So, what you’re saying is that in any story, the female characters cannot die or otherwise its sexist?
No. But what has been noticed here is an aggregate pattern: female characters who die as part of an attempt by a villain to impact a male character. That’s the classic fridging and that’s exactly what happened here.
And it also really doesn’t help that Hermione was a character who was trying to be a heroine and her death saved no one at all.
But its not an aggregate pattern in EY’s work specifically. Harry has to be the main character, its in the title of the story. If any main character is going to die, its going to be a sidekick.
Part of the reason for fridging female characters in general could be that they don’t play an active role in the story, but in HPMOR Hermione was playing a major part.
A second reason is that people care more about women than about men—that’s why reports of disasters are often phrased “X died, including Y women and children”. But this is sexist against men.
In short, if Hermione had served no purpose except to generate emotions in Harry, then I could see your point. But she played a major role, if anything being more independent than in canon.
But its not an aggregate pattern in EY’s work specifically.
It isn’t an aggregate pattern in almost anyone’s work: it happens in individual cases and adds up. The problem is made all the more severe because it is very clear that Eliezer is aware of all these tropes and issues.
If any main character is going to die, its going to be a sidekick.
Sure. What about Neville or Draco?
Part of the reason for fridging female characters in general could be that they don’t play an active role in the story, but in HPMOR Hermione was playing a major part.
Sometimes. Look at the trope page- there’s a large amount of variation on how much of a role they’ve played prior to fridging. Moreover, Hermione while she did play a role, she also had the least power boost of anyone in the story.
A second reason is that people care more about women than about men—that’s why reports of disasters are often phrased “X died, including Y women and children”. But this is sexist against men.
Sure, and obvious way of helping get rid of this sexism is not to reinforce it in stories by using gender as a quick emotional tug.
That’s not to say that there were not legitimate reasons to have Hermione be killed, and from a “is this a reasonable thing for Voldemort to try to do” perspective it makes some sense (although it does indicate that he may not understand the importance of martyrs for how people think). But there were many other options, and again, her death wasn’t even heroic, she saved zero lives and wasn’t even in a position to save lives. When she’s explicitly trying to be a heroine out of feminist ideals, and she then gets quickly killed, what does that look like?
I don’t have a link offhand, but I recall EY stating his reasons for not boosting Hermione:
She doesn’t need the boost to compete with the other characters, including Harry
If she was boosted, the story would be “Hermione Granger Discovers the Methods of Rationality and Becomes Omnipotent” (i.e. a thoroughly power-boosted Hermione would break the story)
A boosted Hermione would plausibly be smarter then EY
Sure. Those are all reasons to not boost the character as much as the other characters get boosted. But that doesn’t mean any boost is a problem. It isn’t difficult to imagine what a slightly boosted Hermione might do. I gave an example elsewhere in this subthread. But one can easily imagine other similar examples.
That’s a good point. But I imagine a more powerful Hermione would not only have a good memory she’d be able to use it. If Harry makes an offhand comment like
“Most spells are from garbled Latin” she should be able to say something like:
“Around 80% of First Year spells fit that description. I noticed it when I was looking at my textbooks and based on linguistic analysis I suspect that the direction is actually reversed: Latin was at some point heavily influenced by spellwords. Here’s my data and the linguistic evidence.”
But that doesn’t happen even to that extent. We don’t get her making any discoveries at all. Instead the power boosted Harry makes fundamental discoveries about potions and transfiguration and about casting the Patronus. Why can’t Hermione make any on her own?
She’s 11⁄12. Harry Potter is Tom Riddle who is 65. This is why Harry acts like an adult, including making discoveries, while Hermione acts like a very intelligent child.
Interesting. I thought it was a polite discussion of disagreements about the issues at hand. I have seen substantial mind-killing on this sort of topic here before, but it doesn’t seem present in this conversation to me.
That argument as explanation doesn’t really work: first of all, many of Harry’s discoveries are low-hanging fruit, and it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of those. Second of all, Harry only has some aspects of TR. He grew up a (relatively normal) child without any of the procedural or other memories of TR. As far as we can tell, the primary way that Harry is akin to TR is close to the same starting minds and being raised in different ways.
Moreover, smart children make discoveries even in our world where there are a lot of scientists. Here a 16 year old discovered a novel method of quickly killing ticks. 11 and 12 year olds have discovered supernovas, and now a 10 year old has now granted that’s observational, but that’s still the same pattern. Young children have also published math papers.
Finally, this doesn’t help because the concern is at a meta-level. Dumbledore, Harry, Voldemort, and Draco all got massive resource and power boosts. But not Hermione.
I don’t really know how the whole ‘HP is TR’ thing works. I mean, on the one hand no 11 year, however gifted, old works out a way to run hypercomputing algorithms on a closed timelike curve provided by time-turners. On the other, Harry presumably didn’t start talking with an adult vocabulary when he was an infant, so… I dunno.
And sure, I can buy 11 or 12 year olds making observational discoveries. But for an actual, highly intellegent 11 year old who isn’t sharing her mind with fragments of an adult’s psyche, the correct tactic is to learn as much as possible, and start doing experiments when you’re older, which was Hermione’s plan.
Finally, this doesn’t help because the concern is at a meta-level. Dumbledore, Harry, Voldemort, and Draco all got massive resource and power boosts. But not Hermione.
Certain of the female charicters did gain a power boost, while Baba Yaga is a new charicter and nicholas flamel is actually female.
Moreover, the way Dumbledore and Voldemort have changed is simply that they are acting like intelligent adults, rather than characters in a children’s story. By comparison, Hermione is acting like a child rather than a child in a children’s story, which… isn’t that much of a change.
The tricks with the Basilisk and the Proddian[sic] charm seem like they could have been adaptable to HPMoR, but at the same time, canon Hermione was older when she accomplished those things.
Even in canon, discoveries in potions were plainly not her thing, at least; see Half Blood Prince.
The tricks with the Basilisk and the Proddian[sic] charm seem like they could have been adaptable to HPMoR, but at the same time, canon Hermione was older when she accomplished those things.
The Protean charm on the galleons occurs in book 5. I’m not sure what you mean about the basilisk. Possible I’m not remembering.
canon Hermione was older when she accomplished those things.
Sure. But again, reasonable power boost. Note how in the above I gave an example of an interesting discovery she could make that wouldn’t even compete with Harry in what area she was focusing on.
I don’t think this line of analysis works for determining that a work is sexist. At least, it’s not sexist in a problematic way (i.e. we need to get rid of it, or at least be aware of the sexism when reading it), it’s sexist because the world we live in is sexist and it’s practically impossible to write anythong non-sexist.
Does HPMOR do anything to advance the condition of women? No, but neither does it do anything to adress racism, ableism, homophobia and plenty of other societal issues. That’s not why the book was written. On the other hand, it has two strong female characters that have agency, and no female “characters” that are boobs on a stick, or a reward for the hero, or anything of the sort. Remember that EY was working from canon and could not exactly add plenty of important characters unheard of in the book. He already promoted Daphne, Tracey and (to a lesser extent) Susan compared to their role in the series (although I guess that’s partially to make up for the lack of Ginny or Luna in Harry’s first year). If your strongest argument to say a work is sexist in a problematic way is “a secondary female character dies without accomplishing anything”, then I feel that’s too strong a criteria. Hell, even in “Blue is the warmest color” (the book, not the movie, which was admittedly quite sexist in its direction), the main character dies a stupid death without ever having accomplished anything, and you’d be hard pressed to find that book sexist. In Worm, an important secondary female character is killed in an anti-climatic way by a villain we had almost never heard of until the chapter where he kills her. Is Worm sexist? I don’t think so.
I don’t think this line of analysis works for determining that a work is sexist.
Well, I’m not sure what it means for a work as a whole to be sexist. So in so far as that doesn’t seem well-defined I agree.
At least, it’s not sexist in a problematic way (i.e. we need to get rid of it, or at least be aware of the sexism when reading it),
Hang on. Full stop. The idea that any form of sexism in a work means we need to get rid of that work is something I strongly, and fundamentally disagree with. No amount of sexism is a reason for censorship.
it’s sexist because the world we live in is sexist and it’s practically impossible to write anythong non-sexist.
Possibly, but there are degrees of sexism, and there are issues when reinforcing certain sexist norms. I’d point out that for example, Brandon Sanderson Mistborn series is an excellent example of a series without any sexism issues in how the author approach things. And that’s far from the only example.
No, but neither does it do anything to adress racism, ableism, homophobia and plenty of other societal issues.
Actually, racism is definitely addressed in the context of Muggles v. wizards, and homophobia has been addressed- see the point where one of the young wizards suspects that claims about homophobia in the Muggle community are an anti-Muggle slur. That was meant as a humorous aside but it was a clear dig at certain attitudes.
I agree that Eliezer did a wonderful job of promoting Daphne and Tracey. If he hadn’t the situation would look very different.
But the argument isn’t just that Hermione died without accomplishing anything, but rather that it was in a context where the male wizards (Harry and Voldemort) both received substantial power boosts, where Hermione was trying to be a heroine for feminist reasons, where people had already complained about feminist issues being treated poorly in HPMoR, and then having Hermione killed without accomplishing anything specifically because the villain desired it to have an impact on the primary male protagonist. It is that totally of issues that made this so bad.
Hang on. Full stop. The idea that any form of sexism in a work means we need to get rid of that work is something I strongly, and fundamentally disagree with. No amount of sexism is a reason for censorship.
But you claim that any “sexism” (however you define it) in the work is bad.
I assign a very high probability that you just downvoted the comment you are replying to. This is generally often indicative of not being interested in a productive conversation. Did you do so?
This is both an incredible strawman and not at all relevant to what’s even being discussed. The article you linked to discusses that average human male is strength is higher than average human female strength. That’s accurate and utterly irrelevant to the characterizations in question.
Heck, I’ll even spot you that average male IQ is higher than average female IQ and that male standard deviation is higher than female standard deviation of IQ so there are more very intelligent males than there are very intelligent females.
Still wouldn’t matter.
We are talking about A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn’t get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously.
If you think your comment is at all relevant to any of these issues, I’d be very much interested in hearing an explanation.
My observation that a significant amount of mind-killing has and is occurring in this thread has not changed, and in fact has been reinforced. In particular, I see that there’s a great deal of back-and-forth happening, but very few unusually pertinent or clear-headed arguments have been put forth, by either side. I haven’t seen a single argument which I would describe as “well-articulated”; it’s all just anecdotal data and branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching point. (Example: Someone brought up Hermione’s canonical proficiency with the Protean Charm, which realistically speaking has nothing to do with feminism.) Moreover, based on the amount of back-and-forth I’ve seen here I assign an extremely low probability to anyone’s mind getting changed based on something said in this thread. That last point is a particularly important warning flag that some sort of mind-killing is going on, because when no updates are occurring, almost certainly some subtext is involved that’s either irrelevant to or actively interferes with epistemic rationality. Further evidence in favor of mind-killing is supplied by the fact that this discussion centers around feminism, which is widely known to be a hotly controversial topic.
The reason I chose to reply to this comment in particular is because it exemplifies some of the mind-killing that I’m talking about (and most emphatically not because I’m trying to single you out; plenty of other commenters on this thread exhibit significant mind-killing—it’s just that yours was the most visible example that I could see):
A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn’t get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously
Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, “What does this have to do with feminism?” If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it’s particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione’s death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn’t about that, either, I would think of something else. “Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times. So immediately we see that this quote’s relation to feminism is tenuous at best. So why bring it up? Does the fact that Hermione is a female character have more immediate relevancy to her death than the fact that, say, she was inadequately prepared? Is her gender somehow more pertinent to the fact that she didn’t get an intelligence boost than the fact that she was already extremely intelligent canonically? Why connect it to gender, of all things? The relationship is minimal and forced at best!Why??
Well, from my perspective, the answer to that question is not because it’s actually relevant in some deep, meaningful sense. Rather, it’s because, for better or for worse, this is a discussion about feminism, a vastly polarizing and controversial topic. And when discussing vastly polarizing or controversial topics, arguments become soldiers. People search and scrabble for any piece of information they can think of that has any connection to the topic at all, no matter how weak. Hermione’s lack of intelligence boost is taken and forcibly connected to her gender, as opposed to a myriad of other things that are much more relevant. Or, to use an earlier example: her skill with Protean Charms in canon is brought up as evidence of how Rowling treats her genders more fairly than does Eliezer. But when you look at it with a neutral eye...
Protean Charms? Character intelligence boosts? Seriously? Is that the best you can come up with?
Strongly disagree- to the point where I’d point out that I think you are being uncharitable to pretty much everyone here (both those arguing that there is a problem from a feminist standpoint and those who are arguing there isn’t one). In particular, the comment about the Protean charm was made by CAE_jones here in a comment that was using it as an example of what canon Hermione could do at the same time pointing out limitations of canon Hermione and pointing out that she was the time much older.
Power boosts matter in this context because it is one of the fundamental changes in the fanfic is to give people power boosts. That really should be self-explanatory and no one (either for or against there being issues here) seems to disagree with that. So the nature and plausibility of the power boosts matters, and it is a reasonable response to concerns about Hermione not getting a boost to outline why giving her a boost would be difficulty.
As for the paragraph in question that you think isn’t connected at all to gender, there may be serious illusions of transparency going on here, so let me spell out the concern explicitly: Hermione is the only major female character in the work (with Minerva the next) - the next two down are Tracy and Daphne who make for hilarious comic relief. That’s the context where what happens matters.
I’m curious incidentally, if you read the initial link to fridging to see why the death matters.
branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching poin
Branching, multifacted conversations happen all the time. Less Wrong and (internet conversations in general) are not exactly known for focusing on narrow issues. I don’t see this as evidence of mindkilling but rather what would be perfectly normal conversation on any side topic that in this case because of the type of topic one sees as evidence of mindkilling.
I do find it curious though that you think that everyone here is mindkilled, whereas, one of the people here who you think is mindkilled doesn’t think pretty much anyone here is except one of the very late stragglers. This makes me wonder if we’ve actually adopted the notion of politics-is-the-mindkiller too strongly here, where even polite conversations that don’t necessarily lead to updating are automatically labeled mindkilling if they involve politics. We may have a problem of confirmation bias for mindkilling, which if true is sort of funny and sad.
“Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times.
You seem to have this idea that if an idea is most immediately relevent to topics other than X, it cannot also be sufficiently relevant towards X to count in a discussion of X.
You seem to have this idea that if an idea is most immediately relevent to topics other than X, it cannot also be sufficiently relevant towards X to count in a discussion of X.
I don’t know where you are getting this from.
I don’t see where you’re getting this reading from. My full quote is here:
Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, “What does this have to do with feminism?” If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it’s particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione’s death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn’t about that, either, I would think of something else. “Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times.
The point here is not that an idea should be disqualified if it is more immediately relevant to topics other than the intended one; it is that it should be disqualified if, when shown to someone out of context, the correct context is not readily deducible from the quote itself—or, in other words, if multiple different contexts leap to mind upon seeing it, none of which are the intended context. That’s what it means for something to be a “stretch”. I’m not seeing why you interpreted my words in the rather strange way you did.
To be honest I’m not sure whether its relevant since I don’t understand why you consider that aspect of MoR problematic. To help me understand could you answer the following questions:
1) Would you consider the relative power levels of the characters in MoR problematic on their own (without reference to canon).
2) Would you consider an independent work that realistically portrayed the relative abilities of men and women problematic?
3) What if it realistically dealt with the consequences of those differences, including that their lesser strength makes it easier for villains to stuff women into fridges.
You really do seem to like downvoting people you disagree with. Interesting. How mindkilled are you? And you didn’t provide the question explanation.
I’m not sure what you mean by question 1. But assuming you mean, something like “If HPMoR existed in in a world without Harry Potter, would the gender issues be problematic” the answer would be yes, because all the other important male characters are substantially more resourceful than the female ones, and because of Hermione’s death and the events surrounding it.
Question 2- No. Please don’t be stupid.
Question 3- Are you seriously trying to implicitly argue that the literal on average physical difference between human males and human females is at all relevant here? Because it seems like you are trying to make such a connection. That’s both silly (for reasons I already explained to you), and stupid for other reasons: villains in stories have things like wands and guns. They don’t need to physically stuff someone into a fridge while they are fighting back. If you think I’m misinterpreting your third point, I’d be interested in hearing an explanation, but frankly, I assign a very high probability that you are hopelessly mindkilled, which is unfortunate because everyone else in this conversation was having a nice, interesting conversation. I thought that skeptical_lurker brought up some very good points as did Nancy.
That is a delightfully awful question. The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there’s no hope of an accurate answer if you include the presupposition that the person being asked is actually somewhat mindkilled.
I’m not sure. At least twice before I’ve gotten that question or a variant of it thrown to me and it helped strongly reevaluate my attitude on the issue in question. Possibly I’m generalizing from one example too much?
Actually, I was probably being too literal about the question because the logical paradox struck me as funny.
I will blame an ambiguity which I think is built into English. “How mindkilled are you?” can imply that you’re mindkilled in some sense which is stable over a period of time, or it can imply that you were mindkilled recently but have a capacity to come out of it.
Are you seriously trying to implicitly argue that the literal on average physical difference between human males and human females is at all relevant here?
Yes, it certainly is for how this trope applies in the real world, as well as the resulting evolved associated feelings in humans. And since you are making your case with reference to the distribution of tropes in other literature, I thought this was very relevant.
That’s both silly (for reasons I already explained to you)
Really, where?
I thought that skeptical_lurker brought up some very good points as did Nancy.
What you mean is that they disagreed with you without questioning your basic premise.
As I said, Draco tries to kill Hermione wouldn’t work, because Hermione’s family don’t have the influence to send Draco to Akazaban, which starts the chain of events leading to the death. Neville isn’t as important a charicter as the other two.
Moreover, Hermione while she did play a role, she also had the least power boost of anyone in the story.
Ron and Hagrid have both been presented as imbeciles when they were heroes in canon.
Sure, and obvious way of helping get rid of this sexism is not to reinforce it in stories by using gender as a quick emotional tug.
What if its wired into us at the biological level because a tribe can repopulate after losing 90% of the men more than after losing 90% of the women?
As I said, Draco tries to kill Hermione wouldn’t work, because Hermione’s family don’t have the influence to send Draco to Akazaban, which starts the chain of events leading to the death. Neville isn’t as important a charicter as the other two.
Neville in many ways had more actual character development than Hermione. If anything, Neville’s death would have been far more tragic if he had died trying to be a hero in the sense of having an impact on Harry. Neville is only at all heroic because of Harry. It would have been a far more emotional rebuke to Harry if Neville had tried trying to be a hero.
Ron and Hagrid have both been presented as imbeciles when they were heroes in canon.
Sure, but Ron was an idiot in canon also, and there are literally multiple subgenres of fanfic to get Ron out of the picture because so many people dislike his character. See for example Ron the Death Eater (again standard TVTropes warning.) And Hagrid being an imbecile is simply taking the issues with the character already and putting them into a serious context where actually harming children might actually have a real response. This is for example parts of Wait, What? (which in its own way is a rationalist fic).
What if its wired into us at the biological level because a tribe can repopulate after losing 90% of the men more than after losing 90% of the women?
That seems very strongly like a just-so story. I’d be very interested in seeing some sort of evidence backing up that this sort of attitude is strongly cross cultural. There are other cross-cultural reasons this might happen but that would be the minimum level.
Note also that just because something is innate doesn’t mean it is a good thing: that’s most of the point of learning to deal with cognitive biases for example.
Sure, but Ron was an idiot in canon also …. And Hagrid being an imbecile is simply taking the issues with the character already and putting them into a serious context
My point is that Ron and Hagrid were not upgraded, and as such I see no overall pattern where the males are upgraded and females like Hermoine are not.
That seems very strongly like a just-so story. I’d be very interested in seeing some sort of evidence backing up that this sort of attitude is strongly cross cultural. There are other cross-cultural reasons this might happen but that would be the minimum level.
I’m neither an anthropologist nor an evolutionary psychologist, so I can’t say whether this is the case with high certainty. I’m also not saying its a good thing to have substantially higher empathy for females over males, but if biases such as this exist, then it does make fridging a little more understandable. Even if you consciously believes in gender egalitarianism, you’re still running on what is, from your POV, corrupted hardware.
My point is that Ron and Hagrid were not upgraded, and as such I see no overall pattern where the males are upgraded and females like Hermoine are not.
But neither became a major character, and both were stupid to start with, so it was much easier to just keep them stupid. If you prefer the following: every character who remains a major character in the story gets an upgrade with an exception of one: Hermione.
Ron, in canon, wasn’t much less bright than Harry: they were both fair-to-mediocre students who bumbled through adventures mostly on the strength of luck, chutzpah, Hermione, and the beneficence of older and more experienced characters. Ron being a non-viewpoint character, though, we didn’t have as clear a view on the motives behind his failings, and so they came off as less explicable. On the other hand, he did have that talent for chess where Harry didn’t, though we only really see it in the first book.
For that matter, Hagrid wasn’t portrayed as especially dim either; he wasn’t a particularly educated character, but when the script called for wisdom of an earthier kind than Dumbledore’s, he was often the one to give it. He just had a blind spot where dangerous animals were concerned, one that for mysterious plot reasons his higher-ups were happy to give him opportunities to indulge.
Well, Hermione is also the least in need of an upgrade. There are important literary reasons not to upgrade her, and insisting that the story must be exactly gender-balanced is a big constraint that limits what stories can be written.
Well, Hermione is also the least in need of an upgrade.
Sure. The problem there though is that everyone else in the original started at around a 1 or a 2 in some 1-10 scale of intelligence/education/rationality and she was at a 3. Then a lot of characters got bumped to 4 or 5 and she didn’t get bumped.
There’s no insistence in this case that things must be “exactly gender-balanced” but rather than less gender inequity would have been nice.
I would rather if she’d been more part of the last long chunk of the story. It’s not so much that her death had a major effect on Harry as that she was taken offstage.
No. But what has been noticed here is an aggregate pattern: female characters who die as part of an attempt by a villain to impact a male character. That’s the classic fridging and that’s exactly what happened here.
And it also really doesn’t help that Hermione was a character who was trying to be a heroine and her death saved no one at all.
But its not an aggregate pattern in EY’s work specifically. Harry has to be the main character, its in the title of the story. If any main character is going to die, its going to be a sidekick.
Part of the reason for fridging female characters in general could be that they don’t play an active role in the story, but in HPMOR Hermione was playing a major part.
A second reason is that people care more about women than about men—that’s why reports of disasters are often phrased “X died, including Y women and children”. But this is sexist against men.
In short, if Hermione had served no purpose except to generate emotions in Harry, then I could see your point. But she played a major role, if anything being more independent than in canon.
It isn’t an aggregate pattern in almost anyone’s work: it happens in individual cases and adds up. The problem is made all the more severe because it is very clear that Eliezer is aware of all these tropes and issues.
Sure. What about Neville or Draco?
Sometimes. Look at the trope page- there’s a large amount of variation on how much of a role they’ve played prior to fridging. Moreover, Hermione while she did play a role, she also had the least power boost of anyone in the story.
Sure, and obvious way of helping get rid of this sexism is not to reinforce it in stories by using gender as a quick emotional tug.
That’s not to say that there were not legitimate reasons to have Hermione be killed, and from a “is this a reasonable thing for Voldemort to try to do” perspective it makes some sense (although it does indicate that he may not understand the importance of martyrs for how people think). But there were many other options, and again, her death wasn’t even heroic, she saved zero lives and wasn’t even in a position to save lives. When she’s explicitly trying to be a heroine out of feminist ideals, and she then gets quickly killed, what does that look like?
Hermione was the smartest student in canon—what would a thoroughly power-boosted Hermione look like?
I don’t have a link offhand, but I recall EY stating his reasons for not boosting Hermione:
She doesn’t need the boost to compete with the other characters, including Harry
If she was boosted, the story would be “Hermione Granger Discovers the Methods of Rationality and Becomes Omnipotent” (i.e. a thoroughly power-boosted Hermione would break the story)
A boosted Hermione would plausibly be smarter then EY
Sure. Those are all reasons to not boost the character as much as the other characters get boosted. But that doesn’t mean any boost is a problem. It isn’t difficult to imagine what a slightly boosted Hermione might do. I gave an example elsewhere in this subthread. But one can easily imagine other similar examples.
That’s a good point. But I imagine a more powerful Hermione would not only have a good memory she’d be able to use it. If Harry makes an offhand comment like
“Most spells are from garbled Latin” she should be able to say something like:
“Around 80% of First Year spells fit that description. I noticed it when I was looking at my textbooks and based on linguistic analysis I suspect that the direction is actually reversed: Latin was at some point heavily influenced by spellwords. Here’s my data and the linguistic evidence.”
But that doesn’t happen even to that extent. We don’t get her making any discoveries at all. Instead the power boosted Harry makes fundamental discoveries about potions and transfiguration and about casting the Patronus. Why can’t Hermione make any on her own?
That’s a good point. Fortunately, HPMOR is hardly the last Harry Potter fanfic.
She’s 11⁄12. Harry Potter is Tom Riddle who is 65. This is why Harry acts like an adult, including making discoveries, while Hermione acts like a very intelligent child.
Observation: there appears to be a significant amount of mind-killing occurring in this thread.
How can you say that? Only the other side is mind-killed; my side is being perfectly rational!
I think this is a joke, because Voldiemort killed the infant Harry’s mind to overwrite it with his own.
Interesting. I thought it was a polite discussion of disagreements about the issues at hand. I have seen substantial mind-killing on this sort of topic here before, but it doesn’t seem present in this conversation to me.
That argument as explanation doesn’t really work: first of all, many of Harry’s discoveries are low-hanging fruit, and it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of those. Second of all, Harry only has some aspects of TR. He grew up a (relatively normal) child without any of the procedural or other memories of TR. As far as we can tell, the primary way that Harry is akin to TR is close to the same starting minds and being raised in different ways.
Moreover, smart children make discoveries even in our world where there are a lot of scientists. Here a 16 year old discovered a novel method of quickly killing ticks. 11 and 12 year olds have discovered supernovas, and now a 10 year old has now granted that’s observational, but that’s still the same pattern. Young children have also published math papers.
Finally, this doesn’t help because the concern is at a meta-level. Dumbledore, Harry, Voldemort, and Draco all got massive resource and power boosts. But not Hermione.
I don’t really know how the whole ‘HP is TR’ thing works. I mean, on the one hand no 11 year, however gifted, old works out a way to run hypercomputing algorithms on a closed timelike curve provided by time-turners. On the other, Harry presumably didn’t start talking with an adult vocabulary when he was an infant, so… I dunno.
And sure, I can buy 11 or 12 year olds making observational discoveries. But for an actual, highly intellegent 11 year old who isn’t sharing her mind with fragments of an adult’s psyche, the correct tactic is to learn as much as possible, and start doing experiments when you’re older, which was Hermione’s plan.
Certain of the female charicters did gain a power boost, while Baba Yaga is a new charicter and nicholas flamel is actually female.
Moreover, the way Dumbledore and Voldemort have changed is simply that they are acting like intelligent adults, rather than characters in a children’s story. By comparison, Hermione is acting like a child rather than a child in a children’s story, which… isn’t that much of a change.
The tricks with the Basilisk and the Proddian[sic] charm seem like they could have been adaptable to HPMoR, but at the same time, canon Hermione was older when she accomplished those things.
Even in canon, discoveries in potions were plainly not her thing, at least; see Half Blood Prince.
The Protean charm on the galleons occurs in book 5. I’m not sure what you mean about the basilisk. Possible I’m not remembering.
Sure. But again, reasonable power boost. Note how in the above I gave an example of an interesting discovery she could make that wouldn’t even compete with Harry in what area she was focusing on.
I think, CAE_Jones refers to Hermione being the one who finds out that Slytherin’s monster (in book 2) is a basilisk.
I don’t think this line of analysis works for determining that a work is sexist. At least, it’s not sexist in a problematic way (i.e. we need to get rid of it, or at least be aware of the sexism when reading it), it’s sexist because the world we live in is sexist and it’s practically impossible to write anythong non-sexist. Does HPMOR do anything to advance the condition of women? No, but neither does it do anything to adress racism, ableism, homophobia and plenty of other societal issues. That’s not why the book was written. On the other hand, it has two strong female characters that have agency, and no female “characters” that are boobs on a stick, or a reward for the hero, or anything of the sort. Remember that EY was working from canon and could not exactly add plenty of important characters unheard of in the book. He already promoted Daphne, Tracey and (to a lesser extent) Susan compared to their role in the series (although I guess that’s partially to make up for the lack of Ginny or Luna in Harry’s first year). If your strongest argument to say a work is sexist in a problematic way is “a secondary female character dies without accomplishing anything”, then I feel that’s too strong a criteria. Hell, even in “Blue is the warmest color” (the book, not the movie, which was admittedly quite sexist in its direction), the main character dies a stupid death without ever having accomplished anything, and you’d be hard pressed to find that book sexist. In Worm, an important secondary female character is killed in an anti-climatic way by a villain we had almost never heard of until the chapter where he kills her. Is Worm sexist? I don’t think so.
HPMOR somewhat examines the automatic lack of respect adults have for children.
Well, I’m not sure what it means for a work as a whole to be sexist. So in so far as that doesn’t seem well-defined I agree.
Hang on. Full stop. The idea that any form of sexism in a work means we need to get rid of that work is something I strongly, and fundamentally disagree with. No amount of sexism is a reason for censorship.
Possibly, but there are degrees of sexism, and there are issues when reinforcing certain sexist norms. I’d point out that for example, Brandon Sanderson Mistborn series is an excellent example of a series without any sexism issues in how the author approach things. And that’s far from the only example.
Actually, racism is definitely addressed in the context of Muggles v. wizards, and homophobia has been addressed- see the point where one of the young wizards suspects that claims about homophobia in the Muggle community are an anti-Muggle slur. That was meant as a humorous aside but it was a clear dig at certain attitudes.
I agree that Eliezer did a wonderful job of promoting Daphne and Tracey. If he hadn’t the situation would look very different.
But the argument isn’t just that Hermione died without accomplishing anything, but rather that it was in a context where the male wizards (Harry and Voldemort) both received substantial power boosts, where Hermione was trying to be a heroine for feminist reasons, where people had already complained about feminist issues being treated poorly in HPMoR, and then having Hermione killed without accomplishing anything specifically because the villain desired it to have an impact on the primary male protagonist. It is that totally of issues that made this so bad.
But you claim that any “sexism” (however you define it) in the work is bad.
At minimum a cause for concern. But if you want to say bad, sure, as a decent approximation of the issue, yeah we can go with “bad”.
Why? Also, how are you defining “sexism”.
I assign a very high probability that you just downvoted the comment you are replying to. This is generally often indicative of not being interested in a productive conversation. Did you do so?
That’s because reality is ‘sexist’.
This is both an incredible strawman and not at all relevant to what’s even being discussed. The article you linked to discusses that average human male is strength is higher than average human female strength. That’s accurate and utterly irrelevant to the characterizations in question.
Heck, I’ll even spot you that average male IQ is higher than average female IQ and that male standard deviation is higher than female standard deviation of IQ so there are more very intelligent males than there are very intelligent females.
Still wouldn’t matter.
We are talking about A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn’t get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously.
If you think your comment is at all relevant to any of these issues, I’d be very much interested in hearing an explanation.
*sigh*
My observation that a significant amount of mind-killing has and is occurring in this thread has not changed, and in fact has been reinforced. In particular, I see that there’s a great deal of back-and-forth happening, but very few unusually pertinent or clear-headed arguments have been put forth, by either side. I haven’t seen a single argument which I would describe as “well-articulated”; it’s all just anecdotal data and branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching point. (Example: Someone brought up Hermione’s canonical proficiency with the Protean Charm, which realistically speaking has nothing to do with feminism.) Moreover, based on the amount of back-and-forth I’ve seen here I assign an extremely low probability to anyone’s mind getting changed based on something said in this thread. That last point is a particularly important warning flag that some sort of mind-killing is going on, because when no updates are occurring, almost certainly some subtext is involved that’s either irrelevant to or actively interferes with epistemic rationality. Further evidence in favor of mind-killing is supplied by the fact that this discussion centers around feminism, which is widely known to be a hotly controversial topic.
The reason I chose to reply to this comment in particular is because it exemplifies some of the mind-killing that I’m talking about (and most emphatically not because I’m trying to single you out; plenty of other commenters on this thread exhibit significant mind-killing—it’s just that yours was the most visible example that I could see):
Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, “What does this have to do with feminism?” If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it’s particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione’s death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn’t about that, either, I would think of something else. “Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times. So immediately we see that this quote’s relation to feminism is tenuous at best. So why bring it up? Does the fact that Hermione is a female character have more immediate relevancy to her death than the fact that, say, she was inadequately prepared? Is her gender somehow more pertinent to the fact that she didn’t get an intelligence boost than the fact that she was already extremely intelligent canonically? Why connect it to gender, of all things? The relationship is minimal and forced at best! Why??
Well, from my perspective, the answer to that question is not because it’s actually relevant in some deep, meaningful sense. Rather, it’s because, for better or for worse, this is a discussion about feminism, a vastly polarizing and controversial topic. And when discussing vastly polarizing or controversial topics, arguments become soldiers. People search and scrabble for any piece of information they can think of that has any connection to the topic at all, no matter how weak. Hermione’s lack of intelligence boost is taken and forcibly connected to her gender, as opposed to a myriad of other things that are much more relevant. Or, to use an earlier example: her skill with Protean Charms in canon is brought up as evidence of how Rowling treats her genders more fairly than does Eliezer. But when you look at it with a neutral eye...
Protean Charms? Character intelligence boosts? Seriously? Is that the best you can come up with?
Yeah. Super mind-killed.
Strongly disagree- to the point where I’d point out that I think you are being uncharitable to pretty much everyone here (both those arguing that there is a problem from a feminist standpoint and those who are arguing there isn’t one). In particular, the comment about the Protean charm was made by CAE_jones here in a comment that was using it as an example of what canon Hermione could do at the same time pointing out limitations of canon Hermione and pointing out that she was the time much older.
Power boosts matter in this context because it is one of the fundamental changes in the fanfic is to give people power boosts. That really should be self-explanatory and no one (either for or against there being issues here) seems to disagree with that. So the nature and plausibility of the power boosts matters, and it is a reasonable response to concerns about Hermione not getting a boost to outline why giving her a boost would be difficulty.
As for the paragraph in question that you think isn’t connected at all to gender, there may be serious illusions of transparency going on here, so let me spell out the concern explicitly: Hermione is the only major female character in the work (with Minerva the next) - the next two down are Tracy and Daphne who make for hilarious comic relief. That’s the context where what happens matters.
I’m curious incidentally, if you read the initial link to fridging to see why the death matters.
Branching, multifacted conversations happen all the time. Less Wrong and (internet conversations in general) are not exactly known for focusing on narrow issues. I don’t see this as evidence of mindkilling but rather what would be perfectly normal conversation on any side topic that in this case because of the type of topic one sees as evidence of mindkilling.
I do find it curious though that you think that everyone here is mindkilled, whereas, one of the people here who you think is mindkilled doesn’t think pretty much anyone here is except one of the very late stragglers. This makes me wonder if we’ve actually adopted the notion of politics-is-the-mindkiller too strongly here, where even polite conversations that don’t necessarily lead to updating are automatically labeled mindkilling if they involve politics. We may have a problem of confirmation bias for mindkilling, which if true is sort of funny and sad.
You seem to have this idea that if an idea is most immediately relevent to topics other than X, it cannot also be sufficiently relevant towards X to count in a discussion of X.
I don’t know where you are getting this from.
I don’t see where you’re getting this reading from. My full quote is here:
The point here is not that an idea should be disqualified if it is more immediately relevant to topics other than the intended one; it is that it should be disqualified if, when shown to someone out of context, the correct context is not readily deducible from the quote itself—or, in other words, if multiple different contexts leap to mind upon seeing it, none of which are the intended context. That’s what it means for something to be a “stretch”. I’m not seeing why you interpreted my words in the rather strange way you did.
To be honest I’m not sure whether its relevant since I don’t understand why you consider that aspect of MoR problematic. To help me understand could you answer the following questions:
1) Would you consider the relative power levels of the characters in MoR problematic on their own (without reference to canon).
2) Would you consider an independent work that realistically portrayed the relative abilities of men and women problematic?
3) What if it realistically dealt with the consequences of those differences, including that their lesser strength makes it easier for villains to stuff women into fridges.
You really do seem to like downvoting people you disagree with. Interesting. How mindkilled are you? And you didn’t provide the question explanation.
I’m not sure what you mean by question 1. But assuming you mean, something like “If HPMoR existed in in a world without Harry Potter, would the gender issues be problematic” the answer would be yes, because all the other important male characters are substantially more resourceful than the female ones, and because of Hermione’s death and the events surrounding it.
Question 2- No. Please don’t be stupid.
Question 3- Are you seriously trying to implicitly argue that the literal on average physical difference between human males and human females is at all relevant here? Because it seems like you are trying to make such a connection. That’s both silly (for reasons I already explained to you), and stupid for other reasons: villains in stories have things like wands and guns. They don’t need to physically stuff someone into a fridge while they are fighting back. If you think I’m misinterpreting your third point, I’d be interested in hearing an explanation, but frankly, I assign a very high probability that you are hopelessly mindkilled, which is unfortunate because everyone else in this conversation was having a nice, interesting conversation. I thought that skeptical_lurker brought up some very good points as did Nancy.
That is a delightfully awful question. The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there’s no hope of an accurate answer if you include the presupposition that the person being asked is actually somewhat mindkilled.
I’m not sure. At least twice before I’ve gotten that question or a variant of it thrown to me and it helped strongly reevaluate my attitude on the issue in question. Possibly I’m generalizing from one example too much?
Actually, I was probably being too literal about the question because the logical paradox struck me as funny.
I will blame an ambiguity which I think is built into English. “How mindkilled are you?” can imply that you’re mindkilled in some sense which is stable over a period of time, or it can imply that you were mindkilled recently but have a capacity to come out of it.
Yes, it certainly is for how this trope applies in the real world, as well as the resulting evolved associated feelings in humans. And since you are making your case with reference to the distribution of tropes in other literature, I thought this was very relevant.
Really, where?
What you mean is that they disagreed with you without questioning your basic premise.
As I said, Draco tries to kill Hermione wouldn’t work, because Hermione’s family don’t have the influence to send Draco to Akazaban, which starts the chain of events leading to the death. Neville isn’t as important a charicter as the other two.
Ron and Hagrid have both been presented as imbeciles when they were heroes in canon.
What if its wired into us at the biological level because a tribe can repopulate after losing 90% of the men more than after losing 90% of the women?
Neville in many ways had more actual character development than Hermione. If anything, Neville’s death would have been far more tragic if he had died trying to be a hero in the sense of having an impact on Harry. Neville is only at all heroic because of Harry. It would have been a far more emotional rebuke to Harry if Neville had tried trying to be a hero.
Sure, but Ron was an idiot in canon also, and there are literally multiple subgenres of fanfic to get Ron out of the picture because so many people dislike his character. See for example Ron the Death Eater (again standard TVTropes warning.) And Hagrid being an imbecile is simply taking the issues with the character already and putting them into a serious context where actually harming children might actually have a real response. This is for example parts of Wait, What? (which in its own way is a rationalist fic).
That seems very strongly like a just-so story. I’d be very interested in seeing some sort of evidence backing up that this sort of attitude is strongly cross cultural. There are other cross-cultural reasons this might happen but that would be the minimum level.
Note also that just because something is innate doesn’t mean it is a good thing: that’s most of the point of learning to deal with cognitive biases for example.
My point is that Ron and Hagrid were not upgraded, and as such I see no overall pattern where the males are upgraded and females like Hermoine are not.
I’m neither an anthropologist nor an evolutionary psychologist, so I can’t say whether this is the case with high certainty. I’m also not saying its a good thing to have substantially higher empathy for females over males, but if biases such as this exist, then it does make fridging a little more understandable. Even if you consciously believes in gender egalitarianism, you’re still running on what is, from your POV, corrupted hardware.
But neither became a major character, and both were stupid to start with, so it was much easier to just keep them stupid. If you prefer the following: every character who remains a major character in the story gets an upgrade with an exception of one: Hermione.
Ron, in canon, wasn’t much less bright than Harry: they were both fair-to-mediocre students who bumbled through adventures mostly on the strength of luck, chutzpah, Hermione, and the beneficence of older and more experienced characters. Ron being a non-viewpoint character, though, we didn’t have as clear a view on the motives behind his failings, and so they came off as less explicable. On the other hand, he did have that talent for chess where Harry didn’t, though we only really see it in the first book.
For that matter, Hagrid wasn’t portrayed as especially dim either; he wasn’t a particularly educated character, but when the script called for wisdom of an earthier kind than Dumbledore’s, he was often the one to give it. He just had a blind spot where dangerous animals were concerned, one that for mysterious plot reasons his higher-ups were happy to give him opportunities to indulge.
Well, Hermione is also the least in need of an upgrade. There are important literary reasons not to upgrade her, and insisting that the story must be exactly gender-balanced is a big constraint that limits what stories can be written.
Sure. The problem there though is that everyone else in the original started at around a 1 or a 2 in some 1-10 scale of intelligence/education/rationality and she was at a 3. Then a lot of characters got bumped to 4 or 5 and she didn’t get bumped.
There’s no insistence in this case that things must be “exactly gender-balanced” but rather than less gender inequity would have been nice.
I would rather if she’d been more part of the last long chunk of the story. It’s not so much that her death had a major effect on Harry as that she was taken offstage.
There is one long chunk left; I would wager that Hermione will play a significant role in it.
I hope so, but (ambiguity around “last”) Hermione wasn’t part of the most recent bunch of chapters.