(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.
baby Harry wasn't affected at all.
Baby Harry did at least get a scar.
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: