Some discussion has popped up on /r/hpmor about the an apparent decline in the quality of HPMoR’s recent chapters. Now, I personally don’t think there’s been any drop in terms of quality, but the commenters there make some compelling arguments. In particular, I feel that /u/alexanderwales articulates those arguments nicely:
I am hesitant to make any remarks prior to the story being completed, as I’m fairly confident that there are things which will only make sense after the fact. And I’m also hesitant to make remarks in a public forum that I know the author reads. But to put on my writing hat anyway …
In terms of prose and mechanics, I think the chapters have been great. In terms of characterization, I think that Eliezer’s Dumbledore has always been a little bit shaky, though almost always when he’s being serious or emotional—this is in contrast to the aloof and enigmatic Dumbledore, which reads wonderfully. In chapter 110, he’s mean, and gives weak arguments in favor of his side of things, and then he dies. Perhaps that’s EY’s conception of the character, but it’s not mine. Harry and Quirrell are written the same as ever, and I had no problem there (save for the two times Quirrell leans so heavily on the fourth wall that it seems like it’s about to break).
And then we get to plot, and that’s where I start having some real problems. I wish that we’d gotten to see the Mirror of Erised prior to the chapter where it became really important. I wish we’d been introduced to the spell that Dumbledore uses prior to the chapter where he kills himself with it. There are a number of things that happen first and are explained after the fact, or that are explained only moments before they’ve happened. (And unfortunately, in a serial you can’t go back and change these things if you realize that you needed to foreshadow them a few chapters back.) So yes, I agree that there are some issues with how information is given out to the audience. Most of it must be transparency illusion, which can be difficult for an author to deal with—it’s clear in your mind what’s happening, but when you put it to the page you don’t realize that you’re not describing it in such a way that the reader will get that too.
I do somewhat wonder whether this is the result of the author reading/writing these chapters all at once, which I would think would enhance the transparency illusion. I think we’d probably have had fewer problems with these chapters if they’d been released all at once.
Yeah. Another problem is that the last few chapters of HPMOR have been kinda “wobbly”, like the last chapters of Ra. Oh we’re saved, oh no we’re doomed again, etc.
It seems to me that many people expect HPMOR to be better than it actually is. To me, the fic has always felt like it’s promising slightly more than it can deliver, though it’s still very enjoyable to read. The characters and their changing points of view are wonderfully realized, e.g. Dumbledore is built up as someone who does amazing clever stuff offscreen. But the actual plotlines of the fic are, and always were, a bit weaker than what the characters suggest. The riff on Ender’s Game, the improbable escapes in Azkaban, the whole SPHEW thing (seriously?), and now the mirror.
I propose that we enjoy the fic for what it does well, and stop demanding so much in terms of plot. If you want a really good plot, the obvious solution is to make one up yourself :-)
If you want a really good plot, the obvious solution is to make one up yourself :-)
While I agree with the sentiment expressed here, I think that might be easier said than done. After all, it’s easy to criticize a dish, much harder to make a better one.
People complain a lot about the lack of foreshadowing of the mirror and the “Riddle can’t kill Riddle” curse. But I don’t think the lack of foreshadowing matters, because both of these things are minor details in the overall story line. Let’s start with the “Riddle can’t kill Riddle” curse. Voldemort wasn’t just not killing Harry because of this curse. After all now that the curse is lifted he still isn’t killing Harry. The curse is entirely unneeded to explain his earlier before, or his current behavior. Nor was the curse needed to resolve the current plot. Voldemort was in complete control of the situation all along.
So there’s no deus ex machina. It’s a sudden unexpected development, yes, but one that doesn’t really affect the story. It’s purpose was to drive home how utterly defeated Harry is. How he is now completely at the mercy of Voldemort, having no clever tricks or last minute saves. Also it gave us a nice cliffhanger. But you can take out the final lines from 111 and the first few lines from 112 and the story continues exactly as it does now.
The same with the mirror scene were Dumbledore gets defeated. Take it out, have Dumbledore never show up,and the story still continues exactly the same as it does now. Dumbledore is a side character. He needed to be got rid of, so neither Harry nor the reader would expect or hope for Dumbledore to show up at the last minute and save the day, but ultimate he’s not important to the story. And Voldie getting rid of Dumbledore with relativele ease is entirely expected anyway. He is established as being much stronger.
Anyway, bottomline: I really like the story so far. Elizier is doing a terrific job of driving home just how utterly screwed Harry is. How completely outplayed and outgunned he is.
I’m really looking forward to the resolution. I have no idea what it is going to be, but I fully expect it to be glorious. I do know it won’t be Harry casting “Problemsolvius” or someone showing up casting “Savethedayius”. I know this because Elizier went to great length to crush that expectation at every possible avenue.
Of course, my disappointment if I am mistaken and the final solution does some completely unexpected deus ex machina, shall be big indeed.
And for the record: My prediction is still that Voldemort shall not be dead by the end of the story. I give that 80%. Up to a few chapters ago my theory was that Voldemort wanted to team up with Harry to permanently get rid of death, but that seems increasingly less likely.
It’s not so much the lack of foreshadowing that bothers me with Dumbledore, but how stupid Dumbledore seems in that chapter.
First, he didn’t even wonder if Quirrel wasn’t possessed/imperiused by Voldemort, even after the Hogwarts security system identified the killer of Hermione to be Quirrel ?
Second, he actually voice that he was stupid, what does he gain in doing so ?
Third, how could he think he can defeat Voldemort with the “frozen time” spell when Voldemort is aware of that spell ? Voldemort has a horcrux network, he can just kill himself. The only hope would have been to use the “frozen time” by surprise.
And finally, he faces Voldemort without even bringing Fawkes with him ? Whyyyy ? If he had Fawkes, he would largely have had the time to teleport Harry to safety while Harry was saying his heroic “I was stupid don’t save me”.
The way Dumbledore acts in this chapter and the ease with which he’s defeated feels very artificial. Especially considering Dumbledore, who will not as smart as Quirrelmort, is still supposed to be near his level.
First, he didn’t even wonder if Quirrel wasn’t possessed/imperiused by Voldemort, even after the Hogwarts security system identified the killer of Hermione to be Quirrel ?
There was a healthy portion of HPMoR’s readerbase that wasn’t convinced that Quirrell was Voldemort, and unlike the readers, Dumbledore hasn’t read canon. I don’t really think you can take this as evidence for Dumbledore’s stupidity.
Second, he actually voice that he was stupid, what does he gain in doing so ?
Nothing, but from his perspective, it’s not like he would lose anything, either, and he was frustrated. People often vent aloud when frustrated.
Third, how could he think he can defeat Voldemort with the “frozen time” spell when Voldemort is aware of that spell ? Voldemort has a horcrux network, he can just kill himself. The only hope would have been to use the “frozen time” by surprise.
I imagine the Mirror would have trapped his soul in it if he had killed himself, or prevent the Horcrux network from coming into play by other means; else Quirrell would definitely have thought of it, and likely so would have Dumbledore.
And finally, he faces Voldemort without even bringing Fawkes with him ? Whyyyy ? If he had Fawkes, he would largely have had the time to teleport Harry to safety while Harry was saying his heroic “I was stupid don’t save me”.
According to Quirrell, the process cannot be stopped after being set in motion, and this probably also applies to removing people from the process (at least without exotic artifacts like the True Cloak of Invisibility). It’s uncertain, then, whether bringing Fawkes would have accomplished anything, and on top of that, we don’t actually know where Fawkes is; it’s very possible that he’s off somewhere else accomplishing some vitally important task Dumbledore set for him.
On the lack of foreshadowing for the “Riddle can’t kill Riddle” curse, there was enough stuff around for me to generate a similar hypothesis last year (admittedly with prompting).
The great-grandparent comment did make me consider unbreakable vows as a theory of what happened on Halloween. E.g. to prevent one of his Horcruxes from later killing him, Voldemort made an unbreakable vow not to magically interact with his alter egos (this causing Harry’s sense of Doom around Quirrell). Doesn’t seem necessary, though.
Dumbledore is a side character. He needed to be got rid of, so neither Harry nor the reader would expect or hope for Dumbledore to show up at the last minute and save the day
There’s technically six more hours of story time for a time-turned Dumbledore to show up, before going on to get trapped. He does mention that he’s in two places during the mirror scene.
Dumbledore has previously stated that trying to fake situations goes terribly wrong, so there could be some interesting play with that concept and him being trapped by the mirror.
I agree with you about the writing but I have a nearly opposite prediction.
I notice that in all the Harry talking to himself or reflecting quietly chapters he allways thinks something along the lines of “there seems to be almost no limit in what you could accomplish with magic if you really understood it”. Several times his mind circles around the becomus godus spell and considers some avenue and decides it wouldn’t work for some reason or another. In each case after thinking that his mind goes off on some other tangent.
So my prediction is that Harry has his situation get worse and worse until he can do nothing but think about how to et out of it. And while thinking and being forced not to divert his mind to other matters he will review clues that were allready available to us (had we been paying closer attention) and by reviewing the right facts in the right order he will deduce something about how magic works. That deduction will allow him to cast some absurdly powerful spell that solves his problems.
it has recently been pointed out that Harry’s Patronus v2.0 is powered by his life as well as his magic and that this (at least according to Voldemort, so obviously it’s true) makes it more powerful than it could have been if powered by just his magic
even the small fraction of his life he was able to give up on the spur of the moment was enough to restore Hermione’s life and magic, which even Voldemort was unable to do on his own
in canon, central to Harry’s ultimate victory is his willingness to die
and suggest that if your prediction is correct, what powers his absurdly powerful spell may be the sacrifice of the whole of his life and magic.
(Hmm. The power of a potion in HPMOR is determined by what went into making its ingredients, a curious and probably important discovery that hasn’t been applied yet for anything other than winning playfights. What went into making Harry was, among other things, the power and ingenuity—and in some sense even the life—of Lord Voldemort. Maaaaybe.)
What if he didn’t just sacrifice the whole of his magic, but the whole of entire magic?
Wow, a “get rid of magic and turn everyone into a muggle” spell would be actually worse than death to Voldemort. Just image having Voldemort living out his last few decades of life as a Muggle.
This makes me think about death being the worst fear of Voldemort. I guess being turned into a muggle and dying decades after that, would be much more fearful to him.
One further remark on that last paragraph. “A potion spends that which is invested in the creation of its ingredients”. What counts as creation? Ultimately, pretty much everything on earth is made of the remnants of supernovas...
I think that must be the role of the stirring and heating requirements: to control which aspects of the thing’s creation, and how much of them, are infused into the potion. There may well be a way to call forth solar fusion from common iron. But of course we know that no one has ever done it.
I would interpret “you could take the following things out and it would make no difference” as criticism of the writing, not as praise. If a piece of information adds complexity without adding proportional value, it shouldn’t be in there to begin with.
(this is a comment on your critique rather than on the quality of recent HPMOR chapters, which I am still undecided on)
Looking back, I think I could have written that more clearly.
People were complaining about the mirror, and the Riddle-curse, being deus ex machina. I’m saying they weren’t, because they weren’t moving the plot forward. Take them out and the overall plot remains the same. That doesn’t mean those scenes served no purpose in the story.
The Riddle-curse scene in particular I thought was very good. When I was reading chapter 111, when Harry got his wand back, I got all excited. I kept thinking perhaps Harry had a chance after all. I did of course wonder why Voldemort let him keep his wand, and figured there might be a deeper reason, but seeing Harry with a wand still makes you hope. And then suddenly Harry is given an opening … and it turns out to have been all Voldemort’s plan all along, and Harry is even more thoroughly beaten then he already was before.
That serves an important function in the story. It drives home how bad Harry’s situation is. It drives home that there will be no easy outs, that Voldemort really is very, very smart, and isn’t going to make any easily exploitable errors. Basically, the scene is setting the background, and building up suspense, for the final confrontation.
It’s perfectly fine for a scene like that to have no foreshadowing. It doesn’t need foreshadowing. Nobody sane will think: “Harry totally would have won without that plot twist!”.
I’d also like to point out that unexpected things were kind of expected to happen. We already knew Voldemort was playing a vastly more complex game than just “I want to grab power” or “I want to kill Harry”. And we also already knew that there were unknown traps guardian the stone.
I’m really looking forward to the resolution. I have no idea what it is going to be, but I fully expect it to be glorious. I do know it won’t be Harry casting “Problemsolvius” or someone showing up casting “Savethedayius”. I know this because Elizier went to great length to crush that expectation at every possible avenue.
So, maybe Harry uses partial transfiguration to kill all the Death Eaters. This still does nothing to solve the Voldemort Problem. And so it seems most likely that the Voldemort Problem is not the actual problem of the fic. As others have linked, Voldemort proposed a long time ago that he would duel Harry and “lose,” and then Harry is established as the eventual philosopher-king of Britain. Maybe, decades from now, Harry manages to stop Voldemort; but probably not.
The most salient alternative actual problem is the Death Problem. It seems like if Harry manages to solve the Death Problem then the Voldemort Problem may get a lot less important (though whether it does probably depends on exactly how he solves the Death Problem).
This… is actually a really good point. As I stated in my original comment, I am also a member of the group that doesn’t think the quality of HPMoR has been decreasing, but until I read your comment, it was just a vague gut feeling of “What are you talking about? It’s still good!” that I couldn’t quite put into words (at least, not in a way that made sense). Thank you for articulating that so well!
I wish that we’d gotten to see the Mirror of Erised prior to the chapter where it became really important.
I felt the same way on that one. Having the plot turn on a previously untold super spell to an existing object that turns out to be extra super duper itself is not that satisfying. The fewer rabbits that get pulled out of a hat for the denouement, the better. (I felt that way about canon and the Deathly Hallows too.)
But the story isn’t done yet, so maybe in the end this point won’t seem so pivotal, or it will turn out to have a different meaning than it seems now. Did Dumbledore really just completely get his ass handed to him? I think a number of people have remarked that he seemed a bit off in character, and canon has him arranging his own death to gain some advantage. It aint over til it’s over.
I think some of the negative reaction is just people feeling shell shocked by the apparent complete disaster. Which could actually be an intended and potentially powerful dramatic effect.
I don’t think that EY wrote this just for entertainment. I expect an ideological point. It may be MIRI EY showing us the disaster of being at the mercy of the uber powerful alien intelligence, or it may be Mr. Glowey Person giving us the positive vision of what life could be. I’ve been hoping for the latter, but I’m not sure we’re going to get it.
I felt this way some, particularly about Ch. 108 which was a lot of “tell me instead of show me” exposition, but EY has a lot of promised explanation to get out of the way and I kindof gave it a pass on that basis.
It was unsatisfying that the magical details of the interactions between Quirrell and Dumbledore seemed to come out of nowhere, but I think we need to keep something in mind: we are following this story from Harry’s viewpoint. You could fill a restricted section of the Hogwarts library and then some with magical things that Harry doesn’t know. It might be unsatisfying to the reader to have these two powerful wizards planning around eldritch magics we’ve never heard of, but that’s how the reality of it would be.
The last few have been a rollercoaster (not in quality, but as an experience), and I’m kindof waiting to see how it all goes to make any judgments. Certainly my expectations have been set high by this series, and I do have a little worry that they might be too high. I don’t know if I can think of an ending that would satisfy me, but I’m hoping that EY has.
I should add the disclaimer that by nature I’m an apologist for pretty much any fiction I read, and HPMOR is quite haloed for me on top of that.
That said, I thought that having several chapters of exposition where Harry gets to ask all the questions he’s been wondering, followed by a whirlwind of utter bewilderment as Quirrell pulls a warren from the woodwork, was a successful demonstration of the challenge of “The enemy is smart.”
There are a number of things that happen first and are explained after the fact, or that are explained only moments before they’ve happened
Yeah, I thought that too. Makes it a bit harder to maintain illusion and forget that this is all really happening on the author’s say-so.
Also I disagree about not being able to go back and improve, if there happens to be room for it. Who gives a damn if it’s a serial. There will be new readers in the future.
Fourth wall stuff always annoyed me, not just in recent chapters, all the pointless inserts and references, all the winking at the audience. “Akemi Homura and her lost love”, really? For some reason lots of readers seem to love this stuff, however, so I don’t know what to say. Except that the best works of literature tend to not do that.
Your last statement is not correct. Many of the works of literature regarded as the best do that very heavily. Dante does that like crazy in the inferno. Joyce does it non stop in Ulyesses. Most of the works of Vladimir Nabokov do it very heavily. As does Pynchon. It may be that you just don’t notice it in literature and do notice it here because you are more familiar the the animie canon than the literary canon.
And then there’s all the callbacks to those. Here’s a few lines of Keats I read recently:
...but to that second circle of sad Hell
Where in the gust, the whirl-wind, and the flaw
Of hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows; pale were the lips I saw
Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
For those keeping score at home, that’s Keats alluding to Dante alluding to a famous and semi-legendary Italian love affair. And the Bible, of course. Earlier in the same poem, Keats throws in a lot of references to Greek myth too.
Of course Keats isn’t alluding to contemporary literature, but to works that have lasted long enough that one can be confident their popularity isn’t limited to a particular moment.
I know very little anime, actually. I could be missing something, I haven’t read Joyce, but all the best novels I’m familiar with—whether it’s something like the Great Gatsby or Dune—don’t seem to do this.
Are we talking about the same thing? I am not talking about meaningful allusions and indirect references, or borrowing from myth and exotic cultures, or re-tellings of the same story for a different effect. I am talking about this kind of blunt, literal, fourth-wall-breaking namedropping of things that have no business being in your story.
Let me give examples of what I do and do not find problematic. For instance, HPMoR’s references to Tolkien are fine. They make sense. What is really being mentioned are the works of Tolkien, we’re not asked to believe that Legolas was part of magical Britain’s history. Of course the works of Tolkien would exist in HPMoR’s reality, and Muggleborn children could cause Dumbledore to be familiar with them. I loved that bit where Dumbledore speaks about all the copies of LotR he’d been gifted, and part of the reason I loved it was how much sense it made in retrospect.
On the other hand, we have Mornelithe Falconsbane—a fantasy character—mentioned next to Hitler as an important historical figure. This is a pointless, throwaway insert in its purest form, an author being ‘clever’. It exists only for the sake of itself, it adds nothing to the story—take it out and nothing is missing, it’s never mentioned again nor did it affect anything. All it does is break the fourth wall.
Seems to me that it’s a lose-lose thing to do. To those who aren’t familiar with the Valdemar books, it means nothing, so it’s useless. To those who are, it’s immersion-breaking. Even in the depths of my happy death spiral back when I first discovered HPMoR and blazed through it in near-pure joy, I found that stuff jarring.
Could be. I’m not that into anime, really, but I admit I haven’t read the books you listed—though I like to read, my respect for “literary canon” has been dead since high school, so my knowledge of it is patchy—so I’ll concede the possibility.
But the best books I am familiar with tend to be a great deal more subtle about it. Of the top of my head, I don’t remember that stuff in Crime and Punishment, or Lord of the Rings, or Solaris, or Pharaoh, or the Great Gatsby, or The Trilogy… and of course I’m not talking about allusions, meaningful hints and figure-it-out references, I’m talking about peppering your work with literal namedropping, of the kind that breaks the fourth wall and only seems to be there for the sake of itself.
And unfortunately, in a serial you can’t go back and change these things if you realize that you needed to foreshadow them a few chapters back.
I don’t think that’s how Eliezer treats it. The reference to the centaur forecasting that giving Petunia the beauty portion will end the world, that’s in the first chapter wasn’t there at the start but was added later.
I can appreciate the need to do this, but at the same time it makes me wonder if my memory of previous chapters accurately reflects their actual content. I rely largely on the podcast for my review, so I am only as updated as it is.
I feel bad for whoever voices QQ in the hpmor podcast. Chapter 108 is going to be a lot of exposition. Much of it should have been cut and/or moved to the narrator.
Some discussion has popped up on /r/hpmor about the an apparent decline in the quality of HPMoR’s recent chapters. Now, I personally don’t think there’s been any drop in terms of quality, but the commenters there make some compelling arguments. In particular, I feel that /u/alexanderwales articulates those arguments nicely:
Any thoughts on this?
Yeah. Another problem is that the last few chapters of HPMOR have been kinda “wobbly”, like the last chapters of Ra. Oh we’re saved, oh no we’re doomed again, etc.
It seems to me that many people expect HPMOR to be better than it actually is. To me, the fic has always felt like it’s promising slightly more than it can deliver, though it’s still very enjoyable to read. The characters and their changing points of view are wonderfully realized, e.g. Dumbledore is built up as someone who does amazing clever stuff offscreen. But the actual plotlines of the fic are, and always were, a bit weaker than what the characters suggest. The riff on Ender’s Game, the improbable escapes in Azkaban, the whole SPHEW thing (seriously?), and now the mirror.
I propose that we enjoy the fic for what it does well, and stop demanding so much in terms of plot. If you want a really good plot, the obvious solution is to make one up yourself :-)
While I agree with the sentiment expressed here, I think that might be easier said than done. After all, it’s easy to criticize a dish, much harder to make a better one.
I disagree that the writing has deteriorated.
People complain a lot about the lack of foreshadowing of the mirror and the “Riddle can’t kill Riddle” curse. But I don’t think the lack of foreshadowing matters, because both of these things are minor details in the overall story line. Let’s start with the “Riddle can’t kill Riddle” curse. Voldemort wasn’t just not killing Harry because of this curse. After all now that the curse is lifted he still isn’t killing Harry. The curse is entirely unneeded to explain his earlier before, or his current behavior. Nor was the curse needed to resolve the current plot. Voldemort was in complete control of the situation all along.
So there’s no deus ex machina. It’s a sudden unexpected development, yes, but one that doesn’t really affect the story. It’s purpose was to drive home how utterly defeated Harry is. How he is now completely at the mercy of Voldemort, having no clever tricks or last minute saves. Also it gave us a nice cliffhanger. But you can take out the final lines from 111 and the first few lines from 112 and the story continues exactly as it does now.
The same with the mirror scene were Dumbledore gets defeated. Take it out, have Dumbledore never show up,and the story still continues exactly the same as it does now. Dumbledore is a side character. He needed to be got rid of, so neither Harry nor the reader would expect or hope for Dumbledore to show up at the last minute and save the day, but ultimate he’s not important to the story. And Voldie getting rid of Dumbledore with relativele ease is entirely expected anyway. He is established as being much stronger.
Anyway, bottomline: I really like the story so far. Elizier is doing a terrific job of driving home just how utterly screwed Harry is. How completely outplayed and outgunned he is.
I’m really looking forward to the resolution. I have no idea what it is going to be, but I fully expect it to be glorious. I do know it won’t be Harry casting “Problemsolvius” or someone showing up casting “Savethedayius”. I know this because Elizier went to great length to crush that expectation at every possible avenue.
Of course, my disappointment if I am mistaken and the final solution does some completely unexpected deus ex machina, shall be big indeed.
And for the record: My prediction is still that Voldemort shall not be dead by the end of the story. I give that 80%. Up to a few chapters ago my theory was that Voldemort wanted to team up with Harry to permanently get rid of death, but that seems increasingly less likely.
It’s not so much the lack of foreshadowing that bothers me with Dumbledore, but how stupid Dumbledore seems in that chapter.
First, he didn’t even wonder if Quirrel wasn’t possessed/imperiused by Voldemort, even after the Hogwarts security system identified the killer of Hermione to be Quirrel ?
Second, he actually voice that he was stupid, what does he gain in doing so ?
Third, how could he think he can defeat Voldemort with the “frozen time” spell when Voldemort is aware of that spell ? Voldemort has a horcrux network, he can just kill himself. The only hope would have been to use the “frozen time” by surprise.
And finally, he faces Voldemort without even bringing Fawkes with him ? Whyyyy ? If he had Fawkes, he would largely have had the time to teleport Harry to safety while Harry was saying his heroic “I was stupid don’t save me”.
The way Dumbledore acts in this chapter and the ease with which he’s defeated feels very artificial. Especially considering Dumbledore, who will not as smart as Quirrelmort, is still supposed to be near his level.
There was a healthy portion of HPMoR’s readerbase that wasn’t convinced that Quirrell was Voldemort, and unlike the readers, Dumbledore hasn’t read canon. I don’t really think you can take this as evidence for Dumbledore’s stupidity.
Nothing, but from his perspective, it’s not like he would lose anything, either, and he was frustrated. People often vent aloud when frustrated.
I imagine the Mirror would have trapped his soul in it if he had killed himself, or prevent the Horcrux network from coming into play by other means; else Quirrell would definitely have thought of it, and likely so would have Dumbledore.
According to Quirrell, the process cannot be stopped after being set in motion, and this probably also applies to removing people from the process (at least without exotic artifacts like the True Cloak of Invisibility). It’s uncertain, then, whether bringing Fawkes would have accomplished anything, and on top of that, we don’t actually know where Fawkes is; it’s very possible that he’s off somewhere else accomplishing some vitally important task Dumbledore set for him.
On the lack of foreshadowing for the “Riddle can’t kill Riddle” curse, there was enough stuff around for me to generate a similar hypothesis last year (admittedly with prompting).
There’s technically six more hours of story time for a time-turned Dumbledore to show up, before going on to get trapped. He does mention that he’s in two places during the mirror scene.
Dumbledore has previously stated that trying to fake situations goes terribly wrong, so there could be some interesting play with that concept and him being trapped by the mirror.
Mirro!Dumbledore appears to not be time-turned: 110 was edited so that Dumbledore says:
That doesn’t sound like he just spun back—it sounds like there might be more than one Dumbledore running around.
I agree with you about the writing but I have a nearly opposite prediction.
I notice that in all the Harry talking to himself or reflecting quietly chapters he allways thinks something along the lines of “there seems to be almost no limit in what you could accomplish with magic if you really understood it”. Several times his mind circles around the becomus godus spell and considers some avenue and decides it wouldn’t work for some reason or another. In each case after thinking that his mind goes off on some other tangent.
So my prediction is that Harry has his situation get worse and worse until he can do nothing but think about how to et out of it. And while thinking and being forced not to divert his mind to other matters he will review clues that were allready available to us (had we been paying closer attention) and by reviewing the right facts in the right order he will deduce something about how magic works. That deduction will allow him to cast some absurdly powerful spell that solves his problems.
I remark that
it has recently been pointed out that Harry’s Patronus v2.0 is powered by his life as well as his magic and that this (at least according to Voldemort, so obviously it’s true) makes it more powerful than it could have been if powered by just his magic
even the small fraction of his life he was able to give up on the spur of the moment was enough to restore Hermione’s life and magic, which even Voldemort was unable to do on his own
in canon, central to Harry’s ultimate victory is his willingness to die
and suggest that if your prediction is correct, what powers his absurdly powerful spell may be the sacrifice of the whole of his life and magic.
(Hmm. The power of a potion in HPMOR is determined by what went into making its ingredients, a curious and probably important discovery that hasn’t been applied yet for anything other than winning playfights. What went into making Harry was, among other things, the power and ingenuity—and in some sense even the life—of Lord Voldemort. Maaaaybe.)
What if he didn’t just sacrifice the whole of his magic, but the whole of entire magic?
Wow, a “get rid of magic and turn everyone into a muggle” spell would be actually worse than death to Voldemort. Just image having Voldemort living out his last few decades of life as a Muggle.
This makes me think about death being the worst fear of Voldemort. I guess being turned into a muggle and dying decades after that, would be much more fearful to him.
You may be on to something. Merlin created his Interdict with exactly that sacrifice.
One further remark on that last paragraph. “A potion spends that which is invested in the creation of its ingredients”. What counts as creation? Ultimately, pretty much everything on earth is made of the remnants of supernovas...
I think that must be the role of the stirring and heating requirements: to control which aspects of the thing’s creation, and how much of them, are infused into the potion. There may well be a way to call forth solar fusion from common iron. But of course we know that no one has ever done it.
