Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[Cain]

Nurse Enabler, the entire story so far (46 chapters) can be read at the provided link.  I suggest not reading it before you go to bed or have any pressing engagements, as it's both quite hilarious and very intellectually stimulating, as a story.

Kai, yeah, Voldemort is so dangerously genre savvy I'm having a hard time seeing how Harry is even capable of defeating him.  Which makes me wonder if he's even the Big Bad of the series at all.  Someone else pointed out while there have been many Draco and Snape redemption fics, there have been none who have tried to rehabilitate Voldemort, or at least suggest he has retired from his Dark Lord ambitions.  I'm still wondering about Mr Hat and Cloak, and wondering if everyone is being manipulated by him, for some unknown and sinister purpose.  It wouldn't take much to get the Lucius and Dumbledore factions fighting, with Voldemort attempting to take advantage of the chaos for his own purposes, and such a conflict could be a prelude to...er, something.

[Kai]

Yeah. I mean, it's possible Harry could find a way to get the horcruxes that are within his reaches (on earth), but how is he going to get to the edge of the solar system?

1. One is in an active volcano, encased in high melting point metal, and possibly in the mantle

2. One is buried in solid rock maybe a kilometer down in the crust.

3. One is in the Mariana trench, or another deep ocean trench.

4. One is buoyant and invisible in the stratosphere.

5. And one is careening out of the solar system.

That leaves out one more, assuming harry is right about the rest. He's the seventh, if Yudowsky is sticking with that part of the cannon.

[Rumckle]

I willing to bet that Harry's rock is one.

Also, it seems to me that another equally logical possibility of how Snape heard the prophecy (if it was Snape who told Voldemort, and didn't Pettigrew ask for Lily to be spared in the original?), is that he was there at the time with Minerva. Then again, seeing as though it seems every adult is trying a Xanos gambit, it probably isn't.

[Jasper]

The Homo Sapiens patronus seemed like a no-brainer for me, but growing up my best friend was a super logical guy who always gleefully professed that his totem animal was a human. 

I'm no longer sure that there is a BBEG in this fic.  Voldemort seems mostly concerned with just making sure Harry becomes a bad person, and Harry seems mostly concerned with becoming god.  That's really all the danger the story needs.

[Kai]

The Homo Sapiens patronus seemed like a no-brainer for me, but growing up my best friend was a super logical guy who always gleefully professed that his totem animal was a human. 

I'm no longer sure that there is a BBEG in this fic.  Voldemort seems mostly concerned with just making sure Harry becomes a bad person, and Harry seems mostly concerned with becoming god.  That's really all the danger the story needs.

Maybe.


I'd like to draw attention to the rant currently in authors notes.

If you'll excuse me, I'd like to go on a bit of a rant about some of the more idiot responses to Ch. 42, namely the ones who said "OMG this fic is now slash and I'm too good to read slash so I'm going to stop reading and let everyone know that!"

The obvious response to this would be to start inserting actual slash. But while I'd willingly take a pill that made me bisexual, this pill does not yet exist, so right now, writing actual slash would be about as much fun for me as a root canal.

So behold this rant, then:

I think of myself as someone who deliberately cuts against the grain of status and prestige. Which, of course, is something that everyone likes to think about themselves. But then again, my claim does have a certain credibility, because I had a reputation as a "real" writer before I started writing Harry Potter fanfiction, and I did that with malice aforethought to intentionally drop myself down multiple levels on the Geek Hierarchy. Snobbery offends me; I am offended by people who are prejudiced against beauty because of its form or its medium. I am offended by people who think "Calvin and Hobbes" can't be real art because it's a comic strip, and I can curse them with no darker fate than that they go look at some ugly, pointless, fake "modern art" that will impress their friends more. And I am equally offended by people who look down on fanfiction because it's fanfiction, who'd take something beautiful like "Always and Always" and turn up their noses at it. So I write Harry Potter fanfiction and be damned to them all. Someday, when I think I can get away with it, I will write deep intellectual self-insert pornography that is even better than MoR just so I can watch people's heads explode.

