I can’t tell whether you mean “this was clichéd and bad writing” or “this made me sad” or maybe even “letting a female character die to motivate a male character is sexist.”
1) I did not choose the sex of the characters in this story. Rowling created the roles and assigned them sexes and everything else follows from those roles. If canon!Harry was female, this story would be about Harriet.
2) Hermione is not some random girlfriend who gets stuffed into a fridge. Things that happen to main characters do not turn into fridge deaths because they are female.
dthunt is right. The prominence a female character has in the storyline before her death doesn’t really affect whether it is or isn’t a fridging. What matters is whether her death is a narratively appropriate end to her story and character arc, or whether her death primarily serves to motivate a male hero and further his heroic journey. (See http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/04/tropes-vs-women-2-women-in-refrigerators/ for a full discussion.)
Hermione’s death was a textbook fridging. That’s not to say that it’s automatically offensive or sexist or whatever: like TVTropes says, tropes are not bad, tropes are tools. But yes, Hermione’s death is a classic fridge death.
Your summary is a much better definition of ‘fridging’ than the one which appears on TV Tropes and should probably be added there, since TV Tropes is where I went to look up ‘fridging’ whereupon I was much puzzled by the accusations. But as the application of your definition deals with future events within HPMOR, rather than things which have already happened inside the story, I cannot comment further.
Someone doesn’t become a main character just because you write from her POV and pin a literal Hero badge to her chest. You gave her toy problems to challenge, children to fight, and then killed her off before she found something to protect or accomplished anything of note, just to motivate the real, male main character. She’s a fridge death.
...unless and until she returns from the dead, in which case you’ll have used her death to motivate her. Gosh, I’m embarrassed to have forgotten that death doesn’t have to be forever. Even the introduction of the Blood-Cooling Charm wasn’t enough of a clue.
She died at age twelve. There’s a limit to how much she could have accomplished—frankly, we’re well past the point where accomplishments of preteens are straining the suspension of disbelief in this story, I’m just accepting it on the grounds that any story is entitled to one ludicrous premise.
I’m currently expecting that, once she wakes up, Hermione’s firsthand experience of death will drive her to rediscover the Philosopher’s Stone, not to pay off Harry’s debts, but to end death altogether. Harry’s quest is to defeat the symbolic Death at Azkaban, and Draco is apparently supposed to heal Slytherin House and end the prejudice against Muggleborns, however one would do that. So I hope you’re wrong about that limit, because it’ll make for a depressing ending; there’s no shortage of problems to solve and no adults stepping forward to tackle them.
You gave her toy problems to challenge, children to fight, and then killed her off before she found something to protect or accomplished anything of note
That’s precisely it, well put.
I’m not very happy about this death because it’s not like Hermione the character couldn’t possibly go anywhere any more, or her relationship with Harry for that matter. All that getting invested in her, all that development and “self-actualisation”, and it ultimately ends in a “not your fault” for Harry? It may get extra points on LW for being “realistic” and allowed to happen, but I don’t care; as a story I find it, well, somewhat unfulfilling.
EDIT: actually, Hermione being a girl isn’t any part of what personally bothers me here (my feminist goggles are almost nonexistent). It’s the killing off of a promising character we were invested in before they achieved even a fraction of their potential.
The trope requires 2 things:
1) The woman winds up in the refrigerator (check)
2) It happens because someone is explicitly trying to get at somebody else, thus disempowering the victim, or that it serves as an empty source of motivation for a character. (???).
As readers, we don’t necessarily have confidence in criterion #2, here. Other commentators have come up with various plausible-sounding explanations for how the deed went down (sunlight resistant troll lures Hero-Hermoine to a place where her injuries can’t be detected, and systematically removes all of her defenses). So, let’s posit that the troll is a weapon explicitly sent to kill Hermoine.
The important question is who and why? If it’s to get a rise out of Harry, that’s it falls under the common heading of the trope. If it’s Mr Malfoy trying to get revenge for the destroyer of his son’s reputation, it doesn’t. I think as readers it’s difficult at this stage to be confident about these things.
Let’s say, however, that Hermoine is the woman in the refrigerator. The road to get there had her basically kicking ass and taking names the whole way there; I’m not inclined to necessarily cry foul because of it.
Well, forgive me for overstating my point in a state of emotional frustration, anguish, anger, disappointment, and just plain loathing. No, it is technically not correct to call this Fridge Stuffing. Nevertheless, the fact is that my willing suspension of disbelief is broken, and that I find that my anger is directed at you rather than at the Universe or the Rules or Fate or whatever forces make the death of a beloved main character acceptable. My brain rejects this. I’ve never, in my life, until now, felt like declaring a piece of fiction DisContinuity, but this is exactly how I’m feeling now. If she had died in Azkaban or from a Kiss or from a Malfoy-funded assassination, that would have perhaps felt better. But the lamest warmup boss of the canon? Offscreen? And making Harry arrive just too late? Not minutes too late, mind you, but right after the troll grabbed and crushed her?
What, would just a few paragraphs of seeing the fight from her perspective have hurt? A sense of closure, perhaps, at least on her side?
If she had died in Azkaban or from a Kiss or from a Malfoy-funded assassination, that would have perhaps felt better. But the lamest warmup boss of the canon? Offscreen?
Isn’t that the point, though? Hasn’t that been the theme? That reality doesn’t care about the narrative arcs that you make in your head? That at any time, the universe is allowed to kill you, your notion of the plot be damned? What you are feeling seems to be more or less the author’s intention—the sign of a good story.
Mind you, if this was the real world. Harry would have found out about Hermione’s death 2-3 days later, not dramatically just in time. From a realism perspective, there was way more closure than anyone ever actually gets when it comes to violent death.
Not at all. HPMOR isn’t quite as full of narrativium as the canon, but it’s hardly a Game of Thrones-esque “The plot doesn’t care about what you want” slaughterfest.
Mind you, if this was the real world. Harry would have found out about Hermione’s death 2-3 days later, not dramatically just in time.
Pretty sure that’s what Ritalin was complaining about. It made the scene seem flat/tropy. Not that I can necessarily propose a better way of doing it. Also no, it would have been at most later that day. But still.
Especially since the tension up to that point had been incredibly generic. Honestly, I found that the chapter was a bore, an incredibly standard race-against-the-clock Hollywoodish action sequence, and never, at any point, did the narrative properly convey that this situation was any different from the myriad other situations where the hero bypasses a traffic jam by driving his car through a mall so that he can get to his beloved in time. The only other instance I can remember of something like this happening was in The Dark Knight, and there too it felt like an unnatural cheat, but at least we had the Joker’s malice to blame.
The only other instance I can remember of something like this happening was in The Dark Knight, and there too it felt like an unnatural cheat, but at least we had the Joker’s malice to blame.
Voldemort has plenty of malice to go around. It’s just less chaotic than the Joker’s. Where the Joker would kill you with an overly complicated punchline, Voldemort would simply kill you.
That’s not malice, that’s just indifference; not the act of a villain, but that of an Eldritch Abomination. Though it is true that hurting people seems to be a terminal value in his utility function, and that seeing others suffer brings him hedons… What’s up with this asshole anyway?
I don’t know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you.
I think you’re probably just mourning for the character and are angry at the cruelty of the story that depicts a cruel universe which lets people cruelly be murdered (just like our own). You’re justifying your anger by talking about the particular details of the depiction—but I think you’re just bloody angry at the murder itself, like Harry is, not anything else.
If that’s the case I think the story has been successful in making you feel Harry’s anger, though you’re misdirecting it. Authors that write honestly end up writing about the moral universe of consequences which they believe exists. An atheist like G.R.R. Martin couldn’t write Lord of the Rings, and a Christian like Tolkien couldn’t have written Game of Thrones. And this is the story that Eliezer Yudkowsky has to write.
Details like “in the canon the troll was much weaker” seriously shouldn’t be affecting your emotional reaction, especially when it’s clear that the troll has been boosted in power even in-story (so that it’d be impervious to sunlight), so it was clearly murder and targetted assassination, not just a random troll than randomly attacked Hermione.
GoT is absurdly dark, though. Things like that have happened in history, but not so compressed in time. After I found out about the Red Wedding, I gave up on the entire thing, I found myself completely losing interest.
“I don’t know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you.” I anticipate that I would. If I had to venture a hypothesis as to why, I’d guess that I would have shared her struggle, her despair, and her eventual acceptance of death. Part of me would have struggled, failed, and died with her. Inability to help oneself is much more acceptable than inability to help others. And, of course, seeing the fight from her perspective would have given me time to get it into my skull that she really was going to die, before she did.
GoT is absurdly dark, though. Things like that have happened in history, but not so compressed in time.
This is historically inaccurate. GoT is fairly accurate for the time period depicted (it is based loosely on the War of the Roses). It is practically lighthearted compared to the vast majority of human history.
After I found out about the Red Wedding, I gave up on the entire thing, I found myself completely losing interest.
The Red Wedding, like most of GoT, is based on a historical analogy with the War of the Roses. Specifically, it is a combination of the Battle of Heworth Moor, where a wedding party was warned in advance of an ambush and managed to hire enough mercenaries to survive, and the Black Dinner, where the leaders of a clan were invited to dinner, then slaughtered.
Usually the War of the Roses isn’t portrayed nearly as darkly. Hm. An interesting thing happened in my head. I imagined GoT as retold in the style of Horrible Histories, and suddenly it all became okay and tolerable. “Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, it’s funny cause it’s true. Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, hope next time it’s not you!”
I am currently reading a history of Byzantium. In the roughly three centuries from Constantine to Justinian, a situation with someone invited with guarantees of safety but betrayed and murdered occurs about ten times.
I thought it was a neat bit of subversion where something that would be a joke speed bump mid-boss in Industry Standard Storytelling ends up straight up killing you instead because things work more like reality here and it’s ten times as big as you and made of magic.
If HPMOR ran on Reium rather than Narrativium, I can think of a dozen opportunities for any of the characters to die horribly, not just during the plot but before the plot even begins.
Why did Voldemort keep the Order alive? As Harry said, a wizard with his skillz and creativity isn’t a threat, it’s an extinction event.
Yes, but only if he wants it to be an extinction event. I’m reasonably confident that HPMoR Voldemort does not want the same things as canon Voldemort. In fact, I give it at least a 50% probability that “Voldemort” was a false flag operation from the get go to achieve some other goal, e.g. uniting wizard-kind against muggle threats.
The one mystery I don’t have even a plausible story for is what really happened Halloween night in Godric’s Hollow. There have been multiple clues dropped that the canon story did not happen in this universe, and that what the characters (except Quirrel) think happened, didn’t. (“And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry’s art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.”)
I suspect that Voldemort did not Avada Kadevra baby Harry, and he probably did not die that night either. I think Riddle/Quirrell/Monroe/whoever was simply done with the Voldemort supervillain persona, and therefore faked “Voldemort’s” death. However I have not yet been able to figure out what really did happen. I suspect the clues are there, but so far I haven’t been able to notice them or deduce the proper answer from them.
Would you want to give the reader closure for the arc of a character who is, as the protagonist states, going to be coming back to life?
Personally, this reminds me more than anything of Crono’s death in Chrono Trigger. Nobody mourns him—mourning is something to do when you don’t have control over space and time and the absolute resolve to harness that control. And so the audience, also, doesn’t get a break to stop and think about the death. They just hurl themselves, and their avatar, face-first into solving it.
I do not, for one second, that Harry Potter is going to pull that off in his first year at Hogwarts. Or ever. I’d find it easier to believe that he beat Entropy than that he figured how to bring back the dead.
While it’s true that he’s already done things Beyond The Impossible before, all the rules of the setting seem to indicate that Death Is Final. Even his dreams of “immortality for everyone” seemed to be about stopping people from dying, not bringing them back.
Not wanting to give anything away, I would remind you that what we have seen of Harry so far in the story was intended to resemble the persona of an 18-year-old Eliezer. Whatever Harry has done so far that you would consider to be “Beyond The Impossible”, take measure of Eliezer’s own life before and after a particular critical event. I would suggest that everything Harry has wrought until this moment has been the work of a child with no greater goal—and that, whatever supporting beams of the setting you feel are currently impervious to being knocked down, well, they haven’t even had a motivated rationalist give them even a moment of attention, yet.
I mean, it’s not like Harry can’t extract a perfect copy of Hermione’s material information-theoretic mass (both body and mind) using a combination of a fully-dissected time-turner, a pensieve containing complete braindumps of everyone else she’s ever interacted with, a computer cluster manipulating the mirror of Erised into flipping through alternate timelines to explore Hermione’s reactions to various hypotheticals, or various other devices strewn about the HP continuum. He might end up with a new baby Hermione (who has Hermione’s utility function and memories) who he has to raise into being Hermione again, but just because something doesn’t instantly restore her, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Or he might end up with a “real” copy of Hermione running in his head, which he’ll then allow to manifest as a parallel-alter, using illusion charms along with the same mental hardware he uses for occlumency.
In fact, he could have probably done either of those things before, completely lacking in the motivation he has now. With it? I have no idea what will happen. A narrative Singularity-event, one might say.
Okay, I’m sold. Shame on me, I was too busy going through the Five Stages of Grief to stop and think about it for five minutes. Of course he’ll bring her back.
Also, that’s why EY didn’t give her final moments the propertreatment a Killed Off For Real protagonist deserves; not if but when she is resurrected, that treatment would appear like a cheat and a red herring and a waste of time. And there are no red herrings in this fic.
I got the strong impression that there was more contrived there (in-universe) than the simple matter of the troll catching Hermione when she was out. The amount of time that passes between Harry injecting her and Dumbledore’s arrival doesn’t seem to be long enough for the effects of the oxygenation to fail. (Will have to reread / research brain death to be sure I’m not jumping at shadows. It does seem that magic, at least, has concluded for sure that she’s dead, and Harry doesn’t seem likely to have time to save her even if magic is mistaken and she has a couple more minutes before her brain is irrepairably damaged (the time turner feats would be frankly badass if he could pull it off).) All of which leads me to believe that Quirrel (or whoever was behind it) took measures to make sure that there was no hope of saving her short of phoenix tears, unless they took precautions against even those, somehow.
Alternative explanation: Magic oxygenation shots don’t work because the inventors did not understand biology, just like the inventors of broomsticks did not understand physics.
Answer which doesn’t break established characters: A death eater disguised as Dumbledore lied.
Answer that I can think of that is the least bad: Quiirrelmort steals !Harry’s time-turner and comes back from 6PM to spill the soup and provide an alibi for how he suppressed the wards of Hogwarts (which have been established to detect sudden serious injury of a student- that’s why Malfoy had to die slowly), and used the troll to kill Hermione for the purpose of turning !Harry into the person who has the motivations required to complete the intended narrative.
I’m feeling really confused at this comment. When I read the chapter I thought to myself
“Oh. Hermione died. Big plot twist, what will the characters do next?”
And not much more than that. I don’t know whether I’m emotionally stunted but I find it extremely difficult to conceive of someone having such a visceral emotional reaction to a fictional character’s death.
I also lacked any strong emotional reaction to Hermione’s death and I have never read a superhero comic in my life. I fact, I’ve never had such a reaction to a fictional character’s death in books, movies or games. While I do get immense enjoyment out of absorbing works of fiction, I never get ‘caught up’ in them to such a degree that the emotional part of my brain starts treating characters as real people.
I can get emotionally invested, but to me (it appears, upon internal reflection) it is the loss of potential and further interaction with the character that gets to me.
For instance, I really like the scenes including X, and I thought that X could have grown and done so much more, and now none of it will happen. Completely different feeling from when RL people die.
I’ve never been into superhero comics so that can’t be the explanation in my case. In fact I often get annoyed when an official writer mistreats the canon they have been entrusted with, or fails to follow up on important plot points.
I’ve been really shocked by the super-emotional-effects from fiction that you seen in Tumblr fandom and the like. On the other hand, I get extremely emotionally affected by opera, so I don’t know. This chapter was certainly a punch in the gut though, but I came out of it feeling more ‘victory—whatever the cost’ than you.
Wow, there’s really no escaping the Typical Mind Fallacy. I find it very hard to connect to what’s going on in an opera.
As for Victory At All Costs, this isn’t Star Trek or a shounen anime; the amount of willpower and smarts you put into things increases your base rate of success, but there are some tasks that are just plain too hard, and sometimes you’re just unlucky and roll a Critical Fail.
Although I do tend to come out of cathartic tragic operas, plays, etc with a kind of transhumanist “look upon the tragedies I avert and despair” bent. But seeking, for example, how the Universe still manages to kill Gilda is a lot different from this sort of thing.
After decades of constant fiction consumption, I’ve just stopped taking it very seriously at object level. I imagine I used to be much more responsive to what storytelling beats the narrator pulls instead of how they pull them back when my brain wasn’t hypersaturated with familiar fiction schema most anything will fit into.
I’m a poor visual imager, so perhaps I find it more difficult to empathize with characters when my experience of them is words on a screen (interspersed with blurry outlines of what I imagine is happening in the scene). I notice that I get more emotional reactions when I’m watching a movie, for example.
Is there any research investigating this sort of thing?
Unfortunately, while 1 and 2 may be strictly valid responses, they come across as extremely tonedeaf given that there were already a variety of complaints about gender issues in the story. To then kill off the primary female protagonist looks pretty bad. You could have gotten almost the same result if you had killed Neville without the gender issues.
You could have gotten almost the same result if you had killed Neville without the gender issues.
Only if he had already been writing a yaoi fic… If he killed off Neville, no one would care and he’d open up a can of plot worms (“why Neville? Why not Hermione?”).
On the contrary, I think Neville could be far more poignant. Hermione wanted to be a heroine independent of Harry, because she has those sorts of cultural goals. Neville only started acting remotely brave because of Harry’s influence.
All of the above, and more. He didn’t just stuff her into the fridge after an entire story of not-measuring-up, and a chapter of bonding and future plans. He killed her off-screen, and then gave us false hope of saving her. And he has the gall to imply that this is Harry’s fault for trying to be sensible, for expecting too much of normal people, and for not thinking to use his Patronus.
It felt contrived, cruel, and uncaring. “Let’s get her out of the way and give Harry a motivation” is the feeling one gets.
It is bridge dropping, and I love it. We are being given a taste of a dark rationalist, who does not give his enemies dramatic deaths where they get to die like heroes, perhaps accomplishing something through it. When a dark rationalist takes control of the story (or rather, starts to use the control over the story he’s always had), the story becomes contrived, cruel and uncaring, as it should. It’s realism.
We are being given a taste of a dark rationalist, who does not give his enemies dramatic deaths where they get to die like heroes, perhaps accomplishing something through it.
See also Fate/zero & Kuritsugu. And note that it’s not just Hermione’s death that is fast and cruel, it’s the troll’s too: Harry steps forward with the stone, stuffs it in, releases it to explode the head, and acidifies the brains in less time than it takes to type that.
Getting caught up in style and throwing away victory is something for the lower ranks to do. Captains can’t even think about doing such a carefree thing. Don’t try to be a good guy. It doesn’t matter who owes who. From the instant they enter into a war, both sides are evil.
And he has the gall to imply that this is Harry’s fault for trying to be sensible
Harry thinks this. In general it’s not a good idea to assume that authors agree with everything their characters think, and Eliezer has explicitly pointed this out on several occasions.
Okay, the narrative implies this. I frankly don’t care what the author himself thinks.
And yes, I have. In the context where I read it, it was an uplifting piece about accepting that we live in a difficult world and making the best of it, and about the very obvious fact that death is bad. You bringing this up in this context makes me angry for some reason I don’t quite understand.
I can’t tell whether you mean “this was clichéd and bad writing” or “this made me sad” or maybe even “letting a female character die to motivate a male character is sexist.”
1) I did not choose the sex of the characters in this story. Rowling created the roles and assigned them sexes and everything else follows from those roles. If canon!Harry was female, this story would be about Harriet.
2) Hermione is not some random girlfriend who gets stuffed into a fridge. Things that happen to main characters do not turn into fridge deaths because they are female.
dthunt is right. The prominence a female character has in the storyline before her death doesn’t really affect whether it is or isn’t a fridging. What matters is whether her death is a narratively appropriate end to her story and character arc, or whether her death primarily serves to motivate a male hero and further his heroic journey. (See http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/04/tropes-vs-women-2-women-in-refrigerators/ for a full discussion.)
Hermione’s death was a textbook fridging. That’s not to say that it’s automatically offensive or sexist or whatever: like TVTropes says, tropes are not bad, tropes are tools. But yes, Hermione’s death is a classic fridge death.
Your summary is a much better definition of ‘fridging’ than the one which appears on TV Tropes and should probably be added there, since TV Tropes is where I went to look up ‘fridging’ whereupon I was much puzzled by the accusations. But as the application of your definition deals with future events within HPMOR, rather than things which have already happened inside the story, I cannot comment further.
Now I’m optimistic that in some sense Hermione’s story is not yet complete :)
Someone doesn’t become a main character just because you write from her POV and pin a literal Hero badge to her chest. You gave her toy problems to challenge, children to fight, and then killed her off before she found something to protect or accomplished anything of note, just to motivate the real, male main character. She’s a fridge death.
...unless and until she returns from the dead, in which case you’ll have used her death to motivate her. Gosh, I’m embarrassed to have forgotten that death doesn’t have to be forever. Even the introduction of the Blood-Cooling Charm wasn’t enough of a clue.
She died at age twelve. There’s a limit to how much she could have accomplished—frankly, we’re well past the point where accomplishments of preteens are straining the suspension of disbelief in this story, I’m just accepting it on the grounds that any story is entitled to one ludicrous premise.
I’m currently expecting that, once she wakes up, Hermione’s firsthand experience of death will drive her to rediscover the Philosopher’s Stone, not to pay off Harry’s debts, but to end death altogether. Harry’s quest is to defeat the symbolic Death at Azkaban, and Draco is apparently supposed to heal Slytherin House and end the prejudice against Muggleborns, however one would do that. So I hope you’re wrong about that limit, because it’ll make for a depressing ending; there’s no shortage of problems to solve and no adults stepping forward to tackle them.
If she gets more time on this planet, the upper bound of what she can do will of course increase.
That’s precisely it, well put.
I’m not very happy about this death because it’s not like Hermione the character couldn’t possibly go anywhere any more, or her relationship with Harry for that matter. All that getting invested in her, all that development and “self-actualisation”, and it ultimately ends in a “not your fault” for Harry? It may get extra points on LW for being “realistic” and allowed to happen, but I don’t care; as a story I find it, well, somewhat unfulfilling.
EDIT: actually, Hermione being a girl isn’t any part of what personally bothers me here (my feminist goggles are almost nonexistent). It’s the killing off of a promising character we were invested in before they achieved even a fraction of their potential.
The trope requires 2 things: 1) The woman winds up in the refrigerator (check) 2) It happens because someone is explicitly trying to get at somebody else, thus disempowering the victim, or that it serves as an empty source of motivation for a character. (???).
As readers, we don’t necessarily have confidence in criterion #2, here. Other commentators have come up with various plausible-sounding explanations for how the deed went down (sunlight resistant troll lures Hero-Hermoine to a place where her injuries can’t be detected, and systematically removes all of her defenses). So, let’s posit that the troll is a weapon explicitly sent to kill Hermoine.
The important question is who and why? If it’s to get a rise out of Harry, that’s it falls under the common heading of the trope. If it’s Mr Malfoy trying to get revenge for the destroyer of his son’s reputation, it doesn’t. I think as readers it’s difficult at this stage to be confident about these things.
Let’s say, however, that Hermoine is the woman in the refrigerator. The road to get there had her basically kicking ass and taking names the whole way there; I’m not inclined to necessarily cry foul because of it.
Well, forgive me for overstating my point in a state of emotional frustration, anguish, anger, disappointment, and just plain loathing. No, it is technically not correct to call this Fridge Stuffing. Nevertheless, the fact is that my willing suspension of disbelief is broken, and that I find that my anger is directed at you rather than at the Universe or the Rules or Fate or whatever forces make the death of a beloved main character acceptable. My brain rejects this. I’ve never, in my life, until now, felt like declaring a piece of fiction DisContinuity, but this is exactly how I’m feeling now. If she had died in Azkaban or from a Kiss or from a Malfoy-funded assassination, that would have perhaps felt better. But the lamest warmup boss of the canon? Offscreen? And making Harry arrive just too late? Not minutes too late, mind you, but right after the troll grabbed and crushed her?
What, would just a few paragraphs of seeing the fight from her perspective have hurt? A sense of closure, perhaps, at least on her side?
Isn’t that the point, though? Hasn’t that been the theme? That reality doesn’t care about the narrative arcs that you make in your head? That at any time, the universe is allowed to kill you, your notion of the plot be damned? What you are feeling seems to be more or less the author’s intention—the sign of a good story.
