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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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Some of the melodramatic parts have already been proven right:
Both of her legs were eaten by a troll before she died, and as she died, she whispered to Harry, "Not your fault." Check.
Check.
Don't go making that second checkmark yet - we're still within the Time-Turner window here. (I'd put it at maybe 2% that he manages to save her - EY doesn't seem the type for cheap copouts like that - but that's still high enough for a bit of bet-heging)
It's not going to happen. You don't hang that much drama on an event if you intend to reverse it quickly, unless you're going for comedy, and comedy doesn't make sense in this context.
That said, if you'd asked me a day ago I would have said that there are too many dangling plot threads surrounding her for the story to do what it just did, so it's probably a good idea to adjust your confidence of predictions based on narrative mechanics appropriately.
Like I said, very low odds. But Eliezer is a clever guy, he could plausibly figure out some way of bringing her back without tripping off too many narrative bullshit detectors.
It sounds like you might be mistaking Eliezer's role in this, and mistaking your desires for desires we can reasonably assign to Eliezer.
This isn't something that happened to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger, this is something that Eliezer, the author did to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger.
He did it for a reason. He's almost certainly been planning it all along. If it made him sad then it first made him sad quite some time ago. He's not feeling the surprised dismay you have today.
He wanted this.
Edit: I just reread
And now...well, I think the odds are below 1%. There's no elegant way to walk that back.
Time turners cannot alter anything the user knows about (for some value of `know'), so it would require reenacting this exact scene. So someone would have to simulate Harry's experiences, including the magical event, confuse Harry's patronus as to location of Hermione (or cause Hermione to actually be on scene, albeit invisible), and control the troll, so that it behaved exactly in the way Harry remembers it to have behaved. Also, Dumbledore would need not to tell Harry anything that he couldn't have lied when he said he was responding to the death of a student.
I'm betting Hermione is really, really dead (though Harry may yet resurrect her). However, remember that writing a story is often the inverse of reading it. It's like solving a maze by starting from the goal and working backward to the beginning: often much easier.
If (big if) Hermione is resurrected and/or not really dead, then Eliezer very likely started from a narrative goal of having Harry see Hermione's horrible but fake/reversible death and then worked backwards from there to make it happen. As readers we have the much tougher task of working forward from the clues to the correct conclusion.
That is, Eliezer did not have to figure out how to write himself out of this series of events. He constructed these events to lead to the conclusion he wants.
Hmm. How about having someone else die in Hermione's place?
I don't recall offhand if the death burst was recognizable as Hermione, but otherwise it seems doable. Dumbledore said he felt a student die and only realized it was Hermione once he saw her.
You'd need polyjuice for the visual appearance, and either Hermione's presence or a fake Patronus for past-Harry to follow. Hermione is unlikely to go along with the plan willingly sho she'd need to be tricked or incapacitated. Hard to tell which would be easier.
Given the last words, Hermione's doppelganger might need to be complicit with the plan. Easy to accomplish if it was Harry, but I think he's too utilitarian for that. He'd need someone loyal but expendable. Lesath would seem to fit the bill, but I wonder if he'd agree to literally die on Harry's command.
Either Dumbledore is on it and lied to Harry, or it was a student.
Harry seemed to think so, but he was obviously biased by seeing Hermione.
Doesn't it wear off after death?
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Overall, this plan requires at least 2 hard things to happen correctly: identical fake magic burst and getting real Hermione there and screaming or Patronus shenanigans. I disbelieve this strongly.
The soul releasing seems easy enough to fake, as does Hermione's comment to the Patronus. Hermione being under an invisibiliy cloak near fake-Hermione would do for the Patronus taking Harry to her(though screaming mid-combat would be quite dangerous, even invisible).
The hardest part would be creating a fake Hermione sufficiently well to convince both the troll and Harry. Do we know of any magic sufficient to that task? Copying the form can be done, as was done with the Azkaban breakout, but the blood and the talking both seem outside the capabilities of that spell.
It's not obvious to me how to fake the soul releasing. It was perceived by the magic-sense, not just with the muggle senses.
Here's a miserable plot possibility. Hermione was concealed, something went wrong, and the feeling of her mind going past was because a number of other things happened, and the concealed Hermione was killed.
Neutral plot possibility: usually, dying minds aren't felt in the wizarding world. Something unusual was going on, and I don't know what it was.
This seems unlikely. This would end up sounding a lot like "don't tamper with fate". That sort of thing is very common in time travel stories where someone tries to save someone's life, but it has a massively anti-transhumanist, pro-deathist vibe. I doubt Eliezer would do it.
I'm assuming that Hermione is going to be brought back somehow, so the implication isn't that you can't fight fate, it's that the world has wildly complicated plot twists.
This seems unlikely. There was a mention about ghosts being caused by "the burst of magic that accompanied the violent death of a wizard" (or something along those lines -- I don't feel like looking up the exact quote right now.)
Thank you for saying this. I've been hoping someone would make note of this. Don't people remember the fight with the bullies in ch 73?
If the mad burst of intellect and magic and etc. was standard, they wouldn't have been able to fake it for even a second.
Now, I'm not necessarily saying that the feeling was only because of something fishy going on. I'm just saying that it cannot be the standard.
That's true, it's still possible. Nonetheless, there is still a scene where Harry watches Hermione die and can do nothing about it. So I'd consider that it checked even if he brings her back / somehow prevents it retroactively.