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EternalStargazer comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97 - Less Wrong Discussion
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... Interesting, if an incredibly anticlimactic ending.
Is this supposed to be a theoretical future?
An alternate ending: Quirrell taking over Harry as a final host, Quirrell admitting to his true identity: being Monroe more so than Voldemort, and to staging his own death, also tying up a few loose ends.
Probably my last prose contribution, judging by the reception. I did have an hour to kill, so I thought why not contribute the above speculation in a more interesting format.
What did you find so anticlimactic? Maybe the "Boy-Who-Will-Live-Forever" is easy to accidentally skip over, the last line is a reference to a poem and a chapter ending of Sanderson's The Way of Kings.
Speaking as one individual, it's not that I dislike what you've written, or do not find it interesting in its own right.
It's just that I come here, to a discussion and analysis thread, for information-dense texts which present their ideas clearly and concisely, because I find they give me the most value relative to time spent reading. Accordingly, when I see here a long prose text which is written to prioritise quality of narrative over efficiency of communication, I skim it quickly or not at all, and move on to other posts. They will contain a similar amount of value, but take a tiny fraction of the time to read and comprehend.
Also, I speculate that some people will think it inappropriate for you to "showcase" your own writing in a thread meant for discussion of someone else's work, though I realise that's not your intention.
I, for one, liked it. I'm not sure here is where it belongs (though I couldn't say where else it does).
Seems pretty well-written and reasonably plausible; I like being reminded that Voldemort winning is a real possibility, and this seems like a way he might do so.
Maybe on ff.net as a one-shot spinoff?
"Commentfic" is a thing, after all.
It seems weird for Harry to actually be disinterested in "all that signaling stuff". He says he is to Draco in Chapter 24 (in nearly the same words), but this is because he wants Draco to try to plot against him.
Well, Harry probably was on the certain fora on the (early) internet too much and got annoyed at the high signalling-to-((object level) information) ratio. He did. Harry, I mean.
Changed the ending, better now?
I think the anticlimax comes from the fact that Harry has basically no agency in the story at all. We get 4 lines of internal monologue, but really, this is Quirrelmort's story, not Harry's.
This isn't because he wins, so much as it is because his winning suddenly in this manner basically invalidates the entire rest of the story. While this might be an accurate rendition of events according to characterization, it ignores almost every subplot, begs the question of why this didn't happen at any other earlier event in the story, and doesn't really fit Quirrell's wistfulness over Harry's similarity yet difference from himself. Obviously that could all have been a lie, but even assuming everything done recently was to bring Harry to the point of matching Quirrell enough for the spell, this doesn't seem like the cutoff. The loss of Hermione's body shouldn't be the Despair Event Horizon for Harry - he was dedicated to getting to godlike power so he could just will it to happen.
Quirrell's knowledge of Ringmione also puts him in the reader's shoes really, it is something he could not have known, unless we assume a lot of things about the story were false.
I suppose a better term to describe the ending is "unsatisfying and plot ignoring".