Mind you, if this was the real world. Harry would have found out about Hermione’s death 2-3 days later, not dramatically just in time. From a realism perspective, there was way more closure than anyone ever actually gets when it comes to violent death.
Not at all. HPMOR isn’t quite as full of narrativium as the canon, but it’s hardly a Game of Thrones-esque “The plot doesn’t care about what you want” slaughterfest.
Pretty sure that’s what Ritalin was complaining about. It made the scene seem flat/tropy. Not that I can necessarily propose a better way of doing it. Also no, it would have been at most later that day. But still.
Especially since the tension up to that point had been incredibly generic. Honestly, I found that the chapter was a bore, an incredibly standard race-against-the-clock Hollywoodish action sequence, and never, at any point, did the narrative properly convey that this situation was any different from the myriad other situations where the hero bypasses a traffic jam by driving his car through a mall so that he can get to his beloved in time. The only other instance I can remember of something like this happening was in The Dark Knight, and there too it felt like an unnatural cheat, but at least we had the Joker’s malice to blame.
Voldemort has plenty of malice to go around. It’s just less chaotic than the Joker’s. Where the Joker would kill you with an overly complicated punchline, Voldemort would simply kill you.
That’s not malice, that’s just indifference; not the act of a villain, but that of an Eldritch Abomination. Though it is true that hurting people seems to be a terminal value in his utility function, and that seeing others suffer brings him hedons… What’s up with this asshole anyway?
Regardless, my bet is that Snape killed Hermione.
I don’t know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you.
I think you’re probably just mourning for the character and are angry at the cruelty of the story that depicts a cruel universe which lets people cruelly be murdered (just like our own). You’re justifying your anger by talking about the particular details of the depiction—but I think you’re just bloody angry at the murder itself, like Harry is, not anything else.
If that’s the case I think the story has been successful in making you feel Harry’s anger, though you’re misdirecting it. Authors that write honestly end up writing about the moral universe of consequences which they believe exists. An atheist like G.R.R. Martin couldn’t write Lord of the Rings, and a Christian like Tolkien couldn’t have written Game of Thrones. And this is the story that Eliezer Yudkowsky has to write.
Details like “in the canon the troll was much weaker” seriously shouldn’t be affecting your emotional reaction, especially when it’s clear that the troll has been boosted in power even in-story (so that it’d be impervious to sunlight), so it was clearly murder and targetted assassination, not just a random troll than randomly attacked Hermione.
GoT is absurdly dark, though. Things like that have happened in history, but not so compressed in time. After I found out about the Red Wedding, I gave up on the entire thing, I found myself completely losing interest.
“I don’t know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you.” I anticipate that I would. If I had to venture a hypothesis as to why, I’d guess that I would have shared her struggle, her despair, and her eventual acceptance of death. Part of me would have struggled, failed, and died with her. Inability to help oneself is much more acceptable than inability to help others. And, of course, seeing the fight from her perspective would have given me time to get it into my skull that she really was going to die, before she did.
This is historically inaccurate. GoT is fairly accurate for the time period depicted (it is based loosely on the War of the Roses). It is practically lighthearted compared to the vast majority of human history.
The Red Wedding, like most of GoT, is based on a historical analogy with the War of the Roses. Specifically, it is a combination of the Battle of Heworth Moor, where a wedding party was warned in advance of an ambush and managed to hire enough mercenaries to survive, and the Black Dinner, where the leaders of a clan were invited to dinner, then slaughtered.
Usually the War of the Roses isn’t portrayed nearly as darkly. Hm. An interesting thing happened in my head. I imagined GoT as retold in the style of Horrible Histories, and suddenly it all became okay and tolerable. “Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, it’s funny cause it’s true. Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, hope next time it’s not you!”
I am currently reading a history of Byzantium. In the roughly three centuries from Constantine to Justinian, a situation with someone invited with guarantees of safety but betrayed and murdered occurs about ten times.
I thought it was a neat bit of subversion where something that would be a joke speed bump mid-boss in Industry Standard Storytelling ends up straight up killing you instead because things work more like reality here and it’s ten times as big as you and made of magic.
If HPMOR ran on Reium rather than Narrativium, I can think of a dozen opportunities for any of the characters to die horribly, not just during the plot but before the plot even begins.
Why did Voldemort keep the Order alive? As Harry said, a wizard with his skillz and creativity isn’t a threat, it’s an extinction event.
Yes, but only if he wants it to be an extinction event. I’m reasonably confident that HPMoR Voldemort does not want the same things as canon Voldemort. In fact, I give it at least a 50% probability that “Voldemort” was a false flag operation from the get go to achieve some other goal, e.g. uniting wizard-kind against muggle threats.
I think that after getting killed, Voldemort’s priorities changed and he’s now using it like that.
The one mystery I don’t have even a plausible story for is what really happened Halloween night in Godric’s Hollow. There have been multiple clues dropped that the canon story did not happen in this universe, and that what the characters (except Quirrel) think happened, didn’t. (“And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry’s art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.”)
I suspect that Voldemort did not Avada Kadevra baby Harry, and he probably did not die that night either. I think Riddle/Quirrell/Monroe/whoever was simply done with the Voldemort supervillain persona, and therefore faked “Voldemort’s” death. However I have not yet been able to figure out what really did happen. I suspect the clues are there, but so far I haven’t been able to notice them or deduce the proper answer from them.
Would you want to give the reader closure for the arc of a character who is, as the protagonist states, going to be coming back to life?
Personally, this reminds me more than anything of Crono’s death in Chrono Trigger. Nobody mourns him—mourning is something to do when you don’t have control over space and time and the absolute resolve to harness that control. And so the audience, also, doesn’t get a break to stop and think about the death. They just hurl themselves, and their avatar, face-first into solving it.
I do not, for one second, that Harry Potter is going to pull that off in his first year at Hogwarts. Or ever. I’d find it easier to believe that he beat Entropy than that he figured how to bring back the dead.
While it’s true that he’s already done things Beyond The Impossible before, all the rules of the setting seem to indicate that Death Is Final. Even his dreams of “immortality for everyone” seemed to be about stopping people from dying, not bringing them back.
Not wanting to give anything away, I would remind you that what we have seen of Harry so far in the story was intended to resemble the persona of an 18-year-old Eliezer. Whatever Harry has done so far that you would consider to be “Beyond The Impossible”, take measure of Eliezer’s own life before and after a particular critical event. I would suggest that everything Harry has wrought until this moment has been the work of a child with no greater goal—and that, whatever supporting beams of the setting you feel are currently impervious to being knocked down, well, they haven’t even had a motivated rationalist give them even a moment of attention, yet.
I mean, it’s not like Harry can’t extract a perfect copy of Hermione’s material information-theoretic mass (both body and mind) using a combination of a fully-dissected time-turner, a pensieve containing complete braindumps of everyone else she’s ever interacted with, a computer cluster manipulating the mirror of Erised into flipping through alternate timelines to explore Hermione’s reactions to various hypotheticals, or various other devices strewn about the HP continuum. He might end up with a new baby Hermione (who has Hermione’s utility function and memories) who he has to raise into being Hermione again, but just because something doesn’t instantly restore her, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Or he might end up with a “real” copy of Hermione running in his head, which he’ll then allow to manifest as a parallel-alter, using illusion charms along with the same mental hardware he uses for occlumency.
In fact, he could have probably done either of those things before, completely lacking in the motivation he has now. With it? I have no idea what will happen. A narrative Singularity-event, one might say.
Okay, I’m sold. Shame on me, I was too busy going through the Five Stages of Grief to stop and think about it for five minutes. Of course he’ll bring her back.
Also, that’s why EY didn’t give her final moments the proper treatment a Killed Off For Real protagonist deserves; not if but when she is resurrected, that treatment would appear like a cheat and a red herring and a waste of time. And there are no red herrings in this fic.
We’ll get her back.
Well, good, now I can relax and wait to see how Harry pulls it off and at what cost. Good mood, good moo-ood, good moo-ood
While I’m putting it at over 90% that Hermione will be resurrected somehow, someway, it doesn’t need to be in his first year.
I got the strong impression that there was more contrived there (in-universe) than the simple matter of the troll catching Hermione when she was out. The amount of time that passes between Harry injecting her and Dumbledore’s arrival doesn’t seem to be long enough for the effects of the oxygenation to fail. (Will have to reread / research brain death to be sure I’m not jumping at shadows. It does seem that magic, at least, has concluded for sure that she’s dead, and Harry doesn’t seem likely to have time to save her even if magic is mistaken and she has a couple more minutes before her brain is irrepairably damaged (the time turner feats would be frankly badass if he could pull it off).) All of which leads me to believe that Quirrel (or whoever was behind it) took measures to make sure that there was no hope of saving her short of phoenix tears, unless they took precautions against even those, somehow.
Alternative explanation: Magic oxygenation shots don’t work because the inventors did not understand biology, just like the inventors of broomsticks did not understand physics.
And yet the broomsticks work.
Easy answer: Dumbledore lied.
Answer which doesn’t break established characters: A death eater disguised as Dumbledore lied.
Answer that I can think of that is the least bad: Quiirrelmort steals !Harry’s time-turner and comes back from 6PM to spill the soup and provide an alibi for how he suppressed the wards of Hogwarts (which have been established to detect sudden serious injury of a student- that’s why Malfoy had to die slowly), and used the troll to kill Hermione for the purpose of turning !Harry into the person who has the motivations required to complete the intended narrative.
Dumbledore teleported by pheonix. I don’t think a disguised death eater could do that.
Yeah, that solution solves the immediate problem by introducing a much larger one.
-And Dumbledore arrives a couple of seconds too late.
Since he traveled there because he sensed her death, that’s neither surprising nor contrived.
DIdn’t Malfoy have to die slowly, because the wards on the castle detect serious injury?
I think that’s true, but I’d lean towards this discrepancy being a plot-point rather than a plot-hole.
They went over this, too.
Dumbledore may have had other things to do, possibly, as he may have needed to arm up or something.
Dumbledore spending too much time preparing before going to save a student is not one of his flaws.
I’m feeling really confused at this comment. When I read the chapter I thought to myself
“Oh. Hermione died. Big plot twist, what will the characters do next?”
And not much more than that. I don’t know whether I’m emotionally stunted but I find it extremely difficult to conceive of someone having such a visceral emotional reaction to a fictional character’s death.
I was wondering whether a lot of exposure to superhero comics could have that effect, since very little (nothing at all?) is permanent in them.
I also lacked any strong emotional reaction to Hermione’s death and I have never read a superhero comic in my life. I fact, I’ve never had such a reaction to a fictional character’s death in books, movies or games. While I do get immense enjoyment out of absorbing works of fiction, I never get ‘caught up’ in them to such a degree that the emotional part of my brain starts treating characters as real people.
I can get emotionally invested, but to me (it appears, upon internal reflection) it is the loss of potential and further interaction with the character that gets to me.
For instance, I really like the scenes including X, and I thought that X could have grown and done so much more, and now none of it will happen. Completely different feeling from when RL people die.
I’ve never been into superhero comics so that can’t be the explanation in my case. In fact I often get annoyed when an official writer mistreats the canon they have been entrusted with, or fails to follow up on important plot points.
Likewise, I find myself shocked when I meet people who don’t care about fictional characters the way I do.
I’ve been really shocked by the super-emotional-effects from fiction that you seen in Tumblr fandom and the like. On the other hand, I get extremely emotionally affected by opera, so I don’t know. This chapter was certainly a punch in the gut though, but I came out of it feeling more ‘victory—whatever the cost’ than you.
Wow, there’s really no escaping the Typical Mind Fallacy. I find it very hard to connect to what’s going on in an opera.
As for Victory At All Costs, this isn’t Star Trek or a shounen anime; the amount of willpower and smarts you put into things increases your base rate of success, but there are some tasks that are just plain too hard, and sometimes you’re just unlucky and roll a Critical Fail.
Although I do tend to come out of cathartic tragic operas, plays, etc with a kind of transhumanist “look upon the tragedies I avert and despair” bent. But seeking, for example, how the Universe still manages to kill Gilda is a lot different from this sort of thing.
Of course. But that still is pretty close to Ardent Harry’s actual resolve.
After decades of constant fiction consumption, I’ve just stopped taking it very seriously at object level. I imagine I used to be much more responsive to what storytelling beats the narrator pulls instead of how they pull them back when my brain wasn’t hypersaturated with familiar fiction schema most anything will fit into.
I’m a poor visual imager, so perhaps I find it more difficult to empathize with characters when my experience of them is words on a screen (interspersed with blurry outlines of what I imagine is happening in the scene). I notice that I get more emotional reactions when I’m watching a movie, for example.
Is there any research investigating this sort of thing?
Unfortunately, while 1 and 2 may be strictly valid responses, they come across as extremely tonedeaf given that there were already a variety of complaints about gender issues in the story. To then kill off the primary female protagonist looks pretty bad. You could have gotten almost the same result if you had killed Neville without the gender issues.
Only if he had already been writing a yaoi fic… If he killed off Neville, no one would care and he’d open up a can of plot worms (“why Neville? Why not Hermione?”).
On the contrary, I think Neville could be far more poignant. Hermione wanted to be a heroine independent of Harry, because she has those sorts of cultural goals. Neville only started acting remotely brave because of Harry’s influence.
Understood. I didn’t claim to endorse the above points, but it was unclear to me whether that was what Ritalin was asserting.
All of the above, and more. He didn’t just stuff her into the fridge after an entire story of not-measuring-up, and a chapter of bonding and future plans. He killed her off-screen, and then gave us false hope of saving her. And he has the gall to imply that this is Harry’s fault for trying to be sensible, for expecting too much of normal people, and for not thinking to use his Patronus.
It felt contrived, cruel, and uncaring. “Let’s get her out of the way and give Harry a motivation” is the feeling one gets.
It was fucking bridge-dropping, is what it was.
It is bridge dropping, and I love it. We are being given a taste of a dark rationalist, who does not give his enemies dramatic deaths where they get to die like heroes, perhaps accomplishing something through it. When a dark rationalist takes control of the story (or rather, starts to use the control over the story he’s always had), the story becomes contrived, cruel and uncaring, as it should. It’s realism.
See also Fate/zero & Kuritsugu. And note that it’s not just Hermione’s death that is fast and cruel, it’s the troll’s too: Harry steps forward with the stone, stuffs it in, releases it to explode the head, and acidifies the brains in less time than it takes to type that.
Actually, there’s a great rationality quote for here:
Harry thinks this. In general it’s not a good idea to assume that authors agree with everything their characters think, and Eliezer has explicitly pointed this out on several occasions.
I think this was deliberate. Have you read the piece Eliezer wrote about his brother?
Okay, the narrative implies this. I frankly don’t care what the author himself thinks.
And yes, I have. In the context where I read it, it was an uplifting piece about accepting that we live in a difficult world and making the best of it, and about the very obvious fact that death is bad. You bringing this up in this context makes me angry for some reason I don’t quite understand.