I would interpret “you could take the following things out and it would make no difference” as criticism of the writing, not as praise. If a piece of information adds complexity without adding proportional value, it shouldn’t be in there to begin with.
(this is a comment on your critique rather than on the quality of recent HPMOR chapters, which I am still undecided on)
Looking back, I think I could have written that more clearly.
People were complaining about the mirror, and the Riddle-curse, being deus ex machina. I’m saying they weren’t, because they weren’t moving the plot forward. Take them out and the overall plot remains the same. That doesn’t mean those scenes served no purpose in the story.
The Riddle-curse scene in particular I thought was very good. When I was reading chapter 111, when Harry got his wand back, I got all excited. I kept thinking perhaps Harry had a chance after all. I did of course wonder why Voldemort let him keep his wand, and figured there might be a deeper reason, but seeing Harry with a wand still makes you hope. And then suddenly Harry is given an opening … and it turns out to have been all Voldemort’s plan all along, and Harry is even more thoroughly beaten then he already was before.
That serves an important function in the story. It drives home how bad Harry’s situation is. It drives home that there will be no easy outs, that Voldemort really is very, very smart, and isn’t going to make any easily exploitable errors. Basically, the scene is setting the background, and building up suspense, for the final confrontation.
It’s perfectly fine for a scene like that to have no foreshadowing. It doesn’t need foreshadowing. Nobody sane will think: “Harry totally would have won without that plot twist!”.
I’d also like to point out that unexpected things were kind of expected to happen. We already knew Voldemort was playing a vastly more complex game than just “I want to grab power” or “I want to kill Harry”. And we also already knew that there were unknown traps guardian the stone.
So, maybe Harry uses partial transfiguration to kill all the Death Eaters. This still does nothing to solve the Voldemort Problem. And so it seems most likely that the Voldemort Problem is not the actual problem of the fic. As others have linked, Voldemort proposed a long time ago that he would duel Harry and “lose,” and then Harry is established as the eventual philosopher-king of Britain. Maybe, decades from now, Harry manages to stop Voldemort; but probably not.
The most salient alternative actual problem is the Death Problem. It seems like if Harry manages to solve the Death Problem then the Voldemort Problem may get a lot less important (though whether it does probably depends on exactly how he solves the Death Problem).
“Anyway, bottomline: I really like the story so far”
I’m with you. Chapter 108 is my favorite in the story, explains so much.
This… is actually a really good point. As I stated in my original comment, I am also a member of the group that doesn’t think the quality of HPMoR has been decreasing, but until I read your comment, it was just a vague gut feeling of “What are you talking about? It’s still good!” that I couldn’t quite put into words (at least, not in a way that made sense). Thank you for articulating that so well!
I felt the same way on that one. Having the plot turn on a previously untold super spell to an existing object that turns out to be extra super duper itself is not that satisfying. The fewer rabbits that get pulled out of a hat for the denouement, the better. (I felt that way about canon and the Deathly Hallows too.)
But the story isn’t done yet, so maybe in the end this point won’t seem so pivotal, or it will turn out to have a different meaning than it seems now. Did Dumbledore really just completely get his ass handed to him? I think a number of people have remarked that he seemed a bit off in character, and canon has him arranging his own death to gain some advantage. It aint over til it’s over.
I think some of the negative reaction is just people feeling shell shocked by the apparent complete disaster. Which could actually be an intended and potentially powerful dramatic effect.
I don’t think that EY wrote this just for entertainment. I expect an ideological point. It may be MIRI EY showing us the disaster of being at the mercy of the uber powerful alien intelligence, or it may be Mr. Glowey Person giving us the positive vision of what life could be. I’ve been hoping for the latter, but I’m not sure we’re going to get it.
I felt this way some, particularly about Ch. 108 which was a lot of “tell me instead of show me” exposition, but EY has a lot of promised explanation to get out of the way and I kindof gave it a pass on that basis.
It was unsatisfying that the magical details of the interactions between Quirrell and Dumbledore seemed to come out of nowhere, but I think we need to keep something in mind: we are following this story from Harry’s viewpoint. You could fill a restricted section of the Hogwarts library and then some with magical things that Harry doesn’t know. It might be unsatisfying to the reader to have these two powerful wizards planning around eldritch magics we’ve never heard of, but that’s how the reality of it would be.
The last few have been a rollercoaster (not in quality, but as an experience), and I’m kindof waiting to see how it all goes to make any judgments. Certainly my expectations have been set high by this series, and I do have a little worry that they might be too high. I don’t know if I can think of an ending that would satisfy me, but I’m hoping that EY has.
I should add the disclaimer that by nature I’m an apologist for pretty much any fiction I read, and HPMOR is quite haloed for me on top of that.
That said, I thought that having several chapters of exposition where Harry gets to ask all the questions he’s been wondering, followed by a whirlwind of utter bewilderment as Quirrell pulls a warren from the woodwork, was a successful demonstration of the challenge of “The enemy is smart.”
Yeah, I thought that too. Makes it a bit harder to maintain illusion and forget that this is all really happening on the author’s say-so.
Also I disagree about not being able to go back and improve, if there happens to be room for it. Who gives a damn if it’s a serial. There will be new readers in the future.
Fourth wall stuff always annoyed me, not just in recent chapters, all the pointless inserts and references, all the winking at the audience. “Akemi Homura and her lost love”, really? For some reason lots of readers seem to love this stuff, however, so I don’t know what to say. Except that the best works of literature tend to not do that.
Your last statement is not correct. Many of the works of literature regarded as the best do that very heavily. Dante does that like crazy in the inferno. Joyce does it non stop in Ulyesses. Most of the works of Vladimir Nabokov do it very heavily. As does Pynchon. It may be that you just don’t notice it in literature and do notice it here because you are more familiar the the animie canon than the literary canon.
And then there’s all the callbacks to those. Here’s a few lines of Keats I read recently:
For those keeping score at home, that’s Keats alluding to Dante alluding to a famous and semi-legendary Italian love affair. And the Bible, of course. Earlier in the same poem, Keats throws in a lot of references to Greek myth too.
Of course Keats isn’t alluding to contemporary literature, but to works that have lasted long enough that one can be confident their popularity isn’t limited to a particular moment.
In that instance, yes; but these are the Romantics we’re talking about. They referenced each other all the time.
Pop culture references are not a new thing. They just stop being pop after a certain amount of time passes.
Your last name alludes to another excellent example … so much so that I had to check that you didn’t just create it for the sake of this comment!
I know very little anime, actually. I could be missing something, I haven’t read Joyce, but all the best novels I’m familiar with—whether it’s something like the Great Gatsby or Dune—don’t seem to do this.
Are we talking about the same thing? I am not talking about meaningful allusions and indirect references, or borrowing from myth and exotic cultures, or re-tellings of the same story for a different effect. I am talking about this kind of blunt, literal, fourth-wall-breaking namedropping of things that have no business being in your story.
Let me give examples of what I do and do not find problematic. For instance, HPMoR’s references to Tolkien are fine. They make sense. What is really being mentioned are the works of Tolkien, we’re not asked to believe that Legolas was part of magical Britain’s history. Of course the works of Tolkien would exist in HPMoR’s reality, and Muggleborn children could cause Dumbledore to be familiar with them. I loved that bit where Dumbledore speaks about all the copies of LotR he’d been gifted, and part of the reason I loved it was how much sense it made in retrospect.
On the other hand, we have Mornelithe Falconsbane—a fantasy character—mentioned next to Hitler as an important historical figure. This is a pointless, throwaway insert in its purest form, an author being ‘clever’. It exists only for the sake of itself, it adds nothing to the story—take it out and nothing is missing, it’s never mentioned again nor did it affect anything. All it does is break the fourth wall.
Seems to me that it’s a lose-lose thing to do. To those who aren’t familiar with the Valdemar books, it means nothing, so it’s useless. To those who are, it’s immersion-breaking. Even in the depths of my happy death spiral back when I first discovered HPMoR and blazed through it in near-pure joy, I found that stuff jarring.
Could be. I’m not that into anime, really, but I admit I haven’t read the books you listed—though I like to read, my respect for “literary canon” has been dead since high school, so my knowledge of it is patchy—so I’ll concede the possibility.
But the best books I am familiar with tend to be a great deal more subtle about it. Of the top of my head, I don’t remember that stuff in Crime and Punishment, or Lord of the Rings, or Solaris, or Pharaoh, or the Great Gatsby, or The Trilogy… and of course I’m not talking about allusions, meaningful hints and figure-it-out references, I’m talking about peppering your work with literal namedropping, of the kind that breaks the fourth wall and only seems to be there for the sake of itself.
Immersion matters.
Your argument would be more convincing if you had managed to actual provide some good literature, as opposed to pompous garbage, as examples.
I don’t think that’s how Eliezer treats it. The reference to the centaur forecasting that giving Petunia the beauty portion will end the world, that’s in the first chapter wasn’t there at the start but was added later.
It was there on day 1.
Bad example, then, but you have changed things. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
I can appreciate the need to do this, but at the same time it makes me wonder if my memory of previous chapters accurately reflects their actual content. I rely largely on the podcast for my review, so I am only as updated as it is.
If I remember right the podcast didn’t contain the reference to the centaur in chapter 1.
That’s in there.
I feel bad for whoever voices QQ in the hpmor podcast. Chapter 108 is going to be a lot of exposition. Much of it should have been cut and/or moved to the narrator.
The creator, Eneasz Brodski, does the narration as well as the voices of Harry and Quirrell.