Author: Eneasz

It’s been a busy week, so a short Production Note today. You’ve likely noticed a lot of pop-culture references in HPMOR (and for that matter, some high-brow-culture references as well). A lot of the fun of reading this sort of fic is finding them on your own and basking in the in-group glow, so I don’t generally point them out (that, and I don’t catch them all either, and I don’t want to look like an out-group loser :) ). But I must make an exception for The Tragedy of Light. Because it’s very good and you should see it if you haven’t yet. It’s a reference to the anime Death Note, and while it drags in the middle, the first half is awesome and finale ain’t bad at all. One of the best animes I’ve seen, so this is a recommendation.

One of the challenges of doing this sort of thing non-professionally is that there’s no way to gather a bunch of people together at once. Many of the voice contributions come from people from other states. This makes it very hard to have to two characters say the same thing at the same time. When people are together they can sync up their timing and inflection instinctively. When they don’t even have a chance to hear each other it rarely sounds right. The tempo is too out of whack, or the stress is too dissimilar, or something.

I was actually pretty lucky in the previous episode where I got all three “um…”s to sync up. It helped that there’s not many ways to say “um”, Hannah said “um” several times, and Hermione submitted two takes. But generally the way I avoid this is by simply saying the repeated phrase in narration. It didn’t sound quite right with ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ in today’s episode, so I doubled Lavender’s line, offset it a bit, and changed the pitch so it sounded more like two different people.

It would be possible to coordinate multiple takes to get well-synced simultaneous lines, but it would be a fair bit more work for everyone involved. I don’t want to ask too much from my volunteers, and I need spare time to pursue my other interests as well, so I haven’t bothered yet. The work-around isn’t perfect, but it works well.

IIRC, Eliezer once said that when he first heard of feminism, he was flabbergasted that a concept as basic as “women should be treated as equals” would need a special word to define it. This mirrors my own experience, and I think the confusion of the SPHEW witches captures that initial dumbfoundedness very well. I realize it’s a perk of male privilege to be that unaware of sexism, and no girl would’ve made it to her early tweens unaware that her gender is systematically treated worse. I consider myself a feminist nowadays, and the SPHEW arc has held a special place in my heart since it was first published, in part due to the culture shock of the witches as they learn how muggle women have been treated and how they’ve had to fight against it. It’s probably akin to the shock Harry felt when learning of the wizarding world’s medieval  political/judicial system, but this time we’re seeing it from the outside side.