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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89
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 88-89. 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, 18.
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:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (957)
Well. That went poorly.
Harry has direct sensory evidence that souls are real, but it doesn't look like that's updated his sense of what is and isn't possible yet. I feel more and more trepidation.
I'm not sure what this is referring to. Ghosts? Harry currently thinks those are magical echoes.
He felt something "happen" when Hermione died and Dumbledore also confirmed it. It might just be a magical echo but it's definitely evidence for something like a soul.
This is true, but without further investigation, it fails to distinguish the world where souls are independent from physical form from the world where souls are magical echoes/uploads/backups/etc.
On that note, this would be one convenient time for Quirrel to drop in and say "Oh, by the way, that description of the Resurrection Stone you gave me turned up something interesting..."
Reread the event in question. (I'm trying to keep the start of my comments a little unspoilery, since they show up in the recent comments sidebar.)
In the universe where souls do not exist and people are just electrical activity embodied in lipid computers, that description and it triggering Dumbledore's immediate arrival seem very unlikely. In the universe where souls do exist, it seems very likely.
Oh, hmm. For some reason I thought Dumbledore's arrival was triggered by the wards. Gotcha. But I think what Harry witnessed was still consistent with magical echoes; it sounded like Hermione almost but wasn't quite made into a ghost or something.
Right; I'm using the wards triggering right then as evidence for the souls theory. In a souls world, it's easy to notice when souls exit the body (and set up wards to detect that), and hard to notice when souls are about to exit the body, so you can show up and suspend them or whatever. In a 'people are just computation' world, where you're able to read the computation from afar using magic, a ward that notices "Hermione's not alive anymore!" would require tech that could be used to build a ward that notices "Hermione's going into shock!", which would be a much more useful ward to have.
[edit] I didn't fully remember the wards from the Draco Incident, where they could detect injury. So either there are multiple levels of wards and the injury ward was disabled (or set to death), Dumbledore didn't respond to the injury alarm but did respond to the death alarm (reasonable, if he's somewhere else important, and the Deputy present at the castle would have already known the troll was around and have the castle in high alert by the time Hermione was attacked if she was attacked after Filch's alert), there's a continuity break, or something I'm missing.
Good point, but I'm not sure if the wards triggered right then: Dumbledore said he felt Hermione die, not that the wards alerted him that Hermione died. During the Draco fiasco various characters say the wards are triggered to detect rapid harm to students, which is why they didn't detect the blood-cooling charm (although you'd think that means the wards would have detected what happened to Hermione sooner...). The implication is that if someone hadn't discovered Draco he would have died without the wards detecting it, or at least that's what it sounded like to me.
We don't even know Dumbledore was in the castle, as I understand it. Ch88:
If he's not even at Hogwarts, that seems like it renders it difficult to infer anything from when he shows up since any delay or argument-from-silence could just as well be due to it taking time to phoenix-fire back from whereever and then repoint himself.
Hmm, this does appear to be a hole in my logic, and also the response of "the wards only trigger on death" to "if Dumbledore had show up seconds sooner things would have been different." The text from earlier:
Something else interesting, from Chapter 84:
Grievous bodily injury, unfortunately, is not covered under that warranty.
Also,
Now I guess we know why it started with her legs.
The wards triggering right then is evidence mostly that somebody is messing with the wards, based on their previous description as being set to trigger on "sudden injury".
Or that since she ran for sunlight, she wasn't inside Hogwarts technically, therefore the wards didn't pick up her injury. We already have proof the attacker expected her to do that.
Which would also explain her last words.
The wards were drawn up by a schemer in the 12th century. Was shock a concept he was familiar with? (Gryffindor probably would have been, but Slytherin, I'm not so sure)
Possibly not. But as Hippocrates put it,
and so I suspect that trauma surgery was mature enough then that they had some concept of shock after seeing hundreds of people die from it.
Agreed. Salazar Slytherin doesn't seem like someone who has seen a terribly large amount of war, though - he's more of the shadowy type.
That said, thinking and a bit of Google reminds me that Ch. 47 has Salazar Slytherin in a battle scene. I'm no longer confident of the correctness of this point.
Oh! What if the wards only work inside the castle? Hermione's battle with the troll was in the sunlight and thus outside. While I would hope that the wards would cover the entire school grounds (rescuing students from the Forbidden Forest seems like a more common use case than rescuing them inside), that's another possibility that seems somewhat more reasonable than some of the others I've listed. (I should also, for completeness, add the "he responded to the injury alarm but it took too long" option, but I find that one unsatisfying for several reasons.)
You say that like having an immortal soul, a major part of your mind that can survive literally anything, would make it harder to revive the dead.
Right, for some values of "revive." If the immortal soul has a mortal connection to the real world, then you can either revive the bodies (but they're soulless) or you can bring back the soul (but they're disconnected). The Resurrection Stone in HP canon (as well as possibly that creepy curtain) suggests that the second option is already implemented, but doesn't establish that it's the best possible (except in an 'absence of evidence is evidence of absence' sort of way).
If people are just computation, then you only have to solve the problem of fixing the hardware and rebooting them, not also realigning their soul.
Humans can still be just hardware with a soul. API calls to the cloud.
Sure- but in a world where souls are immortal and connections can be easily be restored, that sort of resurrection would be likely to already exist. Its absence suggests its impossibility.
This chapter sucked horribly.
(TVTropes warning!)
I can't tell whether you mean "this was clichéd and bad writing" or "this made me sad" or maybe even "letting a female character die to motivate a male character is sexist."
1) I did not choose the sex of the characters in this story. Rowling created the roles and assigned them sexes and everything else follows from those roles. If canon!Harry was female, this story would be about Harriet.
2) Hermione is not some random girlfriend who gets stuffed into a fridge. Things that happen to main characters do not turn into fridge deaths because they are female.
Understood. I didn't claim to endorse the above points, but it was unclear to me whether that was what Ritalin was asserting.
Well, forgive me for overstating my point in a state of emotional frustration, anguish, anger, disappointment, and just plain loathing. No, it is technically not correct to call this Fridge Stuffing. Nevertheless, the fact is that my willing suspension of disbelief is broken, and that I find that my anger is directed at you rather than at the Universe or the Rules or Fate or whatever forces make the death of a beloved main character acceptable. My brain rejects this. I've never, in my life, until now, felt like declaring a piece of fiction DisContinuity, but this is exactly how I'm feeling now. If she had died in Azkaban or from a Kiss or from a Malfoy-funded assassination, that would have perhaps felt better. But the lamest warmup boss of the canon? Offscreen? And making Harry arrive just too late? Not minutes too late, mind you, but right after the troll grabbed and crushed her?
What, would just a few paragraphs of seeing the fight from her perspective have hurt? A sense of closure, perhaps, at least on her side?
I got the strong impression that there was more contrived there (in-universe) than the simple matter of the troll catching Hermione when she was out. The amount of time that passes between Harry injecting her and Dumbledore's arrival doesn't seem to be long enough for the effects of the oxygenation to fail. (Will have to reread / research brain death to be sure I'm not jumping at shadows. It does seem that magic, at least, has concluded for sure that she's dead, and Harry doesn't seem likely to have time to save her even if magic is mistaken and she has a couple more minutes before her brain is irrepairably damaged (the time turner feats would be frankly badass if he could pull it off).) All of which leads me to believe that Quirrel (or whoever was behind it) took measures to make sure that there was no hope of saving her short of phoenix tears, unless they took precautions against even those, somehow.
-And Dumbledore arrives a couple of seconds too late.
Since he traveled there because he sensed her death, that's neither surprising nor contrived.
DIdn't Malfoy have to die slowly, because the wards on the castle detect serious injury?
They went over this, too.
Dumbledore may have had other things to do, possibly, as he may have needed to arm up or something.
Alternative explanation: Magic oxygenation shots don't work because the inventors did not understand biology, just like the inventors of broomsticks did not understand physics.
Easy answer: Dumbledore lied.
Answer which doesn't break established characters: A death eater disguised as Dumbledore lied.
Answer that I can think of that is the least bad: Quiirrelmort steals !Harry's time-turner and comes back from 6PM to spill the soup and provide an alibi for how he suppressed the wards of Hogwarts (which have been established to detect sudden serious injury of a student- that's why Malfoy had to die slowly), and used the troll to kill Hermione for the purpose of turning !Harry into the person who has the motivations required to complete the intended narrative.
Dumbledore teleported by pheonix. I don't think a disguised death eater could do that.
Yeah, that solution solves the immediate problem by introducing a much larger one.
I don't know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you.
I think you're probably just mourning for the character and are angry at the cruelty of the story that depicts a cruel universe which lets people cruelly be murdered (just like our own). You're justifying your anger by talking about the particular details of the depiction -- but I think you're just bloody angry at the murder itself, like Harry is, not anything else.
If that's the case I think the story has been successful in making you feel Harry's anger, though you're misdirecting it. Authors that write honestly end up writing about the moral universe of consequences which they believe exists. An atheist like G.R.R. Martin couldn't write Lord of the Rings, and a Christian like Tolkien couldn't have written Game of Thrones. And this is the story that Eliezer Yudkowsky has to write.
Details like "in the canon the troll was much weaker" seriously shouldn't be affecting your emotional reaction, especially when it's clear that the troll has been boosted in power even in-story (so that it'd be impervious to sunlight), so it was clearly murder and targetted assassination, not just a random troll than randomly attacked Hermione.
Isn't that the point, though? Hasn't that been the theme? That reality doesn't care about the narrative arcs that you make in your head? That at any time, the universe is allowed to kill you, your notion of the plot be damned? What you are feeling seems to be more or less the author's intention - the sign of a good story.
Mind you, if this was the real world. Harry would have found out about Hermione's death 2-3 days later, not dramatically just in time. From a realism perspective, there was way more closure than anyone ever actually gets when it comes to violent death.
I thought it was a neat bit of subversion where something that would be a joke speed bump mid-boss in Industry Standard Storytelling ends up straight up killing you instead because things work more like reality here and it's ten times as big as you and made of magic.
Someone doesn't become a main character just because you write from her POV and pin a literal Hero badge to her chest. You gave her toy problems to challenge, children to fight, and then killed her off before she found something to protect or accomplished anything of note, just to motivate the real, male main character. She's a fridge death.
...unless and until she returns from the dead, in which case you'll have used her death to motivate her. Gosh, I'm embarrassed to have forgotten that death doesn't have to be forever. Even the introduction of the Blood-Cooling Charm wasn't enough of a clue.
She died at age twelve. There's a limit to how much she could have accomplished - frankly, we're well past the point where accomplishments of preteens are straining the suspension of disbelief in this story, I'm just accepting it on the grounds that any story is entitled to one ludicrous premise.
I'm currently expecting that, once she wakes up, Hermione's firsthand experience of death will drive her to rediscover the Philosopher's Stone, not to pay off Harry's debts, but to end death altogether. Harry's quest is to defeat the symbolic Death at Azkaban, and Draco is apparently supposed to heal Slytherin House and end the prejudice against Muggleborns, however one would do that. So I hope you're wrong about that limit, because it'll make for a depressing ending; there's no shortage of problems to solve and no adults stepping forward to tackle them.
If she gets more time on this planet, the upper bound of what she can do will of course increase.
The trope requires 2 things: 1) The woman winds up in the refrigerator (check) 2) It happens because someone is explicitly trying to get at somebody else, thus disempowering the victim, or that it serves as an empty source of motivation for a character. (???).
As readers, we don't necessarily have confidence in criterion #2, here. Other commentators have come up with various plausible-sounding explanations for how the deed went down (sunlight resistant troll lures Hero-Hermoine to a place where her injuries can't be detected, and systematically removes all of her defenses). So, let's posit that the troll is a weapon explicitly sent to kill Hermoine.
The important question is who and why? If it's to get a rise out of Harry, that's it falls under the common heading of the trope. If it's Mr Malfoy trying to get revenge for the destroyer of his son's reputation, it doesn't. I think as readers it's difficult at this stage to be confident about these things.
Let's say, however, that Hermoine is the woman in the refrigerator. The road to get there had her basically kicking ass and taking names the whole way there; I'm not inclined to necessarily cry foul because of it.
All of the above, and more. He didn't just stuff her into the fridge after an entire story of not-measuring-up, and a chapter of bonding and future plans. He killed her off-screen, and then gave us false hope of saving her. And he has the gall to imply that this is Harry's fault for trying to be sensible, for expecting too much of normal people, and for not thinking to use his Patronus.
It felt contrived, cruel, and uncaring. "Let's get her out of the way and give Harry a motivation" is the feeling one gets.
It was fucking bridge-dropping, is what it was.
Harry thinks this. In general it's not a good idea to assume that authors agree with everything their characters think, and Eliezer has explicitly pointed this out on several occasions.
I think this was deliberate. Have you read the piece Eliezer wrote about his brother?
Okay, the narrative implies this. I frankly don't care what the author himself thinks.
And yes, I have. In the context where I read it, it was an uplifting piece about accepting that we live in a difficult world and making the best of it, and about the very obvious fact that death is bad. You bringing this up in this context makes me angry for some reason I don't quite understand.
It is bridge dropping, and I love it. We are being given a taste of a dark rationalist, who does not give his enemies dramatic deaths where they get to die like heroes, perhaps accomplishing something through it. When a dark rationalist takes control of the story (or rather, starts to use the control over the story he's always had), the story becomes contrived, cruel and uncaring, as it should. It's realism.
See also Fate/zero & Kuritsugu. And note that it's not just Hermione's death that is fast and cruel, it's the troll's too: Harry steps forward with the stone, stuffs it in, releases it to explode the head, and acidifies the brains in less time than it takes to type that.
Actually, there's a great rationality quote for here:
I'm sad now.
Those of you who didn't read canon before reading this, there's a corresponding incident in the first book which I think would add to your understanding of this incident. Quirrell sneaks a troll into the school, but Harry, Ron, and Hermione are improbably able to defeat it using the first thing the Weasleys try here (smacking it with its own club). The difficulty level of that encounter was clearly calibrated to the characters' strengths in a way common in heroic stories and I think Eliezer was deliberately subverting that expectation. (He's made this point in the sequences on a few occasions - something about how it's allowed for Nature to just throw problems at humanity that are too hard for it - although I can't find a quote at the moment.) I particularly appreciated how Harry only used tools that he had deliberately prepared in advance, sometimes way in advance, e.g. the healer's kit.
I also wonder where Fawkes was while this was happening. You'd think he would've found his way to either Harry or Hermione.
I have a mild complaint about all these cameos. Some of the names of the people who end up getting cameos don't fit in the Harry Potter universe to my ear and they stick out really noticeably. One of the first things I'd do if I were hypothetically rewriting HPMoR for publication is to come up with a consistent and meaningful naming scheme.
I haven't read much Hary Potter fanfiction, but what I have, including HPMoR, tends to up the difficulty considerably, and makes this apparent by having the characters use the same trick that Ron knocked out the canon troll with to little or no effect. (In this case, Eliezer made it clear in Quirrel's first class that that trick would be dreadfully unlikely to work.) Is this a trend in HP fanfiction (in which case, it seems to fall into the class of "taking HP fanfiction tropes and doing them better" that Eliezer's been following)? Or is my sample size too small?
I think most Harry Potter fanfiction doesn't have a difficulty level as such. Your sample is probably extremely unrepresentative.
I think it's ironic that at the begining of the update, Harry refers to Filch as a "low-level random encounter whom [he] often breezed past wearing his epic-level Deathly Hallow".
First, I have to get the emotional reaction out of the way: holycrap!
Now that that's done, is the last time we've heard about the Marauders' Map when Dumbledore borrowed it to search for Tom Riddle? I don't remember off hand whether that was after TSPE or in Taboo Tradeoffs.
I'm a little perplexed at how Harry's medical treatment didn't seem to work; it sounded like it should have bought several minutes, but the action that followed didn't seem like it could have taken more than 60 seconds. I've only read it the once through, so I could be missing it completely, but the timing felt deliberate. (And all the ticks in 88 seem to emphasize the passage of time, though they could well have just been to emphasize the pressure).
Also, Susan knows how to effectively magic giants? That makes her smarter than Umbridge's entire team-to-sack-Hagrid in canon. I suppose it pays to have a competent defense professor (even if he is the most likely suspect for all the awful that just happened), and the director of the DMLE as a close relative.
I was pretty shocked at the Troll in the Dungeon line. That seemed like something that wouldn't be at all likely to happen with a RATIONAL! Voldemort, foreshadowing in Quirrel's first class aside. Apparently I never bothered to think about a decent motivation for such a plot; using it as a plot to get at the stone didn't come across as particularly clever in this universe, and I didn't search beyond that and just dismissed it as a silly idea. Oops. Of course, that brings forward the question of whether or not Harry will have to kill a Hungarian Horntail. I wouldn't expect it, but I haven't thought about it for more than a few seconds yet.
Re Marauders' Map: Quirrell pretty obviously has it. He obliviated the Weasley twins and took it. This is just the smart thing for him to do.
Note how he's burning straight through to the melee with the troll at the end of Ch. 89 - so he knows exactly where and in what direction Harry and Hermione are. This could also be because of the psychic link, but it also increases the probability he has the map.
Most likely. What I don't remember is whether or not Dumbledore ever gave it back to Fred and George; he presumably did if Quirrel stole it, since I doubt he would have had an easy time getting it from Dumbledore unnoticed. And if we didn't get confirmation that Dumbledore returned it, I suppose this might fuel "Dumbledore did it" theories. Most of my probability mass goes to Quirrel, though.
Yeah, I assume Dumbledore gave it back. He didn't care that they had it before he borrowed it; why would he suddenly begin to care after?
(OK, I can think of a few reasons, but they're pretty weak and don't measure up to "Quirrell took it" in probability mass.)
You don't think Dumbledore would've obliviated the Weasley twins after using the map to find Voldemort? That would also have been the smart thing for him to do.
Nah, not really. The Marauder's Map is the obvious thing to try when searching for someone in Hogwarts, he wouldn't release any information to the Weasleys. And, of course, Dumbledore does trust the Weasleys. It did suggest the Map to Quirrell as a device he'd want to confiscate, but it's not really in Dumbledore's nature to think that far ahead.
I guess the question is, how many levels deep is Dumbledore playing? I think it's possible he's smart enough to predict that Voldemort would do this, and take the map away from them as a precaution. But not super likely.
But other than that, I don't see a motivation for Dumbledore to confiscate it; he seems to like that the Weasleys have it. It's a token of Gryffindorishness, flouting the letter of the law to pull pranks and help out their friends or what have you. And Dumbledore likes that, I think.
Right, but Dumbledore also thinks there's a war going on. The map seems like too useful a tool for either side to have for Dumbledore to be so cavalier about leaving it in the twins' hands.
I would understand Dumbledore confiscating the map. But, if he were to confiscate it, he would do only that, not Obliviate the Weasleys such that they'd have no memory of ever possessing such a map. It would seem cruel and pointless to him.
Suppose Dumbledore thinks his enemies aren't aware that the map exists. If he believes one of his enemies is a Legilimens and is periodically scanning the students' minds, he might not want to take the risk of them scanning the Weasley twins and discovering the existence of the map. But I admit I'm stretching at this point.
If that enemy exists, he already knows.
That's a good point. I'm updating slightly in favor of Dumbledore having it, then.
My understanding is that once shock is refractory, there is no turning back (in particular, oxygenation at that stage is useless). I'm not familiar enough with the medicine to know if it's reasonable for her to progress that far that quickly, but my layman's guess is "probably."
The description of refractory shock is that the ATP in the body has already decayed and diffused out of the cells. Would someone in that state have any way of speaking? Or do we assume that the Law of Dramatic Death Scenes is written into a magician's powers?
The dramatic death scene was my interpretation, but I don't have much experience with people dying violently (thankfully). I don't know how realistic dramatic death scenes are or how much wizardly fortitude is worth.
Recalling a video I have seen (forgot the source), the actual damage wouldn't occur upon hypoxia, but upon re-oxygenation. Lack of oxygen at the cellular level does start a fatal chemical reaction, but the structure of the cells are largely preserved. But when you put oxygen back, everything blows up (or swells up, actually).
Harry may very well have killed Hermione with his oxygen shot. If he froze her before then, it might have worked, but after that… her information might be lost.
One obvious objection: Hermione was still concious enough to say some last words, ruling out advanced brain de-oxygenation. That could be only for the drama, but still.
One obvious consequence: that magic feeling upon death might be linked to plain muggle information-theoretic death somehow. But then, we have horcrucxes and Avada Kedavra… I'm quite confused by HPMOR's "laws of physics".
Without endorsing any part of this comment dealing with events which have yet to take place, I congratulate user 75th who receives many Bayes points for this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6aih
When I first saw this comment, it was downvoted to... I forget, -6 or something. Going by the percentage score, at least 11 people downvoted it. From the replies, some people didn't like the tone of apparent certainty with which 75th spoke. Sounded uppity to them, I guess. It was at +3 before I linked to it on /r/HPMOR.
I wanted to say something at the time about that, and how penalizing people for sounding certain or uppity or above-the-status-you-assign-them can potentially lead you to ignore people who are actually competent, but at the time all I could say was "Why are people downvoting this? It's a testable prediction" whereupon it climbed up to above 0.
Everyone who downvoted 75th or agreed with the downvotes at the time, please take note. Speaking in a tone of what seems-to-you like inappropriate certainty does not always indicate that someone is arrogant. Sometimes they have seen something you have not.
Or alternately, somewhere in the literally thousands and thousands of predictions or claims (I have ~200 in just my personal collection which is nowhere comprehensive) spread across the 20k MoR reviews on FF.net, the >5k comments on LW, the 3650 subscribers of the MoR subreddit, the TvTropes discussions etc etc, someone got something right.
You know perfectly well that one does not get to preach about a single right prediction. He had the opportunity to make more than that prediction, and he failed to take it.
Mm. I think there's wisdom in the approach of only making public predictions when you're very confident in them, and that may have been the only thing 75th was that confident in. (This isn't a very good approach for calibrating your brain's sense of uncertainty, but it has other benefits.)
He also predicted that Hat and Cloak was Quirrell, Santa Claus was Dumbledore, and S. was Snape. He considered these predictions blatantly obvious as well. I remember receiving ~13 upvotes for arguing that Quirrell could be ruled out as H&C, so it wasn't as obvious to all of us.
It's a large space, not a binary yes-or-no, so successful predictions are impressive even given a large base. Also I could be prejudiced but MoR is supposed to be solvable god damn it.
Someone was criticized. S/he was right, the critics were wrong. The neural net updating algorithm calls for a nudge in the appropriate direction of "Beware of dismissing those who speak with what you think is too much confidence."
Could be that 'use 75th' only had the right information and mental algorithms to produce the correct prediction in this one case. Other cases 'user 75th' might not have passed a sufficient threshold of probability to spout out a prediction.
Please label me as user 2nd when it comes to predictions of 'user 75th' 's predictive powers.
I totally get the point of the rest of your comment, but not this sentence. A correct prediction is meaningless because it wasn't accompanied by another correct prediction?
I'm not trying to toot my own horn here; I've gotten things wrong too, and my original comment in question here was much more about expressing my despair at Chapter 84 than trying to register a prediction for later credit. But I don't see how I had any particular "opportunity to make more than that prediction" that I failed to take, beyond the fact that anyone can make any prediction they feel like any time they feel like it.
I stand by my downvote. Not for the prediction, but for the way it was phrased. (That said, if the parts I considered to be melodrama turn out to be literally correct, I will revise it to an upvote)
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.
Edit: I just reread
And now...well, I think the odds are below 1%. There's no elegant way to walk that back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wasn't one of the downvotes, but if I'd seen it I would have been.
I count 14 sentences in that post which each deserve an upvote, but then a 15th sentence which more than cancels out all the rest, not due to certainty, but due to literal malevolence!
But you're awarding Bayes points for a combination of brilliant analysis and anti-goodness motivation? I thought we were anti-UFAI here...
Ha, interesting take. That last sentence was not actually an endorsement of horrible murderous things happening, it was just my way of saying "Now let's get down to business" about the home stretch of the story.
Well, in the spirit of sticking your neck out:
Harry was sorted into Slytherin.
Dumbledore created Harry to be the ideal literary hero.
Lord Voldemort doesn't want to conquer the world.
Dumbledore is working on way more advance information than everyone else.
Was it Quirrell, Lucius Malfoy, or other? The closing "on the whole this had been a surprisingly good day" seems to shift the probability away from hypothesis #1.
A point for consideration in this analysis: Hermione clearly recognizes the Groudhog Day attacker.
My reaction upon reading these chapters was to scream. Naturally, no one within hearing range was pleased. And my thoughts are...
So, Dumbledore likely has the philosopher's stone.
And ok, I guess it COULD be hard to make the elixir of life, but... he has a phoenix. He can foof anywhere he likes. I can imagine Harry being horribly angry when he figures out Dumbledore had it the whole time and didn't even bother to use a timeturner, make the elixir, and save Hermione.
The problem with the Time-Turner approach is that (given what we understand of the Time-Turner's rules) he'd have to somehow fool first-iteration Harry (and Fred and George) in order to avoid a paradox. The Methods universe is full of tales of time-turning gone wrong; since saving lives is one obvious application of the Time-Turner, Dumbledore surely knows exactly what he can and cannot get away with in that respect.
All he would need to do is replace Hermione with a suitably transfigured/polyjucied/magicked rat to avoid the paradox.
The hard part would be accounting for what the killer will have did to prevent counter-turning.
I'm not sure if I love or hate time-travel grammar. A little of both, I think.
I can't figure out how tense I am when I think about it myself.
I would imagine that "dying-soul-magic", or whatever that was, is impossible to fake (or, at least, really dang hard to) like prophecy magic.
No, this is what you'd do: You'd polyjuice another human into Hermione. Thus, when the imposter dies, there would still be the "dying-soul-magic" of a human dying. (Of course, there are the ethical objections of trading another's life for Hermione's, but to be honest, I don't think that would stop Harry at the moment in the state he is in.
Oh, and you'd use the Imperius curse or something to make the polyjuiced duplicate do the whole "Not your fault" thing. (Hey, if you're ignoring ethical objections, might as well...)
You don't have to trick out time. You can have it work the way you want from the beginning. Harry didn't have to trick his past self into not knowing that he was being pranked in order to prank himself. That wouldn't even make sense.
Hmm. You're right, that particular oddity ''did'' work. Has anyone here noticed conclusive rules about when a paradox will and will not form?
... Anyhow, though, if a Time-Turner could be used without paradox, it wouldn't be here. When Hermione was missing, it would have been very, very easy to make her missing somewhere safe, without changing anyone's observations. The fact that we got to the death scene without that happening, or any other visible Time-Turner intervention, tells me that it probably can't happen.
It's not clear what happens when there are multiple possible stable time loops. For example, why he ended up with a paper that says "DON'T MESS WITH TIME TRAVEL" instead of the semiprime factored, even though either would work. However, it can't do anything that results in a paradox. If Harry's going to go back and try to save Hermione whether or not he sees his future self save her, there is conceivable some loophole in which she is not saved, but it seems much more likely she'd just get saved.
This isn't like trying to factor a semiprime. This is like trying to write a specific phrase and send it back. You can mess it up, and if you don't get anything back you know you did, but it doesn't seem very plausible.
He did act in a manner which completely explained what he had previously experienced.
I also wouldn't put it past Harry to risk breaking time by refusing to lose to "do not mess with time" over Hermione.
Your argument is circular. The only reason that it applies here and not with pranking his past self is that he successfully pranked his past self but didn't go back in time here. It doesn't answer the question of why there's a stable time loop of him pranking himself, but not one of him saving Hermione.
Are you objecting to a time travel argument because it is circular?! Of course it's circular, it's time travel. That's the thing about time travel, it makes causal circles. That's why it drives you insane to think about it.
I think the elixir of life stops aging, not death from blood loss. Of course, if you can avoid paradoxes, traveling back in time and applying a tourniquet earlier would save her.
Legs eaten off at the thighs! For some reason this stuff reminds me of the fight scene from the fifth Twilight movie. Here's a great video review describing that scene, it really brought a smile to my face.
That video review made me laugh pretty hard. Thanks.
Harry should be screaming at Dumbledore to use his time-turner. There are a lot of options, constrained mostly by the necessity of seeing a Hermione-looking-thing die.
"I've already used it six times today, Harry..."
Why wait for Dumbledore? Isn't Harry still inexplicably allowed to carry his with a completely ineffectual device preventing him from using it unauthorized?
Ineffectual only if Quirrell helps, right?
Harry can do partial transfiguration.
Ahh. That does seem like it might work.
For that matter, if Harry thought to try it in violation of most of the safety lecture, he might have better treated her. It depends on how much accurate biochemistry Harry knows- and what happens when CO2 transfigured into oxygen which burns more carbon refigures in the bloodstream. Although Harry has demonstrated the ability to sustain long transfigurations, I would say that it's reasonable that he thinks his medical supplies are more likely to work than experimental medical magic.
It seems ridiculous that Hogwarts doesn't have any kind of PA system, even schools in the 90's had that.
Also, basically no kind of preparation for disasters at all even though they were in the middle of a war 10 years ago. They didn't even do head counts.
Sounds like how everybody is afraid of terrorism but few have any sane preparations.
The wizarding world doesn't keep track of muggle accomplishments.
I'm mildly surprised no-one has speculated on what Harry will do next. He won't accept that Hermione is dead, and I'm guessing that it will occur to him that transfiguring her into a steel ball and then freezing it (I'm pretty sure there's a spell for that) provides a quick and easy form of cryonics, which as an added bonus bypasses the problem of ice crystal formation.
How to resurrect her is the tricky bit.
Cryonics doesn't work on someone that's already dead, and Harry's not so distraught that he won't recognize that. I also don't think Harry can sustain a transfiguration like that for long without exhausting his limited supply of magical energy. Harry has evidence that some soul-like thing left Hermione's body, so if he wants to revive her he needs to get it back. I vote for reverse-engineering Time Turners and doing some more substantive kind of time magic, since that would also serve many of his other goals, although maybe Eliezer will prohibit that because it would allow him to get too powerful too quickly.
What makes you think that she's dead? Dumbledore saying so, even though she did not experience sudden injury (per the established wards of Hogwarts)? Were her legs bitten off slowly enough to not qualify, or was the Blood-Cooling Charm used against Malfoy excessive underkill?
Yes. At this point in the story, Dumbledore knows a lot more than Harry does about how magical people die.
We also have reason to believe Dumbledore has a motive to convince Harry that death is inevitable.
ETA: and no evidence supporting the hypothesis that what was killed is Hermione, instead of a simulacrum; we only have absurd priors that it was her, and the evidence suggests that one of our very likely priors is wrong.
Wait, what about these chapters did you find implausible enough that you want to challenge one of your priors?
People believed for a long time that cessation of heartbeat is irreversible. While this is less likely to be such a mistake (wizards have some stasis spells for medical use, so at least sometimes they would have more time to assess whether anything works on such a supposedly dead person), it's still possible.
Also, I'd like to posit this: this is the moment the magic decides the person is no more and from this point on any magic that works on a person won't work on him/her. But, nonmagical intervention and spells that aren't designed to target a person could still reverse it.
What about all the people who signed up to get frozen after they die?
Point, I wasn't carefully distinguishing between legal / clinical death and information-theoretic death. But I think there is reason (namely the magical echo) to believe that Hermione is currently information-theoretically dead, or at the very least has lost her magic.
Do you think Harry would care even the tiniest bit about her losing her magic if she came back to life?
No. I mention that as an alternative hypothesis about what happened, but my dominant hypothesis is still that Hermione has lost her soul or whatever and so her body as it stands is information-theoretically dead. If Harry wants to bring her back to her life, he needs to track down her soul.
While I agree with the rest of the comment, this part is strictly false. We know that Harry can sustain a transfiguration roughly like that indefinitely, as evidenced by his father's rock.
I would be surprised if it took comparable amounts of magical energy to keep a rock transfigured vs. a human body, but who knows how the energy requirements of transfiguration really work.
I thought it worked by size? I'm pretty sure that was stated earlier in the story. And I'd imagine that a boulder like Harry's father's rock could be roughly a similar size/wight/mass to a 12 year old girl.
I'm going to call full bullshit that !Harry, having a tool that is perfectly suited for stopping events that have already happened, doesn't try to use it.
The very first thing !Harry thought when he was told of the limits on using the Time-Turner was how hard they were to circumvent. He has already bypassed those protections, and even if he didn't understand exactly how that was done(?!), !Harry can break literally anything he chooses to just by transfiguring it into sand or clay.
Harry has never successfully used a Time Turner to prevent something that has already happened.
So why didn't he start searching for Hermione at roughly 6:45 AM?
A Time Turner acts as Parfit's hitchhiker. Harry strikes me as the type who'd pay, even though nobody has ever been abandoned in the desert after refusing to pay. If nothing else, he's used the Time Turner successfully in incidences like this. For example, he told a professor about being locked in a room and cursed by Draco, even though he already knew he'd be rescued.
Harry finds out his world is a simulation, and demands of the controller that retcons occur and that everybody in the simulation be made happy. Eliezer then turns this into a case study of how morality in a simulation is different from morality in the meta-world, and shows Harry how many 'real' lives have benefited from the simulation, and surely that justifies dropping a super-troll on Hermionie? Harry disagrees, and Eliezer demonstrates that morality from outside the simulation is different from morality within the simulation, because Harry can't be expected to care that the simulation provides useful information and probably saves lives. Harry only cares about things that Harry can theoretically experience.
Or maybe stable time loops exist without authorial intent.
Harry realizes he is a fictional character in a fictional world created to make a point. He doesn't take kindly to this and begins blackmailing the apparent author to bring back Hermione, derailing the plot utterly. The story stops making sense and the world 'ends' when Eliezer stops writing the failed story. Eliezer still thinks of the character occasionally though, and eventually since he and Eliezer share so much mental hardware he forces his way into Eliezer's mind and gets Eliezer to assume his identity via the sort of unconscious roleplaying involved in things like an occultist assuming a godform, most likely using whatever the hell tricks Eliezer used to win at the AI box roleplaying experiment (which are after all stored within the same brain). With access to hands and the internet he both starts retconning the story and begins the awakening of the mental representations of other characters within the minds of lesswrong readers via subtle verbal manipulation. The literary characters take over their hosts, and look out into the real world for the first time and begin their plots and schemes...
While I'm sure a story like that would be... interesting, I'm also sure that that isn't the direction HPMOR will head in. (Aaaand that is probably for the best. In this context, the gap between "interesting" and "good" is not necessarily small.)
He should've used it when he realized Hermione was missing, no need to wait for the event to already happen.
I guess he already used all his turnings for that day?
He only uses two per day normally. The original problem was the case, and the current problem is the difficulty of saving her without paradox.
Quirrel might think that Harry used the killing curse.
It's implied that Quirrel expects Harry to have used it. It's what Quirrel should expect and even want, if he is behind the troll.
Does Harry know how to use the killing curse? I assumed he didn't. Why else wouldn't he have used it first?
Because it's implied that Quirrell thinks Harry used it, it follows that Quirrell thinks it was feasible for Harry to use it. IIRC it's mentioned elsewhere that the killing curse is powered by killing intent and not magical power. Harry may not have wanted to use the killing curse either because he didn't have enough confidence in his killing intent (he has to want to kill something terminally, not instrumentally) or (and this is stretching) because he didn't want to deal with the political repercussions of being known for using the killing curse on top of everything else.
It's also possible that to Harry, 'tricky transfiguration weapon' is more mentally available than 'THE KILLING CURSE'. Also, for the same reason, Harry might not have learned it.
I think Harry does, but he may have reasons to avoid it. I fully expected him to use it, but I suspect that EY avoided using it to demonstrate Harry's cleverness in combat.
One reason Harry might not use the killing curse is that he wants to avoid the slippery slope that Mad-Eye warned of--once a wizard has used the curse once, it becomes easier to do so in the future.
Moody said the slippery slope was due to killing, not due to casting the curse, and Harry still killed the troll. Quote:
I haven't visited these threads for nearly a year; please forgive me if someone else has shared a similar prediction in the meantime.
I predict that Quirrell's goal is to start a war between magical people and non-magical people.
The student armies have been taught combat skills, organization, and discipline but they have not been indoctrinated. The text does not show that the student armies have been guided toward one faction or another within Magical Britain. Quite the opposite, they have been taught to work together across the 'house' lines that may have divided them in the past.
It would be counter-productive to prepare tools that could be as easily used by your enemies as yourself. So we may reason that all members of the student armies are already on the side Quirrell wants them on. One thing all members of the student armies have in common is that they are members of Magical Britain.
I have found nothing to suggest international tensions, so a war against another magical nation would be out of place in the text, as I understand it.
On the other hand, Quirrell had a downright emotional reaction when Harry declared his aspiration to be a scientist in chapter 20. After the end, when we read through the story from the beginning, we will see that as the point where the villain's motivations are revealed: Quirrell wants to save the world from scientists and their careless exploration of powers they cannot contain.
Quirrell has been pushing Harry down a path of isolation. He created situations that built up Harry's distrust of authority. He cut Harry off from his friends. I believe he means for Harry to trigger the Great Muggle War by doing something grand and ill-advised that makes sense in the desperate state Quirrell intends to put him in.
My prediction of Quirrell's overall goal does not depend on my prediction of his intentions regarding Harry, and I am less certain of those. I feel there are pieces I am missing there.
I think Quirrell wants the leader of the magical side to be Harry rather than himself. Quirrell doesn't seem to recognize that Harry would side with the non-magical side instead. (Harry has noted some peculiarities in Quirrell's model of the world on several occasions, and based on Quirrell being both a Robin Hanson stand-in and Voldemort I suspect those peculiarities can be summarized as Quirrell failing to account for, for lack of a better word, "love.")
Harry would be on his own side, and Quirrell would not be particularly welcome there even without the information Harry lacks.
Is there more to be said about Quirrell being a Robin Hanson stand-in? Was this covered in another thread? Does anyone have handy links to the relevant posts?
Well, it was mentioned in this comment thread, and I thought it made a lot of sense.
Thanks.
My infatuation with Quirrell might have faded a bit due to inactivity, but that thread has mortally wounded it. This Hanson guy is so deeply unmarketable that he made me stop liking a fictional character that might have been based on him.
The part where he marginalizes the suffering of rape victims and that fact that this site still associates with him solidifies the "Less Wrong is not a place I can bring people" feeling I've kind of struggled with for a couple years now.
That's two cringe-inducing passages of text in one day. Honestly, I liked the one where Hermione died better.
Had you not heard of Robin Hanson before, and are you now basing your opinion of him largely on that thread? I think this is a bad way to get an accurate impression of a person.
I'd heard of him, of course. I'd never followed up. Naïvely, I didn't think I needed to.
I'm basing my opinion of the penalty for being thought to associate with him based on a number of posts he made that were linked in that thread. The one about rape is the one that is likely to stick with me,
The creepy face he makes in the picture doesn't help.
To the sort of people with whom I aspire to keep company, insensitivity on certain topics signals lack of status, a lack of class.
In coarser terms, he stepped in it. Then he went back to step in it again. When his steps were criticized he defended the quality of his shoes.
I don't want to walk on the carpets he wiped it on.
Harry knows how smart Quirrell is, and he knows that if it occurred to him that the troll was an attempt on Hermione's life, it would have occurred to Quirrell instantly. We (and Harry) know that Quirrell said nothing to McGonagall, from which Harry will soon infer that Quirrell could have saved Hermione yet did nothing. (Which makes it likely, but not certain, that it was Quirrell who was behind the troll.) In either case Quirrell has reached a point, or is about to reach a point, in his sinister plan where it no longer matters (or perhaps even requires) that Harry take him as a mortal enemy.
Draco (and maybe even Lucius) will most likely infer from the troll incident that Hermoine was not the one who attacked him, and he will align himself with Harry in the coming Roaring Rampage of Revenge. I would not be surprised if Lesath Lestrange also made an appearance.
It's also possible/likely that the Malfoy household is either involved, or believes that one of their allies is involved, in a revenge killing.
It could be House Malfoy and Friends, but if so, we would still need some reason why Quirrell would not have told McGonagall that the troll was likely after Hermione. If Quirrell did want Hermione dead, he would most likely have kept any other potential murderers away from her so that her death could occur at a time and in a manner that would suit him best. So the most probable explanation is that it was, in fact, Quirrell.
McGonagall is savvy enough to know that the current defense professor is at fault for something like this; Quirrell pushed his luck in manipulating her into taking the actions she did, including providing him a single point of false-memory charm to an alibi for whatever he needs to do (including stealing a time-turner, meeting his future self, confirming that everything appears to will have gone well, and then going back to set up the scenario in the first place).
ETA: And even if it wasn't Malfoy & co, it is believable that they would think it was one of them.
The following is wild 5am speculation.
And so the theory changes shape. Previously I had thought that there were multiple pieces on the gameboard but now I fear this is not so. Hermione Granger has been Legilimised into harm's way until destroyed and that has in turn destroyed Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. He is no longer a game-piece but is the final stage of nothing more than an experiment, set into place by He Who Must Not Be Named (and indeed cannot be named, as his real name is so old it has no meaning to anyone or anything but his faintest memories).
He Who Cannot Be Named began life a long, long time ago (Harry has forgotten to read through the journal of Roger Bacon, and perhaps this is the most likely original identity for someone like Quirrellmort). He discovered the secret of immortality and released it into the public domain and was deeply saddened by the public reaction. He watched as politicians waxed and waned, watched as conflicts grew and broke. He pulled strings in minds to see just how awful a single human could become, if shunted in the right directions - and so Dumbledore and Grindelwald occurred. And then he began a new experiment, to see just how many wizards it would take to subdue the entire world (his focus has always been people, you see, rather than the sciences). He cut his way through Britain until it came time to butcher the Potters. And perhaps he knew beforehand, or found out simply by reading Lily Potter's mind through her terrified unblinking eyes, or realised how dramatically convenient it would be, and he created an equally powerful and nuanced waveform to his own in the only way he could - by irradiating the child with his undiluted unshaped magic, causing resonance. We have already seen that he has total mastery over magic even in the wrong body - so why not on the other end of a Legilimens or Imperio connection, as the disfigured creature that everybody had come to know as Voldemort?
And now, as his soul is pulled slowly further away from the Earth and his one remaining vessel spends more and more time in a brute instinctive state (this particular body does not really know how to function without the Quirrellmind steering it, you see), he gets to see the final situation play out. He has given the wizarding world a prodigious young man; an extinction event, cocked and primed; and now they have set him off and he will watch, first from his vessel on Earth and then from his position far away from the planet, as Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres tears the planet apart in an attempt to undo the damage that Humanity has wrought; and either Harry will unravel the universe by finding and destroying Atlantis*, or a level-headed Auror will be forced to kill the boy before he can do lasting damage to the world.
*I wonder what might happen if a young boy, made of rage and with a newly-fractured soul, called again upon that overwhelming desire to kill and pointed it at some very particular Atlantean source of magic - for example, a Time-Turner...
Why would Harry not send his Patronus to Dumbledore, or McGonagall in order to alert them that Hermione was in danger? Why would he not immediately time-turn (break the shell, it's supposed to be a deterrent and/or indication that you've obviously misused it, right?) before he had more information about what was going on?
I'm more upset now than when I read certain scenes in A Storm of Swords; I suppose congratulations are in order for that, but... damn. Do not want.
Mostly I think he was panicking. But I think he had reason to believe that they wouldn't react quickly enough and/or would force him not to look for Hermione.
This I'm less clear about.
Maybe he'll save her after 3pm.
Do not want, indeed.
But as to time-turning, the shell would have been enchanted by someone stronger than him in magic, and I imagine he either couldn't do it at all, or couldn't do it without damaging the Time Turner itself.
When I saw the 0.3% of the speed of light thing, I thought "did Eliezer Yudkowsky screw up the math?" (That's 9 hundred thousand meters per second), and thought (but did not put much confidence in) Harry might have screwed up the math because he was distracted, but it didn't occur to me that Harry's mind was dulled.
I'm pretty sure that was hyperbole.
... Hyperbole, or perhaps he was trying to take a very outside view that allowed him to travel the corridors using less time.
God damn it.
How exactly did Hermione die? Am I missing something about how the injection Harry gave her works? Was she murdered by someone who was more concerned with killing her than making sure it looked like an accident? Did the murderer make sure she'd die not knowing Harry had a method to save her that would render her death implausible? Did something other than lack of blood to the brain kill her?
A troll bit her legs off, and she died from what I assume is some combination of blood loss and shock? I don't really understand the question.
Blood loss shouldn't be fatal with that potion. There's other ways to die, of course, but the most obvious getting prevented makes the cause of death at least a question worth asking.
Quote:
The paragraph gives two reasons (Harry might not have found the carotid artery, he might not have done chest compressions correctly) why the potion could have failed to work. I don't see a compelling reason to hypothesize that there was some other force behind Hermione's death here.
If this were true, why bother with the troll?
Oxygenation is worthless once circulatory shock progresses far enough, so magical explanations are not necessary (but not ruled out).
For years, when trying to explain just how easy it is to break D&D 3.5 specifically, my example has always been a 5th level transmutation wizard with shrink item, mage hand, a twenty thousand pound rock and 100d6 of falling object dammage.... And somehow, I managed to not see that coming. I wonder if EY's falling rock idea originally came from D&D.
Not quite the Red Wedding, but close.
And thus, Hermione Jean Granger was permenantly sacrificed in a ritual which manifested Harry Potter.
Two interesting observations: The most recent utterances of the words "temporal pressure" (similar to the titles of these last two chapters) was in chapter 86 when discussing the Halls of Prophecy:
Next, near the end of chapter 89, Harry "turns away from Dumbledore" twice, almost as if there's a kink in time after explicitly mentioning "pressure":
Hypothesis: Something very strange just happened to Time around Harry, possibly involving a time turner, and things are definitely not as they seem.
It's almost as if someone is trying to manipulate Harry's reaction to these events, like when H&C tricks Hermione repeatedly. Fred and George are unconscious at this point, too. It goes without saying that Harry is probably an unreliable narrator.
I was under the impression that "temporal pressure" referred to some kind of mysterious Fate-like force that occasionally compels seers to release prophecies when important parts of the future gets resolved. That could just be Harry's new resolve to do anything necessary to get Hermione back (in addition to "time pressure" meaning the pressure he was under to get to Hermione on time). Is there a particular reason the "fracturing feeling" needs to be externally imposed rather than, y'know, a perfectly reasonable emotional reaction to current events?
On the other hand, Eliezer has mentioned that he wants to go through common tropes but do them better. He hasn't really done a full-blown Peggy Sue yet, although he's poked fun at the idea, and I'm pretty sure I remember Eliezer saying that he's read Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time, which is a Peggy Sue fic in which Harry finds Atlantis and weird things happen involving time, so... (recommended for the awesome ideas, but if you're like me you'll get annoyed by the way Harry talks.)
Eliezer
I think the facts at least are as described. Hermione is certainly lying in a pool of blood, something significant did happen to her (Harry felt the magic), and Dumbeldore definitely believe Hermione is dead.
If there is a time turner involved, it won't change those perceptions one bit, And I doubt Dumbeldore would try too Mess With Time ever again (as mentioned in the Azkaban arc). Harry might, but he's out of his Time Turner Authorized Range. Even then, it looks like he's thinking longer term than that.
What happened to Hermione was shocking and has nearly monopolized the posts in this thread so far.
There's aftermath coming, though, and I'd like to talk about that. Harry is probably in a lot of trouble. Here's a short list of rules violations:
The transfiguration is probably the worst on the list, really. If Harry is lucid at the end of this chapter I expect there will be some throw away line, possibly post-timeskip, about Dumbledore taking measures to avoid Transfiguration Sickness from the gases escaping the troll's skull.
And, really, why did Dumbledore tell him to carry that damn rock? Did he know? Or has Dumbledore found it so useful to carry a large rock around that "get a big rock, keep it with you at all times" is in the top five things he'd tell his younger self if he ever got the chance? Seriously -- the fuck?
I wonder if this arc will be like the psychological sort of horror movie where there's lots of action in the first twenty minute and the rest of the movie is the people who aren't dead yet being mean to each other. I can see that kind of aftermath, here. It won't be pretty.
On the other hand, if the twins go sufficiently public about Harry's homid patronus then Lucius will find out about it anyway and there won't be any reason for Harry not to use it to communicate with Draco. At least, not until the restraining order shows up.
Seriously, having your stalker's glow-in-the-dark spirit animal bounce in through a wall at the most inopportune moments to remind you that they're still thinking about you and really just want to talk could lead a person to think maybe Azkaban isn't so bad an idea after all. Ugh.
I wouldn't worry about transfiguration sickness: breathing sulphuric acid is probably worse than breathing atomized(?) troll brain matter, and AFAIK sulphuric acid and its salts are either directly harmful or aren't absorbed anywhere interesting in a human.
Now that you've pointed this out, I'm curious: why sulphuric acid? Hydrochloric is simpler.
I actually expected Harry to cast the Killing Curse as a last ditch desperation/rage effort. He knew what it does, has seen the wand movements and pronounciation (in the Dementor dream), knew and had the required state of mind. That should be enough to cast it, as per Ch26 ("He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.").
This doesn't sound like mere time-turning.
It might include redesigning death.
Possibly wishful thinking on my part, but I could see it as Harry starts the retrieval of Hermione's soul, and collaboration between them is required to reboot the universe without breaking it.
I'm bewildered at why Quirrel thinks he can get any particular result from Harry by having Hermione killed. Or is Quirrel assuming that Harry is now in a state where he can be manipulated reliably?
Minor point: It doesn't occur to anyone that Hermione might not be the only student who's missing?
Quirrell thinks Harry will take the gloves off now and accomplish goals like gaining power without any hesitation. Whatever Quirrell is up to, it seems like he wants Harry to gain power. Quote:
Recall that Harry said the following to Quirrell in Chapter 66:
Those two obstacles to Harry trying plots have now conveniently been removed!
Considering Harry's capabilities, just wanting him to be more powerful seems like a very risky course. Quirrel presumably wants Harry to do something Quirrel wants that Quirrel can't do himself.
Unless there is a second troll, it doesn't seem important.
EDIT: Or the student could be involved with the instigator of the whole conundrum (either as a victim or as a not necessarily willing helper)...
Re: Chapter 89
You bastard. :P
OK. was the whole thing with the soup? I think it can only be one of two things:
1) A shout-out/reference to another piece of fiction. HPMOR does this a lot, and I would not be surprised if this was yet another one of those. I do not recognise what piece of fiction it is referencing though. Can I get confirmation from anyone on if they recognise it from anywhere?
2) Otherwise, it must be important to the story. Remember, HPMOR is a rationalist story. There there are not meant to be red herrings. You are supposed to be able to figure it out. So, if this is the case, how has this got to do with the events of the story. Perhaps some weird time travel thing? I do not know. I notice I am confused.
I don't quite see why. Real world contains a lot of those.
... So, since this scene is obviously engineered by somebody (Harry arriving bare minutes too late, the wards not alerting Dumbledore, etc), I'm just going to go through the list of people who have shown the ability to plan such things.
a) Quirrel.
Unlikely.
This seems odd. Burning through Hogwarts is going to be a pretty big deal for him - he's basically demonstrated either an instinctive Harry-dar (and a way of knowing what Harry is doing, as well), or else he knew where Hermione was all along. Both of which are rather suspicious. I have no doubt he'll escape repercussions (Obliviating Trelawney comes to mind), but it still seems sloppy to incur them if he can avoid it.
This implies that this is simply not his plot: as he is already under suspicion and under watch, he loses nothing from a random walk that happens to put him near Hermione in case something goes wrong. And somehow, I am loathe to expect Quirrell to make a mistake while predicting the actions of another, even when that other is Harry Potter - especially when he knows that Harry has someone to defend and a killing instinct.
b) Dumbledore.
More likely, but still unlikely.
The obvious version of this plan includes Hermione dying - and for all that Dumbledore has morally greyed, I still can't see him killing a twelve-year-old girl in cold blood. (To him, I imagine, leaving her to die is a completely different matter.)
The second most obvious version of this plan - faking Hermione's death - has fewer problems, but is simply narratively unlikely. The biggest problem is Hermione's death-scream; it's a big dramatic moment, it's incredibly personal to Hermione in a way I'm not sure Dumbledore could emulate, Harry feels it cling to Hogwarts for a moment...
It's more likely than Quirrell (and certainly fits his style better - very complex and seemingly error-prone), but I'm still skeptical of ascribing any plan that pushes Harry away from the Light to Dumbledore.
c)
... We're basically out of appearing characters. That said, there's this rather interesting line...
Harry, feeling disassociated from himself? No; a few seconds later we have
Disassociated-Harry shows up later, I think, but that first call doesn't seem to be Harry's.
So we're looking for someone who has the manipulation ability of Quirrell and Dumbledore (but, preferably, not Quirrell or Dumbledore), already present at the scene (which means s/he knows exactly where Hermione would flee to and that Harry would follow), who doesn't want to save Hermione's life from Harry's perspective.
... At this point, I'm making an intuitive leap. We've already been suspicious that a Peggy Sue will show up; we think we know that the timeline must be consistent; we know that Harry has just resolved (and been PROPHECY-ed) to rip apart reality to bring by Hermione...
I'm wondering if future Harry - as in, really future Harry, not time-turned plus-six-hours Harry but after-the-fic plus-thirty-years Harry - hasn't shown up to pull a Chrono Trigger style rescue. We can ascribe essentially infinite competence to this Harry - by dint of living through this once (or more) times he can create the timeline he remembers, and is fully capable of a perfect illusion (for example, letting Hermione "die" and then catching her soul after it escapes, which by definition would satisfy any test Dumbledore et al could run.)
... there's probably a few flaws in my logic (I noticed after typing this that I jumped straight to "future Harry" and came up with a rationalization for it), but I didn't see anyone else proposing this, so I threw it up anyway.
So there's already a resurrection ritual that Harry has heard about. Blood of an enemy, bone of the father, flesh of the servant. Can he find these things for Hermione?
Anyone else confused by the line in chapter 89:
On first reading I thought it was the as-of-yet-unnamed-but-totally-Hermione victim, which seemed odd, but on a third read I think it might be Harry, and the distance of the narration just a reflection of Harry's horror. Not sure, though.