Disclaimer: I am thoroughly enjoying HPMOR. That said, I just don’t think Eliezer is quite grokking the substance of feminist complaints.
It makes complete sense within the story for all the female characters to do what they do, given what they’ve defined to be and what circumstances have arisen. The death of hermione makes complete sense. But its a fridging, of course its a fridging, because you are the author. You created these characters, and put them into the situation. If you tell a Superman story where he kills, and you set up circumstances where the only thing he can do is kill, then, sure, within the story, we buy that Superman needed to kill in that circumstance. But you, the author, put him in that circumstance, made him and his opponents make choices which led to that death, because you wanted him to kill.
I don’t think Eliezer necessarily intended to make the female characters in this fic weaker than the male ones, more passive, more timid, more prone to mistakes, but thats how it has turned out. And for the defence that this is what he got from canon? Well to be honest its quite clear that many of these characters aren’t the characters from canon. Moody is far more competent, Dumbledore very different, and Quirrel… Yet Hermione and McGonnogal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.
A feminist reading does not negate the quality of something, and I wouldn’t necessarily say the story should be modified at this point at all, but its something to be aware of. We can enjoy problematic things even while acknowledging they’re problematic. HPMOR isn’t the first and won’t be the last piece of fiction to fail at a feminist reading.
I think it’s a bit absurd to call something a “fridging” when the character in question has been around for 90 chapters and had their own major story arc, etc. That’s really getting away from the spirit of what the “women in fridges” idea is complaining about (ie women who only serve to die in order to motivate the male characters).
While personally, I think this is a entirely legitimate direction to take with the story, I’ll point out that on some level those 90 chapters of relevance can exist for the purpose of heightening the impact of the character’s removal.
It’s entirely possible to deliberately write a female character who exists purely for her death to motivate a male character (or vice versa, but it’s likely that fewer people would complain,) who’s well developed and active in the story for a long time, if the author is doing so simply to set up the extent of the motivation. And I think some people are concerned that, given that Eliezer planned Hermione’s death from the very beginning, this is just what he did.
Yup, this is pretty much my point. Of course, this fic being as it is, Hermione may be back alive in a couple of chapters time, which will change things.
I would be shocked if someone were criticizing comic books for too much planning and coherence, if the Fridge critique referred to the character as a whole rather than her death. So in part this seems like a non-sequitur.
Back to MoR, the “major story arc” could indeed lead to Hermione doing something awesome, and her apparent death might not destroy that possibility for the sake of Harry’s character development. But right now, you’re dismissing the criticism out of hand because of an arc that led some readers to call Hermione silly. You’re talking about a story that led people to question her characterization before now.
As far as malign coherence goes, Eliezer chose to throw in a dig at some strain of feminism during “Self Actualization,” which ends with Harry and some men saving Hermione and friends. Now, Eliezer has said that he made SA longer than it strictly needed to be because he didn’t realize he could take a different road to setting up (an arc where Harry saves her again, and she suffers and feels incompetent and stupid before her apparent death). But in a finished work, it would look like he put all this in for a reason. And looking back from chapter 92, a lot of it does in fact look like deliberate trolling of feminists.
Were this a finished work, certain feminists reaching chapter 89-92 could reasonably delete the file. And if I told them that later chapters improve the issues in question, I would not expect to be believed without major spoilers. Because I’m more like (a dumber version of) Eliezer than they are, and I still don’t know what the Hell he’s doing.
That’s not what fridging is- it refers to a specific type of death, where a female character is killed by a villain and left for the hero to find, specifically for the purpose of affecting the hero mentally. We don’t know yet who killed Hermione and why, but it’s possible that it was meant as a fridging.
A character is killed off in a particularly gruesome manner and left to be found just to offend or insult someone, or to cause someone serious anguish. The usual victims are those who matter to the hero, specifically best buddies, love interests, and sidekicks.
I think it’s a bit absurd to call something a “fridging” when the character in question has been around for 90 chapters and had their own major story arc, etc. That’s really getting away from the spirit of what the “women in fridges” idea is complaining about (ie women who only serve to die in order to motivate the male characters).
That might have some validity, but the validity is detracted by the difference in scale in what Hermione and Harry have dealt with. Harry has been discovering new magic (some small amount with Hermione but only because he helped), destroying avatars of death, rescuing people from prison, putting the son of the most evil person around on the past to redemption. Hermione’s arcs consist mainly of fighting school bullies, and even doing that to a large extent with Harry handling a large fraction of the problem, and occasionally beating Harry in a mock combat situation where he was clearly holding back. It is also noteworthy that Hermione’s death occurred after there were already largescale complaints about the role of women (and Hermione) in the story. And Hermione’s death didn’t even accomplish much: she wasn’t saving the life of another student for example (a student getting in the way of the troll would have been an obvious thing to matter), and despite all her intelligence, she never in the course of her arc developed new magic or the like.
This is only relative to Harry though. Draco didn’t even start doing anything until he was very heavily prompted by Harry, and throughout the story i get the impression that Draco was learning more from Harry than Harry was from Draco. Is Hermione really doing worse than any male student other than Harry?
Hermione’s death didn’t even accomplish much: she wasn’t saving the life of another student for example (a student getting in the way of the troll would have been an obvious thing to matter)
I expect that would have helped a lot, especially if Hermione successfully rescued said hypothetical student (Harry may have killed the troll, but he failed at the whole rescue thing). We don’t really know what Hermione was doing before running into the troll, or how it so quickly went from in the dungeons to on a terrace, or how the troll got into the dungeons rather than a more obvious way in to Hogwarts (was Hermione going to the dungeons? The Ravenclaw girls’ dorms? Somewhere else entirely?).
Yet Hermione and McGonnagal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.
Amelia Bones, Susan Bones, Daphne Greengrass, Padme Patil (and even more minor characters like Hannah Abbot and Tracey Davis) are all significantly stronger and more relevant characters in this one than they ever were in the Harry Potter series.
If you compare ratio of the genders of relevant characters, HPMOR is better than the original Harry Potter ever was. You say Hermione is as flawed as in the original but you forget that it was Ron who was completely downgraded to peripheral status.
And as Velorien said, fridging is defined by its narrative purpose, and we don’t know its narrative purpose yet.
On the other hand, major female characters Luna and Ginny are entirely absent from HPMOR. I guess it was inevitable given the decision to make the story take place only within Harry’s first year (since they are not in school yet) but I would have loved to see an HPMOR version of either of them.
No way—she would kill them at seeing her picture in the newspaper...if she knew it was them. They were keeping their name out of it at least partially to save their necks from their family.
Yeah I meant to mention Amelia Bones, who is by far the most competent female character we’ve encountered thus far. She is not, of course, a particularly major character thus far.
I guess when a character has an exciting fight off stage and we as readers perceive them as mortally wounded and helpless, and our male character swears vengeance at their death.. thats pretty much fridging to me. Regardless of the conclusion, the next few chapters at least will be devoted to Harry’s actions which are entirely predicated on hermione’s death.
If she had, as some suggested, died saving someone, as part of her arc, if we’d seen more of her fight, I do think that scene would have come across better. There may, of course, be excellent reasons that we did not get to observe that scene: perhaps we’ll find out. I’m talking about the response now, and immediate feelings associated with that.
Sorry, how are Hermione and McGonagall, “essentially as flawed as they were in the original text”, exactly? I always saw their characters as being a step up from their original descriptions, and it’s clear that the difficulties that Eliezer is having them overcome are not random things that no other characters have, but rather, the sorts of problems with thinking we see in the real world. Hermione and McGonagall have made more progress over the book than many of the other characters. You can point out that this means they started out weaker, but there are clear, justifiable reasons for this, and not simply downgrading all the females.
You have to acknowledge the backgrounds of these characters.
Moody? Dark Wizard hunter for a hundred years. You can’t expect McGonagall to be able to compete with that. Quirrell? In order for the story to work, we needed a villain that would be a match for the upgraded Harry, so it’s obvious why he would need to be seriously ramped up. Dumbledore? After defeating Grindlewald, he had to wage the war against Voldemort for ten years, so his character needed to be the sort that could realistically withstand that pressure.
While I can’t pretend to know exactly what Eliezer meant, I suspect these sorts of things are what he was referring to when he said canon was constraining him. If you’re going to turn the PotterVerse into a world that makes sense, with actual cause and effect, you need Dumbledore to plausibly be able to have accomplished what he did, and unfortunately canon does not give him a strong backstory for a character like McGonagall. At least, not a backstory as strong as these other characters have, like Moody or Dumbledore.
If you’re going to go out and call HPMOR problematic, and say it fails at a feminist reading, you need to at least understand why the story is like this.
I’m not even going to go into the fridging comment.
I do understand why the story is like that, and, to be clear, its fine for HPMOR to fail a feminist critique! Lots of fantastic stories fail feminists critiques: this will bug some readers more than others, and it might be useful for a particular author to consider that a particular choice might alienate some readers because of the history.
Yes, there are lots of great reasons for Moody and Dumbledore to be how they are, but McGonnogal is an order member, so could easily be different (and in earlier chapters, often is!) .
To be clear, I do think this story in general does portray women pretty well, but the bullying arc and this death feel like misfires because they embody certain tropes without, perhaps, intending to.
If it’s okay for something to fail a critique, doesn’t that kind of mean there’s something wrong with the critique?
And I think there is something wrong with the critique. You don’t quite seem to appreciate the point Eliezer is making in his response.
I take it as a given that it is perfectly legitimate to have the main character of a story motivated by the death of his best friend. It is a premise of the whole endeavor that the main character is a super-smart Harry. So now we have to find a friend. Who could that naturally be? Well, it so happens that the smartest student in Harry’s year in the original is a girl; naturally, she will now be the second-smartest student in the class, because otherwise we’d have to dumb her down. She has the brains and personality to be Harry’s friend—so unless Eliezer takes additional pains to move further away from the original, she is going to be that friend. And it just so happens that she is female, which is entirely irrelevant.
Indeed, one could also turn it around and point out that it’s a positive thing that the person smart enough to be such good friends with Harry that their death motivates him suitably is a girl. But that would be equally besides the point, because Eliezer never chose her gender. The character was already there, gender included, and everything just falls into place as it is. He would have had to distort the original even further to prevent this; which is not the point of such a derivative work, and also the same people who have complained now would then probably have complained about him putting a smart and important female character from the original into a different, necessarily less central role, or removing her altogether (like Ron, who was unusable).
So what exactly is it that people are complaining about? Isn’t this really a problem with their own pattern-matching, which in this case turns out to be inappropriate? Maybe it’s making them uncomfortable, but that’s their problem; it’s not something on the basis of which to critique the story, because we can objectively argue that the pattern-matching went awry. Issues are not a purely subjective thing.
Note that this takes care only of the alleged fridging issue. It does not address the S.P.H.E.W. arc, which is more suspect of being genuinely problematic. I found it at least weird.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn’t to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one’s past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.
For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you’re talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you’re making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn’t have used the language of “fail” and “succeed”.
Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn’t particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it’s simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don’t think anybody will deny this.
Now, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it’s legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you’re not saying it shouldn’t conform to these pattern, I think it’s not relevant. And the reason is this:
However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic.
I’m not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I’m saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don’t count; in the same way that someone who doesn’t speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn’t count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don’t really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn’t so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione’s fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
These things seem to me to work like implicatures. “The author could have told the story in a different way. But she didn’t, she told the story in a way conforming to this or that culturally prevalent pattern. Interesting.”. But if the author couldn’t have told it in any other way anyway and the conformity with the pattern is a purely accidental property and the cultural prevalence of the pattern has nothing to do with anything in how it came about, then this isn’t interesting.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
The point is that once an author is made aware of a trope which can be off putting to some readers, they can
attempt to avoid it in future. Obviously the author doesn’t have to, and sometimes this particular trope might be necessary, but I don’t think its bad to go “hey, this doesn’t work for me for x y and z reasons”.
From a story telling point of view, ignoring feminism for a minute, I personally find characters dying “randomly” unsatisfying. Joss Whedon does this occasionally, killing off characters essentially at random, rather than letting said character have a heroic moment then dying. I appreciate that this is deeply realistic, but the story lover in me rebels. This is, of course, a different issue from the one I’m approaching, but I wonder if it isn’t adding to some people’s reaction.
This was anything but a random death. It was foreshadowed for a long time, we knew who’d do it and why, it’s an integral part of the main storyline. Part of the story worked exactly because we were expecting this, but the characters were not.
Well, you can of course argue that Hermione, being the second smartest first year student, is the obvious candidate for te role of the best friend who dies too early, do you think it’d be equally plausible if Eliezer had killed Neville? Neville should be able to stand just as close to Harry as Hermione did (since Harry has not hit puberty yet, and thinks girls are “icky”), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that Neville’s death could have brought forth the same emotions both in Harry and in the readers that Hermione’s death did. Eliezer probably also knows this and thus chose Hermione to die.
Yes, exactly. Neville’s death would not have created these emotions, but the reason is not that he is male and Hermione is female. Neville should not be able to stand just as close to Harry. Neville is in no position to be anything as close to a comrade or equal as Hermione was. Neville is just someone who Harry has sympathy for and by whose development Harry was impressed. This is a very different thing from the “the two of us are different from the rest of the world” connection that he quickly developed with Hermione at the beginning (and which then faded off a bit, not least due to the questionable SPHEW arc).
I think this may be taking Harry at his word a bit too much when it comes to his views on Hermione. Just because Harry allways speaks in “rationalist” vocabulary, doesn’t mean he is allways rational or free of bias. He is often unfair to people when he’s emotional. And his blind spot for Quirrel is a mile wide. “It was the defense professor last year, and the year before that, and the year before that...” Someone actualy starting from priors and adjusting finds Quirrel very quickly, particularly when you factor in the sense of doom.
Harry thinks he doesn’t like Hermione that way, Harry’s dad is pretty sure he does. I think regarding Harry’s statements as the more objective one here may be a mistake.
Harry thinks he doesn’t like Hermione that way, Harry’s dad is pretty sure he does.
In my experience, relatives are pretty sure the kid likes any friend of the opposite gender that way if they get brought to their attention. At least, in the culture in my general area.
Harry seems to think of puberty as purely binary. It’s not; it’s a gradual process. I don’t know what deficiency in Harry’s education led him to think this way, but it fumbles all of his thoughts about puberty.
Harry almost seems to be reasoning as follows:
I’m not sexually attracted to anybody.
Therefore, I haven’t hit puberty yet.
Therefore, I can’t possibly be romantically attracted to anybody.
Or, Harry is summarizing a wide variety of observations on the topic of puberty in a pithy and relatively un-embarrassing fashion. We don’t know Harry’s actual basis for claiming that he hasn’t yet begun puberty, but his comments on the subject are just a little too flippant to be the complete truth.
Quite true. My ideas at Harry’s age were actually very much like Harry’s, and I didn’t recognise my own first puberty-influenced romantic attractions (at, let me see, probably the age of 10, and at least two years before I felt any sexual attraction to anybody). I just expected Harry himself to know better.
Yet it is extremely out of character for Harry to fail to have conducted even minimal research on a phenomenon which will drastically impact his thinking and emotions as soon as it inevitably kicks in within the next couple of years.
What is “minimal research” on puberty when one is eleven-twelve?
Whatever “minimal research” is, he has vastly surpassed it in most areas where he’s done any research at all, from physics and rationality to transfiguration and potions. It seems nonsensical to expect less of him in one area than all the others without a very good reason.
Indeed. The point is with fridging is that it is not an inherently bad thing, but by repetition, and by being predominately women being fridged to motivate men, it begins to be unfortunate.
While we’re on the subject of bringing in larger context, I’d like to point out the context of your complaint: The SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) regularly goes off the rails over perceived instances of people not being politically correct enough. One recent incident involved the (female) editor of the SFWA bulletin being forced to resign over the following examples of “sexism”:
1) A column in the bulletin used the word “lady” to refer to women and complemented some of them on their appearance.
2) The same issue had a bikini-clad warrior woman on the cover.
This was enough to cause a huge controversy. However, the authors of said column subsequently published another column defending their previous column and pointing out how absurd the controversy was and in particular that “lady” is not a slur. This was considered completely beyond the pail and resulted in the above mentioned resignation as well as the bulletin being put on a six-month hiatus while the issue was being investigated.
I just looked through the articles you linked to and haven’t noticed anything that disagrees with my summary (I have also looked through many others you did not link to before posting my comment). Perhaps you could describe what specific additional information you think my summary is missing.
I’m not interested in having a discussion of the incident; I’m interested in directing readers of your comment to where they can find out more. Any particular sources you suggest?
Well, the sources you side are as decent as any in conveying the facts once one gets past the fact that they’re written as insane troll logic diatribes (or rather two are such diatribes and one was written by someone begging for mercy from said insane trolls). As for sources I’d recommend well Andrew Fox’s and Sarah Hoyt’s accounts are more reasonable, but they may come off as alarmist exaggeration until one realizes how common the insane trolls are.
One of the more obvious details noted in fubarobfusco’s articles is the complaints about how the articles about the female authors had much attention to female authors’ physical appearances. That was a major source of the complaints, especially in the context that one would not see similar such remarks about male authors. This isn’t the only difference, only one of the ones that jumps out.
One of the more obvious details noted in fubarobfusco’s articles is the complaints about how the articles about the female authors had much attention w [sic] to female authors’ physical appearances.
There’s a severe scale difference here in description. This wasn’t just complements but more strong language. Frankly, I’m inclined to think the whole thing did get blown out of proportion, although I suspect that the primary reasons for it had as much to do with the never ending internal politics of SFWA which seems to spend more of its time as a drama factory than anything else, as much as it had to do with feminism. But even given that, it still seemed like your summary downplayed the concerns.
Incidentally, I’m slightly curious if you downvoted my comment and fubarobfusco’s comment; both comments were downvoted within a few seconds of your replies. I don’t particular care much about karma one way or another, but it probably isn’t a great idea to downvote people one is having a discussion with if one is going to have any minimal hope of caring out a productive conversation. Among other issues, it can easily increase cognitive dissonance levels and make it substantially harder to accept an argument from the person one is talking to.
I’m not entirely sure what this has got to do with my comments, other than it is an issue related to feminism in science fiction and fantasy writing. I don’t really want to get into this argument, but would suggest simply that it this situation is perhaps more complicated than your post suggests.
Both arguments are based on the position that while something is not inherently bad (e.g., the frigging trope, complaining about aspects of a story that bother you), this instance of it is a problem because of the larger social context in which it is embedded.
Yet Hermione and McGonnogal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.
Hermione is the most admirable character in HPMOR, and it looks like McGonagal could soon join her at the top. If their portrayal is an affront to feminism, it’s feminism that has the problem, not HPMOR.
Don’t worry, Headmaster,” said the boy. “I haven’t gotten my wires crossed. I know that I’m supposed to learn goodness from Hermione and Fawkes, not from Professor Quirrell and you.
Hermione is the most admirable character in HPMOR, and it looks like McGonagal could soon join her at the top. If their portrayal is an affront to feminism, it’s feminism that has the problem, not HPMOR.
This isn’t an argument, but a conclusion. It also misses the primary issues at hand here. Hermione might be a very impressive character in any other story, but her total accomplishment set when compared to the primary male character is much smaller. Hermione fights bullies (with Harry’s help). Harry’s equivalent accomplishment: rescuing a prisoner from the most secure prison in the world. Harry, finds a way to kill an avatar of death. Hermione is killed by a troll, without even saving someone’s life to show for it. Etc. The problem here is not feminism.
