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I've read it five times. It's one of the most culturally important works of the 21st century.
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Jul 5, 2020 20:23
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Look outside at how this century is going so far if you feel there's some mismatch
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Jul 5, 2020 20:24
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WilliamAnderson posted:I assume you've read the other seminal work, Homestuck? Continuity RCP posted:How does it feel to be so loving stunted
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Jul 6, 2020 01:59
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alexandriao posted:You know, as much as I despise Yud and his followers, and the philosophy he espouses, I don't disagree with his general (originally stated) goal, to add more consistency to a series of novels where the magic system was too underdeveloped to be interesting. There are worse problems with the books, like Harry not actually having any kind of effect on the plot, etc. But for some reason, the magic system always bugged me the worst. Mostly, how Rowling never bothered to put any effort into developing it. It's emblematic of a lot of the problems in Rowling's writing, and political beliefs -- that she puts nothing more than a surface-depth thought into anything. It explains her most recent remarks -- a lot of them are driven by "hey this is neat, and will get me retweets and popularity, I'll tweet it!!". And that Yud attempts to write not just a rationalization of Harry Potter, but a metatextual rationalization of Harry Potter through the lens of its fanfiction is one of the elements of the work that elevate it. As with every grand theme he attempts, it is half-constructed and easily abandoned, but I recognize the impulse. "The consistency we could create"... But ultimately we already have that, as I mentioned, in the fanfiction body as a whole. I believe there was some bruhahah about trying to enter the entire aooo into the contest, which I agree was not entirely sound. But I have read Harry Potter fanfics (branching from you guys "guilty pleasures" you posted here and there over the years, I see each and every one of you now) that do a fantastic job providing consistency of agency, geopolitic, and cosmology to whatever particular aspect of the series most drew its authors - Harry raised by Goblins, Harry becomes Snape's bickering lab assistant, Harry becomes a BYOB communist because we all knew this JK Rowling poo poo was coming. But when any singular author creates a holistic world, or extends anothers holistic world, they are naturally going to imbue their own perceptions and biases about what elements and philosophies are important to draw out. This relation between creator and subcreator, and metatexually the relation between author and God, is central to Tolkien's Silmarillion cosmology - but check those guys out if you want to know more about Tolkien, it's one of the most legit threads in forums history. We can see an object example of this in another element worthy of praise in Methods, the Interdict of Merlin. I have not read enough fanfic to understand any potential antecedents, but it's one of those rare bits where Yudjkowsky remembers his most essential premise and provides a continuous patch to an element of dissonance in the framework of the original. That is: A culture constantly reaching back to the a past age of epic glory while having an extensive academic, literary and research landscape. Cosmologically it allows for artifacts unreplicable yet a "crunchy" (ugh) casting system; geosociopolitically it fills in the history with unfathomable disasters that end up, serendipitously, solving elements such as population size Yet, it is also a vehicle for Yud to explore that element of existence most important to him: existential risk. Merlin becomes twisted to Yud's purposes so far afield because Yud is "uniquely outsider as an artist", but any work will see its characters and devices shaded towards what the author thinks most. Targeting any such "rationalization" towards not the work itself, but its body of fanfiction tropes and standouts, very neatly democratizes that ideal of extended the world of the work beyond its original author, solving this inherent contradiction. I probably wrote a thousand words there so here's my post in picture form 
Daikloktos fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jul 10, 2020 |
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Jul 10, 2020 04:23
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Oh no doubt, and I remember a time before google when virtually any search string on like, AltaVista would return Yu Yu Hakusho fanfic. But Harry Potter also comes in at the level of wider cultural impact. The groundwork was laid by the anime community, and the Star Trek guys like I mentioned and hell, the creators of kids cartoons today were writing fanfiction of the ones we grew up with. And also, while I don't know the numbers, I'd just assume Harry Potter had the biggest volume of fanfiction for its time by whatever metric, and is probably still Top 3. EDIT: Oh and I did say "literary" hit, the fact it's a text is central Daikloktos fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jul 10, 2020 |
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Jul 10, 2020 05:26
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Here's a good post from this thread five years ago (!!). We're extremely lucky to have this thread, and the Less Wrong Mock as it lasted, to accumulate experiences and thoughts like thisCurvature of Earth posted:Like, part of me wants to go easy on him for that. Back in 2002 when I first started reading fanfiction, if you missed an episode of a show you were hosed and had to hope some weeaboo had posted a summary of it on their fansite. I never actually saw about half of the episodes of my favorite show from childhood, but between lovely fansites and lovely fanfiction I could still give you a detailed account of what happened. (It's not that hard. Most of the really popular fics in any fandom are essentially retellings of the series with the author's own spin on it, and they're lazy enough to recycle scenes from the show if they don't feel the need to change them. Read enough and, just from the overlap between all those fics, you can get a very good idea of what actually happened in the series proper.) But I failed to find the Yud quote. It went something like "I felt no need to return to the series, as I had come to think of the universe as a grown up place to tell grown up stories". So I'm going to say I'm either right or too easily able to generate plausible Yudspeak.
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Jul 10, 2020 05:33
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His brain started to think of it as a grownup place and his heart, never held childhood whimsy to begin with
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Jul 10, 2020 05:56
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YggiDee posted:Shamefully, I know the numbers and Harry Potter is absolutely in the top three fanfic by any reasonable measure. On fanfiction.net, Harry Potter is King poo poo of gently caress Mountain, there's 800k+ stories and the next contender, (Naruto) has half that. Archive Of Our Own has HP fic in third place (259k) , but the two properties beating it are 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' (352k) and 'Kpop', (319k) which are... An entire media franchise and a whole-rear end music genre. I don't know if those even count. If you ignore those the next highest seem to be Supernatural (227k) and Sherlock Holmes (131k).
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Jul 10, 2020 05:58
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 Thank you, I should have bolded and keyworded that. It's important to have both kinds of posting accessible in a thread like this and who might know if that picture was part of a predicate point I was making
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Jul 10, 2020 08:52
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Crossposting because the Animorphs thread got to this before I could get to it hereDaikloktos posted:drat, this thread got to fanfic recommendations before I could establish why "Animorphs: The Reckoning is Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality done right" is not a ridiculous sentence to type. The pithy emblematic thing I'll say is that it casts the transhumanist hyper-rationalist optimizer that was the protagonist of that work in Visser 3, and the kids are written as thoughtful human beings struggling with their own limitations. This is a series where the themes and subjects "rational fiction" (as descends from HPMOR) wants to explore are actually congruent to the original canon and for vast stretches it feels more like just thoughtful fanfic than anything written to a literary movement and its philosophies. Having this forums context to engage with Yud and his works and his community to such depth allows us insight into all sorts of authors and works we'd have never had reason to think about to such degree. Even if you don't think about things to the degree I do about everything (clearly) you're still going to make brief abstract connections to posts in those megathreads as you encounter similar writers. If you think it's pointless for anyone to take all this so seriously then explain the hundreds and hundreds of pages before I got here. Daikloktos fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 13:07
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