Excerpts of the best and worst type below the cut.
I hate the author/fanbase/type of story this is, and I need you to know that.This is when you're a fucking idiot who can't distinguish between a thing and the things you associate with that thing. You're a living, breathing intellectual fallacy. Other people exhale carbon dioxide, you exhale IQ points.
HPMOR is the story about a boy who thinks he's smarter than everyone and all the adults are idiots for not letting him do what he wants. Unsurprisingly, it's the new Bible of geeky manchildren everywhere. I'm pretty sure the author thinks he's smarter than me, and that makes me mad. You can tell he thinks he's better than everyone by the way he writes Harry Potter to think he's better than everyone, and since the whole story is obviously a self-insert Gary Stu circlejerk over science and "rationality," then you can definitely tell that's the whole reason the author wrote this, and you can also tell he's a giant fartmouth. Also, the science is laughably bad, since I pride myself on a superior understanding of science to to the average person, and until reading HPMOR I hadn't understood the difference between watching John Oliver and reading popular science books versus actually reading real journal articles or being able to do calculus and not just know that calculus is a word. Plus, I'm a literary expert, and overall, I'd have to say the writing is bad. If you want something more in-depth, I'd say it's medium-bad. Not enough adjectives, I give it 2 out of 5.
In depth literary reviewYou're not going to do this one, so who cares? You'd have to think seriously about writing, how it works, what kind of general principles exist regarding what makes a story engaging, emotional, and instructive, and how to discern where and how in the particulars of the text that story achieved those things. It's long and hard work, why not just shit on things and curse all the time? It's so edgy to say that you don't like a popular thing, be sure to let everyone know that a lot.
HJPEV, of the splurenduritous [you have to use big words in this review, I don't know any, but you can just make them up] HPMOR, is a divisive character, both responsible for the strongest positive reactions to the story, and the strongest negative reactions away from it. In this turgid essay I will explore exactly how the author's choice of social dynamics with respect to the main character create this divide.A common criticism of HJPEV is that he exists to appeal to "snarky male nerds," essentially as a form of wish fulfillment for the overly intelligent, under-respected (in their opinion) primarily male geeks and science lovers who populate the Internet in disproportionate numbers. This critique, we contend, originates in the non-submissive attitude HJPEV takes to adult authority figures, and the contemptuous one he takes to his peers whom he does not regard as intellectual equals. [lots of quotations, page numbers, blah blah]But taking this characterization to an extreme would be to miss the subtleties of HJPEV's personality as it develops over the story. For one, as wish fulfillment, although HJPEV's character contains aspects of that, as indeed fantasy heroes often do, HJPEV is overly complex and detailed to be someone the audience is supposed to project onto. [blah blah more quotes about various minor notes of characterization in his monologues, dialogues, and choices that make him 3D].More significantly, however, is the extent of HJPEV's relationships that do not meet the standard of geek wish fulfillment. His romance with Hermione, most obviously, proceeds in ways that are at times humiliating and painful for him. [quotes blah blah] More importantly, Harry does befriend his less intelligent peers as their General Chaos, and even holds a number of them in high regard outside of the General trio [blah blah quotes about Padma Patil and whatever.] Harry is someone they look up to, but the story has him earn this through the excitement and novelty he brings to their life through imitable behaviors, not authorial fiat [blah blah quotes]. But the most important relationship to this argument and to this story is the one between HJPEV and Professor Quirrell, wherein the former takes an outright submissive attitude to the latter. Here we see that HJPEV's charcter...[blah blah analysis quotes blah no one's reading by this point anyway]
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