But let’s take your example as is, because it demonstrates another point. When Hermione fought bullies, that actually brought about a lasting change in Hogwarts. Compare the good of that accomplishment to the good of setting free one prisoner from Azkaban, the one most likely, capable, and intent on wreaking destruction in the world.
Who has done more good? I don’t think that’s a slam dunk win for Harry, and could be a devastating loss.
In a similar way, recall that Hermione won the first battle of the generals because neither Harry nor Draco knew how to effectively organize a group of people to a shared goal. Also, if Harry is supposed to learn goodness from Hermione, isn’t that a rather huge power, determining whether the world gets one more Voldemort, or one more Dumbledore? Influence of others is power to do good as well. Similarly, it’s McGonagall who actually runs Hogwarts and sets an example for students, not Dumbledore.
Hermione had a lasting power for good. Harry is “exceptionally good at killing things”. If you want something killed, you want Harry on your side. Or Quirrell. Or Voldemort. Or Dumbledore. If you wanted a leader to delegate authority to run an organization to build something good instead of destroy something evil, you want Hermione without question. Same for McGonagall.
The main change between HPMOR and canon is the hugely increased power, intelligence, capability, and potential for evil of the protagonist, who yes, we assume has a penis. If your mind pattern matches this as an affront to women everywhere, you have a problem.
So to the first part, lasting amount of good from a long-term consequentialist standpoint isn’t the same as how much impact someone has. And if one is trying to think of long-term issues then Harry has also discovered how to destroy otherwise unkillable creatures, and has set Draco Malfoy on the path to redemption. Even if Harry dies tomorrow, the total utility of there being one less dementor in the world will add up a lot over the long term. (In canon dementors can reproduce, but I strongly suspect this isn’t the case in HPMOR.)
The main change between HPMOR and canon is the hugely increased power, intelligence, capability, and potential for evil of the protagonist, who yes, we assume has a penis.
This isn’t the only change. There’s also a massive increase in power, intelligence and capability of the antagonist, who, yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Dumbledore’s genre awareness and awareness of the cost of his actions to others, and his general power level (using Time Turners), who yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Draco Malfoy’s manipulative skill, who yes, we assume has a penis.
Moreover, while some female characters have become more interesting (Daphne and Tracy are obvious examples), they still are orders of magnitude less important. And there have been other possible options which could have been interesting. For example, rather than just having Petunia as a helpless housewife, while her husband is a professor, Eliezer could have had written something where she was also an academic, or a successful businesswoman, or a lot.
If your mind pattern matches this as an affront to women everywhere, you have a problem.
I’m not sure if this is a strawman or a genuine failure on my part (and possibly others who are concerned) to explain our concerns. No one anywhere in either this discussion thread or the previous HPMOR discussion thread has made the argument “that this is a general affront to women everywhere”. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t believe that. (Introspecting quickly, it is possible that my stated and actual beliefs don’t align. However, if I did think that it was such an affront I douubt, I would have used as my interesting icebreaker fact last Friday that I had cosplayed as a character from a Harry Potter fanfic, and then used that as a way of getting an opportunity to tell people to read Methods of Rationality.)
To state it more explicitly problem is that this is a set of not great role models. My guess is that close to half the readers of HPMR, or certainly a large fraction, are female, and likely pretty young, which makes them impressionable. So, subtle (or not so subtle) differences in what male and female protagonists can do are important. And if some young girl gets pushed slightly over the edge by this into not becoming a chemist or a biologist, or just becoming interested in rationality, we all lose. Moreover, if part of the goal of the story is to get people as a whole interested in rationality and Less Wrong, then for women of all ages, having a substantially weaker female lead is going to make it harder for them to identify with the characters, and all the more so, when that weaker female is (apparently) killed off without even saving anyone in the process.
There’s a lot of room for legitimate concerns without thinking that this is an affront to women everywhere.
To state it more explicitly problem is that this is a set of not great role models.
If the issue is the set of role models, I submit that Hermione is the best role model in the book.
You can’t model yourself after Harry, redo your birth, and have a superhuman dark side to call on. Similarly, you can’t choose to have a university professor as a parent, who can serve as a role model to you in scientific method, and fully support your efforts in studying science. You can’t trade in your two dentist parents, who think your intelligence is “cute’, for parents who will respect and support your gifts.
But you can be diligent, hard working, honest, caring, and brave. You can do what is right. Though you won’t be as smart as Hermione, she is the best role model the book has to offer.
having a substantially weaker female lead is going to make it harder for them to identify with the characters,
Because it’s much easier to identify with a 10 year old with a superhuman dark side who wants minions and a sparkly throne. Much healthier too.
Role models in fictional works are by nature characters who are interesting more than they are perfect role models. No one wants to read a story about a character who is perfectly good, goes to classes every day, and never gets in trouble. The nature of role models is more subtle than simply being good. For a young child, they aren’t someone with magical talent, but they can still identify with characters with magical talent, and that’s easier when the character is of the same gender. (I remember at last year’s Vericon there was a panel on feminism and science-fiction and fantasy, and every single female author on the panel, including Tamora Pierce, expressed how much frustration they had growing up with the depiction of female characters, not just that they weren’t protagonists, but that when they were a side-kick or a secondary protagonist, how utterly boring they would be. This is a very old set of problems.)
That’s assuming that Draco’s half-year of interacting with his new friend can’t be countervailed by his subsequent several years of interacting with his loving-but-evil father. I would barely rate that as a possibility, much less an obvious assumption.
The question of Draco does have interesting is-HPMOR-feminist implications, though. Suppose we swapped the genders of Draco and Hermione, both of whom just had many of their often-similar arcs cut short for very-similar reasons. Now, Herman is the one who maintains his convictions in the face of an overwhelming villainous threat, and so the villain is forced to murder him via a plot using the third most perfect killing machine in nature, properly prepared using sabotage and magical upgrades because otherwise the troll would have lost. Now, Draca is the one who gets taken out of the action by half-a-plot (a plot which depends on Draca making rash egotistical mistakes), but she survives under her father’s thumb because ending her influence on Harry doesn’t even take killing her. Did the story just become more gender-equal, or less?
And if some young girl gets pushed slightly over the edge by this into not becoming a chemist or a biologist, or just becoming interested in rationality, we all lose.
I hope I understand your model correctly as “p(girl scientist | no HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | current HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | feminist HPMoR)”.
I wouldn’t call it “feminist HPMoR”- as I’ve said before, there’s a big difference between a feminist tract and simply taking into account certain concerns that might be described as feminist. But yes, I agree that’s an accurate summary of the model (heck I wouldn’t have gone and told a 16 year old girl to read it this weekend if that weren’t my model).
My guess is that close to half the readers of HPMR, or certainly a large fraction, are female, and likely pretty young, which makes them impressionable.
Primarily anecdotal and a function of who I know who is reading it, along with the fact that in general fanfic is a heavily female media form, with a lot of young people. From my personal sample, I’d say that about 60% of readers I know are male, but since I’m friends with substantially more men than women, that suggests that that percentage (tentatively) should be correct towards 50⁄50.
rescuing a prisoner from the most secure prison in the world.
demonstrating that, unlike Hermione, he can’t distinguish dangerous quests with high potential pay-offs from dangerous quests that will make the world worse even if he succeeds.
demonstrating that, unlike Hermione, he can’t distinguish dangerous quests with high potential pay-offs from dangerous quests that will make the world worse even if he succeeds.
Which is true, but also completely missing the point. What matters to a large extent is the scale of things. Harry does big stuff. Sometimes that results in what may end up as massive screw ups, but his total scale of what he is impacting is much larger.
Just to be clear, the name of the story in question is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which was based off of a series of seven books also titled with the name “Harry Potter”. The name of the story is not “Hermione Granger and the Methods of Rationality”. If it were, then yes, I would expect to see her impact be the larger one.
Just to be clear, the name of the story in question is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which was based off of a series of seven books also titled with the name “Harry Potter”. The name of the story is not “Hermione Granger and the Methods of Rationality”. If it were, then yes, I would expect to see her impact be the larger one.
In the original though, Hermione does big stuff. It is her Time-Turner that saves things in book 3. And throughout the series (with the exception of book 7 where Rowling took a somewhat anti-rationalist stance), it almost always Hermione that figures out what the big plot is or the like. Part of why Hermione in fact looks so much weaker here is because she was the most rational character in the original, and increasing Harry’s skill set while doing much less to hers makes her look less impressive.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Hermione wasn’t powered up at all.
a basic theory of MoR is that all the characters get automatic intelligence upgrades, except for Hermione who doesn’t need it and starts out as exactly similar to her canon self as I could manage, thus putting everyone on an equal footing for the first time.
Without diminishing the arguments of the feminist side, I think that’s pretty damn impressive.
If someone wrote a book where all the #Gender1′s were Stalins, each responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, and all the #Gender2′s were ordinary people who didn’t do much, I think that would be an anti-#Gender1 story, even though it’s the #Gender1′s who do big stuff.
It might be anti-both. If you insinuate that everyone of gender 1 is liable to become a genocidal dictator, that’s an insult to people of gender 1. If you insinuate that no one of gender 2 is liable to do anything substantial, that’s an insult to people of gender 2. Neither insult ceases to be insulting merely because you said something bad about the other people too.
It’s not about whether the story is pro-women or anti-women. It’s about whether the story reiterates common tropes that reinforce stereotyped roles for women and men that are harmful to one or both.
Some people do not prefer the role traditionally assigned to them. The existence of strong stereotyped roles makes it harder to do anything else. That seems sufficient to establish harm.
Yes, it is. One of the premises in the simple syllogism is implied and is sufficiently obvious as to make a claim that it is not an argument disingenuous. It would be plausible that someone could reject the argument and reject the premise. It is not plausible to claim that it is not an argument at all.
It also misses the primary issues at hand here.
It misses the issues that you consider primary. But to me it seems to touch on the essential issue: Feminist memes are incompatible with HPMoR and feminism would be much improved by becoming more like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.
It would be plausible that someone could reject the argument and reject the premise. It is not plausible to claim that it is not an argument at all.
Ok. So help me out here, what is the premise I was missing?
But to me it seems to touch on the essential issue: Feminist memes are incompatible with HPMoR and feminism would be much improved by becoming more like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.
If you phrase the “essential issue”, that way, then I agree denotationaly but disagree connotationaly. Sure there are bad feminist memes (this shouldn’t be surprising, almost every movement has bad memes), and there are definite trends in feminism which are outright awful. There’s a heavy anti-science attitude in a large part of the feminist movement, and feminism in many forms almost raises identity politics to a weird combination of an art form and a religion. Lots of things could benefit from being more like HPMoR. But that doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t also benefit from some aspects of feminism, it doesn’t mean that the (by and large) healthy memes in feminism are incompatible, and it doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t benefit by taking those ideas into account.
(Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue. It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.)
The only time I’ve been (or at least noticed being) mass-downvoted, it was immediately after having some slight involvement in a discussion of feminism or PUAistry or something of the kind, and making some comments on what, for want of better terminology, I’ll call the pro-women side. I just went looking to see if I could find the incident in question to check my facts; I didn’t (though I didn’t spend ages looking) but did turn up a remark from someone else that they’d seen that happen. I think there is very good evidence for at least one LW participant who has made a habit of punishing people for feministish opinions by this sort of mass-downvoting.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
It seems to me that this isn’t “controversy” but outright abuse, and the kind of abuse that merits severe sanctions, because (1) it poisons the environment for everyone and (2) it seems like an attempt at coercive manipulation and coercive manipulation is generally harmful. I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”...
I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”
As far as I know that feature isn’t implemented. It would certainly be something that could be implemented if it turned out to be sufficiently desired. This would catch lazy mass-downvoters and force dedicated mass-downvoters to use a little more effort and patience.
I wasn’t (for the avoidance of doubt) conjecturing that there’s already a nice UI feature where you click a button and it says “wedrifid has downvoted JoshuaZ’s last 20 comments” but, rather, that (1) the information is present in the system somewhere and (2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
(1) the information is present in the system somewhere
It seems somewhat likely based on the first incarnation of the monthly karma feature.
(2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
This part is the unlikely part. A (system) administrator yes, if (1). A moderator, I doubt it.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue.
It couldn’t be me. I had already downvoted most of your feminism politics comments on perceived merit at the time I noticed them in the recent comments thread so cannot downvote further.
It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.
It was briefly intriguing once, three years ago. Now it is tiresome and predictable.
I have seen many things in many years, and I’m pretty sure I ‘grok the substance’ of the feminist complaints. The problem is twofold:
1) Feminists pattern match for feminist issues, so they sometimes find issues even where issues don’t actually exist, and
2) feminists have integrated feminism into their identity.
The end result is that even minor perceived issues can directly affect their identity, resulting in offense. It is not a good combination, making discourse difficult and littering the discussion landscape with hot-button triggers. It’s a common political pattern—similar logic holds for many different ‘righteous belief’ systems.
Regarding your comment, “We can enjoy problematic things even while acknowledging they’re problematic.”, I personally feel that’s more than a little unfair. In this case at least, the audience that finds it problematic is at best a vocal minority.
Perhaps “We can enjoy things that some people find problematic, while acknowledging that those people find those things problematic.” While a less potent soundbite, I find it more appropriate.
Or perhaps even, “Some people will always find certain things problematic. That doesn’t mean that it’s anybody else’s problem.”
they sometimes find issues even where issues don’t actually exist
Issues are subjective. Something that’s not an issue for you can still be an issue for someone else.
For example, you have a problem with thakil’s phrasing and have offered a “corrected” version. However, you’ve destroyed the point of thakil’s sentence, which is that it’s possible that ((Person A finds X enjoyable) AND (Person A finds X problematic)). I know from direct experience that this is true; I have been Person A in that situation.
If you have not personally been in that situation, it doesn’t follow that another person has not, nor that they are somehow being “unfair”.
Well quite. When I call this something problematic that can be still enjoyed, I find it problematic and still enjoy it!
With regards to whether an issue exists or not.. I mean if readers can perceive it, then it exists. Eliezer can decide that the story he’s going to tell is just going to alienate those readers, or perhaps he can make adjustments now or in future to avoid that. My minor concern is that in some of his responses I don’t feel like he has quire grasped the substance of the complaints: the problems exist, and trying to argue that they do not is probably a hiding to nothing.
With regards to whether an issue exists or not.. I mean if readers can perceive it, then it exists.
How certain are you of this?
If told that a particular tune is present, a significant fraction of people will report that they can hear the tune when presented with recordings of white noise.
If told that a pattern is present, a significant fraction of people will find a pattern in a random distribution of points. (Constellations, for example.)
Indeed. When we are talking about facts about reality, then these kind of things become a problem. When we are talking about people’s critical response to the text, then if someone has that response to a text, then its there for them at least. If multiple people do, then we can argue that
a-there’s something about the text which causes this reaction in a subgroup of people
b-this subgroup of people would have this reaction to every single text.
I assign b a lower probability because this is a reaction borne of particular chapters rather than the entire novel.
This could be an interesting way to measure mindkilling. Get people from different groups, let them hear white noise or see random points and ask them to report how often they hear/see messages offensive to their groups. (For example how often a fundamentalist religious person would hear/see indecent or satanic messages.)
Are we talking about whether or not a measurable phenomenon exists, though? I thought we were talking about a completely subjective kind of thing. You can control for whether or not people are judging levels of sound or patterns or physical comfort inaccurately due to some bias, but is there even such a thing as judging their own emotional reactions inaccurately due to some bias?
I don’t think that it’s judging their own emotional reactions inaccurately due to some bias so much as it is perceiving information in a matter that it results in an unwarranted emotional reaction due to some bias.
A persecution complex is the standard example, I believe. If one is predisposed to believe that they are being attacked, then one sees it everywhere—sometimes they are noticing something real that is subtle enough that others don’t pick it up, and sometimes they are (essentially) selectively interpreting the information to back up their preconceived notions.
I get something like that on an airplane or bus every once in a while. I usually spend about a minute trying to exert some control over the process, but I’ve yet to internally locate the on/off switch for that version of it. (it’s not a normal ear-wig, which can be defused by forcibly thinking of a different arbitrary song; it’s confined to what may or may not be the harmonics of the vehicle I’m on.)
Understood. I had not taken that meaning. In this particular case, I enjoy the work and do not find it problematic, but I acknowledge that other people may find it problematic, in the same way that I acknowledge that other people think vaccines cause autism and that homeopathic medicines work.
Disclaimer: I am thoroughly enjoying HPMOR. That said, I just don’t think Eliezer is quite grokking the substance of feminist complaints.
I agree, but I don’t think you’re quite groking his responses either. His main point is that it’s an exercise in futility to apply critical theory to an incomplete work, in particular one that claims to be more complicated than Death Note; for all we know HG asked AD to help him fake her own death, or maybe she’s been outsmarting everyone from behind the scenes all long. (Though I admit that both of these are unlikely, they would be within the level of “where did that come from?” that EY’s already done)
His main point is that it’s an exercise in futility to apply critical theory to an incomplete work
Then he is simply incorrect. It’s not just what you do, it’s the way that you do it, at all steps along the way. Having an end in mind doesn’t mean you can’t be called out on the means.
Are you saying, in essence, that it doesn’t matter whether this turns out not to be fridging in the end, because Eliezer could have chosen not to use a literary device that looked like fridging, and yet he did?
I think you are missing at least one of his key arguments. A fridging is defined by its purpose, that a female character died for the sake of a male character’s development. And you can’t judge an event’s purpose within the story until you have the full thing in front of you and can see all of that event’s effects, short- and long-term.
IMO, Hermione died because she was in fact the most admirable character in the book. The stakes in our fight against death are all the things that make life worth living, not nameless drones in the security detail dressed in red.
That only serves to shut down discussion. Not only are analysis based on only part of the work fundamentally valid, they are exceedingly popular at the moment, and they are being participated in by the author. Besides...as Akin’s 9th law of spacecraft design states, “Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.”
Whether or not I agree with the conclusion, your argument here is weak.
Calling an opposing viewpoint ridiculous (with formatting for emphasis, no less) does not advance the discussion. It’s just a way of saying “I disagree with you strongly enough to be rude about it”.
Saying that analyses based on only part of the work are fundamentally valid doesn’t automatically make it so. You have to actually justify your claim.
Popularity is no indicator of validity.
If Eliezer is indeed participating in critical discussions of unfinished works, that might make his objection to having the same done to his own hypocritical, but it still tells you nothing about whether doing so is legitimate or not.
You provide no evidence that Akin’s laws of spacecraft design are relevant to this discussion. Having Googled them, I can’t even imagine how most of them could be relevant here.
I do, however, agree that Michelle’s argument can easily be used to shut down discussion, and that this is an issue that needs addressing.
Not my intention. I was attempting to say “Don’t condemn the work as irredeemably anti-feminist or whatever before it’s even finished.” I see how I could have been misunderstood, though.
That would need to be qualified somehow—I don’t care what the second volume of the rules of FATAL are, the system as a whole is irredeemably anti-feminist.
I think this may not be a ‘fridging’ simply because we don’t know what role it plays in the story yet. It may be a Damsel In Distress + Girl In The Refrigerator combo, and it may be something else. It could be both a DiD+GitR AND something else. It could subvert or twist the tropes (Hermione helps fake her own death). It could play them straight but make up for it in other ways (as is already happening with Minerva also gaining a level despite not being the typical beneficiary of this trope, but I’m thinking more so).
What if she died because it was her Destiny? She went to do battle with the troll, because it was her duty to die and be reborn as something greater than she was? It wasn’t Harry’s fault because she chose to be struck down, and will become even more powerful than we could possibly imagine?
If it’s all part of her plan, will you retract the critique?
Possibly. It would depend on when and how that is presented in the story really. There is a problem with critiquing a work in progress which I am aware of, but I think its sort of inevitable with the sort of release schedule this story has.
Disclaimer: I am thoroughly enjoying HPMOR. That said, I just don’t think Eliezer is quite grokking the substance of feminist complaints.
It makes complete sense within the story for all the female characters to do what they do, given what they’ve defined to be and what circumstances have arisen. The death of hermione makes complete sense. But its a fridging, of course its a fridging, because you are the author. You created these characters, and put them into the situation. If you tell a Superman story where he kills, and you set up circumstances where the only thing he can do is kill, then, sure, within the story, we buy that Superman needed to kill in that circumstance. But you, the author, put him in that circumstance, made him and his opponents make choices which led to that death, because you wanted him to kill.
I don’t think Eliezer necessarily intended to make the female characters in this fic weaker than the male ones, more passive, more timid, more prone to mistakes, but thats how it has turned out. And for the defence that this is what he got from canon? Well to be honest its quite clear that many of these characters aren’t the characters from canon. Moody is far more competent, Dumbledore very different, and Quirrel… Yet Hermione and McGonnogal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.
A feminist reading does not negate the quality of something, and I wouldn’t necessarily say the story should be modified at this point at all, but its something to be aware of. We can enjoy problematic things even while acknowledging they’re problematic. HPMOR isn’t the first and won’t be the last piece of fiction to fail at a feminist reading.
I think it’s a bit absurd to call something a “fridging” when the character in question has been around for 90 chapters and had their own major story arc, etc. That’s really getting away from the spirit of what the “women in fridges” idea is complaining about (ie women who only serve to die in order to motivate the male characters).
While personally, I think this is a entirely legitimate direction to take with the story, I’ll point out that on some level those 90 chapters of relevance can exist for the purpose of heightening the impact of the character’s removal.
It’s entirely possible to deliberately write a female character who exists purely for her death to motivate a male character (or vice versa, but it’s likely that fewer people would complain,) who’s well developed and active in the story for a long time, if the author is doing so simply to set up the extent of the motivation. And I think some people are concerned that, given that Eliezer planned Hermione’s death from the very beginning, this is just what he did.
Yup, this is pretty much my point. Of course, this fic being as it is, Hermione may be back alive in a couple of chapters time, which will change things.
Hush, I convinced myself that Snape was really a bad guy in the original books, I want this to be a surprise too.
He was a bad guy. He happens to be a bad guy who has the same broad tribal affiliation.
You mean like Cedric Diggory? (Tv Tropes Warning)
I would be shocked if someone were criticizing comic books for too much planning and coherence, if the Fridge critique referred to the character as a whole rather than her death. So in part this seems like a non-sequitur.
Back to MoR, the “major story arc” could indeed lead to Hermione doing something awesome, and her apparent death might not destroy that possibility for the sake of Harry’s character development. But right now, you’re dismissing the criticism out of hand because of an arc that led some readers to call Hermione silly. You’re talking about a story that led people to question her characterization before now.
As far as malign coherence goes, Eliezer chose to throw in a dig at some strain of feminism during “Self Actualization,” which ends with Harry and some men saving Hermione and friends. Now, Eliezer has said that he made SA longer than it strictly needed to be because he didn’t realize he could take a different road to setting up (an arc where Harry saves her again, and she suffers and feels incompetent and stupid before her apparent death). But in a finished work, it would look like he put all this in for a reason. And looking back from chapter 92, a lot of it does in fact look like deliberate trolling of feminists.
Were this a finished work, certain feminists reaching chapter 89-92 could reasonably delete the file. And if I told them that later chapters improve the issues in question, I would not expect to be believed without major spoilers. Because I’m more like (a dumber version of) Eliezer than they are, and I still don’t know what the Hell he’s doing.
You know, I thought 89 trolled feminists the most.
Er thanks, that was an odd mistake on my part. Prime, even.
… did I just get outdone?
That’s not what fridging is- it refers to a specific type of death, where a female character is killed by a villain and left for the hero to find, specifically for the purpose of affecting the hero mentally. We don’t know yet who killed Hermione and why, but it’s possible that it was meant as a fridging.
TvTropes:
Also keep in mind the tropes are not bad.
That might have some validity, but the validity is detracted by the difference in scale in what Hermione and Harry have dealt with. Harry has been discovering new magic (some small amount with Hermione but only because he helped), destroying avatars of death, rescuing people from prison, putting the son of the most evil person around on the past to redemption. Hermione’s arcs consist mainly of fighting school bullies, and even doing that to a large extent with Harry handling a large fraction of the problem, and occasionally beating Harry in a mock combat situation where he was clearly holding back. It is also noteworthy that Hermione’s death occurred after there were already largescale complaints about the role of women (and Hermione) in the story. And Hermione’s death didn’t even accomplish much: she wasn’t saving the life of another student for example (a student getting in the way of the troll would have been an obvious thing to matter), and despite all her intelligence, she never in the course of her arc developed new magic or the like.
This is only relative to Harry though. Draco didn’t even start doing anything until he was very heavily prompted by Harry, and throughout the story i get the impression that Draco was learning more from Harry than Harry was from Draco. Is Hermione really doing worse than any male student other than Harry?
I expect that would have helped a lot, especially if Hermione successfully rescued said hypothetical student (Harry may have killed the troll, but he failed at the whole rescue thing). We don’t really know what Hermione was doing before running into the troll, or how it so quickly went from in the dungeons to on a terrace, or how the troll got into the dungeons rather than a more obvious way in to Hogwarts (was Hermione going to the dungeons? The Ravenclaw girls’ dorms? Somewhere else entirely?).
Amelia Bones, Susan Bones, Daphne Greengrass, Padme Patil (and even more minor characters like Hannah Abbot and Tracey Davis) are all significantly stronger and more relevant characters in this one than they ever were in the Harry Potter series.
If you compare ratio of the genders of relevant characters, HPMOR is better than the original Harry Potter ever was. You say Hermione is as flawed as in the original but you forget that it was Ron who was completely downgraded to peripheral status.
And as Velorien said, fridging is defined by its narrative purpose, and we don’t know its narrative purpose yet.
On the other hand, major female characters Luna and Ginny are entirely absent from HPMOR. I guess it was inevitable given the decision to make the story take place only within Harry’s first year (since they are not in school yet) but I would have loved to see an HPMOR version of either of them.
They’re not old enough to be in Hogwarts yet.
Luna isn’t entirely absent, she’s been mentioned by name and her own musings have been published as fact in the Quibbler.
Ginny does seem to be entirely absent so far though.
Not so—she was involved in Fred and George’s plot in some way (otherwise she would kill them upon seeing her photo in the newspaper).
No way—she would kill them at seeing her picture in the newspaper...if she knew it was them. They were keeping their name out of it at least partially to save their necks from their family.
You’re right, I had forgotten the Marriage Law plot.
Yeah I meant to mention Amelia Bones, who is by far the most competent female character we’ve encountered thus far. She is not, of course, a particularly major character thus far.
I guess when a character has an exciting fight off stage and we as readers perceive them as mortally wounded and helpless, and our male character swears vengeance at their death.. thats pretty much fridging to me. Regardless of the conclusion, the next few chapters at least will be devoted to Harry’s actions which are entirely predicated on hermione’s death.
If she had, as some suggested, died saving someone, as part of her arc, if we’d seen more of her fight, I do think that scene would have come across better. There may, of course, be excellent reasons that we did not get to observe that scene: perhaps we’ll find out. I’m talking about the response now, and immediate feelings associated with that.
Sorry, how are Hermione and McGonagall, “essentially as flawed as they were in the original text”, exactly? I always saw their characters as being a step up from their original descriptions, and it’s clear that the difficulties that Eliezer is having them overcome are not random things that no other characters have, but rather, the sorts of problems with thinking we see in the real world. Hermione and McGonagall have made more progress over the book than many of the other characters. You can point out that this means they started out weaker, but there are clear, justifiable reasons for this, and not simply downgrading all the females.
You have to acknowledge the backgrounds of these characters.
Moody? Dark Wizard hunter for a hundred years. You can’t expect McGonagall to be able to compete with that. Quirrell? In order for the story to work, we needed a villain that would be a match for the upgraded Harry, so it’s obvious why he would need to be seriously ramped up. Dumbledore? After defeating Grindlewald, he had to wage the war against Voldemort for ten years, so his character needed to be the sort that could realistically withstand that pressure.
While I can’t pretend to know exactly what Eliezer meant, I suspect these sorts of things are what he was referring to when he said canon was constraining him. If you’re going to turn the PotterVerse into a world that makes sense, with actual cause and effect, you need Dumbledore to plausibly be able to have accomplished what he did, and unfortunately canon does not give him a strong backstory for a character like McGonagall. At least, not a backstory as strong as these other characters have, like Moody or Dumbledore.
If you’re going to go out and call HPMOR problematic, and say it fails at a feminist reading, you need to at least understand why the story is like this.
I’m not even going to go into the fridging comment.
I do understand why the story is like that, and, to be clear, its fine for HPMOR to fail a feminist critique! Lots of fantastic stories fail feminists critiques: this will bug some readers more than others, and it might be useful for a particular author to consider that a particular choice might alienate some readers because of the history.
Yes, there are lots of great reasons for Moody and Dumbledore to be how they are, but McGonnogal is an order member, so could easily be different (and in earlier chapters, often is!) .
To be clear, I do think this story in general does portray women pretty well, but the bullying arc and this death feel like misfires because they embody certain tropes without, perhaps, intending to.
If it’s okay for something to fail a critique, doesn’t that kind of mean there’s something wrong with the critique?
And I think there is something wrong with the critique. You don’t quite seem to appreciate the point Eliezer is making in his response.
I take it as a given that it is perfectly legitimate to have the main character of a story motivated by the death of his best friend. It is a premise of the whole endeavor that the main character is a super-smart Harry. So now we have to find a friend. Who could that naturally be? Well, it so happens that the smartest student in Harry’s year in the original is a girl; naturally, she will now be the second-smartest student in the class, because otherwise we’d have to dumb her down. She has the brains and personality to be Harry’s friend—so unless Eliezer takes additional pains to move further away from the original, she is going to be that friend. And it just so happens that she is female, which is entirely irrelevant.
Indeed, one could also turn it around and point out that it’s a positive thing that the person smart enough to be such good friends with Harry that their death motivates him suitably is a girl. But that would be equally besides the point, because Eliezer never chose her gender. The character was already there, gender included, and everything just falls into place as it is. He would have had to distort the original even further to prevent this; which is not the point of such a derivative work, and also the same people who have complained now would then probably have complained about him putting a smart and important female character from the original into a different, necessarily less central role, or removing her altogether (like Ron, who was unusable).
So what exactly is it that people are complaining about? Isn’t this really a problem with their own pattern-matching, which in this case turns out to be inappropriate? Maybe it’s making them uncomfortable, but that’s their problem; it’s not something on the basis of which to critique the story, because we can objectively argue that the pattern-matching went awry. Issues are not a purely subjective thing.
Note that this takes care only of the alleged fridging issue. It does not address the S.P.H.E.W. arc, which is more suspect of being genuinely problematic. I found it at least weird.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn’t to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one’s past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.
For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/tag/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/
When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you’re talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you’re making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn’t have used the language of “fail” and “succeed”.
Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn’t particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it’s simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don’t think anybody will deny this.
Now, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it’s legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you’re not saying it shouldn’t conform to these pattern, I think it’s not relevant. And the reason is this:
I’m not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I’m saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don’t count; in the same way that someone who doesn’t speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn’t count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don’t really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn’t so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione’s fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
These things seem to me to work like implicatures. “The author could have told the story in a different way. But she didn’t, she told the story in a way conforming to this or that culturally prevalent pattern. Interesting.”. But if the author couldn’t have told it in any other way anyway and the conformity with the pattern is a purely accidental property and the cultural prevalence of the pattern has nothing to do with anything in how it came about, then this isn’t interesting.
You appear to be saying that readers are unfair to authors. Well, yes, they are.
That sounds a lot like Conservation of Expected Evidence to me, by analogy if not quite literally.
The point is that once an author is made aware of a trope which can be off putting to some readers, they can attempt to avoid it in future. Obviously the author doesn’t have to, and sometimes this particular trope might be necessary, but I don’t think its bad to go “hey, this doesn’t work for me for x y and z reasons”.
From a story telling point of view, ignoring feminism for a minute, I personally find characters dying “randomly” unsatisfying. Joss Whedon does this occasionally, killing off characters essentially at random, rather than letting said character have a heroic moment then dying. I appreciate that this is deeply realistic, but the story lover in me rebels. This is, of course, a different issue from the one I’m approaching, but I wonder if it isn’t adding to some people’s reaction.
This was anything but a random death. It was foreshadowed for a long time, we knew who’d do it and why, it’s an integral part of the main storyline. Part of the story worked exactly because we were expecting this, but the characters were not.
Whether this is a reasonable request depends very much on whether the readers in question are themselves reasonable in being putt off by the trope.
Well, you can of course argue that Hermione, being the second smartest first year student, is the obvious candidate for te role of the best friend who dies too early, do you think it’d be equally plausible if Eliezer had killed Neville? Neville should be able to stand just as close to Harry as Hermione did (since Harry has not hit puberty yet, and thinks girls are “icky”), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that Neville’s death could have brought forth the same emotions both in Harry and in the readers that Hermione’s death did. Eliezer probably also knows this and thus chose Hermione to die.
Yes, exactly. Neville’s death would not have created these emotions, but the reason is not that he is male and Hermione is female. Neville should not be able to stand just as close to Harry. Neville is in no position to be anything as close to a comrade or equal as Hermione was. Neville is just someone who Harry has sympathy for and by whose development Harry was impressed. This is a very different thing from the “the two of us are different from the rest of the world” connection that he quickly developed with Hermione at the beginning (and which then faded off a bit, not least due to the questionable SPHEW arc).
I think this may be taking Harry at his word a bit too much when it comes to his views on Hermione. Just because Harry allways speaks in “rationalist” vocabulary, doesn’t mean he is allways rational or free of bias. He is often unfair to people when he’s emotional. And his blind spot for Quirrel is a mile wide. “It was the defense professor last year, and the year before that, and the year before that...” Someone actualy starting from priors and adjusting finds Quirrel very quickly, particularly when you factor in the sense of doom.
Harry thinks he doesn’t like Hermione that way, Harry’s dad is pretty sure he does. I think regarding Harry’s statements as the more objective one here may be a mistake.
In my experience, relatives are pretty sure the kid likes any friend of the opposite gender that way if they get brought to their attention. At least, in the culture in my general area.
Harry seems to think of puberty as purely binary. It’s not; it’s a gradual process. I don’t know what deficiency in Harry’s education led him to think this way, but it fumbles all of his thoughts about puberty.
Harry almost seems to be reasoning as follows:
I’m not sexually attracted to anybody.
Therefore, I haven’t hit puberty yet.
Therefore, I can’t possibly be romantically attracted to anybody.
Puberty doesn’t work that way.
Or, Harry is summarizing a wide variety of observations on the topic of puberty in a pithy and relatively un-embarrassing fashion. We don’t know Harry’s actual basis for claiming that he hasn’t yet begun puberty, but his comments on the subject are just a little too flippant to be the complete truth.
Real adolescents are often stunningly ignorant of how puberty works, despite all efforts to educate them otherwise...
Quite true. My ideas at Harry’s age were actually very much like Harry’s, and I didn’t recognise my own first puberty-influenced romantic attractions (at, let me see, probably the age of 10, and at least two years before I felt any sexual attraction to anybody). I just expected Harry himself to know better.
Yet it is extremely out of character for Harry to fail to have conducted even minimal research on a phenomenon which will drastically impact his thinking and emotions as soon as it inevitably kicks in within the next couple of years.
He clearly knows about hormones and etc., he just doesn’t know the details of the process.
How much hindsight bias are you operating under? What is “minimal research” on puberty when one is eleven-twelve?
Whatever “minimal research” is, he has vastly surpassed it in most areas where he’s done any research at all, from physics and rationality to transfiguration and potions. It seems nonsensical to expect less of him in one area than all the others without a very good reason.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, keep in mind that tropes are not bad.
Indeed. The point is with fridging is that it is not an inherently bad thing, but by repetition, and by being predominately women being fridged to motivate men, it begins to be unfortunate.
While we’re on the subject of bringing in larger context, I’d like to point out the context of your complaint: The SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) regularly goes off the rails over perceived instances of people not being politically correct enough. One recent incident involved the (female) editor of the SFWA bulletin being forced to resign over the following examples of “sexism”:
1) A column in the bulletin used the word “lady” to refer to women and complemented some of them on their appearance.
2) The same issue had a bikini-clad warrior woman on the cover.
This was enough to cause a huge controversy. However, the authors of said column subsequently published another column defending their previous column and pointing out how absurd the controversy was and in particular that “lady” is not a slur. This was considered completely beyond the pail and resulted in the above mentioned resignation as well as the bulletin being put on a six-month hiatus while the issue was being investigated.
Edit: Here are Andrew Fox’s and Sarah Hoyt’s articles on the subject.
Your description of the incident does not seem to be very complete or accurate.
Fortunately, others have written about it — such as E. Catherine Tobler’s open letter, this io9 article … and, of course, SFWA president John Scalzi’s statement.
I just looked through the articles you linked to and haven’t noticed anything that disagrees with my summary (I have also looked through many others you did not link to before posting my comment). Perhaps you could describe what specific additional information you think my summary is missing.
I’m not interested in having a discussion of the incident; I’m interested in directing readers of your comment to where they can find out more. Any particular sources you suggest?
Well, the sources you side are as decent as any in conveying the facts once one gets past the fact that they’re written as insane troll logic diatribes (or rather two are such diatribes and one was written by someone begging for mercy from said insane trolls). As for sources I’d recommend well Andrew Fox’s and Sarah Hoyt’s accounts are more reasonable, but they may come off as alarmist exaggeration until one realizes how common the insane trolls are.
One of the more obvious details noted in fubarobfusco’s articles is the complaints about how the articles about the female authors had much attention to female authors’ physical appearances. That was a major source of the complaints, especially in the context that one would not see similar such remarks about male authors. This isn’t the only difference, only one of the ones that jumps out.
Um, I noted that in my summary.
There’s a severe scale difference here in description. This wasn’t just complements but more strong language. Frankly, I’m inclined to think the whole thing did get blown out of proportion, although I suspect that the primary reasons for it had as much to do with the never ending internal politics of SFWA which seems to spend more of its time as a drama factory than anything else, as much as it had to do with feminism. But even given that, it still seemed like your summary downplayed the concerns.
Incidentally, I’m slightly curious if you downvoted my comment and fubarobfusco’s comment; both comments were downvoted within a few seconds of your replies. I don’t particular care much about karma one way or another, but it probably isn’t a great idea to downvote people one is having a discussion with if one is going to have any minimal hope of caring out a productive conversation. Among other issues, it can easily increase cognitive dissonance levels and make it substantially harder to accept an argument from the person one is talking to.
I’m not entirely sure what this has got to do with my comments, other than it is an issue related to feminism in science fiction and fantasy writing. I don’t really want to get into this argument, but would suggest simply that it this situation is perhaps more complicated than your post suggests.
Both arguments are based on the position that while something is not inherently bad (e.g., the frigging trope, complaining about aspects of a story that bother you), this instance of it is a problem because of the larger social context in which it is embedded.
Hermione is the most admirable character in HPMOR, and it looks like McGonagal could soon join her at the top. If their portrayal is an affront to feminism, it’s feminism that has the problem, not HPMOR.
Excellent point.
This isn’t an argument, but a conclusion. It also misses the primary issues at hand here. Hermione might be a very impressive character in any other story, but her total accomplishment set when compared to the primary male character is much smaller. Hermione fights bullies (with Harry’s help). Harry’s equivalent accomplishment: rescuing a prisoner from the most secure prison in the world. Harry, finds a way to kill an avatar of death. Hermione is killed by a troll, without even saving someone’s life to show for it. Etc. The problem here is not feminism.
I said most admirable, not most powerful.
But let’s take your example as is, because it demonstrates another point. When Hermione fought bullies, that actually brought about a lasting change in Hogwarts. Compare the good of that accomplishment to the good of setting free one prisoner from Azkaban, the one most likely, capable, and intent on wreaking destruction in the world.
Who has done more good? I don’t think that’s a slam dunk win for Harry, and could be a devastating loss.
In a similar way, recall that Hermione won the first battle of the generals because neither Harry nor Draco knew how to effectively organize a group of people to a shared goal. Also, if Harry is supposed to learn goodness from Hermione, isn’t that a rather huge power, determining whether the world gets one more Voldemort, or one more Dumbledore? Influence of others is power to do good as well. Similarly, it’s McGonagall who actually runs Hogwarts and sets an example for students, not Dumbledore.
Hermione had a lasting power for good. Harry is “exceptionally good at killing things”. If you want something killed, you want Harry on your side. Or Quirrell. Or Voldemort. Or Dumbledore. If you wanted a leader to delegate authority to run an organization to build something good instead of destroy something evil, you want Hermione without question. Same for McGonagall.
The main change between HPMOR and canon is the hugely increased power, intelligence, capability, and potential for evil of the protagonist, who yes, we assume has a penis. If your mind pattern matches this as an affront to women everywhere, you have a problem.
So to the first part, lasting amount of good from a long-term consequentialist standpoint isn’t the same as how much impact someone has. And if one is trying to think of long-term issues then Harry has also discovered how to destroy otherwise unkillable creatures, and has set Draco Malfoy on the path to redemption. Even if Harry dies tomorrow, the total utility of there being one less dementor in the world will add up a lot over the long term. (In canon dementors can reproduce, but I strongly suspect this isn’t the case in HPMOR.)
This isn’t the only change. There’s also a massive increase in power, intelligence and capability of the antagonist, who, yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Dumbledore’s genre awareness and awareness of the cost of his actions to others, and his general power level (using Time Turners), who yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Draco Malfoy’s manipulative skill, who yes, we assume has a penis.
Moreover, while some female characters have become more interesting (Daphne and Tracy are obvious examples), they still are orders of magnitude less important. And there have been other possible options which could have been interesting. For example, rather than just having Petunia as a helpless housewife, while her husband is a professor, Eliezer could have had written something where she was also an academic, or a successful businesswoman, or a lot.
I’m not sure if this is a strawman or a genuine failure on my part (and possibly others who are concerned) to explain our concerns. No one anywhere in either this discussion thread or the previous HPMOR discussion thread has made the argument “that this is a general affront to women everywhere”. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t believe that. (Introspecting quickly, it is possible that my stated and actual beliefs don’t align. However, if I did think that it was such an affront I douubt, I would have used as my interesting icebreaker fact last Friday that I had cosplayed as a character from a Harry Potter fanfic, and then used that as a way of getting an opportunity to tell people to read Methods of Rationality.)
To state it more explicitly problem is that this is a set of not great role models. My guess is that close to half the readers of HPMR, or certainly a large fraction, are female, and likely pretty young, which makes them impressionable. So, subtle (or not so subtle) differences in what male and female protagonists can do are important. And if some young girl gets pushed slightly over the edge by this into not becoming a chemist or a biologist, or just becoming interested in rationality, we all lose. Moreover, if part of the goal of the story is to get people as a whole interested in rationality and Less Wrong, then for women of all ages, having a substantially weaker female lead is going to make it harder for them to identify with the characters, and all the more so, when that weaker female is (apparently) killed off without even saving anyone in the process.
There’s a lot of room for legitimate concerns without thinking that this is an affront to women everywhere.
If the issue is the set of role models, I submit that Hermione is the best role model in the book.
You can’t model yourself after Harry, redo your birth, and have a superhuman dark side to call on. Similarly, you can’t choose to have a university professor as a parent, who can serve as a role model to you in scientific method, and fully support your efforts in studying science. You can’t trade in your two dentist parents, who think your intelligence is “cute’, for parents who will respect and support your gifts.
But you can be diligent, hard working, honest, caring, and brave. You can do what is right. Though you won’t be as smart as Hermione, she is the best role model the book has to offer.
Because it’s much easier to identify with a 10 year old with a superhuman dark side who wants minions and a sparkly throne. Much healthier too.
Role models in fictional works are by nature characters who are interesting more than they are perfect role models. No one wants to read a story about a character who is perfectly good, goes to classes every day, and never gets in trouble. The nature of role models is more subtle than simply being good. For a young child, they aren’t someone with magical talent, but they can still identify with characters with magical talent, and that’s easier when the character is of the same gender. (I remember at last year’s Vericon there was a panel on feminism and science-fiction and fantasy, and every single female author on the panel, including Tamora Pierce, expressed how much frustration they had growing up with the depiction of female characters, not just that they weren’t protagonists, but that when they were a side-kick or a secondary protagonist, how utterly boring they would be. This is a very old set of problems.)
That’s assuming that Draco’s half-year of interacting with his new friend can’t be countervailed by his subsequent several years of interacting with his loving-but-evil father. I would barely rate that as a possibility, much less an obvious assumption.
The question of Draco does have interesting is-HPMOR-feminist implications, though. Suppose we swapped the genders of Draco and Hermione, both of whom just had many of their often-similar arcs cut short for very-similar reasons. Now, Herman is the one who maintains his convictions in the face of an overwhelming villainous threat, and so the villain is forced to murder him via a plot using the third most perfect killing machine in nature, properly prepared using sabotage and magical upgrades because otherwise the troll would have lost. Now, Draca is the one who gets taken out of the action by half-a-plot (a plot which depends on Draca making rash egotistical mistakes), but she survives under her father’s thumb because ending her influence on Harry doesn’t even take killing her. Did the story just become more gender-equal, or less?
I hope I understand your model correctly as “p(girl scientist | no HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | current HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | feminist HPMoR)”.
I wouldn’t call it “feminist HPMoR”- as I’ve said before, there’s a big difference between a feminist tract and simply taking into account certain concerns that might be described as feminist. But yes, I agree that’s an accurate summary of the model (heck I wouldn’t have gone and told a 16 year old girl to read it this weekend if that weren’t my model).
On what do you base this guess?
Primarily anecdotal and a function of who I know who is reading it, along with the fact that in general fanfic is a heavily female media form, with a lot of young people. From my personal sample, I’d say that about 60% of readers I know are male, but since I’m friends with substantially more men than women, that suggests that that percentage (tentatively) should be correct towards 50⁄50.
demonstrating that, unlike Hermione, he can’t distinguish dangerous quests with high potential pay-offs from dangerous quests that will make the world worse even if he succeeds.
Which is true, but also completely missing the point. What matters to a large extent is the scale of things. Harry does big stuff. Sometimes that results in what may end up as massive screw ups, but his total scale of what he is impacting is much larger.
Just to be clear, the name of the story in question is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which was based off of a series of seven books also titled with the name “Harry Potter”. The name of the story is not “Hermione Granger and the Methods of Rationality”. If it were, then yes, I would expect to see her impact be the larger one.
In the original though, Hermione does big stuff. It is her Time-Turner that saves things in book 3. And throughout the series (with the exception of book 7 where Rowling took a somewhat anti-rationalist stance), it almost always Hermione that figures out what the big plot is or the like. Part of why Hermione in fact looks so much weaker here is because she was the most rational character in the original, and increasing Harry’s skill set while doing much less to hers makes her look less impressive.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Hermione wasn’t powered up at all.
Without diminishing the arguments of the feminist side, I think that’s pretty damn impressive.
If someone wrote a book where all the #Gender1′s were Stalins, each responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, and all the #Gender2′s were ordinary people who didn’t do much, I think that would be an anti-#Gender1 story, even though it’s the #Gender1′s who do big stuff.
It might be anti-both. If you insinuate that everyone of gender 1 is liable to become a genocidal dictator, that’s an insult to people of gender 1. If you insinuate that no one of gender 2 is liable to do anything substantial, that’s an insult to people of gender 2. Neither insult ceases to be insulting merely because you said something bad about the other people too.
It’s not about whether the story is pro-women or anti-women. It’s about whether the story reiterates common tropes that reinforce stereotyped roles for women and men that are harmful to one or both.
The evidence that the traditional roles are harmful appears to be lacking.
Some people do not prefer the role traditionally assigned to them. The existence of strong stereotyped roles makes it harder to do anything else. That seems sufficient to establish harm.
Yes, it is. One of the premises in the simple syllogism is implied and is sufficiently obvious as to make a claim that it is not an argument disingenuous. It would be plausible that someone could reject the argument and reject the premise. It is not plausible to claim that it is not an argument at all.
It misses the issues that you consider primary. But to me it seems to touch on the essential issue: Feminist memes are incompatible with HPMoR and feminism would be much improved by becoming more like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.
Ok. So help me out here, what is the premise I was missing?
If you phrase the “essential issue”, that way, then I agree denotationaly but disagree connotationaly. Sure there are bad feminist memes (this shouldn’t be surprising, almost every movement has bad memes), and there are definite trends in feminism which are outright awful. There’s a heavy anti-science attitude in a large part of the feminist movement, and feminism in many forms almost raises identity politics to a weird combination of an art form and a religion. Lots of things could benefit from being more like HPMoR. But that doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t also benefit from some aspects of feminism, it doesn’t mean that the (by and large) healthy memes in feminism are incompatible, and it doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t benefit by taking those ideas into account.
(Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue. It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.)
The only time I’ve been (or at least noticed being) mass-downvoted, it was immediately after having some slight involvement in a discussion of feminism or PUAistry or something of the kind, and making some comments on what, for want of better terminology, I’ll call the pro-women side. I just went looking to see if I could find the incident in question to check my facts; I didn’t (though I didn’t spend ages looking) but did turn up a remark from someone else that they’d seen that happen. I think there is very good evidence for at least one LW participant who has made a habit of punishing people for feministish opinions by this sort of mass-downvoting.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
It seems to me that this isn’t “controversy” but outright abuse, and the kind of abuse that merits severe sanctions, because (1) it poisons the environment for everyone and (2) it seems like an attempt at coercive manipulation and coercive manipulation is generally harmful. I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”...
As far as I know that feature isn’t implemented. It would certainly be something that could be implemented if it turned out to be sufficiently desired. This would catch lazy mass-downvoters and force dedicated mass-downvoters to use a little more effort and patience.
I wasn’t (for the avoidance of doubt) conjecturing that there’s already a nice UI feature where you click a button and it says “wedrifid has downvoted JoshuaZ’s last 20 comments” but, rather, that (1) the information is present in the system somewhere and (2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
It seems somewhat likely based on the first incarnation of the monthly karma feature.
This part is the unlikely part. A (system) administrator yes, if (1). A moderator, I doubt it.
Yeah, you might be right; perhaps the only way of getting at it is querying the database directly.
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
It couldn’t be me. I had already downvoted most of your feminism politics comments on perceived merit at the time I noticed them in the recent comments thread so cannot downvote further.
It was briefly intriguing once, three years ago. Now it is tiresome and predictable.
I applaud your patience and diligence. I couldn’t muster more than a shrug and a “whatever” in my head.
Haters gonna hate.
I have seen many things in many years, and I’m pretty sure I ‘grok the substance’ of the feminist complaints. The problem is twofold:
1) Feminists pattern match for feminist issues, so they sometimes find issues even where issues don’t actually exist, and
2) feminists have integrated feminism into their identity.
The end result is that even minor perceived issues can directly affect their identity, resulting in offense. It is not a good combination, making discourse difficult and littering the discussion landscape with hot-button triggers. It’s a common political pattern—similar logic holds for many different ‘righteous belief’ systems.
Regarding your comment, “We can enjoy problematic things even while acknowledging they’re problematic.”, I personally feel that’s more than a little unfair. In this case at least, the audience that finds it problematic is at best a vocal minority.
Perhaps “We can enjoy things that some people find problematic, while acknowledging that those people find those things problematic.” While a less potent soundbite, I find it more appropriate.
Or perhaps even, “Some people will always find certain things problematic. That doesn’t mean that it’s anybody else’s problem.”
Issues are subjective. Something that’s not an issue for you can still be an issue for someone else.
For example, you have a problem with thakil’s phrasing and have offered a “corrected” version. However, you’ve destroyed the point of thakil’s sentence, which is that it’s possible that ((Person A finds X enjoyable) AND (Person A finds X problematic)). I know from direct experience that this is true; I have been Person A in that situation.
If you have not personally been in that situation, it doesn’t follow that another person has not, nor that they are somehow being “unfair”.
Well quite. When I call this something problematic that can be still enjoyed, I find it problematic and still enjoy it!
With regards to whether an issue exists or not.. I mean if readers can perceive it, then it exists. Eliezer can decide that the story he’s going to tell is just going to alienate those readers, or perhaps he can make adjustments now or in future to avoid that. My minor concern is that in some of his responses I don’t feel like he has quire grasped the substance of the complaints: the problems exist, and trying to argue that they do not is probably a hiding to nothing.
How certain are you of this?
If told that a particular tune is present, a significant fraction of people will report that they can hear the tune when presented with recordings of white noise.
If told that a pattern is present, a significant fraction of people will find a pattern in a random distribution of points. (Constellations, for example.)
Indeed. When we are talking about facts about reality, then these kind of things become a problem. When we are talking about people’s critical response to the text, then if someone has that response to a text, then its there for them at least. If multiple people do, then we can argue that
a-there’s something about the text which causes this reaction in a subgroup of people b-this subgroup of people would have this reaction to every single text.
I assign b a lower probability because this is a reaction borne of particular chapters rather than the entire novel.
This could be an interesting way to measure mindkilling. Get people from different groups, let them hear white noise or see random points and ask them to report how often they hear/see messages offensive to their groups. (For example how often a fundamentalist religious person would hear/see indecent or satanic messages.)
Are we talking about whether or not a measurable phenomenon exists, though? I thought we were talking about a completely subjective kind of thing. You can control for whether or not people are judging levels of sound or patterns or physical comfort inaccurately due to some bias, but is there even such a thing as judging their own emotional reactions inaccurately due to some bias?
I don’t think that it’s judging their own emotional reactions inaccurately due to some bias so much as it is perceiving information in a matter that it results in an unwarranted emotional reaction due to some bias.
A persecution complex is the standard example, I believe. If one is predisposed to believe that they are being attacked, then one sees it everywhere—sometimes they are noticing something real that is subtle enough that others don’t pick it up, and sometimes they are (essentially) selectively interpreting the information to back up their preconceived notions.
I get something like that on an airplane or bus every once in a while. I usually spend about a minute trying to exert some control over the process, but I’ve yet to internally locate the on/off switch for that version of it. (it’s not a normal ear-wig, which can be defused by forcibly thinking of a different arbitrary song; it’s confined to what may or may not be the harmonics of the vehicle I’m on.)
Then it is an issue for them.
Projecting the problem outwards is just that—seeing the problem where the problem isn’t
Understood. I had not taken that meaning. In this particular case, I enjoy the work and do not find it problematic, but I acknowledge that other people may find it problematic, in the same way that I acknowledge that other people think vaccines cause autism and that homeopathic medicines work.
I agree, but I don’t think you’re quite groking his responses either. His main point is that it’s an exercise in futility to apply critical theory to an incomplete work, in particular one that claims to be more complicated than Death Note; for all we know HG asked AD to help him fake her own death, or maybe she’s been outsmarting everyone from behind the scenes all long. (Though I admit that both of these are unlikely, they would be within the level of “where did that come from?” that EY’s already done)
Then he is simply incorrect. It’s not just what you do, it’s the way that you do it, at all steps along the way. Having an end in mind doesn’t mean you can’t be called out on the means.
Are you saying, in essence, that it doesn’t matter whether this turns out not to be fridging in the end, because Eliezer could have chosen not to use a literary device that looked like fridging, and yet he did?
It is a fridging. It’s using fridging as a means to an end.
Are you using “fridging” as interchangeable with “female character’s death”? If not, how are you using it?
I think you are missing at least one of his key arguments. A fridging is defined by its purpose, that a female character died for the sake of a male character’s development. And you can’t judge an event’s purpose within the story until you have the full thing in front of you and can see all of that event’s effects, short- and long-term.
IMO, Hermione died because she was in fact the most admirable character in the book. The stakes in our fight against death are all the things that make life worth living, not nameless drones in the security detail dressed in red.
Ensign Ricky’s friends and family will miss him as much as Kirk will miss Spock.
I believe the point is that the viewers don’t.
Alright, the droid armies in “attack of the clones.”
I think it would be prudent to wait until the story is completed to make those kinds of judgements. We simply do not know the intention yet.
That’s ridiculous.
That only serves to shut down discussion. Not only are analysis based on only part of the work fundamentally valid, they are exceedingly popular at the moment, and they are being participated in by the author. Besides...as Akin’s 9th law of spacecraft design states, “Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.”
Whether or not I agree with the conclusion, your argument here is weak.
Calling an opposing viewpoint ridiculous (with formatting for emphasis, no less) does not advance the discussion. It’s just a way of saying “I disagree with you strongly enough to be rude about it”.
Saying that analyses based on only part of the work are fundamentally valid doesn’t automatically make it so. You have to actually justify your claim.
Popularity is no indicator of validity.
If Eliezer is indeed participating in critical discussions of unfinished works, that might make his objection to having the same done to his own hypocritical, but it still tells you nothing about whether doing so is legitimate or not.
You provide no evidence that Akin’s laws of spacecraft design are relevant to this discussion. Having Googled them, I can’t even imagine how most of them could be relevant here.
I do, however, agree that Michelle’s argument can easily be used to shut down discussion, and that this is an issue that needs addressing.
Not my intention. I was attempting to say “Don’t condemn the work as irredeemably anti-feminist or whatever before it’s even finished.” I see how I could have been misunderstood, though.
That would need to be qualified somehow—I don’t care what the second volume of the rules of FATAL are, the system as a whole is irredeemably anti-feminist.
I think this may not be a ‘fridging’ simply because we don’t know what role it plays in the story yet. It may be a Damsel In Distress + Girl In The Refrigerator combo, and it may be something else. It could be both a DiD+GitR AND something else. It could subvert or twist the tropes (Hermione helps fake her own death). It could play them straight but make up for it in other ways (as is already happening with Minerva also gaining a level despite not being the typical beneficiary of this trope, but I’m thinking more so).
What if Hermione dying was NOT to motivate Harry?
What if she died because it was her Destiny? She went to do battle with the troll, because it was her duty to die and be reborn as something greater than she was? It wasn’t Harry’s fault because she chose to be struck down, and will become even more powerful than we could possibly imagine?
If it’s all part of her plan, will you retract the critique?
I certainly will. Do you think there’s any appreciable chance that Eliezer will do that, and it will be awesome? I’m not seeing it.
Possibly. It would depend on when and how that is presented in the story really. There is a problem with critiquing a work in progress which I am aware of, but I think its sort of inevitable with the sort of release schedule this story has.
Given how EY seems to have developed his overall plot out of what appeared in the books, this already isn’t far from the truth.