It also allows him to master the preparatory Occlumency exercises with extreme speed and ease. Which makes sense since the heart of Occlumency is assuming whatever personality you want at a given time, a gift Voldemort claims to have in abundance.
I just thought of something, and I'm not sure what the connection is to this but I feel like there is an underlying connection. Is EY emphasizing Snape's history for a pragmatic plot type reason? Maybe there's a secret reveal coming up, about Lily or something? This is purely intuitive so it's probably crap. But sometimes my intuition is smarter than my active thoughts.
My guess is that he's filling in Snape's character background to give him the full complexity he deserves as one of the major players. Although Dumbledore doesn't seem to think twice about him, Harry treats him as an obstacle, and Quirrell dismisses him as an opponent, it's been made clear that Snape is running his own multi-stage plans (such as his manipulation of Hermione), which interact and interfere with everyone else's. Perhaps his role is due to expand.
Harry is totally schizophrenic in MOR though. He's got all of the Founders in his head.
The dark side isn't even a personality, as such, which implies strongly that it's not a soul.
I think your interpretation of the Snape thing is probably accurate.
The next discussion thread is here.
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 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
There is now 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.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: