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Permission to go slightly off-topic and talk about another phenomenon in what I'll hesitantly call Harry Potter fanfic 'culture'? It doesn't have much to do with HPMOR's subject matter and particular breed of insanity, but it's an interesting companion piece with some notable parallels, and an amazingly deep well of crazy.
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 03:00 |
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# ? May 17, 2024 02:39 |
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quote:Time reversed matter is equivalent to anti-matter - Yes. Physics is correct. EDIT: Nvm, misread what he was quoting Tunicate fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Aug 29, 2015 |
# ? Aug 29, 2015 04:19 |
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Tunicate posted:
True. Yeah, due to the CP violations as discussed in the above link this is unlikely to be more than a mathematical oddity and an historical footnote. But the strong CP problem remains unsolved. Hmm. Text is 'time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter' I guess it comes down to how pedantic you want to be about defining 'ordinary matter'? Also, it was the sole correct use of science in the preceding 6 chapters!
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 04:37 |
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Darth Walrus posted:Permission to go slightly off-topic and talk about another phenomenon in what I'll hesitantly call Harry Potter fanfic 'culture'? It doesn't have much to do with HPMOR's subject matter and particular breed of insanity, but it's an interesting companion piece with some notable parallels, and an amazingly deep well of crazy. It's not like the "topic" of this thread is particularly sacrosanct. No permission is required to go off-topic at any time.
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 06:12 |
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Darth Walrus posted:Permission to go slightly off-topic and talk about another phenomenon in what I'll hesitantly call Harry Potter fanfic 'culture'? It doesn't have much to do with HPMOR's subject matter and particular breed of insanity, but it's an interesting companion piece with some notable parallels, and an amazingly deep well of crazy. And remembering that it goes back a decade or so. HPMOR is seriously the most popular HP fic ever. If it got an honestly-garnered 2016 Hugo "Best Fanwork" nomination (and not "Best Novel", I mean gently caress off), that wouldn't be a disgrace to the rocket. For the genre it's not bad. It's when you add the serious intent and the author's delusions that it becomes champagne comedy. But how did it become by far the most popular? Note it wasn't LessWrongers spamming it, it was HP fans coming to LW. Was there pent-up demand for "approaching HP magic as science", even if it didn't deliver? What was going on here vis a vis the HP fandom itself?
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 09:08 |
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Crossposting from the PYF NRX thread, on divabot's orders: From chp. 25. Yud's story is basically our brains are big in order to gently caress each other over - to outsmart each other in a battle of wits. quote:And beside Draco, Harry walked along with a smile on his face, thinking about the evolutionary origins of human intelligence. I guess nobody is surprised by Yud not getting very simple, trivial facts about groups and social interactions beyond one single individual alpha nerd's lonely struggle in a zero sum game against all other apes. quote:But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits. So what Yud says is not actually false - surely a part of this maneuvering within larger, more complex groups means competition and possibly even some battle of the wits stuff. But the tone in the primary scientific literature is typically very much about cooperation than competition. IMO the most interesting thing about this is not that Yud has a very idiosyncratic take on the literature, but in which way he is idiosyncratic; he takes a story about cooperation driving brain size, and makes it into one where brains grow in order to subjugate your fellow pre-human. I'd say winning over others via your nerd smarts to establish a philosopher king hierarchy is a typical nerd dream. Contrast with the "feminine", soft and mushy and un-cool cooperation, coexistence, and harmony.
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 09:22 |
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Cingulate posted:I'd say winning over others via your nerd smarts to establish a philosopher king hierarchy is a typical nerd dream. Contrast with the "feminine", soft and mushy and un-cool cooperation, coexistence, and harmony. ehh, I always liked the social brain hypothesis. It feels like it explains so much of what I see around me, and I like the idea that quantum physics, our huge complicated technological civilisation and lesbian internet porn are mere side-effects of trying to talk the other chimp into giving you the banana. But I admit it's still pretty drat speculative.
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 09:33 |
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divabot posted:ehh, I always liked the social brain hypothesis. It feels like it explains so much of what I see around me, and I like the idea that quantum physics, our huge complicated technological civilisation and lesbian internet porn are mere side-effects of trying to talk the other chimp into giving you the banana. But I admit it's still pretty drat speculative.
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 09:35 |
divabot posted:And remembering that it goes back a decade or so. There are two things going on here. First, yes, you're correct; people like fanfics that treat magic as a comprehensible system. For example, one of the most popular recent fics, The Arithmancer, is about Hermione applying modern "Muggle" math to invent spells. It's kind of the antithesis to HPMOR in that it portrays the development of magic as an ongoing scientific endeavor that Hermione becomes a part of. You might have noticed HPMOR doesn't actually do this very well; it promises it and fails. So, then, why do people keep reading? Well, Yud seems pretty reasonable and intelligent to a teenager. Less Wrong occupies a Ron Paul esque niche of intellectual "common sense" that makes perfect sense if you are young and inexperienced with living in society. Less Wrong stuff was popular among nerdy 15 year olds even ten years ago, so slapping HP on it just broadens the appeal.
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 13:24 |
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divabot posted:And remembering that it goes back a decade or so. It was because Yud is very big on gettin people to spam reviews for each chapter.
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# ? Aug 29, 2015 18:32 |
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divabot posted:And remembering that it goes back a decade or so. It's been years since I read HP fanfic but I can think of a lot of epic length stories that are way better than this. It's not terrible but it's hardly the best that the fandom has to offer. You have to trawl deep to find good fanfiction but it exists.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 01:05 |
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Prince of the Dark Kingdom, if you want a random example of that. I dunno if I'd call it "good", but it's a good example of hugely-lengthy HP fanfiction that's better than Big Yud. It's 1.2 million words and not finished, but hey.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 04:32 |
Makes one wonder what is it that forces fanfiction authors to write books you can clobber cows with. I guess they just don't plan the whole story beforehand so they keep extending it?
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 10:16 |
anilEhilated posted:Makes one wonder what is it that forces fanfiction authors to write books you can clobber cows with. I guess they just don't plan the whole story beforehand so they keep extending it?
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 10:23 |
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Unlimited enthusiasm, but limited tendency to seek out editors.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 10:53 |
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OK, time for that big ol' effortpost I promised. Think Yudkowsky's magnum opus is crazy? You ain't seen nothing yet. Two years before Methods of Rationality, the big thing in Harry Potter fanfic was Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness, a 250,000-word monster (50,000 words bigger than the book it was theoretically based off, though positively svelte compared to HPMOR's bloated 660,000) about the adventures of Neville Longbottom and the Hogwarts resistance during the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. DAYD was laser-targeted to appeal to Harry Potter's teenage fandom - it was a dark, angsty, melodramatic power-fantasy following a fan-favourite character through one of the most intriguing unexplored parts of the Harry Potter saga. As a result, it' hard to exaggerate how big it was - it never achieved the mainstream presence of HPMOR, but it had an army of fans, the 'DAYDians', and even its own small convention, DAYDcon. Even now, after all the poo poo that's gone down, there are around two hundred people in fanfiction.net's DAYD community. Then, in 2009, the mock-site fandom_wank discovered that Andrew 'Thanfiction' Blake, the author of DAYD, was also the individual known variously as Jordan Wood, Amy Player, and Victoria Bitter, the Lord of the Rings megafan and cult leader who was convicted of charity fraud for his role in the Tentmoot debacle, and poo poo hit the fan. Now, this requires a bit of backstory, but I promise we'll get back to Harry Potter fanfic eventually. Blake was born as Amy Player, a Virginian from what by all reports was a loving, well-adjusted family. Despite this, he had psychological issues from an early age, and became unhealthily attached to various works of fiction including, eventually, Lord of the Rings. He dropped out of college and dived straight into the fandom, using his charisma and formidable manipulative talents to gather a group of close-knit devotees with ties to both LOTR and Wicca including a theologically confused young woman in a failing job and a failing marriage named Abbey 'Orangeblossom' Stone. He spun all sorts of wild fantasies for them, claiming that he was a 'paladin' for a mysterious goddess and could communicate with the dead. Then he could channel the dead, letting them speak through him. Then he could do the same thing for living people. Then he started explaining that due to the heavy influence of European myth on Tolkein's work, the Lord of the Rings and its companion texts was a fictionalised account of the history of the world, much like what Robert Howard claimed with his Conan novels. Like the Bible with a couple of extra degrees of separation. That logically (ahem) meant that the characters in it might have been based on real people, and guess who he'd just started channeling? Yup, the guy founded a cult based around him being possessed by Frodo Baggins. OK, that's not quite accurate. He was possessed by Elijah Wood. To be clear, he'd been born female, but wanted to transition, and he explained this to his cult (who were now in so deep and so isolated from the rest of the world that they'd swallow anything he fed them) as his old female personality being killed and replaced by the spirit of a Hollywood actor who served as a conduit to a small primordial being with big hairy feet. Yeah. Amy Player got his sex change, and started calling himself Jordan Wood (as in, Elijah Jordan Wood). He figured his cult had been marinating long enough, and were sufficiently insulated from reality that he no longer needed to artificially shelter them from it. With them as his core, he founded Bit of Earth, a popular Lord of the Rings fansite ostensibly designed to direct LOTR nerds' energies towards charitable work, and marketed himself as Elijah Wood's cousin, with a history in both child acting and the IRA (yes, the one with the bombs). Bit of Earth engaged in several projects, some successful, most not, and eventually launched Tentmoot 2003, a massively ambitious five-day convention where the profits were supposed to go to the literacy charity Reading Is Fundamental. It was a total disaster, with LOTR actors stranded in airports across the globe and devoted fans/cult members having to fork out ludicrous amounts of money to patch things up as more and more arrangements Blake/Player/Wood had promised to make failed to materialise. He locked himself in his hotel room, threatening suicide, and by the time the dust settled, there was a $3,000 black hole where Reading is Fundamental's profits were supposed to be that nobody could account for. To add icing to the cake, the Player family then showed up reporting a missing-persons case - they had received a long, dramatic suicide note about how their daughter Amy wanted to end her life after her girlfriend Abbey had run off with the villainously suave Jordan Wood. The police reaction when they found out the truth was predictable, and Blake is no longer allowed in the state of Oregon. Tentmoot marked the end of Blake's high-profile involvement in Lord of the Rings. He retreated back into his cult, which got weirder and more controlling by the day. Eventually, it fell apart, as more and more of his disciples escaped and got help. Abbey Stone, his girlfriend, finally burned out in 2007 after a disastrous attempt by the cult to flee to Canada and start a new life there, reconnecting with her family and requesting their help (which was made a bit awkward because she'd cut them off in 2004 at Blake's behest after he gaslighted her into falsely recalling memories of extensive parental abuse). They bailed her out, got her away from him, and put her on an extensive cult reprogramming course, letting her slowly become a functional member of society again. One year later, Andrew Blake emerged in the Harry Potter fandom with DAYD, back to his old tricks. The story was based on the narrative he'd created for his old cult after the whole Lord of the Rings thing fell through, about a group of child soldiers in World War II, and the DAYDians became a fresh recruiting ground for a fresh cult. His new name was taken from a hardcore porn director in order to thwart Googling by vengeful cult members and scam victims, and he presented himself as a cisgender man with an unusual disorder that prevented his body from absorbing testosterone (and also an ex-IRA spirit warrior, because of course). Abbey Stone (now Willson, thanks to a new and much more successful marriage) became 'Louise' (her middle name), the ex-girlfriend from hell who had cruelly snatched away their son during their breakup (actually a sparrow that the cult had raised together). Soon, he was back to isolating his devotees and channelling the fanfic's characters for them, as the sequels to DAYD got stranger and more divorced from Harry Potter canon (the second story, Sluagh, featured Seamus Finnegan travelling to war-torn Belfast to knife-fight an ancient Celtic demon). When the fandom_wank revelations came out, Blake waved them away by explaining that Amy Player, the villain of Tentmoot, had been his evil twin, then admitted he was Amy Player, then issued lachrymose apologies, then arranged DAYDcon (which was a mess, but not a Tentmoot-level mess), and then announced his retirement from the Internet. Then poo poo got real. In May 2011, Jason Eisenberg shot his wife, Brittany Quinn, and two of her roommates before suiciding. The only survivor, who escaped with minor injuries, was Andrew Blake. Quinn had been the new Abbey Willson, a woman in an unhappy marriage who was drawn into Blake's cult (she was a DAYDian) and convinced to let him live with/sponge off her. She'd cut off her family and extorted money from her husband with lurid tales of abuse that sounded suspiciously similar to the letters Willson and her fellow Lord of the Rings cultists had been told to write to their families by Blake. Blake responded with by forming a domestic-abuse charity with the unintentionally revealing name of 'It's About Power', and organising a hike along the Trail of Tears in Brittany's memory. Details are hazy, but the cult members who went along hint that it didn't end well. Soon afterwards, Willson, now recovered, started blogging about her experiences with Blake in a series of posts aptly entitled 'The Crazy Train', reaching out to DAYDians still in the cult and explaining her ex's long and sordid history. This triggered a series of cult members coming out with their own stories, including another member of Willson's LOTR cult and a couple of ex-DAYDians. The Quinn murder was the second Tentmoot, striking a fatal blow to Blake's presence in a second fandom. The DAYDians are still operational, but they're going the way the LOTR cult did as he loses interest. His new game is Supernatural, where he's embedded himself in the 'Destiel' community, focused on the fan-favourite pairing of Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel. Things haven't gone as smoothly this time around, as the Internet has become used to his tricks, and even the infamously deranged Supernatural fandom (Google 'omegaverse' to see what I mean, and bring mindbleach) aren't biting as hard as they might. Nevertheless, he's got an new young woman to sponge off, a rapt inner circle, and plenty of stories of channelling angels to go around. It's only a matter of time until poo poo gets bad again. So yeah, that's the DAYD story. Methods of Rationality wasn't the first time Harry Potter fanfic was used as a cult recruitment tool, and for all that's bad about Yudkowsky's word-vomit, at least it hasn't got someone killed yet.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 14:40 |
what the poo poo I mean, it's not like it's the first time fanfiction has been used as a basis for cult behavior - FFVII House comes to mind - but it's always just as painful to read.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 15:48 |
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I think 'yet' is the operative word there, unfortunately. But yeah that poo poo is loving terrifying.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 17:12 |
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Suddenly, HPMOR doesn't seem nearly as distressing anymore. I... guess that's good..?
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 20:16 |
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I have trouble conceiving of why anyone would read this idiot garbage.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 21:12 |
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anilEhilated posted:what the poo poo Not emptyquoting Because holy gently caress that is insane. Also props to whoever recommended the arithmancer. It's actually not terrible!
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 22:33 |
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Darth Walrus posted:OK, time for that big ol' effortpost I promised. Think Yudkowsky's magnum opus is crazy? You ain't seen nothing yet. I was mentally saying "holy poo poo" sentence after sentence of this. My God.
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# ? Aug 30, 2015 22:39 |
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Unlimited enthusiasm, but limited tendency to seek out editors. And an even more limited pool of decent editors willing to do work for the pay that a fanfic author can give them (ie nothing).
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# ? Aug 31, 2015 02:47 |
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Liquid Communism posted:And an even more limited pool of decent editors willing to do work for the pay that a fanfic author can give them (ie nothing). Let's be honest, even when people like su3 provide editing and science fact checking for free out of a compulsion to correct science errors most fanfic writers don't want the help. Yud is hardly alone in this failing.
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# ? Aug 31, 2015 03:54 |
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I missed a JosephWongKS Let's Read for this long, I am ashamed of myself.
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# ? Aug 31, 2015 08:21 |
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Chapter 15: Conscientiousness Part Two quote:
I wonder whether Eliezer also feels “desperately humiliated” if he has to ask for assistance or advice. This attitude is understandable in children, but mature self-confident adults should never be ashamed or embarrassed to seek help. quote:
This is not a totally likable or pleasant aspect of Eliezarry, but at least he’s a lot more relatable and more human now.
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# ? Aug 31, 2015 09:49 |
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The Iron Rose posted:Also props to whoever recommended the arithmancer. It's actually not terrible! Thirding Arithmancer, Hermione is breaking out matrices and vectors to write her own spells. Edit: Bwhahaha, this is hilarious. In HPMOR, Harry spends 2 chapters researching variant jinxes, and gives up. And then when he does invent a variant spell, he refuses to tell anyone how it works. Hermione in Arithmancer is working on spells and science literally every chapter, and when she discovers something she publishes in a journal. Methinks this Hermione is a bit better at science. Loel fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Aug 31, 2015 |
# ? Aug 31, 2015 11:21 |
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LowellDND posted:Hermione in Arithmancer is working on spells and science literally every chapter, and when she discovers something she publishes in a journal. Methinks this Hermione is a bit better at science. This is because Yudkowsky does not actually want magic that works like science. He wants science that works like magic.
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# ? Aug 31, 2015 18:29 |
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Pavlov posted:This is because Yudkowsky does not actually want magic that works like science. He wants science that works like magic. I think one reason so many of these singulitarian booster types either never went to college or failed at science in college is because of this. I dropped out of Biochemistry to study history, myself, because once I got in enough I A: Discovered I absolutely can't do Calc 3 and have a hell of a time with Organic Chemistry and B: Even if I could've, I wasn't enjoying that kind of work enough to want to do the sheer amount of grunt work on it that science requires. Like, science is both intellectually difficult, but it requires a lot of passion because there's a hell of a lot of hard, repetitive work involved (just like any form of research) and if you don't enjoy it or just instantly want results you're going to be miserable. I enjoy history and religious studies enough to be happy reading through hundreds of pages of old philosophy or combing religious texts for citations and textual support, but wouldn't have felt the same about biochem and lab work. Guys like Yud, I feel, are essentially writing about how disappointed they are that science doesn't work like it does in science fiction and Hollywood. "Why can't I be the supreme master of the mind who is so smart he can manipulate everyone and instantly reasons his way through the plot?" and "Science should be all about being smart enough and enabling all my dreams, not all this boring hard work and study."
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# ? Aug 31, 2015 18:40 |
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Night10194 posted:I think one reason so many of these singulitarian booster types either never went to college or failed at science in college is because of this. I dropped out of Biochemistry to study history, myself, because once I got in enough I A: Discovered I absolutely can't do Calc 3 and have a hell of a time with Organic Chemistry and B: Even if I could've, I wasn't enjoying that kind of work enough to want to do the sheer amount of grunt work on it that science requires. Like, science is both intellectually difficult, but it requires a lot of passion because there's a hell of a lot of hard, repetitive work involved (just like any form of research) and if you don't enjoy it or just instantly want results you're going to be miserable. I enjoy history and religious studies enough to be happy reading through hundreds of pages of old philosophy or combing religious texts for citations and textual support, but wouldn't have felt the same about biochem and lab work. Guys like Yud, I feel, are essentially writing about how disappointed they are that science doesn't work like it does in science fiction and Hollywood. "Why can't I be the supreme master of the mind who is so smart he can manipulate everyone and instantly reasons his way through the plot?" and "Science should be all about being smart enough and enabling all my dreams, not all this boring hard work and study." As I recall, his other short story about the Bayesian Conspiracy is angry at 'the old methods of science' that took 30 years to get it right, as opposed to just thinking the right thing early on. Its very 'early Greek philosophy' imho.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 01:04 |
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LowellDND posted:As I recall, his other short story about the Bayesian Conspiracy is angry at 'the old methods of science' that took 30 years to get it right, as opposed to just thinking the right thing early on. Its very 'early Greek philosophy' imho. This is not at all surprising, since as has been remarked before, Yudkowsky basically treats science as a gnostic religion. Something with revealed truths that are only passed on to initiates.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 05:32 |
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Hate Fibration posted:This is not at all surprising, since as has been remarked before, Yudkowsky basically treats science as a gnostic religion. Something with revealed truths that are only passed on to initiates. To be fair, a shitton of people treat science that way.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 07:49 |
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Chapter 15: Conscientiousness Part Three quote:
