I almost said 'but HP isn't a portal fantasy' and then was like 'oh wait, duh, it is.' I take your point, but to me that's more like saying it's in conversation with the genre, you know? Except he's not just genre savvy. His savviness isn't the sort where he understands how the narrative is going to go. He just understands where it's fucked up. And let's be real here, anticolonialism and pacifism are not the things he would have learned by reading genre classics. He's critical genre savvy, specifically. I mean, clearly this is a kid who belonged online if he hadn't been shipped off to monster-fighting school. Tbf, at a certain point, in conversation with the genre does blur into being in conversation with HP, given how large it looms. Though I still maintain the connections are hardly more than superficial.

...I never did finish Methods of Rationality and I'm probably okay with that. The comparison is a good one, though. But actually, I don't really think MoR is particularly interested in HP either? Which I realize on the surface is a weird thing to say, but I honestly think it's true. I mean, the author's fandom is clearly philosophy wanking way way way more than it is HP>