When Salazar Slytherin invoked the Parselmouth curse upon himself and all his children, his true plan was to ensure his descendants could trust one another's words, whatever plots they wove against outsiders.
In short, today either every wizard in Britain is a descendant of Salazar Slytherin or none is.
It seems awfully convenient for Quirell to suddenly have a foolproof way to make Harry believe certain claims. It seems to me that the whole "snakes can't lie" thing would have been revealed when Quirell was trying to convince Harry he didn't want to kill Bahry in Azkaban. In fact, that would have shortened that particular discussion considerably, in a situation where time was essential.
It has already been established that ventriloquism and silencing charms exist and that Quirell can do silent and wandless spell casting, so the "two plus two" test could easily have been faked.
Two new short chapters! Since the next one is coming tomorrow and we know it'll be short, let's use one thread for both.
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 105 (and chapter 106, once it comes out tomorrow). EDIT: based on Alsadius' comment about thread creation for MOR chapters, let's also use this thread for chapter 107 (and future chapters until this nears 500 comments) unless someone objects to doing so. Given that this is the final arc we're talking about, thread titles should be updated to indicate chapters covered.
There is 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.)
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: