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Donny comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10 - Less Wrong
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Hat-and-Cloak is Voldemort but not Quirrell. When in Quirrell, Voldemort has a whole (probably quite powerful!) brain to run his computation on. Outside of Quirrell, he relies only on what computation he can do purely as a 'ghost', or as magic, or whatever. Hat-and-Cloak is thusly disguised because Voldemort lacks a body. Or maybe Voldemort possesses someone else, who isn't as smart as Quirrell, and is proportionally dumber and more prone to mistakes. Quirrell is zombie while Voldemort's away because Voldemort set it up that way. Don't want your robot walking away without you.
Part of the groundhog-day attack involved setting up a trigger in Hermione, that when she can attack Malfoy, she should try to kill him. This explains her behaviour in the battle, and her apparent behaviour in the duel.
Hat-and-Cloak is a player in this story. Players in this story are clever and powerful. A sensible way of resolving this apparent contradiction is to postulate some form of disability or restriction applying to Hat-and-Cloak. Then all you need is Conservation of Characters.
It would simply be bad writing to set up a mysterious and malevolent figure like Hat and Cloak and then reveal him as one of the story's established villains. It's redundant, a wasted move, to reveal that the villain was secretly a villain. It drains tension from the story to reveal that the heroes were only facing one opponent, not two. I would rule out the possibility just by assuming a competent author.
A point in favor of Hat and Cloak being Grindelwald: the playing card he chose to represent Dumbledore was the King of Hearts. ♥
Unless the reveal involved learning about the Voldemort-Quirrell symbiosis, or Voldemort-Hat-and-Cloak outsmarting Voldemort-Quirrell, or any of a dozen other dramatic reveals.
At first I wanted to say "reading too deeply", but you have a point: the choice of card was not a throwaway line, it was intended to be mysterious, so it should have some depth worth plumbing.
I like it here! Everyone's so gracious. Upvoted and thank you.
You're postulating increasingly complex (ie unlikely) explanations to defend your theory. Donny's statement is strong evidence for H&C not being one of the existing villains.
That's a disjunction of several unlikely explanations; any one alone is enough to 'defend' my theory.
Why do you think that particular Santa Claus was H & C ?
Sounded more like Lupin to me, with the 'getting into more trouble than James' reference.
That Santa Claus is Hat and Cloak was the implication I took from this exchange. Still seems correct to me. It's the combination of his paranoid advice and ignorance of current events. Why would Lupin tell Harry to avoid Dumbledore? (That's the letter with the 'more trouble than James' reference.)
This is a good question, and we do in fact have evidence that Lupin doesn't totally trust Dumbledore - he worries that Dumbledore may have sent Harry off to evil step-parents.