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Izeinwinter comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97 - Less Wrong
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...Thinking..
No. Persuasive theory, but it has flaws in it - specifically, the Troll was too successful at neutralizing Grangers defenses to have been a misfired plot. Arranging for her to be wandering the halls alone? Sure. Sabotaging her broom? sure. Invisibility cloak not doing what it was supposed to? Well, I can see that. Telling the troll to eat her feet first so that the emergency portkey does not work?
That absolutely requires lethal intent. The rest of it all fits, but having Granger get ported out of harms way if Harry flies into a wall while en-route or something does not even require D to put a backup plan in place, it merely requires him to not neutralize a precaution already in place.
The anti-troll weapon.. Well, if the troll got stolen from the philosopher stone defenses...
however, that does not mean D was not hat and cloak. Because, as Harry so ably demonstrated, breaking someone out of askaban is not difficult. Sending Granger there would not require D to intend to leave her there, even if he was expecting the wizengamot to enact a lesser sanction.
There's no need to do that. The portkey is already blocked by the Hogwarts wards prohibiting Apparition. If the murderer instructed the troll to eat Hermione feet-first to disable the portkey, that would mean they expected her to be able to make it out of the castle and across the grounds while being pursued by the (much faster) troll - something she could not do without a working broomstick or some other asset that in itself foiled the assassination attempt.
Just like Harry was not portkeyed out of Hogwarts in Goblet of Fire?
Exactly like that. [sigh]
While your example is undeniable, Santa Claus does instruct Harry to get outside Hogwarts before using his playing card portkey, and I'm fairly confident there are other instances to the same effect. It seems that the state of the evidence, both in canon and MoR, roughly amounts to "Portkeys and Apparition do not work within Hogwarts wards except when they do".
All mentions of portkeys in HPMoR explicitly describe themselves needing to get out of the Hogwarts wards first. The "Santa Clause" letters, the emergency toe-ring portkey, when Quirrel and Harry leave together they walk out of the wards first before Quirrel throws a portkey to Harry, etc.
Besides which, Dumbledore made the portkey in the first place - unless he's the culprit (which I doubt), he's very unlikely to forget to make the portkey bypass the wards somehow.
In GoF they had to set up an apparition-is-allowed-zone at the end of the maze in order for the portkey to work, which is why Crouch had to wait until Harry had won the cup instead of just turning a piece of silverware into a portkey or something.
Problem is that in the book Crouch says:
Doesn't say "added an extra Portkey location" or anything such. That would have been the perfect place for JKR to say so.
This is definitely not canon. I think it's pure fanon, but it may be Word of God, I don't know. In any case, this makes the argument from this point a fair amount weaker.
Nobody was surprised when Harry showed up with the Cup. They all just got up and started clapping.
To me, as well as many others, it makes sense that the Cup was made into a portkey that specifically bypassed the Hogwarts wards, which Barty Crouch then subverted to give it an extra stop along the way. It's also the only reason I can think of (besides Bahl's Stupefaction) for the Cup to then send Harry back to Hogwarts--not the center of the Maze, where it originated, but to another location, one that happened to be centered right before the audience.
If anyone can think of an alternate theory, I'd love to hear it.
You're thinking of the movie. In the book it just says: "A torrent of sound deafened and confused him; there were voices everywhere, footsteps, screams. ... He remained where he was, his face screwed up against the noise, as though it were a nightmare that would pass. . . ."
...bugger. I hate making that kind of mistake.
Alright, granted. That does weaken my argument somewhat, but it still appears to stand overall.
Poor writing on JK's part?
That's always a possibility, but it's also a cop-out.
Besides, the kinds of discussions that happens in places like this depends on extrapolating on small details.
The logic seems to hold up to me. Does the theory presented above seem faulty to you?
No. If we want to actually explain something that looks like it's just bizarre, it seems a decent theory. But I don't want to spend too much time explaining why the side of the plate farther from the heat source is warmer, especially from the canon, which I think is less well-planned than HPMOR.
I don't feel that your metaphor applies, but okay. Plenty of other things to devote time and energy to.
To be fair, it ate her legs, not just her feet. It seems likely enough that if a troll is trying to kill you, it might as well eat your legs as any other part of you.
On the other hand...
Try thinking the plots through from the perspective of whoever plotted them. The hat-and-cloak plot? That all fits someone who is reluctant to kill or overtly coerce, but free with memory charms. (Hi there Snape. Welcome to the suspect pool!) If the assumption is that the alarm on Draco was known, then at no point is anyone in serious danger. Worst case scenario, Hr gets to spend a night in azkaban before being quietly extracted. Heck, if Harry goes ballistic and kills off the dementors? Win for the light! .. and the fact that this might kill Harry is severely non-obvious. The standard patronus does not tax the caster.
.. Checking chapter 46. Right, first question. Dumbledore asks is what the toll of Patronus 2.0 is. Given Harrys answer, I think he may well be under the impression that Harry could safely kill off every dementor in britain if backed up by a phoenix. That could have been the entire point. Getting azkaban purified by Ûber-patronus..
So, yhea, this could all be the work of Dumbledore. If it was the work of someone else, the plotter still exercised some restraint. The plotter still fails actual etics, of course, but this could all be the work of someone who thinks they are one of the good guys.
But the troll plot? Uhm. Not so much. At some point while disabling Hr's defences and buffing the troll to the heavens, some niggling little thought along the lines of "Ehh.. this is quite likely to end up with a corpse on the ground" would have to present itself to the most senile Dumbledore I can plausibly model. It reeks of malice.
More than that, it's trivial to nullify that possibility. Just watch the battle. If you know it's happening, and you know where it is, then just use one of the many, many scrying implements we know Dumbledore has to watch the battle. The moment the troll ate her legs Dumbledore should've been there; even if he wanted Harry to save her or something he could've discreetly stabilized her, Harry had no way to notice.
Dumbledore was absent from the castle.
And he made it sound like the wards only alert him when a student has died. It's reasonable to expect them to warn ahead of time, after serious injury or something, but going by canon Dumbledore had no external alarm when Harry broke however many bones however many times on the Quidditch pitch.
Dumbledore placed a ward on Hermione that alerted him to any "hostile magic" or "evil spirit" that touched her. Someone either got very lucky, or knew about the wards.
And yet the explanation for the method of the attempted murder of Draco was that the slow cooling of his blood would cause his vitals to drop too slowly to trigger the wards until he died. Which explicitly relies on the common knowledge that Hogwarts DOES have wards that track the vitals of its students and that those wards are keyed to track sudden changes, and the removal of significant portions of the body would certainly constitute a "sudden change" in vitals.
So in the attempted murder of Draco, the wards were circumvented; in the troll attack, they were actively compromised.
Or the wards only detect sudden vital changes caused by hostile magics.
My grandparent is working on the assumption that Dumbledore is the culprit and would have had simple ways to make sure Hermionie doesnt die by mistake as a result of the attack he coordinated.
Ah, I see. I was also working on the assumption that McGonagall was correct; no reason Dumbledore couldn't say he was leaving, head to his office, sit back, and watch.
If it was him and he wanted Hermione to die, then he also had an excellent excuse to watch the battle with wards without acting on it, namely that he supposedly timeturned back after the fact and couldn't change anything.
To be even fairer, that might be just because the legs were bite-sized, and polite trolls are taught by their mothers not to nibble their food.
I think if you use this line of reasoning and then allow yourself to dismiss arbitrary parts of it as "not part of the plan", you can make a convincing argument for almost anything. For that reason, I consider the entire theory suspect.
Well, Harry trying to save Hermione could have been part of the plan, but it seems like both major candidates (Quirrel and Dumbledore) thought (or at least hoped) that Harry would not succeed.
I think it's relatively plausible, actually. The troll did not necessarily have specific orders to eat her feet-first.
As a matter of character, Dumbledore does have odd notions of what it takes to be a hero. And he may think Harry needed to see the real toll of wars by having someone close to him die.
Or he really was confident that Harry would save her, and he would use the troll attempt as evidence against Malfoy (which would have worked).
And my favourite part of your comment:
Yes; that's the problem :)
So it's Dumbledore who's the sexist fridger, not Eliezer!
I realise you're probably just being flippant, but I should note that Hermione is the only person Dumbledore knows and has access to that really matters to Harry. If he was going to fridge anyone, it would be her, for that reason rather than sexist ones.
Well, he could have killed Harry’s parents. It might not trigger Harry’s “kill death by any means necessary” reaction, but then I don't think anyone would have anticipated that in-universe, given that even Q was surprised by the prophecy.
Point.
That said, I suspect that to Dumbledore Hermione's self-proclaimed hero status automatically signals "willing to die for the cause", whereas Harry's parents are innocent bystanders in every possible way.
Perhaps, although “story logic” can imply parents being willing to sacrifice for their children. That’s a problem with thinking of the world in terms of stories, you can find a trope to justify almost anything. Authors always can (and often do) pull deus ex machinas out of their nether regions.
Although this is often assumed, it has most likely not been the perpetrators real concern. CF:
I strongly suspect it was to heighten the emotional impact on Mr. Potter, to be able to see her face.
That still indicates lethal intent and malice. Does not fit with the "Plot misfire" theory.
I wouldn't plan that way. If I would order the troll I would tell it to knock the person unconscious to prevent the person from triggering port-keys.
Or eat her head-first. That would prevent the activation of portkeys too.
Grabing someone and moving them in a way that the head is near the mouth of the troll takes a tiny amount of time. It's faster for the troll to simple hit her head directly to knock her unconscious.
If I think a bit more about it Hermonine should have been able to portkey away if the key isn't manipulated in any case. The troll makes noise so she would be aware that something is happening and turn in the direction of the troll. Seeing it should trigger a direct portkey activation.
Anybody who can deactivite the invisible cloak probably has no issue to deactivate the portkey as well.