be a critique, but not about feminist issues.
A few months later, I think this section is an interesting case study in meta-token-feminism. I think that Eliezer in general agrees with most goals of the movement, but is probably actually opposed to token feminism. (This is based off of a few vague statements he made, I’m only 65% confident). I also think that SPHEW was originally intended to sort of lampshade the issue, addressing some real issues but in a tongue-in-cheek way. (The issues—mostly about the power imbalance that he created between Hermione and Harry—aren’t inherently feminist-oriented, but they happened to interact with the gender dynamics of the original story in a way that made attempt to fix them look like token feminism. I think it could have been pulled off it a much subtler way, but in general MoR isn’t particularly subtle anyway. (Or rather, it IS subtle, but you can’t hear the subtlety over the sound of how awesome Harry is, unless you’re actually looking for it).
And then it turned out to be a lot harder to write than he thought and it dragged on for a long time which made it seem even more long and intense than it actually was. If we were reading this story through all at once, I think the section would still be long, but wouldn’t have generated the complaints it’s gotten.
The important thing to remember about all of this is that this entire segment takes place before the end of year one. Hermione just leveled up dramatically. Yes, Harry got a surprise visit to Azkaban, but I’m pretty sure by the time year one ends, she and Harry will be participating side by side against serious, life threatening issues.
By the end of the section, I’m less worried about how the gender issues played out and more concerned about how the “Hermione and friends are level-grinding by picking fights with bullies” vibe.
Regardless, I think MoR definitely needed a less serious intermission before the next Dark Serious Thing, and I think some over-the-top token feminism and silly level-grinding isn’t too bad a way to do that if it is also addresses some issues with the character-power-dynamics. It would definitely feel out of place in a traditional novel, but with the TV-series pacing, it’s an okay diversion.
Huh. My first thought was simply to argue that a work of fiction is rarely improved by attempting to make it meet certain moral standards; The Kreutzer Sonata isn’t any less great for espousing despicable beliefs, and plenty of terrible novels inspire laudable ideas of human society. So, if artistic quality and moral quality are unrelated, better that an author write what comes from their heart rather than attempt to teach what they haven’t yet interiorised themselves, and risk coming off as insincere or overzealous.
However, MoR is ostensibly meant to be an educational and inspirational story as much as an entertaining one, so in that particular light the suggestion carries more weight. Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female. Perhaps more importantly, had Ron kept his canon role instead of being replaced by Draco, there would have been a second, male WMBOHH companion, Hermione’s frustration would not have been framed in terms of perceived sexism in the first place, and there probably would not have been a S.P.H.E.W..
However, MoR is ostensibly meant to be an educational and inspirational story as much as an entertaining one, so in that particular light the suggestion carries more weight. Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female. Perhaps more importantly, had Ron kept his canon role instead of being replaced by Draco, there would have been a second, male WMBOHH companion, Hermione’s frustration would not have been framed in terms of perceived sexism in the first place, and there probably would not have been a S.P.H.E.W..
I mostly agree with this. But with an extremely lengthy qualifier:
My take, as a storyteller, is that your collective work should meet your moral standards. (I mean, they’re YOUR standards, your work should be meeting them, whatever they are). That doesn’t mean jamming morals down people’s throat, it doesn’t mean making sure each work conveys every single positive thing you believe in. But I think it does mean that you should consider what impact your story might have on the people who read it, and given the chance, you should try to make that impact positive.
Some of my favorite stories are ones where the main character’s judgment is obviously questionable. The Eisenhorn trilogy (from Warhammer 40k) is set in a world whose morality is completely orthogonal to mine. There is so much wrong with the Imperium of Man I don’t know where to begin. (Basically imagine a medieval catholic church managing an entire galaxy). But the main character is not a 20th-century American reacting to his crazy world, he is a product of that crazy world. He does things I’d consider completely immoral in 20th century America, but I certainly wouldn’t blame him for given his upbringing. In the face of a bizarre world, he makes choices, whose rightness and wrongness correspond to my notions in about the same way that pebble-sorters’ choices would.
