Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94

elharo

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 94. The previous thread has passed 200 comments.

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, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.

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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

Note that there is also no explanation why Avada Kedavra of all things would produce a burned body. That particular bit of description ("burned husk", "burned to a crisp" etc.) has been repeated often enough to be strong foreshadowing, and burning is a great way to make a corpse unidentifiable, especially if dental records for the supposed victim are unavailable and/or no-one has ever heard of such a form of forensics.

Note also that Harry has no memory of Voldemort actually casting the Killing Curse on him. His memory apparently cuts out right after his mother's death.

why Avada Kedavra of all things would produce a burned body.

How about Fiendfyre? Does that leave anything behind? I mean, it cut through Hogwarts.

Hey, when was Draco’s mother killed? He should be about the same age as Harry, and yet Harry’s Mum died when he was like a year old, and the war pretty much ended right then. So Narcissa’s burning could not have been long before (well, I guess it could be a few months; but that still leaves Draco a baby; if he were that much older than Harry to have had time to know her, he’d be a second year now).