Hermione's character
Hermione's character
After reading HPMOR and the original seres, I liked HPMOR better. Harry and most of the other characters acted coherently, with one exception - Hermione seemed nerfed to the point of becoming a strawwoman to Harry. In the original, she is much more realistic and sensiible, whereas here, calling her naive and soppy would be an understatement. Do you think EY was trying to create a Watson to Harry, or am I missing something?
I... don't agree with you at all. To the point where I'm wondering if we read the same work. Hermione recognizes the true villain of the book as such on the first day of defense classes. She performs well in defense battles against the son of a death eater and a mind-clone of Voldemort and when she finds herself outclassed she decides to take on the task of eliminating bullying in the school as a self-improvement exercise. Most critically, Voldemort is unable to get her to willingly compromise her morals. Perhaps you could give some examples of behavior you find sloppy or naive?
I agree that she is brave, hardworking, and a good person. It's her smartness I'm questioning. Also, please see my reply to CocoSavege.
Can you give examples of Hermione's naivety that are outstanding?
Remember that they have to be outstanding in the sense that she's extraordinarily naive in context, compared with reasonable peers.
One big counterexample is Herm always assumed that QQ was evil. Harry had to have a serious plot naive outfit to make the narrative work.
About your last point, she was right for the wrong reason - she was objecting to QQ's cold pragmatism, not somehow figuring out that Q=V. As for an example of her naivete - her calling QQ, whom she knows to be a ruthless wizard far stronger than herself, 'horrible' in his face. Or trying to stop bullying all by herself, without considering the political implications. In general, if Harry is crazy prepared, Hm thinks that the world is somehow fair, and that nothing bad will ever happen to a good person like her. In short, she behaves like Twoflower in Discworld.
I think the biggest differences between HPMOR Hermione between canon and HPMOR are firstly that she has a better version of her role as book nerd right next to her and that makes her look bad, and secondly that she's an 11 year old dealing with a plot that's no longer an adventure suitable for an 11 year old.
Beyond that, if you think that canon Hermione wasn't naive, then I suspect you haven't read the earlier parts of the series recently.
Point taken. To clarify, I meant that canon Hm is not much more naive that everyone around her.
What I found weird about her was that she had serious trouble in understanding other people and their emotions, while in the original she was the one who explained to Harry and Ron what other people felt.
Now that you mention it, yes, that's absolutely correct.
Can you point out some examples of her having trouble understanding other people and their emotions? I can't think of any off the top of my head, though that might just be due to me not looking out for it during my read-throughs.
I don't think you are missing something, and the portrayal of Hermione has been pretty heavily criticized. You certainly aren't the first person to make that complaint. If you do want to read an almost reversed version of that with an absolutely awesome Hermione, check out the fanfic Arithmancer and its two sequels (the author got into writing fanfic in part due to reading HPMOR).
I'm just reading HPMOR. And I would like to thank the author very very much.
I know, without the original there would be no HPMOR. But this great story is often better than the original I think! Especially the final if the chapters Humanism is at least on Jk Rowling level!
So, if Less Wrong is going to read this at any chance: thank you very much for your great creativity, your endurance und great effort! I really love this story.
This is a theory about the words inscribed on the mirror, relevant passage (yes, I'm aware of the easter egg, let's look beyond that for now):
"The runes say, noitilov detalo partxe tnere hoc ruoy tu becafruoy ton wo hsi -" Harry stopped, feeling more prickles at his spine. Harry knew what the rune for noitilov meant. It meant noitilov. And the next runes said to detalo the noitilov until it reached partxe, then keep the part that was both tnere and hoc. That belief felt like knowledge, like he could have answered 'Yes' with confident authority if somebody asked him whether the ton wo was ruoy or becafruoy. It was just that when Harry tried to relate those concepts to any other concepts, he drew a blank.
Also a very important quote:
I had wondered if perhaps the Words of False Comprehension might be understandable to a student of Muggle science. Apparently not.
Suppose you want to inscribe a message, a Voyager plaque so to speak, for people to understand what you know. Your organization has worked for decades, maybe centuries, and found a very non-obvious groundbreaking insight on the key to making, say, a Friendly AI. So you write the insight down, but what if the people have a different language? So you devise a translation spell that maps the words to the mental structures a person has for their meaning, so they understand it no matter what language they have.
But hold on. Suppose that you're a caveman who barely gets addition, and the text reads something like (just a random example):
Yoneda's lemma concerns functors from a fixed category C to the category of sets, Set . If C is a locally small category (i.e. the hom-sets are actual sets and not proper classes), then each object A of C gives rise to a natural functor to C called a hom-functor. This functor is denoted...
What would be the experience of the caveman reading this? Probably much the same as Harry's experience in the passage at the top. They've tried their best to tell us something, we just aren't sufficiently advanced to have even the groundwork of understanding what their terms mean.
In Ch47 Draco remembers:
Father had told Draco that to fathom a strange plot, one technique was to look at what ended up happening, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited.
I'm wondering if this is a (possibly altered) quote from somewhere, or just another piece of Eliezers wisdom? I have googled but couldn't find anything.
Harry initially thinks that Comed-Tea might be usable to rewrite reality to his wishes with a simple Confundus or two, based on his inaccurate assumption about the Comed-Tea causing things to happen rather than future-things causing an impulse to drink Comed-Tea. However, once Harry realizes how it really works, he essentially writes it off entirely, only busting it out once or twice later when he knows it will be highly enjoyable for him to do so and then forgetting about it once it's gone.
Several related thoughts spring to mind to me for other possible uses that Harry didn't consider:
He could still potentially use the Comed-Tea as a warning by conditioning himself or hexing himself to find certain dangers bizarre or humorous. He could test whether or not it's possible to use Comed-Tea as a means of retrieving other future information as well.
Comed-Tea is remarkably precise. It's constantly scanning the immediate future for events the drinker will find the sort of amusing or surprising that will cause them to do a spit take. If Harry could reverse engineer it or otherwise obtain the recipe and figure out how, magically, that effect is created, he may be able to replicate the effect; or more importantly generate other effects with some changes. It may be that changing a single ingredient could cause it forewarn the drinker of dangers an hour away by giving them profound goosebumps on their left thigh, or stirring it counterclockwise instead of clockwise for the last bit means the drinker will feel a distinct tingling sensation whenever someone appears just behind them. Heck, there's a non-zero chance that research into Comed-Tea could produce something akin to the main canon's Felix Felicis potion in terms of its ability to direct the user into circumstances that will be favorable to them. It's a small chance, sure, but worth investigating. There could be all manner of interesting products, and if nothing else it stands to improve understanding of both Time and Divination.
Not sure if this would work at all, but a friend of mine suggested that the cans of Comed-Tea themselves should have something highly amusing or shocking about them that occurs once you've drunk a certain amount, or purchased multiple, or some chaining action--it's not clear exactly how the cause-effect relationship works in this context, but there might a not-quite-but-approaching-"Do-Not-Mess-With-Time" sort of way to cause the act of buying and drinking Comed-Tea itself to be self-sustaining, with you constantly having impulses to drink more and more with future shocking events continuously occurring. If it works, it could be very addictive, so Harry probably wouldn't swing for it, but he might be able to share some sort of business ideas with the Comed-Tea people to increase revenue in exchange for a cut if he can refine it. My suspicion is that this would not work, but again, something potentially worth testing, probably as a part of the experimentation done on # 2.
Any fun thoughts on Comed-Tea? I find myself very interested in it and low key wishing it had still popped up a bit more frequently past the first third of the book.
In chapter 109 Quirrell said, "I have outwitted myself, I fear. Neither you nor I dare be reflected in this Mirror. " It is also described on his character sheet on TVTropes that "All of his major setbacks are results of him systematically out-thinking himself." The meaning of this particular expression, however, has long eluded me.
I've considered two possible interpretation of it, but neither sounds fit:
(a) Quirrell's tendency of overthinking makes him prone to being double-bluffed, just like how he decides to play the long game in the potion chamber despite him being practically impervious to a dementor ambush even if there is one. His intelligence makes him overcautious, and being bold is not always the worst option in decision-making. (Doubtful. Although the conclusion leans toward mundane wisdom, the anti-intellectual "relax-and-let-your-intuitions-take-control, unlearn-what-you-have-learnt" vibe doesn't really fit into the atmosphere of HPMOR, and I find it highly unlikely that EY's true intent behind the words "Quirell claims that he outwits himself" would fall into this option)
(b) Quirrell's seemingly "cunning" plots (that he enjoys weaving) often come back to bite himself in the ankle (Oft evil will shall evil mar, that is). In this scenario, this manifests in that Harry's resemblance to him (the outcome of a deliberate choice on his part in the past) causes both of them to be vulnerable to the Mirror's traps, rendering his carefully crafted heir and puppet useless in this vital plan of his. (More likely than the first one, but it still sounds unconvincing somewhat)
Would you mind to clarify to this clueless HPMORer?
Has anyone talked about setting up a GoFundMe for professional recording of HPMOR? I love audio books and would love to see a free download available recorded by a professional actor.
Has EY talked about not wanting this or anything?
Thanks
Hi. I'm interested in psychology and I was wondering if Hermione in HPMOR has any psychological pathology or tendency. I'm mostly thinking about what is described in chapter 8:
Aside from helping people with their homework, or anything else they needed, she really didn't know how to meet people. She didn't feel like she was a shy person. … it was just too awkward to go up to someone and say... what? She'd never been able to figure out what. And there didn't seem to be a standard information sheet, which was ridiculous. The whole business of meeting people had never seemed sensible to her. Why did she have to take all the responsibility herself when there were two people involved?
Thanks for your answer.
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