this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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It's like 50% of Eliezer Yudkowsky's personality too, if you need more motivation to hate it.
There's literally a scene in HPMOR where Harry Potter, 11 years old, sits down and gives Draco Malfoy a lecture on Bayes' theorem.
I maintain HPMOR is one of the greatest artistic works of our time.
Imagine writing 122 chapters of fanfic where you establish your boy genius can do literally anything with magic, and then asking the community to "solve the best way to kill Voldemort" like you think they're literally all too stupid to see what you're doing and it works because they are that stupid.
That's an artist at work, the art in question just wasn't literature.
what is it they were doing?
He wrote himself into a corner with his villain being too powerful and well-prepared to defeat and wanted ideas on how to fix it, but he was incapable of admitting he screwed up. So instead he told the readers they had to "guess" his plan (read: come up with one for him), and even threatened to give the story a bad end if they didn't. It was utterly transparent but his fanbase ate it up.
Be that as it may, I like a good power fantasy story with an intelligent and ethical hero. I like Doctor Stone and The Culture. I don't like Overlord, because after the first season, which was quite fun, they moved the perspective away from our overpowered and quite ethical hero, Ainz. I like Kamen Rider Zi-O, which has an OP protagonist and plays with themes of good and evil, tyranny and justice, very artfully. And HPMOR, I read and enjoyed before I even knew of all of those. I liked how Harry reforms a Nazi and I like how he thinks Azkaban is shit.
HPMOR isn't... good... but it's exactly the specific kind of nonsense that most strongly appeals to My tastes, and it's a damn sight better than the originals by most any measure.
Still, the best kid genius story remains A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Is the other 50% smugness and delusions of grandeur?