Reading Wednesday
So while I was at my dad's cottage for Thanksgiving, I had a sudden craving for Slytherin Harry fic. I ended up reading something very... peculiar. Those of you who were active in HP back in the day probably know all about it, but my participation was pretty much limited to reading stories written or recced by my friends. (Aside from three brief bursts of very particular interests: (1) Remus/Sirius and Remus/Snape, (2) Snape/Hermione, and (3) after all my favorite characters DIED, post-canon epilogue-compliant Harry/Draco. Bitter middle-aged wizards FTW.)
ANYWAY. I searched for "best Slytherin Harry fics" and found this rec list called "Best novel-length AU powerful/independent/dark/Slytherin Harry stories (100k+)" Doesn't that sound promising?
And there was one story on that list that had 10 times the number of faves and reviews as anything else on the list. Doesn't *that* sound promising? It was called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Here, have the author's summary: "Petunia married a biochemist, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction. Then came the Hogwarts letter, and a world of intriguing new possibilities to exploit." Still promising, I'd say.
And you know, I'm not sorry I read the 19 chapters that I read before it got too weird and I bailed. Then I searched for other reactions to the story and discovered JUST HOW WEIRD it was. Definitely the only fanfic story I've read by an autodidact AI researcher who uses his fic to promote his rationality blog.
Actually, a large part of why I bailed is because the author didn't seem to understand the thought-experiment nature of the AU genre. This surprises me, given his passionate devotion to and encyclopedic knowledge of the scientific method. This is how an AU works: you vary one factor and hold the others constant, and you speculate on how the changes would play out. Or, no, that's not quite right. I can think of AUs that vary more than one factor and yet still feel like lawful AUs to me. Toft's The Girls of St. Mary's, for example, genderswaps the SGA characters *and* puts them in an English boarding school.
Oooo, I've got it, I think it has to do with independent and dependent variables. So let me describe why I originally liked HPMOR quite a bit, and how it all went wrong. The summary makes it sound like an AU of random chance: "Oh, Petunia just happened to marry this other fellow." But when Harry gets his letter and his adoptive father needs convincing about the existence of magic, Petunia tells him that she begged and begged Lily to cast a (very risky) spell that would make Petunia beautiful, and Lily finally gave in, and that's when Petunia met her husband. So that made the AU more intriguing right there -- the real point of divergence was a difficult decision made by Lily. Then a few chapters later, Harry hears a mysterious whisper telling him to look for Hermione Grainger on the train. BOOM, suddenly we have the potential for an entirely different subgenre of AU: the one where the characters in our canon version intentionally do something to create the alternate universe. (It's a subgenre I quite like). There are several clues suggesting that something went drastically wrong in our timeline, and someone worked some desperately difficult and dangerous time travel spell to give Harry a better start on his quest. Intriguing!
Meanwhile, the story was managing to make hefty science and philosophy infodumps genuinely fun. I know that in fantasy circles there's a lot of debate about magic and how systematic it should (or shouldn't) be, but you have to admit, the magic in HP is more than usually absurd, and fanfic writers spend more time than your average fan trying to systematize things, because you need a good feel for how things work if you're going to extrapolate convincingly. So it was a lot of fun to have Harry get frustrated with how absurd it all is and dig in with some well-considered hypothesis testing. I will say that the sorting hat chapter was an absolute treat.
But then we get to Professor Quirrell. Who is nothing like what he is in canon. At first this seemed like yet another wrinkle in the intriguing time travel AU: Voldemort is aware of their desperate attempt, and works his *own* time travel magic to counter Harry's new advantages! And possibly this is what the author might be doing? But both Harry and the author seemed to *really* be fanboy-ing the weird new Quirrell, which is not consistent with him being a newly revised plot by Voldemort. And then I went back and read the author's notes, which clearly say, "This is not a strict single-point-of-departure fic - there exists a primary point of departure, at some point in the past, but also other alterations." And that's when I hit the back button. (Everything I found out about the author afterward just validated that decision.)
Because, okay, here is my unified theory of AUs, which I just generated on the spot: there are some story aspects that make good independent variables, and others that are dependent variables. Character qualities like sex, race, class, sexual orientation, etc. make good IVs. Setting qualities (time period, location) make good IVs. Even basic human nature can be a good IV -- go ahead and give humans a whole new breeding system! But character *behavior* is generally a DV. We are exploring the effects that all those IVs have on what the characters DO.
The only way behavior really works as an IV is to limit it to a single choice point -- "What if so-and-so had chosen the other option that one time when he...." It doesn't really work for ongoing behavior -- "What if so-and-so was consistently nice and helpful?" I mean, sure, you can write that story if you want to, but it doesn't really feel like an AU to me. It just feels like you don't like the canon characterization and want to write something different.
So, given that the story was starting to feel like, "What if this really intriguing thing happened, and also what if Quirrell (and Dumbledore, and who knows how many other characters) were completely different people?" I bailed. But it gave me occasion to lecture my children on positivity bias in hypothesis testing, and that is all to the good.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/450824.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.
ANYWAY. I searched for "best Slytherin Harry fics" and found this rec list called "Best novel-length AU powerful/independent/dark/Slytherin Harry stories (100k+)" Doesn't that sound promising?
And there was one story on that list that had 10 times the number of faves and reviews as anything else on the list. Doesn't *that* sound promising? It was called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Here, have the author's summary: "Petunia married a biochemist, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction. Then came the Hogwarts letter, and a world of intriguing new possibilities to exploit." Still promising, I'd say.
And you know, I'm not sorry I read the 19 chapters that I read before it got too weird and I bailed. Then I searched for other reactions to the story and discovered JUST HOW WEIRD it was. Definitely the only fanfic story I've read by an autodidact AI researcher who uses his fic to promote his rationality blog.
Actually, a large part of why I bailed is because the author didn't seem to understand the thought-experiment nature of the AU genre. This surprises me, given his passionate devotion to and encyclopedic knowledge of the scientific method. This is how an AU works: you vary one factor and hold the others constant, and you speculate on how the changes would play out. Or, no, that's not quite right. I can think of AUs that vary more than one factor and yet still feel like lawful AUs to me. Toft's The Girls of St. Mary's, for example, genderswaps the SGA characters *and* puts them in an English boarding school.
Oooo, I've got it, I think it has to do with independent and dependent variables. So let me describe why I originally liked HPMOR quite a bit, and how it all went wrong. The summary makes it sound like an AU of random chance: "Oh, Petunia just happened to marry this other fellow." But when Harry gets his letter and his adoptive father needs convincing about the existence of magic, Petunia tells him that she begged and begged Lily to cast a (very risky) spell that would make Petunia beautiful, and Lily finally gave in, and that's when Petunia met her husband. So that made the AU more intriguing right there -- the real point of divergence was a difficult decision made by Lily. Then a few chapters later, Harry hears a mysterious whisper telling him to look for Hermione Grainger on the train. BOOM, suddenly we have the potential for an entirely different subgenre of AU: the one where the characters in our canon version intentionally do something to create the alternate universe. (It's a subgenre I quite like). There are several clues suggesting that something went drastically wrong in our timeline, and someone worked some desperately difficult and dangerous time travel spell to give Harry a better start on his quest. Intriguing!
Meanwhile, the story was managing to make hefty science and philosophy infodumps genuinely fun. I know that in fantasy circles there's a lot of debate about magic and how systematic it should (or shouldn't) be, but you have to admit, the magic in HP is more than usually absurd, and fanfic writers spend more time than your average fan trying to systematize things, because you need a good feel for how things work if you're going to extrapolate convincingly. So it was a lot of fun to have Harry get frustrated with how absurd it all is and dig in with some well-considered hypothesis testing. I will say that the sorting hat chapter was an absolute treat.
But then we get to Professor Quirrell. Who is nothing like what he is in canon. At first this seemed like yet another wrinkle in the intriguing time travel AU: Voldemort is aware of their desperate attempt, and works his *own* time travel magic to counter Harry's new advantages! And possibly this is what the author might be doing? But both Harry and the author seemed to *really* be fanboy-ing the weird new Quirrell, which is not consistent with him being a newly revised plot by Voldemort. And then I went back and read the author's notes, which clearly say, "This is not a strict single-point-of-departure fic - there exists a primary point of departure, at some point in the past, but also other alterations." And that's when I hit the back button. (Everything I found out about the author afterward just validated that decision.)
Because, okay, here is my unified theory of AUs, which I just generated on the spot: there are some story aspects that make good independent variables, and others that are dependent variables. Character qualities like sex, race, class, sexual orientation, etc. make good IVs. Setting qualities (time period, location) make good IVs. Even basic human nature can be a good IV -- go ahead and give humans a whole new breeding system! But character *behavior* is generally a DV. We are exploring the effects that all those IVs have on what the characters DO.
The only way behavior really works as an IV is to limit it to a single choice point -- "What if so-and-so had chosen the other option that one time when he...." It doesn't really work for ongoing behavior -- "What if so-and-so was consistently nice and helpful?" I mean, sure, you can write that story if you want to, but it doesn't really feel like an AU to me. It just feels like you don't like the canon characterization and want to write something different.
So, given that the story was starting to feel like, "What if this really intriguing thing happened, and also what if Quirrell (and Dumbledore, and who knows how many other characters) were completely different people?" I bailed. But it gave me occasion to lecture my children on positivity bias in hypothesis testing, and that is all to the good.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/450824.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.