J. K. Rowling is watching you from where she waits, eternally in the void between worlds.

[freckles_and_doubt]

My Standard 5 class hangs around on Facebook, currently commenting on a class photo in which we're all ickle and stuff. Today someone mentioned that one of my friends from back then has subsequently grown up to produce ten children. She was brighter than I am: her O-level results kicked mine to the curb, and mine were pretty OK. She didn't do A-levels. She went off to secretarial college, got a job, got married before she was twenty, and presumably started procreating immediately thereafter, if she's racked up that kind of sprog count. She was deeply religious, as was her husband, and horribly enmeshed in Rhema Bible Church. It makes me want to cry. It's quite possible that she's blissfully fulfilled and contented, but I am heartsore to think of all that intellectual potential that never went anywhere.

Fortunately, talking about tears and intellect, an antidote is at hand. I have just spent an entirely hysterical hour reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is a Harry Potter fanfic which leaps gleefully, boots and all, onto the totally ginormous logical flaws all over the series, and proceeds to surgically dissect them on strict rationalist principles, with frequent reference to science and logic. It made me laugh until I cried. Seriously. There were actual rivers of actual tears. I cannot recommend it in high enough terms. Rowling's absolute absence of actual thought about the structures and logic of her world have always infuriated me: this is an extremely joyous-making response.

Also, the disclaimers at the head of each chapter are genius.

Edited to add: Damn. Fic jumps the shark with excessive syrupy emotion in Chapter 18, although not before delivering a trademark snarky slapdown of Snape's incompetence as a teacher.

Comments

Slooge...

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

I suppose an argument could be made that while she did not take advantage of her intellect the intellectual potential has in fact been multiplied tenfold. Let’s hope at least two of them can break free from the strangle hold of jesus and do something with it (the intellectual potential that is) and on the numbers the world will be a better place... it’s a tenuous argument I know (and I haven’t taken into account the neutralising affect of one or more of the siblings)—however it is the jesus factor that reduces any potential genius there might be, both in the plan itself and participants therein.

Ten kids...man, that is misguided! I hope at the very least she enjoyed the sex...