So, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s long-running Harry Potter fanfic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, is now complete. I’ve been holding off until now to post some thoughts on it I’ve had since the climax was posted ~2 weeks ago.
Readers of TVTropes will be familiar with the concept of deconstruction–not in the pretentious post-modern sense, but in the sense of literary works which try to poke holes in the conventions of other literary works, often (as TVTropes puts it) by asking, “‘How would this trope play out with Real Life consequences applied to it?’ or ‘What would cause this trope to appear in Real Life?’”
Alan Moore’s Watchmen is the go-to example of deconstruction in superhero comics. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels play the same role for epic fantasy. And these days, lots of works dabble in it: think of Christopher Nolan’s attempt to give us a more “realistic” take on the Batman mythos, or the Daniel Craig Bond movies, which tried to do the same thing with James Bond.
HPMOR works in a similar vein, by giving us a version of Harry who was raised by an Oxford professor, one who’s smart enough to notice all the things that don’t quite make sense in J. K. Rowling’s fictional universe. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I found much of it wildly entertaining.
Unfortunately, I also found the ending to be a huge let-down–which is a real problem for a story like this, because at least half the story is set up as a giant puzzle, tempting the reader to believe that any apparent plot holes would be plugged in some incredibly clever way in the end. When the ending doesn’t deliver, it makes those parts of the story look a lot less impressive in retrospect.
At this point, I have say SPOILER ALERT!, not just for HPMOR but Watchmen, Joss Whedon’s Avengers film, and the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire (/slash the first three seasons of the latter’s TV adaptation A Game of Thrones.)
Still with me?
Okay, so at the end of HPMOR it’s revealed that in this version of the story, the reason Voldemort was such a great threat in the First Wizarding War is that he was a tactical and strategic genius unmatched in the rest of the the magical world. Among other things, it’s hinted early on that this version of Voldemort wrote the Evil Overlord List, a famous internet posting on how to avoid all the mistakes of James Bond-esque villains.
When he heard the prophecy about Harry defeating him, instead of stupidly walking straight into the trap like in canon, he tried to devise a plan to fulfill the prophecy on his own terms, which involved overwriting the baby Harry’s personality with his own, strategic genius included, to set Harry up has his “equal.” Except this plan blew up in his face anyway (because something something magic resonance), so Voldemort had to wait to return until Harry’s first year at Hogwarts like in the books.
Finding this out was my first major disappointment with HPMOR–it had been hinted that this version of Voldemort was a lot smarter than the canon version, but I figured that would mean he faked his own death rather than being tricked into destroying himself, for some inscrutable reason that would later be revealed. What actually ended up being revealed was just a more elaborate justification for the same result we got in Rowling’s books.
Okay, but that was sort-of understandable. What’s really inexcusable is the climax. You see, originally, Voldemort was planning on using the mini-self he’d created in Harry to rule Magical Britain for him, but then he heard another prophecy saying Harry was going to destroy the world, which Voldemort wasn’t going to stand for, because you can’t rule the world if it’s been destroyed. And Voldemort decided based on past experience that the whole “fulfill prophecy on your own terms” thing was a mistake, so he decides to just kill Harry.
Which leads to Harry finding himself surrounded by Voldemort and 37 Death Eaters, all with their wands pointed at them, and the Voldemort says… that before he kills Harry, he’ll give Harry a chance to trade any remaining secrets Harry knows for the lives of his friends and family.
Harry, of course, uses the extra time to kill all the Death Eaters and incapacitate Voldemort indefinitely, through incredibly clever means the details of which aren’t relevant to this review, because of course he does, you didn’t think this story was going to have an unhappy ending, did you?
What makes this ending such a disaster is that having a hero’s victory depend on the villain not just shooting him at the first opportunity is probably the single most infamous brand of fictional villain stupidity in existence. Seeing that trope used in 2015 is unavoidably painful. But using that trope after a hundred chapters of not-so-subtle hints that your villain so much smarter than all those other fictional villains? That’s just unforgivable.
A bunch of people on the HPMOR subreddit noticed this and complained, and somewhere Eliezer justified it by saying that Voldemort “underestimated Harry’s threat level.” Which seems to misunderstand why Bond villain stupidity is so grating. In any given instance, you can always say, “well, Blofeld underestimated Bond’s threat level.” But once you notice the pattern, it becomes obvious that the real reason for the mistake isn’t whatever in-universe justification is given, but because it was the only way the writers could get their happy ending.
The first time a writer did this, it was fine. After all, in the real world it’s extremely uncommon for captured secret agents to not only escape but kill the leader of the organization that captured them in the process. When, in the 2012 Avengers movie, after decades of such scenarios, Loki fails to just stab Tony any instead throws him out the window (giving him a chance to suit up as Iron Man mid-fall), it’s significantly more annoying.
Even then, though, it’s forgivable, because if you manage to overlook it, it makes the movie more fun. Even if Robert Downey Jr. hadn’t been under contract for another Iron Man movie, the Avengers is the kind of movie that demands you don’t kill of such a major character without giving him a better send-off. And while you could have avoided both the cliche and the character death by skipping the scene entirely, it would have deprived us of Tony quipping at Loki, and everyone knows Tony’s quipping is one of the best things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Therein lies the dilemma for the writer of something like HPMOR: these story telling conventions don’t exist because writers are stupid, but because they make for fun stories. If you’re going to build your story around attacking them, eventually you’re going to have to do something your readers won’t like, like letting the villain successfully complete his plot before the heroes even arrive (Watchmen). Or you have to kill your hero, have you ex-protagonist’s son try to avenge him, and then kill the son for good measure (A Song of Ice and Fire).
The problem with doing this devoted connoisseurs of your genre will appreciate having their expectations subverted, most of your potential audience won’t. So sure, Watchmen is widely regarded as the greatest comic book of all time, but will its characters ever enjoy the broad popularity of Batman and Superman? I suppose George R. R. Martin may avoid that fate by never having had a single main character, letting him kill off a few of his protagonists while keeping others around to deliver a satisfying ending–we’ll see.
The alternative is to dabble in deconstruction, then chicken out. This is what Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and Daniel Craig’s Bond movies do and I think the result is basically a disaster. Pointing out the implausibilities of previous iterations of your franchise, but still trying to give your audience the genre-fiction experience they want, just means you’ll end up falling back on versions of those implausibilities in the end, and they’ll be all the more painful because you pointed them out yourself.
If Eliezer had had the courage of his convictions, the story would have ended with Harry dying in a way where he could not possibly come back from the dead and then Hermione having to defeat Voldemort after him. Not necessarily that, but something on roughly that level of weirdness, and definitely not an what amounted to setting up an elaborate justification to have Voldemort make basically the same mistakes he made in canon.
Okay, I could say more about the issues I have with HPMOR, but this is the one I most wanted to get off my chest. And now I have to go, because just because I found the ending a terrible disappointment doesn’t mean I’m not going to the HPMOR wrap party in Berkeley tonight.
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