It would have to be; a male would know that boys of any age can get an erection. Did you find the original author of that line? I couldn’t find it through Google
It seems plausible that Malfoy wouldn’t know that. Some boys never get erections before puberty. Getting erections reliably (as opposed to accidentally) before puberty might not happen either.
Actually, that was something about the original books that really bugged me: their sexlessness. Rowling captures the frustration and rage of being an adolescent boy very well, but not the lust—and that’s probably deliberate. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books are much better in this regard.
Wow, I haven’t thought of Adrian Mole in years. I enjoyed those books when I read them—I should read them again and see how they stand up. Thanks for the reminder.
If you don’t believe me, do a google search. Lots of people on “ask the community” websites like Yahoo answers have asked whether prepubescent boys could get erections. Some of these people are adult men. In any case, obviously Eliezer didn’t know that or he probably wouldn’t have included that tidbit!
A google search didn’t turn up anything saying that some boys don’t get erections before puberty. Why do you think this?
Yahoo answers isn’t an especially reliable source, and it looked like most of the people asking were women, but I guess it’s possible that some adult men forgot what it was like to be a kid.
As I said above, my theory is that Eliezer wrote that line to make fun of fanfiction.
Alternatively, male sexual development might be more varied than is commonly believed.
Or the Malfoys might put a lock on their kids’ early sexuality to make them easier to control. Something like that might make arranged marriages less prone to drama.
I think this might actually be feasible. Malfoys are probably not likely to have intimate enough conversations with children from other families that something odd is going on, and could write off what other children imply as just big talk.
Or the children could find out the truth relatively early, and buy into a family belief that this is the sensible way to do things rather than an imposition.
Given how much emphasis a Malfoy education places on preserving your status and appearance of power, it’s fairly silly that Draco would so openly and freely reveal such an important (at least symbolically) deficiency.
That is possible but it seems less likely. He’s young and sex-positive, and there are other fanfiction references in the story as well, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if he included another.
I assumed it was a reference to the way young kids sometimes write slash fanfic when they don’t know anything about sex, and they make all kinds of mistakes. There are other fanfic references, like Harry’s line to Draco, “It makes my heart swoon”. I don’t know if it’s a reference to anything specific, but NihilCredo seemed to suggest that e found it.
Actually, what I meant is that I cannot possibly conceive an eleven-year-old kid openly admitting that he cannot yet have an erection—he’d rather jump into a fire. It makes me wonder what kind of kids Eliezer hung out with.
In most Western societies, boys’ relation with sex moves straight from “knowing nothing” to “pretending to know everything”. (Wizarding Britain could be different, but there is nothing in Rowling’s or Eliezer’s writings to explain that.)
I’m not sure the Draco I’ve been writing for the last few chapters would use the term “bitch” in front of Harry Potter, it doesn’t sound dignified enough for the heir of Malfoy.
(But yes I did explicitly consider that alternative. If I get enough votes for keeping the shock value I’ll put it back in, or figure out something, I guess.)
It is expected that villains, even in the canon of children’s books, will kill and maybe occasionally torture victims in order to establish that they are bad. It is not expected that villains, especially in the canon of children’s books, will permit/condone/commit rape. Additionally, the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede murder and torture are more familiar than the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape, and so someone unfamiliar with the actual etiology of any of those crimes finds rape less relatable and more shocking.
It is expected that villains, even in the canon of children’s books, will kill and maybe occasionally torture victims in order to establish that they are bad. It is not expected that villains, especially in the canon of children’s books, will permit/condone/commit rape.
Agreed. I also think the original “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question (in one of the Author’s Notes) was a little bit misguided because, as far as most HP readers are concerned, Voldemort is already considered to have passed the moral event horizon from the outset. There’s little he could do that would make us think “Wow, I didn’t know Voldemort was that evil”. And 11-year-old Draco, being the son of a Death Eater, might be expected to hold certain evils as justifiable or compulsory — we expect that he’s been conditioned to find it acceptable to kill, torture, and exploit non-purebloods, and generally to manipulate people for his own ends. And as long as he’s still young, we’re inclined to be relatively lenient in judging him for those attitudes, considering he has never learned anything else, nor been allowed (or allowed himself) to reconsider it. What we don’t expect is for him to talk casually about committing rape, considering that nobody in the series does, even the darkest of the canon dark wizards; it makes it seem like it’s an idea he came up with on his own, like he just heard a definition of rape and thought to himself “Hey, that sounds like a fun thing to do to young female political enemies, and I bet I could get away with it, too”. So I bet most of the objections were based not on thinking “that’s more evil than Voldemort”, but “that’s way more evil than Draco is supposed to be right now”.
What we don’t expect is for him to talk casually about committing rape, considering that nobody in the series does
Those are the children’s books version, and MoR is not a children’s book, nor is most fanfiction. If you’ll pardon the size of the hypothetical: If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
This is true. But even among works of fanfiction, the ones that point this out tend to also be the ones that are full of sex acts in general, which MoR is not.
MoR points things out for the sake of pointing them out, by way of trying to teach the art of the awakened mind. Actually I’m not clear on what if anything we’re arguing about at this point.
True. By the laws of fiction, most evil characters are fugly.
Not true. Indeed, Draco is a classic counterexample to this statement. This is part of the reason why there’s a whole trope entitled Draco in Leather Pants. Moreover, the notion that whether people are ugly or not has something to do with whether or not they engage in rape is so wrong-headed I’m not at all sure how to even begin to touch it.
I said most fictional, evil characters are fugly. I stand by that statement.
Correct my “wrong-headed” beliefs if you can, but I suspect the sexually desperate are more likely to rape. This column presents evidence that sex crimes go down when the internet is introduced.
Porn → decreased desperation → less rape
Is there another pathway that explains this evidence I’m not seeing?
Ceteris paribus, girls are far, far less desperate than guys. Supply and demand says an egg produced once a month will have a higher asking price than what guys churn out. This makes me suspect female rapists must be less attractive.
Correct my “wrong-headed” beliefs if you can, but I suspect the sexually desperate are more likely to rape. This column presents evidence that sex crimes go down when the internet is introduced.
Right, this evidence is one of the strong pieces of evidence that undermines the entire rape-is-about-power claim. And there’s other evidence for this also (for example, prison systems that allow conjugal visits have lower rape rates than those that don’t(a citation for this claim would be nice. I’ve seen it before but a quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything useful)). But sometimes, it is about power. Indeed, the type of rape being discussed in this context, by someone like Draco is the classic power situation. And when people are raping enemies that’s more or less unambiguously about power.
I think that depends entirely on particulars that should probably not be discussed here—suffice it to say that a male can be raped in multiple ways, just as a female can, and that rape involves emotional/mental pain as well as physical pain.
I imagine rape is way, way, way more painful for girls than for guys.
What!
Oh, wait. You mean rape of males by females without the use of any paraphernalia.
My impression of approximate rape statistics was along the lines of 90%/9%/1% male->female/male->male/female->male. I don’t know where female->female fits.
“Involuntary heterosexual coitus” is the last think of when evaluating the relative expectations of pain.
I think it’s complicated. Even the access to the internet lowering the incidence of rape could be about increased chances of finding partners as well as access to more porn—it isn’t as though porn was rare before the internet.
My impression is that it isn’t as true as it used to be that fictional evil characters are ugly, but I don’t have stats. It’s certainly reassuring to think that the people you find repulsive are also more dangerous.
Interestingly, I actually had a specific female Death Eater that I had in mind when I wrote that post. The character in question, Bellatrix Lestrange, was played by Helena Bonham Carter, who does not strike me as unusually physically unattractive.
If I recall correctly, she was attractive—even beautiful—in the books until she was imprisoned, at which point she became a shadow of her former self. However, she was imprisoned for torturing two people into insanity (I can rot13 that if necessary, but I think it’s a very minor spoiler at best), so I think it’s fair to say that she was evil before she became unattractive and not the other way around.
Ceteris paribus, girls are far, far less desperate than guys. Supply and demand says an egg produced once a month will have a higher asking price than what guys churn out. This makes me suspect female rapists must be less attractive.
There may be different factors going on for female rapists. The statistics you cite don’t separate out male and female rapists, and I suspect that female rapists are less likely to rape out of desperation, rather than being less attractive.
Those are the children’s books version, and MoR is not a children’s book, nor is most fanfiction. If you’ll pardon the size of the hypothetical: If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
I agree. My point was only that, in the context of the canon, having an 11-year-old boy talk about committing rape seems more jarringly unexpected — narratively, not inferentially — than having him talk about committing torture and murder (or having an adult Death Eater commit or talk about committing rape), relating to my point that the “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question was probably not relevant to people’s actual objections.
(For the record, I’m not arguing the line shouldn’t be there, and I don’t disagree at all with your rationale for including it. I’m just trying to imagine the thinking of people who did react negatively to it.)
There’s little he could do that would make us think “Wow, I didn’t know Voldemort was that evil”.
Would people be shocked if they found out that Voldemort didn’t believe in Pure Bloodism and/or didn’t care whether it was true—he was just using it as a means of getting power and an excuse to kill people?
Would people be shocked if they found out that Voldemort didn’t believe in Pure Bloodism and/or didn’t care whether it was true—he was just using it as a means of getting power and an excuse to kill people?
Huh? That was what I assumed when reading the books. I recall some ‘blood purism’ claims but thought they were just cheers. The sort of thing that only the low-to-mid level death eaters actually believe, before they evolve enough to actually ‘get it’.
I suppose on reflection that in a fantasy story I should expect the ‘evil’ to be blamed on something politically incorrect rather than on universals of human nature.
I’m reading this, which goes into some detail about how carelessly built the Harry Potter universe is.
Still, while blood purism is an obviously easy win for the author, it strikes me as pretty well built into human nature to have a destructive political movement based on amping up prejudice. What would you consider to be a more universal basis for evil?
I have to say, for a blog (?) focused on good writing and story structure, that’s a really terrible essay/brain-dump—highly repetitive, problems mostly alluded to rather than described, fact & citation-free, and very very ranty. (I suspect I’d also find a number of self-contradictions if I cared to re-read.)
If it didn’t have the occasional good insight, I’d never have finished reading it. I did, but I still hate essays which are intermittent reinforcement schedules.
But here’s one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can’t live forever 2) you shouldn’t avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 (‘fine, I can’t live for ∞ but can’t I live for a few thousand years at least?’), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from ‘what is Quirrelmort’s grand plan?’ to ‘how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?’
But here’s one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can’t live forever 2) you shouldn’t avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 (‘fine, I can’t live for ∞ but can’t I live for a few thousand years at least?’), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
Would we go the Dark Side? I’m not sure. I think most people here would not murder someone to get the chance at a few extra centuries of life. And it seems that making a Philosopher’s Stone is not a Dark Side event, although why no one other than Nicholas Flamel makes one is never made clear.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from ‘what is Quirrelmort’s grand plan?’ to ‘how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?’
I’m afraid that still puts us on the Dark Side; even wise and great Dumbledore and Nicolas Flamel weren’t allowed to use a single PS for, at max, more than 4 centuries. Indefinite use by any joe schmoe...
Thanks. I’d been wondering why I was having trouble focusing on the essay, and thinking the problem might be me.
I kept reading it because I thought a lot of the zip in the series faded out in the later books, I hated the epilogue with a passion, and was hoping that I’d get some explanations for why. I think I got some partial explanations, though I got tired of the theories about what Rowling must have been thinking.
Also, at the point when I’d mentioned the essay, I hadn’t gotten to the material about accepting death nor the revolting chunk of resentment about how Rowling cheated to make her books popular by not concealing that she’s pretty.
“Accept death” is a cheap and easy way to add profundity to fantasy and science fiction. I think the anti-immortality stories are pretty much sour grapes, and there are a lot of those stories. Peter Beagle’s built a big chunk of his career on them.
Rebecca Ore’s Centuries Ago and Very Fast is an exception—the main character is non-aging and a time traveler, he likes his life, and he has a pragmatic ability to enjoy it.
I think I got some partial explanations, though I got tired of the theories about what Rowling must have been thinking.
I too was tired—of his incompetence.
There is a lot of value to critically sifting authorial statements over decades about multi-installment works. But his sucked.
If you want to see it done right, in a way that completely revolutionizes your interpretation of the source material and gives you genuine insight, resolving all sorts of continuity issues, plot holes and whatnot, proving its case with citations and points beyond a reasonable doubt, the beau ideal would have to be The Secret History of Star Wars. I doubt you’ve read it, but take this old SW fan’s word for it, it was a masterpiece that that essay comes nowhere near.
I was more interested in what he had to say about the books themselves rather than his guesses about what Rowling was thinking.
I’m not likely to get around to The Secret History of Star Wars, but if there’s a short answer, what happened to Lucas between the end of the first trilogy and the beginning of the second? He seemed to have forgotten most of what he knew about telling stories.
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” is brilliant. Starting a movie with a scrolling description of the tax(?) situation isn’t.
if there’s a short answer, what happened to Lucas between the end of the first trilogy and the beginning of the second?
The short answer is that A New Hope had nothing whatsoever to do with any grand story about Darth Vader, who was merely a mid-level flunky of the Empire. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi frantically retcon this, but Lucas simply didn’t have a decent backstory centered around Darth Vader and couldn’t come up with one.
The longer answer goes into the above, and also points out that Lucas’s support network (of beta readers, if you will) which edited and improved his trilogy had largely fragmented or vanished by this point. For example, his wife, a very skilled film editor, had divorced him by the time of the prequels.
Citation? I think I’ve read a fair number of JKR interviews and I don’t remember her saying this. A quick Google search doesn’t turn anything up but my Google-fu may be weak.
Death is an extremely important theme throughout all seven books. I would say possibly the most important theme. If you are writing about Evil, which I am, and if you are writing about someone who is essentially a psychopath, you have a duty to show the real evil of taking human life.
No, because the books heavily imply that Voldemort didn’t believe. He was not pure-blood himself (Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a very bad example of the Aryan ideal). And, I think that the discussions of how Voldemort chose to interpret the prophecy as referring not to Neville (as pureblood as they come) but to Harry (who, through his mudblood mother, is impure) specifically take this tack.
Interesting. My recollection was that as the books progressed, the plausibility of LV not caring about pure-bloodedness grew larger, but he himself didn’t admit to any such thing onscreen. Then in Deathly Hallows he suddenly did care about it again, because Rowling suddenly realised that he didn’t actually have a motive at all. So any old ill-fitting one would have to do, as part of the overall trainwreck.
Voldemort says so little on-screen that I don’t really get much out of him. His minions certainly do get more pure blood-centric as time goes on—look at Dolores Umbridge even before Deathly Hallows.
Thanks. I really should give up on having opinions about most details in the books—I’ve read them at most three times (once for the last two) and have forgotten a lot of detail.
Do you think the Death Eaters really care about Pure Bloodism?
Is MOR’s Draco being shocked to find out that Pure Bloodism isn’t true just a sign that he’s young and naive?
I’ve read them at most three times (once for the last two)
Only twice here, but I have a good memory for written material, and the ideology, physics, and philosophy of Harry Potter interested me long before MoR—so this is just an old topic for me.
Do you think the Death Eaters really care about Pure Bloodism?
Some do. The Blacks and Malfoys, probably. Others are in it to ‘back the strong horse’, and others are in it because it gives scope to their sadism.
Is MOR’s Draco being shocked to find out that Pure Bloodism isn’t true just a sign that he’s young and naive?
Yes. Eliezer has written about ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ before: they are transparent efforts to shrink religion to something which can’t be falsified, an effort at special pleading. Even though religion (especially Western ones) have made many empirically falsifiable claims—which largely have been falsified. A very young person might take those claims seriously and be shocked that they are falsified.
To not know theological explanations of the theodicy (a topic recently relevant because I finally got around to reading Eliezer’s Haruhi story (which was very good)), to not ‘believe in belief’, to not dismiss empiricism, to lack all those sophisticated dodges and excuses that intelligent adult theists use to remain theist—this we call ‘young and naive’.
Sure. What would Lucius worry about disillusioning Draco? The anti-pure blood wizards don’t have a leg to stand on, unlike theists and atheists.
(Think back—do you recall any good arguments made against pure blood, the theory as opposed to the believers? Rowling assumes we’ll instantly identify pure bloodism == racism, and that’s that. If they think any harder, most people will fall into the usual trap of thinking that exceptions/brilliant-mudbloods like Hermione Granger disprove pure bloodism, which of course they don’t. The history of the Wizarding world is even more consistent with pure bloodism than not!)
It wouldn’t just be about Pure Blood. It would be about not having any abstract loyalties of any sort—Malfoys want to be in charge because it’s more comfortable at the top.
Were Robin here, I suspect he would point out that allowing your children to remain innocent and naive is a sign of luxury, and a signal of high status. Lucius would be embarrassed not to have his 11-year-old son appear innocent and naive.
ETA: Childhood innocence is conspicuous consumption!
I’d be somewhat but not entirely surprised if I learned that about canon Voldemort. I’d be pretty surprised if Smart Science-Aware HPMoR Voldemort hasn’t figured it out (not sure how likely it is that he knew all along).
The new wording — “As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her” — makes it sound, in the absence of any alleged biological limitations now, like it’s some sort of traditional rite of passage in the Malfoy family. (Or at least that’s what it made me think of. Probably not the intended meaning.)
Was there supposed to be something after that quote, or did you cast a non-verbal Protego and deflect one of my points back at my own argument? (If that’s the case, I don’t quite see the significance of that line. Is it that we’re supposed to have the same attitude toward Draco?)
Additionally, the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede murder and torture are more familiar than the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape, and so someone unfamiliar with the actual etiology of any of those crimes finds rape less relatable and more shocking.
Aren’t the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape just extreme sexual arousal, frustration, and anger? Is that what you mean? I’m not sure how accurate that is in real life but that doesn’t seem too unrelatable.
It seems to me that people think rape is preceded by sickness, as in “he must be a real sick bastard”. That’s in large part because the common picture of rape is someone leaping out of the bushes at a random stranger, when a lot of rape is actually between acquaintances who know each other, and like or at least voluntarily spend time around each other.
There are few people above the age of 10 who find the word ‘bitch’ shocking nowadays. What was shocking about it isn’t its ‘naughtiness’ (??), it’s what it revealed about Draco’s mentality, namely that it’s polluted by a good amount of medieval misogyny.
I vote for putting the shock value in. I’d also change it to “When I’m old enough, I’m gonna rape that bitch and knock her up” or “When I get a chance, I’m gonna rape that bitch.” As well as being old enough to get an erection, 11-year-olds are oldenough to rape, though of course this could just be Draco’s bravado.
I have a notion that this bit (especially the earlier version where Draco admits to not having erections yet) was the result of story constraints.
After somewhat about the Malfoys being pretty cool in ways which are important from the point of view of the story, it was necessary to shockingly remind the reader that they’re also morally deficient and seriously bad news. At the same time, it was also a good idea to make this a hypothetical threat—the story line isn’t now (and perhaps not ever) about Hermione being in danger.
Read chapter 22 and 23, then look at what you just wrote. Are you sure that’s the same Draco? If the passage actually does need more shock value (and I’m not quite sure that it does, especially given the wide variance in reader taste and the number who enjoyed the rest of the fic but thought that one part was too shocking) then it has to be more in-character for the later-revealed Draco. There’s a simple way to increase the shock without adding vulgarities that polite young Death Eaters don’t use—namely, substitute “torture and rape” for “rape”—but I already think this whole conversation is getting a bit off-topic for LW.
It didn’t bother me. If Malfoy was thinking about self-control and wasn’t really bothered, he wouldn’t be using a curse at all; once your self-control is lost, it doesn’t matter whether you use ‘bitch’ or some amusing Elizabethanism like ‘trull’ or ‘maculate hobbyhorse’.
Don’t think so, sorry (unless archive.org or similar sites are especially zealous with ff.net). But you can do what I did and add the various chapters to the Update Scanner extension for Firefox, which will do the job for you.
Well, for one thing, sometimes Orwellian Retcons are there for important future reasons. It’s one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.
Also, what kind of load does Update Scanner put on FFN’s servers?
Well, for one thing, sometimes Orwellian Retcons are there for important future reasons. It’s one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.
Well then, please keep notes on the different versions so that future historians can look at the versions. I estimate a small chance that historians will be interested in this work (< 5%), but if one puts a high probability of a Singularity then the probability goes up a lot. So you would presumably think that it is worthwhile to keep them.
What’s worse is that I’m one of the people here who seems to give a lower estimate for a Singularity type event… Maybe it should be two shots whenever it is brought up by someone who doesn’t identify as a Singularitarian?
Maybe it should be two shots whenever it is brought up by someone who doesn’t identify as a Singularitarian?
Unfortunately, which category you belong to won’t be apparent from a random post, unless you happen to drop some illuminating clue (say, a screenshot of your porn folder).
Do Singularitarians like a different type of porn than non-Singularitarians? I guess transhumanists might be more likely to like animated or photomodified porn...
I’d love to see some Singularity porn. The PrimeIntellect stories might be included in this genre, thought they’re a lot more than just erotica.
I am a Singularitarian, and yes, I think I do like different porn than non-Singularitarians. Porn of stuff that won’t be possible until after the Singularity. Porn of nonhuman beings: furries, aliens, fantasy creatures, robots… and beings of nonstandard gender. Not just remixes of the standard male and female genders, but entirely new genders too. And yes, I also like tentacle monsters :)
And that’s just the sorts of images I like. There’s also the role playing I do in Second Life. I do stuff that’s only possible in a virtual reality. Morphing my body into whatever form I happen to find convenient, creating and manipulating virtual objects in ways I find useful, and of course defying the conventions of our universe’s physics. And sometimes even directly manipulating my mental state, or doing stuff like telepathically sending out waves of pleasure and happiness.
And then there’s books… My favourite transhuman sex scenes are from Greg Egan’s novels. He did a good job of thinking of some genuinely original ways for transhumans to have sex. Most notably in Shild’s Ladder, with the aliens whose genitals form new and interesting shapes by exchanging pheremones with their partner. And also Oceanic, which featured the “bridge”, which allowed the inhabitants of the planet to swap genders with their partner after they have sex. And then there’s the 7-gendered society in the novel Distress. And one brief scene of virtual reality sex in Permutation City, and also a couple of his other short stories… hehe, sex positions that are only possible in 4 spatial dimensions :)
I didn’t like Prime Intellect though, it involved way too much pain. Actually, when I read those scenes, I imagined what they would be like if the people modified their minds to experience pain as a new form of pleasure. That… was interesting :)
Sorry if this is totally off-topic for LW, I just couldn’t resist replying to that comment :)
It’s one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.
You mean the removal of “there’s plenty of girls out there who deserve it”, or some other change you made in the past?
And why is the auto-scanner anything but good for anyone? Had I not had it running, I would never have become at all aware of the changes, and the old version would have remained the only one I knew.
Also, what kind of load does Update Scanner put on FFN’s servers?
Default setting is checking each page once per day, though you can set whatever you like, so don’t worry, it’s not bringing the site down any time soon. The comparison with the last downloaded page is done locally. Here for more.
Yes, I found that sentence really jarring too. Even assuming that Draco was for some reason unable to get an erection, he’d hardly admit it.
That sentence actually sent me on a quick Google mission to confirm that the author was a woman.
It would have to be; a male would know that boys of any age can get an erection. Did you find the original author of that line? I couldn’t find it through Google
It seems plausible that Malfoy wouldn’t know that. Some boys never get erections before puberty. Getting erections reliably (as opposed to accidentally) before puberty might not happen either.
At this rate, Draco will be a master Bayesian before he figures out masturbation...
(sorry, sorry)
Actually, that was something about the original books that really bugged me: their sexlessness. Rowling captures the frustration and rage of being an adolescent boy very well, but not the lust—and that’s probably deliberate. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books are much better in this regard.
Wow, I haven’t thought of Adrian Mole in years. I enjoyed those books when I read them—I should read them again and see how they stand up. Thanks for the reminder.
Source for this? I would be very surprised if this was true, except possibly in cases of extreme sexual dysfunction caused by a severe injury.
If you don’t believe me, do a google search. Lots of people on “ask the community” websites like Yahoo answers have asked whether prepubescent boys could get erections. Some of these people are adult men. In any case, obviously Eliezer didn’t know that or he probably wouldn’t have included that tidbit!
A google search didn’t turn up anything saying that some boys don’t get erections before puberty. Why do you think this?
Yahoo answers isn’t an especially reliable source, and it looked like most of the people asking were women, but I guess it’s possible that some adult men forgot what it was like to be a kid.
As I said above, my theory is that Eliezer wrote that line to make fun of fanfiction.
Alternatively, male sexual development might be more varied than is commonly believed.
Or the Malfoys might put a lock on their kids’ early sexuality to make them easier to control. Something like that might make arranged marriages less prone to drama.
I think this might actually be feasible. Malfoys are probably not likely to have intimate enough conversations with children from other families that something odd is going on, and could write off what other children imply as just big talk.
Or the children could find out the truth relatively early, and buy into a family belief that this is the sensible way to do things rather than an imposition.
Given how much emphasis a Malfoy education places on preserving your status and appearance of power, it’s fairly silly that Draco would so openly and freely reveal such an important (at least symbolically) deficiency.
Fair point.
BTW. Eliezer removed these words. Now they are ” As soon as I’m old enough”.
Victory!!!! :-)
Alternatively, Eliezer forgot what it was like to be a kid. That seems simpler.
Or we’ve just learned something about Eliezer’s sexual development that I, for one, would rather not have known.
That is possible but it seems less likely. He’s young and sex-positive, and there are other fanfiction references in the story as well, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if he included another.
Or he was too busy to play with himself.
Uh, that’s Eliezer’s, from one of the early chapters of MoR. Unless he’s making a reference I didn’t get?
I assumed it was a reference to the way young kids sometimes write slash fanfic when they don’t know anything about sex, and they make all kinds of mistakes. There are other fanfic references, like Harry’s line to Draco, “It makes my heart swoon”. I don’t know if it’s a reference to anything specific, but NihilCredo seemed to suggest that e found it.
Actually, what I meant is that I cannot possibly conceive an eleven-year-old kid openly admitting that he cannot yet have an erection—he’d rather jump into a fire. It makes me wonder what kind of kids Eliezer hung out with.
In most Western societies, boys’ relation with sex moves straight from “knowing nothing” to “pretending to know everything”. (Wizarding Britain could be different, but there is nothing in Rowling’s or Eliezer’s writings to explain that.)
And Eliezer has just fixed the sentence (along with a few other small tweaks to Chapter 7). Glad to see improvements!
The new sentence is a bit lacking in the original’s shock value. I would have left the “that bitch” part in.
I’m not sure the Draco I’ve been writing for the last few chapters would use the term “bitch” in front of Harry Potter, it doesn’t sound dignified enough for the heir of Malfoy.
(But yes I did explicitly consider that alternative. If I get enough votes for keeping the shock value I’ll put it back in, or figure out something, I guess.)
Rape isn’t nearly shocking enough. We need naughty words.
This, unfortunately, is precisely how most people’s minds work.
Correct. Do I need to point out again that no one even noticed the thing with the monastery?
It is expected that villains, even in the canon of children’s books, will kill and maybe occasionally torture victims in order to establish that they are bad. It is not expected that villains, especially in the canon of children’s books, will permit/condone/commit rape. Additionally, the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede murder and torture are more familiar than the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape, and so someone unfamiliar with the actual etiology of any of those crimes finds rape less relatable and more shocking.
Agreed. I also think the original “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question (in one of the Author’s Notes) was a little bit misguided because, as far as most HP readers are concerned, Voldemort is already considered to have passed the moral event horizon from the outset. There’s little he could do that would make us think “Wow, I didn’t know Voldemort was that evil”. And 11-year-old Draco, being the son of a Death Eater, might be expected to hold certain evils as justifiable or compulsory — we expect that he’s been conditioned to find it acceptable to kill, torture, and exploit non-purebloods, and generally to manipulate people for his own ends. And as long as he’s still young, we’re inclined to be relatively lenient in judging him for those attitudes, considering he has never learned anything else, nor been allowed (or allowed himself) to reconsider it. What we don’t expect is for him to talk casually about committing rape, considering that nobody in the series does, even the darkest of the canon dark wizards; it makes it seem like it’s an idea he came up with on his own, like he just heard a definition of rape and thought to himself “Hey, that sounds like a fun thing to do to young female political enemies, and I bet I could get away with it, too”. So I bet most of the objections were based not on thinking “that’s more evil than Voldemort”, but “that’s way more evil than Draco is supposed to be right now”.
Those are the children’s books version, and MoR is not a children’s book, nor is most fanfiction. If you’ll pardon the size of the hypothetical: If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
This is true. But even among works of fanfiction, the ones that point this out tend to also be the ones that are full of sex acts in general, which MoR is not.
MoR points things out for the sake of pointing them out, by way of trying to teach the art of the awakened mind. Actually I’m not clear on what if anything we’re arguing about at this point.
I see no need to limit that claim to the males.
True. By the laws of fiction, most evil characters are fugly.
Not true. Indeed, Draco is a classic counterexample to this statement. This is part of the reason why there’s a whole trope entitled Draco in Leather Pants. Moreover, the notion that whether people are ugly or not has something to do with whether or not they engage in rape is so wrong-headed I’m not at all sure how to even begin to touch it.
I said most fictional, evil characters are fugly. I stand by that statement.
Correct my “wrong-headed” beliefs if you can, but I suspect the sexually desperate are more likely to rape. This column presents evidence that sex crimes go down when the internet is introduced.
Porn → decreased desperation → less rape
Is there another pathway that explains this evidence I’m not seeing?
Ceteris paribus, girls are far, far less desperate than guys. Supply and demand says an egg produced once a month will have a higher asking price than what guys churn out. This makes me suspect female rapists must be less attractive.
Right, this evidence is one of the strong pieces of evidence that undermines the entire rape-is-about-power claim. And there’s other evidence for this also (for example, prison systems that allow conjugal visits have lower rape rates than those that don’t(a citation for this claim would be nice. I’ve seen it before but a quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything useful)). But sometimes, it is about power. Indeed, the type of rape being discussed in this context, by someone like Draco is the classic power situation. And when people are raping enemies that’s more or less unambiguously about power.
That’s a good point. However, I think there’s a false equivalence in there.
I imagine rape is way, way, way more painful for girls than for guys.
I think that depends entirely on particulars that should probably not be discussed here—suffice it to say that a male can be raped in multiple ways, just as a female can, and that rape involves emotional/mental pain as well as physical pain.
What!
Oh, wait. You mean rape of males by females without the use of any paraphernalia.
My impression of approximate rape statistics was along the lines of 90%/9%/1% male->female/male->male/female->male. I don’t know where female->female fits.
“Involuntary heterosexual coitus” is the last think of when evaluating the relative expectations of pain.
Wikipedia on motivations for rape
I think it’s complicated. Even the access to the internet lowering the incidence of rape could be about increased chances of finding partners as well as access to more porn—it isn’t as though porn was rare before the internet.
My impression is that it isn’t as true as it used to be that fictional evil characters are ugly, but I don’t have stats. It’s certainly reassuring to think that the people you find repulsive are also more dangerous.
Interestingly, I actually had a specific female Death Eater that I had in mind when I wrote that post. The character in question, Bellatrix Lestrange, was played by Helena Bonham Carter, who does not strike me as unusually physically unattractive.
True. But I still think Harry Potter is a traditional melodrama in that evil is very hard to miss. Bellatrix’s boss looks like this.
That is the movie.
(Warning: TV Tropes)
If I recall correctly, she was attractive—even beautiful—in the books until she was imprisoned, at which point she became a shadow of her former self. However, she was imprisoned for torturing two people into insanity (I can rot13 that if necessary, but I think it’s a very minor spoiler at best), so I think it’s fair to say that she was evil before she became unattractive and not the other way around.
There may be different factors going on for female rapists. The statistics you cite don’t separate out male and female rapists, and I suspect that female rapists are less likely to rape out of desperation, rather than being less attractive.
I don’t see what that has to do with my post, and I also don’t think it’s true.
I agree. My point was only that, in the context of the canon, having an 11-year-old boy talk about committing rape seems more jarringly unexpected — narratively, not inferentially — than having him talk about committing torture and murder (or having an adult Death Eater commit or talk about committing rape), relating to my point that the “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question was probably not relevant to people’s actual objections.
(For the record, I’m not arguing the line shouldn’t be there, and I don’t disagree at all with your rationale for including it. I’m just trying to imagine the thinking of people who did react negatively to it.)
Would people be shocked if they found out that Voldemort didn’t believe in Pure Bloodism and/or didn’t care whether it was true—he was just using it as a means of getting power and an excuse to kill people?
Huh? That was what I assumed when reading the books. I recall some ‘blood purism’ claims but thought they were just cheers. The sort of thing that only the low-to-mid level death eaters actually believe, before they evolve enough to actually ‘get it’.
I suppose on reflection that in a fantasy story I should expect the ‘evil’ to be blamed on something politically incorrect rather than on universals of human nature.
I’m reading this, which goes into some detail about how carelessly built the Harry Potter universe is.
Still, while blood purism is an obviously easy win for the author, it strikes me as pretty well built into human nature to have a destructive political movement based on amping up prejudice. What would you consider to be a more universal basis for evil?
I have to say, for a blog (?) focused on good writing and story structure, that’s a really terrible essay/brain-dump—highly repetitive, problems mostly alluded to rather than described, fact & citation-free, and very very ranty. (I suspect I’d also find a number of self-contradictions if I cared to re-read.)
If it didn’t have the occasional good insight, I’d never have finished reading it. I did, but I still hate essays which are intermittent reinforcement schedules.
But here’s one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can’t live forever 2) you shouldn’t avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 (‘fine, I can’t live for ∞ but can’t I live for a few thousand years at least?’), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from ‘what is Quirrelmort’s grand plan?’ to ‘how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?’
Would we go the Dark Side? I’m not sure. I think most people here would not murder someone to get the chance at a few extra centuries of life. And it seems that making a Philosopher’s Stone is not a Dark Side event, although why no one other than Nicholas Flamel makes one is never made clear.
Mass produce Philosopher’s Stones maybe?
I’m afraid that still puts us on the Dark Side; even wise and great Dumbledore and Nicolas Flamel weren’t allowed to use a single PS for, at max, more than 4 centuries. Indefinite use by any joe schmoe...
Thanks. I’d been wondering why I was having trouble focusing on the essay, and thinking the problem might be me.
I kept reading it because I thought a lot of the zip in the series faded out in the later books, I hated the epilogue with a passion, and was hoping that I’d get some explanations for why. I think I got some partial explanations, though I got tired of the theories about what Rowling must have been thinking.
Also, at the point when I’d mentioned the essay, I hadn’t gotten to the material about accepting death nor the revolting chunk of resentment about how Rowling cheated to make her books popular by not concealing that she’s pretty.
“Accept death” is a cheap and easy way to add profundity to fantasy and science fiction. I think the anti-immortality stories are pretty much sour grapes, and there are a lot of those stories. Peter Beagle’s built a big chunk of his career on them.
Rebecca Ore’s Centuries Ago and Very Fast is an exception—the main character is non-aging and a time traveler, he likes his life, and he has a pragmatic ability to enjoy it.
I too was tired—of his incompetence.
There is a lot of value to critically sifting authorial statements over decades about multi-installment works. But his sucked.
If you want to see it done right, in a way that completely revolutionizes your interpretation of the source material and gives you genuine insight, resolving all sorts of continuity issues, plot holes and whatnot, proving its case with citations and points beyond a reasonable doubt, the beau ideal would have to be The Secret History of Star Wars. I doubt you’ve read it, but take this old SW fan’s word for it, it was a masterpiece that that essay comes nowhere near.
I was more interested in what he had to say about the books themselves rather than his guesses about what Rowling was thinking.
I’m not likely to get around to The Secret History of Star Wars, but if there’s a short answer, what happened to Lucas between the end of the first trilogy and the beginning of the second? He seemed to have forgotten most of what he knew about telling stories.
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” is brilliant. Starting a movie with a scrolling description of the tax(?) situation isn’t.
The short answer is that A New Hope had nothing whatsoever to do with any grand story about Darth Vader, who was merely a mid-level flunky of the Empire. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi frantically retcon this, but Lucas simply didn’t have a decent backstory centered around Darth Vader and couldn’t come up with one.
The longer answer goes into the above, and also points out that Lucas’s support network (of beta readers, if you will) which edited and improved his trilogy had largely fragmented or vanished by this point. For example, his wife, a very skilled film editor, had divorced him by the time of the prequels.
Me too. I stopped reading the essay because of this.
J. K. Rowling once said that Harry Potter was a story about death.
Citation? I think I’ve read a fair number of JKR interviews and I don’t remember her saying this. A quick Google search doesn’t turn anything up but my Google-fu may be weak.
Your Google-fu is weak; a search like http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%22J.K.%20Rowling%22%20%22Harry%20Potter%22%20death%20interview turns up Wikipedia linking to several interviews, and then some quick C-fs turn up:
http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2001/1201-bbc-hpandme.htm
No, because the books heavily imply that Voldemort didn’t believe. He was not pure-blood himself (Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a very bad example of the Aryan ideal). And, I think that the discussions of how Voldemort chose to interpret the prophecy as referring not to Neville (as pureblood as they come) but to Harry (who, through his mudblood mother, is impure) specifically take this tack.
Interesting. My recollection was that as the books progressed, the plausibility of LV not caring about pure-bloodedness grew larger, but he himself didn’t admit to any such thing onscreen. Then in Deathly Hallows he suddenly did care about it again, because Rowling suddenly realised that he didn’t actually have a motive at all. So any old ill-fitting one would have to do, as part of the overall trainwreck.
Then again, my perspective on HP has been thoroughly polluted by the brilliant essays over at http://www.redhen-publications.com/.
Voldemort says so little on-screen that I don’t really get much out of him. His minions certainly do get more pure blood-centric as time goes on—look at Dolores Umbridge even before Deathly Hallows.
Thanks. I really should give up on having opinions about most details in the books—I’ve read them at most three times (once for the last two) and have forgotten a lot of detail.
Do you think the Death Eaters really care about Pure Bloodism?
Is MOR’s Draco being shocked to find out that Pure Bloodism isn’t true just a sign that he’s young and naive?
Only twice here, but I have a good memory for written material, and the ideology, physics, and philosophy of Harry Potter interested me long before MoR—so this is just an old topic for me.
Some do. The Blacks and Malfoys, probably. Others are in it to ‘back the strong horse’, and others are in it because it gives scope to their sadism.
Yes. Eliezer has written about ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ before: they are transparent efforts to shrink religion to something which can’t be falsified, an effort at special pleading. Even though religion (especially Western ones) have made many empirically falsifiable claims—which largely have been falsified. A very young person might take those claims seriously and be shocked that they are falsified.
To not know theological explanations of the theodicy (a topic recently relevant because I finally got around to reading Eliezer’s Haruhi story (which was very good)), to not ‘believe in belief’, to not dismiss empiricism, to lack all those sophisticated dodges and excuses that intelligent adult theists use to remain theist—this we call ‘young and naive’.
Is it plausible that Lucius would allow Draco to be that much of an idealist?
Sure. What would Lucius worry about disillusioning Draco? The anti-pure blood wizards don’t have a leg to stand on, unlike theists and atheists.
(Think back—do you recall any good arguments made against pure blood, the theory as opposed to the believers? Rowling assumes we’ll instantly identify pure bloodism == racism, and that’s that. If they think any harder, most people will fall into the usual trap of thinking that exceptions/brilliant-mudbloods like Hermione Granger disprove pure bloodism, which of course they don’t. The history of the Wizarding world is even more consistent with pure bloodism than not!)
It wouldn’t just be about Pure Blood. It would be about not having any abstract loyalties of any sort—Malfoys want to be in charge because it’s more comfortable at the top.
Were Robin here, I suspect he would point out that allowing your children to remain innocent and naive is a sign of luxury, and a signal of high status. Lucius would be embarrassed not to have his 11-year-old son appear innocent and naive.
ETA: Childhood innocence is conspicuous consumption!
Yes, and note that Draco expects to spend his life catering to idiots. Harry’s upbringing is clearly higher status.
That sounds exactly right to me.
I’d be somewhat but not entirely surprised if I learned that about canon Voldemort. I’d be pretty surprised if Smart Science-Aware HPMoR Voldemort hasn’t figured it out (not sure how likely it is that he knew all along).
My deduction was that the Malfoy family culture included rape for spite, not that it was something Draco came up with.
The new wording — “As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her” — makes it sound, in the absence of any alleged biological limitations now, like it’s some sort of traditional rite of passage in the Malfoy family. (Or at least that’s what it made me think of. Probably not the intended meaning.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were one.
Was there supposed to be something after that quote, or did you cast a non-verbal Protego and deflect one of my points back at my own argument? (If that’s the case, I don’t quite see the significance of that line. Is it that we’re supposed to have the same attitude toward Draco?)
I suspect that Eliezer may be taking that statement as a challenge.
I certainly hope so.
Also, murder can be presented in fiction with enough distance to be fun, but this isn’t true of rape.
Note that there are mystery weekends for solving murders, but not for solving rapes.
Aren’t the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape just extreme sexual arousal, frustration, and anger? Is that what you mean? I’m not sure how accurate that is in real life but that doesn’t seem too unrelatable.
It seems to me that people think rape is preceded by sickness, as in “he must be a real sick bastard”. That’s in large part because the common picture of rape is someone leaping out of the bushes at a random stranger, when a lot of rape is actually between acquaintances who know each other, and like or at least voluntarily spend time around each other.
There are few people above the age of 10 who find the word ‘bitch’ shocking nowadays. What was shocking about it isn’t its ‘naughtiness’ (??), it’s what it revealed about Draco’s mentality, namely that it’s polluted by a good amount of medieval misogyny.
I vote for putting the shock value in. I’d also change it to “When I’m old enough, I’m gonna rape that bitch and knock her up” or “When I get a chance, I’m gonna rape that bitch.” As well as being old enough to get an erection, 11-year-olds are old enough to rape, though of course this could just be Draco’s bravado.
I have a notion that this bit (especially the earlier version where Draco admits to not having erections yet) was the result of story constraints.
After somewhat about the Malfoys being pretty cool in ways which are important from the point of view of the story, it was necessary to shockingly remind the reader that they’re also morally deficient and seriously bad news. At the same time, it was also a good idea to make this a hypothetical threat—the story line isn’t now (and perhaps not ever) about Hermione being in danger.
Read chapter 22 and 23, then look at what you just wrote. Are you sure that’s the same Draco? If the passage actually does need more shock value (and I’m not quite sure that it does, especially given the wide variance in reader taste and the number who enjoyed the rest of the fic but thought that one part was too shocking) then it has to be more in-character for the later-revealed Draco. There’s a simple way to increase the shock without adding vulgarities that polite young Death Eaters don’t use—namely, substitute “torture and rape” for “rape”—but I already think this whole conversation is getting a bit off-topic for LW.
It didn’t bother me. If Malfoy was thinking about self-control and wasn’t really bothered, he wouldn’t be using a curse at all; once your self-control is lost, it doesn’t matter whether you use ‘bitch’ or some amusing Elizabethanism like ‘trull’ or ‘maculate hobbyhorse’.
Can we maybe get a list of these changes somewhere?
Don’t think so, sorry (unless archive.org or similar sites are especially zealous with ff.net). But you can do what I did and add the various chapters to the Update Scanner extension for Firefox, which will do the job for you.
Oh, I was more of hoping we could prod Eliezer into supplying us with a list of such. :)
Well, for one thing, sometimes Orwellian Retcons are there for important future reasons. It’s one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.
Also, what kind of load does Update Scanner put on FFN’s servers?
I was thinking more for the benefit of those of us who only saw the older versions rather than for those of us who only saw the newer versions...
Yes, a diff would be great, so we don’t need to read the whole thing to get the Orwellian Retcon.
Well then, please keep notes on the different versions so that future historians can look at the versions. I estimate a small chance that historians will be interested in this work (< 5%), but if one puts a high probability of a Singularity then the probability goes up a lot. So you would presumably think that it is worthwhile to keep them.
The Less Wrong Drinking Game: have a shot each time someone brings up the Singularity in a completely unrelated thread.
What’s worse is that I’m one of the people here who seems to give a lower estimate for a Singularity type event… Maybe it should be two shots whenever it is brought up by someone who doesn’t identify as a Singularitarian?
Unfortunately, which category you belong to won’t be apparent from a random post, unless you happen to drop some illuminating clue (say, a screenshot of your porn folder).
Do Singularitarians like a different type of porn than non-Singularitarians? I guess transhumanists might be more likely to like animated or photomodified porn...
I’d love to see some Singularity porn. The Prime Intellect stories might be included in this genre, thought they’re a lot more than just erotica.
ok, I just have to reply to this comment...
I am a Singularitarian, and yes, I think I do like different porn than non-Singularitarians. Porn of stuff that won’t be possible until after the Singularity. Porn of nonhuman beings: furries, aliens, fantasy creatures, robots… and beings of nonstandard gender. Not just remixes of the standard male and female genders, but entirely new genders too. And yes, I also like tentacle monsters :)
And that’s just the sorts of images I like. There’s also the role playing I do in Second Life. I do stuff that’s only possible in a virtual reality. Morphing my body into whatever form I happen to find convenient, creating and manipulating virtual objects in ways I find useful, and of course defying the conventions of our universe’s physics. And sometimes even directly manipulating my mental state, or doing stuff like telepathically sending out waves of pleasure and happiness.
And then there’s books… My favourite transhuman sex scenes are from Greg Egan’s novels. He did a good job of thinking of some genuinely original ways for transhumans to have sex. Most notably in Shild’s Ladder, with the aliens whose genitals form new and interesting shapes by exchanging pheremones with their partner. And also Oceanic, which featured the “bridge”, which allowed the inhabitants of the planet to swap genders with their partner after they have sex. And then there’s the 7-gendered society in the novel Distress. And one brief scene of virtual reality sex in Permutation City, and also a couple of his other short stories… hehe, sex positions that are only possible in 4 spatial dimensions :)
I didn’t like Prime Intellect though, it involved way too much pain. Actually, when I read those scenes, I imagined what they would be like if the people modified their minds to experience pain as a new form of pleasure. That… was interesting :)
Sorry if this is totally off-topic for LW, I just couldn’t resist replying to that comment :)
Voted up for giving buzz to Prime Intellect—some of my favorite writing.
I’m afraid it’s over the event horizon.
You mean the removal of “there’s plenty of girls out there who deserve it”, or some other change you made in the past?
And why is the auto-scanner anything but good for anyone? Had I not had it running, I would never have become at all aware of the changes, and the old version would have remained the only one I knew.
Default setting is checking each page once per day, though you can set whatever you like, so don’t worry, it’s not bringing the site down any time soon. The comparison with the last downloaded page is done locally. Here for more.
Oh, some other change I made in the past.