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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 108
New long chapter! Since I expect its discussion to generate more than 160 comments (which would push the previous thread over the 500 comment limit) before the next chapter is posted, here is a new thread.
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 108 (and chapter 109, once it comes out on Monday).
EDIT: There have now been two separate calls for having one thread per chapter, along with a poll in this thread. If the poll in this thread indicates a majority preference for one thread per chapter by Monday, I will edit this post to make it for chapter 108 only. In that case a new thread for chapter 109 should be posted by whoever gets a chance and wants to after the chapter is released.
EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.
There is 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.)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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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Comments (352)
So who was Alexander Chernyshov? Wikipedia says:
This doesn't seem particularly relevant, and also he died while Tom Riddle was a young boy. But it's a common name (as Google tells me). Did anyone catch the reference?
I'd just assumed it was a cameo.
Confirmed.
... Huh.
The power that the Dark Lord knows not... might end up being love after all.
Crazy theory: Voldy resurrects Hermione to keep his promise, then kills Harry. Hermione then drops Voldy somehow, and resurrects Harry using the same means that were used on her.
Additional crazy theory: The method for doing both will be the Philosopher's Stone. She will transmute Voldemort into something mortal-but-inert - a bristlecone pine, perhaps.
Fine tuning: She will transmute Voldermort's spirit into something inert (since he is free to leave his body otherwise).
What is HPMOR's stance on souls?
Still unknown. Harry believes they don't exist, Quirrell may or may not, and Hermione's death released a big explosion of Hermione-ness.
Her death released a big explosion of her magic. If Quirrel revives her body, she likely won't be a witch any longer.
Except that magical power has already been established to be genetic. The Potterverse doesn't have Wheel of Time-style shields or cutting people off from their magic, to the best of my knowledge.
Ugh, stilling. What a horrible idea that was.
You mean from the author/story/reader perspective, or in-universe?
Between horcruxes, possession, ghosts, and people turning into cats but still thinking like humans, I think souls or at least some form of mind/body dualism for magical people is strongly implied.
ETA: see details in nested comments.
Not really. All of this can be explained by Atlantis - if you already have some mind-reading system to power your spellcasting system (since the actual gestures and whatnot of a spell aren't nearly complex enough to code their results, they have to be executing some protocol stored elsewhere anyway), it's not much of a stretch to say that it has stores of people's mindstates too.
Anything and everything can be explained by Atlantis, but for purposes of experimental predictions, there do appear to be souls.
Not quite. Souls - as in "you are not your brain" - run into all the usual problems with brain damage and whatnot. Mind backups make much more sense, because without a secondary "restore from backup" system nothing particularly interesting will happen.
Well, Harry hasn't actually tested the idea that wizards can suffer brain damage the same way as Muggles. He just assumed they do. But it's a reasonable assumption.
What happens if you progressively damage Quirrel's brain? At some point Voldemort will either decide or be forced to go and possess another body or Horcrux. That thing-which-goes-off is for all intents and purposes a soul.
A backup isn't a good description, because Voldemort is always aware - there's no point at which he exists only as a backup and may or may not be restored. Also, a backup implies restoring multiple instances, and creating multiple backups; the True Horcrux doesn't seem to do that.
Yes, but that's a new spell - that's the equivalent of a live-sync system, where you make your "backups" so often that they're all basically the same anyway. That's not the default. By that argument, only Quirrell has a soul.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10023949/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Philosopher-s-Zombie
Just for fun.
The Longbottoms were tortured into "insanity", but their canon appearance in St. Mungo's looks far more like brain damage from Cruciatus. And lots of Obliviates seem to cause brain damage as well. Breaking a FMC on Bertha Jorkins in book 4 ended up killing her.
I suspect that Quirrel's spell uploaded his brain into an invisible magical computer he calls "spirit". The biological brain of the body he is possessing is either doing nothing or is limited to low-level unconscious functions.
Agreed, and I want to expand that a little:
Muggle science determined that muggle minds are contained in muggle brains, and Harry has been reluctant to let go of this idea even though there are observations against it and he has seen that magic can freely violate very solid muggle conclusions like conservation of matter.
Even if muggle brain damage seems to damage the mind, it could be that it damages the mind's interface to the body. Here in the real world, this dualism adds additional complications and doesn't help explain any evidence. In the HPMOR universe there is a great deal that would be explained by mind/body dualism.
Animagus transfigurations almost require it. Skeeter's mind is not contained in the physical arrangement of a beetle's brain. Therefore, her mind isn't just a physical brain in this world. Her brain could be held in some extradimensional pocket and interfacing to the beetle. Her mind could be running on a magical, rather than physical substrate (always or just during transformation?). She could have a soul. (And some versions of "mind on a magical substrate" would also qualify as "souls".)
As DanArmak says, Quirrel didn't just have backups of himself in Horcruxes, he was able to think and perceive while this was his only form of existence. Those copies were running, thinking, planning. They were also connected to each other, and still are. Quirrel was not revived from the Pioneer horcrux, but he has the memories of the Pioneer horcruxes experiences. The pioneer plaque or a pebble or whatever is not a physical substrate that a mind can run on by any natural-to-muggle-science means. Again we have dualism. Brain in another dimension, magical substrate, soul. And brain in another dimension gets pretty strained here, I think.
Here Quirrel's mind is totally disembodied through the help of the Resurrection Stone.
Ch. 1:
I observe a world where minds are not just physical arrangements of brains. The "we are just our brains" hypothesis is being falsified all over the place in HPMOR.
For me there is no question about whether disembodied minds exist in this universe. My questions are whether minds are disembodied all the time or just when magic requires it. Whether muggles also have disembodied minds that are just much more inaccessible to observation. "Minds are always disembodied" seems more elegant by far than magic translating your physical brain into another equivalent form and creating an interface between that and your body only during animagus transformations and other such events, translating that back when returning to human form, and your mind just being a brain at all other times. That would be way more complicated than dualism.
I'm lost---what does Atlantis mean here?
It is implied in previous chapters as the 'source' of magic, having invented it, and all methods having pretty much decayed since its glory days. Also implied to have messed with time in serious ways.
Is he? I don't recall any such line in this chapter. I mean, it's probably something he's taken precautions against, but it's hard to be sure(unless I missed something).
From chapter 107:
Good call - I only double-checked 108. That makes my theory far less likely.
The stone makes transfigureation perminant. It doesn't mean you can transfigure through shields.
Or through different means. You might be able to brew a Harry resurrection potion with forcibly drawn Thestral blood, Hermione's body, and unknowingly bequeathed bones of a Potter, Slytherin heir, or Peverell.
I wonder if the final room is not visible on the Marauder's Map because it's warded or because the room you enter is determined by whether/how the potion is flawed.
As a veteran Potion's professor, Snape would be able to predict very accurately the way a first year would screw up such a fiddly task. Screw it up in the right way, see an innocuous final room with a little "Well done, don't spoil it!" from the Headmaster. Execute it perfectly and trigger... what exactly?
There's an old metaphor I read somewhere, that compared an unmeasured quantum state to the image in an unobserved mirror. The Map isn't sure who is in the Mirror room; maybe it's still indetermined.
Maybe indetermined because the room is (so far) causally disconnected from Hogwarts, there is still one hour of time turning left and a stable time loop has not formed yet, because it is not clear who and how is going to use the time turner to get into the room before now.
Alternatively, the true Cloak of invisibility hides you from the Death itself, never mind a mere map...
Ch. 79 After the aurors come get Hermione for the attempted murder of Draco, Harry is in the Headmaster's office:
After a lengthy discussion of the case, Harry leaves:
But there is no reason to believe he left Hogwarts. Dumbledore then retrieves the Weasley twins from Divination class and gets their map:
I'd previously assumed that no information came of this, because the Defense Professor was being detained at the DMLE at the time, but Dumbledore almost certainly saw the map report Harry as Tom Riddle.
What did he conclude from this, I wonder?
That Harry is a horcrux, and then ...?
The solution seems obvious (albeit hard and dangerous): make the students smarter so they are no longer idiots.
A man with the tendency to kill people for idiocy should not take a teaching position if he doesn't want to risk exposing himself on his first day.
He managed to last a year.
Skeeter?
He didn't kill her for idiocy, and she wasn't a student.
Her disguise wasn't very good, actually. More cleverness might have saved her.
From chapter 25:
She was set up, given a chance to realize her stupidity in attacking Quirrell and make amends, failed despite Quirrell's superiority (demonstrated then and there), and he began to enjoy thinking about killing her for her idiocy.
You're right.
Why go through all that trouble when you can also just, you know, not stay at Hogwarts?
But people elsewhere aren't much smarter. In fact, they are the same people from Hogwarts, just a few years older.
Once he's achieved immortality, he can do both at once. By killing idiots, he'll improve the gene pool, and eventually the children will stop being idiots. Then he can become a teacher.
Possible stupid question:If Quirrell was so frustrated with with the idiocy of the students, then why did he kill Hermione (the next smartest student) in an unnecessary subplot (Quirrell admitted it did not matter in the long run whether the plan succeeded or not) and cause the next smartest one after that to be withdrawn from the school?
That's not one of the plans listed as unimportant. The relevant part was removing or weakening her influence on Harry, and this was achieved by the Troll plan when the original plan failed.
Another solution would have been for him to have children, since intelligence is highly heritable. Unfortunately, now that his original body is dead, this may not work.
META: I'd like to suggest having a separate thread for each publication. These attract far more interest than any other threads, and after the first 24 hours the top comments are set and there's little new discussion.
There aren't very many threads posted in discussion these days, so it's not like there is other good content that will be crowded out by one new thread every 1-3 days.
You can change the comment sort to "new" instead of "top", below the tags at the bottom of the original post.
Voldemort making random rocks into horcruxs? One day someone steps on the wrong rock and turns into LORD VOLDEMORT! I hate it when that happens.
It's worse than that. What's something you're likely to have on hand at all times, and worse, are then likely to hand off to someone other person, who will hand it off to another, and so on and so forth?
Even if wizarding currency is protected against such shenanigans, some unknown number of UK sterling could have fractions of Voldemort's soul in them.
I was thinking wedding rings. One of the few things that rarely leaves a person. Or some wizarding-equivalent of a heart valve, something kept inside the body.
Clever idea, but currency doesn't stay long in circulation. Coins longer than bills -- the oldest bill in my wallet is from 2006, while I found a quarter from 1976 in my pocket. And if horcruces are as hard to destroy here as they are in canon, I imagine even Muggles would find it curious if a 50p coin were found intact after it should have been melted down.
I suppose it'd work if you're planning to keep supplies up on an ongoing basis and didn't think much of Muggle investigative abilities or their ability to interface with wizarding authorities, though -- and the latter does seem minimal in this universe.
How about the doorknob on the men's room in St. Paul's Cathedral? Or some other building you wouldn't expect to go away for a while. Or, heh, the Blarney Stone, if you can find enough time alone with it.
Also, I read the original Horcrux restriction, not as "someone has to be close at the time," but as "anyone who has ever touched the Horcrux." Otherwise the original would be even more useless, since it'd be very likely to discharge while you were still alive.
Both are withdrawn from circulation as they decay, and if they don't decay they'll stick around for a while. As it gets old enough, it'll get picked up by a collector of some sort, who will keep it better-preserved and think nothing of its long lifespan. (This does, however, limit the amount of possessing it can do)
Better idea: Door handles.
Yeah the new version stills work by imprinting his brain state on to a victim. He just link the ghost and victims together so that they stay updated. Hence he can see space from the plague. The resurrection stone allows the ghost in the objects to move on their own and possess people without them touching them.
I was thinking a door handle, or a hand rail in a busy area.
How about a bullet? Make things appear like someone was the victim of an attempted murder, and have them "survive" with your identity hidden in them.
Too time-sensitive, I suspect.
The door handles of the ministry of magic would be my own choice.
So far, the important spells get their detail work done. How does the improved horcrux work?
AFAICT all Q's claims of its total novelty are in human speech. It's possible but not certain that his previous Parseltongued comments horcruxes puts a lower bound on how similar they are. It certainly means he's confident his ritual is not the one the legends are about, but given that it ended up suiting the stories better than the weak horcrux, it's quite possible he unknowingly reinvented the true forgotten original. (speculation: this would explain the possible-but-improbable appearance of a sixth-year able to outsmart and kill Baba Yaga)
We know it was expected to make him a disembodied possessor spirit but in fact required the victim to touch an anchor, until augmented with the resurrection stone. We know it requires a murder. We know the user is conscious while residing in the anchors. We also know that the legends it resembles say that it works by tearing the soul.
So far that's the one part that doesn't seem to correspond to anything that's happened.
Muggle research in the 2010s has revealed much about what actually makes people happy, and how often people are deceived. The best way to find out is with one of those mood-tracking cell phone apps, which eliminate the biases of memory. Quirrell doesn't have that, but as an approximation, I searched the PDF for the word "smile", which appears 310 times in chapters 1-106, and the word "enjoy", which appears 32 times. What did I find?
Interacting with Harry makes Quirrell happy. Moreso than killing idiots. Moreso than teaching Battle Magic. Killing him would be a grave mistake.
Having Quirrell kill someone wouldn't count as them cheering him up deliberately.
When Lord Voldemort was feeling down, Bella would bring him chocolate and idiots to kill to cheer him up. I don't know why it never worked.
The book is mostly from Harry's perspective, so I would expect some selection bias in searching for interactions that make Quirrell happy, since most of the interactions described are with Harry as the protagonist. I agree with your conclusion though.
As far as I understand, Quirrell believes (or claims to believe) that killing Harry will put him one step closer to fulfilling his CEV. Thus, any amusement Harry could provide is to Quirrel kind of like as ice cream is to us mortals: a minor, fleeting, and ultimately inconsequential pleasure.
Too bad the 2010s haven't happened yet.
We haven't seen him kill idiots, so we don't know how happy that makes him.
From his perspective, Firenze would have been an idiot, and killing him didn't result in any visible sign of happiness.
That quote is from chapter 74. I mention this because you didn't specify and to save the trouble for others to search.
That was absolutely awesome. This story is really very well written. So much exposition, and it just all made perfect sense. And it was even somehow brought back far more in line with the original novel than I thought possible.
And I guess the '"Power the dark lord knows not" really is love, which is kinda awesome.
It's still kind of obvious how to defeat Voldemort though. Simply permanently disable him without killing him. Some magical prison, or a coma, or a permanent transfiguration into a stone. This is in fact so obvious that Voldemort himself should realize it as well. Maybe he just figures he is so far above Harry's power level that he has nothing to fear. Or he has some defenses against even this.
Another way to get rid of him: Destroy all his horcruxes on earth, then kill him. He'll live on on pioneer, but that's fine. You can pick him up again in 10000 years when humanity has progressed far beyond him, and can probably even cure him. Heck that'd even be a nice ending. A epilogue set 10,000 years from now, with Harry recovering the Pioneer 11 and curing Voldemort.
The sequel could then be a Harry / Voldemort slashfic where Harry and a redeemed Voldemort rule the galaxy as father and son.
It seems like he can leave the body at will to go to another... I don't think permanently disabling would help.
The details seem like they would matter here. If he's transfigured into a rock, as far as we know he would not be conscious and experiencing anything, so how could he 'will' to go to another body?
Conversely, you could ask: if he can't be conscious or experience anything in his current "body", doesn't that mean it's dead for purposes of the Horcrux spell, and he is automatically shunted to another horcrux?
I don't think we know enough details to be sure what would happen.
Is Quirrel aware of all the people whom he can possess via his True Horcruxes? Can he possess any one of them at will, without the original body dying?
This may explain the fact that he occasionally leaves his host body. We thought it was to inhabit his other horcruxes, particularly the Voyager one, but it may be to possess other people.
ETA: apparently the answer is yes:
So by the way, has anyone notice that Eliezer did something even more impossible? Not only was Harry saved from certain death at the hands of a hoard of Yaoi fangirls by Voldemort and it wasn't crack, but Voldemort was the one who responsible for the whole thing and it still isn't crack.
You probably mean a horde of Yaoi fangirls, but Harry would be wise indeed to hoard them, until he hits puberty.
I get what is meant, but if they had been lovers for some time then I would say that Perenelle was not a virgin in any meaningful sense of the word. Of course, from an old-fashioned point of view she might have been, but this sentence is not accompanied by a modifier expressing the change in values as the next one is.
*shrug* Maybe Perenelle didn't exercise much and still had an intact hymen. There's your drop of blood.
No, I mean she had an intact hymen probably, but it's just the fact that "virgin = intact hymen" is a pretty silly notion to begin with. Especially since it outright says she'd been Baba Yaga's lover for some time already. Having sex pretty much means you're not a virgin any more. Kind of the point.
Couple of centuries ago. Their definitions are not our definitions.
Also possibly a stupid natural-language parsing artifact.
Maybe, but it's certainly the common definition at the time, and besides the terms of the deal pretty explicitly said "drop of blood" anyway.
If you're going to be using old definitions "lovers = having sex" is a pretty recent change in meaning.
Um, the relevant property is that the man can be sure the woman's child will be his, and for that "virgin = intact hymen" is useful.
Well, given that I've been asked if I was dating someone who lived on the opposite coast, by someone who knew about the fact that she lived on the opposite coast, and knew that I hadn't been over there in quite some time...
Then again, it could still be a recent change in meaning, just reversed by the internet.
I'm not sure it's even the current meaning. I would call two religious people who avoid sex before marriage lovers before they have sex.
An anecdote: in contemporary Russian, lovers most readily translates as любовники, and not only has it a strong meaning of people having sex, but also that at least one of them is cheating upon their rightful spouse. The situation you describe would need the word влюбленньіе, literally 'those in love'.
Yet it's not impossible for 'lovers' to mean exactly 'those in love', if you speak colloquially/in a ballad mode.
In Japanese, IIRC, one of these is 'koibito' and the other 'aijin', written with almost identical kanji, both meaning 'love person'....
koibito 恋人 vs. aijin 愛人 -- so it's only half identical. 人 has kun'yomi hito (from Old Japanese *pi₁to₂), with voicing of the initial consonant in the compound word koibito, and kan'on reading jin. If Wiktionary can be trusted, koibito is the generic term for 'lover/boyfriend/girlfriend', whereas aijin was borrowed (regularly) from Chinese to translate the English terms 'lover' and 'sweetheart', underwent semantic shift in Japanese, and ended up meaning 'mistress'.
Interestingly, Chinese 愛人 àirén is just an old-fashioned word for 'lover', and the word for 'partner in an extramarital relationship' is 情人 qíngrén... except Valentine's Day is qíngrénjié. Wiktionary also thinks there's a difference in usage of 愛人 àirén between the PRC and the ROC, but it doesn't describe it.
(Why was rén borrowed as jin? I'm guessing there are borrowing patterns, like how English has borrowed enough from Latin that new Latin borrowings will mangle the vowels in entirely predictable ways, but I don't know what they are. My first guess was that kan'on readings are based on a dialect of Chinese that had the same ȵ > ȵʑ > ɻ shift as Mandarin. I figured that was too simplistic, but given that 日 has the kan'on reading jitsu and the go'on reading nichi (go'on was earlier than kan'on), it might be right. Aijin is almost certainly regular, since 刃 is rèn in Mandarin and has kan'on jin. *ɻiC > ɻəC? Could be, since the apical vowel can't occur with a coda consonant.)
(edit: I should probably point out that I don't actually know most of this stuff -- I just know how to look it up. So my sources could be wrong or I could be misinterpreting.)
Edit: moved the comment to the right place, sorry.
The story doesn't really make sense as told. It fit's Quirrell's view of the world to a T, tough, so he isn't questioning it enough.
Dons tinfoil
Someone on reddit pointed out that "confused scribble" might simply mean "A busload of aurors in a bag of holding" Now for really amusing wtfry, let's make that "A busload of arch-wizards."
Follow me down the rabbithole for a second: Voldemort's read on the tale of Perenelle is obviously, blatantly, just wrong. It fits his worldview far to well, and has some logical flaws in it, especially concerning the cup.
So, I had a thought. As Harry pointed out, one thing to do with immortality, is to share it.
Further, it is a core part of wizarding culture to not share dangerous magic freely. And the stone is dangerous. It isn't just immortality, it is also a weapon of utterly insane destructive potential.
Theory 1: Baba Yaga is not dead. Perenelle was simply the first person she chose to share her secret with. I give this one quite high odds. The most likely alternative is that her death was accidental, which would be just.. ugh. Traumatic, much?
Theory 2: All those historical wizards that lived very long lives? Those were her further apprentices as she - being appropriately cautious with the dooms-day device - established that they could, in fact, be trusted with this level of power over a very long period of time. (.. and probably some mind-reading) Most of them are also not dead. And most of them are sitting in that chamber, playing poker.
Baba Yaga is Flamel.
That might be the case, but we have the breaking of the tradition of Dark Wizards teaching Battle magic as independent evidence for the murder.
It's evidence that it's generally believed she was murdered.
Romeo and Juliet, the Star-Crossed Lovers (so called by Shakespeare), never had sex. So the words were used as Quirrel describes, six centuries ago.
Let us recall that this story takes place in the 90s and that Tom Riddle attended Hogwarts in the 40s. I don't think that his views on sexual politics are entirely consistent with those of the present-day, so he may view "virgin" as meaning "not penetrated by a man".
Then again Eliezer has been imposing modern sexual attitudes on the Wizarding World, whether out of ignorance or a desire to be politically correct I'm not sure. In any case, I find it one of the most jarring aspects of the fic.
An allusion to the Passover ceremony? Why???
Passover is the reenactment of a ritual, powered by blood, to ward off the Angel of Death.
Where?
Oh, I see. I just didn't have the context to recognize that. Thanks.
Eliezer's reason: Because it's funny (and maaaaybe, as others have said, because Passover is all about saving people from death by means of a ritual involving blood). Harry's reason: Maybe the thought just occurred to him.
...which would probably be out of character for Harry -- how likely is it that an eleven-year-old with WASP-sounding parents would spontaneously think of a line from a Jewish ritual? -- but, oh well, know your audience.
Unless he has some of Voldemort's knowledge stored up in that dark side of his? He's traveled pretty far and he's interested in the sorts of things that would lead him to read up on both the social technologies of religions and the cultures of the Muggle superpowers, so he'd be more likely than Harry to get it.
But it's probably just a throwaway reference.
I'd assume that Harry has picked up phrases from all over because he's widely read.
This is precisely the plan that Quirrel originally planned for Harry, have him pretend to defeat LV and set him up to rule the country.
Note that this poll only samples people who care about these threads enough to read them. People who avoid these threads and don't like them cluttering /discussion will not see it.
Fair point, though I feel like that logic is sort of letting them cause a comparatively large disruption to our enjoyment of real-time discussion of the final arc of a fiction we've been following for years, in return for the prevention of a comparatively small temporary disruption to their enjoyment of the Discussion forum. Scope, of course, plays a part here, but I doubt it's remotely enough on the side of the 500 comments people to tip the scales.
I will point out, one per 500 comments was the old system. There was ~30 threads for the first ~100 chapters.
I must say, the thought of Voldie kicking himself (well, wanting to, but he couldn't because no legs) while spending nine years as a disembodied spirit in the Voyager Plaque was extremely amusing.
I also loved the fact that his Voldemort persona was designed to be a stupid Dark Lord that would last weeks at most and ended up being way too strong for Magical Britain.
One of my favorite bits:
One wonders how Lucius Malfoy, and Draco, will react to hearing all of this.
Morfin is a Riddle family name, so we can probably rule out Eliezer choosing it for its anagrams. Nevertheless, might as well have some fun:
Tom Morfin Riddle
What else?
On Reddit, Eliezer endorsed these:
Always the one you least expect...
Maybe it was a horcrux.
Terraforming tool?
Not that dissimilar to what set up the confrontation in the hallway...
Norm Modifier, Ltd.
Dim dolt informer
Find old Mortimer
Doom mind trifler
I'm Milton Redford
I'm Milford rodent
Florid Tinder mom
And, ultimately ...
Lord Tim, [the] Informed
"There are some who call me ... Tim."
I wonder if he's just getting a new name for arbitrary reasons (like HPJEV, Bellatrix, etc.), for just this sort of anagram fun, or for some story-related significance to his mother naming him after her brother instead of her father?
'Mort dried no film
Firm dildo mentor
When the Dumbledore sees himself on the Map in chapter 79, it initials his middle names:
But when it shows the Tom Riddles, it doesn't include the middle initial M.
This is probably just an oversight.
Eliezer and I are now part of the literary canon.
At least, we're both taught in the English department at Princeton. Anne Jamison's course, "Fanfiction: Transformative works from Shakespeare to Sherlock", will cover Eliezer's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on March 2, and one of my short stories, "The Magician and the Detective", on March 4.
I have a cunning plan:
What constraints are Harry working under?
The deadman switch hostage killer cannot have go off because they are timeturned, and the deaths of hundreds of students would surely cause a paradox by disrupting the match. Its possible that it sets a timer to go off after Harry jumps back in time, but then presuming that Harry knows exactly when he jumped back and Quirrel does not, Harry can then warn the teachers before the bomb goes off. At the end of the day, even if the hostages die, hundreds of lives are a small price to pay for stopping Voldemort.
If Quirrel dies, he will come back and torture Harry's parents. But presumably it will take Quirrel a little time to possess his new host. If the accessible Horocruxes are scattered throughout the world, then he will probably have to apperate back to the UK, which could take several jumps. Meanwhile, all Harry has to do is send his patronus to Dumbledoor, who can then Phoenix travel to Oxford, and should get there first, bringing Harry's parents back to the comparative safety of Hogwarts.
Quirrel cannot directly hurt Harry using magic, but he has a gun and the reflexes of a martial artist, plus he has the strength of an adult, so despite being ill he can probably overpower Harry if Harry managed to grab the gun.
Harry could transfigure a knife, but this wouldn't work, mostly because it would take some time, Voldemort would notice, and shoot him. So, a possible solution: transfigure a knife, but with the electrons swapped out for muons. Muons have higher mass, so the muon orbitals are far smaller than electron orbitals, so the material will be denser, and I think also stronger. Because of this, the blade can be made much thinner, and so easily concealed, perhaps to the extent of being invisible. The blade could be attached to Harry's wand, which could serve as a handle. It can penetrate Quirrel's shields, because his magic cannot interact with an object Harry has transfigured.
This still leaves the problem of fighting an immortal dark wizard with hundreds of Horocruxes. The next time Voldemort attacks, he will have got Bellatrix to cast shielding spells over him, which can stop any transfigured objects Harry throws at him. But by that time, Harry can have the order of the phoenix fighting at his side.
I imagine Volde attacking Hogwarts again and again, and everytime he is killed, possessing a new body and returning to the fight minutes later, while dead teachers and aurors stay dead (or do they, given the stone?) meanwhile, Harry desperately tries to think of a plan before the defenders are slowly worn down.
Voldemort took Harry's wand away already.
It's been suggested that he might have grabbed Snape's when they fell down together, but it doesn't seem real plausible to me that the Defense Professor didn't notice that and isn't capable of seeing that Harry has a magical item on his person. I can't rule it out though; there is a symmetry with him falling down at Gringotts.
There's also this (c. 106):
Quirrel says:
That seems very important, so why didn't he ask any of them why they arrived early? It looks like a blatant mistake on his part.
So far the update schedule seems to follow the Fibonacci sequence.
I sincerely hope that pattern doesn't stick.
The hourly countdown seems likely, though.
Further bonus trivia: 108 is the number of worldly sins according to Buddhism. Given that this is heavily referenced in anime and manga, which Eliezer enjoys, the fact that it's the chapter in which Voldemort's backstory is revealed is unlikely to be coincidental.
I think it is highly likely to be coincidental :P
Actually, he wouldn't be the first author to deliberately pace his work to achieve this effect. The Death Note manga, for example, is exactly 108 chapters long.
Also, look at how short the previous chapters were. If he were stretching it out so that this one would be 108, this is what I would expect it to look like.
That's really interesting and definitely helps your case. My main beef is that, opposite Vaniver, I think that there have been quite a few scenes that could be argued to be related to worldly sins to the same degree, and so this is not very different from what random chance would look like.
Aaaaand there were 107 horcruxes (meaning 107 murders) before he stopped keeping count.
If the pattern continues then it is impossible for the posting to end on "pi day", the 14th of March.
Hmm. My probability that Hermione will be recreated as an alicorn princess is now over 75%:
It seems unlikely that Voldemort thinks that humans are the optimal creatures to be (that's flowing with the status quo, which he does not do). It might be best to be, say, both a Wizard and a Troll, or a Wizard and a Dragon, or a Wizard and some new optimized thing. But why try this out on himself first, when it could go horribly wrong, when he could try it out on Hermione?
I just read up to the point in chapter 108 where Voldemort refuses to answer the question about the immortality spell (and haven't read the comments here yet.) It occurred to me immediately that since this is question about the past -- assuming Voldemort has already cast the spell -- that he has broken his agreement, which means that Harry can now start executing plans to overcome him, and say "No" without lying when Voldemort asks if he has betrayed him.
... Hm.
This isn't the chain of logic I followed - for the sake of authenticity I'll put that at the end, but -
Isn't a little... strange, that artifacts designed and destined to defeat death transfer primarily by death?
I mean, even aside from the "kill the previous owner and take their stuff" method, the other option - inheriting it - is also heavily tied to death, as powerful artifacts like these are unlikely to be permanently given away until the original owner has no further use of it.
Backing away from plot for a minute - if you don't expect to manage to destroy death yourself, you should really program your powerful artifacts to seek out the most effective owners, anyway. Inheritance is very unreliable, and murder is entirely counterproductive - both would be backup selectors to anyone designing such a thing. So what's the primary determinant?
I think we've seen it. The prophecy stone, that responded to Harry's oath to end death, engraved with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows, and completely unmentioned since - if I were going to design such a thing, gifting the Hallows to someone who had sworn an honest oath against death would be a good start, particularly if I could somehow tie it into True Patronus capability (as the silvery light suggests.)
If that's the case, then Harry has a stronger claim on the Hallows than their current physical possessors. Most importantly, this includes the Resurrection Stone. Further, magic seems to register HJPEV as "Tom Riddle" - at any rate, the ancient Hogwarts wards do. So unless magic has multiple names for Harry Potter, then HJPEV may really count as the same person as Voldemort - in which case he would have access to his Horcrux network. Voldemort may even have anticipated this - but since literally nobody knows both the existence and the significance of that glowing stone, he can't anticipate losing control over the Stone.
So, predictions:
Harry is the Master of Death, in the sense of being the primary magical owner of all three Hallows - 75%.
HJPEV counts as Tom Riddle, to the point that on death, the Horcrux network will attempt to update based on him. - 60%.
Links go to PredictionBook pages.
(My actual chain of logic started from noticing that I was confused about the Death prophecy - since I didn't really see how the Hallows would play much of a part in the climax of the story - which lead to the realization that the prophecy might reassign ownership of the Hallows.)
How odd. You think the Order would've mentioned that Riddle and Monroe were in the same year at school.
After reading the chapter I am dumbstruck by similarities between Professor and Dr. Manhattan. There might be a trope for this kind of character somewhere..
Has it been previously established that no lying can take place when using parseltongue or is Harry's belief in this based solely on his inability to lie to Quirrell?
His belief is based on Quirrell telling him and on his inability.
What the hell? Making horcruxes for your friends doesn't actually test the invention. You also need to kill your friends and hope that the invention works. That doesn't sound so nice, does it? And we don't have a good explanation why Riddle missed this idea anymore.
You just need a friend who would otherwise die soon, so that the risk of permanent death is worth eternal life.
I don't think Harry meant to imply that actually running this test would be nice, but rather that one cannot even think of running this test without first thinking of the possibility of making a horcrux for someone else (something which is more-or-less nice-ish in itself, the amorality inherent in creating a horcrux at all notwithstanding).
Make them for lots of friends, friends who like you lead dangerous lives and who unlike you are not vastly more powerful than every other wizard around. Some of them will likely die soon enough.
You don't have to test it on your friends; you can test it on your enemies, or on bystanders you don't care about, or in Voldemort's case, on minions you don't care about.
Get a random wizard off the street (if you're Voldemort) or a prisoner you're going to kill anyway (if you're ethical). Control them by Imperius, Legilimizing, or plain threats. Have them make a Horcrux. Kill them and activate the horcrux on a second person you're willing to kill. Test the result. When done, kill the second person and destroy the Horcrux.
Yeah, that's why I said "we don't have a good explanation why Riddle missed this idea anymore".
Harry thinks it's because making a Horcrux for someone else pattern-matches "teaching your most powerful spells to others", which pattern-matches "helping others altruistically", and Voldemort has an ugh field around that concept, or at least a blind spot. For what it's worth, Voldemort agreed with this analysis.
What did he do with it once he stole it?
Made it into a Horcrux, obviously :)
Became the Defense Professor at Hogwarts without any fear of being required to make a binding promise with the Goblet of Fire. He's making sure history doesn't repeat itself.
So, why did Quirrell offer Hermione to leave before killing her?
That's a good question. Quirrel said:
Killing her allowed Harry to put the dilemma to Lucius Malfoy, that either Lucius had killed her, or some other enemy was behind both her death and the attack on Draco. And that led to Lucius returning Harry's money and renouncing the accusation that Hermione, sworn to the House of Potter, had attacked Draco.
If she left, none of that would have happened.
It seems to be a character trait that he tries to allow opponents a way out if they're smart enough: a chance to lose, if you will. He offered Harry's mother a deal rather than simply killing her, he offered Skeeter a chance to make amends before killing her, he offers the Auror a stun or an AK, he offered the master a chance to teach him rather than die - and he offered Hermione a chance to stop being the heroine opposed to the dark lord.
In each instance, the character chose... poorly.
I agree.
That one was a trick though. He never intended to kill Harry, just to cast a Horcrux 1.0 on him, which needs a murder to activate. That's why he was amused when he offered 'yourself to die, and the child to live' - because it was his plan to kill her and leave Harry alive anyway.
I'm not sure it was such a trick. She could have killed herself, or she could have surprised him such that he was not prepared to use her death to turn Harry into a Horcrux, in which case, frustrated of his primary goal, he would have settled for AKing the baby to try to block the prophecy more normally. Both parties prefer a binding deal in which the mother dies and the infant survives.
There was no possible reason for her to kill herself. And if he couldn't use her death, he would have taken Harry and gone on to murder the first convenient person he encountered to make the horcrux, delaying him by a few hours at most.
Since Snape had begged Voldemort not to kill Lily, he was going to let her live ("move aside, foolish woman!"), and taken the trouble to hunt down someone else to kill for the horcrux. But since she offered herself to die, he agreed, and was amused.
'No possible reason'? Here's 4 off the top of my head. She could kill herself to avoid being tortured to insanity & then death. That's always a good reason. She could kill herself to frustrate Voldemort and deprive him of the satisfaction of killing her himself (also a classic, dating back at least to Masada). She could kill herself after he offers the deal, reasoning that even if you don't understand why, it's a good policy to try to prevent whatever your enemy wants. She could kill herself as part of a nasty ritual or black magic.
When does Voldemort ever linger at the scene of a crime for multiple hours? I'm fairly sure that would violate some Rule or other. No, simpler if the plan fails to fallback to killing Harry directly and making a timely retreat as a dark lord should.
What I meant was that there was no reason for her to kill herself in order to help Harry. When I read your previous comment:
I didn't parse to mean "Voldemort bargained with her to make sure she didn't kill herself, so he could kill her instead". But yes, that's a plausible interpretation, if victims of Voldemort sometimes killed themselves for any of the reasons you give.
He needn't linger there; he could just take Harry and leave with him. Before he created the Horcrux, Harry had no particular protection from Voldemort.
So, if this were Pact, I would expect that Dumbledore has one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, and he can be possessed by Voldemort at will. Dumbledore would show up to save the day, and then the brief uptick in probability of success would be followed by a precipitous drop.
I am fairly confident this will not happen, but I'm noticing that most of my confidence seems to come from arguments that I am not confident in once I give them explicit form. For example, that seems too hard an antagonist for Harry, and he needs to have some chance of success, and EY seems against giving the protagonist the plot armor* that Wildbow gives them. But when I observe that this is an outside view argument that's reference class specific, HPMoR seems much closer to Worm or Pact than to other works of fiction, which says I should expect it to follow the same convention. Thoughts?
* Typically, Wildbow protagonists look like they're taking two steps back for every one step forward, but I see it more as "trading away parts of themselves / resources for success, and eventually getting to the end goal / end of the story." If you predict that they will eventually win but it will be the most Pyrrhic victory possible (over the long haul), I think you have a good shot at getting all the details right.
ETA: gjm is right: Voldemort himself says the target must be either willing or too weak to resist him. So Voldemort can't possess most random people, and certainly not Dumbledore.
If Voldemort could possess Dumbledore, he could have done so earlier and simply given himself the Stone, as well as the Elder Wand and any other interesting gadgets Dumbledore has. He'd have made Dumbledore teach him all the spells he knows, too, if those survive possession. And he'd have used Dumbledore to attack by surprise Flamel or anyone else if he wanted to.
In the least convenient world, possessing someone doesn't give Voldemort access to any of their previous memories or spells, it just wipes the mind and takes over the body. Then it might be hard to possess Dumbledore and use him to get the Stone. But he could still take out Dumbledore, cause Flamel to remove the Stone from Hogwarts, and then possess Flamel while he has the Stone.
Possessing anyone in the world (or at least, any wizard other than Harry) just by making them touch any object you prepared beforehand is so overpowered that if it's true, the only possible reason Quirrel is still plotting anything or playing games or appearing to ever be in danger, is that he'd be bored otherwise.
If Voldemort can possess Dumbledore at will and chooses not to, the only reason I can think of is that it would make the game too boring, like he said about the Wizarding War. This strikes me as... inadequate. With the Stone involved, Voldermort is playing for real stakes, and waiting for the end of the year increases the chance something will go wrong, weakens the Quirrel body, and eventually forces Voldemort to operate on the last day of the school year, when others might guess something important would happen.
(Edited:) But why wouldn't Voldemort be able to possess Dumbledore, or anyone else in the world, other than Harry? He claims the only requirement is to have the target touch a Horcrux 2.0. This seems fairly easy: to give make sure your target will touch a Horcruxed coin, you can just toss them one and they will catch it by reflex, as an earlier chapter pointed out. And you can horcrux the doorknob of their office, a chair they'll sit on in a public park, etc. It may be, however, that since Voldemort has only had this ability for a few months, during which Dumbledore has been on high alert, he hasn't been able to accomplish this yet.
No. They must either consent or be too weak to resist. It seems unlikely that either Dumbledore or Flamel would meet either condition.
You're right. I'll amend my comment.
Riddle no longer needs the target to touch a horcrux, and Dumbledore is too powerful to possess.
We're not sure the Horcrux 3.0 doesn't need the target to touch a horcrux, or at least to have touched one sometime in the past. All we know is that Voldemort can possess any suitable target at will, choosing which one he wants, and almost certainly without being forced out by his current host body dying.
Note that they still get to resist if they're strong enough.
(Emphasis mine.) There's no suggestion that introducing the Resurrection Stone does away with victims' ability to resist. It just means that Voldemort's spirit can "fly where it pleases" rather than having to stay attached to the horcruxes, as he always planned for Horcrux 2.0.
A thought occurs: how do we know the Stone is actually at the end of the gauntlet? Is there anything to keep Dumbledore from setting up the traps as a decoy to flush out Voldemort while the real stone is elsewhere (and presumably under proper security)?
The Stone is probably there because Quirrel covered how he led Flamel to believe the Stone had to be actually in the trap before it would work; ch108:
But Voldemort doesn't actually have a way of finding the Stone. So given that the rooms meant for students don't actually protect the Stone from Voldemort, Dumbledore could have created several similar final-rooms, equally protected, and placed the rooms meant for students in front of one of the wrong ones.
And if Dumbledore has any way of protecting the Stone inside Hogwarts that's better than placing it in a usually-unguarded room fool of traps and spells, then he would have used it, but still created the room full of traps and spells as a decoy.
As long as Dumbledore isn't completely certain Voldemort can in fact find the Stone, this would be a smart thing to do. Voldemort bluffed Flamel, who (as portrayed by Voldemort) isn't really smart, but Dumbledore may not be fully convinced. (He's been trying to convince Flamel to remove the Stone from Hogwarts.)
Then he would expect Voldemort, using something like a map or scrying or just being clever, to know that the student rooms weren't the real trap and so those are a waste of effort.
But how would Voldemort know the other rooms even existed, or where they were in Hogwarts (before he acquired the Map)?
He knows about these rooms because Dumbledore deliberately drew the whole school's attention to them, and when Voldemort tried looking in, he saw very powerful spells guarding them. That sounds exactly like a trap to me. And a trap is something you set even if you anticipate a low chance of success.
The one reason so far to believe these are the right rooms (though I am not fully convinced) is that Snape was guarding them.
He would know - if you were Dumbledore/Flamel, with a healthy respect for the devious mind of the greatest dark wizard ever, who has a particular gift for finding out secrets, making a mockery of his foes' plans, and generally being a complete pain in the ass - because he did incredibly Dark magic to defeat your hiding of the rooms. Since you believe he knows where the Stone is, thanks to the Crown, he'll be able to focus his efforts in looking for secrets and traps around the Stone.
Dumbledore, unlike Flamel, may not fully believe Voldemort can really use the Crown to find the Stone. Otherwise why would Dumbledore ask Flamel to remove the Stone from Hogwarts - does he really care more about the safety of a few students than about Voldemort getting the Stone? If so, he could prepare alternative traps, just on the chance he is right.
Also, whatever he believes, there's no reason for him to mark the true location of the Stone with corridors to which he directs the Gryffindor students. That just increases the chances that Voldemort will use the students to get at the Stone, or will encounter some of them while there, and harm them. Why would Dumbledore not separate the Stone's guardroom from his challenge to the students, unless he doesn't think Voldemort can locate the stone, and is using the students' forbidden corridor to lure Voldemort into a trap?
Or Dumbledore can be carrying the Stone on his own person all the time, because even though Flamel insisted it be in Hogwarts, 1) the strongest protection the castle can offer is an 'adult wizard', in Quirrell's terminology, 2) it is inconsistent with Dumbledor's morals to set up a scenario in which a student can actually die, no matter how possessed, 3) canon!Dumbledore said once that he only took the Elder Wand to protect others, but not to rule, and that would be a nod to Rowling, 4) if he knows the wards have been tempered with, then it is at least weak evidence that Voldemort (or whoever in the castle can speak to snakes and has the Crown) has bluffed and the Stone, after a while, can be returned to Perenelle...
He arranged for the Stone to be in Hogwarts. Whether it's at the end of that particular series of traps is not entirely certain. I'm sure someone like Moody would point out the flaws inherent in a system that students can penetrate. Why not just stick it in the Room of Requirement or some hidden room that only the Headmaster can access (and use proper security)?
Certainly if Dumbledore & Flamel knew that the Crown stuff was a bluff, they could put it elsewhere in Hogwarts. But they don't. Why build an elaborate trap for an enemy who (you believe) will follow the scent to somewhere else entirely ("the Stone wherever it was hidden")?
But why endanger the students by challenging them with a Forbidden Corridor that happens to be the place Voldemort is going to attack?
To have a public reason for a dungeon crawl inside your school. When you multiply it over, the danger posed by Voldemort is not enhanced that much by this move.
Old jokes from chapter 79:
And also
He's Mr. You-Know-Who.
In Ch. 37, Quirrell explains how he found Harry:
Conditioned on Lord Voldmort being a blood purist, this is evidence for Quirrell not being Voldemort (probably the intended interpretation). In fact, this was evidence for Lord Voldemort not being a blood purist.
And if you've been paying attention to the Muggle world for the whole 20th century, a blood purist is exactly the sort of villain you'd think up.
Does anyone else think this reads like Quirrel has an awful lot of emotional connection to and personal memories about this story, almost as if it were Baba Yaga speaking about herself in the 3rd person? Could Riddle or Quirrel have come across a Baba Yaga horcrux? The resurrection stone, perhaps? Earlier than that? Why would Perenelle share these secrets? How would anyone know these details if Baba Yaga was dead and Perenelle had not shared them? No one else would have been present for those private moments.
And what are the odds that a Dark Lady like Baba Yaga did not have a horcrux?
In Ch. 70 Quirrel makes a point during the S.P.H.E.W. confrontation with the headmaster that Dark Ladies are also underrepresented, and that few could name one except Baba Yaga. Self-reference?
She would probably need to be faking the map labelling her (and Harry?) as Tom Riddle, but a sorceress as powerful as Baba Yaga combined with the secrets of Salazar, who created the Hogwarts security system in the first place, could probably accomplish that.
Notice what Quirrel does and doesn't say in parseltongue:
This makes some sense, but if Quirrell could bamboozle the map, surely he wouldn't do so in such a way as to reveal vitally important and damaging secrets to his enemies.
I can't figure out what you mean by "reveal vitally important and damaging secrets to his enemies." Would you expand on that please?
Quirrell and Harry both show up on the map as "Tom M. Riddle". Is there any reason why Baba Quirrell would want that to happen?
I'm not sure what is gained by convincing Harry that he is Riddle, whether it is true or not, but Quirrel communicated that before the map came into play so it is clear that s/he wants Harry to believe that Harry is Riddle. Quirrel is also acknowledging that he is Voldemort, so them both showing up on the map as Riddle is confirmation of what has already been said rather than new information.
I thought maybe you were talking about the scribbles over the mirror room, but I don't know what to make of that at all so I can't even attempt to interpret it though the "Quirrel is or is co-habited by Baba Yaga" lens.
More questions. I'll just gather them here, instead of making a new comment for each one.
1) Making horcruxes for your friends doesn't actually test the horcrux spell, you also have to kill your friends. So it makes more sense to test on a minion, which doesn't require you to be nice in the first place. Why didn't Quirrell think of that?
2) Why did Quirrell offer Hermione to leave before killing her? The plot against Malfoy wouldn't be served by her departure, only by her death.
3) If magical resonance can kill, why didn't it kill or otherwise affect baby Harry?
4) If Quirrell's problem is that he's bored and doesn't see the fun in anything, why didn't he solve that problem long ago by using mind magic on himself?
5) In Ch. 107, why not just call mind-controlled Snape and ask him to explain what's up with his room? Eliezer has said that wouldn't work because Snape is a perfect Occlumens, but Quirrell don't need to read Snape's mind, just threaten him and demand the truth.
6) Why kill Hermione to plot against Lucius? What's so difficult about killing Lucius to begin with?
Edited to add:
7) If Riddle wished for magical Britain to become more competent, why did he kill Yermy Wibble?
(1). What did you think about my argument here? That Quirrel couldn't think of a plan that started by teaching his most powerful and secret magic to a minion.
(3). Maybe the backlash is proportional to the strength of one's magic, so in Azkaban Quirrel was affected a lot more than Harry, and baby Harry wasn't affected at all. That matches the fact that Quirrel's new strategy for surviving such moments is to stop using magic, throw away his wand and abandon the very shape of a wizard.
(5). If he tortured or threatened Snape, he couldn't trust anything Snape might say. A perfect Occlumens is perfectly prepared to assume a false identity that will confess false information.
(6). Back then, Quirrel wanted to strengthen Harry politically and eventually help him rule Britain. If he killed Lucius, Draco would blame Dumbledore, be very angry and afraid, and probably leave Hogwarts. If he caused Lucius to be disgraced, he might succeed in making Draco believe that Lucius had indeed killed Hermione, and then Draco would come back to Hogwarts and become even closer friends with Harry.
1) I'm not sure. Also, Riddle always wanted to be a teacher, so it seems like he should be able to imagine plans that involve teaching X to Y.
5) A well-chosen threat can make Snape want to tell the truth. "Help me get the Stone! If I fail today, I will return and do horrible thing X." Just mentioning the hostage situation might be enough.
6) If you want to remove Lucius, why set up a new crime for him to commit? He's already committed any number of crimes while working for you as a Death Eater, so you have all the proof you need. And if you want to turn Draco against him as well, the obvious solution is to provide "ironclad evidence" that he burned Narcissa.
5) Snape isn't a Parselmouth, so Voldemort can't precommit to him not to do the horrible things if Snape does help.
6) Judging Lucius for being a Death Eater, on no new evidence, would require a major political shakeup. Dumbledore's faction already failed to do this after the war, so why would they succeed now? And it would probably require judging all other prominent Death Eaters too, like Jugson. Voldemort might not want to remove all of his previous identity's servants off the board.
What possible motive could Lucius have had to burn Narcissa? Not to accuse Dumbledore - they were at war at that point, and nobody really cared. And later he couldn't convince anyone of it. And, I get the impression he's taken some political hits (or missed opportunities) due to his insistence that Dumbledore burned her.
Is this the same Asian combat instructor mentioned earlier, I wonder?
Yes. Riddle received this training as Monroe, most likely, and then threw his temper tantrum as Voldemort to make sure no one else could get it.
Hmm... some thoughts occur to me:
Firstly, he hasn't used any of the muggle equipment Fred and George got him yet has he? But Quirrell's got his pouch.
Secondly, this may not come as a surprise but he is likely to succeed since "HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL DESTROY THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN" this could refer to Quirell, true, but I far expect it to refer to HJPEV due to the timing. Also note that Quirell says something about prophecies in ch. 108, but I can't find the quote.
Third: obligatory wacky theory that his father's rock is the Stone of Permanency. Stones == rocks, and he was given it by Dumbledore after all. And Harry's magic interferes with Quirrell's so it might shield the magic trace.
Fourthly: this is my first post on LessWrong, nice to meetcha!
I decided to collect the stuff about these recent updates that confuse me, and when added together two were in the shape of a theory!
Even Quirrell is confused! Wow!
So... Dumbledore did know all along, just like cannon, and sent the map to the twins for plausible deniability. He can get away with that because he doesn't mind when people think him a fool. And he really needs Querrellmort to think of him as ignorant so he will play the role perfectly... well Voldemort said he could play chess.
In the last thread roystgnr wrote
That is totally something I wouldn't have figured out on my own. Well, the first part. I had just put that up to Harry not wanting to see ill of his friend, but magical obfuscation makes sense too. Oh, but someone else had the knowledge if the first theory is right. Someone who used Legilimancy on Harry in chapter 19 and that's just when Harry found out about it!
Prediction on destroying the Horcux network: we know that the Horcruxes are all connected to Voldemort. If you could locate one (and we know they are now distributed so anyone can stumble across and be possessed by them), perhaps you could use that Horcruxes's connection to the network to destroy or incapacitate it, then kill Voldemort. Locating all possible nodes to physically destroy is heavily implied to be infeasible even with magic. I give this 60% confidence.
Prediction on next chapter: Voldemort kills Harry and succeeds. After all, Harry just told Voldemort about giving Horcruxes to your friends and testing your Horcrux network. I imagine Voldemort is curious as to whether or not Harry, as a Tom Riddle, will be absorbed by the network. I give this 40% confidence.
Outcomes: A. Only the part of Harry that Voldemort imprinted is absorbed by the network. This consciousness is either reborn as a purely young Tom Riddle, or reabsorbed by Voldemort completely upon his next death.
B. Harry himself is absorbed into the network. I'm not sure about all the implications of this. Obviously, he could attempt possessing someone, but this seems mostly against his moral code (unless he thought he could prevent more suffering by doing so.) Or he could potentially mess with the Horcux network internally.
C. Another magical explosion occurs--we're still not entirely certain what caused Voldemort's Horcrux spell to backfire in the first place.
D. Harry, in fact, dies. A possible, if unsatisfying literary ending.
I just realizied that the trap for voldie might well be Baba Yaga's hairbrush.
It follows from the curse on the defense position.
Because I just realized that I think it was an accident, and happened because Voldemort moved the goblet of fire out of Baba Yaga's reach.
Theory: Voldemort is wrong about the Baba Yaga. She faked her death and ran off with her new wife. This part I am quite confident about. 70% probability? Most of the remainder is that her death was accidental and the reason Perenelle has spent centuries accumulating lore is that she wants her back. Yes, Im assigning under 10% likelyhood to the chance that Voldemort read this story right.
Anyway, given "Baba Yaga is not dead". A thought occurred to me. "Did they remember to terminate her employment? Could they in fact even do so without being whammied by the goblet?" The answers to which is obviously "No." Unfortunately worded contract is unfortunate, Baba Yaga has magical tenure despite slacking on her job for going on 6 centuries.
This was all well and good as long as the goblet was somewhere Baba could get at it. - Telling the goblet to lay of a new teacher every couple of decades isn't much of an imposition. But then Voldemort stole the darn thing! and it has been striking down everyone that looked to move from the status of "Temp" to actually taking over her job. Because the job is hers.
.. This also implies she is still keyed into the wards. And still unable to harm any student of hogwarts. If that holds for graduates too, it neatly explains why she never directly opposes most dark lords - they are hogwarts graduates, and would invoke the contract if she fought them.