It went above their head because it was poor writing in their view? Why would you think taste in writing has anything to do with their ability to understand the points the writer was trying to make? This seems unecessary and you are probably capable of coming up with a more interesting response.
It's commonly thought (and obvious) that Yud wrote the book about himself so I doubt it. It doesn't really fit the rationalist playbook either, they take themselves excessively seriously.
He's too fragile and prone to overcompensation for that, nice try. Of course he's going to back track after getting mercilessly mocked for it and then claim it was just a joke.
The first few chapters have a song scene parodying ghostbusters and a joke about the protagonist biting a teacher in a tantrum as a young kid. There's plenty of elements of crackfic parody in it.
At the end Harry is basically a Messiah that can order the magical world to provide emergency medical aid to everyone in the whole world and turns Hermione into basically an angel; not really seeing the story itself saying he did anything wrong...
Nah, HPMOR just sucks, plain and simple. There was no need for a HP fanfiction in the first place. Also, if you ever ask anyone that reads fanfiction, no one will ever have a positive opinion of HPMOR. There are millions of HP fanfics, and there are many that are much better than HPMOR. My guess is that it was set in the HP universe just so it could be popular.
My strong belief is that HPMOR is a Harry Potter fanfic not for any calculated reason, but just because the author was in a demographic maximally interested in making Harry Potter fanfic.
he has literally stated that's why he did it as a Harry Potter fanfic. "There's a large number of potential readers who would enter at least moderately familiar with the Harry Potter universe." He was also reading a lot of HP fic himself, so he knew the stuff.
I think that Eliezer is very well-situated by both age and social niche to find HP fanfiction vastly more appealing than most human beings do. I think that he genuinely finds the idea of "Harry Potter but more as a hard fantasy with a hero bent on breaking the setting by using everything without regard for genre convention" interesting as a story concept. And when he set out to write up his ideas about rationality in the form of something other than dry nonfiction essays, I think that HP fanfiction sounded good to him.
I don't think that he correctly found the medium that is maximally appealing to the potential target audience for his ideas (like, I definitely do not want to read a super long Harry Potter fanfic, and I think I'm joined in that by essentially everyone who's not a very geeky millennial), and I don't think that he gritted his teeth and wrote a HP fanfic in order to increase the audience for his ideas despite not liking HP fanfics.
> I definitely do not want to read a super long Harry Potter fanfic
This hits the nail on the head for me.
I mostly enjoyed the books as a kid, but didn’t really maintain being a Harry Potter “fan” into adulthood. Out of the dozen or so “hardcore” millennial nerds that I know really well, there’s exactly one person that I think would attempt to read something like that, and based on the reviews I’ve read, I would bet that she would struggle to finish it, if at all.
There is a somewhat interestingly vocal group of internet adults that insist that the default mode for nerds in their 30s is to be Harry Potter super fans, some of whom lapse. Like we were all raised Catholic and some stray.
I was a big fan of Animorphs at that age too, but you won’t see me going around reading or writing Hork-Bajir/Andalite fanfic. Because I enjoyed it as a kid and then went on to read other books.
