Some thoughts about Comed-Tea.

(I apologize in advance if these have already been discussed; there are a LOT of MoR comments and I haven't read all of them. If someone points me at the thread I'll slink off quietly and apologetically and read it.)

1) It seems there have to be two pieces to the behavioral control surrounding Comed-Tea (supposing Harry's basic theory is correct).

The first piece is, as Harry infers, inducing the drinking of Comed-Tea just before a surprising event is about to occur.

The second is suppressing the drinking of Comed-Tea otherwise. Were it not so, the "guarantee" wouldn't work... there would be no reliable expectation of something surprising happening when you drink it.

That second part needn't be magical, incidentally; there are many things that suppress people's desire to drink them via non-magical routes... castor oil is a canonical example. But if Comed-Tea had blatantly aversive properties Harry presumably would have noticed that. So whatever the aversive factor is, it's subtle (which still doesn't make it magical).

Actually, now that I think about it, the first piece of that is so unreliable (that is, most surprising events aren't preceded by drinking C-T) that it's probably better to model it the other way: the unusual aspect of C-T is that it suppresses the desire to drink it UNLESS something surprising is about to happen.

This seems like a realization worth highlighting in the text, as it gets at a very basic and important fact about false positives and false negatives that people lose sight of all the time.

2) Harry seems to be holding the Idiot Ball when it comes to Comed-Tea's implications.

That is, he convinces himself that Comed-Tea doesn't have the ability to Alter the Very Fabric Of Reality... all it does is combine some minor clairvoyance with the ability to magically influence his decision to drink it... and drops the subject.

Um... really? Isn't that second thing basically a limited version of the Imperius Curse? Isn't that at least noteworthy?

At the very least, it suggests that Comed-Tea is an empirical test of defenses against magical mind-control: if Comed-Tea still works on Harry while using X, then X is not a defense against magical mind-control. Harry in the MoRverse is apparently an Occlumens; testing whether using Occlumency suppresses the effect of Comed-Tea seems worth doing. (This is admittedly difficult because Comed-Tea doesn't work reliably, but it's the best thing he's got at the moment. It seems out of character not to try. Also, if I'm right about point 1, then maybe Comed-Tea does work reliably... maybe it's chemically very addictive, but magically suppresses the cravings except at the right time. In that case using Occlumency against it, if it worked at all, would suddenly cause one to crave it. Which would be startling.)

More broadly, the implication that magic to systematically influence Harry's behavior without his knowledge or consent -- in other words, to introduce bias -- is cheap and widespread seems fundamentally important. What other forms of mind-control are operating in the wizarding world? Does Occlumency work against all of them? Does anything work against all of them? Who markets this stuff, anyway, and how was it developed, and why isn't it classified as an Unforgivable Soft Drink? Is there a variant formula that influences people not to bully one another, or to think rationally, or to hail Harry as their lord and master?

That none of this even occurs to Harry (let alone the rest of the wizarding world) in a world nominally without the Idiot Ball seems like a plot hole. That said, one could retcon it by suggesting that ubiquitous magical mind-control artifacts also suppress thinking about magical mind control. (You might even expect this: mind-controlling artifacts that don't do this don't become ubiquitous.)

Narratively, all of this seems like a worthwhile topic to explore in the context of MoR. The parallels to advertising and critical thinking skills, for example, seem inescapable.

3) I see a number of comments talking as though the Comed-Tea itself were influencing minds to drink it at the right moment, and as I recall Harry thinks this way as well.

That something is influencing the drinker's mind seems a sound theory, but that the Comed-Tea itself is doing so seems less clear. Harry should at least consider alternate theories.

In particular, if Harry is still positing an eavesdropping Atlantean Font of All Magic that responds to "Wingardium Levioso", it seems just as plausible that the AFoAM mediates the drinking of Comed-Tea.

Admittedly, the AFoAM is pretty close to being a Fully Generalized Explanation... which is to say, Harry is coming awfully close to theism there. But I suppose that's another post.