Harry doesn't understand heroism
This is one of those subtle things that I didn't really notice until well after I read the story for the first time. I might be imposing my own interpretation on the story here, but I'm fairly sure it was at least partially intended. To the point though:
Harry makes it clear on multiple occasions that he doesn't like angst. He despises fictional heroes who complain about their situation, to the point where he can't stand reading about them. He believes that all these characters who were entrusted with great responsibility and put in enormous danger should just suck it up and accept their lot in life. He isn't a hypocrite in that regard either - he makes it clear multiple times that he will not resent his role and that there are millions of people who deserve pity more than him. At first I took that sentiment as the author's own opinion - the heroes sometimes get too angsty for my tastes as well - but Harry's opinion on 'whiny' heroes still felt a bit too harsh.
Later in the story we get insight regarding Dumbledore's past, and it really paints Harry's views in a bad light. Dumbledore was a hero for most of his life and it sucked. It left him a guilt-ridden wreck who is only a few steps away from being outright suicidal and might or might not be clinically depressed. And why wouldn't it? Who would want to live a life that forces you to make difficult decisions on behalf of thousands of people and that leaves your friends and family pernamently endangered? Because that's what being a hero truly means.
Then we have Hermione, who is later stated to be the true heroic archetype of the story. When she first decides to be a hero, she approaches it rather enthusiastically. But soon, when she is faced with responsibility of protecting her classmates from attacks, that attitude begins to waver, and it only gets worse with time. Over the course of two dozen next chapters she get framed for murder, almost sent to Azkaban, made into a social pariah, killed brutally... pretty harsh stuff. She ultimately perserveres and chooses to continue walking down the heroic path, but she never pretends as though she is lucky to have that opportunity. She doesn't shy away from self-pity, even if it ultimately doesn't affect her decisions. She doesn't pretend that being a hero is easy, like Harry probably would in her situation. Because being a hero is hard.
When I first read Hermione's statement that Harry isn't a hero, but rather an old wise wizard, I don't think I understood it as well as I do now. Harry was never meant to be a hero, he never really had the potential to. Even back when he had all his idealism and enthusiasm intact, he could never quite understand what it meant to be a hero. He read about all these 'whiny' heroes without understanding what they must had been going through. He will do well as an old mentor, but heroism was never for him.
He might be compared to Iron Man in the first Avengers movie.
There's a scene where Tony and Steve are arguing about whether Tony would be willing to "lay down on the wire and let the other guy crawl over" (i.e. allow himself to be injured to prevent his comrades from enduring the same), and Tony suggests just cutting the wire.
Harry has been shown, repeatedly, not to be able to accept lesser defeats for the sake of greater gains. It's a massive disappointment to him when he realizes that he wasn't able to conquer the world without causing a single death.
Heroism is about making tough choices, and that's something Harry is pretty much incapable of doing. He always tries for the solution that lets him eat his cake and still have it, and, usually, it works out for him.
By contrast, Dumbledore lost far too much, against Grindelwald and then against Voldemort, to ever believe that there was a perfect solution. And Hermione, if she ever thought in terms of a complete victory, had such a belief damaged by the fate of SPHEW, and probably shattered by her imprisonment and death. Harry, on the other hand, reacted to each of these events by adding "fixing that injustice, and the underlying injustices that enabled it" to his victory parameters.
And now, the path of heroism has been forever taken from him. He can't be the hero that makes tough choices, because all of the tough choices ahead involve the fate of the world (which he is incapable of taking chances with). His task is now to find the perfect solution to the problem, or else the world ends, and its people with it.
And that's just not a job for a hero: it's a job for a scientist.
Harry begins the story unable to relate to heroes, but over time he not only comes to rationally understand heroism, but also steps into the role of hero himself.
Recall the thought experiment Harry performs when he contemplates why Tom Riddle would have decided to become a dark wizard. Harry's conclusion is that anyone would eventually grow bored of trying to solve the world's problems and would inevitably find it more interesting to play the game of maximizing his own power.
Voldemort simply feared the mental death that is boredom. Harry could relate to this and in that moment saw that he, too, would be tempted to follow that path. It was then that Harry decided that he had to stop Voldemort because of people like Hermione who were destined to be heroes. Harry made the value judgment that the cause of heroism was more noble than the cause of avoiding boredom, and took sides, committing himself to destroying Voldemort and rescuing Hermione.
The important thing is that the details of Harry's mental process are irrelevant as he was trying to save Hermione, which is heroic. So Harry effectively backed himself into a thought process that supported what he had actually been doing nearly instinctively. This is a priceless bit of irony in the story, where I think Eliezer is wryly making the point that he has in fact written a book about heroism just like the original Harry Potter. This double irony sent synesthetic sparks of glee through my body when I encountered it in HPMOR.
Heroes are venerated because some people hold the suffering, bravery, and sacrifice they exhibit to be intrinsically valuable and noble, considering these attributes to be praiseworthy whether or not they are strictly necessary in a particular case. Harry holds human life valuable whether or not a particular human actually demonstrates goodness or intelligence in a particular case. But he does not ascribe the same value to 'heroism' in the way that Dumbledore does.
I rather empathize with Harry on this one - better to dive into the ditch with the rest of your squad and have everybody live than dive on the grenade and die unnecessarily. If a soldier sacrificed himself by diving on a grenade, Harry - but not Hermione - would want to run the numbers for the utility of the various options. Probability that everyone else will actually be protected by your human shrapnel shield, probability you have time and success to throw or kick it away, probability that everyone can dive to cover before it goes off, probability of nonlethal injury vs. death when it does go off...
It would be incredibly tasteless to stand at the funeral of the decorated, heroic soldier who sacrificed himself and say "there was a doorway with reinforced concrete walls immediately ahead of the grenade, everyone would almost certainly have lived with only minor injuries if he just kicked it through". No, he's a hero because he sacrificed himself regardless of outcomes. It seems strange to me (and probably to Harry) that we give the guy who died a parade and posthumous medals and glory in return for his heroism, while the guy who kicked it away gets little more than a high five and a thanks when the team returns to base in return for his greater success but lesser heroism.
When did Harry complain about whiny heroes? I don't seem to remember Harry ever talking about other heroic people
He mentally complains about them quite a lot. The two examples I can find right now are:
For a moment Harry wondered what would happen if someone told Hermione she had to fight an immortal Dark Lord, if she would turn into one of the whiny self-pitying heroes that Harry could never stand reading about in his books.
And:
Harry didn't believe in angst, he couldn't stand reading about whiny heroes, he knew a billion other people in the world would have given anything to trade places with him, and...
My brother just stumbled onto HP:MoR this year, so I thought I would make him the patches for Christmas. I made the designs myself and <pathetic 38 year old> asked my mom to run them through her embroidery machine. I didn't use the right colors in the finished product, but I think they look reasonably good.
And on each uniform's breast, a patch bearing the name and insignia of your army. A small patch. If you wanted your soldiers to wear, say, colored ribbons so that they could identify each other at a distance, and risk the enemy getting their hands on the ribbons, that was all up to you.
I took that to imply the colors would use "subdued" color schemes, meaning the same colors as in the camouflage. I pulled up a British camo pattern and took the colors. The final patches are three inches across (maybe a bit bigger than the description) and I messed up picking the colors, but I'm still pleased.
Harry, after considering alternate choices such as the 501st Provisional Battalion and Harry's Minions o' Doom, had decided that his army would be known by the simple and dignified appellation of the Chaos Legion.
Their insignia was a hand poised with fingers ready to snap.
For their insignia, instead of the too-obvious dragon's head breathing fire, Draco had elected to simply go with the fire. Elegant, understated, deadly: This is what's left after we've passed. Very Malfoy.
Harry had earnestly advised Hermione that the young boys serving under her were probably nervous about her being a girl with a reputation for being nice, and that she should pick something scary that would reassure them of her toughness and make them proud to be part of her army, like the Blood Commandos or something.
Hermione had named her army the Sunshine Regiment.
Their insignia was a smiley face.
And the final product. I think I'll put them on a camo print throw pillow or something.
The TVTropes page links to a story called 'Nonlinear Regression' (under Single Point of Departures/Actual Single Points of Departure, and yes, the inconsistent pluralisation is very annoying), but that page has been replaced with one about automobile buying suggestions. http://freetexthost.com/ikucx6nse4
I decided to try the WayBack Machine and yay! Here it is.
Now I'm off to read the story. Just thought I'd put this here in case someone else ran into this issue.
Edit: user Low_Hour has updated the TVTropes page to link to the backup version of the story.
I expected the author to talk about psychology like he does about the rest of sciences, but strangely that's where he uses the "show don't tell" principle and Harry never quite defines Voldie in any kind of scientific manner or has any theories about him. If I haven't missed anything, Harry only reacts to "true Voldie" (the one at the end) emotionally, i.e. he dislikes him killing people and thinks "why are you like that!", etc.
But that said, overall Voldie in MoR is implied to be incapable of forming bonds with people, I think? I'm curious because I'd found the original novels sadly lacking in psychological department (and that's fine, they're for kids), and I've long since tried to find some fanfiction that would "fix" the cartoon villain vibe. I had a lot of hope for Methods of Rationality, and originally it did deliver in this regard (an intelligent antagonist playing both sides of the war), but sadly at the very end Voldie started to behave unrealistically, just like he did in canon. Like, why the hell is he laughing all the time like an idiot, or speaking in "cold voice"? That's just ridiculously stupid and in real life he'd be put into asylum immediately if he started laughing evilly mwahaha, unless we're supposed to think that HP-universe people are THAT stupid and that a "true Voldie" whom we see in the ending is just a mask, too. But I got a strong impression that it was supposed to be his true nature revealed at the end, at least for 99%. Even Dumbledore says that anyone who can play Voldemort really is Voldemort, which isn't exactly a subtle hint. So if this is no mask, then why does he behave like a clown?
What else gives me pause is that originally, before the prophecy about Harry destroying the world, Voldie planned to basically just have him around for companionship, to play "games" with, as per his own words. And that doesn't sound sociopathic to me, that sounds like someone having a certain fondness for someone else's existence. So it's just a little confusing. You can't be capable of making something like an extremely weak bond if you're a sociopath. You either can make them or you can't, period...
I know that HPMOR is about "hard sciences" rather than psychology, but still I wonder what others make of the antagonist and his disappointingly canon behavior at the ending. It's like a cunning manipulator that he'd been built up to be was gone in a poof for no good reason. I liked HPMOR, but that detail left me a little sad. Maybe the author just wanted to tie his work in with canon that way? And so he used a canon personality as "real" one. I don't know.
I haven't read many spin-offs, but I've become interested in writing one myself. I'd like to deal with mind-wiped Tom Riddle and how he is re-integrated into society, but I want to make sure that whatever I write hasn't been done before.
So, what are the common ways of handling Tom Riddle? Any interesting ones, or are there any that haven't been done yet that you'd like to read about?
"A centaur?" the Headmaster said. "When did you - ah, the Time-Turner. You are the reason why I could not travel back to before the event, on pain of paradox."
"Am I? I guess I am." Harry shook his head distantly. "Sorry."
I thought I knew the answer, i.e. Quirrell had put up anti Time-Turner charms as a precaution. But now it just occurred to me that then Harry shouldn't have been able to go back either, right?
If there was no jinx, the only reason I see Dumbledore not being able to observe the event is due to Quirrell detecting him... But that shouldn't cause a paradox, but rather the Time should have arranged the events in such a way in which Dumbledore never saw the need to go back in time and observe the events. Or I guess threatening him with a paradox also qualifies...
Now that I think about it, a similar "paradox warning" happened to Dumbledore shortly after the Azkaban escape. Could it be that there was a jinx after all, but Quirrell put it up only after Harry had already observed his past self, but before Dumbledore received information about the incident (and thus that future cannot touch the past)?
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