The Harry Potter Fanfiction Thread

At the very least, it's meant to make you smile. I don't know who Thomas Mann's works were meant to please, but he got a Nobel Prize for them, the sick fuck.

Try us. What is "this" and which reasons did the story offer, which reality then quickly contradicted?

Again, it's not uncommon for the originators of an ideal to not live up to it. It takes a different skill-set to come up with good ideas and to implement them. The Trope Maker is not the Trope Codifier. Indeed, the first inhabitants of Scotland share little in terms of behaviour, beliefs, or values, with what is currently understood as the archetypal Scotsman.

More like they set out to write whatever they wanted to write, and did not care whether the result would come out as "trash" or not, so long as they got their fun while doing it. The second part is a very strange assertion, given that I feel EY's work to have gone pretty damn high and far.

EY doesn't have a chosen philosophy, just a series of skills and pieces of information that he wanted to spread around in a compelling way. He isn't some kind of philosophical theorist promoting a closed system of dogmas. HPMOR isn't meant to be foolproof, and that goal is acknowledged to be unattainable, and treated as such. But he does owe it to himself to make it as strong as he can, to the best of his abilities, and thus The War on Straw is not an option.

I would wish you to make your tone more gentle and civil. No one is trying to fool you or mislead you, so expressions like "pull the other one" are frankly uncalled for. The same goes for calling arguments "ridiculous" instead of, say, "uncompelling" or "unconvincing". You're generally treating this discussion like a fight, being abrasive and uncivil, and, here, that kind of attitude is frowned upon.

The values of the Enlightenment, and the behavior of people who lived during the Enlightenment, are two completely separate things. Much like the values espoused in the US Constitution are separate from US foreign policy. Rational Harry isn't concerned with what the people of the Enlightenment period did or how they acted, he is concerned with the values of objective truth, individualism, human rights, and moral philosophy. We do not abandon the espoused values of, say, Voltaire because he didnt always live up to them. Failing rise to the level of our own standards and expectations is not a justification for abandoning those standards and expectations- it's an incentive to try harder. I have come to accept the difficult fact that I will always be a racist; but I have not abandoned the attempt to become less racist. Being unable to achieve one's own standards isn't a sign of hypocrisy- it's a sign of ambition.

I'm having trouble understanding what the "No True Scotsman" fallacy has to do with anything. I'm not claiming that people who espouse and fail to live up to Enlightenment values are not truly enlightened people- I'm claiming that's normal. Regardless, I cant find any place where EY seems to have meant to imply that rape is entirely a product of "non-enlightenment cultures", whatever those are. He claimed that adopting the values of the enlightenment authentically will make it impossible to justify raping someone. He's still right.

The distinction between Enlightenment and non-Enlightenment cultures is one Yudkowsky himself made, by my read.

While I can hardly see any issues with going "the ideals of the Enlightenment are anti-rape," the quoted passage can easily be read as more saying "only the ideals of the Enlightenment are anti-rape," which does not say very nice things about those groups that don't happen to trace their cultural history up through all that business in Europe around the eighteenth century.

The only thing about the discussion I will say is that I will take anything and everything with a grain of salt.

And I will also ask you to think about how much of his making his characters' arguments fallible is him putting the story above his personal views and how much is him being unintentionally fallible as he tries to present a perfect counter argument.

Because it's kinda sad when a book aimed at 3 year olds is more effective at presenting a real moral quandary than something ostensibly aimed at mature adults.

Which book aimed at three-year-olds were you thinking of? The Lorax? The Sneetches? Green Eggs and Ham?

The Lorax, actually.

The movie was on Universal and I remembered just how bad it was.

edited 23rd May '15 10:42:09 PM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

Oh, you were serious? I thought you meant to type thirteen-year-olds.

Seuss tackles some heavy shit, but I dunno if I'd call his stuff a moral quandary, exactly. It's pretty clear what the right choice is, i.e. "listen to the fuzzy orange thing and don't cause rampant ecological destruction."

I didn't mean that.

I mean that even the Lorax itself admits that it doesn't know what the right choice is when prompted with the question of whether the onceler should stop overproduction and basically crash the economy to save the trees or save the economy and doom the trees.

Of course, we, grown adults with developed brains, know the right choice is in sustentable exploitation, but that's beside the point. The joke is that sometimes the answer isn't in either extreme, and that the world isn't always Black-and-White Morality.

Well, yes, that much is made obvious in the story. I don't know what perfect counterargument you're talking about. Harry admits to not knowing what to do and to doing the wrong thing quite often. He actually almost destroyed the world once.

And yeah, as an Arab that passage pisses me off to no end. It's just plain ignorant. First, there's a ton of cultural diversity in the world, and that type of nobility doesn't exist everywhere. Second, that type of nobility still exists in countries like the UK. When an English nobleman commits rape, they're practically unpunishable. Also that type of nobility isn't needed when you have money. Blood isn't the only way to screw the rules.

edited 24th May '15 2:05:28 AM by TheHandle

"While I can hardly see any issues with going "the ideals of the Enlightenment are anti-rape," the quoted passage can easily be read as more saying "only the ideals of the Enlightenment are anti-rape," which does not say very nice things about those groups that don't happen to trace their cultural history up through all that business in Europe around the eighteenth century."

Ah, now I get it. Thank you for framing the issue in a way that I could understand. No, I would not agree that only cultures that descend directly from the Enlightenment could be considered "anti-rape" (several Native American cultures achieved that distinction before the arrival of Europeans, then lost it after contact occurred). And, as Handle said, there are still elites in the West with very loose definitions of what constitutes acceptable behavior with vulnerable females. Wasn't there a French official who stirred up a lot of controversy in New York by molesting a maid?

So- point taken. That does not, of course, mean that Enlightenment values are worthless, nor that people who seek to abide by them are, a priori, hypocrites.

I think that anyone who preaches a code can and will end up acting hypocritical, be it by willing-spirit-in-weak-flesh or by simply not thinking things through. Doesn't discredit the code itself, though.

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3618966/1/As_Long_As_You_Know_That_Potter

I liked this one!

I get the serious nature of the story, but still....

edited 7th Jun '15 5:48:21 PM by 32ndfreeze

So there's this one fic concept I want to read that should be common and I want to know if anyone knows of any good ones.

Does anyone have a good What If? fic on hand where Petter is captured instead of Sirius and he ends up raising Harry? It could be neat if well done.

Also, while it's likely been pimped to hell here, I'm going to pimp Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past since I'm pretty sure I think it's Better Than Canon.

90% of the fics I've seen that involve Sirius raising Harry are slash stories in which Sirius is extremely out of character.

Another 9% of them have Sirius change his name for poorly explained reasons, turn both Harry and Sirius "dark" (evil) and bash Hagrid.

Why bash Hagrid? I mean, sure, he's woefully irresponsible and unreliable but who could possibly hate that lovable goofball?

Because Hagrid said Dumbledore is a great man, and they bash Hagrid because Hagrid is supremely loyal to Dumbledore.

It's because those authors tend to bash Dumbles like crazy.

Well, Dumbledore is a great man. Just... a bit of an asshole. Also woefully irresponsible and dangerously sentimental and with Skewed Priorities. But, overall, a good man, and a somewhat decent Headmaster.

And he's polite and affable to a fault. That counts for a lot.

edited 11th Jun '15 1:53:54 PM by TheHandle

Let's put it clear.

The Dumbledore bashers rarely, if ever, actually portray Dumbledore being the way he really is.

Hell, you're very likely to find Dumbledore running slavery rings in the bashfics.

My main criticism to this is: Don't invent flaws to pounce on. You don't need to.

Pounce on the flaws that he does have. Like his inability to trust other people with secrets which leads to a gajillion problems down the line because he just can't trust people.

Or the idealism that leads to him being incapable of seeing that sometimes, people are irredeemable.

Or his inability to curb Snape's behavior.

Or his inability to keep Hogwarts safe in any way.

Or his inability to keep a semblance of discipline in Hogwarts.

Or his inability to really make an effect on the country despite having the elite's children for like nine months out of a year in his care.

Seriously, Dumbledore can be pounced on for a lot of things because he is a very, very flawed character. Some are intentional, some are not, but the point is, he has real flaws.

But you see, the writers aren't trying to bring up Dumbledore's flaws. Because they don't really care about all that stuff. No, what the bashfic writers are doing is basically getting back at Dumbledore for a perceived slight against them. Lo and behold, bashfic writers also tend to self insert a lot, using Harry as a recipient. Who'd thunk it, rite?

edited 11th Jun '15 2:10:31 PM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

... That's genuinely perplexing.

So there exists no good fic with that premise? That's... disappointing.

Hmm. Nightmares of Future Past is very interesting. Thanks for that link.

There might be. If there is, I haven't found it.

It's much like the 'betrayal' fics.

You could write a genuinely interesting fic based on a clever villain using Divide and Conquer by framing a heroic character with performing a vile act of some sort.

Buuuut it's not used that way.

It's used in the typical "And then they'll be sorry" fantasy kids write when they feel that people don't value them enough.

Funny. I gave up on Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past because it didn't feel like the HP world and because of all the Dumbledor bashing. Which is pretty much why I gave up on Fan Fic/Team8. Didn't realize they were written by the same person...