Yeah, unless it's another lie of Riddle, and it's really his Diary. ;-)

 

Gee, ya think?

 

I did LOL at him again lampooning a common fanfic trope. And yes, of course, the gift is suspicious.

Why did Voldemort

Spoiler

kill Skeeter

?

Who here thinks the twins pranked Ginny too, rather than clearing it with her and staging the photo?

 

So, as a playwright, I think this is absolutely hilarious. One of my issues with this story in general is that it often appears that just about every character at points seems like a mouthpiece for the author himself, especially after reading his author's notes. If he truly thinks this, and if you can extrapolate based on this as Pers has, this author is clearly actually an idiot. Because if I extrapolate, I could claim that you can't write about ANYTHING that you don't personally know firsthand, and that's absolutely idiotic and limiting for a writer. And oh yeah, just because you can conceivably create a situation on the page that allows a character to take over the world does not mean you would or could do it in real life.

Anyways, this story is still just a meh. I don't really know why I keep reading the updates...

 

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DanBrowned

If you write from your imagination instead of experience or good research, and a reader has real knowledge of the subject, and you got it wrong, they will laugh or cry and tell people that you suck. The difference between your description and reality can only be as big as the difference between the retelling of the experience by two different people. If no one who really experienced it retells it the way you're telling it - you're doing it wrong. Just label it fiction and don't pretend otherwise. Crime, war, violence, politics, etc. are very real and are experienced every day by millions of people. If you describe those things so unrealistically that nobody who lived trough it would believe you'd lived through it yourself you're doing a disservice to your readers and I would like to know about it before I read your stuff.

You get a pass when you write about something with which no one could have real experience: magic, vampires, aliens. But you still have to get, for example, falling in love right, even in speculative fiction.

 

You're wrong. Because what we're talking about is fiction. The author has the right to put on paper anything they want, regardless of experience. Someone has the right to dislike it for those reasons, but there are writers out there who do a very very limited amount of research and then use their imaginations to extrapolate what that could be like in a world of their own choosing. Many writers are not trying to realistically portray what is actually going on in the world. Realism is not the only answer. There are other ways, and so to suggest that unrealistic writing is inherently flawed is itself a flawed viewpoint.

Coming from a playwriting background, I know that many fantastic plays come about through experimentation and imagination from a prompt. For instance, Mark Ravenhill (fantastic playwright) does just the bare minimum of research before writing, because he doesn't want his work interfered with by real life.

As Sesc says, the mark of a good writer is not someone who can simply regurgitate knowledge in an attempt to spoon feed it to us, but someone who can take a base knowledge and from that create something for more interesting and enticing, something that fans a flame underneath the true thing to create something more, something better.

 

Maybe I'm strange, but you lose me as an audience when you sacrifice too much verisimilitude on the altar of awesome.

What I want to say is that when your fictional world differs from the real world, it has to be purposefully done in ways that are useful to your story (like allegory or parable), not out of carelessness: using imagination instead of fact when facts are available is wrong.

You use your imagination to invent a fictional character, and to invent a fictional situation in which you put that character. But if the situation is impossible because of physics, I hope you have a good reason, and if your character acts in a way that no human being in history would ever act in such a situation, I hope you have a reason. And if you write about non-fictional people, places and events and you're wrong, I hope you have a good reason. Suspension of disbelief is not unlimited. I can't believe we disagree on this.

The original point of contention was a comment made by an author mouthpiece about a play depicting an overly elaborate plot to take over the world or something. The play may be a good story (judged as entertainment or art), but the plot is junk and one should not try to use such a plot in life because it was not a real plot invented by a real mastermind, but rather something a playwright had imagined. Had the author of the play been a former evil mastermind who wrote based on personal experience, the plot may have been plausible. Or, had the author been a playwright who acknowledged his limitations and used a real plot from a history book or a biography, it might have been not bad. But if it's so amateurish that the audience can tell it won't ever work, while in the fictional universe it's taken seriously, that hurts the story. Unless it's done on purpose for comedic effect. So yes, by all means, use your imagination to write fiction instead of journalistic articles and essays, but don't use artistic license to excuse ignorance and laziness.

 

Bah. Its still well written, but there are still no dramatic stakes established.

Lots of nifty ideas, thin on story.

I'm still waiting for something to actually happen that involves some jeopardy. It seems like we're just going along with Harry as he discovers the magical world, but without any dramatic momentum building.

And at this point, to still be indulging in "cool ideas" and to not have developed a sense of tension and story is bad. It has become a noticeable weakness, and detracts from the overall quality.

BUT

The cool ideas are still pretty fucking cool. Quirrelmort slyly killing Skeeter was great, as was the prank on Skeeter. And chapter to chapter the story is still enjoyable.

Although Draco torturing Harry and Harry apologizing was some lame fucking shit. I mean seriously? Psychological torture or exposure to an unpleasant fact are not equal to trying to deliberately maim someone. And this ain't canon Harry. He's from a healthy family, so why is he taking it?

4.3/5

 

This is a good point - however the author has implied that perhaps Harry's family isn't actually quite so healthy at all. How much can Petunia really change even with a new husband?

 

Depending on what type of person someone is, a different husband could change someone so completely that they'd be unrecognizable from before.

 

Spoiler

In her quest to destroy Harry's reputation, she'd implied that Quirrell was trying to turn him dark. In the chapter before, he bumped into her on the street and more or less promised to deal with her. Reading this chapter, it's apparent that Quirrell either suspected or knew of her animagus form and went out of his way to entice her into spying on them just so he could kill her. He even made sure to cover his tracks with Harry by suggesting that Rita would go into hiding.

 

I'm definitely on the 'love' side of the equation on this, though certain chapters were a bit hit and miss. Enjoying Quirrell a whole lot in this story, and I've loved intellectual!Harry every time I've come across him.

4.5/5

 

I have to say I'm kind of undecided when it comes to this story, it does have it's really great moments, sometimes they are just really funny or very interesting pieces of information or just a very interesting take on some old idea, but what I've problems with is that some scenes simply don't fit together.

If someone had shown me a few scenes from the story I would never have guessed that they are from the same story, maybe the same author, but not the same story.

I like it when the authors shows that an eleven year old can't simply march into a new territory/world and shake it in its very foundations with a it common sense. At first I thought that would happen, but I was proven wrong when Harry was proven wrong.

To sum it up:
The story is quite charming, but it could do without some scenes that simply hinder the flow of the story, confuse the reader with no explanation whatsoever or are so boring and long that you always skip over them anyways.

3/5

 

He's taking it because he's being rational. In this context, that means maximizing expected utility. He has nothing to gain from trying to 'get back at' Draco, and the stakes of this endeavor are very high. Some background that's transparent to anyone who knows EY's work but others might not have picked up on yet:

Spoiler

Everyone in the world is going to die, and billions of people are suffering needlessly. Harry realizes that with the power of magic combined with some good-old-fashioned science, he can change the world so that this doesn't have to happen anymore. He's willing to sacrifice a lot to make the world a better place.

 

Lol at ANOTHER new guy with just one post coming in here to fearlessly defend the author.

 

You're high as a kite. You want to live in a post-aging, post-scarcity society? Never mind the second law of thermodynamics or the heat-death of the universe. It would be boring.

 

Boring is better than poverty, suffering, pain and all the other negative shit out there Wolf.

You really didn't accomplish much more than making yourself look like the new guy.

 

Harry's actually somewhat irrational, though authorial fiat provides adequate plot armor for his conceits. For one, he believes without proof that rationality must necessarily govern magic and that the probability that he is the first to apply the so-called methods of rationality (and thus is uniquely qualified to make the world a better place) are sufficiently high as to warrant such a sacrifice on his part. The former is a leap of induction not necessarily supported by the data thus far. The latter is also not supported by the data--Quirrel is a counterexample. That said, it's not an uncommon conceit for an eleven year old who styles himself a genius.

Your spoiler text is a little silly, frankly, since it's merely a restatement of the philosophical chestnut: "Is it moral to sacrifice a man to save a city?" Answer: "Certainly, if the sacrifice is suicide." It hardly takes reading someone's essays to suss that out.

Harry's not been backed into a real moral corner yet--asked to sacrifice Draco's or Hermione's lives for the greater good, say. He shies away from such choices in the text and refuses to recognize when he's made them (see Rita's fate). When he does, then this story will get interesting, since it's no longer tracking the easy path. Naked application of the logic you stated above is at odds with Harry's self-doubt over whether he's becoming a dark lord and whether doing the right thing is indeed right. While it may be for the author (I haven't read his essays, so I can't comment), such bleak utilitarianism is not as cut and dried an option for Harry yet as you might have us believe.

 

EDIT: It seems to me now that I've misunderstood thomblake.

Even if food and entertainment was free, some people would still want power and would manipulate other people to this end, so suffering would not end. I'm unfamiliar with the existing significant body of work on Utopias, but my ignorant conclusion is that they don't work.

Sacrificing people to the greater good is a problem, unless they have volunteered to be sacrificed. Soldiers and spies are often treated as if they agreed to be sacrificed even if they don't know about it. The morality of conscription is another issue.

The protagonist's problem is hubris. It seems to me the author thinks he has conquered his own hubris and is writing about a younger naiver version of himself, but he has not - he was just even worse as a child.