Comment by HappyPanacea
4 days ago
> Anyone dedicated enough to get through it is a believer by the end.
Got through the end, not a believer in anything. Not only your statement is wrong (because most absolute statements are) even the weakened statement of most who finished are believers is likely wrong because likely most people who read it are just fanfics enthusiasts like me.
> The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual.
I have read way worse btw.
> because likely most people who read it are just fanfics enthusiasts like me.
Sorry but I don’t believe that HPMOR holds a particular draw to normal Harry Potter fanfic readers.
The parts I read were basically Yudkowsky doing a self-insert into the book and trying to dress rationalist lecturing up with Harry Potter themes.
> I have read way worse btw.
That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
> Sorry but I don’t believe that HPMOR holds a particular draw to normal Harry Potter fanfic readers.
Believe as you wish but I found about it through r/HPfanfiction.
> That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
It is a fanfiction, you shouldn't expect a good published book level writing. Sturgeon's law apply very strongly to fanfiction.
My Immortal?
No, Brockton's Celestial Forge for example, a true masterpiece in excessive verbosity and meandering writing which makes The Silmarillion look like a riveting and concise short novel.
Yeah, it also suffers from the over-powered protagonist trope found in a lot of fanfics. It has good elements (of what I've read thus far). I think the story could have been better if it focused on a few crossovers and technologies instead of going "here's a completely unrelated power/ability from a new setting", but the premise (earning rewards for writing that result in random abilities from different franchises) doesn't really lend itself to that.
Like, you could still have the different members of the forge and lean into a single source of the tech. Warhammer 40K could fit, given Tetra and some of the initial abilities/power. So you could keep most/a lot of the summit meeting events.
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The Silmarillion is riveting and concise! I will grant that it's not a novel.
A fanfiction where the author gives the main character good boy points for writing more words is kind of the extreme end of this, though. Web serials and fanfiction tend to be overly verbose and meandering, and the Methods of Rationality is very much on the less verbose side of them, but by the standards of traditionally published fantasy and sci-fi it is wordslop.