“Oh, no, my issue is not with the fact that Eliezer killed a female character for Harry’s motivation. Like I said, I like character death. I like character death used to put other characters through an emotional rollercoaster. And when people complain that X is sexist because a female character got fridged, that annoys me because while the trend is an issue, there is nothing wrong or sexist with an individual instance of a character who happens to be female dying for a character who happens to be male. It actually kind of surprised me on a meta level that I was so mad—I have never been annoyed by an individual instance of fridging before.
But the issue here is with the context in this particular instance. Your argument that it had to happen this way is flawed, because it assumes the story prior to the exact point of Hermione’s death was fixed and out of Eliezer’s hands. I don’t have a problem with Eliezer killing Hermione, in itself—but if he was going to, he should have either not given her this character arc in the first place or completed the arc first in a way that gives at least some vague kind of closure. He could also have killed Neville if he wanted to—he’d just have needed to develop Harry’s relationship with Neville in such a way that it would make sense as a motivator, instead of (or along with) his relationship with Hermione. And it’s not as if he suddenly realized here after writing the story up to this point that he needed to kill Hermione in order for it to work out—the trigger warnings page has noted that the next chapter with a trigger warning would be called “The Bystander Effect” (he notes specifically on chapter 88 that the original title was “Bystander Apathy”, clearly as a way of alerting those who have been watching out for the next triggery chapter that this is it) since August 2010. This was planned. He knew exactly how he was going to kill Hermione, and he had all the time in the world to plan out a way for it to go that wouldn’t involve aborting a potentially interesting arc and making Hermione The Character Who Could Never Step Out Of Harry’s Shadow And Then Died.
If you’ve watched Game of Thrones (or read A Song of Ice and Fire, assuming this bit is more or less the same as the show), it also shockingly kills off main characters a lot, but while it is shocking and unexpected, it is not unsatisfying like this, because the characters who are killed, while they had personalities and plans and development, didn’t have arcs going much of anywhere in particular at the moment—the story wouldn’t have been any better with them remaining alive than dead at that point. I feel this is very distinctly not the case for Hermione in MoR. She had interesting stuff left to do. She had been written with uncomfortable overtones (taking a canon character one of whose main qualities was being smart and repeatedly making her fail where Harry succeeds because he’s more rational), but the story suggested her arc was about her discovering her own way towards not having to be in Harry’s shadow anymore, which would have fixed it. By aborting the arc, all that’s left is those uncomfortable overtones of glorifying Harry and belittling Hermione—a character who happens to have canonically been the intelligent one, who taught millions of girls that being smart could be pretty badass.
And now MoR’s only remaining vaguely developed female character is McGonagall, who, while fun, is also repeatedly emphasized as being markedly irrational (in this very chapter, even). From a source material that did at least reasonably well with female characters, after a story that seemed to be heading towards also doing at least okay on that front, Eliezer ended up with a story about how much better a boy is than almost everybody else, where all of the rare exceptions are male and the one female character who could have held her own gets fridged before anything comes of it. As a canon-Hermione fan, I feel pretty damn slapped in the face, especially when this comes straight after chapter 87 (which also irritated me a lot by making Hermione preoccupied with her tiresome ~unrequited love~ for Harry when she’s just been framed for murder and should have way better things to think about). It did not have to be this way.
And, like I said, even if he absolutely had to develop an arc and make it look like Hermione was going to get something done in her life only to have it not happen to make her death more shocking, he could still have done it without the pathetic damseling, and I might have been able to let it slide. Couldn’t this have been from Hermione’s point of view up until when Harry arrives at the scene? (He could still have done Harry’s viewpoint, too.) Couldn’t we have actually seen her attempts to fight it off (which Eliezer could at least have attempted to make somewhat awesome)? Couldn’t Harry have arrived sometime before Hermione became a helpless immobile McGuffin, and seen her holding her own at least somewhat? (If chapter 90 is Hermione’s fight with the troll from her point of view and it’s awesome and has some kind of closure to her character, or Hermione gets brought back in some manner and gets some closure afterwards, I’ll be reasonably content.)
The end result, as I also mentioned, is that I don’t even find it heartwrenching, because I’m too busy being angry at the context to be immersed in the story at all anymore at that point. I couldn’t even concentrate when reading the whole last bit because all I wanted to do was start to type a rant into the comment box. If I had managed to be emotionally impacted by it, I’d probably also be more inclined to forgive it for the sake of good storytelling, but exactly because the context was so maddening, I couldn’t. I was more saddened by the death of Mrs. Norris than Hermione.
I posted my review on FFN, and he says he reads all reviews, so he’s probably read it already, but you can post it if you want. (Probably better include my elaborations here.)”
I can’t help but observe that even if Hermione had been male, and just Harry’s friend—even if we take out all notions of sexism or relationship dynamics from this problem—killing him off is still not really the best solution. This was a character who was growing, who was admittedly more interesting than Harry, and who was on a path that could’ve potentially put this character at or even above Harry’s level of rational thinking. But now we’re just left with Harry again, and it feels like settling for second-best.
Perhaps later chapters will convince me otherwise, but for now I am suspicious that the direction this story is going is not the best direction for this story.
I emailed back, and she elaborated:
“Oh, no, my issue is not with the fact that Eliezer killed a female character for Harry’s motivation. Like I said, I like character death. I like character death used to put other characters through an emotional rollercoaster. And when people complain that X is sexist because a female character got fridged, that annoys me because while the trend is an issue, there is nothing wrong or sexist with an individual instance of a character who happens to be female dying for a character who happens to be male. It actually kind of surprised me on a meta level that I was so mad—I have never been annoyed by an individual instance of fridging before.
But the issue here is with the context in this particular instance. Your argument that it had to happen this way is flawed, because it assumes the story prior to the exact point of Hermione’s death was fixed and out of Eliezer’s hands. I don’t have a problem with Eliezer killing Hermione, in itself—but if he was going to, he should have either not given her this character arc in the first place or completed the arc first in a way that gives at least some vague kind of closure. He could also have killed Neville if he wanted to—he’d just have needed to develop Harry’s relationship with Neville in such a way that it would make sense as a motivator, instead of (or along with) his relationship with Hermione. And it’s not as if he suddenly realized here after writing the story up to this point that he needed to kill Hermione in order for it to work out—the trigger warnings page has noted that the next chapter with a trigger warning would be called “The Bystander Effect” (he notes specifically on chapter 88 that the original title was “Bystander Apathy”, clearly as a way of alerting those who have been watching out for the next triggery chapter that this is it) since August 2010. This was planned. He knew exactly how he was going to kill Hermione, and he had all the time in the world to plan out a way for it to go that wouldn’t involve aborting a potentially interesting arc and making Hermione The Character Who Could Never Step Out Of Harry’s Shadow And Then Died.
If you’ve watched Game of Thrones (or read A Song of Ice and Fire, assuming this bit is more or less the same as the show), it also shockingly kills off main characters a lot, but while it is shocking and unexpected, it is not unsatisfying like this, because the characters who are killed, while they had personalities and plans and development, didn’t have arcs going much of anywhere in particular at the moment—the story wouldn’t have been any better with them remaining alive than dead at that point. I feel this is very distinctly not the case for Hermione in MoR. She had interesting stuff left to do. She had been written with uncomfortable overtones (taking a canon character one of whose main qualities was being smart and repeatedly making her fail where Harry succeeds because he’s more rational), but the story suggested her arc was about her discovering her own way towards not having to be in Harry’s shadow anymore, which would have fixed it. By aborting the arc, all that’s left is those uncomfortable overtones of glorifying Harry and belittling Hermione—a character who happens to have canonically been the intelligent one, who taught millions of girls that being smart could be pretty badass.
And now MoR’s only remaining vaguely developed female character is McGonagall, who, while fun, is also repeatedly emphasized as being markedly irrational (in this very chapter, even). From a source material that did at least reasonably well with female characters, after a story that seemed to be heading towards also doing at least okay on that front, Eliezer ended up with a story about how much better a boy is than almost everybody else, where all of the rare exceptions are male and the one female character who could have held her own gets fridged before anything comes of it. As a canon-Hermione fan, I feel pretty damn slapped in the face, especially when this comes straight after chapter 87 (which also irritated me a lot by making Hermione preoccupied with her tiresome ~unrequited love~ for Harry when she’s just been framed for murder and should have way better things to think about). It did not have to be this way.
And, like I said, even if he absolutely had to develop an arc and make it look like Hermione was going to get something done in her life only to have it not happen to make her death more shocking, he could still have done it without the pathetic damseling, and I might have been able to let it slide. Couldn’t this have been from Hermione’s point of view up until when Harry arrives at the scene? (He could still have done Harry’s viewpoint, too.) Couldn’t we have actually seen her attempts to fight it off (which Eliezer could at least have attempted to make somewhat awesome)? Couldn’t Harry have arrived sometime before Hermione became a helpless immobile McGuffin, and seen her holding her own at least somewhat? (If chapter 90 is Hermione’s fight with the troll from her point of view and it’s awesome and has some kind of closure to her character, or Hermione gets brought back in some manner and gets some closure afterwards, I’ll be reasonably content.)
The end result, as I also mentioned, is that I don’t even find it heartwrenching, because I’m too busy being angry at the context to be immersed in the story at all anymore at that point. I couldn’t even concentrate when reading the whole last bit because all I wanted to do was start to type a rant into the comment box. If I had managed to be emotionally impacted by it, I’d probably also be more inclined to forgive it for the sake of good storytelling, but exactly because the context was so maddening, I couldn’t. I was more saddened by the death of Mrs. Norris than Hermione.
I posted my review on FFN, and he says he reads all reviews, so he’s probably read it already, but you can post it if you want. (Probably better include my elaborations here.)”
I can’t help but observe that even if Hermione had been male, and just Harry’s friend—even if we take out all notions of sexism or relationship dynamics from this problem—killing him off is still not really the best solution. This was a character who was growing, who was admittedly more interesting than Harry, and who was on a path that could’ve potentially put this character at or even above Harry’s level of rational thinking. But now we’re just left with Harry again, and it feels like settling for second-best.
Perhaps later chapters will convince me otherwise, but for now I am suspicious that the direction this story is going is not the best direction for this story.
Hmm, I wonder if this is the review he responded to in the AN.