= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Velorien comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (287)
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So the prophecy is no longer in effect.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?
I don't think Dumbledore thinks it's cheating:
He is the hogwarts headmaster. I figure they defied him in that capacity quite sufficiently. Heck, possibly even in his capacity as head honcho of the Ootp
The theory is that the prophecy was always about him - or at least that it was always a possible read on it, in the same way as Neville could have been the prophecied child. That is why it was spoken in his presence, not in Voldemorts. It isn't cheating, it is settling the open question. And well, he told people it was about Voldemort because letting it be known that you suspect you are a dark lord with prophecies about you is not very politically helpful.
Because it doesn't let him actually possess people? Being permanently intangible and voiceless makes him rather less of a threat. Or the darn thing is a monstrously powerhungry magic sink and his tests have used up dozens and dozens of horcruxes.. if it's a trap, there is a lot of things it could be doing.
And the mirror is easy, it can be programmed to let people go who believe themselves safe from it, regardless of if they are.
Heck, it occurs to me that they could be the true artefacts, just cursed - the point is that Voldemort was told about them quite deliberately, and so his use of them cannot possibly be to his benefit.
The prophecy was only heard by Severus and Minerva.