I don't think he really believes in magic... he just points out that belief is not necessary since it can be tested:
"Then you don't have to fight over this," Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. "If it's true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it's true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it's false. That's what the experimental method is for, so that we don't have to resolve things just by arguing."
Although he also thinks
Except that some part of Harry was utterly convinced that magic was real, and had been since the instant he saw the putative letter from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
In canon, it's suggested that accidental magic is self-defense. Harry apparently has a perfectly happy & safe childhood spent reading, so no need for underage magic to ever manifest and no events to cause his dark side like an abused child. So what explains all this?
Well, we know one thing that explains both the certainty and dark side, and does not require any unhappiness or accidental magic in his childhood: influence from a Voldemort horcrux.
Well, we know one thing that explains both the certainty and dark side, and does not require any unhappiness or accidental magic in his childhood: influence from a Voldemort horcrux.
You know, if it weren't for everyone else taking it so seriously, I would have (and did, before I started following discussions) dismissed Harry's so called dark side as a perfectly normal personality quirk which he makes a big deal of because once he's told he's a prophesied hero he feels he ought to have something dramatically appropriate like a mysterious dark side.
In hi...
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This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
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