cahn

So -- I'd been reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which I actually like rather a lot! It ended around the same time A. was born, so it was pretty much perfect to read while I was nursing or otherwise occupied with mindless infant-rearing things.

The ending, though, bothered me, and I couldn't really articulate why until I read Sorcerer to the Crown, which superficially has a similar ending but -- but really, really doesn't.

Here's the thing: In the middle of HPMoR, Hermione is fridged. The author got a lot of flack for this, and for being unfeminist, etc., and he kept defending himself.

Well. At the end, Harry resurrects Hermione. Then, Harry becomes the Wise Mentor who sends her out as the New Sparkly Magic Super Heroine.

"See!" said Eliezer Yudkowsky. "Now Hermione is the HERO. Isn't that super-feminist of me?! What more do you want?" (Okay. I'm paraphrasing.)

And -- I mean -- it's better than Hermione staying fridged, or Hermione not being a Sparkly Heroine. So he does get some points for that, I guess! But it's still irritating. Harry is specifically set up as the superior to Hermione -- she may be the chess queen, who gets to go everywhere and do everything, but he's the chess king and the chessmaster, the puller of strings, the prime mover, and the prime chessboard piece without whom the entire game self-destructs.

It's still about him, and setting him up as a direct superior to her. The fact that she gets some subsidiary power -- through his gift, by a choice he gives her, and used for his ends -- is only a secondary consideration. (It's a little more complicated than that, and he does give some lip service to the idea that it is a bit objectionable. But it doesn't change that it is obnoxious.)

(I find the original rather less irritating on this point. The Rowling books are about Harry, yes, with Hermione and Ron sidekick friends, but they're all on the same level. The books are not about Harry manipulating the world and sending Hermione out on errands for him.)

(Tangentially, in Fringe Season 4 I thought they were going to go this way, with Olivia Dunham moving towards the role of Wise Mentor to a young hero blue!Lincoln Lee, and I was very annoyed when they pretty much dropped that thread entirely. Because it would have been so cool to have the Puller of Strings be the female superhero!)

Also, by the way, the author wants HPMoR to get a Hugo nomination. Although I appreciated a lot of the things he was doing, I vote no on this. Here are the reasons:

1. It is fanfic. You know that I am obviously not dissing it on these grounds. I don't think anyone is surprised that I think fanfic is important and valuable and can do really interesting things. However, fanfic is not original fiction. They have different roles and objectives, and perhaps more to the point, require a different skill set. Fanfic is primarily in dialogue with an already-existing canon, and as such, good fanfic will often have a lot of canon analysis, and one needs specific writing skills to both be able to support that critical thinking while still supporting the original canon. (Some authors of original fiction are terrible at fanfic. Here I am thinking of Lawrence Yep, who I mistakenly thought was a terrible author for years because his Star Trek professional fanfic was so awful and out-of-character.)

Original fiction is about telling an original story and requires skills in original worldbuilding and characterization that fanfic does not, generally, need. Obviously there are exceptions (I can think of some really awesome original worldbuilding and characterization that still fall under the fanfic umbrella), but HPMoR is not one of those exceptions, as its very title points out. All the characters are different (sometimes very different) from their Rowling counterparts, but in ways in which they are still in dialogue with the canon characters; for all the major characters it's pretty clear how he got from hither to hence.

So no, I do not think HPMoR should be nominated for an award that I feel should reward the kind of writing skills that are present in original fic.(*)

2. It's not that good, good enough I would nominate it for a Hugo. I mean, I find it sort of on the level of Steven Brust's Vlad books? It's got some fun ideas, some good plot arcs, some places where I was really excited about the action and really wanted to know what happened next. It never made me so engaged with the characters that I actually cared that much about them (to be fair, this may have been partially because of reading it via installment, and to be fair to Brust, I care a lot about e.g. Kiera), or excited about a piece of original worldbuilding (as opposed to the specifically fanfictional reactional response to Rowling, which I really loved). Compare Ancillary Justice, which did both. Heck, compare Three-Body Problem, which had maybe one character of note but had some rather preposterously interesting ideas.

3. It has a number of writing flaws even on the fanfic level. The biggest one, I think, is the plot point involving, well, the big reveal from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. This is also a big plot point in HPMoR. Because pretty much everyone who is reading HPMoR has read HPPS, it wasn't at all surprising, and the big emotional climax came across as "Oh, didn't we know this already? What is Harry going on about? Oh, right, he didn't know yet," which is... not what you want your big emotional climax to evoke in your readers.

But in general, it was written in installments and it shows. The kind of story it was at the beginning is not the kind of story it was at the end.

Again, I still enjoyed it a lot. But I'm looking for something more for my Hugo nominations.

4. See above re: Hermione. This by itself would not necessarily be enough to sink a novel, for me, but can be indicative of a kind of thoughtlessness about the worldbuilding that can often sink novels for me.

5. The author kind of annoys me. Usually I would say that just being a jerk shouldn't affect what I think about your book, unless it affects your actual writing (hi, all the posts I've ever made about Card), but the fact is, usually when I read books I don't have the author's opinions on the actual book staring me in the face. But when you're posting something installment by installment and writing Author Notes on each chapter, and one of the Author's Notes threatens to not finish the story if your readers can't come up with a good solution to a character's dilemma... nope, you're being a jerk. I felt like saying, "Fine, then don't finish the story. If you don't feel like you owe the story itself to finish it, then don't let me get in your way, whether or not I can jump through your ridiculous hoops." Also, I get annoyed by people campaigning for a Hugo nomination. Perhaps this is not a good reason, but since it is nevertheless a reason in my brain I'm putting it on the list.

It occurs to me that part of what annoys me is that I think he's trying to have his cake and eat it too. To go back to point (1), he is trying to capitalize off of being a HP fanfic -- because let's face it, could he have gotten nearly as many readers for Self-Insert Scientist Boy In Generic Fantasy World? No. He could not. (And I'm not sure he has the specific writing skills to pull it off, either. Rosemary Kirstein did something similar and pulled it off, but she manifestly does have the requisite skills -- and I note she never got nominated for a Hugo.) And to capitalize off of that and at the same time argue he should be nominated for an original-fic award: I think that's quite disingenuous.

(*) Yes, I know that I've just described why one could very well categorize Sorcerer to the Crown as Heyer AU fanfic. My answer to that is, if you write a book that is this charming you can override all my stated preferences and I don't even care LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU ALL THE AWARDS FOR THIS ONE PLEASE. On a more serious note, it's not in character- or plot- dialogue with Heyer as HPMoR indisputably is with HP, even if it is in worldbuilding dialogue with Heyer to a certain extent.