"I wonder how difficult it would be to just make a list of all the top blood purists and kill them.
They'd tried exactly that during the French Revolution, more or less - make a list of all the enemies of Progress and remove everything above the neck..." -Harry's internal monologue, HPMOR Chapter 7
"Amusing, but that was not your first fleeting thought before you substituted something safer, less damaging. No, what you remembered was how you considered lining up all the blood purists and guillotining them. And now you are telling yourself you were not serious, but you were. If you could do it this very moment and no one would ever know, you would." -The Sorting Hat, HPMOR Chapter 10
Well...well I guess it wasn't technically a guillotine. And Harry didn't make a list himself. But Harry did do it, and set it up so no one would ever know.
Other note. Dumbeldore defeated Voldemort. He placed Minerva to intercept any discoveries of Harry and he made Harry swear not to tell anyone about it. This left Voldemort underprepaired against the weapon that got him in the end. Dumbeldore had a million plots going, and this one worked. Sometiems one is all you need.
After sleeping on it, I'd like to raise two problems I have with the last double-update, and see what you guys think.
1. That Harry would be able to cast Partial Transfiguration in those circumstances does not seem clearly and unambiguously established by the story so far.
(unless I'm missing something, in which case please point it out to me.)
I'm not saying it's wrong that he was able to cast it. I'm saying that as a reader, I couldn't know that in advance, and that's bad for a story.
First we're told that you can't transfigure air. And EY repeatedly insists Harry cannot overcome any limitations of magic in 60 seconds, so that felt like a hint not to look for a spellcasting solution, at least not without regaining some freedom of movement first.
We did get an earlier scene where Harry considers the fact that his wand is showing some minor wear and tear, and seems robust against small loss of wood. So yes, that feels like a hint in the other direction, maybe even fairly strong evidence.
But the thing is, magic in Harry Potter universe is arbitrary in so many ways, like that you have to say "Wingardum Leviosa" and not something else if you want to levitate something. HPMoR draw...
Do The Impossible, indeed. Looping a thin thread over someone's head several meters away is tricky business. The slightest bit of wind throws it off. And this must be done without moving the wand or betraying the operation through one's facial expression. I can't imagine it being done without the utmost concentration, allowing of course for effort to be expended talking to Voldemort and maintaining mental blocks against any Legilimens among the Death Eaters (recall that in Half-Blood Prince Snape was able to detect spells forming in Harry's mind). This is all done perfectly the first time around. Thirty-six times, plus Voldemort's wrists.
I suppose one can honestly say A Wizard Did It...
Reading the chapters again, I can't help feeling that, while Harry's sudden victory is satisfying from a "we, the fandom, have passed the test" perspective, without that context it is really unnatural. Harry abruptly goes from being utterly emotionally overwhelmed and reeling to the flawless, cold-blooded execution of a perfect plan that fully draws on a number of disparate ideas and abilities.
Edit: Also, I'm far from the first person to say this, but Harry's sudden spike in competence is preceded by Voldemort becoming a hammier, less intelligent villain. His precautions against Harry attempting to escape, and his plans for how to kill him reliably, are reasonably intelligent, but there are a dozen simpler and/or more effective countermeasures he could have taken, starting with something as obvious as getting rid of Harry's wand.
If there were more chapters left to go, I'd put money on "Voldemort let all this happen as part of a greater gambit", but as things stand I'm feeling pessimistic.
Voldemort allowed Harry to be a threat because otherwise there wouldn't have been a story.
The problem is that he did so in a way that feels inconsistent with the rest of the story. Most villains in most stories aren't the type that would relieve their nemesis of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Sauron didn't seal off the Cracks of Doom, or even post a serious guard around them. The Emperor didn't place the shield generator on Endor in a hidden underground compound guarded by a small army. A great succession of villains have failed to just shoot James Bond. HPMOR!Voldemort would do all of those things, because from the start his extraordinarily high intelligence and skill at what he does have been cornerstones of his character. When he makes a mistake, many readers will assume (and have assumed, usually correctly) that it is a deliberate ploy. Mistakes as bad as what we're seeing here aren't just folly; they verge on character derailment.
As a simple matter of fact, Voldemort is stronger than Harry in basically every way, other than Harry's (incomplete) training in rationality. If Voldemort were a good enough planner, there's no way he could lose; he is smarter, more powerful, and has more ancient lore than any other wizard. If Voldemort were also rational, and didn't fall prey to overconfidence bias / planning fallacy...
Well, you can be as rational as you like, but if you are human and your opponent is a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All, then the story is going to read less like HPMOR, and more like:
"...HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD." Quirinus Quirrell calmly activated the toe ring he had prepared months ago, causing the capsule of sulfuric acid embedded in the top of Harry's skull (placed there earlier by an Imperiused Madam Pomfrey, in case of emergency) to break open and quickly dissolve the other Tom Riddle. Quirrell shook his head in disappointment as he felt the sense of doom diminish and then disappear, but it had to be done. He turned to walk towards the third floor corridor. The End.
Is that what we've seen presented so far?
Dumbledore won during the Battle of the Three Armies. His assault on Azkaban would have gotten him killed (and more seriously, set back his efforts by years) for a stupid communication error, were Harry not willing to risk his own life and invent new magic to save the man. Hermoine outlasted several hours of the Defense Professor's most aggressive psychological attacks possible, using fairly basic deontology. His 'lesson plan' with Ma-Ha-Su in Chapter 16 was bluntly stupid, even if Harry hadn't used the easy way out. In Chapter 35, he fears that Harry has screwed over his plans because of voicing an obvious disagreement that Harry has repeatedly given privately before.
And that's before we get to the stupidity that was enforced by canon : testing multiple novel spells (Horcruxes, however he 'reformated' the young Harry Potter) without sufficient and verified safeties, the highly fractious Death Eaters, the lackluster war with Dumbledore.
Quirrellmort is smart. He thinks ahead. But his fundamental philosophy is still very restricted. As much as he tries to claim otherwise, he's running on distilled Command Push -- we'll note that no De...
I think this is a great comment, but could you please expand on two points?
His 'lesson plan' with Ma-Ha-Su in Chapter 16 was bluntly stupid, even if Harry hadn't used the easy way out.
What are you talking about here?
And also
he's running on distilled Command Push
What does this mean?
What are you talking about here?
In Chapter 16, Quirrelmort instructed the class in a very simple hex that caused a small amount of pain and no lasting harm called Ma-Ha-Su. He then selects three students, Hermoine, Draco, and Harry Potter, and then requires them to select a student and fire Ma-Ha-Su at them, taking Quirrel and later House points for non-compliance. The comparisons to the Millgram Experiments become explicit in chapter 63. Hermoine refuses, Draco fires on Hermoine, and Harry fires on himself.
Harry explicitly beats Quirrelmort's plans, here : "Yes, quite ingenious, but there was a lesson to be taught and you dodged it." It's not clear he ever gets the intended lesson, given that Quirrelmort seemed to intend to teach Harry to harm Draco on obedient command.
Interestingly, this could have not just failed but have gone horribly wrong for Quirrelmort, and he wouldn't have even understood why. One of the common responses to Millgram-like actions in the last few years of science fiction is to turn on the person giving illegal orders. Harry wouldn't do that because of his upbringing, but other possible Riddle-clones would wanted to fire Ma-Ha-Su on Quirrel...
Let me have a go at coming up with a dozen:
I posted this as part of my review. I think it explains the wand thing. As so often happens in real life, we don't see the workings of mind that lead to every decisive factor in an outcome. In real life, we get to the end of a problem and often don't know why a particular mistake was made. ...
A small disturbance dwelt in my mind for these days, for I had concluded that Eliezer had already contrived a clever solution for Harry, sealed off all other such pathways, and that a strong indicator of what that contrived plan was, was that Voldemort left Harry with his wand after the Vow. Curious, that, oui? Voldemort specifically forbade Harry to raise his wand, and told his servants to attack him in a flurry of eclectic attacks, the mere thought of which would inevitably have an emotional effect on Harry, clouding his mental acuity. Since, Voldemort has in his consciousness that Harry has his wand, and has no reason to let him hold it, the clear explanation is that Eliezer could only think of a way for Harry to win if he had his wand, so he made Voldemort make a stupid mistake, it was the best he could do. Still quite good; I did not begrudge him it.
Since victory depends upon the wand, an...
I think there may be some hindsight bias here. We know that Harry has partial transfiguration and we know that it turns out poorly for LV. LV himself did not know these things. To the best of his knowledge (which he has good reason to believe is considerable and maybe exhaustive) there is no magic Harry can cast wordlessly with his wand down.
For LV to enact the additional precautions above, magic would be needed. He can't use magic on Harry, so taking them means reducing the size of the death eater guard by 1 or more during the time needed to take those precautions. If you don't know that Harry can do previously unknown to the world wandless magic, than that might actualy not seem like a good trade off.
Additionally, regardless of if trading 1 guard for additional precautions is actualy a good security trade, it is totaly in character that the kind of mind that created horcrux number 107 after allready having over a hundred redundant horcruxes would think the additional redundancy of guard 36 over guard 35 to be valuable.
I'm so disappointed that the Partial Transfiguration faction turned out to be correct.
Yeah, this is one of those solutions that, had I been writing, I would have ruled as not actually workable. Takes too long, Voldemort or a Death Eater sees the threads and breaks them on general principles, nanotubes don't actually have enough tensile strength to reasonably slice up everybody at once consistently, and so forth. I pretty much filed any tactical violence plan under "not practical".
Still, not my story. It's not out of keeping with the rest of the stuff in HPMOR.
High odds that Voldemort escaped. He's been extraordinarily hammy this whole time, and he called all the Death Eaters together, killed or crippled a few, and then explained his evil scheme to the hero before giving him a countdown to his inevitable death, while leaving him armed. It seems very plausible that Tom Riddle was tired of Lord Voldemort, and decided to retire him via dramatic massacre. Why make his new body a snaky freak-show, after all?
On the pedantic nitpicker trivia side of things, you don't have a tank of "oxyacetelene". An oxy-acetylene rig uses a tank of oxygen, and a tank of acetylene. But Harry is probably not a welder, and neither are the Weasely twins, so nobody involved was equipped to notice the problem.
Me too. I didn't say this a couple of days ago, owing to a lack of confidence that I now see to have been misguided; but while the nanowire PT solution is reasonable and effective and exactly the sort of thing that a sci-fi fan who fancies themselves clever would come up with, it's narratively shallow. And I can't see messily killing thirty-six people as in character for Harry at this moment, however much noise has been made about killing intent. Coming up with creative ways to kill people is one thing; actually going through with it in anger, or even thinking of it when faced with real hostility, is quite another.
(I'm also not totally sure it would work, but that depends on messy materials-science math that I can't be bothered with right now.)
Lest I be accused of being overly negative, though, the Obliviation bit does have a certain elegant symmetry to it.
Voldemort doesn't want the world destroyed, and he just made Harry into a world-destruction-preventer. Pointing this out — and pointing out that Harry is now a better world-destruction-preventer than Voldemort could become — doesn't involve changing Voldemort's utility function.
(Voldemort can't swear an Unbreakable Vow akin to Harry's because nobody has trust in him that could be sacrificed to power it.)
I feel like the problem turned out to be unnecessarily easier than it had to, that too much of the credit is due to luck, and some things could've been done better (Death Eaters could be saved). It's somewhat of a theme with all these spells and rituals being performed in unique situations and working on the first try, with little precaution taken to test them or theoretical grounds to expect reliability. For example, Hermione still wasn't tested. It's the first resurrection ever performed, at least by the people present. It involved further effects that might've never been combined in this way before. The person who knows the details is now defunct. He didn't plan to test it either, for the primary use case intended. Hermione's brain is warm and might be losing information or she might get terminally sick soon, with brain damage. We just assume everything worked.
One problem is that Harry didn't know that he can remain conscious after directly casting a spell at Voldemort, so it should've been planned around, with the less direct transfiguration being plan A for rendering Voldemort unconscious. We now know that this might've failed (more likely than before Ch. 114), and there had t...
My criteria for whether a character acts smart or stupid is whether I can see a glaring issue immediately. Like many others, I had asked right after ch.113 "why does Harry still have his wand and his glasses"? And, sure enough. Whatever trope describes the villain suddenly going into the Stupid and Careless mode at a critical time, it sure applies here. LV probably broke a few rules from the Evil Overlord's list, too.
Wow, I was expecting more of a pure Talking His Way Out of the Box solution, instead of a partial transfiguration solution. I'm curious as to whether or not this is the bad ending. I do think Voldemort was a bit stupid to not just kill Harry instantly instead of quizzing him for the Powers He Knows Not. As he said himself, given an eternity of immortality it is likely he would stumble across everything Harry has read, thought, and figured out.
Next chapter should be up any minute now...
Edit: It's up.
A lot of people think that Voldemort was going too easy on Harry, making this a "Coil vs. Taylor in the burning building" violation of suspension-of-disbelief for some of them. I am considering rewriting 113 with the following changes:
[pollid:840]
I would add a reason for Harry to have the wand.
Like, instead of, "You will not raise your wand", "You will only raise your wand when and how I permit it. Do not demonstrate a spell unless ordered."
That would imply that Voldemort was open to the possibility that Harry might demonstrate something, which would require arming him.
The big problem is that he left Harry his wand. If he uses more precautions against Harry, but still keeps leaving Harry his wand, then that makes the fact that he left Harry his wand less realistic, not more. So I actually think that you should go the other way with it - have him be less paranoid about Harry. Because otherwise you're making the inconsistency even worse. He's being cautious and paranoid enough to strip Harry's clothes from him, but leaves the wand in Harry's hand for one moment longer than he has to? It makes more sense if he has the Death Eaters throw a bunch of Finites at him to check for residual traps left by Dumbledore, and for that to be where he sees most of the threat coming from.
Having the Death Eaters look around makes sense, but the paralysis seems contrived to me. It's a very specific level of intelligence between what he have now and just having Mr. Grim cast Expelliarmus. I think it is more realistic for Voldemort to have dismissed the threat than for him to have considered it and decided that paralyzing Harry was the best solution.
Don't be too hasty, whatever you end up deciding! It's only been a day. A lot of people put a lot of thought into solving this problem, and it makes sense that their attitudes about whether the problem was too easy, or too hard, or whether they solved guessed the author's solution, or whether it's unrealistic, would be emotionally enhanced by the effort they spent.
Take a week, take a month, talk to people you trust.
As AlexanderWales says, the biggest flaw is the wand. If you add a line about harry being left holding his wand so that Voldemort can impose further unbreakable vows if he sees fit, or he has it left in case he needs to demonstrate any secret knowledge (along the lines of Patronus 2.0), Voldemort goes from holding the Idiot Ball to just making a mistake. He's trading off Harry possibly doing something impossible with his wand vs a far likelier benefit.
Long time lurker, signing up just to be able to vote for the harder version. Turns out I start out with 0 karma and am not allowed to vote. Oh well.
I do remark that Dumbledore was unable to detect Harry doing an ongoing Transfiguration while he looked into Harry's prison cell in Azkaban.
How did Harry move the wires through the air with partial transfiguration alone? He doesn't have bugs to carry it like Skitter does. How does he prevent air currents from messing it up?
Me:
Plus, carbon nanotubes are black, not silver.
HPMOR:
Over the next seconds, those near-invisible threads of reflected moonlight turned black.
Dammit.
Incidentally, did none of the death eaters have shields raised, or did the filaments pass through the shields?
Raise shields on general principles! There could be Aurors with invisibility cloaks or disillusioned nearby, enemies could suddenly appear by phoenix or some other method, there could be muggleborns with sniper rifles hidden a km away, someone could have travelled back in time to plant a bomb, one of the Death Eaters could be a traitor...
Mad-eye Moody would be disappointed.
EVER VIGILANT!
Nit: Harry correctly guessing before this chapter that the resonance affects mainly the caster in proportion to the caster's strength seems overly specific. His experience did indicate that the resonance was a greater threat to V than to himself, so his actions were justified, but his prediction should have been more disjunctive: Either the resonance mainly affects the caster in proportion to the caster's strength, or it affects both parties in proportion to their strength, or it mainly affects V regardless of who casts what due to some asymmetry, or it affects the caster in proportion to the spell's magical strength, or something else.
So, what's the probability that Harry returns to the Quidditch stands, checks his watch, and then snaps his fingers right before the explosion goes off?
Hopefully he doesn't--it'd suggest he was involved in the incident, which he would probably rather avoid--but I don't know if he has the emotional maturity to resist that opportunity.
So, Harry can only do potentially dangerous research if Hermione approves.
Consulting Hermione doesn't seem wise if she cannot protect her secrets. Does this mean Harry's research is on hold until she learns Occlumency?
This is the real magic, when you see something impossible happening. I had no idea how you can realistically beat immortal and powerful dark wizard.One "Obliviate" and your perspective shifts and that's it. It now looks pretty simple despite being impossible 5 minutes ago.
I wonder if it would be possible to erase most of Voldemort, but keep the Quirrel mask personality through some combination of Memory Charms, Obliviation and Legilimency. He was a pretty cool teacher, after all, when not murdering the students and whatnot. Using the Stone, it would be even possible to give him a permanently-transfugured Quirrel body, so that the students don't get scared of Voldie teaching them...
R.I.P Quirrelmort, we shall miss you...
I feel stupid. Not for the nanowire, as I was among many who suggested something similar.
I feel stupid for not suggesting the "make Voldemort insane" strategy. I thought it will not work because a wizard's mental state is not necessarily connected to his brain. For example, an animagus transformed into a cat can still retain her human mental state with a cat's brain.
But being driven insane because of a curse might be completely different, and could have an effect not only on the physical brain, but on whatever shape or form the mental state of a wizard is implemented in.
Looks like I had the right idea after all. I think strands of strong acid or a highly reactive alkaline metal would have been a safer tactic than the nano-wire garrotes, since Harry wouldn't need to spend the extra action to constrict, but apparently Eliezer had this planned out from chapter one and it was too late to change it (due to the silver line, black robes, etc).
What came after, though? Not quite as convincing for me. I can't believe that Harry was able to transfigure Voldemort despite the resonance cascade. I also am skeptical that Voldemort didn'...
in the back of his mind he felt some explosions of magic like he'd felt when Hermione died but he ignored them
Maybe some of the Death Eaters will leave ghosts behind, who will tell everyone what really happened.
Without any hesitation despite his wounds the Dark Lord jerked down and right through the air.
Something that could indicate trying to dodge, or consciousness leaving the body. It's not unreasonable for Voldie to think "I've lost here, no matter what I do this body will be unusable in the near future, in case he has a plan to incapacitate me without triggering my Horcrux wards I'd better go someplace else".
All in all I'd assign a high subjective probability to Voldie's spirit being intact. Voldemort is a thorough planner, so total Oblivation is...
I am starting to think that Lord Voldemort planned to commit suicide by proxy. Being without any personal aims, totally bored, without any happiness, surrounded by idiots, no chance of improvement - yet he cares about the world, at least somewhat, and realized that the original plan of playing chess with Harry would not alleviate his mood anymore anyway. And he has a better, happier and (age adjusted) more intelligent clone running around, so it is not like he will cease to exist altogether.
So he told Harry where to find Memory charms, prepared the plot, g...
And now we really know why Harry had to carry around his father's rock. For practice:
And meanwhile, just like magic hadn't defined a Transfigured unicorn as dead for purposes of setting off wards, Voldemort's horcruxes wouldn't define a Transfigured Voldemort as dead and try to bring him back.
That was the hope, anyway.
Harry's scar twinged one last time when the steel ring went on his pinky finger, holding the tiny green emerald in contact with his skin. Then his scar subsided, and did not hurt again.
There's a parallel between Dumbledore and Reddit's approach to the Ch. 113 solution: put a plethora of plots into motion, you only need one to work out.
Why doesn't Harry resurrect the people he just killed, or at least freeze them? They don't have to die.
He's out of mana. Also, staying at the scene would be an enormous risk. Also, being death eaters, they would on average kill more than one person each.
Well done Eliezer!
I have read lots and lots of 'partial transfiguration' solutions over the past few days. I didn't really like them, they seemed artificial, unrealistic.
But somehow when you told the solution, it didn't feel artificial at all. It felt like it made sense. And I really liked the way Harry stalled for time as well. A few very nice tricks there.
I'm not sure why Harry went through all the trouble of covering up his involvement though. Is there a reason he doesn't want to to take the credit? Is he afraid it will give away the secret of partial transfiguration? Or perhaps he doesn't want Draco to know he, presumably, killed Lucius? I guess we'll find out tomorrow ;)
The way he set it up gives Hermione the same credit for defeating Voldemort that Harry got when he was a baby.
Chaos General gets the Stone, Sunshine General gets superpowers, Dragon General gets No Parents.
There are a lot of theories over at fanfiction.net that Harry is inside the Mirror, seeing what he wants to see.
I considered this possibility back when we were searching for Harry's solution, and found that Voldemort uses the same hand for wand and gun before and after the Mirror. I thought: If they are in the Mirror, Eliezer would have subtly indicated that, perhaps Voldemort's use of hands would be reversed since the Mirror.
Does this qualify as sufficient proof that Harry and Voldemort are not in the Mirror?
Two things strike me as odd that I don't seem to have seen yet in other comments (but I might have missed them).
How could the "torture" option work ? From my understanding, if Voldemort gains consciousness again, he can leave his body. And you can't torture someone who is unconscious. The wand in Azkaban pit could work, but the "call Moody to torture Voldemort" option I really don't see how it could work.
How can it be so easy to Obliviate Voldemort ? Can't perfect Occlumens protect themselves from mind-altering spells even when unco
So... Quirrel told McGonagal that he was David Munroe, and it was implied with Madam Bones. It looks like David Munroe was killed in a battle with Voldemort, ending that noble and most ancient line, which has now been avenged by Hermione destroying Voldemort with her magic Girl-Who-Lived powers.
Are we going to get the Noble House of Granger? Does the House of Potter lose its noble status since David Munroe was apparently not previously dead to be avenged by Harry? Will they both be noble because the Wizengamot doesn't know what to do with the ambiguity?
I love how close we collectively got. Both that we came up with a solution close to the canon one, and that the canon one was just that bit more polished and elegant thanks to longer prep time.
So I decided not too look at comments during the hunt. I then got a "solution", but decided to wait a bit for something better to post it. And then I did not have time to post it. Well, silly me...
Anyway, because I have not seen this discussed (but maybe it was and I missed it?), here's my take on defending yourself from most ways to kill you. Note that this would not have worked for Harry for various reasons (as I said, my solution was unsatisfying), but I still think it could be debated.
Fact 1: Killing Curses cannot be blocked by magic or mater...
So did Harry just outsmart himself? Are we really expecting the clever Lord Voldemort to not have something in place to recover from obliviation? Harry seemed to appropriately judge the importance of this spell about half a second after he first heard of it, but Tom Riddle doesn't realise at all?
There is an artifact that might suffice, the Pensieve. Voldemort might have prepared such an artifact with all his memories, and had Bellatrix and/or others ready to restore them to him by it if necessary.
But I grant the extreme difficulty Voldemort is likely to have having been transfigured into a ring. If necessary, Harry can always do with the ring what Voldemort did with the Horcruxes and ensure it is lost forever.
I am glad to see that Stuporfy did the trick, and I did not see the Obliviate coming. My private (i.e. I would have posted it if I had more time/attention for HPMOR over the last two days and had vetted it) way to solve the Voldemort Problem would have been to time-turn him the violent way by shattering Harry's Time-Turner on him; but looking into it now it turns out I misremembered the scene of canon I was thinking of. (The shelf containing the Time-Turners gets bumped, and they all fall off, turning them- causing them to go back in time and fall again; I...
I really can't believe "use magic" was the right answer. In addition to being unsolvable from the perspective of the audience -- we don't know anything about magic! -- it's also totally out of step of the rest of the work. I'd love to see a rewrite fork from the "AI Box" line of solutions.
In the meantime I really hope they're still in the mirror.
One can network computers in such a way that computations, online services (web site), and/or stored information (databases, files) keep running seamlessly even after some nodes are crashed/destroyed/hacked. Certainly you would not design a decent AI whose mind had a potential single point of hardware failure like humans do with their brains. Shouldn't a wizard's True Horcrux network similarly be resilient against any active body(ies) being Obliviated, Imperiussed, etc.?
I think the solution was over-constrained. Simultaneously killing 36 death eaters, disarming (hah) Voldemort, and then stunning him wasn't just A way out of the predicament without dying immediately, it's arguably the BEST way. All the limitations Voldemort put on Harry were irrelevant, and all the relevant ones that could've happened, like taking away his wand or shooting him in the kneecaps before he talks weren't taken. Voldemort forces Harry to use his ONE ability he can use without moving his wand, which also happens to be the one that can nearly effortlessly kill dozens of people in an instant? I guess when you look at it has him falling to the power he knew not it kind of works.
Waiting for the other foot to drop because, as I'm sure the comments are full of, it is completely absurd that a wizard as powerful as ~Lord Voldemort~ is incapable of detecting a transfigured spidersilk looping its way around him and his followers regardless of his unawareness of partial transfiguration.
It's still magic.
Wizards are not blind to magic around them created by methods they are unaware of. The patronus charm 2.0 was still noticeable by Quirrel and Dumbledore. When Harry demonstrated partial transfiguration, Dumbledore and McGonagall were surpr...