A good rule of life in general, although I suspect that Eliezer rarely admits being ignorant about anything and/or he declares that anything he’s ignorant about must be a useless or frivolous field of knowledge. quote:
This all but guarantees that one of her students this year will be permanently injured from Transfiguration.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 08:34 |
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The Reddit thread meltdown continues, on Tumblr. nostalgebraist sums up the problem. Do click on all the "reblogged this from" below with comments, there's a fascinating conversation going on there. (I post here with stuff I said in this thread.) The disappointed cultists are particularly delicious, e.g. this one lamenting that Yudkowsky has strayed from Yudkowsky's path.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 09:00 |
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divabot posted:The Reddit thread meltdown continues, on Tumblr. nostalgebraist sums up the problem. Do click on all the "reblogged this from" below with comments, there's a fascinating conversation going on there. (I post here with stuff I said in this thread.) The disappointed cultists are particularly delicious, e.g. this one lamenting that Yudkowsky has strayed from Yudkowsky's path. Shoulda blamed the whole thing on his evil twin.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 09:40 |
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Speaking as someone who read Harry Potter fanfiction for a ridiculously long time, when people say that Methods is good, it's just factually a lie. It commits a bunch of what, even at that point in time were considered enormously obnoxious cliches. Such as:
But above all else, the most obnoxious, stupid, ridiculous thing about Methods is the time frame. 1.2 million words. What the person who mentioned Prince of Dark Kingdom didn't tell you was that it's in book 6, and the writer doesn't bother splitting up the books because s/he finds it redundant - they're all the same story thread anyways. The actual years are about 80,000~120,000 each; fairly sizeable, but not ridiculous. Methods of Rationality will never leave first year. It begins, and finishes, when Harry Potter is eleven. And that's sort of where it falls apart. Harry Potter and the Boy Who Lived went through 2 years or so, in a tenth of the words, and created far more interesting plot threads then Methods did. Methods' problem isn't the science, or the plot, it's a problem a lot of mediocre SFF fiction falls into. It's boring. It's so goddamn boring. Yudkowsky writes with all the style and flair of a textbook. It's serviceable writing - impressive for fanfiction, but when things like Forging the Sword (In 4th year, once more at a tenth of the words) exist, it makes for a pretty piss-poor comparison. Methods is popular for 3 reasons. One, he begged for reviews in every chapter. Two, he already had a cult following. And the most important, three - People like to sort by reviews or words. Methods is long, and it has more reviews then any other fanfic - because he liked to do it Youtube style; like and comment if you enjoyed the chapter. And when you add all those together, you get the most popular, most mediocre fanfic of all time. Mazzletoff fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Sep 1, 2015 |
# ? Sep 1, 2015 10:06 |
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Okay this Arithmancer story is pretty cool but it's literally half a million words long and that's the sort of thing you warn someone about before they start.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 10:43 |
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Mazzletoff posted:[*]Bashing. Big Yud dislikes Ron a lot, for no explicable reason - the only characters who really go it alone without getting viciously re-characterized for the purpose of Yudkowsky's dislike are pretty much just Fred and George.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 10:50 |
YggiDee posted:Okay this Arithmancer story is pretty cool but it's literally half a million words long and that's the sort of thing you warn someone about before they start. That is only very slightly longer than the actual Harry Potter books 1-4, which is the timeframe that it covers so far. It's certainly hefty but not inappropriately so like HPMOR. By the way, while I didn't explicitly recommend The Arithmancer while using it as an example before, it is a genuinely good story.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 12:28 |
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# ? May 17, 2024 02:39 |
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Yud's characterization of Transfiguration never really fit to me. While "Turning something into something else and back again" would certainly be considered highly dangerous by anyone scientific, in the main series it's mostly portrayed as harmless up until you get to the advanced stuff, and even then the harmful stuff seemed to be fixable for the most part. The way this fanfic characterizes it, Krum's partial transfiguration into a shark was the single riskiest move made during the triwizard tournament yet that was treated as well thought out but imperfectly done, and a group of teenagers managed to work out becoming animagi all on their own with no apparent ill effects. The kind of seriousness McGonagall expressed in the last section had the tone of a NEWT class where they start routinely deal with complex poo poo that will send you to St. Mungo's if you screw up, not a first year intro to basic magic for 11 year olds.
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# ? Sep 1, 2015 13:12 |