I don't think Harry Potter fans would look kindly on their favorite story being treated with such contempt. Remember that within about three sentences of introducing Ron Weasley our hero finds him guilty of the heinous crime of enjoying sports and concludes he should not exist.

Excuse me. It was Draco Malfoy, our rapist deuteragonist, who said that. Our hero merely agreed.

Maybe Harry Potter fans would read a bad fantasy book, but HPMOR is not just a bad fantasy book. It is repugnant to healthy people from the first few pages.

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HDThoreaun a day ago | parent | next [-]

I really, really dont understand this complaint at all. Harry and draco disliking ron is supposed to show that they are snotty kids who have big blind spots. The characters are supposed to be dislikable at the start, the story is about the growth they experience from there. This is part of what makes it a better story than the original. Yudkowsky's harry grows as a character which basically doesnt happen at all in the original series.

Do you dislike succession too? Some people just need completely heroic protagonists in their stories. Thats fine, but it doesnt make the story bad.

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aiedrionio a day ago | parent [-]

They are introduced as insane, not snotty. Nearly the first thing Draco says is that he plans to rape Hermione and our Hero uses his Agency to do exactly nothing about it. (It is hard to exaggerate how bizarre this story is to people who haven't read it.)

Hundreds of pages later, Harry uses the first iota of power he is given to prohibit students from playing Quidditch according to rules he believes are irrational. There is an immediate outcry which he dismisses because it's just the mewling of inferior intellects. It's hard for me to see any signs of growth here.

(Harry's contempt for sports is amusing, given that about a third of the story is dedicated to his love of cheating at a particularly moronic sport invented by the Lord Voldemort ripping off Ender's Game.)

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HDThoreaun a day ago | parent [-]

He convinces Draco that his whole ideology is wrong. He convinces him not to rape anyone before he rapes anyone. Not exactly sure what the better outcome is here, just turning him in would only strengthen his violent ideology. There are many complaints to be made about the story, as you said its boring and too long and often too preachy. A lot of the visible changes in the characters happens in the last quarter. Even though the whole story has been building to that it can seem like its a bit out of nowhere.

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aiedrionio a day ago | parent [-]

Does Yudkowsky spill more ink on condemning Draco's hatred and violence or on making fun of Hermione Granger's feminism? Voldemort is treated as an ultimately worthy adversary, while Ron is a joke and Hermione is a pet handed power by our Awakened Hero. Yudkowsky treats sexual violence, genocide, and mass murder as forgivable missteps on the road to greatness, but treats liking sports as a fatal character flaw and being concerned with human rights as risible. Arrogance is consistently rewarded while goodness is consistently ridiculed.

I don't claim Yudkowsky believes these things consciously, but they are omnipresent in his story and they reflect his bizarre attitudes to morality. The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools doesn't change the fact that he spent six hundred thousand words holding them up as paragons of virtue and rewards them with apotheosis.

	▲	HDThoreaun a day ago \| parent [-]
		Hermione is the actual hero of the story. Every time rationalist harry makes a mistake he is acting against her direct advice. Her character literally exists to show off his deficiencies and his coming of age basically boils down to realizing he should be more like her. For many reasons voldemort is an ultimately worthy adversary. Much of that has to do with Harry's biases that come from being too invested in rationalism. Since he considers himself above everyone he's ever met he longs to find someone he considers his better and voldemort fills this role. He wants a mentor so badly that he's willing to throw out his entire ideology to keep him. I think yudkowsky's portrayal of voldemort as the ultimate adversary to rationalism is better than pretty much any plot arc in the original story. Harry does ultimately completely reject voldemort so Im not sure how sexual violence, genocide, and mass murder as treated as forgivable. From the very beginning Harry is deeply concerned with human rights, his distractions and the path he takes toward achieving human rights in this messed up world is again an integral part of the story. > The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools I think this is my biggest issue with your characterization. Yudkowsky shows harry to be a fool from the very beginning, as you pointed out with the draco/ron stuff. With his dismissal of much of hermiones advice. He very consciously did not create harry as some ubermencsch character who can do no wrong. He shows that harry believes himself to be a parity of virtue, but that he very much is not until hermione's death.

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krageon a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a forgivable statement if you didn't read it, because then I guess you may not have seen that there's themes at play and a point being made. If you did read it I do not understand how you don't see how you are meant to dislike the summary judgement and the judgement itself being an effect of yet another plot point.

But then if you did not read it it seems a little disingenuous to say "this is a bad book", because you would not only not know but anything you did know you would not understand.

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aiedrionio a day ago | parent [-]

What is there in the story that indicates this judgment is wrong? Ron does not appear in the story again, while by the end Harry is an immortal superbeing. His arrogance is never once punished.

You can be a sexually predatory sociopath and still be of value in Yudkowsky's world, but like sports and you're dismissed in your entirely within a single paragraph.

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Viliam1234 a day ago | parent [-]

> What is there in the story that indicates this judgment is wrong?

The ending? https://hpmor.com/chapter/122

> "Ah..." Harry said. This was very hard to say. "Actually, the rest of the world doesn't know this part, not even the Headmistress. But in point of fact you were one hundred and twelve percent correct about [spoiler], and I'll remember for future reference that although 'Dark' and 'evil' may not technically be the same thing, there's a great big statistical correlation."

> "Oh," said Hermione, and fell silent again.

> "You're not saying that you told me so?" said Harry. His mental model of Hermione was yelling: I TOLD YOU SO! DIDN'T I TELL YOU SO, MR. POTTER? DIDN'T I TELL YOU? [spoiler], I SAID, BUT YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO ME!

It feels like most people who criticize the story didn't actually read it, and just start with the premise that Yudkowsky sucks at writing, then conclude that obviously Harry Potter must be Mary Sue, and that whatever Harry says is what Yudkowsky wants you to believe.

If you actually read the story, you will find out that many things that Harry said and believed turned out to be wrong. That ending was written by Yudkowsky, too. The characters that disagreed with Harry since the beginning, such as Hermione and Dumbledore, were written by Yudkowsky, too. Perhaps there is a little more depth in the story than if you assume that it must be a Mary Sue story.

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aiedrionio a day ago | parent [-]

Ah, yes, the ending where the invincible Superman uses his gigabrain to singlehandedly save humanity, end death itself, get the girl (and turn her into an immortal magical unicorn princess (yes, really, this story is dumb)), vanquish a dozen Wizard Hitlers at once, and tear apart entire stars for their raw resources shows that he paid the price for his earlier arrogance.

I have read the story in its entirety. Don't ask me why. The fact that our Lord and Savior holds the idiot ball on occasion does not make him realistically flawed. The fact that Voldemort would have realistically been exposed within thirty seconds makes the story dumber, not smarter.

Also, you ignored the question I actually asked: where does Harry realize that it is wrong to steamroll everyone he thinks is stupid?

	▲	Viliam1234 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I have read the story in its entirety. Then how could you make so many mistakes in one sentence? > end death itself was done by Flammel > turn her into an immortal magical unicorn princess was done by you-know-who > tear apart entire stars for their raw resources is foretold to happen in unspecified future, outside the story time frame