Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
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 96. The previous thread is at almost 300 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, 23, 24, .
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
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More fridge logic:
The Dark Mark. Everything we know about it is that there are very specific restrictions on how the bearer can conceal or display it, and what they can say about it.
Snape, who is subject to the restrictions about what he can say about it, provided information (consistent with all previous information, all of which he is well aware) that Harry, by describing how to use the restrictions on speech to identify bearers, removed those restrictions. Snape then allegedly described the restrictions, and the description he gave is roughly the stupidest possible one that is consistent with all available data.
Which is more likely, that the Dark Lord created a mark that prevents people from saying what it does unless they are told that they will be asked to say what it does, and in that one case ceases all operation... or a Dark Mark that has the restriction "Provide as little true information as possible about the nature of the Dark Mark.", which would force a response identical to the one received.
How does one perform a Bayesian update where A is "The phenomenon produces evidence B in such a way as to minimize the value of P(B|A)/P(B)"?
Looking at this with my current eyes, I see no reason to anthropomorphize the Dark Lord more than necessary. I think it is reasonable to say that Harry is "born" of the Peverell brothers, who have thrice defied death. Even at this point, death/dementors have marked Harry as an equal (by dealing with him), he has power that they know not, and he has resolved to destroy "all but a remnant" of it.
Ignotus(?) Peverell created the Cloak of Invisibility, was immortal while he wore it, then passed it on to his son. As a consequence, he died and his son became immortal (presumably until he, in turn, passed it on to his child). Why didn't Ignotus simply make another Cloak of Invisibility for his son, or have his son make one for himself? They had the necessary knowledge, and however ardurous, demanding or costly the ritual, one would think it was worth performing just a few times a generation to keep oneself and one's family from dying.
Is it certain that the Cloak confers outright immortality? None of the other Hallows seem to quite match that scope of power either in scale or in utility (and number of applications). Maybe that property is more exaggeration than reality, and the Cloak only protects against unnatural death?
If the Cloak does offer full immortality, you'd certainly expect crafting your Cloak of Immortality to be a coming of age ritual. Maybe there can only be one Cloak for whatever reason, or the materials needed for it are virtually impossible to acquire?
Also, how is the immortality conferred to the owner of the cloak? Does having use of the Cloak confer protection or do you have to be master of the Cloak? Does the Cloak protect you only while you're wearing it? I imagine Ignotus didn't go around wearing the Cloak every second of every day-- it might be hard to convince someone to have children with you that way.
James Potter was surely still considered owner of the Cloak when he was killed, even if he didn't have it in his possession at the time. But maybe he wasn't "master" of the Cloak.
If you have to be master of the Cloak for it to make you immortal, Harry couldn't have saved Hermione with it even if he'd tried. But if, as master, you can extend that property to people you lend it to as you do its invisibility, he might have been able to save her with it assuming "hiding" someone from death works when they're bleeding out.
Or maybe it real was given by Death himself.
Given the fact that there is a Tracey, then that act of conception must have completed. So, either McGonagall caught them at exactly the right moment, or the Davises had just kept on going after they were caught...
No matter how it happened, this scene must have played out hilariously.
Er, it's not like people can't be caught during the second round or after completion. This is also from McGonagall's point of view and could be unreliable. The time she caught them probably wasn't the ONLY time they had sex within the window of time that would have produced Tracey. It could just be a convenient conceit for McGonagall to be thinking it was during the time she caught them that the girl was conceived, since she only knows of one encounter during the appropriate timeframe.
... (a few paragraphs, whose action gives no great reason to think that eye contact was broken) ...
Uh-oh.
Well. Quirrell has already covered for Harry's penetration of the Azkaban wall. He wasn't explicitly informed about how it was originally done but he's somewhat good at filling in the gaps. (Obviously there's room for more confirmatory evidence though, so not a complete lack of uh-oh either.)
Has it been pointed out yet that while Hermione lay dying and Harry was trying to save her, he neglected to cover her in the cloak that hides the wearer from death, and also neglected to notice this fact during the time afterwards when he was getting mad at himself for everything he had screwed up?
If the cloak protects all within it from death, I predict that Harry will simply /turn it inside out/.
Do we actually know that Harry has made the connection between "hides the wearer from death" and "may have life-prolonging effects"? For that matter, does evidence of same exist, beyond the fact that no known owner out of three or so died with it in their possession?
He sat there for hours thinking about what he overlooked. We might simply not have seen all his thoughts.
Prediction: Harry will have to make an unbreakable vow not to use the elixir of life himself in order to get the Philosopher's stone from the Mirror or Erisid
Knowing Harry, an ordinary vow will suffice. Or he gets Dumbledore to retrieve it.
Classic Parfit's Hitchhiker.
Greetings, forum!
So, I confess myself a bit suspicious of whether the last bit really means what it's supposed to do/what the Patronus claims it does. The reason being that in both English and German, the direct object of the respective modern cognates of [ge]win[n]an, "to win" and "gewinnen", indicate the prize, not the foe: The latter is in both cases indicated as an indirect object employing a suitably confrontational preposition.
Like so: In order to win (gain) the princess, the knight must win against (subdue) the dragon.
Being neither a proper scholar of OE nor of linguistics, I obviously can't rule out that the intended/suggested sense is valid even so, but whenever English and German show commonalities of this ilk, the natural assumption is that both preserve something present in their common root, rather than that analogous changes occurred independently in both, surely.
If there are any Scandinavian-speakers around, it'd be good to hear if the corresponding constructions function the same in that branch of the Germanic tree as well.
ETA: Ah, I skipped over the assumption that the verb is indeed meant to be the one which gives us the modern "to win", rather than the one whence we get "to wean" and which would mean something along the lines of "growing accustomed to or familiar with", as another poster suggested. So, I'm retroactively adopting and stating that one now. :)
Puzzle:
Who is ultimately in control of the person who calls himself Quirrell?
If Voldemort is possessing the-person-pretending-to-be-Quirrell using the path Dumbledore & co. are familiar with, or for that matter by drinking unicorn blood, then why isn't Voldy's magic noticeably weaker than before? Quirrell seems like he could at least hold his own against Dumbledore, and possibly defeat him.
If Voldemort took control of the-person-pretending-to-be-Quirrell's body outright using incredibly Dark magic, then why would Quirrell openly suggest that possibility to the DMLE Auror in Taboo Tradeoffs I?
If Voldemort returned to life via the Philosopher's Stone, then how did he get past the 'legendary' and 'fantastic' wards on the forbidden corridor without so much as triggering an alarm?
If Monroe disappeared on purpose in 1975, and has been having random other international adventures since then, and has only just now decided to teach Battle Magic at Hogwarts (thereby ensuring his demise, per the Dark Lord's curse on the position) because his zombie syndrome is worsening and he is worried about living out the year, then what is his purpose in teaching Battle Magic? Is it just for the fun of it? This seems unlikely; he is very serious about his subject and rarely indulges in jokes or in irrelevant scholastic diversions.
Is it because he expects that teaching the students Battle Magic will help them learn to fight back and resist Dark wizards? Then why did he plan so poorly for his big Yuletide speech about resistance and unity as to allow Harry to seriously disrupt it? Could someone as intelligent as Monroe, whose major goal is to sway political opinion, really only give one big political speech and then, at that speech, fail to prevent one (admittedly precocious) student from giving a moderately persuasive opposing speech? Why not, e.g., cast a silent, wandless Silencio charm on Harry? Or simply inform him that he has 30 words in which to state his backup wish, or else it is forfeit? Or pretend to honor the wish that he would teach Defense against the Dark Arts next year? All of these alternatives (plus others) seem obviously better to me than tolerating such blatant interference with his primary goal.
If he had those kinds of powers, he would wield them openly and just take over Britain. Also, it's hard to imagine he wouldn't have been keeping a closer watch on his son, to the point where he would know if his son was involved in a duel and/or sitting around freezing for six to eight hours.
It has mysteriously powerful lore from the ancient past, and there's no firm evidence that it was killed or locked back in the Chamber of Secrets after Voldy broke in. In fact, the person who claims that Voldy's last words to the Monster would have been Avada Kedavra is...Quirrell. Not exactly a trustworthy source if Quirrell is the Monster.
OTOH, this would be ludicrously under-foreshadowed -- canon!Monster was a non-sentient beast, and the only HPMOR foreshadowing for the Monster focused on its being very long lived and able to speak Parseltongue. It's not clear how a rationalist would deduce, from available information, that the Monster was responsible -- we have very little data on what the Monster is like, so it's very hard to strongly match the actions we observe to the actions we expect from the Monster.
Lots of pieces of weak evidence point here; Dumbledore and Quirrell are two of the highest-powered wizards around, and are two of the weirdest wizards around, and have roughly the same power level, so the hypothesis that says they are both caused by the same phenomenon gets a simplicity bonus. Dumbledore is frequently absent without a good explanation; Quirrell is frequently zombie-ish without a good explanation; Quirrell is zombieish more often as Dumbledore starts to get more energetic and activate the Order of the Pheonix; I cannot think of any scenes where both Dumbledore and Quirrell are being very active at exactly the same time. Sometimes Dumbledore expresses skepticism at something Quirrell says, but I cannot think of any examples of them engaging in magical cooperation or confrontation. If they are the same person, then it is convenient that Quirrell made Dumbledore promise not to investigate who Quirrell is.
We know Dumbledore snuck into Harry's room (in his own person) and left messages for Harry warning Harry not to trust Dumbledore; perhaps Dumbledore also turns into Quirrell and warns Harry in Quirrell's body not to trust Dumbledore. It is a little unclear why Dumbledore would want to limit Harry's trust in him, but it could have to do with the idea of heroic responsibility (nihil supernum) or even just standard psychology -- if Quirrell and Dumbledore agree on something, even though Quirrell says not to trust Dumbledore, then Harry is very likely to believe it.
It is hard to imagine Dumbledore murdering Hermione in cold blood, but, as Harry has been musing, you can only say "that doesn't seem like his style" so many times before the style defense becomes extremely questionable. Dumbledore prevents Hermione from receiving a Time-Turner, was suspiciously absent at the time of the troll attack (but showed up immediately after it was complete, with just enough time in between to have obliviated Fred and George, who, conveniently, handed the Marauder's map over to the Headmaster and then forgot all about it).
OTOH, having Hermione attempt to kill Draco and then having the troll kill Hermione on school grounds is terrible for Dumbledore's political agenda -- he winds up losing support from the centrists over the attack on Draco, and losing support from everyone over incompetent security. The school, where he has been Headmaster for decades and where he must keep the Philosopher's Stone, might even be closed. It's hard to understand how putting his entire power base in grave jeopardy could be a deliberate plot on his part, nor is it easily explained in terms of feeling plot-appropriate (it doesn't) or Dumbledore's insanity (a fully general explanation).
It is possible, though unlikely given his increasing zombieness, that "Quirrell" has found a way around Voldemort's curse. The one that comes to mind is that Voldemort cursed the Defense against the Dark Arts position. Quirrell is teaching Battle Magic, not Defense against the Dark Arts, so he may be immune. Similarly, if Quirrell is Voldemort, he may be able to counter his own curse (or have put a check for himself or a loophole on the curse); if Canon!Voldemort had thought of that, he may have been able to successfully steal the Stone.
Yes, Voldemort could probably teach DaDA without suffering from the curse, and a full-strength Voldemort with a Hogwarts Professorship could probably steal the stone.
I'm not sure either of those explains how Voldemort got back to full-strength in the first place, though. Did Voldemort fake the charred hulk of his body? And Harry forgot that apparent charred bodies aren't perfectly reliable evidence of a dead enemy because his books have maxims like "don't believe your enemy is dead until you see the body?" But then what was Voldemort doing between 1975 and 1990? He was winning the war until he tackled Harry; why would he suddenly decide to stop?
I've been leaning away from the idea of Quirrel being Voldemort because there are so many differences between him and canon!Quirrel... They don't appear to be the same person and the details of Quirrel's affliction are different. At the very least, the possession is different, either for a fundamental reason or because HPMOR!Quirrel is more capable of resisting Voldemort.
This leads to a few hypotheses:
1) Quirrel is not possessed at all and suffers from some unrelated affliction, such as the side effects of a dark ritual. (Doesn't discount the possibility of Quirrel actually BEING Voldemort, no need for possession, depending on circumstances of his 'death')
2) Quirrel is possessed by Voldemort, but is able to resist in a way that causes or exacerbates the zombie state 2a) Quirrel is slowly losing against Voldemort (explanation for increasing frequency of zombie state) 2b) Quirrel actually overpowered Voldemort after he was possessed and counter possessed Voldemort, thereby gaining Voldemort's various resources (Voldemort rallying might explain increased frequency of zombie state)
3) The method of possession is somehow different, causing different symptoms.
Keep in mind that the only actual evidence for HPMOR!Quirrel being Voldemort is the proximity-based sense-of-doom and the problems with casting spells on each other. This is actually quite different from what happens in canon, where the issue is with the wands, not their persons. Also, the clash between the Patronus and the Killing Curse didn't cause the Priori thing to happen. So the doom feeling could have a number of different explanations while the spell-casting issue doesn't seem to be the same as that of canon (and even if it were, that's only evidence of Quirrel using Voldemort's wand, not actually of BEING Voldemort... And wasn't the location of Voldemort's wand what Bellatrix was trying to tell Harry during the escape?).
It seems to me that if Voldemort isn't actually the referent of the Prophecy (as speculated by others, it might refer to Death instead) then Voldemort might actually have died. Alternatively, I like the idea of Voldemort inadvertently casting a ritual while murdering Lily-- perhaps Voldemort's body, power, life, or a combination of the above we're sacrifices in addition to the sacrifice of the target's mother. It's hard to speculate what the actual result of that ritual might be aside from the sacrifices, but any of those effects on Voldemort would have similar consequences for Voldemort.
I think it's unlikely that it's all an elaborate decades long hoax by Voldemort since as you say it just doesn't make sense for him to give up the war like that. I would almost say that just as likely to happen might be some crazed wizard with an outsize talent for memory charms coming up with a way to effect a memory charm on a nationwide scale to completely fabricate Voldemort's entire history and existence... Maybe Mad-Eye should take another pass at Gilderoy.
Source of confusion: Harry isn't dead. Why hasn't the Mysterious Enemy (ME) had him killed?
1) Harry isn't a target: he's just in the way of some other objective.
Let's lay that theory aside for the moment, on the grounds that it's not fun. The next most likely is:
2) ME's objective is to make Harry behave in a particular way.
So Harry is intended to go huge and dramatic. But that's a somewhat stupid plan on the part of ME, too prone to random factors derailing it. Except that we've already seen plans like that working, in one particular case: where time-turners are involved, and the person is manipulating themselves.
The easier way for Harry to achieve godhood is to break the restrictions on the time-turners, and go back arbitrarily far. This is fine - but the time-travelling future!Harry has to ensure that current!Harry forms the firm resolution to achieve godhood. So the ME is a time-travelling future!Harry, working to ensure that current!Harry does indeed follow the path to making the future version come into existence.
If we want to go all Ouroboros, we could have future!Harry influencing Harry's upbringing, feeding his "dark side" to ensure he ends up sufficiently intelligent and motivated to carry the plan through...
Prediction: HPMoR will end after 108 chapters.
(Warning: TV Tropes link. Notably, Failed Utopia #4-2 is listed as an example (because 107 clauses in a wish to make people happy are not enough); moreover, Death Note also has 108 chapters. There, now you don't have to click on the link if you don't want to.)
It could happen, though I think it will take a few more chapters than that to wrap everything up.
If you're implying that Eliezer has purposely sought to achieve a certain number of chapters, though, I'm almost certain that's not correct. He's mentioned too often his uncertainty as to whether certain plot points would be resolved in a single chapter or split into two. He's expressed regret at writing ten full chapters of the Self Actualization arc instead of accomplishing its intended purpose in a few paragraphs. He's certainly had a plot outline from the beginning, but it almost certainly wasn't chapter-by-chapter granular.
Isn't the fact that people like Dumbledore don't invest significant amount of time into thinking about ressurection a sign that they really do believe in life after death?
It could also be evidence that they don't like thinking about death. (Which inference you prefer depends on your own level of Quirrellness.)
Dumbledore feels no fear from the Dementor's presence- only fatigue and slight ache. If he didn't like thinking about death, the Dementor ought to have affected him more sharply.
Harry to Dumbledore in Ch. 39:
I think it's pretty clear that Harry doesn't have a good model of Dumbledore's beliefs at this point. Later on he figures out that:
When does he say this?
Chapter 56
Good point! I missed that one.
Dumbledore believes in an afterlife, and unlike in the the Muggle world of non-magic, the idea is significantly harder to dismiss.
I thought this was the point Harry got right. Dumbledore says:
He doesn't talk like he has a model of reality in which he continues to exist forever. If anything, he sounds tired (and like he correctly expects to get more tired of being who he is). Now, in principle he could have a strong expectation of radical change that makes the next life wholly unlike this one, so that his objection to eternity does not apply. But why expect him to expect this? (And if, say, he does not expect most of his memories to carry forward, then in what sense does he expect to survive?)
We might ask transhumanists the same question.
Ah, but a transhumanist who wants to survive has a) precedent (consider the difference between 1700 and 2000, for example), and b) doesn't require a radical change, because by selection bias most transhumanists are going to be the kind of person who think life is fun in the first place.
Then Dumbledore doesn't require a radical change. His exact phrasing is "our next big adventure", not "our next new adventure".
Right, but if he's tired of life, why does he want a next big adventure? At least, that's grandparent's point.
If the invisibility cloak is so good at shielding people from death AND the Potter/Peverell family is focused on defeating death, why didn't James put baby Harry and Lily under the cloak as soon as they knew Harry was a target?
Harry is going about his daily life under cloak w/ broomstick now; surely his parents--who spent more time with Mad Eye than Harry has--would appreciate the need for constant vigilance when Voldemort wants to kill your baby.
The Potters did not know that Voldemort was after their son specifically, only that they were in general danger from the Death Eaters by being opposed to them and also active members in the Order of the Phoenix. At this time, they were hidden by the fidelius charm, which is some pretty serious magics: "As long as the Secret Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window!"
Voldemort only went for their son after Snape told him of Trelawney's prophecy, which was immediately after it was spoken, making very little time for McGonagall to inform Dumbledore and for the OotP to react. (Even supposing they could decipher the prophecy instantly.)
Also, the note from Dumbledore specifically says that James left the cloak in Dumbledore's possession before he died. (Maybe to prevent it from getting into Voldemort's hands.) This explains why the cloak was not available when then Potters needed it the most.
Really late reply, but: the prophecy was made before Harry was born; Voldemort and Dumbledore found out about it at roughly the same time (almost immediately); and the attack came when Harry was fifteen months old. They knew about the prophecy while they were in hiding.
I'll be damned. Good correction!
Since Dumbledore was the strongest magician of them, giving the cloak to Dumbledore to fight more effectively might have been effective.
Of course, Dumbledore doesn't need a cloak to become invisible ... in the books, he requests it so he could study a real deathly hallow, possibly while squeeing.
This explanation assumes that:
1) The Potters didn't have the cloak on them because they trusted in the Fidelius Charm to keep them safe from Voldemort/Death Eaters.
2) The Potters didn't have the cloak on them because they did not trust in the Fidelius Charm to keep it safe from Voldemort/Death Eaters.
So yeah, I don't buy it.
I think you missed my point.
We know the Potters did not have their cloak because Dumbledore said so in his note to Harry.
To defend my parenthesis: earlier in the war, Voldemort taught Dumbledore that a human life is not of infinite worth. A corollary of this is that three humans lives may not be worth more than a deathly hallow. I.e. that the protection adequate for the safeguarding of three humans is not adequate for the protection of a deathly hallow (if the risk is that the deathly hallow falls into the hands of Voldemort).
In Escalation of Conflicts
In Multiple Hypothesis Testing
James must have known that it wouldn't be very long before Voldemort found Lily and Harry even with the Cloak, given Voldemort's legendary powers. Trying to hold him off despite this was still a better idea, as it would at least give Lily and Harry the chance to flee rather than hide.
Agreed, but wouldn't a true cloak of invisibility still be a good thing to have while fleeing? Hiding in a corner of your house would be stupid, since everybody knows that's where you live, but if the Death Eaters aren't quite sure what city you're in, it would be good to be able to walk into the supermarket without anybody recognizing you.
I don't understand, we're talking about the instant Voldemort breaks into their house, right?
On a related note: Why didn't the Death Eaters just blow up the Potter house? Sure, they wouldn't be able to find their actual bodies, but it seems like blowing up the most likely place your prey are hiding is a smart move.
Similarly, why did Voldemort go to Godric's Hollow all by himself? He KNEW the prophesy, so he should have been a bit cautious. Plus, considering the source of his info on the Potters, he should have been a little suspicious about walking into a trap. If he had gone with henchmen, the henchmen could have killed Harry/blown up the house after Voldemort disappeared, thus allowing the Death Eaters to cover up Voldemort's disappearance and at least try to figure things out for 5 minutes before surrendering completely.
Because they would just be setting themselves up for the No-one Could Possibly Have Survived That trope.
... can you do that if it's under a Fidelius?
Note that the Grimmauld Place mansion took up no space in the neighborhood outside when Harry went there. I'd also imagine (purely because Fidelius is supposed to be a slam-dunk in terms of defense/secrecy) that, for example, if you tossed a baseball from one house to the other "across" a Fidelius'd house, the baseball would not vanish at the boundary as it falls into the hidden lawn. So presumably there's a spatial effect going on that would exclude such things from working.
Something curious happened in canon, where the Death Eaters knew enough about #12Grimwald Place to set up a vigil around it, but they couldn't enter until one of the keepers actually showed them in, so Harry et al had to stand at the very edge of the wards and apparate everywhere. What's curious about this is that it means Snape told them enough (or maybe it was Creacher? Hm.) to narrow down its location, but not enough to get in, and this never set off "Snape is hiding something" alarms among the Death Eaters. Which tells me that the naive interpretation where the secret dies with the original keeper was the common interpretation, but the Order of the Phoenix knew that it was much less secure than that and everyone who knew the secret became co-keepers on the original's death. This also begs the question of what happens when all the keepers die (what happened with Godrick's Hollow? The magical Graffiti implies that the Fidelius was broken altogether, not just by Voldemort).
So, according to canon, it's still possible to lay siege to a place under the Fidelius, and the Death Eaters eventually broke in because Yacksly was grabbing Hermione when the trio made a return trip (How would that work with a small animagus, I wonder? Tracing wards probably wouldn't work--the trace on underaged magic apparently wasn't enough to get anyone in to any of the locations under Fidelius in Canon).
Prediction: we shall see Fidelius Charm 2.0.
I think it was actually the constant use of the name Voldemort by Harry and Hermione, as they had not yet heard of the Taboo, that told the Death Eaters there was something worth investigating in the area.
I was under the impression that it just appeared to take up no space. It was there, just your brain couldn't actually take notice of that. People do keep describing it in terms of it being impossible to locate, not that it spawned a pocket dimension or anything.
Using your example, the baseball wouldn't vanish at the boundary, you just wouldn't notice that it was passing a house, and couldn't be able to explain why you can't throw it as far in this spot.
The problem is, there's an easy way to break that. If you toss a ball so that it lands in the yard, it's in a place you can't access: from your point of view the ball has vanished. Then you can break the Fidelius for certain purposes by figuring out the general neighborhood and then tossing conjured balls everywhere, then picking up all the ones you can find (magically) and counting them. If you're missing a ball, it's because you can't find it, so there's a Fidelius or equivalent nearby. Repeat on smaller scales until you've narrowed it down to a particular house, then Fiendfyre.
It may be that Voldemort didn't have the manpower to take out the Potters, the Death Eaters tied up elsewhere.
In Coordination Problems, Part 2
In order for fifty Death Eaters to wreak the havoc that magical Britain is recovering from, they would literally need to be working round-the-clock, the Dark Mark being an example of the extreme discipline and obedience needed to be one. Voldemort may have wanted the Potters taken out ASAP, but he'd already sent everyone out on assignments. Snape wasn't going to do it, and based on what we hear about the Potters, he and Bellatrix were probably the only Death Eaters capable of actually taking them out.
Don't know if this has been suggested before, but:
Possibility: Harry's "Father's rock" is the Resurrection Stone. Giving this one low probability, since it has thus far demonstrated no other magical properties, and just seems like a way to get Harry to grind his Transfiguration and mana stats.
Possibility: Harry's "Father's rock" is the Philosopher's Stone. Giving this one even lower probability.
Possibility: The Philosopher's Stone is actually the Resurrection stone, or a similar magical construct. Middling probability; Dumbledore refers to Flamel insisting "the Stone" be kept at Hogwarts, but never mentions the Philosopher's Stone; it seems quite plausible that all of the "Philosopher's Stone" rumors are in fact obfuscations about the true nature of the object, and that Flamel's wealth has more to do with his alchemical talents and his having had six centuries to accumulate capital than an actual ability to transmute base metals into gold.
Harry dismisses the possibility of the Philosopher's Stone far too readily, especially considering he already knows that magic, at least to some degree, works the way you (or the creator of a spell) believe(s) it will work, AND knows that fruit which seems low-hanging to him is obviously not so to the rest of the magical world. This smells a little bit idiot-ball-ish to me, even if he is correct.
Note that the Philosopher's Stone in MoR is actually supposed to transmute base metals into silver, not gold. I can't help but think that this difference is suggestive; if it was purely the result of a happy death spiral, gold would make more sense.
Wait, could you pull a quote for that? I must have missed it.
I think there used to be something implying that in the exchange with Griphook in chapter 4, but it seems to have been rewritten.
Yes. And Ch 87 says, "gold or silver".
Ho ho. That is interesting.
The real publication attributed to Flamel claims he transmuted silver, then some time later (years, as I recall) transmuted gold. Presumably silver is left out in most discussions of the stone because who would settle for silver when you could have gold?
Dumbledore (who has used Transfiguration in combat and lived) gave Harry his father's rock the day after Quirrell publicly accused Harry of always thinking purely of killing and novel ways to do it. I don't know if D wanted to encourage H in this, or to provide an alternative to some more dangerous action. (Maybe D has considered the possibility that Q has some dark reason for wanting Harry to learn the Killing Curse?) But I feel very sure that he was thinking of the use H did in fact make of it, and we don't need to imagine another purpose.
If anything, Dumbledore would want to keep the Philosopher's Stone more directly under his control, eg hidden under the lampshade in his office.
I think this chapter explained something which has struck me as strange for a long time:
If the killing curse can be stopped by love, how come only Harry ever survived? Its not like Lilly is the only person who ever loved anyone, nor the only person who would sacrifice themselves to save another.
Maybe the Potters possessed a new, experimental deathly hallow, one capable of stopping the killing curse (or, alternativly, an old one whoes purpose has been forgotton). It must have limits on its power, otherwise James and Lilly would have lived, and probably wouldn't have been tested thoroughly, otherwise Lilly wouldn't have seemed to panic so much (unless she was acting to stop Voldemort guessing).
This could be the stone which glowed, and it may or may not require a love/sacrafice to power it.
I thought about this for a while too, more than five whole minutes by the clock, and eventually I came up with a possible explanation.
It's not that Lily sacrificed herself for her child. As you and uncountable other people pointed out, that must have happened innumerable times throughout history, even just among the witches and wizards. It's that she sacrificed herself for her child when she could have lived.
Think of the oddness of the situation. The murderer arrives to kill the child, but not the mother. How often is that the case, historically? Then the murderer offers the mother a chance to live when she gets in his way, which is still stranger. When she rejects the offer to try to save her child, he does not bother to subdue her, but then chooses to kill her, which invalidates basically all of the explanations that I could think of that fit the above two criteria.
It's not that she sacrificed herself for her child--it's that the killer came with the express purpose of killing the child but sparing the mother, and she deliberately threw away that chance for her child. It never would have worked if he had come with the intent to kill her as well.
Which implies that Snape's request was what was needed to give Lily that opening. Which further implies that Snape really did save Wizarding Britain, if accidentally.
I don't believe I've shared the theory here before, I look forward to seeing if there are holes in the story that I have not yet discovered.
Well, really, what evidence is there that Avada Kedavra EVER works on infants? There's only one datapoint here as far as we know. It doesn't particularly stretch the imagination that even the inventor of a Killing Curse might have been repulsed at the idea of the spell being used against infants even if they didn't consciously consider the possibility.
For that matter, considering how important it is for a certain kind of thought to be used for both the AK and the Patronus (or status of the soul), perhaps an infant's innocent outlook on life offers it protection from the curse.
Unless someone were to step up and risk death or infanticide, there's no way to disprove it, but I doubt there would be many volunteers for an experiment like that.
Well, the Killing Curse works on animals, or as Professor Quirrel puts it, "anything with a brain," so that's gotta count as some kind of evidence that AK works on infants. They should possess the same "innocent outlook" an infant has.
Plus, I thought it was part of canon that Death Eaters were known to have Avada Kedavra-ed whole families during the first war on Voldemort. We don't know explicitly of any other attempts to Avada Kedavra infants, but it stretches the bounds of plausibility to think that nobody else has ever tried to Avada Kedavra a baby in the history of the curse. Distraught mothers trying to kill their babies is common enough (too common), and AK would probably seem like an attractive option to such witch mothers. No pain, no struggle, just death. That's not to mention the infanticide that happens during wars and feuds.
I considered the fact that it kills animals and everything with a brain. However, it seems to me that if the target's state of mind can have any effect on the outcome of the spell (and that's a pretty big /if/), then it might well be working under the same principle as the Patronus vs True Patronus-- animal minds don't understand death and therefore don't offer as much protection from death. The obvious linchpin here is 'to what degree do one-and-a-half- year-old infants understand death?' If it's similar to either an animal or an adult human, they wouldn't have any protection.
As for AKing infants during war, I do think it is likely that it's very difficult for normal people to do. The Avada Kedavra curse has much stricter requirements for casting it than other curses capable of killing-- it requires you to want the target dead, but it also requires you to hate the target. I don't think a distressed mother trying to prevent her child from suffering would be able to cast it even if she had cast it before (unless she's an occlumens, I guess). And most infanticides are accidental, not deliberate (though we tend to hear about the deliberate ones because they get publicized more).
And as for soldiers/Death Eaters, there are other curses that can be used to kill people that are probably easier to cast on infants and don't require you to be so conscious of and hateful towards an infant. There's a lot of reasons why I think AK would be virtually impossible for a normal person to cast on an infant, but chief among them is that you have to be aware of the realities of your action when you cast AK. That means you can't dehumanize your target and you can't dissociate yourself from your action. As the mechanics of AK are explained, you pretty much have to be someone like Voldemort to pull it off [edit: against an infant].
Granted, infants might have accidentally been caught by the Curse, since it is said to be indiscriminate once it's been launched. In that case, assuming infants can't be intentionally AKd (a hypothesis that obviously hasn't been tested), it would serve as a test between an innate protection and something built into the spell that only prevents the targeting of infants.
I think you're mistaken there, or working with an extremely loose definition of "hate". Did Voldemort hate the infant Harry when he tried to kill him, even though his knowledge of Harry's threat status was purely intellectual and abstract? Did he hate Lily, whom he appeared to treat with dismissive amusement at most? Or that groundskeeper at the Riddle mansion in canon? Did Moody hate the spider he used to demonstrate AK back in canon?
While we're at it, did Quirrell hate Bahry, at whom he cast AK with the alleged intent to miss?
I trust you see the point. We have far too many cases of AK being cast at random bystanders, perfect strangers etc. to claim that in each case the caster was feeling a personal hatred of the target rather than merely a brief, focused intent that the target die.
IIRC, that was Barty Crouch, Jr. disguised as Moody, not Moody himself. Not a very major point, but my model of Rowling says she'd be more likely to write a generalized hatred for all living things into one of the bad guys than into a good (if rather spooky) one.
In HPMoR, Moody says-- regarding casting AK-- that it's easier to do after the first time, and that might be interpreted as saying that only the first time you cast it do you have to muster up a deep, personal hatred. Afterward, a more generalized hatred seems to work, which would be the case for any of the examples above. He DOES say that you need hatred, though. Again, it seems like a parallel to the Patronus Charm, since that also seems to be easier to cast once you've done it once.
Side note: what characters have been seen to cast both Patronus and AK? Snape does it in canon I think? Does he ever cast his Patronus after he kills Dumbledore?
I realize that doesn't particularly help my argument that AK's casting requirements might prevent its use on infants and it can't be taken as any kind of explanation for how AK is shown to work in canon. But I think you do still need to want the target to be dead, and that might be a higher bar to reach with an infant.
I just wanted to point out that we don't really have a lot of data on how AK works or if it works on infants specifically. So in order to explain what we see as an anomaly (an infant surviving the unsurvivable Killing Curse), we don't necessarily need an explanation like a mother's love protecting the infant or an unknown and mysterious new Deathly Hallow. The AK having a built-in protection against its use against infanticide is no more complicated than any of those explanations. Rather than settling on any of those explanations, I wanted to encourage people to keep thinking, because none of them sound completely right!
Upvoted because this line is music to my ears.
Yes, in book 7 he used his patronus to lure Harry to the lake where he left Gryffindor's sword.
I have believed, ever since Q detailed how rituals work and we saw that Voldie agreed that Harry would be spared if Lily died (because seriously, she thought that would work?), that Voldemort accidentally triggered a powerful Ritual, with Lily as the sacrifice.
Hmm ... is it possible that was deliberate? It doesn't quite seem to fit ... but then, they were pretty desperate.
There are at least three plausible explanations:
Also, Lily was clever: maybe she tried to bluff Q into relaxing his guard by feigning surrender and thus attack him at his weakest. Possibly Q, playing at a higher level, realized this and accepted her offer of "surrender" out of amusement. So either Q saw through Lily's feigned surrender or she realized that Q accepted her genuine surrender only because he thought she was trying to trick him and this triggered her into attacking him.
Oh, it was clearly sarcastic, from the context - but perhaps the ritual didn't care.
Perhaps Harry was wrapped in the invisibility cloak when the AK hit him?
Seems like something Voldemort would've noticed.
If Harry was saved by a Deathly Hallow and not by Lily's sacrifice, then it should have saved James instead, since he was killed first.
One may counter that perhaps the Hallow had range limitations or something, but in any event it would have made more sense for it to be carried by/attuned to James or Lily rather than Harry. Among other things, they can defend themselves, and kill the person who unsuccessfully tried to kill them. Whereas even if Avada Kedavra was blocked by the power of love, all it would have taken was for another of Voldemort's minions to be present and finish Harry off (possibly with a more standard hex).
That said, your criticism of the power of love is one I wholly agree with.
You are underestimating the irrational love that parents have for their children. When a family is in danger, parents constantly work to save their children first, even when doing so is stupid. It's enough that the oxygen masks on planes have explicit instructions for parents to put on their masks first, because they can just put their kids' on next if they are still conscious.
Not that I agree that such a new artifact existed.
Regarding the "he's here... he is the end of the world" prophecy, in view of the recent events, it seems like it can become literally true without it being a bad thing. After all, it does not specify a time frame. So Harry may become immortal and then tear apart the very stars in heaven, some time during a long career.
I'm an idiot. I'm not sure why I didn't see this before, except that it was 2 am when I first read the chapter.
I've read the other posts below, but I think we are missing something specific here.
Spoken in the presence of them. Not by them.
It was spoken to them by a Seer, before they made the Deathly Hallows. Possibly also before they had children.
It's a prophecy and they had two things to do to ensure its completion, create the Hallows, and sire whatever offspring eventually leads to the birth of one Harry James Potter Evans Verres.
Harry's final success over Death will include the Hallows. "...by which Death shall be defeated."
... damn, nobody else got that? Eliezer might want to change the wording, then.
I definitely saw that as a strong possibility. And it seemed pretty clear to me too.
Wild speculation: I wondered before if all prophecies stem from Harry "End of the World" Potter and Its magic, reaching back in time. This is technically evidence for that theory.
Does Harry already know or suspect at this point that Dumbledore has the Elder Wand? Either way, this looks like a piece of foreshadowing worth paying attention to regarding Dumbledore's fate.
(By the way, tags on the opening post are wrong. There should be a tag reading "harry_potter", not two separate tags for the first and last name.)
This is going to be vitally important in the future. Thoughts on what it could be?
Storehouse of lost knowledge from the Peverells is my guess, perhaps their notes or a Slytherin-esque way around the Interdict.
If not, the notes would be enough for Harry to start brainstorming a way around the Interdict.
Maybe certain other Deathly Hallows symbols will now light up in Harry's presence, especially if there is a lost storehouse of some sort with a similar mark.
If it doesn't end up being important, it could just be whatever enchantment is on the Peverell gravestone that makes it recognize someone's anti-Death resolve (possibly only if they're a Peverell descendant) and recite the prophecy, pointed out in the narration so the reader knows where the prophecy was coming from.
Just spelling out that we have a much better idea now what the first lines of the book mean:
The silver likely refers to:
The black robes might be a Dementors cloak. The falling might mean the Dementor moving faster than any broomstick, the robes being left behind.
I always figured that was a knife, flashing. Y'know, because of all the blood.
Interesting. Some of the things that have been described as silver or silvery so far:
All of these seem to have in common that they represent some sort of resistance to death or indifference (usually represented by coldness, like the vacuum of space or Harry's dark side). This has probably already been pointed out a lot, but I predict that whatever is glinting silver in the prologue represents something similar, even if it's something else entirely (e.g. a dagger, the Sword of Gryffindor, etc.)
Edit: also, as someone pointed out earlier, the Philosopher's Stone now turns metals into silver as well as gold (see Hedonic Awareness).
...and Harry Potter. By Draco Malffoy, no less.
I think "likely" may be an overstatement at this juncture. The entire Deathly Hallows insignia hardly seems like "a tiny fragment… a fraction of a line". I suppose it's possible that some ritual results in the glowy part being erased until only a small portion of the wand is left. But the word "glint" sounds like it's a metallic object moving and flashing light briefly, not something glowing with its own light continually for a time. And while it's possible that Harry will be driven to spill liters of blood to resurrect Hermione, that sounds more like a ritual for Little Hangleton than for Godric's Hollow.
It's definitely a candidate, though. It's in a graveyard, which as we all know is a great destination for bloody moonlit rituals in Harry Potter books. There is a silver line involved. Too early for "likely", but worth keeping in mind.
Harry resurrecting his parents?
If so, then:
All, of course, pure wild ass-speculation.
Why? What makes you think that the rational hero wouldn't push the fat man?
From chapter 39:
and recall his anguished inner debate about whether he would, in extremis, allow himself to kill people on the other side in his war against Voldemort. But, for sure, that's not enough evidence to be certain he wouldn't, which is why I added:
Can't be Harry's blood; at age eleven he's certainly got less than 3 litres (if he weighs ~80 pounds), possibly little more than two (can't recall if HJPEV is as skinny as Canon!HP). If you cut off a limb, he might have as much one litre "spill" out, but the rest would just sort of... dribble in spurts.
Is there any stipulation that the blood must be freshly gathered, and not kept preserved as for transfusions?
What is meant by the three sons? Harry, Draco, and someone else? Quirrell perhaps? Using the three Deathly Hallows?
On Reddit, there seems to be a substantial number of users hoping for Harry, Draco and Hermione. Draco makes some degree of sense (ur jnf gur znfgre bs gur Ryqre Jnaq sbe zbfg bs pnaba Qrnguyl Unyybjf), though the Hermione ideas are pretty handwavy (still, the idea of Hermione somehow resurrecting herself and mastering the Resurrection Stone is awesome, if hard to believe possible).
The main objection to Dumbledore as the master of the wand is his devout deathism; Quirrel participating as the master of the stone is much more believable.
I interpreted this to mean that long ago, there were 3 Peverell brothers, each of which created one of the Hallows. Harry is descended from this family. Note that it doesn't say that "Pevererll's sons" will necessarily be the ones to use their devices to defeat Death, only that the devices are theirs.
'Shall be' refers to a change of future state, so it can't be about the way things are now.
Agreed, but this prediction could be older than the Hallows and their creators.
Unlikely given it was "spoken in the presence of the three Peverell brothers".
Ah, I missed this, I think you're correct (upvoting you and maltrhin). I suppose that my interpretation is the one EY is trying to trick unobservant readers such as myself into making.
I do still think there's still some wiggle room for that interpretation though: Harry's whole outburst about Trelawney's "He's coming!" prophecy, where he said it couldn't possibly be about him because he's already arrived, would seem to indicate that EY is willing to use prophecies whose proper interpretation is not-quite-literal.
Or maybe Harry was right, and "he" in the "tear apart the very stars" prophecies refers to death; after all, "he is here!" happened as soon as Hermione died, so death had indeed arrived at Hogwarts.
It occurred long enough afterwards for Quirrell to realize, stop casting Fiendfyre, stop moving, land the broom, and then think for a small time. It wasn't the same instant.
Though not spoken in Prophecy bold. It would be consistent for the brothers to have heard a retelling of a prophecy from before their birth. You could further fit evidence to this theory and claim that the Perevells' hearing of the prophecy caused great misfortune, and Dumbledore's wariness at bringing Harry to the Hall of Prophecy stems from this incident.
It would be a little too much, I think, for the omniscient narrator to "make a game of lying with truths".
I don't think they'll go this route, but the three heirs to Gryffindor and Slytherin (Fred, George, and Harry)?
The reason both Fred and George can be the Heir to Gryffindor is because they're magically the same person, though...
Good point. And speaking to the broader point, I think the chance of those three being the magic three is approximately nil. Slightly more likely than nil are the three current masters of the Deathly Hallows: Harry (Cloak), Dumbledore (Elder Wand), Quirrell (Resurrection Stone, though perhaps not master). Master of the Elder wand is very important in canon, and Master of the Cloak is important in this story.
I'm not sure I follow the second sentence. It doesn't seem responsive to the first.
People don't know how to pretend to care, thus them being terrible at it - see, for example, not even spending five minutes to try to think of a way to bring their friends back to life.
Right, but how would they even know that caring is the thing they're supposed to pretend to do?
Because if you care about someone else (i.e. put a value on protecting and aiding that person), you become a resource worth preserving to that person.
So people pretend to care about others because this might cause others to actually try to help them? It's a plausible theory of human behavior, but seems awfully complicated to describe the mental processes of people we are all but explicitly told are too stupid to consistently implement their preferences.
In other words, there could actually be a reason that people think caring is the right thing to do, but trivial inconveniences and other errors of thinking prevent them from actually doing what they really think is right. This seems like a better description of most folks' mental processes than "doesn't care, and knows it" - which is the implication I get from the response sentence.
I would say the likeliest explanation is that people do care, but only insofar as it enables them to signal that they care. Caring much farther than that is pretty much pointless, from an evolutionary perspective, and probably actively detrimental.
I dunno.
Unless, of course, the machinery for caring is much simpler when it's simply "care" vs "not care". Pretending to care could be a much more complicated neurological adaptation that would be more wasteful than just implementing a nice "Sympathy" subsystem.
I mean, the way humans model each other's behavior is by looking at our own self in other people's scenarios, and then making minor adjustments for accuracy's sake, since they think a little differently. I mean, why would you invent an entire subsystem just for understanding other people? That's insane! YOU HAVE AN ENTIRE BRAIN ALREADY, AND EVERYBODY'S BRAIN IS REALLY DAMN SIMILAR, RIGHT?
Now, once you have this "self modeling and adjustment" system in place, actual caring makes a lot of sense. oh, pretending to care about your family and tribe is useful? here, i'll just slap on an extra module here. we'll call it Sympathy. It kinda works like this: you'v got that model of your brother you use to predict his behavior, right? It's running on the same hardware YOUR mind is, and you care about YOUR mind, right? so we'll just switch that "care" knob to the on position for your bro, alright? There. ha. now he'll respond by viewing you as a valuable resource!
That "Really Intelligent Sociopath Who Accurately Predicts Every Scenario In Which Pretending To Care Is Useful And Rarely Makes Wasteful Mistakes Regarding That Decision" module seems a little bit costly to implement. Honestly, it's just easier to actually freaking care about other people, albeit in a silly, ignorantly applied human way.
(I side with Harry on this one, in case you couldn't tell.)
There has previously been some speculation that the dark lord in Harry's birth prophesy is death rather than Voldemort. I think this interpretation just got a lot stronger.
James and Lilly had defied Voldemort but not death. The new lines back an interpretation that the Peverells thrice defied death with the three deathly hollows and Harry is born to the Peverell line.
This is, in some ways, a more natural interpretation of that clause since James and Lilly were in the Order and were defying Voldemort on a daily basis not just 3 times. The line of the Peverells makes the number three make sense rather than being arbitrary.
A piece of evidence in favour of this idea is that Harry, in spite of Dumbledore's warnings, has tried to interpret the prophecy and arrived at almost exactly the canon interpretation on his first try. With dramatic convention regarding the interpretation of prophecies demanding that Harry's interpretation is completely wrong, this lends credibility to the Dark Lord Death hypothesis.
I don't think there's really reason to think this new prophecy must be evidence of any hypothesis made for the Trelawney prophecy(s). It's tempting to look at all the threes and see that that makes nice things happen to the parts of your brain that are concerned with pattern recognition, but there's no reason they have to even be referring to the same things at all. And depending on how you look at it, the simpler explanation is that they are just two different prophecies about two different things.
The time pressure explanation for prophecies suggests that it's rare for prophecies to be about the same events. By all rights we should be focusing on the fact that there seem to have been a series of prophecies and quasi-prophetic stresses all focused on one person. This is particularly true if 'He is coming' and 'He is here' refers to Harry (or more specifically the development of his mind or spirit), but even if it isn't, it seems Harry is a lightning rod for prophecies. That in itself might be more significant than the prophecies themselves.
I can't believe no one has pointed this out yet. One line differs from the HPMoR prophecy and the canon one:
This has obviously been rewritten to take out any reference to life or death, and instead talking about destruction and existence. Eliezer must have done this because "killing death" doesn't make sense. I would say 75% chance this theory is either true or discussed at some future point in the fanfiction.
I assumed it meant Harry's not going to be able to reach the Pioneer Plaque. (Though I'm not sure what Harry's remnant would be, in the reverse case.)
I had figured that was intended to add "all but a remnant" so Our Hero wouldn't have to let the villain die. A most cunning misdirection, it seems - I think there's a good chance you're right.
Although judging by "he is coming ... he is here", EY doesn't shy away from questionably literal prophecies. (Or that didn't refer to Harry!)
I thought that prophecy sounded differently the second time because it was actually a second prophecy, given that the end of the world is a significant enough event to produce enough time-pressure for multiple prophecies.
You mean "he is coming ... he is here"? Yeah, those are two separate linked prophecies. I meant they did not, on the most obvious interpretation, refer to a literal arrival.
Would this imply that Harry is descended from all three Peverell brothers?
Not really, no. Why would it? In fact, I'm pretty sure only the third brother had any children.
Voldemort and Potter are descended from two different brothers. I'm unsure if the third had any canon children or not, but I'm now imagining Dumbledore being descended from him and the three main characters going on a Death-killing mission.
The third was the only one to have a directly referenced child, he passed on his cloak to it.
Given that the brothers lived 800 years ago and the magical world is quite small that's very probable.
And then he uses a Time-Turner to have three total copies of himself to do the ritual?
My largest problem with the Dark Lord == Death theory is that it doesn't really square with Quirrelmort being another super-rationalist and Eliezer's First Law of Fanfiction (You can't make Frodo a Jedi unless you give Sauron the Death Star). Either Quirrelmort is a henchman or personification of Death, which is unlikely considering he is afraid of dying and the dementor try to frighten him in the Humanism arch. Or Quirrelmort is not the Sauron of this story but will help Harry to defeat the main bad guy Death. This could be a really cool ending, but I doubt that it would fit in the remaining arch.
I don't know, I think turning Sauron into death is comparable to giving Sauron the Death Star (i.e. your 'Quirrelmort is not Sauron' interpretation).
Read Eliezer's short story "The Sword of Good". I half-expect a "The 'good' wizard is only playing the role and really isn't helping make the world be a better place, while the 'evil' wizard is actually the righteous one".
At this point, I think "Quirrel is secretly good, he just acts evil for his own amusement/cynicism" simply isn't layered enough for that to really be what's behind the mask. After all, it's what he shows to Harry.
I've read it but didn't consider the possibility of a twist like that here as well.
Just remembered a serious objection, originally from Tarhish on reddit:
(from here, it's only 4 months old, you still can upvote that)
This argument can be somewhat handwaved away by "James is ascendant of Ignotus Peverell, and prophecy talks about several possible futures", but still.
In canon, the assignment of eligible hearers to prophecies is done by Minesty workers. Specifically, the judgment that "the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord" refers to Harry, and thus that Harry should have access to the prophecy, was made some time after the recording of the prophecy, by a human. On the assumption that things work the same in the rational-verse, the fact that Lily and James could hear the prophecy isn't evidence of anything other than the interpretation of the Minestry worker who handled the case.
Frankly, this reads like a non-answer to me.
I think Dumbles is trying to tell McGonagall that he took the Potters there while letting her keep plausible deniability.
This theory fits some lines better than others. It's not a perfect fit, but it doesn't require Dumbledore to have lied. Even if "born to those who have thrice defied him" refers to the Peverell line and Death rather than to Lily & James and Voldemort, the "born as the 7th month dies" certainly does refer to Harry's birth and Lily had a hand in that. So she's mentioned in the prophesy and would be able to hear it under either interpretation
"Three shall be Peverell's sons and three their devices by which Death shall be defeated."
When I first saw this line, I didn't think it was very important, but could it mean that Harry is actually going to use the three Deathly Hallows to defeat death, i.e. make everyone immortal?
I confess, I hadn't paid that much attention to the possibility, because the canonical Deathly Hallows don't seem well-suited for the purpose. But I suppose there could be some effect where when the Elder Wand is used to cast the Patronus 2.0, you get an Uber Patronus, or maybe it lets you lets you kill a hundred Dementors without depleting your own life force, or something. And I suppose the Resurrection Stone could easily get an upgrade from canon. But how could the Invisibility Cloak be used as part of the process of granting immortality, beyond hiding from Dementors? Could hiding from Dementors become really important at the climax somehow? Doesn't seem like it, if the Elder Wand + Patronus 2.0 takes care of the Dementors, hmmm...
There is the theory that the Invisibility Cloak's power to hide one from Death does not only apply to Dementors, but to death in general. So if you put the cloak over someone who is dying, they would stay alive, at least until the Cloak is removed and death can find them again.
It's just another of those crazy crackpot theories floating around here, but I think it could fill in that gap in your theory.
Well, Harry suggested himself that they practiced on the "little deaths" of Dementors first ... so you're probably on to something ;-)
The legend in canon says exactly that; the Peverell brother who got the Cloak was most successful, and lived a long time because the Cloak allowed him to evade death (until one day he took it off and got screwed).
I think that there's a difference between preventing imminent death, and avoiding death. That is, there's a difference between being in a situation where you "should" die, but you don't, and not getting in such a situation to begin with.
And in the canon story (which may not be canon; it appears in the canon, but that doesn't mean it's canon), the third brother greeted Death "as an old friend", so apparently he had the same attitude that Dumbledore had: dying after a full life is not a tragedy.
Of course he had that opinion, Rowling was writing themes so deathist that even the me of that time--who had yet to even hear of transhumanism--was thrown by it.
Voldemort is defined as evil partially just because of his fear of and avoidance of death--if you notice, she explicitly built it so that most of his atrocities occurred after and because of the steps he took to avoid death.
He took it off and gave it to his son. In canon he meets death intentionally.
I'm surprised Harry didn't try this for Hermione, then. Maybe he wouldn't have expected it to work, but it's still an easy hypothesis to test.
It's a shame you retracted this, because I wanted to +1 it.
I don't actually remember why I retracted it. I tried to un-retract it afterwards, but I don't think that's possible.
Voldemort's name means "full of death". (Maybe "thief of death".) Perhaps Voldemort made himself a personification of Death in order to personally avoid it, seeking for himself alone what the Peverells sought for all?
"Death" isn't the name of any aspect, surely you mean "Thief of Time"? :p /me imagines Volvermort in a red gear-emblazoned Vriska outfit
Sure? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Voldemort :
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Tom_Riddle :
Killing intention?
I've always assumed it meant "flight from death"
It would be slightly interesting to read a fic in which Naming was a mechanism of magic, and Voldemort chose that specific name for very good reasons. Reasons which explained why people feared the name. Maybe he stole the Grim Reaper's power for his very own, somehow becoming Master of Death or Flight from Death or something similar, something involving an actual title with power invested into it. Neat thoughts in this area, easy for the picking. French is kind of a silly language for it, of course.
It's a canon name, so let's not overthink it ...
Rowling certainly didn't.
Canon Tom Riddle didn't either. There are only so much words you can get from letters "TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE", after all.
Google Translate gets me "flight of death" or "wants death". "Flight of death" might refer to AK. More interestingly, "wants death" would make no sense in reference to himself wanting death, but it would make sense in reference to Voldemort wanting the deaths of others. There's some possible support for your interpretation there.
Thing of note:
Harry in chapter 86:
The prophecy can be interpreted in two ways: "Harry fights Voldemort" and "Harry fights Death" (ignoring more exotic ones like "Harry is Dark Lord and Quirrel is the hero").
At this point, both positions are justified. Yes, some lines look strange if we assume "Harry fights Death" point of view, but some lines look strange if we assume "Harry fights Voldemort" point of view: just look at chapter 76. The passage above suggests this is normal.
I find myself in a doubt about which interpretation is correct, and it looks like this is exactly as Eliezer wanted it.
Oddly, I feel like each line in this prophecy could equally well point to Dark Lord as Voldemort OR Dark Lord as Death.
Although P(Dark Lord as Death) should get a complexity penalty since Voldemort should be the default candidate due to canon.
EDIT: The last sentence is wrong. What I should've said is that since Voldemort is the prophecy's referent in canon, and he is called the Dark Lord in both canon and hpmor, I'm still assigning >50% probability to Quirrellmort being the entity referred to in hpmor's prophecy.
This is a misuse of jargon.
Since it seems like these two explanations fit this specific piece of evidence (roughly) equally well, and we know that Quirrelmort is the entity referenced by the prophecy in canon, and that Voldemort is called the Dark Lord in both canon and hpmor, then why wouldn't Dark Lord as Death get a 'complexity penalty'?
If I'm using it wrong, please explain.
You are talking about prior probability. P(Dark Lord is Death|no specific background information) roughly equals to P(Eliezer changes things from canon), which isn't very large; so after updating both with a equally favorable piece of evidence "Death is Dark Lord" is still behind "Voldemort is Dark Lord".
You can assign prior probabilities in various ways, and one of them is giving every hypothesis an appropriate complexity penalty (or you can just judge everything as equally likely, or give everything a simplicity penalty, or penalize every hypothesis according to how many people it affects, or...). Some ways are better than others, but:
1) Why "complexity penalty" should work in fiction, even in a rationalist fiction?
2) Why hypothesis "Voldemort is Dark Lord" is simpler than "Death is Dark Lord" in the sense of program length? One can argue that the former hypothesis points to the specific human from a pool of a 6 billion people (or 100 billion, if you want to consider every human ever lived) while the latter talks about some entity likely to be very basic from the Magic viewpoint.
Hope that clears some of confusion!
Hmm, I suppose you could judge the "complexity" of the plot of a fan fic by how much it deviated from Canon.
It's not very useful measure.
So, there is Lesath Lestrange, an original character. Which is more likely: "Lesath thinks that Harry is his Lord" or "Lesath is a 3-level (or any specific number instead of "3") player who wants to decieve Harry, and also he is H&C which is possible because he knows how to fool anti-obliviation wards"?
Your approach will just say "I don't know what to make of it. We have already departured from the canon and I can't work here" with a sad look on face.
EDIT: I re-read my comment, and it seems to be arrogant and condescending. I didn't intend it to be so, and not sure how I should change it, so I figured I should just apologize beforehand. Your approach to assigning priors is reasonable one, it just lacking some vital parts.
I agree that it's an incomplete measure. As you point out, we would need some measure of the complexity of divergences from Canon, which requires a more general measure.
Another way to put it would be, I don't think it's unreasonable in a fanfic to assign all the details prescribed in Canon a complexity of zero.
This seems reasonable indeed.
(if you are interested, the thing you are pointing at is conditional Kolmogorov complexity)
Because there will still be an infinite (countable) number of finite hypotheses which could be considered and only a finite amount of probability to divide among them, which necessarily implies that in the limit more complicated hypotheses will have individual probability approaching zero. This will be true in the limit even if you define 'complexity' differently than the person who constructed the distribution.
Is "A or B" more "complex" than "A"? It seems to me that it generally takes more bits to say "A or B", but the prior for "A" should be smaller than for "A or B". Is there something in the "assign prior according to complexity" heuristic that accounts for that?
Complexity means it requires additional things to happen even if you had no evidence.
For example, a more complex hypothesis than "Bob is a human" is "Bob is a human who lives at 123 Fake St."
Voldemort being called the dark lord is evidence, and learning about new evidence does not itself make a hypothesis more or less complex. It's just evidence.
You seem to be saying "A is more complex than B means 'if A then B' ", which is not true. The commonly used term for this is "strength". "Bob is human who lives at 123 Fake St." is strictly stronger than "Bob is human".
You're right. Thanks for the correction!
I strongly agree, but I'm still left wondering how to interpret the rest of the prophesy:
Edit: The prophesy still seems to be a good fit for Quirrelmort for this second half, but Death for the first half. I'm left wondering if there is some important relationship between Death and Quirrelmort that may resolve this.
We know that Quirrelmort is afraid of death (as is Harry's dark side), and that Harry is entirely sympathetic to that view. Voldemort/Riddle/Monroe seem to have an aging effect on Quirrel's body. Could it be that Voldemort/Riddle/Monroe have engaged in some sort of arrangement with Death to secure their own immortality? This would make the Quirrelmort character both ally and enemy of Death, and complicate the interpretation of the prophesy as well as Harry's course of action.
How can Death leave a piece of Harry undestroyed? And it 'must' do so. This seems to make more sense the spirit be a comparable thing. (On a silly note, I know exactly 1 fic in which attention was paid to another part of Trelawney's prophecy, equally vague in wording, but it was set in Rowling-verse.)
On the other hand -- again paying close attention to the wording of Eliezer's modification -- it doesn't seem to me that Death, in HPMOR, can reasonably be described as a "spirit".
Great idea, but what of the rest of the prophecy ?
That I can't think how to interpret it... how did Death mark Harry his equal ?
That could be any of love, rationality, or hope, the most common hypothesis of what powers Harry have.
The remnant would be memory then ? If death defeats Harry, Harry is dead, but people will still remember him, probably for a long while, and if Harry defeats death, the memory that death existed will stay forever in everyone. Or the remnant of death would be death of non-sentient beings ?
So Harry doesn't get to bring back Hermione then?
In the canon, the "neither can live while the other survives" didn't really make sense to me. I was willing to buy/pretend that Infant Harry somehow didn't count, and Spirit Voldemort didn't count, but Voldemort spent three years in corporeal form after that.
Dementors symbolise death. Dementors can destroy humans (by their kiss), and Harry can destroy dementors (by True Patronus). That if anything marks him as Death's equal. If not, dementors obeying him can be understood as him being Death's equal.
Yes, I was going to point out that "Make him go away," surely marked him as a monster or source of terror in someone's eyes.
In HPMoR universe there is a ritual for summoning Death. Unless it is an euphemism for casting area-wide avada kedavra, it could mean Death is a person. A super-dementor or something. (In a world with magic, patronuses, dementors, cloaks that can hide their owner from death... why not?)
Words "shall mark him" are future tense. Maybe it didn't happen yet. It could happen after Harry (or someone else) summons Death. Probably after or during the magical FOOM.
(How exactly does killing the Death-person stop people from dying, I have no idea. I guess it is just another kind of magic. Or perhaps Harry will somehow stop people from dying, and the Death-person will try to stop him, e.g. by dispelling his magic.)
But it doesn't even have to be anything super powerful, this ritual. Imagine if it really defeated Death with the capital D - people would be keen on it, wouldn't they? Maybe it is something relatively mundane, like Comed Tea. You perform it and it automatically guides you to the nearest fatal trouble. Ideal for a HPMoR version of a Triwizard Tournament, with the prize being learning the anti-spell. I mean, it certainly seems like it will be an important thing, but that doesn't mean we can privilege the hypothesis that it will be THE way Harry will win.
Ritual for summoning Death is just reference to the spell of Seething Death from one of the Lawrence Watt-Evans books.
Or the Rite of Ashk'Ente from Discworld.
Or the ritual from the beginning of Gaiman's Sandman?