Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112
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 112.
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: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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 (287)
Well, that's unfortunate. At least there won't be an update for a few days; maybe I can actually finish my thesis now in peace.
Still no direct answer for whether or not we are in a Mirror!Verse. Confirmation that Voldemort is acting to prevent Harry from destroying the universe--But I find myself still confused as to what he wants to do with Harry that is more important than killing him immediately to protect the universe. I would think that possibility negates any benefit of keeping Harry around.
In useless trivia: the Death Eaters got those masks and cloaks on in a hurry. It suggests that the outfits are some sort of spell that can be quickly applied, if seconds after being summoned the Death Eaters can arrive in full regalia.
This is a feature of the Mythic Dawn armor in Oblivion, and actually one of the cooler things about the game, I thought--the sleeper agents are dressed and act like normal people, and then BAM, conjured full plate.
And it's not like you would want your agents to be exposed when people rummage through their things.
Something about that line reminded me of a very, very old quote:
We've got the robes and the moonlight and the context, but... Harry's naked, so that can't be Harry falling and Hermione screaming. I ... don't think Harry would scream for Voldemort at this point.
I get the feeling that splitting it up like that was intended to be a test of if we could figure out the flaw in Harry's plan quickly, much like Harry himself needing (and failing) to figure it out fast.
And someone did figure it out; congrats to SilentCal.
EDIT: On the other hand, as Reddit is eager to point out, the curse Riddle invoked on his doubles was not exactly foreseeable.
I was going on the Parseltongue-promise from ch. 105:
I had taken this to mean Voldemort had precommitted to not killing Harry without tricking him first.
Yes--I prefer your version to what happened.
Graveyard: check.
Voldemort resurrected: check.
Death Eaters: check.
Now I’m looking forward to an HPMoR-style Priori-Incantatem-scene …
The resonance would have to be resolved somehow, unless Harry intends to sacrifice himself, which I doubt would be rational because it now seems that Voldemort's horcrux network is still functional.
If the resonance was Voldemort's self-curse, it has been resolved.
I seem to have missed the implication that the curse was the cause of the resonance, I had assumed that the curse was some new thing we had not seen before. Thanks to you and Vaniver for pointing this possibility out to me.
I'm reading one of Voldemort's claims in this chapter to be that the resonance, rather than caused by Lily's sacrifice, was caused by Riddle's curse that he put on himself and his descendants, and Voldemort is no longer at risk now that Harry has attempted to end Voldemort's immortality. It could be the case that this is Voldemort's mistake, and love remains the power that he knows not, and there would still be magical resonance if the two came to magical blows, and in canon it's relevant that their wands both have Fawkes's feathers in their core.
That doesn't explain the Godric's Hollow explosion, since Harry wouldn't have been a Riddle instance at the time. I'm pretty sure Voldemort was telling the truth about the resonance, unless something else leveled the Godric's Hollow cottage and killed Voldy's last instance.
Voldemort can just shoot Harry now, however, where previously the curse would have prevented him from doing so.
And since this fact is explicitly mentioned in chapter 6 (see quote below), I expect this to play a role in one of the future chapters. (“Law of Conservation of Detail”)
(edited for formatting)
In canon it's fundamentally a coincidence; in story terms it functions as foreshadowing for the Horcrux reveal, but since Horcruces in canon don't seem to affect people's personalities or magic there's really no good reason for it, unless we want to grant wands magical Horcrux-detection powers that we've never seen elsewhere.
Here, though, Harry isn't just a vessel for Voldemort; he's actually a copy of the same soul. It makes perfect sense for the wands to be very similar, and it makes sense from an authorial perspective to emphasize that: it looks like an echo of canon in the event, but it's the sort of thing that enriches the story on a second reading.
w/r/t magic: IIRC, the Voldemort-Horcrux inside Harry is responsible for him being able to speak Parseltongue. (Although my memory is a bit fuzzy on this; it’s been a while since I last read book 7.) Also, there’s a weird horcrux/magic interaction, which leads to the King’s Cross scene near the end of book 7.
w/r/t personality: Wearing a Horcrux can at least influence the mood of the wearer, see the big row between Harry/Hermione and Ron in book 7. (Why canon!Harry is apparently not influenced by being a horcrux is still a mystery to me …)
You’re absolutely right; the Law of Conservation of Detail is already satisfied by that. However, I still consider Priori Incantatem a plausible option for the next few chapters.
He was - he had a kind of telepathic link to Voldemort, which gave him visions of what Voldemort was doing. Snape was supposed to teach Harry Occulemency to keep Voldemort out of his head, but it didn't work; Voldemort sent Harry a false vision of Sirius in danger to lead him into a trap.
Oh, absolutely!
Sorry, my original phrasing was bad. Let’s try again: I still don’t understand why the horcrux inside canon!Harry seems to have no influence on his mood, similar to the mood changes caused by wearing Slytherin’s locket in book 7.
Maybe it did, just think how jolly Harry might have been otherwise!
I wonder if the Elder Wand will come into play. It has so far not been mentioned in the last two chapters, but that doesn't mean Voldemort doesn't have it/hasn't been using it.
I don't think the curse caused the resonance, for two reasons. First, Voldemort never harmed a Riddle. He arguably killed a Potter, but he made no move against the ensuing Riddle. This isn't the type of story to have a race condition bug in the Dark Lord's curse, though that's a great idea for omake.
Second, the don't-kill-each-other curse doesn't explain the feeling of doom or the Azkaban resonance incident very well.
Nor does it explain the pain in Harry's scar or his crawling feeling after the gunshots. (Harry was supposedly never under the curse to begin with, in which case he can't still be under it.)
Relevant, from Ch 111:
He did kill his family.
True, but irrelevant since they are not subject to the curse:
(chapter 112)
... So. That was a thing.
Let's see here. My current best guess for Voldy's extremely redundant anti-apocalypse plan looks something like this:
1) Kill Harry Potter. 2) Thoroughly kill Harry Potter with thirty-odd Death Eaters. 3) Have Harry Potter kill himself 4) Convince Harry Potter that if all else fails and he somehow manages to, I don't know, stab himself in the Resurrection Stone and set off a chain reaction that throws his other 108 Horcruxes into the Sun, he'll kill himself anyway 5) If he doesn't kill himself, ensure that Hermione Granger is around to keep him sane.
I think Voldemort wants to actually kill Harry last, after he's already meticulously taken apart the prophecy in as many ways as he can think of, in case Harry's death sets something off. In the meantime, he wants to limit Harry's influence on the world as much as possible, by not allowing him to move or speak.
"Remember that, in casse something goess wrong with next movess." might be referring to this: if the plan to permanently incapacitate Harry is somehow unsuccessful, he's to have the instructions for keeping Hermione around.
YESS! Voldemort is as intelligent as QQ always was! The true Dark Lord returns!
Attempting to shoot Voldemort was still the correct action for Harry to take, given his constraints.
Any opportunity to defeat Voldemort at this stage is going to be sudden and short-duration. If you pass up a potential victory shot because it's possibly some sort of misdirection, you'll likely pass up every potential shot at victory you might encounter.
I think that attempting to shoot him there wasnt giving an intelligent enemy very much credit. It would only work if the stupid mistakes that Voldemort was making were real, and not a ruse. Given that Harry possibly has only one chance (because Voldemort promised in parseltongue not to try to harm Harry unless he tried to harm him first), taking the first opportunity that presents itself, which might be a trick to get Voldemort out of that promise, is probably unwise.
Wise sort of went on vacation when Harry elected to oppose the invincible dark lord instead of volunteering to be his most favored flunky.
Voldemort is capable of making stupid mistakes; he admitted that with his whole discussion of being trapped for years without a body. But he doesn't make stupid mistakes very frequently. So, if you believe he's making a stupid mistake, you should try to take advantage, because you may not see another one.
Yes, that makes sense. It seems Harry shouldve been much less confident that Voldemort was making a mistake, but he was very rushed.
Even if Volde really was hamming it up that badly as to shout that he was mortal again, he would presumably have shields up which would stop bullets.
Harry has literally been watching the current body Voldemort is inhabiting for the entire time that body has existed. He has seen every spell cast while Voldemort has been using it.
Either Voldemort has not raised shields (which he typically did not do as Quirrell) or he's capable of casting shielding spells which Harry cannot detect either the casting or ongoing effects of even in the midst of extended close observation. And if it's the latter, we're back to "in order to have a shot at beating someone, you have to assume he's theoretically beatable and act accordingly".
On the gripping hand, I'd more expect his new, permanently-transfigured body to just be naturally bulletproof, rather than conventionally shielded. But it's not helpful to believe he's actually thought of everything.
I seem to remember that in Azkaban his shields were invisible.
I don't recall invisible shields, but it's certainly plausible.
We've also seen him just flatly stop curse bolts in midair and then flick them away, without apparent shielding or obvious effort. He's got defense options like Smaug has gold coins.
If killing him was easy, someone would have done it before. Even though he had horcruxes, it's telling that he never actually had to respawn from one until he tried juggling dynamite and blew his own self up.
From Ch. 74. It's not clear to me whether the shield was invisible until struck or if he put it up very quickly and silently.
This.
For what it's worth, the visual effect is that of an AT Field from Evangelion, which is normally invisible until struck.
Shields are useless against Harry's magic because of the resonance. The earthbending trick was nice, though.
Exactly. I believe the authors notes or some other comment EY made say that bombs might be effective though. RPG rounds, maybe?
Or transfigured bullets which cannot be blocked due to resonance.
Not necessarily. Voldemort did say that he reanimated Hermione for Harry. Simply going along with the plan might be the best option. That would also mean to ask Voldemort about keeping Harry alive. Harry problem is that he can't lose and settle for something less than total victory.
So true. The "learn to lose" lesson fell on the world's most barren soil.
Harry had a better choice: "Shoot the hostage"
Either fatally or a good wounding in the leg.
Harry'd already committed that his life was a worthy sacrifice to foil V's plans. Clearly V. felt Harry should be alive for some reason. Ergo, Harry's death would have hurt his plans. Stopped entirely? Maybe, maybe not.
A leg wound, preventing him from walking, requiring his own wand to heal or some machinations on V's part to find some non-magical interaction way to heal/move Harry would have also done nicely.
To what end? He already has his wand back at that point, so this would merely be a slight inconvenience to V (but a great inconvenience to himself).
Also, for what it’s worth, Harry still has the Healing Pack (which he bought in chapter 7) in his pouch, right? So there’s a way to heal him without any magical interaction between V and H; even if H doesn’t know the appropriate healing spells.
So, how is Voldemort going to try to avert the prophecy with the help of the Death Eaters?
Thirty-seven death eaters now all have their wands pointed at Harry. Why aren't some of them pointed at other death eaters, to ensure loyalty, and some looking around, to maintain situational awareness? At this point, it seems more likely for a disloyal Death Eater to cause trouble, than for Harry to do it.
From what we know of Voldemort (as a persona), he recruited idiots and gave them explicit instructions when he wanted them to do something. It is unlikely that he'll grant them discretionary judgment in such a sensitive situation, or (rightly or wrongly) that he'll expect them to notice something he doesn't.
Methinks Voldemort is about to betray the Death Eaters. They are summoned here to be killed. Pointing their wands away from him is a precaution.
In canon, the only really disloyal Death Eater, Severus Snape, didn't respond to the call. Although given how Quirrelmort left him last chapter, he probably couldn't respond now if he tried.
"The steel ring upon his left pinky finger was yanked off hard enough to scrape skin, taking the Transfigured jewel with it."
I guess we'll see whether Dumbledore knew what he was talking about when he told Harry to carry his father's rock.
Why is Voldemort not getting rid of Harry in some more final way?
Even if he's worried killing Harry will rebound against him because of the prophecy somehow, he can, I don't know, freeze Harry? Stick Harry in the mirror using whatever happened to Dumbledore? Destroy Harry's brain and memories and leave him an idiot? Shoot Harry into space?
Why is "resurrect Harry's best friend to give him good counsel" a winning move here?
Perhaps because this might all be happening within the mirror, thus realizing both Harry!Riddle's and Voldy!Riddle's CEVs simultaneously.
Because Voldermort expects the prophecy to become a reality if all the conditions it states are met, e.g. hermione dying. It doesn't matter how he tries to thwart Harry, as long as Hermione dies the prophecy will be fulfilled and Harry wil end the world. He believes this strongly because he's tried it before himself and there is plenty of lore of it happening before.
It's a form of prophecy-aversion that's pretty orthogonal to the various forms of destroying Harry. The mechanisms of prophecy are still an unknown for Voldemort, and it seems potentially consistent with how magic works that all attempts to neutralize Harry are doomed to fail but redeeming him with friendship can work.
...or he's setting up his next chess match, either as an explicit goal or as a subconscious desire influencing his prophecy-aversion plans.
Before Harry shot at him, Voldemort was cursed to be unable to threaten Harry's immortality, and given the several times he's found himself getting wrong answers to questions previously, I don't think he was certain Harry would have betrayed him even with such a convenient que. So that covers anything that happens before Harry fires the gun.
After that point... I think he's trying to cover his bases. That he set up such a ploy to enable him to kill Harry means that he's likely at least going to try. But that's not the only Winning move, and it's a Winning move that prevents other Winning moves from being attempted.
This is one of those plots. "Keep Harry Potter from destroying universe" does not allow duct tape, WD-40, and lesser wishes to attempt a do-over. Killing Harry is probably the most effective way to keep that from happening, if you can do it. The last time Vold tried to subvert or redirect a Prophecy by destroying most of a person involved, things went so badly he spent most of a decade as a howling disembodied spirit. It's not been explicitly stated that Prophecies act like Time Turners (aka DO NOT MESS WITH TIME/NO), but it's pretty strongly implied to result in something like Mage's Paradox or Continuum's Frag. Resurrecting Hermoine and giving aid to Harry Potter was something that had to be done before any Death Eaters were summoned and arrived, and was about the only such thing, and was disjoint enough from people directly related to the Prophecy as to be unlikely to result in Paradox/Frag.
Vold knows Harry's best friend as a pillar of restrictions. Even if we know her to be a threat to his plans, Vold knows that her death triggered Harry's transformation into The One Who Tears Stars and that this is more dangerous than even an immortal Hermoine.
((I think he forgot some of the matters he said earlier, though. The Parsletongue curse will probably strike soon since he promised neither he nor his would seek to ever harm Hermoine. I'm genuinely surprised that cutting curse here didn't already cause something horrible to happen to him.))
Don't think the curse actually enforces oaths, just ensures that you're telling the truth at the time you said it.
Besides, Voldemort, from his point of view, isn't harming Hermione - since, after all, he just went ridiculously out of his way to make sure she wouldn't care.
This seems an incorrect usage of "insofar as", since it means "to the extent that", not "because" or "since". Native speakers, what do you think?
Native speaker here; I think you're right. It didn't leap out at me on a first reading, but I probably would have changed it if I was copy-editing this.
Native speaker here; I think it's acceptable. It gives a connotation along the lines of, "had it not been for the fact that he would die, he would have no other reason for doing X."
Non-native speaker here; I agree with you. I knew what "insofar as" meant, and the statement parsed fine.
Native speaker--it's not wrong, but it is somewhat awkward. That said, the whole excerpt is redundant, so I'd be making more extensive changes than replacing "insofar as" with something else if I were editing. (Also: "He tried not to shiver in the falling night temperatures, for...it was getting colder.")
Agreed, it jarred when I read it too. I would prefer ‘inasmuch’, but it's probably better to just say ‘because’.
People here should be aware of fresh Word of God. Apparently we're NOT in the Mirror.
It's implied but not stated that we're not in the mirror. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
(I say as someone who is >98% sure that we're not in the mirror.)
Ah well, if we are in the mirror, then the real we, the we with abominable terminal values and recurring stupidity, at least get one hell of a kick out of life.
Sounds... bad enough
To be fair, we only had 2.5 hours to question 111, while we had nearly a whole day to question 110.
A summary of the reaction, in two points:
I believed 110, and then when 111 came out I was like "No, 110 and 111 are both mirror bullshit; there's no way it's a coincidence that they both get resounding, total victories after being reflected in the mirror." Aaaaand I'm wrong. EY keeps me guessing.
Me too. I did not doubt chapter 110 was veridical until chapter 111 ate my suspension of disbelief.
The Mirror is in the fourth wall. Now that we-the-readers have seen the mirror, we have to consider that our seeing Eliezer saying this isn't in the mirror might just be part of our coherent extrapolated volition.
I think that one of Harry's biggest mistakes in the whole scenario was not bargaining harder with Voldemort before they entered the corridor. It was clear that he had some leverage over Voldemort there, Voldemort needed him for some unknown reason. He should have been less fearful for his own life (since Voldemort apparently needs him), and tried to barter for limits upon Voldemort's future reign of terror should he succeed. For example, if he agreed to help, Voldemort would need to promise in parseltongue not to Kill, Torture, or Imperius (or have minions do it for him), more than X people per year. (Limiting to X instead of 0 might be enough to get Voldemort to go along with the plan, and Harry might be able to morally justify his assistance given that he would be saving hundreds of students lives that Voldemort was holding hostage, so the net result might be less lives lost).
He could have sold this to Voldemort as the only way that his moral compass would allow him to assist him: by making the scenario into a trolley problem, where Harry helping Voldemort was the option that cost less lives.
But also that Voldemort has leverage over Harry; there are people right there that he can torture or kill to punish Harry for taking too long to agree.
Harry has some bargaining power, but Voldemort holds the cards. He can use the Cruciatus on some of the other students or just threaten to kill extra people if Harry insists on "unreasonable" terms that constrain his future plans.
So, the next chapter.
To be fair to Harry, neither of those are good examples - Voldemort's plan also had Hermione in Azkaban thinking she had murdered Draco Malfoy for two weeks, which would have had... unpleasant effects on her mental health, and there's a pretty sharp limit to how much you can count "going along with a hostage situation at gunpoint" as "meddling." A mistake, yes, intentional meddling, no.
I'm not saying that the alternative was good--just that the alternative was better.
I am considering primarily the earlier mistakes Harry made with respect to Quirrell.
Was it?
I really don't think the alternative was better than the canonical "Harry gets her out of there at a reasonably low cost considering all the myriad ways he has of making tons of money".
I mean, given that his opponent turned out to be Quirrell, maybe, but otherwise...
Which earlier mistakes were these?
The chief of them is the one that Harry realizes:
I think Dumbledore did realize the fact that the Defense Professor is Voldemort, so that's no consequential error on Harry's part.
Did he? The beginning of chapter 110 seems to suggest otherwise:
That's sarcasm.
That precise wording might carry sarcastic undertones. However, the bewilderment right before that seemed (and still seems, on second reading) genuine to me:
It's also an eerie echo of Lucius Malfoy:
A possible Voldemort failure mode: due to them both being Tom Riddle, Voldemort's Horcrux network might accept Harry upon his death and somehow hurt Voldemort (leaving Harry able to coordinate others through Resurrection Stone). Killing Harry is either the next step of Voldemort's plan, or a possible move on Harry's part. Killing Harry seems prudent, alluded to in Ch. 108 and throughout in Harry's internal monologue:
This time, the potential problem is not the spells used in the killing (where an axe would be a workaround), but the consequences of death governed by Horcrux 2.0. Problems with Voldemort's Horcrux due to some sort of interference (feint with Hermine) and also Voldemort's limited understanding due to insufficient testing were foreshadowed. A more careful plan might be to recreate the whole setup on disposable victims, together with infant copies that are grown up, and check how Horcrux 2.0 responds to the death of a copy who doesn't have a Horcrux of their own; and how it responds to a copy creating a Horcrux 2.0 of their own etc., while keeping Harry sedated somewhere in a way that wouldn't register as death.
Even after re-reading the horcrux stuff a couple times, I'm still confused.
There are two types of horcuxes, v1 and v2. v1 only captures your mindstate as it was at the time of creation. v2 updates all horcruxes to the current mindstate. v1s were hidden in the canonical places (diadem, slytherian's locket, etc), v2 in the hard to reach ones (mariana trench, pioneer probe).
After 10/31/1981, Tom's mindstate bounced around the v2 horcruxes. In 1992, Quirrell found a v1 horcrux ("one of my earliest"). How does that work? How can a v1, which hasn't updated, give rise to the current Voldemort?
He wouldn't have Slytherin's monster's power, or knowledge of anything after the horcrux's creation.
Also, how are those current v2 backups handling two Toms? Which mindstate is getting backed up? Probably the QQ one, but how does V know the system even works??
