Comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:59:18 GMT

Voldemort tried to kill Harry

One person's modus ponens is another person's modul tollens. Reading this chapter made me update that Voldemort actually never tried to kill Harry.

He came for Harry (but he never said he came to kill him), probably motivated by the prophecy.

He killed everyone around (but he gave Lily a chance to leave).

He did something that resulted with scar on Harry's head.

Then someone (who exactly, if the event had no survivor besides a baby?) spread a story about how reflected death spell killed Voldemort.

And since then, nobody has ever seen Voldemort again.

From more recent history (Quirrel's description and self-description -- although he could have lied to us/Harry) we can reason that:

Quirrel enjoys company of smart people.

Quirrel enjoys role-playing; but he recently prefers role-playing a good guy, because villains naturally attract insane people.

Quirrel does not hesitate to kill people who cross his path, but that is instrumental, not a terminal value.

Quirrel is very, very smart.

So I guess that Voldemort, after hearing the prophecy, did not panic and try to kill Harry (unlike the Canon!Voldemort). Assuming that Voldemort/Quirrel is extremely smart and he knows how the prophecies work, he could expect that trying to kill Harry -- without "marking him as his equal" first, whatever that means -- would somehow magically fail, and that is an unnecessary risk.

Perhaps the original plan was to simply take Harry and raise him as a Sith apprentice; to make him Voldemort's equal in skill, but also charm him into a smarter version of Bellatrix Black. (Converting is better than killing, because you gain an ally; like Harry later tried with Draco.) But during the action he realized that people expect him to kill Harry, and that this could be a convenient way to get rid of the Voldemort persona. So he just -- made Harry his horcrux? performed on him a brain surgery to raise his IQ? -- and disappeared, pretending to be dead; only to return to Harry later as Quirrel.

Discuss