hypothesis: Voldemort is pretending to lose.
Everything he said and did about Hermione is true - he wants Harry to have restrains and a sidekick (and a true friend, but his is an emotion he knows not). He knows that Harry has the best chance to defeat death, and so the best course of action is to move to the background to live a safe, boring life, now with his horcrux network, new body with who-knows-what capabilities, Harry being one of the very few things in the world that can hurt/kill him. So if Harry will think Voldemort is finally dead...
Against this hypothesis speaks the fact that Voldemort acts in a really stupid way - he surely must be aware that Harry might notice it. And he did not set up any plausible reason why he might act stupidly.So why would he be playing suddenly two levels down?
Assume Voldemort is pretending his Horcrux network became Hermione's, and then lets Harry kill him. When Hermione wakes up, she will tell Harry she senses no Horcrux network. Granted, they won't kill her to test this, and because they don't know Voldemort's Horcrux rituals (and don't even have the Resurrection Stone ring), they will never be sure. But they will (should) suspect.
I wonder if there is any way to test if someone has a Horcrux 2.0?
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 111.
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: