What I love about it
That it (sometimes) deals with magic system asking the questions I would ask, if I saw the universe acting in such a suspiciously anthropomorphic way.
That it''s totally hilarious in places about those questions.
That I genuinely care about its version of some of the characters.
What I don't like (so much)
Obviously writing something like this is hit-and-miss, and you couldn't have the great bits without having the rough edges, so I don't mean to criticise the fic by pointing out what worked less well for me.
It sometimes seemed to be pushing Harry's hyper-rationality at the expense of common sense or normal human feeling. Which is understandable, as that's sort of the point. That's what I had a problem with when I first tried to read it, that Harry's father and to some extent Harry dismissed his mother's experiences of magic, and only reluctantly implementing a rational test, which well-characterised or not annoyed me; but I got to like it a lot more when I saw that the fic did expose Harry's own biases (such as always looking for clever solutions that made him shine, rather than sane ones), for instance when the sorting hat points them out.
But there's still a definite tendency to fetishise rationality: for instance, several times there are mentions of extreme torture or other evil stuff, and I feel like (1) yes, it's good that someone can examine this stuff objectively but (2) he needs to be more aware of most people's reluctance to face it, not as "something I'll understand once it's explained to me" but "something I will respect even before I understand why people do it".
I feel someone going around asking questions like "hm, so is torture evil?" is like someone designing an atomic bomb: most probably it will NOT lead them into unrestricted amorality if someone can't justify it quickly enough, or set fire to the entire atmosphere of the Earth, but you want to be careful examining that sort of thing.
And it's good to examine all the questionable premises of a magical story, and a commonly effective way of doing that is to take them to the logical conclusion. But it's not always the best way: sometimes it smacks of someone reading Animal Farm and saying "This doesn't make any sense, animals can't talk, and if they COULD talk, they STILL wouldn't act like that", and then driving that point into the ground. In magic systems, the details vary enormously, but a common set-up is that performing a spell correctly is something like invoking a complicated one-line perl program: incomprehensibly powerful if you don't know the rules, but amenable to a mixture of hard work and aptitude. Now, this is a good metaphor, but not a perfect metaphor, and it's perfectly possible to critique it. But I think everyone understands instinctively, even if they can't articulate it, that examining the exact correspondence between magic words and results won't hold up, and driving that into the ground is funny and may make a good point about how science works but is a dead end when criticising the world-building.
Also, some of the pop culture references, while nice, are a bit forced.
That it (sometimes) deals with magic system asking the questions I would ask, if I saw the universe acting in such a suspiciously anthropomorphic way.
That it''s totally hilarious in places about those questions.
That I genuinely care about its version of some of the characters.
What I don't like (so much)
Obviously writing something like this is hit-and-miss, and you couldn't have the great bits without having the rough edges, so I don't mean to criticise the fic by pointing out what worked less well for me.
It sometimes seemed to be pushing Harry's hyper-rationality at the expense of common sense or normal human feeling. Which is understandable, as that's sort of the point. That's what I had a problem with when I first tried to read it, that Harry's father and to some extent Harry dismissed his mother's experiences of magic, and only reluctantly implementing a rational test, which well-characterised or not annoyed me; but I got to like it a lot more when I saw that the fic did expose Harry's own biases (such as always looking for clever solutions that made him shine, rather than sane ones), for instance when the sorting hat points them out.
But there's still a definite tendency to fetishise rationality: for instance, several times there are mentions of extreme torture or other evil stuff, and I feel like (1) yes, it's good that someone can examine this stuff objectively but (2) he needs to be more aware of most people's reluctance to face it, not as "something I'll understand once it's explained to me" but "something I will respect even before I understand why people do it".
I feel someone going around asking questions like "hm, so is torture evil?" is like someone designing an atomic bomb: most probably it will NOT lead them into unrestricted amorality if someone can't justify it quickly enough, or set fire to the entire atmosphere of the Earth, but you want to be careful examining that sort of thing.
And it's good to examine all the questionable premises of a magical story, and a commonly effective way of doing that is to take them to the logical conclusion. But it's not always the best way: sometimes it smacks of someone reading Animal Farm and saying "This doesn't make any sense, animals can't talk, and if they COULD talk, they STILL wouldn't act like that", and then driving that point into the ground. In magic systems, the details vary enormously, but a common set-up is that performing a spell correctly is something like invoking a complicated one-line perl program: incomprehensibly powerful if you don't know the rules, but amenable to a mixture of hard work and aptitude. Now, this is a good metaphor, but not a perfect metaphor, and it's perfectly possible to critique it. But I think everyone understands instinctively, even if they can't articulate it, that examining the exact correspondence between magic words and results won't hold up, and driving that into the ground is funny and may make a good point about how science works but is a dead end when criticising the world-building.
Also, some of the pop culture references, while nice, are a bit forced.