And isn't it suspicious that Quirrell finds this horcrux just a few months before Harry is to attend Hogwarts?
Upon rereading 108, it's ambiguous if QMort is telling the full truth about horcruxes. His Parseltongue confirmation comes later, after his horcrux explication.
Don't have it in front of me, but my sense was the timeline was more nuanced. First he made some Horcruxes. Then he invented the True Horcrux, and made some of those. Then he invented the True Horcrux Hiding Place, and made about a zillion of them. Quirrel found Horcrux v2 in Hiding Place v1.
Voldemort is lying in parseltongue. He's not going to kill Harry because he can't. He can't because the curse or unbreakable vow he took to not harm himself didn't have release conditions. There was no purpose in putting them in. You don't set up "I can't kill myself unless I try to kill myself", because the 2nd part is useless if the first part works.
You sir, are a lying liar who lies in parseltongue. Or Harry would be dead right now. Indeed, he would have been dead long ago.
Voldemort is not allowed to kill a version of himself, period. This is how he intended to get around the prisoner's dilemma with his eternal chess buddy. There were to be no clever "Baba Yaga draws Perverelle's blood" outs that would allow someone to murder the foresworn, you were just. not. allowed. Ever. This is the lesson Tom Riddle drew from the story of Baba Yaga; don't leave that loophole. This is what he did with the Goblet of Fire, perhaps?
Voldemort would defect in a heartbeat, and he knows it. He has precluded this possiblity, precluded it so strongly that killing Harry or even willing him killed is either impossible to him or would mean his own death.
Note the instructions he gave to his Death Eaters are non-lethal, and varied, and multiplied by dozens of them. He is taking extraordinary non-lethal precautions. He is taking extraordinary measures to resurrect Hermione to prevent a living Harry from destroying the stars. Voldemort is doing this because he wants desperately to not die, and the more obvious option of just killing the idiot-child of foretold destruction is not available to him.
He might be able to kill Harry for value of the kill!parseltongue but the Horcrux network would keep Harry alive.
Not that I think you reason wrongly, but...
And I could be wrong, of course, but if I am I have no idea why Harry is alive.
Because V. is afraid of prophecies?
We have seen him to be afraid of this one. We've seen him express intent to stop that destiny at every point of intervention. Killing Harry is a really obvious and seemingly certain point of intervention.
He certainly seems to think that Harry's death would solve the problem, and he's willing enough to have Harry kill himself, but not willing to kill Harry. Why?
Another possibility is that there's a separate curse. Broken curse completely prevents a Riddle from trying to kill a Riddle, second curse imposes consequences. Maybe if one Riddle kills another Riddle, all the Riddles die -- that would explain why Quirrellmort hasn't killed Harrymort. All he says in Parseltongue is that Q may kill H any time Q wishes; there's nothing that says that Q killing H would have consequences bad enough that Q won't.
I don't know if there's any evidence for this, but it is a possibility that explains why Q hasn't killed H and doesn't require lying in Parseltongue. (If there's a second curse, could that be behind the resonance? Do we know what causes the resonance?)
Another possibility that fits is that prophecies are not to be messed with in that manner.
It could indeed be that he isn't actually lying in parseltongue, as you suggest. I think I've come out too strong on that point. But the threat to kill Harry is a bluff. Voldemort has some really compelling reason to not kill Harry.
Maybe when Salazar cursed his line (?!..) there were conditions, since having his descendants not plot against each other should come second to 'not annihilate each other'.
And somewhere here we will hear more about Ravenclaw being sister to Slytherin:)
It is highly improbable that he is lying.
I would guess Harry is more valuable to him alive at the moment than dead (and is incapable of harming him at the moment), and that's all.
I just can't think of anything more valuable to Voldemort than his own continued existence. I assume from this that killing Harry is either not an option or that Voldemort does not believe that killing Harry will save his own life.
That's true, but if someone is no longer a threat and is more valuable to him alive than dead, then why kill him? Using this logic he would kill everyone he meets.
Everyone he meets who is the apparent subject of not one but two prophecies that gravely threaten Voldemort's continued existence. I think that's a little less than everyone.
Without the second part any clone of Voldemort exploiting a bug in magic to negate the first would have a huge advantage over all the others. Given the whimsical nature of magic in this story such a bug is highly likely to exist. Voldemort is smart enough to both realize that and know that at least one clone of his would eventually find it. His only correct move is then having to find the bug first, thus wasting his time and negating the point of the curse in the first place.
I really don't think that he should be allowed to lie in Parseltongue. But fooling himself, that he can do.
Voldemort orders Harry to keep his wand lowered. Why not to drop it?
Is there a reason Voldemort wants a priori incantatem?
Quirrell, chapter 65:
With Dumbledore out of the way, Harry becomes the unrivaled leader of the light side, which could make him quasi-king of magical Britain with some maneuvring. His power only increases as he gets older. Voldemort!Riddle enjoys watching Harry!Riddle do all the work, while he goes on a multi-decade vacation on a nice beach in the Caribbean.
The End.
That's what I thought as well, but giving Harry access to power presumably doesn't help avert the whole tearing the universe apart prophecy thing...which is what makes this so confusing
Hermione is intended to avert that.
This.
You beat me to posting this quote.
Riddle Sr. doesn't care to rule magical Britain, and will use this to rid himself of his Voldemort persona. Eventually he can reap the fruit of whatever magical research Harry!Riddle Jr. does, as well as have interesting challenges with him. I'm highly confident he doesn't want to restart the wizarding war (which he couldn't make challenging for himself no matter how hard he tried).
Pure speculation: similar to cannon, Harry will survive Voldemort killing him by coming back from Limbo (possibly the Riddle Horcrux Network).
Putting Harry into political power was certainly part of the original plan (spelled out by Quirrel in parseltongue, even), although I'm not sure if the rest of the original plan was "make Harry do all the work" (in which case why constantly try to make him less altruistic?) or "possess Harry and enjoy that power".
I'd assume the new plan must revolve more around "stop Harry from ripping apart the stars and ending the world", and indeed Voldemort confirms "all I have done, iss to ssmassh that desstiny at every point of intervention". But you'd think the new plan wouldn't be "1. Make it possible to kill Harry. 2. Leave Harry with his wand and tell him not to interfere with next moves. 3. ???" it would be "1. Make it possible to kill Harry. 2. Kill Harry."
(Random aside: we have someone named "Jossed" coming up with theories about fan fiction? That's marvelous. Or possibly morfinous; I've heard a rational world wouldn't have conveniently-coincidental names.)
Upvoted for random aside.
Nice theory. But are you suggesting that the Death Eaters are going to witness Harry defeat Voldemort, then proceed to not kill Harry, and to go out and spread the word among the general populace?
"So, Lord Jugson, how did you happen to witness this extraordinary event?"
"Oh, I, uh, just happened to be passing by when I saw the Boy-Who-Lived duelling a returned Lord Voldemort. As did Lucius Malfoy and thirty or so of our mutual friends who had all been falsely accused of being Death Eaters last time. Err, excuse me, I think I left the kettle on..."
Do you really want to throw a killing spell when the last person who threw a killing spell died?
It will start with some of the Death Eaters simply apparating away, because they don't want to be part of the mess. The last ones who remain have a choice to offer Harry their allegiance.
Even if the Death Eaters would normally be too stupid to switch to their other lethal hexes (not guaranteed - Lucius, at least, has a respectable measure of intelligence), just now they've been instructed to apply a significant variety of countermeasures if Harry does anything. This greatly increases the probability of at least one of them thinking outside the extremely narrow AK box.
That's still of limited use from a social capital perspective. Harry will have a devil of a time getting the remaining Light champions to align behind him if his first public recruits are Death Eaters. (and if they're not public recruits, then the whole "spread the word" element fails and there's no reason for the public to believe that Voldemort came back and was defeated again)
Can someone with a horcrux network and the ability to create new bodies create new horcruxes without killing pre-existing people?
Transform a grain of sand into a human being, make transformation permanent with Philosopher’s Stone, bring them to life with a defibrillator (which should be sufficient to “create” a muggle, if I understand chapter 111 correctly), kill them to create a horcrux. Sure, from what we know, that should work.
The ethics of creating living humans in order to kill them seconds late are … well, debatable, to put it mildly.
Voldemort refers to sacrificing one person's "life and magic" to preserve another's when describing the horcrux procedure in 108. This suggests that a muggle would not work as a sacrifice.
Don't think that'd work. Horcruces, or at least the 1.0 kind, seem to be related to ghosts: Quirrell mentions redirecting a 'death-pulse' to create the caster's ghost instead of the victim's. We don't have a clear idea of how that works, but since Muggles don't leave ghosts, I think it's reasonable to assume that whatever the spell's doing, it needs a magical victim to do it.
We see Voldemort making a Horcrux out of a Muggle in canon, but I don't think we've seen it here.
In canon he used the murder of his muggle father to make the Gaunt ring (which is inset with the Resurrection Stone) a horcrux, the murder of a muggel tramp to make Slytherin’s locket into a horcrux, and the murder of an Albanian peasant to make Ravenclaw’s diadem a horcrux.
But you’re right, this makes it seem unlikely that a Muggle victim would work. (Damn, these small differences between canon and HPMoR can really confuse me …)
On the other hand, it seems possible to use up a part of one’s magic/life force to create a witch or wizard (cf. Hermione), which could then be killed to create a horcrux. So while these horcruxes aren’t free to make, at least they are not a zero-sum game, either.
I was thinking more along the lines of:
1 - Possess accomplice
2 - Create your body
3 - Inhabit your body
4 - Have your body killed, creating horcrux that binds to the rest of the network
5 - Repeat
6 - Profit
EDIT: I have realized one potential folly (or alternately, brilliance) of such a plan. It might mean that anyone could create their own horcrux from their own death.
Or it might mean a few people would need to die to establish the initial network but then everyone with a network could create networks for others.
Adapting the Horcrux (2.0 in HPMoR) spell to make Amulets of Life Saving was the very first thing I thought of when considering ethical immortality in HPverse.
If the created human is never conscious, but always asleep, I don't see any ethical problems. Creating a sleeping body doesn't really count as creating a sentient human.
It just depends whether their dreams are good or bad.
So, like, is Snape in that crowd of Death Eaters, or what?
I rather doubt it; he might still be “guarding” that corridor.
On the other hand, Lucius Malfoy should be there. His reaction might be interesting, given his previous, rather unusual encounters with Harry …
Oh right, good point. Likewise Nott.
Lucius is the power Voldemort knows not!
Better yet, Nott is the power that Voldemort knows!
You mean, Voldemort will be defeated by the power he knows: Nott?
(Don't vote me up, this has been suggested here before.)
You can't Apparate within the Hogwarts wards.
I was thinking that Harry should have asked who killed Narcissa Malfoy. Though in fairness, I don't have a good way for him to tell Lucius that V did it.
What makes you say that V did it?
He constantly uses Fiendfyre and once burned an inkwell to death. Also, he kills people for fun.
We just saw that he has a use for the Death Eaters. This seems foreseeable, though his disappearance was apparently less so. And we know that he didn't particularly want to rule Britain; also, that he made plans for a failure that should have been impossible, connected to his disappearance (the escape clause in his curse). Narcissa's death ensured that Lucius and Draco would remain Dumbledore's enemies indefinitely. I'm not the only one to point this out.
The evidence given for Dumbledore or Bones would make this a plausible deception on V's part. Now, this involves a claim I should probably re-examine: that Lucius would 'play the game' at a low level in regards to his wife's death. I could see someone disputing this. But we have to take into account general emotional distress, and a distrust of Dumbledore that predated V's appearance. I admit that the bias V described in Chapter 108 probably does not apply (at least not to the character Lucius within the story) and that lowers the probability of my theory somewhat.
ETA: the Doylist reason given to suspect Dumbledore (that it would force Harry to fight him) is now looking more dubious.
That might make things more complicated for Harry because he suddenly has to start to fight a specific person.
From the top of the chapter 1 page:
We'd previously assumed that the primary point of departure was when Lily Evans/Potter used magic to help make her sister Petunia attractive enough to get the attention of Michael Verres, who raised HJPEV in a much better environment and gave him a much better education than canon!HP, which caused HJPEV's increased intelligence. This was even reinforced by Petunia's comment that "...Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to..."
However, it now seems that the reason for Harry's increased intelligence was that he had parts of Voldemort's mind implanted into his own when he was one year-old, presumably years after Lily helped Petunia. While HJPEV's intelligence isn't the only thing in the story, without that link I don't see how Lily's actions were the primary factor in determining HJPEV's potentially apocalyptic course of life.
Thoughts?
Could both the decision to give her the potion and the different Voldie modus operendi be caused by the same older event?
Are there any good guesses out there of what the apocalyptic-seeming prophecies about Harry might mean? The one about tearing apart the stars could be a reference to star-lifting. Could the "end of the world" prophecy just mean that Harry would change the world or something?
As in “the end of the world as we know it”? Maybe.
That’s the trouble with prophecies: You only really understand them in hindsight …
Could Hermoine's crux hold the key to defeating Voldemort? If it was touched to his host body, could she take him on spirit to spirit?
They have the instructions
They have the flesh of his servant, who will willingly give
She has the means to find his foe, and forcibly take its blood
With the bones of an ancestor (Potter, Slytherin heir, or Peverell), unknowingly bequeathed, they will have the final ingredient.
Prediction: Harry will die, and Hermione will resurrect him
(previous discussion)
The blood bit seems a little shaky, but I like this.
Counters to this hypothesis: Harry knows the procedure is safe because of Parseltongue. Hermione does not, and it would be hard for Harry to communicate that information to her if he were dead.
Re: Chapter 112
Blasted cliffhangers... :(
I don't think Hermione is actually asleep anymore. I was expecting her to wake up right away when resurrected, and that didn't happen. Then the death eaters started appearing with loud pops loud enough to count distinctly, and that didn't seem to wake her. And since she's fully repaired there's no need to sleep to recover.
Chapter 73
Chapter 30
We do get
And later:
So as much as I like your theory, I don't buy it.
General Theorem: This series of chapters ought to be named "Tom Riddle and the Illusion of VIctory".
Voldemort has a nigh-absolute escape hatch. He can escape nearly any defeat, any trap, simply by dying. Possibly it's even worse than that, and he can abandon bodies at will.
He also has a strong tendency to discount the intelligence of anyone who is not him.
The order of the pheonix was operating under the theory that he was a body-jumper from the word go.
The traps laid, the strategems in place are predicated on the central principle of allowing Voldemort to continue to think he is winning until it is much to late, and his defeat has become truely inescapable.
And I am pretty sure he's walked into several of these snares already - In cronological order: Things that were likely traps not yet triggered. The DADA job. The corridor - in particular, standing around in Snape's chamber for a full hour. The trip through the mirror, donning the cloak. Picking up the stone. Heck, Hermione's corpse. (Harry should not have succeeded in sneaking that past Dumbles. So maybe he did not?) I'm probably missing several...
Why is Harry still conscious? It makes no sense that LV would not get someone to stun him until he needs him again.
Therefore, LV needs him for something right now.
Prediction: This is the scene where that happes, and the "fraction of a line" is partial transfiguration used as a cutting weapon.
Is it just me, or is Voldemort also using Hermione as a test subject for things he'd like to do to himself but never tried before? (In other words, he learned his lesson after Harry told him he should have tested Horcrux 2.0 on someone else first.)
Some discussion has popped up on /r/hpmor about the an apparent decline in the quality of HPMoR's recent chapters. Now, I personally don't think there's been any drop in terms of quality, but the commenters there make some compelling arguments. In particular, I feel that /u/alexanderwales articulates those arguments nicely:
Any thoughts on this?
Yeah, I thought that too. Makes it a bit harder to maintain illusion and forget that this is all really happening on the author's say-so.
Also I disagree about not being able to go back and improve, if there happens to be room for it. Who gives a damn if it's a serial. There will be new readers in the future.
Fourth wall stuff always annoyed me, not just in recent chapters, all the pointless inserts and references, all the winking at the audience. "Akemi Homura and her lost love", really? For some reason lots of readers seem to love this stuff, however, so I don't know what to say. Except that the best works of literature tend to not do that.
Your last statement is not correct. Many of the works of literature regarded as the best do that very heavily. Dante does that like crazy in the inferno. Joyce does it non stop in Ulyesses. Most of the works of Vladimir Nabokov do it very heavily. As does Pynchon. It may be that you just don't notice it in literature and do notice it here because you are more familiar the the animie canon than the literary canon.
I felt the same way on that one. Having the plot turn on a previously untold super spell to an existing object that turns out to be extra super duper itself is not that satisfying. The fewer rabbits that get pulled out of a hat for the denouement, the better. (I felt that way about canon and the Deathly Hallows too.)
But the story isn't done yet, so maybe in the end this point won't seem so pivotal, or it will turn out to have a different meaning than it seems now. Did Dumbledore really just completely get his ass handed to him? I think a number of people have remarked that he seemed a bit off in character, and canon has him arranging his own death to gain some advantage. It aint over til it's over.
I think some of the negative reaction is just people feeling shell shocked by the apparent complete disaster. Which could actually be an intended and potentially powerful dramatic effect.
I don't think that EY wrote this just for entertainment. I expect an ideological point. It may be MIRI EY showing us the disaster of being at the mercy of the uber powerful alien intelligence, or it may be Mr. Glowey Person giving us the positive vision of what life could be. I've been hoping for the latter, but I'm not sure we're going to get it.
I feel bad for whoever voices QQ in the hpmor podcast. Chapter 108 is going to be a lot of exposition. Much of it should have been cut and/or moved to the narrator.
The creator, Eneasz Brodski, does the narration as well as the voices of Harry and Quirrell.
I don't think that's how Eliezer treats it. The reference to the centaur forecasting that giving Petunia the beauty portion will end the world, that's in the first chapter wasn't there at the start but was added later.
I can appreciate the need to do this, but at the same time it makes me wonder if my memory of previous chapters accurately reflects their actual content. I rely largely on the podcast for my review, so I am only as updated as it is.
If I remember right the podcast didn't contain the reference to the centaur in chapter 1.
That's in there.
Yeah. Another problem is that the last few chapters of HPMOR have been kinda "wobbly", like the last chapters of Ra. Oh we're saved, oh no we're doomed again, etc.
It seems to me that many people expect HPMOR to be better than it actually is. To me, the fic has always felt like it's promising slightly more than it can deliver, though it's still very enjoyable to read. The characters and their changing points of view are wonderfully realized, e.g. Dumbledore is built up as someone who does amazing clever stuff offscreen. But the actual plotlines of the fic are, and always were, a bit weaker than what the characters suggest. The riff on Ender's Game, the improbable escapes in Azkaban, the whole SPHEW thing (seriously?), and now the mirror.
I propose that we enjoy the fic for what it does well, and stop demanding so much in terms of plot. If you want a really good plot, the obvious solution is to make one up yourself :-)
While I agree with the sentiment expressed here, I think that might be easier said than done. After all, it's easy to criticize a dish, much harder to make a better one.
I felt this way some, particularly about Ch. 108 which was a lot of "tell me instead of show me" exposition, but EY has a lot of promised explanation to get out of the way and I kindof gave it a pass on that basis.
It was unsatisfying that the magical details of the interactions between Quirrell and Dumbledore seemed to come out of nowhere, but I think we need to keep something in mind: we are following this story from Harry's viewpoint. You could fill a restricted section of the Hogwarts library and then some with magical things that Harry doesn't know. It might be unsatisfying to the reader to have these two powerful wizards planning around eldritch magics we've never heard of, but that's how the reality of it would be.
The last few have been a rollercoaster (not in quality, but as an experience), and I'm kindof waiting to see how it all goes to make any judgments. Certainly my expectations have been set high by this series, and I do have a little worry that they might be too high. I don't know if I can think of an ending that would satisfy me, but I'm hoping that EY has.
I disagree that the writing has deteriorated.
People complain a lot about the lack of foreshadowing of the mirror and the "Riddle can't kill Riddle" curse. But I don't think the lack of foreshadowing matters, because both of these things are minor details in the overall story line. Let's start with the "Riddle can't kill Riddle" curse. Voldemort wasn't just not killing Harry because of this curse. After all now that the curse is lifted he still isn't killing Harry. The curse is entirely unneeded to explain his earlier before, or his current behavior. Nor was the curse needed to resolve the current plot. Voldemort was in complete control of the situation all along.
So there's no deus ex machina. It's a sudden unexpected development, yes, but one that doesn't really affect the story. It's purpose was to drive home how utterly defeated Harry is. How he is now completely at the mercy of Voldemort, having no clever tricks or last minute saves. Also it gave us a nice cliffhanger. But you can take out the final lines from 111 and the first few lines from 112 and the story continues exactly as it does now.
The same with the mirror scene were Dumbledore gets defeated. Take it out, have Dumbledore never show up,and the story still continues exactly the same as it does now. Dumbledore is a side character. He needed to be got rid of, so neither Harry nor the reader would expect or hope for Dumbledore to show up at the last minute and save the day, but ultimate he's not important to the story. And Voldie getting rid of Dumbledore with relativele ease is entirely expected anyway. He is established as being much stronger.
Anyway, bottomline: I really like the story so far. Elizier is doing a terrific job of driving home just how utterly screwed Harry is. How completely outplayed and outgunned he is.
I'm really looking forward to the resolution. I have no idea what it is going to be, but I fully expect it to be glorious. I do know it won't be Harry casting "Problemsolvius" or someone showing up casting "Savethedayius". I know this because Elizier went to great length to crush that expectation at every possible avenue.
Of course, my disappointment if I am mistaken and the final solution does some completely unexpected deus ex machina, shall be big indeed.
And for the record: My prediction is still that Voldemort shall not be dead by the end of the story. I give that 80%. Up to a few chapters ago my theory was that Voldemort wanted to team up with Harry to permanently get rid of death, but that seems increasingly less likely.
I agree with you about the writing but I have a nearly opposite prediction.
I notice that in all the Harry talking to himself or reflecting quietly chapters he allways thinks something along the lines of "there seems to be almost no limit in what you could accomplish with magic if you really understood it". Several times his mind circles around the becomus godus spell and considers some avenue and decides it wouldn't work for some reason or another. In each case after thinking that his mind goes off on some other tangent.
So my prediction is that Harry has his situation get worse and worse until he can do nothing but think about how to et out of it. And while thinking and being forced not to divert his mind to other matters he will review clues that were allready available to us (had we been paying closer attention) and by reviewing the right facts in the right order he will deduce something about how magic works. That deduction will allow him to cast some absurdly powerful spell that solves his problems.
I remark that
and suggest that if your prediction is correct, what powers his absurdly powerful spell may be the sacrifice of the whole of his life and magic.
(Hmm. The power of a potion in HPMOR is determined by what went into making its ingredients, a curious and probably important discovery that hasn't been applied yet for anything other than winning playfights. What went into making Harry was, among other things, the power and ingenuity -- and in some sense even the life -- of Lord Voldemort. Maaaaybe.)
So, maybe Harry uses partial transfiguration to kill all the Death Eaters. This still does nothing to solve the Voldemort Problem. And so it seems most likely that the Voldemort Problem is not the actual problem of the fic. As others have linked, Voldemort proposed a long time ago that he would duel Harry and "lose," and then Harry is established as the eventual philosopher-king of Britain. Maybe, decades from now, Harry manages to stop Voldemort; but probably not.
The most salient alternative actual problem is the Death Problem. It seems like if Harry manages to solve the Death Problem then the Voldemort Problem may get a lot less important (though whether it does probably depends on exactly how he solves the Death Problem).
There's technically six more hours of story time for a time-turned Dumbledore to show up, before going on to get trapped. He does mention that he's in two places during the mirror scene.
Dumbledore has previously stated that trying to fake situations goes terribly wrong, so there could be some interesting play with that concept and him being trapped by the mirror.
I would interpret "you could take the following things out and it would make no difference" as criticism of the writing, not as praise. If a piece of information adds complexity without adding proportional value, it shouldn't be in there to begin with.
(this is a comment on your critique rather than on the quality of recent HPMOR chapters, which I am still undecided on)
I think it's quite poetic that Hermione is going to be made into a book.
That’s a beautiful way of phrasing it! :)
Plus, this makes chapter 8 even more amusing, in hindsight:
Yes, from now on whenever she meets anyone, she'll be doing it partially from inside a book.
It's a quite strange move to leave Harry standing at the end with his wand in his hand. I think that means Harry is still in a position to do transfiguration which is wordless.
Maybe Voldie wouldn't mind teaching Harry a lesson in killing, the sacrifice of his incompetent followers notwithstanding. What with blood spilling out in liters and all. Fraction of a monomolecular line?
Harry gives some of his life (what does this even mean? Vitalism?) and magic to resurrect Hermione. Suppose he's given x% of his magic. Does this mean that Hermione has x% of Harry's magic, now and forever? For that matter, are the sums of their lifespans equal to Harry's previous natural lifespan? Or does it work like a spark, a small amount allowing Hermione to bootstrap back to full health?
If the second option is right, then patronus 2.0 + philosophers stone allows almost self-replicating wizards and witches. The only bottleneck is the stone takes "minutes" to work which still seems to imply that you could easily produce hundreds of wizard clones per day, against a wizard population of about 15000 in muggle Britain. Clone someone powerful, and world domination should be easy.
I think that since this story is Harry Potter and the Methods of rationality, its going to be Harry who saves the day. But if this wasn't a story...
Harry is in a totally impossible position (baring some experimental transfiguration). The best hope lies with McGonagall. She's been seen going off scrip before and if she realises the magnitude of the threat Volde now poses (perhaps Harry could impress this upon her, and point out that Volde has recently resolved to stop wasting time and just take over the world) she might realise that the only way left to stop Volde is to go totally off-script, and seek help from the Muggles.
While a gun can't hurt a shielded wizard, the shielding only has so much strength. Bring in the Muggle army with overwhelming numbers, heavy weapons, helicopter gunships and so forth. Wizards have access to apperation, dissilusionment etc which might still allow them to win against a pure muggle army, but a combine force of Muggles and Wizards would also have access to anti-apperation jinxes and so forth.
Admittedly, this ends centuries of secrecy. Therefore, the second option she has is to go to the Wizard UN or whatever their equivalent is, and explain that without reinforcements she will be forced to go to the Muggles for help.
HPMOR isn't centrally about having a battle. It's a tale that teaches concepts of rationality. I don't see how the story that you propose would help with that goal.
I'm also not sure how a Muggle army would help against Voldemorts 100+ horcrux protection. He can apparate around and constantly make new horcruxes. There's nothing for a Muggle army to attack.
I think the secrecy is likely backed by a bunch of curses that aren't easily broken.
Well, it might teach a rationality concept that you don't always have to personally be the hero and its ok to ask for help. But as I said, I'm not saying this is how I think the story will end, nor how it should end, just that this would be a possibility if it was real.
This is true, but whatever happens a way has to be found to deal with this problem, and having an army would buy time. Its also possible that once Voldie has fallen, feeding his wand to the dementors would work.
In canon I got the impression that the enforcement was conducted by the ministry of magic, rather than by ancient curses dating back to Merlin. But if the curses do exist, then this would stop my plan working.
How? I don't think it reduces the ways Voldemort can attack individual wizards by a meaningful amount.
If you gather wizards in defensible locations such as Hogwarts, and then defend them with an army, then yes it does.
Voldemort can hide his wand at a safe place. Then he detaches from a body. As a free roaming spirit Voldemort can take over a student inside Hogwarts and transfigure solids into gas.
What's the Muggle army going to do to defend against such an attack? Helicopter gunships don't help at all.
Gas masks?
But its not just a Muggle army, its a Muggle-Wizard alliance. The wizards counter the subtle threats, like this, while the muggles defend against a brute-force assault. Specifically, the Maurauder's map, if it can be recovered, would detect Tom Riddle, and I'd guess there would be other methods.
Also, he has stated that he doesn't want to kill students, he wants to rule them.
Yes, it's questionable that he even would want to attack Hogwarts.
He can just transfigure a nuclear bomb and explode it near Hogwarts. Hogwarts itself might have protections but the army around likely doesn't.
Given Quirrel's rant about Muggles destroying the world with nukes, I doubt he'd escalate the situation by using one, especially when he has so many other options.
The gas doesn’t have to be poisonous. It could be an explosive (or simply oxygen, which returns to its original solid form, while it is in someone’s lungs …)
Also, Voldemort is flexible about not killing people. He doesn’t want to rule over a pile of ashes, but he won’t abandon his plans just because they force him to kill someone. Even Harry abandoned the superhero morality after the first victim …
True enough. In the case that Voldemort decides to use some form of gas weapon, the best solution seems to be a combination of biochem warfare suits, bubble-head charms, and mass 'finite incarnum' to clear the air. This would defend against transfigured gasses in general.
You’re right. The Statute of Secrecy was created in the late 17th century and is enforced by the Ministries of Magic of the different countries.
I am dubious that "seeking help from the Muggles" is as straightforward as you seem to think it is.
Can't you Imperious a few heads of state?
(Though probably not, or someone would have done it, though McGonagall may be aware of the details of the restrictions.)
It is of course only quite resonantly that Muggles have gained enough firepower to be a threat to shielded wizards.
It is mentioned that Grindelwald confunded Neville Chamberlain, and that the Nazis were his "muggle pawns". So I think its probable that "Imperious a few heads of state" has already happened and the result was WWII.
McGonagall would probably want to use a different method that didn't involve unforgivable curses though.
I didn't say it would be easy, but what other option does she have?
"There is no headmaster to be notified if I kill you" was not said in Parseltongue, I think, so MM is presumably keyed into the Hogwarts wards at Headmaster level & may know Harry's gone missing.
UPDATE: Hmm, there may be a different reason that sentence was not said in snakespeech - namely, the "I could kill you" part.
And since todays temp work was impressively mindless, I got rather a lot of thinking done.
Fair warning, this may well just be heading right into epileptic trees turf.
Dumbledore just cast himself from time in order to fulfill the prophecy about Harry Potter.
That line about how Harry will have to find some other dark lord to vanquish? It was not about the far future at all, it was about the next four minutes.
Let me explain: As long as the prophecy is in play, only Harry can defeat the dark lord. And that is not going to work against Voldemort. An 11 year old, no matter how resourceful and clever is just not going to come out on top of that fight. But just as the prophecy could have been about Neville as well as Harry, there is also more than one dark lord it could be about. The story pointed this out earlier.
So the prophecy is no longer in effect. Voldemort can be defeated by anyone with the firepower and a counter for the horcruxes.
And Dumbledore, the order of the pheonix, and everyone else he could bring in on it have crowdsourced a smackdown, which is about to land.
Most of this smackdown is in the form of longterm plots that are about to bear fruit.
From the top: Dumbledore knew who Quirrel and Harry were, from day one. Each and every single piece of information given to Harry was relayed in the expectation that Voldemort would hear it.
Dumble, Flamel, et all made a fake true cloak of invisibility. The point of this being to provide misinformation about what the mark of the deadly hallows looks like. I don't know what the "stone of resurrection" actually is, but I think Voldy will not like what it does, not one tiny bit. At a guess, it is for mapping out the magical "net" and find the darn things?
The people who just apparated in: Not death eaters. They're masked and cloaked minions. That's such a cliche it's actually painful to contemplate.
Voldemorts use of the stone to raise the dead is not the first time it has been used to do that. The rite he intended to use is not original to him, it is an old piece of lore, and it is an old piece of lore Flamel told the order of the phoenix about. This means "Flamel" has been able to raise anyone who still had foes and servants living and known graves of ancestors.
So it isn't new. Not widely used, but not new. Note that this isn't a good rite for defeating death in general, simply because most people dont have the first two at all. But it is a very effective way to ditch an identity for any of her collaborators who are in it for the long haul. Which means a lot of very powerful, supposedly deceased wizards and witches owe her. And he just tried to have her killed. (May even have succeeded. If so, she's probably already back up and wanting her stone back before anything expires.)
That is what the hour's delay in Snapes room was about - it was to take all the deatheaters into custody, and gather people up for a seriously onesided bout. The reason this ends in "liters of blood" is that the plan is to drain Voldemort dry so that they can raise as many of his victims as possible.
Oh, and Dumbledore didn't have unique access to divination, beyond a season pass to the hall of prophecies. That would make the plot unsolvable, because we can't reason a-causally.
How does the fake Cloak hide you from the Mirror?
A couple of problems:
Everything we've seen of Dumbledore shows him to be a man who thinks in stories. I can't see him fulfilling a prophecy by cheating, especially given that he's already lost a friend due to a failed attempt to mess with time. (plus it would raise the question of why he's spent the whole story telling everyone that Voldemort is Harry's fated foe)
For that matter, that is a hard prophecy to make apply to Harry and some new dark lord. What other candidates do we have for the "him" of "born to those who have thrice defied him"?
The only way Voldemort would know that the Stone of Resurrection grants him free-floating ghost powers is by testing it out, since no one has ever been able to use it in that fashion before. We must assume that he's tested it, and whatever else it does, it really does possess that devastatingly powerful function. How and why would Dumbledore and co. fake that?
Assuming a fake Cloak, I suppose Flamel could have programmed the Mirror with contingencies to trigger on "anyone wearing the Fake Cloak of Invisibility", rather than on "anyone reflected in the Mirror" as we originally expected.
Edit: Actually, that might not work for the same reason that putting mayonnaise on a hamster might not work: the fake Cloak isn't inherent to the target, and so the Mirror doesn't care about it.
Crazy thought: Merlin lives backwards, Dumbledore has the Line of Merlin Unbroken, Dumbledore has a weird way of being able to make the future happen for the wrong reasons, Dumbledore just vanished into a place beyond time. Which makes me think Dumbledore might be Merlin's origin.
There was a novel by A&B Strugatsky, Monday starts on Saturday, which has this subplot (vaguely), and deals with an Institute of magic, and the protagonist is a programmer:)) set in 60-s - 70-s and with a pinch of propaganda. Translated into English, though i don't know how good.
Maybe you'd find it amusing, if at least for naivete.
Can somebody make a poll with two options: I have pitied Quirrell and I haven't pitied Quirrell? The dead one, y'know.