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The first thing in my Pillowfort feed right now is a meta post discussing Girl Genius in the context of the genre of Rationalism Fic. While I first saw that post in the context of the Fandom Meta community, I'm not sure of the etiquette of posting this as a comment--not when the author didn't reblog the post to the community and seems to have written it for her own page--so I'm going to talk about it in my personal space. Besides, the conversation I want to have is quite orthogonal to hers, and it feels rude to derail it in comments. (And hey, I can crosspost from over there to DW that way--I like being here, too.)

Here's the thing: I loathe the genre of Rational Fic. I had several friends who were very enthused by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, many of whom tried to get me avidly to read it. This... probably didn't work very well, because the attempts at realism in the story fell badly flat to me in the very first point: the characters seemed to me to certainly not be developmentally realistic for eleven-year-olds, and to a greater or lesser degree sympathetic protagonists appear to be... look, put it like this: the genre abandons emotional realism for me. I can't work out how this kid becomes this obnoxious, biochemistry professor stepfather or not--and I'm perpetually astounded by the absence even the emotional weaknesses I associate with highly logical gifted kids given their head in the context of academics.

Of course, this isn't surprising, given the conceits of rationalism: the idea that the emotional is the enemy of rationalism, that emotions are the primary source of mistakes in logic, and that pure dispassion would allow us to best understand and predict the chaotic world around us.

(I think this is silly. We know empirically what happens when you lose emotionality: you also lose the ability to make any decisions at all. I also find that the result of striving to minimize all potential emotional reasoning is to... muddy the water where emotions hide, making illogical decisions and behavior more likely than it would be if people would just acknowledge their emotional position outright and move on with asking whether those emotions are justified or ethical or whatever.

I would have so much fun yelling at Vulcans over the poor logic of their position, is my point. I love Vulcans, but I don't think they're right about the approach to emotionality and kohlinar, particularly.)

The big problem with this kind of "Rational Fic" is that I'm reading fanfiction heavily for emotional continuity. I don't think it's a surprise that the Fanlore collated criticisms of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality focus heavily on the contentions that the characterization is bad. Because many people explciitly enjoy fandom as in ways heavily focused on emotional continuity and characterization, of course a genre driven by a philosophy that totally fears emotional reasoning and engagement would mesh badly for many people.

But I do find it interesting and wryly amusing that I find this "hyperrationalistic" genre of writing so completely frustrating because I parse and perceive it as completely emotionally unrealistic and incoherent.

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The funny thing is, I read HPMOR and got to this part in Chapter Six:

"Mr. Potter..." [McGonagall]'s voice trailed off. Then she sighed, and knelt down beside him. "Mr. Potter," she said, gently now, "it's not your responsibility to take care of the students at Hogwarts. It's mine. I won't let anything bad happen to you or anyone else. Hogwarts is the safest place for magical children in all the wizarding world, and Madam Pomfrey has a full healer's office. You won't need a healer's kit at all, let alone a five-Galleon one."

"But I do!" Harry burst out. "Nowhere is perfectly safe! And what if my parents have a heart attack or get in an accident when I go home for Christmas--Madam Pomfrey won't be there, I'll need a healer's kit of my own--"

"What in Merlin's name..." Professor McGonagall said. She stood up, and looked down at Harry in an expression torn between annoyance and concern. "There's no need to think about such terrible things, Mr. Potter!"

Harry's expression twisted up into bitterness, hearing that. "Yes there is! If you don't think, you don't just get hurt yourself, you end up hurting other people!"

Professor McGonagall opened her mouth, then closed it. The witch rubbed the bridge of her nose, looking thoughtful. "Mr. Potter... if I were to offer to listen to you for a while... is there anything you'd like to talk to me about?"

"About what?"

"About why you're convinced you must always be on your guard against terrible things happening to you."
Harry stared at her in puzzlement. That was a self-evident axiom. "Well..." Harry said slowly. He tried to organise his thoughts. How could he explain himself to a Professor-witch, when she didn't even know the basics?

And then he and the story spend a great deal of time defending Harry's point of view as completely rational. They explicitly confront and dismiss the possibility that he was abused as a child, and have Harry slowly wear McGonagall down and prove himself a better judge of reality than her.

Which is, frankly, nonsense. God knows my area of specialty is the psychological damage that happens when you raise baby geniuses in isolation; and I can absolutely say that the ideal response is not for that child to become a wholly self-sufficient automaton who has worked out the ideal response to every disaster. That doesn't get you a functional adult; that gets you a rigid, isolated, paranoid person whose ability to cope with the world depends heavily on the world's adherence to a model they can comprehend and predict. (Which... kind of sounds like Yudkowsky of late)

The lack of emotional realism is because hyperrealism tends to completely ignore the bonds of familiarity, trust, affection, and love between people; it dismisses emotion as irrational and doesn't understand that we need minds other than ours; we need to be more than the sole guiding intelligence of the universe. We're dependent on being heard and seen by other people, and having them take action because they view our internal lives as meaningful and important. Harry of MPMOR reads like "someone who spent his first eleven years locked in a cellar" because he's responding to the emotional trauma of having parents who didn't validate his emotions and provide him with coping mechanisms to handle his fears and anxieties. His damage is, in fact, the result of the kind of hyper-realistic worldview he espouses. The problem isn't fundamentally that he's "too smart", smarter than his parents; it's that he was taught that to be empathized with, he had to be absolutely logically correct, and to have any effect on the world, he had to be more competent than the adults around him.

As soon as I realized that Yudkowsky has no idea about any of this, I stopped reading.

Hi! I think the hyperlink in "the characterization is bad" is not what you meant?

I appreciate this take! I maybe read a chapter of HPMOR and didn't care for it, and the lens you provide is so useful!