Comment by aiedrionio
1 month ago
It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws, but the most serious is that it's boooooring. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages go by with nothing happening except creepy children preaching at each other.
It's terrible as a fan fiction. Not a single character acts anything like the original, the world is unrecognizable, and the plot is derailed entirely by the end of the second or third chapter. The original story needs to be distorted beyond recognition because the author's bizarre worldview works even more poorly in a fantasy world than it does in reality.
It's demonstrably effective as a manifesto, but that is despite the fact that it is riddled with scientific and conceptual errors.
It's one of the worst things I've ever read. The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.
War and Peace is shorter than HPMOR.
Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.
I don't think Harry Potter fans would look kindly on their favorite story being treated with such contempt. Remember that within about three sentences of introducing Ron Weasley our hero finds him guilty of the heinous crime of enjoying sports and concludes he should not exist.
Excuse me. It was Draco Malfoy, our rapist deuteragonist, who said that. Our hero merely agreed.
Maybe Harry Potter fans would read a bad fantasy book, but HPMOR is not just a bad fantasy book. It is repugnant to healthy people from the first few pages.
I really, really dont understand this complaint at all. Harry and draco disliking ron is supposed to show that they are snotty kids who have big blind spots. The characters are supposed to be dislikable at the start, the story is about the growth they experience from there. This is part of what makes it a better story than the original. Yudkowsky's harry grows as a character which basically doesnt happen at all in the original series.
Do you dislike succession too? Some people just need completely heroic protagonists in their stories. Thats fine, but it doesnt make the story bad.
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I loved HP as a kid; I loved HPMoR.
Harry is a sociopath in HPMoR. he's not the hero. he's a blatant Mary Sue for the author, the book is unapologetic Rationalist propaganda, and it features such improbable sentences as: "Harry glumly considered the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956."
I find it side-splittingly hilarious to imagine an eleven-year old magic wizard boy hero acting like he does.
maybe my sense of humor is warped, but I find it hilarious. it's like the Satanic Verses of Harry Potter.
This is a forgivable statement if you didn't read it, because then I guess you may not have seen that there's themes at play and a point being made. If you did read it I do not understand how you don't see how you are meant to dislike the summary judgement and the judgement itself being an effect of yet another plot point.
But then if you did not read it it seems a little disingenuous to say "this is a bad book", because you would not only not know but anything you did know you would not understand.
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> It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws
Pretty much all fan fiction is terrible literature. I find yudkowsky's prose to be above average for fan fic which admittedly is just saying hes among the best of the worst. Every single fanfic ever written that doesnt end after 1 book has significant boring sections, theres no editor.
> Not a single character acts anything like the original
This is the point. Yudkowsky recognized that the hp world acts as a natural foil for his ideology. By changing the characters he points out the original characters flaws, but also the ways they are better than the rationalist versions of the characters. I dont understand why people claim fanfic should be always be faithful to the original setting. Using it as a foil can work too. The characters in the original, especially the authority figures are all incredibly flat. Why would you want more of that? Even the ones he largely keeps the same, like dumbledore, he explores in a new light which makes them seem different even though they are very similar to the original. The reveal that the 2 Dumbledore's are actually very similar(the exact same?) characters is central to understanding rationalist harry's deficiencies.
> The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.
Agreed but I think this says more about how crap HP fan fic tends to be than anything else. Yudkowsky saw unmet demand and used it to shoehorn his ideology in
>he author's bizarre worldview
what is the author's bizarre worldview, other than the AI will make us extinct view?
Sounds a lot like Atlas Shrugged, then.
Agreed. It's quite bad. Like, even for fanfic, it's not good. And a lot of fanfic is written by fourteen year olds.