Comment by HDThoreaun
1 month ago
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.
They are introduced as insane, not snotty. Nearly the first thing Draco says is that he plans to rape Hermione and our Hero uses his Agency to do exactly nothing about it. (It is hard to exaggerate how bizarre this story is to people who haven't read it.)
Hundreds of pages later, Harry uses the first iota of power he is given to prohibit students from playing Quidditch according to rules he believes are irrational. There is an immediate outcry which he dismisses because it's just the mewling of inferior intellects. It's hard for me to see any signs of growth here.
(Harry's contempt for sports is amusing, given that about a third of the story is dedicated to his love of cheating at a particularly moronic sport invented by the Lord Voldemort ripping off Ender's Game.)
He convinces Draco that his whole ideology is wrong. He convinces him not to rape anyone before he rapes anyone. Not exactly sure what the better outcome is here, just turning him in would only strengthen his violent ideology. There are many complaints to be made about the story, as you said its boring and too long and often too preachy. A lot of the visible changes in the characters happens in the last quarter. Even though the whole story has been building to that it can seem like its a bit out of nowhere.
Does Yudkowsky spill more ink on condemning Draco's hatred and violence or on making fun of Hermione Granger's feminism? Voldemort is treated as an ultimately worthy adversary, while Ron is a joke and Hermione is a pet handed power by our Awakened Hero. Yudkowsky treats sexual violence, genocide, and mass murder as forgivable missteps on the road to greatness, but treats liking sports as a fatal character flaw and being concerned with human rights as risible. Arrogance is consistently rewarded while goodness is consistently ridiculed.
I don't claim Yudkowsky believes these things consciously, but they are omnipresent in his story and they reflect his bizarre attitudes to morality. The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools doesn't change the fact that he spent six hundred thousand words holding them up as paragons of virtue and rewards them with apotheosis.
1 reply →