theaudientvoid:

rocketverliden:

the-grey-tribe:

nuclearspaceheater:

cromulentenough:

argumate:

notyourexrotic:

In which I rant about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, transhumanism, and death

this would be a better thread if it had less occurrences of the word “dudebro”

but the disagreement over death is really the central issue here.

meh. I agree that the not dealing well with the source material and smugness are issues, and for sure it did have a sense of ‘i’m gonna pick HP because it’s popular’ and the treatment of ron and hermione did kinda suck. I really liked HPMOR overall but it certainly had a ton of flaws. for example, it started out doing stuff like investigating the system of magic and there were allusions to atlantis or the source of magic etc. and then it just…stopped. And that was one of my favourite bits.

but i can’t get over the ‘death is a part of life and thinking death is bad is the REAL bad thing uwu’ stuff here. death is bad and sucks, we can work on improving quality of life sure, but improving quantity of life is not bad because ‘then we don’t appreciate how special the tiny bit of life we actually do have is’. and yeah fuck off with the dudebro bullshit.

I didn’t read all of that but I seriously doubt it could contain anything more insufferable than just being in long-form Twitter.

manthreading - https://www.wired.com/2017/04/jargon-watch-quarterly-review/ - http://gizmodo.com/men-please-stop-manthreading-1790036387

I have never read HPMOR, but am I really reading a Twitter thread by a person who is most likely to be a creative-type of fan (her handle is “Creatrix,” even) as opposed to a curative-type of fan complaining that a guy’s Harry Potter fanfic takes a radically different tack than J.K. “Queen of Retcons and also America only has like three magic schools” Rowling’s own source material that fans love to poke holes in?

Like, legitimately, I usually associate these people with being ideologically aligned with “tearing down anything established.”

(Now, granted, I can understand not wanting a setting’s rules to be broken or for some crazy bullshit to be shoehorned in, but again, this is something that is traditionally closer to the “neckbeard curative fan” end of the spectrum.)

(Also, god, “Roko’s Sealions.” May the powers that be give me charity, because if they gave me strength, I would flip a bastard.)

(And also also, let it be known that if you will not let us have the transhuman future, then I will be doing all I can to make this into the Space Robot Battles timeline instead)

I think the issue is that the purpose of transformative fandom is that the transformation needs to be informed by the material being transformed. Otherwise, then what was the point of writing something as a transformation of an existing work, rather than just starting from scratch. At first, HPMOR seems do be doing this; the apparent premise of the first part seemed to be taking the Harry Potter universe, a source material infamous for not having any real rules about how the universe of the story is supposed to work, and figuring out how it works. The problem is that this premise is almost completely dropped fairly early on. After that point, being a Harry Potter fic provides relatively little to the narrative, while still bringing along a bunch of baggage that detracts from the stories over all narrative effect.

The “Creatrix” in my username doesn’t have anything to do with my approaches to fandom - it’s a stage performance/writing/art name I’ve been using for about 6 years now. “neckbeard” ANYTHING is totally on the opposite end of the spectrum from my actual demographic.

And yeah, what theaudientvoid said.