I haven’t read the books but I’ve read Rationality and I enjoyed it quite thoroughly. I haven’t taken a critical eye to it, just tried to enjoy the ride so to speak. I mean it is fanfiction, we should just be lucky that… well we’re lucky anyway. It drives my friend nuts that I’ve read this but haven’t read the books, which makes it even better.
“And, and what kind of incantation is Wingardium Leviosa? Who invents the words to these spells, preschool children?”
I chuckled a little.
Who reads these books… oh wait!
this got updated with 4 more chapters if you’re interested. It’s not everyone’s bag, but I enjoyed it quite a lot.
It reads like an “Artemis Fowl”-like character has become Harry Potter. After a while the mind games started to become a tad boring. But i do like the other point of view of JKR’s world. Wizards who don’t know the muggles have already gone to the moon a few decades ago. :P
That battle was pretty awesome.
I just started reading this recently, after it popped up in David Brin’s recommended list. Looks like when this thread was started, the story only had 72 chapters? And in the end, it was last updated in 2015, with 122 chapters, it looks like?
Anyway, I’ve only read 7 Chapters so far, but I have to say, it is lovely finding myself back in the world of Harry Potter, even if the main character is completely different. Despite the completely different tone to Rowling’s writings, the book has the advantage of Rowling’s world-building, and all the familiar things you see in that world still give me tingles of delight to read about. I’m not sure if I’ll continue to enjoy it as it descends into the “logic-fueled maelstrom” posters mentioned above, but for now at least, it feels really good to inhabit this world again.
I’m at Chapter 32 now. Around Chapter 21 or so, I started wondering, “Wait, so isn’t this very different from what happened in the first book?”. I don’t have a digital copy of the first book, but Hoopla has been advertising that they’re letting everyone read the first Potter book without even using a borrow for that month, so I started reading that in parallel.
I’ve now reached Christmas Time in both Book 1, and in Methods of Rationality. The main difference that is not explained is why Professor Quirrell is so different. In Sorceror’s Stone, he’s always described by Harry as a nervous young man. (We find out later that he was being controlled by Voldemort). But of course, he’s nothing like that in Methods of Rationality. Even his physical description is not one of a young man. I guess this will be explained later in the book.
My main complaint with this book so far is that it’s sooooooo heavy. Over-analytical Potter is fun at first, but he is not much fun to spend extended time with. Sorcerer’s Stone is so much more a children’s book which keeps things light, and she knows to mix in fun things when it starts getting too bogged down. The one fun thing in MoR that finally happened though is the simulated war game. That was really cool, it’s the first thing that’s unique to this book, and at the same time it was light and fun and a good break from over-analytical Potter and over-analytical Malfoy.
On Chapter 41 now, and I finished re-reading the original Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. So it turns out at the end Quirrell was pretending to stammer and be timid. He was really the Quirrell that we see in the fan fiction book the whole time, he was just pretending to be weak and scared all the time.
I also found quite a few things in the first book that the fan fiction story has a direct rebuke to. It’s almost as if the author hates certain aspects of the world created here. One, for instance, is Dumbledore’s comment to Harry at the end of Sorcerer’s Stone where he tells him he’s destroyed the stone, and his 6 hundred year old friend and his wife are okay with moving onto another adventure. This inspired two really long chapters in the fan fiction story where rational geeky Scientific Harry gets insanely mad at Dumbledore for suggesting that there’s an afterlife or that everyone wouldn’t want to be immortal. He scoffs repeatedly at the “boredom argument”, and dismisses it out of hand, thinking there would always be some other pursuit if one were immortal.
I’m guessing the author of this story probably REALLY hated the ending of The Good Place.
Picking up from Chapter 42 onward again, I liked coming back to this story after a long rest period. It tends to get too up its own ass if you read it through. One needs to take breaks and read and enjoy other things between chapters.
Anyway, the series of chapters dealing with Harry’s attempt to get a Petronis charm working at age 11 were very amusing and well written.
I’m currently in the Chapters dealing with the heist at Azkaban. This is so good, you guys.
The trap that most heist movies and novels fall into is that even a medium failure means the whole thing is kaput. But what makes for exciting viewing or reading is when things go wrong. So what most heists or even journeys have in fiction is small failures that are corrected, and you get back to the plan. That’s not as exciting. GRRM understood this in the Ice and Fire Series. Whenever his characters undertook a journey in the first three books, major shit went wrong, and it was super exciting.
In this fan fiction Harry Potter book’s heist, major shit goes sideways, so it’s exciting to see how things unfold. Good stuff. Good writing.
Finished! All 122 Chapters. Good lord, that was a long book, and mostly wonderful. What a great way to use the Harry Potter world and all the knowledge of the 7 books to craft an alternate timeline.
I was a bit disappointed in the ending confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. I actually found it much less satisfying than what JK Rowling did in her books, and what this author did earlier in this book. Azkaban and the Wizengamot trial were the two major highlights for me in this book. Both really well written, and both really using the more Rational Harry Potter really well as a character as compared to his original self in the normal books.
Gosh, if anyone finds fan fiction this good again, I hope they let me know. I didn’t really have a very positive opinion of fan fiction before reading this.
I found this thread on reddit from 5 years ago that asks the question of what other fanfics are worth reading. I’m tempted to go down that rabbit hole.
Out of the list you linked to, Worm is phenomenal. I didn’t recommend it when you first asked, since to me fanfic means reusing an existing fictional setting, and Worm is an original setting. Instead I’d call it a web serial.
Are you looking specifically for something with a low barrier to entry since you already know the characters, or just something that was not professionally published?
Wow, missed this thread. I ended up loving Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality despite a bit of a rough start. It was my first fanfic and a great introduction.
Worm is ridiculously long so when I say I loved almost every minute of it you should take that as a ringing endorsement. I actually reread it in preparation for the second book and enjoyed it all over again. There is a second book, but you can and probably should skip it, the first book is completely stand alone.
The author has other serials released and I read them all but only recommend Twig. Not as great as Worm, but still pretty good and a wildly inventive, haunting world and mythos.
I have Mother of Learning on my docket to read soon, which is not Fanfic (nor is Worm) but yet another web serial that gets high praise. Harry Potter’ish apparently, in the attending a school of magic vein at least.
Again, this is my first time actually reading fan fiction, and I found it so good, I wanted more, if the quality is just as good.
As for the appeal of it, you’re right that low barrier to entry is big, since you already know the world and the characters. In this particular case though, the world is just so much fun, and the characters are also really well established and so it’s fun when the author plays around with what happens to them, based on his premise. (I don’t care about professionally published or not, though I do appreciate that Methods of Rationality is pretty professional in terms of quality of editing).
I did try reading Worm I think, quite a few years ago, and I think I stopped because it was just so long and kept going and the pace of it was so slow with chapters and chapters of the story just comprising one day. It just seemed like too massive of a project for me to take on at the time.
That does sound intriguing. I am an unabashed lover of the genre of “young people go to school together to learn X” genre of fiction, ever since Ender’s Game. There’s just something about that genre, I’ve never NOT loved it, as far as I can remember.
Last week after I posted that reddit thread, I did try reading the sequel to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is written by a different author, but continues the story right where the other one stops. But the author just isn’t as good. The writing is much poorer in comparison. Methods of Rationality, I noticed, makes a concerted effort to write in JK Rowling’s overall style, not just write within the same world. So the way that action scenes are described, the way any particular scene is set is very reminiscent of Rowling’s writing. But that sequel author had a birthday party, as an example, where Harry is having a conversation with someone, and then someone else joins in and as a reader I think “oh, I see that other person is here too”, and then someone else does something in the room and I think “oh I see, that other person is the room too?”, and then someone else does something and I think “what the hell kind of party is this? Who else is here? And why didn’t the author first establish the scene?” Again, it’s something Rowling always does, and the author of Methods of Rationality also does, so it’s jarring that this other author has a completely different style.