That's why chocolate helps, why they generate feelings of hopelessness, why they take away happy memories and leave unhappy ones, and why their ultimate power is to put people into a coma rather than to kill them. None of this makes sense for a manifestation of death.
I don't know about chocolate, but bad memories are definitely scars you get from death. And what I suspect triggered the idea in Eliezer's mind to make Dementors be about death is the idea of the Dementor's kiss, because of the old metaphor "kiss of death".
bad memories are definitely scars you get from death
That's backwards. I suppose experiencing the death of someone close to you could leave a mental scar in the form of a bad memory. But that's hardly the definition of a bad memory. Nor is a painful memory an inevitable outcome of someone's death.
(The HPMOR discussion thread after this one is here.)
The previous thread is over the 500-comment threshold, so let's start a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. This is the place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic and anything related to it. The latest chapter as of 09/09/2011 is Ch. 77.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The fanfiction.net author page is the central location for information about updates and links to HPMOR-related goodies, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: