I read...a fair bit of it (up to around the point where Harry and Hermione's families started shipping them, and then I lost spoons for reading it and then I heard that Hermione got killed off and decided against reading any more), but I am Not Good at managing to actually get fic that's longer than drabble-length written. Also, I'm not even sure where I'd start with a spitefic.
It is 122 chapters and who has the goddamn time (eliezer yudkowsky also very deliberately wrote it as a tract trying to convert readers to his way of thinking, and picked Harry Potter because lots of people like Harry Potter, and I don’t need to be putting that in my head)
God, MoR. My fifty-something father, who spent over a decade being totally confused and blank-eyed-thousand-yard-stare-frozen-smile over his children's fanfic-reading habits, recently started trying to tell me about this really interesting Harry Potter fanfic he started reading, he has it right there on his kindle, and he doesn't know if I've ever heard of it, but it has some cool ideas and if I have the chance maybe I could check it out-- ;u;
With regards to spitefics, maybe just one scene based on a particularly egregious piece of stupidity like the currency thing?
okay that’s cute and wonderful actually MoR has, as far as I can tell, fallen pretty far out of the general consciousness except in its specific circles, if you didn’t reference it directly I doubt anyone would twig on unless they’d read it themselves
It is pretty darn adorable! But also it is very much dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge XD Spoiler: gif
This kind of smug pointing out plot holes that aren't actually plot holes is making me think of my early teens and some nonsense on Redwall fanboards about "haha the characters must not have ever invented toilets because we don't see anyone use one", and I'm like "do you have NO CONCEPT of conservation of detail?"
Yeah, EY had this whole rant in why Dementors couldn’t possibly represent clinical depression, they actually must represent death, and the whole thing was based on a premise that confused the properties of dementors and boggarts.* “OK let’s look at this like a CLEVER person would look at it, what looks different to everyone who sees it?” A boggan boggart, Mr. Yudkowsky. Read the fucking book before deciding you know what it means better than the author. Better yet, read it while paying attention. Like frig. *edited for right word. I totally know what the fuck I’m talking about you gise.
Didn't JKR outright say that Dementors are a metaphor for/representation of/inspired by her experiences with depression?
(Whoops, yeah. Pressed post, got the sensation that something was off about “boggan” but I couldn’t pinpoint it. There it is.) (I totally read it, but it’s been a while, okay.) (*edit* And yes, he thought dementors were shapeshifters. Or just that they looked different to everyone who saw them, because reasons. Reasons which he then made up. He is allowed to do that, because he is so rational.)
I remember that one time he Harry attempted to prove that P=NP using time travel. Except we already know we can, in theory, solve those problems in polynomial time using time travel. It doesn't mean that P=NP. Because time travel inherently messes with the concept of time.
I mean a fic that pokes at the weirdness of the wizarding world? Sure. Let's do some science on it, maybe we can figure out why some stuff works or doesn't work the way it does instead of shrugging and going "magic". Maybe we'll learn something new, or figure out a better way how to do things. Hell, gimme an autistic witch/wix/wizard who is like "ok shit this changes everything but *why*. Let's do science on this." I'm pretty certain the entirety of Ravenclaw Tower including Professor Flitwick will want a piece of that. But MoR empathically does not do that while pretending it does.
I read it mostly as a bit of goofy wish-fulfillment from someone who was a weird, lonely kid in the same way I was. I read the self-importance as self-satire and kind of funny until I realized the author genuinely didn’t think it was a problem. Then he killed Hermione in a deeply horrifying way, and I was like, dude. Fuck you.
I gave up on MoR before Hermione’s death, but one of my least favourite things about the fic was just how much she was marginalised. It’s as if EY had no concept of her canon character beyond The Cleverest, and in making Harry into his super-intelligent author avatar he just couldn’t think of anything else she could do in the story other than not very subtly mocking feminists.
I mentioned this to a friend who was able to stand more of the fic than I was, and: Friend also said:
Not to mention "oh, it must be Deeply Meaningful that it doesn't look the same to everyone" when there's actual magic in the setting is...I'm just line-facing. There's already a really good Watsonian explanation for why bogarts change appearance and why no one's sure what a dementor's face looks like. There's no need to go inserting high-angst drama in there.
I mean, it IS Meaningful, but what it Means is that people are afraid of different things. For some people, the scariest thing in the world is their abuser, and for others, it's failure, and for others, it's the condition ruining their life and making them a risk to those around them, and for others, it's despair. Like. This is not a hard concept. Also I'm pretty sure we DO know what a Dementor's face looks like in the text, since Harry almost got Kissed, though I don't remember exactly. (It's certainly shown in the movies.)
