Harry is missing a point, tough. Flamel is 600 years old, and started out powerful. Presumably, "trying to blackmail / kidnap Flamel" has been the endpoint of the careers of enough dark lords that they do not attempt this anymore.
,,, Wait. alchemical diagrams need to be drawn "to the fineness of a child's hair"? ... ... Eh,, I think it entirely possible that Flamel is the only wizard to ever manage to make a stone because he is the only wizard to ever try it while young enough to use his own hair. In which case, Hermione is going to show up with a working stone shortly.
You can't use the fineness thing as a reason for the Philosopher's Stone to be unique to Flamel as it says explicitly in the chapter that all alchemical magic has the same requirements, and it doesn't sound at all like Flamel is the only one who can do alchemy.
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 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
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, 16, 17.
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: