(Inspired by Slate Star Codex's "What universal human experiences are you missing?")
It was the gelling of the HPMOR hatedom which caused me to finally realize that I was blind, possibly I-don’t-have-that-sense blind, to the ordinary status-regulation emotions that, yes, in retrospect, many other people have, and that evolutionary psychology would logically lead us to expect.
Status is a tremendously valuable and scarce ancestral resource, and one which exists in people's minds and behaviors. We would expect people to have emotions where, if X assigns status S to Y, and X thinks that Y is trying for status S+2 or that Y wants S+2 or worst of all Y is behaving as if S+2, X tries to slap Y down for it. S+2 doesn’t have to be higher than X’s own status, it just has to be higher than the S that X has already mentally assigned to Y as deserved or held.
People who have this emotion leave angry reviews on Chapter 6 of HPMOR where they complain about how much Harry is disrespecting Professor McGonagall and they can’t read this story. Or they post to Twitter about how they can’t stand HPMOR because the author clearly wrote it to show off how smart he was. (Historical note: P. 3 of http://intelligence.org/.../12/procrastination-paradox.pdf is an example of what I sound like when I’m actually showing off. If I wanted to impress people with my intelligence, I wouldn’t have chosen to write a *Harry Potter fanfiction*.)
I now understand, in this deliberate and abstract way, something which puzzled me greatly when I heard it a long time ago, which is that some black students will ostracize other black students who they think are “acting white” by doing their homework (http://www.google.com/search?q=acting+white). It makes sense now that I think about in terms of the status-regulation emotion that should exist as a matter of evolutionary psychology, and which I can see all the time in the HPMOR hatedom, but which I apparently don’t possess. It's not envy, because then they would also envy racially-white students. It's just a slapdown of greater-than-previously-assigned status.
The characters in HPMOR love, cry, resent, fear, protect, hate, and generally experience the full range of human emotions that I knew about at the time. It was only afterward that I looked back and realized that nobody ever hates Hermione, or Harry, on account of either of them acting like they have more status than someone else has already mentally assigned. Characters in HPMOR may dislike people who are ahead of them, or envy people who have things they want, but “you don’t have a license to be important” is not a thing that anyone in HPMOR, hero or villain or NPC, ever feels.
For though I have known many a negative emotion in my life, yea I have known bitterness, frustration, despair, resentment, and a few times even envy and a sense that someone else has something that I deserve more, I have never felt the status-regulation-slapdown emotion. I needed to deduce its abstract existence via evolutionary psychology once HPMOR finally provoked enough data. I still have no idea what it *feels* like.
I explain this at length, because I expect that a selection-filter phenomenon, of people who *do* feel this emotion often being repelled by my writing, has selected many of you to also not feel this emotion, or feel it very weakly. Like I bet some of you are reading this and going “Ohhhhhhh…”