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Yvain comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 111 - Less Wrong
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Comments (173)
So Harry gets his wand back, gets his pouch back, Voldemort resurrects Hermione with superpowers, then Voldemort becomes super-weak, his horcruxes mysteriously stop working, and he mentions this is happening loudly enough for Harry to hear and kill him?
Either this is still all in the mirror, or Harry needs to buy lottery tickets right away.
Or this is a big setup by Voldemort. Saying "I must make a Horcrux" out loud is the giveaway; I doubt even Harry's fantasy of a beatable Voldemort would be that stupid.
My guess (conditioned on this not being the mirror) is that Voldemort gave Harry his pouch and wand and then faked weakness to trick Harry into attacking him so that he could kill Harry without violating his prior promise. He resurrected a nearly-immortal Hermione to dissuade Harry from ripping the stars apart in case killing him failed, as part of his defense-in-depth strategy against the prophecy. Since he could have tricked Harry by much simpler means if that were the only goal, he can say in Parseltongue that restoring her counsel is the greater part of his motivation.
hat tip
No, you've got it completely backwards, he just used some ancient pre-rolled dice, now he can't buy lottery tickets for like a zillion years until he builds that used up luck back.
In other news, the chapter is titled Failure part 1. So we're still in for more Failure.
Meta-level evidence for this: Eliezer doesn't usually post two chapters, short or not, in one day.
Not wasting his readers time speculating about a "dream" would be a good motive for that.
I think it's more plausible that the mirror acts like it does in canon; that is, you see the room you're in, plus some features that you deeply desire; you don't see yourself leave the room unless you actually leave the room.
I see three broad paths the next chapter could take:
(As always, there is the category of "everything else.")
Upvoted retroactively.
They did leave the room and go to a graveyard before Hermione was resurrected.
The reader sees them leave the room and go to a graveyard. But whether or not they in actuality left the room depends on how the mirror transmits information. Yvain is leaving open the possibility that Harry is hallucinating this (with the mirror's help), and giving it high probability because of how much is going in his favor very quickly. I agree that's a possibility, but think it's unlikely given how the canon mirror operated and the evidence we have of how the MOR!mirror operates.
I see. Point taken, then.
Voldemort believes that Harry “WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN” without Hermione. What wouldn't you do to protect the person preventing that, given that you are willing to murder unknown hundreds for Horcruxes.
Be stupid?
There's no excuse for letting Harry have his stuff back, after all.
Further speculation along this line: Even if this is a dream, what has Harry gained from this vision?
How to resurrect Hermione when he gets around to it. After all, she has to become an alicorn princess!
I suspect I'm spoiling the in-joke here, but is that a literal in-story thing, or just a fan joke? Honestly, it's getting hard to tell sometimes.
It has to deal with an author's note written after Hermione's death, in which Eliezer responded to claims that the story was insufficiently feminist with 'wait until the story is finished!', and ended with the line that she would be resurrected as an alicorn princess. It was, I believe, at the same time that the MLP community was still reacting to Twilight Sparkle being turned from a unicorn to an alicorn princess.
People have been genuinely uncertain how serious he was, given his reputation for both honesty and silliness.
And when the similarly themed, similarly silly suggestion came true that Twilight Sparkle (in a pre-alicorn state, as it happens) would appear in the fic, people really began to take it seriously.
I feel like the people who thought it wouldn't happen really underestimated him. Author!EY knows how to nail an ending.
A reasonably non-dark way of making people nigh-immortal, though he might have to leave out the troll part if they turn out to be sapient.
He hasn't actually learned the magic Voldemort was using just by observing it. And it's likely a Dark secret that noone else can teach him.
He doesn't actually know that ritual, though. Quirrell does stuff with his wand and Harry knows better than to just blindly copy whatever off his memory.
The resurrection ritual, as near as I can tell, requires only going to that obelisk, placing flesh on the slab, and saying "X, X, X so wisely hidden", where "X" is whatever you you have - blood, flesh, bone, vitreous humors of the eye, whatever.