Are you sure that's right chronologically? Just because in the UK we use dd/mm/yy and we say "Fourteenth of March, twenty-fifteen".
Japan apparently uses yy/mm/dd which makes even more sense, but I have no idea how they pronounce their dates. Point being, I'm not sure which order things actually evolved in.
"Drop dead, Potter."
OK, that one got me to chuckle out loud.
Hm. So far, while I've been enjoying these epilogue chapters, it feels like there's not ENOUGH of them. I'm not sure the story can be given a satisfying conclusion with just one more chapter.
...Of course, in theory the chapter can be 100,000 words long, but...
I do not feel that the following dialog:
"How did you destroy all but a remnant of the Dark Lord?"
Harry hesitated. "I Obliviated most of his memories and... sealed him, I guess is how wizards say it. Even if the seal breaks, he won't come back as himself."
Severus frowned briefly and then shrugged. "I suppose that is acceptable."
really fit with what Snape told sooner in the story:
"No," Severus said flatly. "The prophecy is not yet fulfilled. I would know if it were."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Yes, Potter. If the prophecy had already come true, I would understand it! I heard Trelawney's words, I remember Trelawney's voice, and if I knew the events that matched the prophecy, I would recognize them. What has already happened... does not fit." The Potions Master spoke with certainty.
I was expecting a more interesting reaction than just a shrug from Snape.
The Dark Lord spoke the words "Hyakuju montauk" without pausing in his stride, accompanied by a jab of his wand; and Severus staggered before he lifelessly drew himself up beside the door once more.
"What -" Harry said, as he followed. "What did you -"
"Just fulfilling my obligation to my faithful servant. It shall not kill him, as I promised you." The Dark Lord laughed again.
I don't understand either of these. Though this in the mix and I still don't understand.
Severus shook his head. "Too many students would remember me as the evil Potions Master. No, Minerva. I will go someplace new, and take a new name, and find someone new to love."
I get the character arc "Snape's obsession was used by Dumbledore and Voldemort, but he has finally gotten over Lily and can move on" -- it's just these specifics I don't understand.
Eh. I think Snape already understood that Dumbledore was manipulating him. From the interlude with the confessor:
“It's strange," Snape said quietly. "I have had two mentors, over the course of my days. Both were extraordinarily perceptive, and neither one ever told me the things I wasn't seeing. It's clear enough why the first said nothing, but the second..." Snape's face tightened. "I suppose I would have to be naive, to ask why he stayed silent."
This sentence just clunked for me:
There was so much to do, so many things, that even Headmistress McGonagall didn't seem to know where to start, and certainly not Harry.
"and certainly not with Harry", with Harry as the object of McGonagall's starting, or "and neither did Harry", as in "Harry didn't know where to start either"?
Someone else may have already come up with this interpretation, but I just wanted to get a prediction posted before the last chapter comes out.
Voldemort most likely had turned the diary of Roger Bacon into one of his horcruxes. The book was described as unusually durable, and it was given to Harry at a point in the story before Voldemort acquired the Resurrection Stone, so horcruxes would have worked only by touch. Needless to say, it was to his advantage to have one in Harry's possession, to be able to potentially take over the body of Tom Riddle v2.0 if the whole Quirrell thing didn't work out.
And now the diary is (supposedly) Hermione's horcrux too. Oh, dear. Since Voldemort wrote her into Harry's Vow as a required source of advice and restraint, he would have wanted to retain the option to influence that advice and force Harry away from dangerous decisions. So mixing horcruxes together in the same object might have been intended to give him the option to take over Hermione's body with access to her memories, if his plans failed to the extent of Harry surviving the night of the final exam.
With his personality now Obliviated, the mixing of souls might work in the other direction. My prediction for the final chapter is that Hermione has retained her personality but now has access, at some level, to Voldemort's accumulated magical lore, and possibly to things like passwords to his hidden caches of artifacts (since they'll eventually need to get the Resurrection Stone back to finally get the Hallows together).
This would be a neat last twist, opening a lot of possibilities for Harry and Hermione to kick off a collaboration on solving the problems of the universe in subsequent years. And the parallelism is elegant: the Girl-Who-Revived acquires a fragment of the vanquished Voldemort just as the Boy-Who-Lived originally did. We'll see if she gets a dark side too. ;-)
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 121.
Plans for next chapter release:
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.)