HPMOR - Soylent Granger

(If you'd like to reblog this picture on Tumblr, please use this link. Thank you.)

Too soon?

Admit it, this is exactly the kind of thing Eliezer Yudkowsky would come up with to torment his poor readers. After he (SPOILERS!) killed Hermione Granger, he received a flurry of negative responses in the wake of that infamous chapter. Given the way that one of the major themes of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is life, death, and everything - and his wonderfully quirky (and often disturbing) sense of humor - could totally give him the idea to reincarnate Hermione as a unicorn, and then let Harry pick that exact unicorn to be used as Professor Quirrell's invigorating juice box in chapter 102.

(If the unicorn had been purple, this conspiracy theory would be incontrovertible.)


- OMAKE FOR CHAPTER 102 -

Harry had read once, somewhere, that the opposite of happiness wasn't sadness, but boredom; and the author had gone on to say that to find happiness in life you asked yourself not what would make you happy, but what would excite you. And by the same reasoning, hatred wasn't the true opposite of love. Even hatred was a kind of respect that you could give to someone's existence. If you cared about someone enough to prefer their dying to their living, it meant you were thinking about them.

Lost in his glum thoughts, Harry didn't even notice the glowing incorporeal form that glided out through a wall and hovered beside him.

It had come up much earlier, before the Trial, in conversation with Hermione; when she'd said something about magical Britain being Prejudiced, with considerable and recent justification. And Harry had thought - but not said - that at least she'd been let into Hogwarts to be spat upon.

"Hello, Harry," said the ghost of Hermione Granger. She eyed him with a dubious expression as he continued to ignore her.

Not like certain people living in certain countries, who were, it was said, as human as anyone else; who were said to be sapient beings, worth more than any mere unicorn.

"I'm not so sure that you're a sapient being, at least not right now," she said, as she waved a translucent arm in front of the maudling boy's unresponsive eyes. "You do realize I can hear you, right? You really aren't supposed to be mumbling to yourself when you're having an internal monologue. That makes it more of an external monologue, you know?"

But who nonetheless wouldn't be allowed to live in Muggle Britain. On that score, at least, no Muggle had the right to look a wizard in the eye.

"That's not true," Hermione said with a frown. "Wizarding Britain discriminates against Muggles, just like the British Muggles discriminate against Muggles from foreign countries." She floated in front of him, gesticulating wildly as she grew more agigated, both by the topic of her one-sided debate, and his self-absorbed silence.

"Wizards treat Muggles as completely inferior," she said. "They don't even regard them as people. Harry, you've even said that yourself, on several occasions! Isn't that right?" Hermione turned to look at the other Hogwarts ghosts, that had congregated in the corridor, where the Boy-Who-Wallowed-In-His-Own-Misery continued to ignore the ever-un-living crap out of them all. Nearly-Headless Nick, the Fat Friar, the Grey Lady, and Moaning Myrtle were all nodding in agreement with the Muggle-born ghost. The Bloody Baron simply stared, in his usual unnerving manner.

Magical Britain might discriminate against Muggleborns, but at least it allowed them inside so they could be spat upon in person.

"Well, what about Squibs? Remember we had that discussion, Harry, about how they could benefit tremendously from several of the courses taught at Hogwarts, but they aren't even admitted? They're effectively cut off from learning their own history! How sad is th- Eww! Stop it" Hermione howled, wiping a glob of ectoplasmic saliva out of her bushy ethereal hair.

"Sorry," Myrtle smirked, looking anything but. "I thought that was my cue." She reached out and poked Nearly-Headless Nick's cheeks, squirting a gobbet of ghostly sputum out of his mouth as his head wobbled with a startled expression from the unexpected agitation. Harry simply sighed and continued his morbid fit of introspection, while the ghost of his best friend flailed her transparent arms, warding off the deluge of ghost-loogies from the giggling Myrtle. Harry somehow even managed to ignore Peeves' tantrum, who had just arrived on the scene and thrown a fit over Myrtle's behavior.

"Trying to upstage me, huh?" the spook spat. "If there's going to be any spitoonin' goin' on at Hoggy Warts, it's gonna be ol' Peevesy who does the spittin'!"

Yep, Magical Britain was sooo much better and more morally upstanding than the Muggles could ever dream of being.