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To be honest, throughout all the books Harry acted impulsively and against good advice of most of his allies. There is a reason why Yud was pissed or let's say motivated enough, to create a non-moronic version of Harry in his own fanfic. The fact that Harry even lives can be assigned more to dumb luck rather than anything else, so it makes sense that people keep secrets from him. Heck, Dumbledore himself held the prophecy for himself and told to Harry about it only in OOTP book you read - because basically he thought that Harry would be dumb enough to disobey and get himself killed if told earlier. And for good reason, Harry is just a child and being dumb is excusable. The same goes for Dumbledore keeping the truth about horcruxes for himself up until the last minute. The idea was to keep Harry free of concerns and give him normal childhood, but the unsaid part in this noble speech is that Dumbledore did not trust that Harry would keep it all secret, and would spill it over to somebody so that Voldemort would learn about the fact, and he would put together that Harry is a horcrux.
By the way, there is a great video comparing Frodo Baggins and Harry Potter as heroes, arguing that they are the opposites. Harry is the "chosen one", a special hero who on the other hand acts like a moron trying to do normal stuff like playing sports games and fooling around, while almost getting himself killed multiple times due to his own stupidity. Of course a lot of it is a plot device to make especially Hermione look awesome, but it is still there as his character trait. While Frodo is a normal or even unassuming guy especially among the heroes of the fellowship, but he almost always acts with integrity, courage and wisdom. This in turn paradoxically makes him extra special to the extent that he is even trusted with the One Ring as he can resist its temptations.
I think this is partially deliberate. Harry needs to grow up through most of the books. Dumbledore tries to encourage this, but his own secrecy and special treatment makes this difficult. It's only during Deathly Hallows where Harry actually is thrust into leadership without any adult mentor figures that he really begins to make better decisions. I think this is pretty clearly shown in the choice that Harry makes about the Deathly Hallows themselves. Rather than make himself into superman by pursuing all the hallows, Harry chooses to follow Dumbledore's instructions and focus on destroying the Horcruxs. I think this represents real maturity.
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You think Harry Threenames is non-moronic? The little I read that was quoted about how great this new version was and everyone should read it made me want to slap the face off him and hope that he'd be eaten by a magical creature the second he did his "haw haw, I am Big Brains Know It All" performance about knowing magic better than adult wizards and witches despite never hearing of it until ten minutes beforehand.
EDIT: I know, I know: everyone says it gets better in the later chapters, Harry stops being such a brat, and EY deliberately wrote him like that at the start. I doubt that part, I think EY was writing Haroldus Potterus-Evansus-Verresus as a self-insert about being a boy genius autodidact whom adults didn't understand and so feared and bullied him and that's why it's okay if he bites his teacher during a meltdown while his legal guardians only laugh it off, and only due to reaction while writing the webserial about "Hey, Haroldus The Magnificent And Always Perfectly Correct is a pain in the you-know-what" did he tone it down. Like ST Enterprise etc., 'it gets better later, trust me' was too late, it had lost me by then.
Harry Potter is written in the traditional British children's fantasy fiction mould. So of course he's the gender-swapped Cinderella at the start. Of course he and a small band of friends go off adventuring despite the grown-ups trying to keep them out of trouble and abiding by the rules. For the non-magical version, see The Famous Five by Enid Blyton (an astoundingly popular British children's author of yore, during the 30s-50s) and the various boarding school stories for both boys and girls.
For the fantasy version, nearly too many to mention, from E. Nesbit to Alan Garner onwards, plus all kinds of TV shows (e.g. The Worst Witch based on a novel series first published in the 70s). Rowling isn't unique or novel, she's writing in a well-established tradition, but she successfully cracked the global fame formula.
There's an epidemic of people who want to write within the YA/Coming of Age paradigm, but don't actually want to write a story with child characters doing child things and thinking child thoughts.
Say what you like about JK Rowling's writing*, her eleven year old Harry Potter reads like an eleven year old. Hermione is smart, but she reads like a smart eleven year old who reads a lot. The trio are brave, but stupid. They're scared of minor things, irrationally. They lack incredible leadership or organizational skills. Draco is a bully, but he's a middle school bully.
Yudkowsky's Harry Potter reads like an MIT freshman, or maybe a dorky high school senior. He does not think or act like a child. Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
This makes sense in that Yud was 30 writing his Harry Potter fanfiction, and I doubt that Yud spent a lot of time with kids.
A similar problem infects a lot of media made about kids. Big Mouth suffered from this increasingly as the show went on. The characters were supposed to be just hitting puberty, but talked and acted like college kids.
It tends to destroy my willing suspension of disbelief, and also lead to off-putting situations where a story really starts to become about kids having sex.
*Introducing a new macguffin because you realize that the party is going to get the old set of macguffins out of the way too quickly is, like, a classic rookie dungeon master error.
I mean - I was not quite eleven years old when I was figuring out how to protect my "bodily sovereignty" using mutually-assured destruction dynamics. However, Yudkowsky's Potter is just too brilliant for eleven - you need to make him at least 14 or 15 to be halfway believable as literary fiction. Unless he's getting plenty of coaching from someone older and wiser.
Depends on what you count as coaching.
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I mean yeah, I don't think the idea of HPATMOR was that is was supposed to be a realistic protrayal of children. It was a vehicle for delivering Yud's philosophy. I found it grating myself but not really for this reason.
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I am even more relieved that I noped out before I got to that little gem.
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So, on the one hand, yes, the characters in HPMoR don't act like realistic kids. But, on the other hand, I don't want to read about realistic kids, because realistic kids are annoying and boring; I'd much rather read about an MIT freshman. There is a reason I dropped Harry Potter after Order of the Phoenix, and that's because Harry goes all emo.
I only went back and read the last two books because Methods was ongoing and Eliezer was clearly drawing on material from all seven books so I wanted to make sure I understood the lore. Half-Blood Prince was decent; I'd probably have enjoyed it a lot as a teenager. Deathly Hallows was terrible.
If you want to read about MIT freshmen, then read about MIT freshmen.
What's weird and often disgusting to me is the practice of writing a story about middle schoolers and making them think/talk/act like college freshmen at MIT. You're writing fiction, you can choose what age you want the characters to be!
If you want to write a story with mature, rational, scheming characters who talk frankly about sex; then you ought to place them at an age where it makes sense for them to be mature, rational, scheming, and have frank conversations about sex. If you want them to be eleven, write them as eleven year olds. Game of Thrones is an unfortunate example of this, of course, though I think GRRM is bright enough to have recognized the problems and that's one of many things keeping The Winds of Winter from ever being publishable.
There's no rule saying you go to Wizard school at 11! Wicked has seen plenty of success making magic-school a college level endeavor, with Elphaba beginning school at 17 in the book and 20ish in the play (and played by comically old actors in the unfortunate film)! HPMoR could easily have started by having McGonnagall say "We start wizarding school at 16 here. Starting at 11 would be quite irrational!"
Rowling was writing twelve year olds for twelve year old readers. Writing twelve year old characters for adult readers is a different thing (particularly if you're using those characters as didactic puppets to get your message across). That is where the "A and B are supposed to be twelve but talk and behave like they're twenty-two year old college students" does get uncomfortable (ranging from "these are not kids and this is bad writing" to "uh yeah no Stephen I didn't really need a pre-teen orgy in the middle of a good scary horror novel").
Point of order: it happens at the very end.
And while it was a very, um, off-putting scene, I still find myself defending it inasmuch as I understand what King was trying to convey there. In his very unfiltered and probably-written-on-a-coke-bender way. I mean, the entire book was full of really unpleasant things happening to children - that was the point.
Now if you want skeevy, let's talk Piers Anthony (or not).
I gave up on the Piers Anthony series because it got too uncomfortable for me, but the scene in "It" was still just too much. Like you say, I understand what he was trying to get at, but it still reads very badly (particularly when the girl's father is abusive, and may be going to be sexually abusive once under the influence of Pennywise, and her husband later on is physically abusive to her because he gets a sexual thrill out of it). Group hug surely would have been enough?
On the one hand, yes, but on other hand, no?
See, you read it "That was gross, why would you do that, Stephen King? Why, why have an underage teen gangbang in the sewers? Ewww, what were you thinking?"
That is how I see a lot of people react to that scene. And I can't really blame them. I attribute a lot of that, like I said, to King's being high at the time (most of his books written since he got sober lack the kind of raw, deranged energy you see in his earlier books), and also, honestly, King has some squirming eels in his head that he has been trying to exorcise for half a century with his writing.
But--
Yes, Becky's father is abusive, and is probably going to start sexually abusing her soon (which he may have done even without the influence of Pennywise), and as an adult she follows that sad predictable pattern of partnering with a man who reminds her of daddy. She's been traumatized and abused (like all the kids were) by her fucked up childhood. Pennywise was a metaphor for the rot in Derry, and more generally, in good old small town American society. This is a theme that is evident in most of King's books. Especially his horror books. Sure, they're about space aliens and ancient eldritch spider-demons and vampires and psychics and other weird shit, but basically they're about how fucked up some people are, and how a little pressure will really twist the insanity dial.
So Becky and her friends face Pennywise the monster who basically turns everything terrible about their childhoods and makes it explicit and violent and feeds on the blood and pain.
They are kids who were forced to grow up too early, both by their mundane life experiences and by facing Pennywise. They can't handle it. Some of them break because of it.
What we see in the sewers is, yes, a big "friendship affirmation ritual" to counter the influence of Pennywise and it would have been a lot more palatable as a group hug. But these are kids who don't exactly have healthy role models or good examples, and... they're also all horny pubescents. So this is what comes to their minds.
I'm not going to say there was no other way King could have written it, and it's fair to say "Really, Stevie, what were you thinking?"
But a heartwarming little "friendship is magic" moment just wouldn't have had the same effect. There was both a bonding and denial effect amongst the kids, a "We really did that?" that among other things ensured that when they were called back to Derry years later, they'd come. And it was symbolically the end of their childhood (something a hug would not have accomplished).
King himself has kind of made this point. From anyone else, I'd roll at my eyes at "I wasn't really thinking about the sexual aspect of it" but from Stephen King, yeah, I believe it. Especially from 1978 to 1986...
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I don't really think this is true. Natasha in War and Peace is 13.
Bingo
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The Magicians does a pretty good take on adult wizard school (wizard school replaces college with all the associated neuroses of high-achieving college students included).
Eh, I hated it because it felt like it was just taking a spite-filled dump on the source material. The sequel makes it even worse when he takes an even more spite-filled dump on CS Lewis.
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All good points including Evans Veres also being a huge dick. I am not against children's literature - I am quite a fan of The Three Investigators and they did dumb shit constantly, including going against dangerous hardened criminals alone or crawling into unknown dark caverns just because. I am not at all against the genre and it was not necessarily meant as a criticism of Harry Potter which I also like quite a lot. It was more to point that Harry being moron is a fact and most heroes of these children books are quite self-aware of that.
Yes, Harry Potter acts sort of like you'd expect a kid like him to act: he goes from being the neglected unwanted encumbrance to a world where he's special and famous and treated as exceptional. It's be a very rare person whose head wasn't turned by that! Also, the rule-breaking makes sense given the way he was raised under arbitrary and unfair rules; he has no reason to think the adult authorities in his new life have his interests at heart, and it's obvious from the start that at least one of them (Snape) is actively out to get him even if that means abusing his authority. He wants to be a hero, to soak up all this adulation and special treatment that he's been craving all his life, and it's down to him being basically a decent kid and making the right friends that manages to steer him along the right path. He probably also doesn't have a deeply-felt belief in the dangers of the magical world being real; he's spent the first twelve years of his life with "magic isn't real" so it's hard to break that conditioning, deep down he won't really feel like "this is real and this is dangerous" until he gets more experience of living in that world. He can do magic so that will save him, right?
He grows up during the series, and being an obnoxious teenage boy is a natural part of that. EY's version, however, was Big Special from the start, indulged by his guardians (when a clip round the ear was what was needed), and an obnoxious brat due to his belief in his own genius and that he knew everything so magic couldn't be right and if it did exist then it had to run on what he deemed to be the rules. What everyone else told him was wrong, because it just was, because they weren't smart like him and didn't know Science like him. If he could have been toasted to a crisp by a salamander within ten minutes of arriving at Hogwarts in that world, I'd have cheered. Maybe he got some of the arrogance knocked out of him in later chapters, but I loathed him in the early ones so much, I wasn't going to stick around for more lectures on Rationalist principles from the author insert.
Problem is that JK speaks through a magical macguffin and the Mirror of Erised makes it clear that his real desire is to be with his family.
It's Ron who sees himself as a hero who finally outshines his many brothers when he looks at it. Harry simply doesn't seem to value that in the same way, which makes sense because he already has fame and adulation and it has nothing to do with him: in his mind his fame is unearned, creates insane expectations and is frankly grotesque in that it was born out of the death of the life he could have had.
To try to reconcile both views: I think Harry's drive is less about getting the adulation of being a hero and more just a sort of instinctive mistrust of authority figures and the sense that he should do things himself (he also doesn't like the idea of friends suffering for him which is how Voldemort finally gets him). It being a YA novel, he's at least sometimes right which makes things worse.
I don't think he wants to be a hero for the sake of "lookit me the big damn hero", it's because of the crushing weight of expectations. He's the Boy Who Lived, but that's because his parents sacrificed themselves for him. How can you repay that? You have to justify your existence somehow by being extra-special, and if you haven't earned the attention and praise you are getting, then you have to go out and be that big damn hero in order to deserve the deaths that spared you.
He is not exactly given a choice. Voldemort tries to kill him from the first year he's in Hogwarts. It's not expectations, it's survival. I don't think he cares about how people who don't know him perceive him. He just doesn't like being in danger and doesn't like his new friends being in danger.
I've seen a lot of complaints from fanfic authors that Harry can appear suicidally lackadaisical about his studies (though he's most interested in DADA which is appropriate). Without Voldemort he'd probably be a normal kid who's maybe good at Quidditch (like his dad).
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As much as it was never going to happen, even at the time of the series I remember really liking the 'Harry is a decoy chosen one / Neville was the real boy who lived' theories for what it could have let Harry Potter be.
Mostly for Harry's character flaws, though not because they make him a worse protagonist. Quite the opposite. Harry being reckless, careless, and not inclined to be discrete are great protagonist flaws. They balance how Harry even as a child had real character virtues- brave, friendly, above the bigotries of the setting. But those virtues, and child age, don't negate the sort of self-centeredness which, while natural/appropriate for a young boy, detracted from a sort of humility that might have been initially assumed from the 'abused / eager-to-please boy' of his early years.
Neville being the real child of prophesy, but Dumbledore letting Harry be the one drawing attention to himself, would have had a number of interesting elements. It would have required better working Neville into book plots to have a slowly emerging role, and thus required Harry to have a few more close male friends over the series than just Ron, but that could have worked well as a parallel to Harry's awkward-but-building friendship with Cedric in Goblet of Fire (where Harry went from the awkward younger male in the dynamic to the more confident/established alternative to Neville). It would have reframed Dumbledore's indulgences of Harry, since it could be seen as a darker user relationship (encouraging Harry to act out), but then it might also have reframed parts of it positively (Dumbledore not manipulating Harry into destiny).
But what could have really made it stand out was as a character challenge to Harry himself, to have gone through a character arc of having come to believe the lie that he was the special / chosen hero, coming upon the revelation that he wasn't the special / chosen one after all, but overcoming it to still be a hero, except this time with humility. It doesn't mean that Neville has to displace Harry as the protagonist of the series, or the leading role in various plots, but reframing the later series as Harry realizing that he is the decoy- that he is drawing the attention / threats / danger that Neville isn't ready for while Neville has to overcome his past trauma and grow to face his own destiny- opens up a lot of juicy character drama.
Like, letting Harry be arrogant / have wounded pride. Hasn't he been the hero so far? Isn't he better than the wimpy, loserly Neville? Isn't he richer than his best friend, who is minor wizard nobility / established family? Isn't he the prodigy who speaks snake-tongue, manifests patroneus, and has a super-cool uncle/patron who got him the best broomstick to win at quidditch with? Isn't he the one who gets young girls crushing on him after dashingly saving them? Why can't he be the chosen hero on top of all that? It's Not Fair!
But also- if he's not the actual Boy Who Lived, what will he be if that title is taken away from him? He'll be an orphan with no name and no clue, a middling quidditch player. Worse, who will be left if, when, he's revealed to be a fraud? Will anyone believe him, will the girl he liked / the girls who liked him because of that reputation, and then got to know him, still like 'him' if the popular legend stops being so popular? Harry started the series as a friendless, family-less, isolated child, and what wouldn't he do to not go back to that?
And yet...
And yet, Harry growing to overcome that, and how, could be equally interesting. Take Neville. Neville's start in the series has many (deliberate) parallels to Harry, but he's clearly traumatized in a way Harry was not. (And, vice versa, is not in ways Harry was by his abusive family.) Neville is not yet a man, is not confident, and not ready. He quivers under Snape, and were worse to find him... well, in Goblet of Fire Harry comes off as worse in many ways to Cedric, the older boy who has what Harry wants (the girl, the confidence, the respect of peers). The 'gift' of being thrown into the tournament was no gift, but Harry survived and burnished the legend. Could Neville have survived, let alone thrived, as Harry did?
But Neville could also be framed as a person who looks up to Harry. Like a good Gryffindor, Harry, even as a child, is brave where Neville is not. Harry is popular where Neville is not. Harry acts when Neville when freeze. But most of all, Harry is kind despite all of that, or maybe because of all that, because Harry has been the boy shoved into a closet and worse. Harry is a jock, true, but he acts out of concern, and dislikes cruel bullies, and at least tries to do the right thing despite his jealousies (Cedric) or his dislikes (Malfoy) even if Harry isn't constrained by rules. Harry is happy to help others. Harry is not just the sort of person Neville probably wants to be more like, but also the sort of person who- personal dynamics otherwise- could help Neville grow into someone who can stand up not just for himself, but for others as the hero.
This is a relationship dynamic that could be worked with, especially for how it might play to Harry's arrogance / insecurities. Does Harry just think it's his due at first? That Neville is a fanboy for the Boy Who Lived? After Harry realizes the truth, does Harry feel jealous or insecure, wondering if Neville knows? When Harry realizes the influence that he has over Neville- and that his positive influence is itself what may lead to Neville assuming the mantle of Chosen Hero- what does that mean to him, and to them? If Harry knows he has Neville's trust, and knows he could reveal the truth or hide the secret that gives him his status, what would he do? Especially when both hiding and revealing the truth could be simultaneously selfless and selfish: is Harry hiding it because he wants to protect his status, or because it protects Neville? Would he consider revealing it because Neville Needs to Know, or because he's tired of being the increasing target of the Dark Lord's attention in a war he didn't ask for?
That would be a good character story not only in itself, but also help reframe Harry's place with his friends, which addresses Harry's insecurity. Part of Harry's growth can come from realizing that people like him for him, not just his legend. Ron's signature trait is loyalty, and certainly isn't sticking with Harry to nose up for perks or money. Hermoine as a mudblood never knew the legend, just that he was the boy she met on the train who saved her from a troll in the bathroom. Even the animosities were natural. Draco who might have been fake friends with the Boy Who Lived would be as petty a bully to a commoner-potter, or a Neville-he-didn't-know-better-about. Snape's deal was with Potter, the parents, not The Boy Who Lived.
But just as important for the character arc and series culmination, Harry can learn / actualize that people also like him for his relationships with others. Yes, he saved Ginny from the Chamber of Secrets, which is grounds enough to transition a hero-crush to a personal-hero crush, but he's friendly and capable of being friends with looney Luna, her friend that others avoid. Yes, he finds magically-attractive Fleur attractive, but her regard is won by him risking himself for her sister in the tournament, not his place in it as a legend. When Harry comes to fixate on his legend, his friendships can wane- the sort of distancing where his insecurities When Harry can overcome that by having a true friendship with Neville, then it can inspire others- including Neville- into the Dubledore Army or whatnot that nominally exists to support Harry, but secretly supports Neville, with whom Harry is in alignment.
I imagine such a series finale would go into its endgame with Neville integrated into the core three, all knowing the truth but keeping the lie so that Harry can play the part of decoy protagonist and draw away the Dark Lord's attention so that Neville can do his Chosen One deed. Harry's earlier flaws- his brash, reckless nature- are allowed to be assets complimenting his virtues, even as Harry's greatest virtue from the character arc- his growth of true humility, as opposed to the abused boy syndrome he had at the start- is what lets Neville take the Dark Lord by surprise.
Truly a power the Dark Lord knows not.
At which point the story can wrap up with its happily ever after where the series-long secret is revealed, but ends with Neville publicly crediting / elevating Harry as the indispensable hero in defeating the dark lord, in a parallel to how over the books Harry helped elevate Neville into the chosen hero he needed to be. Harry might lose the mythic hero backstory he no longer cares so much about, but gains a new (genuine) heroic legend to replace it, and more importantly keeps the personal relationships he was once afraid of losing. War scars the survivors, but the optimism is there, as not just Harry, but people he's influenced like Neville are in turn giving hope / building up the next generation more than Harry himself ever could have alone.
Cue the series end, with Harry Potter ending it as the hero of his own story, just not in the way he intended it to be, but having developed other character virtues that bring him to the company of fictional greats like Frodo.
You spent time on DLP, didn't you?
But seriously, it's amazing how much that series resonates with basically everyone who read it, across generations. People can hate on Rowling all they like, but I think Voldemort and Umbridge references are going to be as durable as Shakespeare quotes.
Doubt it. Voldemort and Umbridge were existing archetypes. Certainly in the next 500 years someone will write a more current version of them which will supplant them.
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Yeah. See his dad when he was Harry's age, and how he and his gang of friends bullied Snape. That's perfectly understandable! Kids that age do pick on outsiders and are little monsters, this is why school and society have to socialise and civilise them. James and his gang are not bad or wicked or evil, but they are jerks and they do need to learn the consequences of their actions.
Harry without the experiences of being the unwanted orphan, especially with the mythos of being The Boy Who Lived, could have been like that. He could have palled up with Draco at the start. He could have bullied Neville. But the crucial difference is that he had those early experiences and chose to be kind when he had the choice to make.
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Speaking of LOTR and rings, does anyone else want to see a tv show/book where Galadriel (not the new tv series version) gets her hands on the ring and uses it to take over.
We know what happens then. It's in LotR itself, because Frodo offers it to her.
I feel compelled to note that OnlyFans is practically an ongoing mass LARP of this.
Yeah, so at best it's a femdom porno.
Elf dommy mommy?
"All shall love me and despair" sounds much more like the findom end than the GFD end, and sensibly given how much of a rat bastard the One Ring actually is. I didn't bring up OnlyFans - practically a Tartarean pit of suffering - on a whim.
Arguably, "elf dommy mommy" is what Galadriel already is without the One.
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No, no more than I want to see the version where Gandalf takes it. They both are aware of the dangers there, of the seduction of power, of starting out with good intentions (or what they think are good intentions) and how the Ring would warp those:
Unless you think a series of "Galadriel commits atrocities and war crimes and ends up the despotic ruler of a world of mind-controlled slaves" would be jolly good fun, I don't want to watch that.
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To be fair, Frodo inherits the ring at 33 years old and goes on his quest at 50.
The sheer amount of idiocy (even for a teen!) that Harry consistently exhibits is not the kind to go away with age. He’d grow more tired but not much wiser.
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