And by the end of the story, he might or might not have become incredibly deluded, so anything he ‘learned’ should not be taken as an Aesop.
Still, it’s a story that deals DIRECTLY with morality, by completely ignoring what is actually right and focusing on the way humans make decisions in response to their environment. My reaction to the characters is an interesting sort of Rorschach test. I think a SF-loving conservative christian who read it would come away with completely different reactions to many key choices, but still enjoy it, feel like her “political/moral” neurons had been satisfyingly tickled, and not feel like the author was presenting an Argument To Attack/Agree-with.
This all makes it “moral,” in my opinion.
So does the fact that it features a variety of characters of various skin colors, genders, and levels of disability. Most of them are powerful, flawed, and interesting. None of them draw attention to their non-white-male-able-bodied-status as a political thing you should care about. But I believe this has a (subtle) effect on people of helping to normalizing a wider spectrum of humanity (including, I should note, the idea of living for hundreds of years thanks to advanced science). Multiplied over multiple authors who bother to do this, and potentially millions of readers, I think this adds up to positive effect worth noting. (I don’t know whether the author intentionally did this or not. I didn’t even think about the disability angle until just now).
On an unrelated note, it’s also a really fun, well crafted adventure story about a guy who hunts demons across the galaxy.
Moral and artistic value are mostly unrelated to each other. In general, it’s more important to be a fun story to read than to be a moral story, because no one will read a moral story that isn’t fun. But there is no reason you can’t try for both. Most fun-but-not-moral stories could probably be improved morally in some way without harming the work.
It might require some skill on the author’s part, and practicing to get better at it (without hamfisted metaphors) will probably result in a few bad stories while they get better. I think that’s okay.
MoR happens to be a moral story in almost the opposite way that the Eisenhorn trilogy is. (That’s fine—sometimes you want your message proudly displayed). The SPHEW section was a bit where I think Eliezer was stretching a bit, and it shows, but I’m confident there will be a net-benefit to Eliezer and the world at large due to that growth.
What’s wrong with completely shutting up about morals? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo is also about an alien crapsack world where the only character who disagrees with common morals is even worse than everyone else, and it’s wonderful. Except the parts where the book cuts itself off during a description of mass murder, torture, human sacrifice, or male-male couples, to remind the reader that they are wrong and abnormal. Yes, Gus, that’s nice, but will you be quiet and let the grown-ups read?
I guess you could make the argument that it teaches you that the typical mind fallacy is false, or to question your own society, or something, but that looks dubious. It’s just a pretty thing, and it doesn’t have to meet moral standards any more than gastronomic ones.
You’re still conflate “be a moral work” with “shove morals down your throat in a hamfisted way” which is exactly what I was saying you DIDN’T have to do. If Salammbo does this in a clumsy way, well, then yeah, maybe that book could be written better. (If it says male-male coupling is bad, I disagree with it on a moral level anyway, although that’s different than disagreeing about how that morality was dealt with).
When I say “works should be moral” I mean that, all else being equal, I prefer art works to produce a positive effect on the world. Sometimes by directly inspiring people, sometimes by subtly shaping them.
Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female.
Actually, insofar as he decided not to gender-flip everybody or change the prediction, he did decide to make the fated hero male and the companion female.
Not that I think he should have done otherwise, all things considered, but this kind of argument annoys me in general.
Harry isn’t dealing with any life threatening issues now, except internally. I’d be surprised if the story reaches its conclusion without her being made aware of the issue of Voldemort and playing an active role in the conflict.
And he has dealt with bullying in past chapters (though he focused most on Snape’s bullying). Harry and Hermione learned almost directly opposed lessons from the experience, both of which seem correct.
Chapter 75 was sad but did have its funny parts.
I really liked:
I do think that there is a serious problem with the scale of the problems that Harry is dealing with as opposed to those Hermione is dealing with it. It almost comes across as token feminism. The actual books have been criticized for that same thing but at least there Hermione got to actually deal with the same life-threatening issues that Harry did. I’m not sure what to think about this.
ETA: Is Harry’s comments about asking for Hermione’s permission supposed to be an implicit argument about whether a Friendly AI should ask us before it implements what it thinks our CEV is?
