36 KiB
What is the community's take on the approach to literary criticism referred to as "Death of the Author" as applied to works-in-progres?
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Author: u/IowaPharm2014 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2x94h6/what_is_the_communitys_take_on_the_approach_to/
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Score: 14
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Created: 2015-02-26T17:41:17
Post:
For a brief overview to the concept see here. My (admittedly limited) academic exposure to the field would suggest that this is the prevailing mindset of contemporary literary analysis.
Writer of the in-progress, fan-fiction serial web-novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Eliezer Yudkowsky (/u/eliezeryudkowsky,) has been actively inserting himself into the discussion of his work. This has obviously colored the interpretation and criticism of the novel.
A recent (possibly intentionally misleading) post by the author regarding the interpretation of the latest chapters [not linked due to potential spoilers] have led me to ask these questions. At this point in the story, the reading that seems most internally consistent with the text itself as we have it runs counter to the author's recent statement.
So my questions are:
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Does "Death of the Author" apply to works that are not yet finished?
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Should the way we respond to a work of fiction be shaped by the fact that a large part of the public interaction with that work is occurring in a space where the author now frequents?
Thank you for your considered responses to these questions.
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+27] Time flies like an arrow (38 minutes later)
I don't think it's the author's place to say what happened in their story. I see it as a failure state for a text if the author has to chime in and explain what it is that they really meant by what they said. The text should endeavor to be the whole of it, standing apart from anything that the author has to add, because if he wanted to add to it, well, then it should have been in the text itself.
So with that said, I've always hated "death of the author" when taken to its extremes. If I know that the author fought in the Vietnam War, of course that's going to help me extract meaning from the text. "Death of the author" is one of many lenses to look at a work through, and it's not always the best. But I do think that it can be applied well to works-in-progress, to roughly the same extent that it can be applied to finished works. (However, if you're totally ignoring what the author said, then I think you'll have poor predictive power for what text is left to come.)
Should the way we respond to a work of fiction be shaped by the fact that a large part of the public interaction with that work is occurring in a space where the author now frequents?
I've long shaped my online interactions by considering what would happen if the worst possible person read them. If I'm ever writing something about my wife, I think about what her reaction would be like if she read it. Would she be insulted? Would she feel like her privacy had been violated for the enjoyment of strangers? As a general policy, I think that this tends to result in more measured and thoughtful discussion, and it has the added bonus of making me seem like I'm a swell guy who doesn't tear down or insult people. But if you're going to pursue a sensible policy of online interaction like this, you need to be the sort of person who is willing to say what they think - you can't hold criticism back because you're worried about hurting someone's feelings, but you do need to make sure that you're not hurting someone's feelings for no reason.
tl;dr If the author wants you to think something, their job is to do it in the text. If you like your interpretation better than the author's, go with it. But as always, be kind.
u/robobreasts [+8] (6 hours later)
Ooh, you just implied your wife is the worst possible person! Better edit that shit, she'll find out you know, you can't hid anything from your wife.
u/Timewinders [+3] (9 hours later)
Heh. I think he meant "the person you least wanted to read them." But you never want to write something that could be misinterpreted in the worst possible way.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (9 hours later)
Yeah, that's rule number two. I'll leave that ambiguity for posterity's sake though.
(My sister was once beta reading for me, and started talking about "the rape scene" which I had no recollection of writing. A hilarious misunderstanding when taking a work of fiction for a test drive, but not something that you want to accidentally imply when you don't mean it.)
u/Timewinders [+2] (9 hours later)
And now I want to know what scene that was.
u/Pluvialis [+1] Second Age Sauron (23 hours later)
I'm getting deja vu. Hasn't this exact conversation already happened? I'm sure I've read alexanderwales' comment before, and someone replied with this.
u/None [+2] (7 days later)
Can you please expand on this rape scene thing?
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (7 days later)
I can tell you in very general terms.
The girl in question is eighteen years old and out of her depth, and talking with someone who has an enormous amount of power over her. He's flirtatious, which she detests. He invites her up to his bedroom, and she doesn't really have a choice but to follow. Once there he drinks too much wine, tells her that he admires her and thinks she's beautiful, and then falls asleep. Nothing happens.
The problem was that this was all told in a very compressed form, with only the barest sketching out of the scene - very little of the actual dialog between them. If you were reading it, there was a part where you could infer that something happened, and you could see the girl's distress and anger afterwards as building on that implication. The whole thing does have definite sex/power dynamics going on, by intent. It was a reasonable way to read things.
But it was never my intent to imply that she was raped - in part because I think that would be a little too heavy-handed for what's meant to be a fairly subtle character.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+3] (an hour later)
The aspect of this approach that has always appealed to me is as you said "if he wanted to add to it, well, then it should have been in the text itself."
I appreciate your insight as an author of what I consider to be good online fiction and as a fellow reader - and critical commenter - of HPMoR.
When the author condescendingly responds to his readers' speculations based on the text as it is (rather than perhaps the text as he imagined it, or the text as it is yet to be) it makes it hard to be sympathetic to a reading suggested by the author's extra-textual voice.
tl;dr Thank you for your response and your writing.
edited to remove pointless (bordering on nonsensical) ramble.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Thanks for the kind words.
How authors can or should respond to their readers (and critics) is something that I've given a lot of thought, in part because I consider myself to be on both sides of that coin. I get the impulse to engage - I haven't put anything online in quite some time, but I still get a trickle of reviews in my inbox, and every single time I feel this nervous anticipation. Is it going to be good? Bad? And if it's bad, how bad is it going to be? There are a lot of ways that a review can be bad. I actually find name-calling to be one of the least bad; it's articulate negativity that gets me. One of the most impactful reviews I got ended with this: "I think the writing may simply be too precise, dry, bloodless to really let me be absorbed by the story." This wasn't a bad review - it was four stars - but that cut really deep, because as much as I didn't want to, it rang true to me.
And it's so, so easy to blame the readers, to say "You didn't understand me." But I think that's partially an ego preservation tactic. Sure, sometimes people just don't have good reading comprehension, and miss things that are explicitly stated to be true in the text. And sometimes they're not in the audience for your text, and have wandered into it with none of the background or enthusiasms that you're expecting, in which case I feel it's legitimate to simply say "Alright, this is not for you". But most of the time, I don't think that you should assume that it's the reader's fault, because I don't think that leads to improvement. So instead of thinking "You didn't understand me", I say to myself, "I didn't make myself understood", and I think that generally leads me down a better path. I can always decide later, after examining what the reader is saying, that it really was their fault (because sometimes it is).
I might be biased, but I think that authorship is an expression of self in a pretty unique way. And when I hear that someone didn't like what I wrote, there's a part of me that translates that to them not liking me. And when people are enjoying something that I wrote, it's such a wonderful sense of validation, and I want to rush in and just have us talk endlessly about how great and clever
I ammy work was. It's even worse when writing a serial, because when people see the hints of foreshadowing it's like I'm watching someone do a crossword and I know the answer to one of the clues. It's not going to make them happier to hear that I know the answer, and it's certainly not going to make them happier if I point out what they're missing. Or it's like sitting in a movie theater with a friend who's told you that this is his favorite movie, and every time something dramatic or funny happens he looks to you to see what your reaction is. I understand the impulse of it, that need to share in understanding and enjoyment, but I think it's ultimately destructive unless done in carefully considered ways (because of course I don't think that an author should have zero interaction with their readership).Hopefully that's not too much. I'm not talking about Yudkowsky or anyone else, just about myself, and my own personal experiences instead of the more simple "this is what authors and readers should do" I gave above.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
I don't think it's the author's place to say what happened in their story. I see it as a failure state for a text if the author has to chime in and explain what it is that they really meant by what they said.
Especially in a rationalfic, where a significant part of The Point is to provide the readers with enough information for "fair play" to be in effect.
On the other hand, leaving a Word of God comment isn't actually that harmful in circumstances where you really did mean to give readers the information, but the Illusion of Transparency got the better of you.
u/nevinera [+8] (an hour later)
I have no opinion about 'Death of the Author', but I do think that it does the work an injustice to ignore its context - by 'context' I mean the conversations and interactions that surrounded its creation. This is not a book, it is a serial, and it is being released in a very interactive context.
There are a number of details sprinkled around that that would be weird and pointless descriptions without knowing about some specific bets and promises made in conversations about earlier chapters.
u/darkflagrance [+3] (4 hours later)
One point is that these additional contexts also make it difficult to fully appreciate a web serial like this after it is completed and archived; for instance, those who followed web discussions knew at an early point that a certain teacher was possessed, but the extra-textual hints that pointed to this and the discussions that revealed this fact were deleted and lost except in community memory.
To a late reader of the text, death of the author might then be the default reading methodology for lack of access to these contexts and even communities.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (8 hours later)
Are you referring to the retracted note on Chap 20, or is there something else I missed?
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (8 hours later)
There's an author thread about the epilectic trees after ch 110 and 111 referring to some of r/hpmor's opinion about weather or not certain very powerful artifact is affecting things where the author vented frustrated with the level of questioning one scenario had, often based on it being "campy" while another was assumed to be true by some vocal bodies of the r/hpmor crowd.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+1] (9 hours later)
That thread is what I was referring to, but I believe /u/darkflagrance was referring to that author's note.
u/darkflagrance [+1] (15 hours later)
I think I am. I wasn't around to witness it and only heard about it second-hand.
u/RolandsVaria [+5] (51 minutes later)
Outside of the text itself, the writer is generally nothing more than a fan with a remarkably well thought out opinion. Nothing to be taken as gospel. When the lines blur between canon and non-canon, it's best to just take what you like and discard the rest. Heck, even with the canon stories themselves we have a tendency to remember the good and forget the bad, and I don't think that practice is wrong. Certainly we must still accept the canon text as canon, but that doesn't prevent us from forming whatever opinions we choose about the work.
u/kaukamieli [+5] (4 hours later)
I personally think author as a fan is just stupid, when he can actually modify the canon by making a sequel. If he saw fan speculation about untold thing going in the non intended direction, he can explain things he wants in the sequel. Should "Death of the Author" apply only to actually dead authors?
u/RolandsVaria [+7] (4 hours later)
Any television program typically uses several writers in the span of its existence. Some book series include works from several different authors. Comic companies routinely employ dozens of writers. On many occasions, shmucks with woefully incomplete knowledge of the source material get the opportunity to create new canon. Valuing a writer's opinion infinitely more simply because they have a higher chance of contributing something "official" to a story you enjoy...is a belief that has several holes in it.
"Canon" and "non-canon"...it's all irrelevant, honestly. If a writer suddenly disavows large parts of their story, does that make it "non-canon?" Both terms only mean what people think they mean. If most people generally consider certain books of a franchise canon and certain books non-canon, so it shall be. If you choose to believe the company publishing the books, then what they say is canon is what is canon to you.
And ultimately, "canon" is nothing more than a distinction made for convenience, meant to describe whatever elements or works certainly exist in the context of any given fictional universe. So you could go for one of many definitions, depending on what suits your purpose.
And therefore, I generally just don't bother much worrying about what is "canon" or "non-canon." I simply try to focus on the aspects of stories that I like, and not dwell on the aspects that I dislike. If word of god enhances your reading experience, good for you. If not, feel free to disregard it.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (5 hours later)
Valuing a writer's opinion infinitely more simply because they have a higher chance of contributing something "official" to a story you enjoy...is a belief that has several holes in it.
Well, it's not my main argument, but yours don't convince me either.
Both terms only mean what people think they mean.
That's tautology. Everything means only what people think it does. That's why we have defined the terms. So we can actually talk and know we talk about the same thing when we use the same terms.
And ultimately, "canon" is nothing more than a distinction made for convenience, meant to describe whatever elements or works certainly exist in the context of any given fictional universe.
Not really. Marvel has multiple universes and continuities. All canon.
And therefore, I generally just don't bother much worrying about what is "canon" or "non-canon."
Me neither. It's very clear, so why would anyone worry about it?
u/RolandsVaria [+2] (5 hours later)
Canon can sometimes have certain gray areas. Stories can contradict themselves, new stories can retroactively alter old ones, multiple people who worked on a story can all have different opinions of it, etc. And word of god exists in an even more gray area than that. I think it's a place where people should just be able to believe what they like.
I for one know of at least a few authors with poor memories, who don't sometimes seem to know their stories as well as their fans do. That's natural, humans are quite fallible. And so I'm not going to automatically treat anything the author says as superior, especially if it doesn't appear in the story proper.
That's tautology. Everything means only what people think it does. That's why we have defined the terms. So we can actually talk and know we talk about the same thing when we use the same terms.
When a person writes a new story in a series, perhaps a comic, they must make certain considerations. Did spinoff X take place in continuity? What about that really nonsensical issue that contradicted several of the other ones? How much weight do stories that were written 20 years ago have?
A writer picks and chooses what they consider to be canon for any given story. Sometimes they make oversights, sometimes they make contradictions, sometimes they flat out ignore what happened before. So in a since, yes, canon truly does only mean what people think it means. For the writer certainly, and for the fans too, if everything is less than transparently spelled out in the story itself.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (5 hours later)
When a person writes a new story in a series, perhaps a comic, they must make certain considerations. Did spinoff X take place in continuity? What about that really nonsensical issue that contradicted several of the other ones? How much weight do stories that were written 20 years ago have?
Yes, I did talk about different continuities from official sources and said they are all canon.
A writer picks and chooses what they consider to be canon for any given story. Sometimes they make oversights, sometimes they make contradictions, sometimes they flat out ignore what happened before.
Nah, it's all canon, different continuities. Oversights and contradictions are just mistakes. Ignoring can be a way of rewriting history, which is bad form.
u/RolandsVaria [+1] (6 hours later)
Yes, I did talk about different continuities from official sources and said they are all canon.
They're all stories that exist. It doesn't mean any of them are necessarily related to each other at all, and when I'm talking about any particular canon I am definitely trying to establish which stories I can accept as having some bearing on the fictional universe I am reading about.
"Mistakes," if made canon themselves, put something else into discontinuity. Which is one of many reasons that the concept of canon has some measure of wiggle room.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+2] (9 hours later)
Thank you for your responses. I especially appreciate :
I simply try to focus on the aspects of stories that I like, and not dwell on the aspects that I dislike. If word of god enhances your reading experience, good for you. If not, feel free to disregard it.
u/thakil [+3] (14 hours later)
Canon is not a term that can really be applied in this context, because it is explicitly driven by authorial intent. Let's say Eliezer writes hpmor. Then, two years later, writers hpmor 2, where in the first paragraph it explains that hpmor was all a fever dream that Hagrid had after being stabbed by a unicorn because he was no longer a virgin after bedding a dragon. Hpmor 2 then follows Hagrid's attempts to understand his dreams of rationality, while Harry is just an ordinary kid in the background.
Does that alter HPMOR? I mean sure, it'll alter your perception of it, but it hasn't changed the words in the text at all. The text is the text. It can be useful to hear what an author wanted the text to say, but that doesn't mean you have to accept it. Tolkien apparently disavowed the notion that Sauron represented technology, but it kind of screams out from the page.
Obviously this becomes blurred when the author goes back to modify the original text, which can obviously change interpretations!
u/None [+6] (7 hours later)
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u/autowikibot [+2] (7 hours later)
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#### Nemzeti dal:
The Nemzeti dal ("National Song") is a poem written by Sándor Petőfi that is said to have inspired the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 [citation needed]. Petőfi read the poem aloud on March 15 in Vörösmarty Square in Budapest to a gathering crowd, who by the end were chanting the refrain as they began to march around the city, seizing the presses, liberating political prisoners, and declaring the end of Austrian rule.
Hungarians celebrate the anniversary of the revolution on March 15. Red-white-green ribbons are worn to commemorate the fallen revolutionaries and the ideal of the revolution. Hungary briefly achieved independence from 1848–1849, but were defeated by the combined forces of the Habsburgs and the Russian Empire. Despite its ultimate defeat, the revolution initiated a chain of events that led to the autonomy of Hungary within the new Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867.
The poem has come to rank third after the Himnusz and Szózat as a statement of Hungarian national identity.
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^Interesting: ^Sándor ^Petőfi ^| ^Himnusz ^| ^Hungarian ^National ^Museum ^| ^Hungaria ^(Liszt)
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u/IowaPharm2014 [+1] (8 hours later)
Good insight. This idea seems to be what was motivating my second question. Some other commenters here have suggested that maybe HPMOR is also incomplete without context since the community interaction has so strongly shaped the text itself.
u/None [+1] (8 hours later)
[deleted]
u/IowaPharm2014 [+1] (9 hours later)
I hadn't seen that. It's been fascinating to see the many derivative art and fiction pieces that have sprung from this story.
u/Nighzmarquls [+5] (8 hours later)
as an author/creator I consider death of the author paramount and vital to remember. Things are not always obvious to me as an author and seeing what people see in absence of my own views and internal biases/greater knowledge on my own work is really valuable.
I've been getting a lot better because I pay attention to what people THINK is going on versus what I mean to be going on.
That said I've decided to try to take a more 'hands off' approach to my serial writing because I want to see what people interpret and view more clearly without me adding cloudiness to the waters.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+4] (9 hours later)
I haven't had the opportunity to read any of your work, but I appreciate you sharing an author's perspective. This was really my objection to EY's author thread: It seemed like he was getting upset because he failed to predict reader responses and instead of doing something productive about it, he decided to rant. I sort of understand how after spending months of his life creating and editing these chapters he might be upset when the readers throw him a curveball. Reading a rant didn't really add to my appreciation or understanding of the book, though.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (10 hours later)
I avoid ranting if at all possible :) but I can understand the desire too. Haven't been keeping up with HP:MOR or the drama. Sounds like it should be interesting though.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+2] (23 hours later)
I'm roughly 25% through Deeprise. I'm really enjoying it.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
Oh thank you! Glad you like it, I play around with a lot of narrative arcitecture styles, so Apologies if things suddenly get jarring every quarter or so of story.
u/Farmerbob1 [+3] Level 1 author (16 hours later)
Wow, this ended up being long. Sorry. Wall of text warning.
I'll start off by saying that I'm a serial writer. Amateur and hoping to start self-publishing soon.
I am not entirely certain if I grasp the full meaning of the concept of "Death of the Author" as written by Barthes, but the surface meaning seems clear enough. While I reserve the right to change my mind later if someone comes up with a good argument, I don't believe "Death of an Author" applies to any book of fiction.
The author has a different frame of reference than the reader. This means that in most cases, especially in fiction, what the author sees in a scene is slightly, or even vastly different from what the reader sees. If you understand the author, you will probably better understand their work. Especially in prose fiction.
I will say that the best writers of prose typically are able to carry the reader with them without vast subjective differences in perspective. That's one common trait of good writers - they immerse the reader, and the reader stays immersed without stumbling over unexpected reactions. Serialized fiction allows authors the opportunity to see when they break immersion for their readers, and address it.
Serial fiction is not new. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Leo Tolstoy were serial writers. While the speed of the response is certainly much greater these days, you can be certain that Twain, Dickens, and Tolstoy were questioned about their serial works by both their fans and their detractors. I don't know if these three chose to engage their readers often while their serials were not fully published, of if their editing team would allow changes, but I cannot imagine that even back before the internet, serial authors could not help but hear both praise and criticism. I would be shocked if some of that criticism didn't shape modifications in the books as they were prepared for full-length printings.
In the end, if the author chooses to engage the readers, then it's fairly certain that the story will be colored by the readers to some extent. If one approaches "Death of an Author" from that point of view, then the author's perspective is not the only perspective being considered during the writing. An understanding of the author isn't going to give as pure an insight in a serialized work where the author interacts with many other people, especially if the prose is modified based on the author's interactions. That having been said, knowing the author will still give some insight, because you don't write a work worthy of in-depth critique by committee. Authors might have been nudged here and there by others, but the final product is their own work, salted to taste with the influences of readers.
u/Timewinders [+5] (33 minutes later)
I consider the author's interpretation to be just a better-informed interpretation than the reader's. I generally trust the author's opinion, but if the text seems to clearly contradict it then I go with the text. Sometimes the author just forgot what they were thinking when they wrote a particular section. Sometimes they have a motive for convincing you away from a particular interpretation even if it's accurate.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+2] (39 minutes later)
That's where I'm trying to stand right now. What are your thoughts on the second question? My current take is EY's interaction with his readers is his primary motivation for completing a quality work. If we readers stop considering his extra-textual comments, we may have no more text to read.
u/Timewinders [+2] (59 minutes later)
I think EY's interaction with the readers is a source of motivation for him, but I think his primary motivation is just to introduce rationality and MIRI to more people, which may be one of the reasons why he chose to write a Harry Potter fic instead of a more obscure fandom. And why he's spending so much time writing this fic in the first place when he could be spending some of that time working on AI, not that unwinding in between work doesn't provide advantages as well. So I say choose to ignore or incorporate EY's interpretation as you want to. Even if you ignore it, plenty of other people will still be considering his interpretation, and even if everyone ignores it I'm fairly confident that future chapters will bring the general readers' interpretations closer to EY's, if only because the current interpretations become less likely the longer the story goes on.
Personally, I think people are just making a pattern recognition mistake because EY unintentionally primed them by using the exact word 'caricature' in the previous chapter.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+1] (8 hours later)
If the book were to end as it is, would you think the last few chapters matched the quality of many of the earlier portions of the work?
u/Timewinders [+1] (9 hours later)
Do you mean if the story were to end on the chapter that was just posted? Well, then the story would be incomplete and it wouldn't really make sense to judge it like that because of course these chapters only work as a the beginning of the ending arc, not an actual ending. But if you're just asking whether I've liked these last few chapters so far, I'd have to say I don't think they quite match the quality of the previous ones, but they're still very good. There's a bit too much exposition, necessary though that may be for the next chapters to make sense. I'm not sure what Quirrell's motivations are and I don't yet know whether his actions make sense. I think the logic in the last few chapters has not quite been up to par - I'm surprised EY didn't realize at first that Quirrell HPMOR - and I'm not sure I'm convinced that HPMOR Also, not everything in these last few chapters seemed solvable to me. We've had a lot of new plot concepts introduced that we didn't have much way of predicting earlier, such as HPMOR Again, I think this is necessary to set up the final arc, and introducing these concepts too early could have had problems, but if you took these chapters on their own then you could consider it a flaw. Still, the plotting is entertaining and I am confident that there will be a good explanation for the sequence of events in the next couple of chapters. HPMOR I prefer the more lighthearted and/or pure awesome antics of the earlier chapters, but this is highly entertaining too.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (12 hours later)
u/Timewinders [+1] (19 hours later)
I don't know that. I'm just judging these chapters based on what we know so far. It's entirely possible that he has some good reason for not doing that yet. Also, spoiler tags.
u/darkflagrance [+2] (4 hours later)
Whether or not death of the author applies may not bring anything to bear on the real problem you bring up.
Because the author is interacting with the community and actively responding to interpretations of his work, no community interpretation can be fully discounted as wrong or irrelevant, as it can potentially influence the unfolding of the narrative. If we the readers see errors or inconsistencies in the text as it exists, and the author tacitly agrees with them and accommodates them, or even makes changes specifically to deny them, our interpretations can become valid.
I will therefore say that the answer to your second question is yes.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+1] (8 hours later)
I have definitely seen places - as recently as the "author's saving throw" - where that interaction was reflected in the text. Until he actually changes the text or releases new text my internal lawyer keeps throwing up "objection! Assumes facts not in evidence" and wondering what he is really adding to the discussion. After seeing all the insightful comments like yours on this thread I have mostly moved past that initial frustration.
I'm just really fascinated by the way emerging formats change the way we interact with literature. I have been reading HPMOR since around Chapter 30's release, but only really started reading and interacting with the online community of readers during this final arc.
u/chaosmosis [+2] and with strange aeons, even death may die (4 hours later)
When an author claims that a book "isn't really about that", I think it's possible for the author to be incorrect. Sometimes we write about ideas without seeing the entire shape of them.
However, oftentimes the author is correct. If the author says something about the book, that's certainly relevant information even if it's not absolutely definitive.
u/IowaPharm2014 [+2] (8 hours later)
Thanks.
u/Newfur [+1] Crazy like a fox. Literally. (4 hours later)
What precisely is going on? I read HPMoR but haven't bothered to be a part of the discussion for the most part for precisely this reason; mind PMing me to let me know what the disconnect between interpretation and WoG is at the moment?