A problem with the "He" who stood in the circle theory is that Quirrel can't have been confident in advance that Dumbledore would make that mistake. Even if Dumbledore didn't think "I'd better use gender-neutral language in case Quirrel is really female," he could easily have said something like "The person in this circle is the defense professor."
Another issue I don't think I've seen anyone brought up: if the troll was identified as the Defense Professor, and Quirrel is then just an ordinary adult wizard as far as the Hogwarts wards are concerned, how was it possible for him to frame Hermione for Draco? Wouldn't the wards have screamed at the Memory Charm? It's pretty clearly implied that it had to be a professor, in some way, who cast the key spells:
..."And how would Lucius even Memory-Charm Hermione in the first place, without setting off the wards? He's not a Professor - oh, right, you think
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 98. The previous thread is at nearly 500 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, 25, 26.
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: