A fulfillment of Doom and a plan gone awry.
Original chapters, written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, can be read here and the audiobook chapters, recorded by Eneasz Brodski, can be found earlier in this podcast feed and on the website.
We bit off more than we could chew on this one, so we’re moving 56 to the next episode. Next episode we’ll be covering chapters 56, 57, and 58!
Album art courtesy of Lorec. Thank you!
Coy manages an RSS feed that compiles the relevant audiobook chapters with the WW MoR counterparts. Just copy and paste that link into your favorite podcast app in the “add by url” option. Thanks, Coy!
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I actually really resonate with the dry and disconnected way that Harry analyzes his state of dementation before being able to change his emotions.
It reminds me of how you can have overwhelming negative feelings even if you know on an intellectual level that they don’t match reality, and sometimes you can make your emotions more closely match your knowledge of the world, but takes a herculean amount of effort.
Sometimes I think to myself “this is a trauma triggered panic attack with no basis in the real proportion of the situation” and keep having one anyway but not for as long as I would if I didn’t know what was happening.
Nonetheless I understand that not all mental health issues work like that and I can see how Brian doesn’t like this passage since it doesn’t match his personal experience with depression, and ignorant people often insist that depression does work that way.
On a different note I am pretty sure that Harry is just rationalizing his own sense of self preservation in this chapter. His reasons for not saving everyone in Azkaban only superficially resemble good decision making.
He’s using all of his grandiose ambitions to justify turning down a certain and immediate opportunity to do an enormous good. For all he knows this could be the best thing he could ever do. All his expectations for the future are pure speculation. It’s classic “Harry bias” to think he has a decent chance of doing better than this.
There isn’t even any certainty that he will ever be able to come back with more true patronus casters. What if Voldemort killed him before he could? My point is that the further he tries to predict into the future the more likely it is that he’s fooling himself.
I’m not trying to say Harry is a bad person for this, it’s a very understandable human failing. Nonetheless we all know that Hermione wouldn’t even hesitate.
The other thing is that thinking rationally isn’t actually the primary solution to the problem. It doesn’t just let him ignore the dementors through sheer force of will. It just lets him avoid falling into complete despair long enough to get his patronus back up.
In the mental health analogy, it’s not saying, “Just realize that depression isn’t rational and it’ll go away,” more something like, “even though it seems pointless maybe you can logic your way to taking your meds/going to therapy.”