I’ve been pondering this. I was really glad when Hermione started getting to take the spotlight, and a lot of my appreciation was from a straight-forwardly-feminist perspective. I posted a mini review talking about how Hermione had been lacking as a character, the hints Eliezer had dropped about her future development, and my appreciation for the way he eventually handled it. Apparently this comment played a role in Eliezer coming up with the SPHEW acryonym. I’m not sure if it ended up otherwise shaping the arc. He also noted that the initial setup (where Dumbledore basically tells Hermione she can’t be a hero because she just can’t) was intended to be a critique, but not about feminist issues.
A few months later, I think this section is an interesting case study in meta-token-feminism. I think that Eliezer in general agrees with most goals of the movement, but is probably actually opposed to token feminism. (This is based off of a few vague statements he made, I’m only 65% confident). I also think that SPHEW was originally intended to sort of lampshade the issue, addressing some real issues but in a tongue-in-cheek way. (The issues—mostly about the power imbalance that he created between Hermione and Harry—aren’t inherently feminist-oriented, but they happened to interact with the gender dynamics of the original story in a way that made attempt to fix them look like token feminism. I think it could have been pulled off it a much subtler way, but in general MoR isn’t particularly subtle anyway. (Or rather, it IS subtle, but you can’t hear the subtlety over the sound of how awesome Harry is, unless you’re actually looking for it).
And then it turned out to be a lot harder to write than he thought and it dragged on for a long time which made it seem even more long and intense than it actually was. If we were reading this story through all at once, I think the section would still be long, but wouldn’t have generated the complaints it’s gotten.
The important thing to remember about all of this is that this entire segment takes place before the end of year one. Hermione just leveled up dramatically. Yes, Harry got a surprise visit to Azkaban, but I’m pretty sure by the time year one ends, she and Harry will be participating side by side against serious, life threatening issues.
By the end of the section, I’m less worried about how the gender issues played out and more concerned about how the “Hermione and friends are level-grinding by picking fights with bullies” vibe.
Regardless, I think MoR definitely needed a less serious intermission before the next Dark Serious Thing, and I think some over-the-top token feminism and silly level-grinding isn’t too bad a way to do that if it is also addresses some issues with the character-power-dynamics. It would definitely feel out of place in a traditional novel, but with the TV-series pacing, it’s an okay diversion.
Absolutely not.
Draco will be in between them.
I’m pretty positive Draco and Hermione will be flanking him.
Dramiorry: OT3 for lyfe.
I’m totally shipping that threesome. And wondering just what their parents would say about it.
Huh. My first thought was simply to argue that a work of fiction is rarely improved by attempting to make it meet certain moral standards; The Kreutzer Sonata isn’t any less great for espousing despicable beliefs, and plenty of terrible novels inspire laudable ideas of human society. So, if artistic quality and moral quality are unrelated, better that an author write what comes from their heart rather than attempt to teach what they haven’t yet interiorised themselves, and risk coming off as insincere or overzealous.
However, MoR is ostensibly meant to be an educational and inspirational story as much as an entertaining one, so in that particular light the suggestion carries more weight. Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female. Perhaps more importantly, had Ron kept his canon role instead of being replaced by Draco, there would have been a second, male WMBOHH companion, Hermione’s frustration would not have been framed in terms of perceived sexism in the first place, and there probably would not have been a S.P.H.E.W..
I mostly agree with this. But with an extremely lengthy qualifier:
My take, as a storyteller, is that your collective work should meet your moral standards. (I mean, they’re YOUR standards, your work should be meeting them, whatever they are). That doesn’t mean jamming morals down people’s throat, it doesn’t mean making sure each work conveys every single positive thing you believe in. But I think it does mean that you should consider what impact your story might have on the people who read it, and given the chance, you should try to make that impact positive.