That, at any rate, was the damn-the-torpedoes, screw-the-critics, defiant iconoclastic spirit in which I decided to write this wacky little story just for fun, during my downtime from working on a nonfiction rationality book.

I should not have been surprised, but I was, to find my work being read by many people who took their Harry Potter fanfiction extremely seriously, and who were shocked at the way I was casually violating some of their most cherished artistic conventions.

And if I claimed that there was anything odd about taking Harry Potter fanfiction just as seriously as, say, 18th-century classical music, then I would of course be revealing myself as a great big snobby snob.

I came in thinking that I was making a great show of defiant iconoclastic spirit by writing Harry Potter fanfiction, and that means I wasn't nearly as iconoclastic as I thought. And for this I am heartily ashamed.

However.

If you think that everyone who writes Harry Potter fanfiction should take it as seriously as you take yours, and that it is sinful for anyone to enjoy it unless it's done exactly your way according to your favorite artistic conventions, then you are being a snob about Harry Potter fanfiction. I am just barely sensitive enough to the status conventions of the real world to notice that this is a tiny bit incongruous.

Don't get me wrong. You can write Harry Potter fanfiction. You can take it seriously. You can craft it with care. You can make it mature, emotional, and deep. You can have artistic conventions, and criticism of work that tries to obey those conventions and fails. And you can do all that with a straight face, because beauty knows no law but beauty.

What you cannot do with a straight face is be a great big snobby snob about Harry Potter fanfiction.

You cannot, for example, claim that your kind of Harry Potter fanfiction is real art, but that no Harry Potter fanfiction which involves slash can possibly be taken seriously.

Not unless you have stayed in your tiny little corner of the Internet for so long that you have totally lost perspective on what the rest of the world thinks about Harry Potter fanfiction in the first place.

Thank you.

[Jasper]

That was magnificent.  Yudkowsky is my hero.  He makes rationality cool.

[Kai]

Wait, with the stone and Harry, that would make seven wouldn't it?

Also, this just struck me:

1. In the magma = fire

2. Buried deep in the crust = earth

3. At the bottom of an ocean trench = water

4. Floating invisible in the stratosphere = air

5. Drifting in space = void

The riddle?

[Jasper]

Mind.

[Kai]

Mind.

Explain.

[Jasper]

Just a hunch, but if Harry is the final horcrux, then it fits the pattern.

And yes, I'm basically just pattern matching here.  And at the same time, I'm doing the Dumbledore thing of expecting reality to match dramatic narrative cliches.  Two rational failures in one.

I still maintain that I have a hunch.

[Kai]

Just a hunch, but if Harry is the final horcrux, then it fits the pattern.

And yes, I'm basically just pattern matching here.  And at the same time, I'm doing the Dumbledore thing of expecting reality to match dramatic narrative cliches.  Two rational failures in one.

I still maintain that I have a hunch.

The other being the stone? Matter?

[Requia ☣]

Harry being a Horocrux would explain his initial reaction to the Dementor.

Though, doesn't Voldemort need access to at least one of his horocruxes in order to come back from the dead properly in the books?  If that holds true Harry's ideas aren't terribly useful.

Edit: Apparently not.

[Cain]

I don't belive the rock is one of Voldemort's horcrux. Remember, the horcrux is a piece of Voldemort's soul, with awareness and intent to do evil.  Giving it to Harry would be exceptionally dangerous, he is already "susceptible" via his scar to possession and manipulation, and Dumbledore isn't that stupid.

It may be the Resurrection Stone, though.

[Rumckle]

I don't belive the rock is one of Voldemort's horcrux. Remember, the horcrux is a piece of Voldemort's soul, with awareness and intent to do evil. 

That is a good point.

[Jasper]

Just a hunch, but if Harry is the final horcrux, then it fits the pattern.

And yes, I'm basically just pattern matching here.  And at the same time, I'm doing the Dumbledore thing of expecting reality to match dramatic narrative cliches.  Two rational failures in one.

I still maintain that I have a hunch.

The other being the stone? Matter?

That would complete the cliche...

I'm back to thinking Yudkowsky is going to actively avoid cliches.  And if (big if) the clue about Harry guessing the horcruxes is right, then Harry will probably scold Voldemort for being so obvious.