The Killing Curse is unblockable, unstoppable, and works every single time on anything with a brain.
Professor Quirinus Quirrell, HPMOR chapter 16. Unless he's wrong or lying, nonsapient animals are killed by it just fine. (In canon, doesn't the Fake Defence Professor Du Jour use it on a spider in, er, book 3 or thereabouts?)
Which reminds me of something. At (IIRC) that point in canon, the teacher who's introducing the Killing Curse says something like "It kills absolutely anything, every time. Only one person has ever survived one, and he's right here in this classroom". Here in HPMOR we have Quirrell introducing the Killing Curse in a classroom that's got Harry Potter in it, and everyone knows the story just as much as in canon, and he conspicuously doesn't make any such remark.
Maybe it's just coincidence. But (assuming, as is customary, that Q=V) it looks to me like another bit of evidence that in HPMOR what happened at Godric's Hollow was not that V. attempted to AK Harry and failed.
The Killing Curse is unblockable, unstoppable, and works every single time on anything with a brain.
Not related to the current discussion, but I was always very unsettled by that kind of affirmation.
From both canon and MoR, the Killing Curse looks like missile spell. A bolt of green light flows from the wand to the target, and kills it. But the bolt can't get around material objects, it doesn't go through them, and it doesn't switch directions to avoid them like a seeker missile could do.
It can't be blocked by raw magic (Protego and similar) but what p...
The next discussion thread is here.
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 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
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.)
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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
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: