I'm doing a reread.
"In any case, when I was thirteen years old, I read through the historical sections of the Hogwarts library, scrutinizing the lives and fates of past Dark Lords, and I made a list of all the mistakes that I would never make when I was a Dark Lord."
Harry giggled before he could stop himself.
"Yes, Mr. Potter, very amusing. So, Mr. Potter, can you guess what was the very first item on that list?"
Great. "Um... never use a complicated way of dealing with an enemy when you can just Abracadabra them?"
"The term, Mr. Potter, is Avada Kedavra," Professor Quirrell's voice sounded a bit sharp for some reason, "and no, that was not on the list I made at age thirteen. Would you care to guess again?"
Why does Quirrell react this way? I see two major possibilities.
He is picky about using the proper term. That's the surface appearance, and it jives well with the model of Professor Quirrell as a formerly evil teacher. But, we have to realize that ambiguous data might count as non ambiguous data when dealing with Professor Quirrell, because his skills at deception are so great. I think it's convincing that he might respond sharply to Harry misusing a term like that, but we don't see him do anything else in the book like that. And, if he was primarily focused on teaching, shouldn't he have been happier that Harry clearly understood the lesson he was trying to hammer into them, rather than focusing on a technical mistake? I think it's pretty convincing, but not an accurate explanation.
He took it personally. Specifically, this might have happened because he had the opportunity to simply avada kedavra Harry, but then he didn't. I don't believe that it's ever been confirmed in HPMOR that Harry actually got hit by the killing curse. Using more meta clues, Harry's alternative to avada kedavra'ing your enemies is a suspiciously specific sort of scenario, but yet also a very obvious lesson. Voldemort would have been upset that Harry so easily recognized what his mistake was. I also think Harry's lighthearted tone would do a lot to provoke Voldemort. The combination of these things might have made Quirrell's mask slip.
I guess I don't really think there's any strong evidence for two, but it's just interesting to me how reading the book two times before this allows me to reinterpret Quirrell's behavior. I enjoy this.
I think #1 is much more plausible. Notice that Draco did not misuse any terms, and addressed Quirrel twice as 'Professor'; saying 'Abracadabra' is flippant and a tad contemptuous of the greatest gem of Quirrel's chosen field.
The personal version seems to either trade on knowledge of canon (not the first time, though! and such references can be spotted on the first read-through) or presume a version of Voldemort's fall we currently have no evidence for, although this is certainly a controversial topic.
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 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
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, 15.
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: