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ChrisHallquist comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Another question: can we try to nail down Voldemort's body-management strategy (for lack of a better term)?
I've been assuming that Voldemort possessed Quirrell shortly before the beginning of the Hogwarts school year, and the dark magic he used is only good for about a year before it "uses up" the possessed body in some sense. (Killing it, rendering it an un-possessable vegetable, something like that.)
But after thinking about this hard, I'm not so sure about that. Maybe the degredation in that body's condition is due to being in constant close proximity to Harry Potter, or something. Also, that may not even be Quirrell's body, Quirrell may be long dead and this is just some poor schmuck Voldemort decided he could pass off as Quirrell.
I assume Voldemort has a backup plan, in case his plans for Harry do not come to fruition this year.
Going back in time, what was going on when Voldemort was also, simultaneously, David Munroe? It seems he was planning on using the Munroe persona for many years, so he can't have used the same method he used for the Quirrell-body. What if the Munroe body was his original body, and he was just counting on years of aging to prevent people who knew him as Tom Riddle from recognizing him?
We may safely assume Voldemort used different facial features for Voldemort and Munroe. I don't know if it's been explicitly stated in HPMOR if Voldemort (as Voldemort) was disfigured as he was in canon, but it seems likely. However, I doubt the disfigurement was an unintentional side-effect of dark rituals, as in canon, because Voldemort had no trouble appearing as Munroe. More likely, it was a deliberate choice, to make the villain he set up for himself to defeat as Munroe as evil-looking as possible. One possibility is that this was not a second body, but the same body as the Munroe body, shape-shifted.
I assume what happened on the night of Harry's parents' death went exactly as planned for Voldemort. While Voldemort could have been betting on his ability to resurrect via horcruxes, it's not clear what going there would accomplish. More likely, he either (1) did not die (2) sort of died, but already had a second body ready to go so he wouldn't have to waste time gathering his power to resurrect.
If he had two different bodies for the Voldemort and Munroe identities, it's possible he kept the Munroe body in reserve upon retiring that identity, deliberately disposed of the Voldemort body shortly after or as part of whatever he did to Harry, and then went back to using the Munroe body secretly as he prepared for Stage 2 (to be executed when Harry became old enough to attend Hogwarts.) I wonder if the place he goes when he leaves the Quirrell body is back to the Munroe body.
I thought the clear implication was that Quirrell performed more powerful magics by ritual magic, sacrificing some bit of health with each exertion of power, so that he aged quickly after large exertions.
Yet all his uses of powerful magic either have no visible effect on him whatsoever, or cause him to revert to pretty much the same zombielike form for varying periods of time. It's strongly implied that different dark rituals require entirely different kinds of sacrifice.
I can't remember whether it was after the "war" that stuck people to the roof, or after Bellatrixes rescue, but there was visible aging to Quirrell.
Huh, hadn't thought of that. Which raises the disturbing possibility that he uses body-snatching as a way to cheat on the costs of dark rituals. But what do the rituals do that he's been using do, beyond the fiendfyre?
Can't say what exactly Quirrell did, but he seems to be aging quickly. Search for "bald" and you'll find rapid balding in Quirrelll, where early on he may have been balding, to increasing indications of baldness. After Azkaban, as Quirrell recovers in the infirmary, Harry notes:
Could this be a result of very frequent time-turning?
Not unless Quirrel is using some sort of super-Timeturner. 6 hours per day over an entire school year of ~180 days is still only
(180 * 6) / 24 = 45days. Most people don't age visibly over just 45 days - unless, of course, there were some sort of massive ordeal & trauma.I don't see the increased again being accounted for just by increased hours of living through time turning either.
If the argument is that too frequent time turning has a damaging effect in itself, I can't see them giving out such a potentially health damaging item to children without at least warning of that specific effect. Also, if EY is keeping the same basic timelines for Dumbledore, he is holding up better than average for his chronological age despite his time turning adventures.
Meanwhile, Quirrell explicitly talked about the advantages of ritual magic, and how it allows greater power than otherwise possible. He has greater power. He is aging rapidly. And by many indications, he is traveling host to host over time. If you could do that, the natural thing would be to use up the host and travel to a new one when you use it up, since your supply of bodies is in effect infinite, while it's a finite resource of 1 body for everyone else.
Yeah, I think he takes bodies and burns them out, then moves to new ones.
One idea I like is that his problem lies in having his soul bound to an object a cosmic distance away from him, which makes the body-soul connection increasingly difficult to maintain.
In canon, Quirrell's identity was relevant because he had been the Hogwarts Muggle Studies teacher before being possessed by Voldemort. Since this is not the case in HMOR, Quirinus Quirrell basically is "some poor shmuck" - there is no reason why anybody would wish to falsely assume his identity. Had Voldemort possessed, say, John Smith, he would simply enter Hogwarts as John Smith.
Blaming the Pioneer Plaque for the progressive degredation sounds like it makes sense at first, but the point of the Pioneer Plaque thing is that this Voldemort is supposed to be smarter than canon Voldemort, and a Pioneer Plaque horcrux superior. That theory makes the Pioneer Plaque horcrux inferior. Also I'm pretty sure Voldemort has other horcruxes, including Roger Bacon's diary and quite possibly ones hidden in the other locations Harry suggested when discussing how to get rid of a Dementor.
No data could ever have existed in past for the effect of Horcruxes at interplanetary distances. He may well simply be a victim of unknown unknowns.
Smart people still overlook things. A lightspeed delay problem in horcrux syncing would not have come up ever before, so it could have been easily overlooked even by a very smart person, especially one that is not scientifically oriented. If he had been more scientifically oriented and been otherwise interested in Muggle space programs, this possibility might have occured to him and he could have tested it with the moon missions, if he had come up with a way to detect anticipated problems.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that. Quirrel seems to like the idea of being out among the peaceful pure stars; a strategy which dooms his earthly vessel is not necessarily such an issue. And while he's slowly slipping away, he can fulfill a few last regrets - such as finally becoming Battle Magic Professor at Hogwarts.
He may like being out among the stars, but that's no reason to cut his fun on Earth short unnecessarily. Like, if the Earth were to be destroyed, and all the horcruxes hidden there with it, he'd regard having the Pioneer horcrux left as vastly superior to nonexistence, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't like to continue hanging out on Earth.
Edit: Also, if he's afraid that someone like Harry could accidentally explode the Sun, taking the Pioneer Plaque with it, he has reason to stick around to stop that from happening. Also, if Bacon's diary wasn't a horcrux, how do you account for Voldemort telling Harry it's nearly indestructible?
That isn't necessarily the same level of indestructibility as a horcrux. It could just be a standard charm placed on rare books.
We don't know of any such charms, and why would Voldemort settle for a less degree of protection, when he has so few qualms about killing? My guess is he murdered the owner to make the horcrux.
Canon Voldemort chose his horcruxes for symbolic value. HPMOR!Voldemort presumably chose the plaque for its indestructibility by human hands (though it might have symbolic value too). On the other hand, Bacon's diary has nothing to commend it in terms of material (it is just a book), and Voldemort has no special attachment to Muggle science as a whole - indeed he is inimical to much of it.
I’m not arguing, but how do we know that? IIRC we’ve never seen exactly what was in there, and Harry never got around to reading it. And it doesn’t sound like Quirrell to just make a gift just because it’s an "old rare item”, especially since he doesn’t quite like science and Bacon’s relevance to Harry is not that he had magic, but that he was a (proto-)scientist.
We're told that Bacon's research into magic did not get very far without a wand, and he never had any formal magical training since he refused his letter. It thus seems unlikely that he enchanted his diary in any interesting way.
There's a couple potential advantages to having a horcrux in Harry's possession: Harry's then guarding it, and it might be used to possess Harry later on. Though that's less helpful if, as in canon, Harry is a horcrux. But even then, I'd hardly be shocked to see Voldemort creating an additional horcrux on a whim.
"You can never have enough big white belts, remember that."
He gave it to Harry. It's something Harry would unquestionably want.
Unfortunately, it hasn't come up again, so maybe not.
maybe that's why he hasn't killed harry after hearing the prophecy.
he needs help in finding his horcrux.
which he won't, because space is huge.
Does a Dementor count as a material object? If so, the (now-disproven) fact of their indestructibility would have made them seem to be ideal Horcruxes.
Or, since they are "wounds in the world", are they simply places where space isn't?
Or would they simply "eat" the Horcrux? A dementor is no fun place to be when you have just, like, died (as in "lost a body").
Since they eat souls ... probably not an ideal place for a soul-fragment, yeah.