I like this line of reasoning. I've been batting around the idea that Dementors and Patronuses are essentially opposite (anti) versions of one another. Perhaps a dementor is made when someone tries to cast the Patronus Charm with entirely 'the wrong kind of thought to cast a Patronus Charm.'
A dark ritual would explain their persistence compared to the patronuses, but it doesn't adequately explain their number... Also, if the ritual created a dementor, wouldn't people be saying the ritual summons a dementor, rather than Death? Most people in hpmor seem to associate the dementors only with fear, not death, and you would expect otherwise if the ritual to summon death always resulted in a dementor.
Countering that, though, most people trying to summon 'Death' are probably both very sensitive to dementors and incapable of defending against them, so people could be mistaking the results of a Kiss with 'what happens when you try to summon Death.'
someone tries to cast the Patronus Charm with entirely 'the wrong kind of thought to cast a Patronus Charm
Under what circumstances would such an event actually take place?
A few obstacles:
A caster would already have been trained in the Patronus Charm (otherwise they'd not know the wandwork etc.), and therefore would be aware that there's no point trying to cast the Patronus Charm with non-happy thoughts.
The basic use of the Patronus Charm is emergency Dementor protection, which you would not want to mess up by experimenting with alternative kinds of
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 96. The previous thread is at almost 300 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, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, .
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: