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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.
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...
I get your point about abused kids acting out in unhealthy ways because of what they have experienced, but some at least of the little gang had stable home lives. "Let's all fuck our pre-teen classmate!" is really the first thing that is going to come into their heads in a situation of high stress facing a supernatural and magical monster?
Yeah, maybe. But it's more that however good a writer King is, and he can sometimes be very good, he was not a good enough writer to pull that particular scene off. I've read some things by writers which have left me going "That's diabolical but he or she writes like an angel". That scene had me just going "Stephen, no".
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