Some of my favorite stories are ones where the main character’s judgment is obviously questionable. The Eisenhorn trilogy (from Warhammer 40k) is set in a world whose morality is completely orthogonal to mine. There is so much wrong with the Imperium of Man I don’t know where to begin. (Basically imagine a medieval catholic church managing an entire galaxy). But the main character is not a 20th-century American reacting to his crazy world, he is a product of that crazy world. He does things I’d consider completely immoral in 20th century America, but I certainly wouldn’t blame him for given his upbringing. In the face of a bizarre world, he makes choices, whose rightness and wrongness correspond to my notions in about the same way that pebble-sorters’ choices would.
And by the end of the story, he might or might not have become incredibly deluded, so anything he ‘learned’ should not be taken as an Aesop.
Still, it’s a story that deals DIRECTLY with morality, by completely ignoring what is actually right and focusing on the way humans make decisions in response to their environment. My reaction to the characters is an interesting sort of Rorschach test. I think a SF-loving conservative christian who read it would come away with completely different reactions to many key choices, but still enjoy it, feel like her “political/moral” neurons had been satisfyingly tickled, and not feel like the author was presenting an Argument To Attack/Agree-with.
This all makes it “moral,” in my opinion.
So does the fact that it features a variety of characters of various skin colors, genders, and levels of disability. Most of them are powerful, flawed, and interesting. None of them draw attention to their non-white-male-able-bodied-status as a political thing you should care about. But I believe this has a (subtle) effect on people of helping to normalizing a wider spectrum of humanity (including, I should note, the idea of living for hundreds of years thanks to advanced science). Multiplied over multiple authors who bother to do this, and potentially millions of readers, I think this adds up to positive effect worth noting. (I don’t know whether the author intentionally did this or not. I didn’t even think about the disability angle until just now).
On an unrelated note, it’s also a really fun, well crafted adventure story about a guy who hunts demons across the galaxy.
Moral and artistic value are mostly unrelated to each other. In general, it’s more important to be a fun story to read than to be a moral story, because no one will read a moral story that isn’t fun. But there is no reason you can’t try for both. Most fun-but-not-moral stories could probably be improved morally in some way without harming the work.
It might require some skill on the author’s part, and practicing to get better at it (without hamfisted metaphors) will probably result in a few bad stories while they get better. I think that’s okay.
MoR happens to be a moral story in almost the opposite way that the Eisenhorn trilogy is. (That’s fine—sometimes you want your message proudly displayed). The SPHEW section was a bit where I think Eliezer was stretching a bit, and it shows, but I’m confident there will be a net-benefit to Eliezer and the world at large due to that growth.
What’s wrong with completely shutting up about morals? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo is also about an alien crapsack world where the only character who disagrees with common morals is even worse than everyone else, and it’s wonderful. Except the parts where the book cuts itself off during a description of mass murder, torture, human sacrifice, or male-male couples, to remind the reader that they are wrong and abnormal. Yes, Gus, that’s nice, but will you be quiet and let the grown-ups read?
I guess you could make the argument that it teaches you that the typical mind fallacy is false, or to question your own society, or something, but that looks dubious. It’s just a pretty thing, and it doesn’t have to meet moral standards any more than gastronomic ones.
You’re still conflate “be a moral work” with “shove morals down your throat in a hamfisted way” which is exactly what I was saying you DIDN’T have to do. If Salammbo does this in a clumsy way, well, then yeah, maybe that book could be written better. (If it says male-male coupling is bad, I disagree with it on a moral level anyway, although that’s different than disagreeing about how that morality was dealt with).
When I say “works should be moral” I mean that, all else being equal, I prefer art works to produce a positive effect on the world. Sometimes by directly inspiring people, sometimes by subtly shaping them.
Actually, insofar as he decided not to gender-flip everybody or change the prediction, he did decide to make the fated hero male and the companion female.
Not that I think he should have done otherwise, all things considered, but this kind of argument annoys me in general.
Harry isn’t dealing with any life threatening issues now, except internally. I’d be surprised if the story reaches its conclusion without her being made aware of the issue of Voldemort and playing an active role in the conflict.
And he has dealt with bullying in past chapters (though he focused most on Snape’s bullying). Harry and Hermione learned almost directly opposed lessons from the experience, both of which seem correct.