I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea that could still be true, but wasn't needed in Chapter 114-115. It had bothered me that the Hermione toe-ring wasn't detected. In fact, it was explicitly checked for magic and it was discovered that it was portkey magic rather than transfiguration magic.
Overnight, I had the idea that perhaps Harry put his portkey toering on Hermione's body (though obviously not her toe) before he transfigured her. I have no idea how such things work, but I suppose its possible that the portkey magic would still be detectible when transfigured and would even mask out the transfiguration magic.
I am somewhat surprised that no wards triggered on any of Harrys actions. OK, we learned little about what wards can and can't do but given that ant-apparition, anti-phoenix and whatnot are established by Death Eaters by default and Quirrell used - what 50? - protective measures in that secret hotel room when he left off for Azkaban. I'd guess that some protective measures should have triggered.
Interesting. I wonder ifHarry just killed Sirius. I suppose that's not exactly the most important thing from a shut-up-and-multiply perspective, but it might also explain an additional reason why Harry avoids looking (and finding information about) something he may change later with the use of a time turner.
Also, no reference to a certain pack of cards yet.
I am surprised that using transfiguration and defeating Voldemort played such a large role in the solution.
I thought that it was much more likely that the solution would be to lose in some way, but to lose in a way that maintained hope / constrained Voldemort's actions to not be evil, and then to continue to work towards a better situation once out of immediate danger.
I also thought that the Vow that Harry had made would be the biggest key to the solution. After all, transfiguring carbon nanotubes and antimatter were things that Harry could have achieved ...
Harry should be treating himself for transfiguration sickness right now. He breathed some strange smells, and having a death eater poison the air is exactly the sort of contingency Voldemort should have taken.
Also, he doesn't seem to have paid any attention to where the Philosopher's Stone is. Which seems like a huge mistake.
(Edit: Reread, and noticed it says "Harry donned his robes, and placed the Stone of Permanency in an ordinary pocket, he wasn't sure what the Stone might do to his pouch." Retract previous sentence.)
I think Harry went with a slightly more risky PT solution than the one I suggested, but it's satisfying and considerably more in character than the PT => time turner escape solution path.
I suppose if I thought more narratively I would have discarded every solution that didn't involve killing his enemies.
I was extremely disappointed by these chapters, enough so that I would prefer the shorter and sadder ending. Various things that seem to me wrong with it:
Harry's plan is the kind of complicated plan that would not really work, because of unknown constraints on magic, constraints on his concentration and imagination, either his magic or the strands themselves being noticed by Voldemort, or for some other reason.
Voldemort is left holding the Idiot Ball, which Eliezer promised would not happen, because he left Harry with his wand and glasses for no reason, as...
"Other living weapons cannot be Transfigured; they will not survive the disenchantment for the requisite six hours to avoid being traced by Time-Turner."
So, how does Harry plan to evade been traced by Time-Turner?
Is it correct that Voldemort will die when he will be disenchanted?
By the way, why did Voldemort make a description of Hermione resurrection ritual and put it in a pouch if he planed to kill Harry anyway?
Guys everyone on reddit/Hpmor seems to be talking about a spreadsheet with all solutions listed. Could anyone please post the link as a reply to this comment. Pretty please with sugar on top :)
I'm wondering whether Harry believes himself to be a threat to the world at this point in time. This would be a plausible reason for him to be setting Hermione up to take the credit for killing Voldiemort.
For me chapter 114 was all I wanted it to be (and possibly more) and chapter 115 was lovely.
I did stop thinking at "so he could transfigure a tip of his wand or maybe his fingernail into a nanotube, but I have no idea what he could do with that, because there is practically no way for him to talk his way out".
I didn't really check the LessWrong thread earlier, but I am happy to see that people here are a lot less willing to accept the unsatisfying solution than at r/HPMOR.
I used to really enjoy HPMOR, but it is now basically ruined for me - Voldemort holding the idiot ball, the one time where things really matter, and this is also when Harry's untested strategies work like a charm on the first try without him being noticed? I guess I was too quick to praise Eliezer on being able to write more believable scenes than Rowling.
What disappoints me almost as much is that the original answer was (from all that I can gather) to mainly just use the swerving hex. Hahahaha.
I'm pretty sure the original answer always had the partial transfiguration / nanotubes / garotte element. Consider the bit at the very start of chapter 1 (fraction of a line, robes falling, blood); the fact that in H&H's transfiguration experiments they use nanowires, verify that they're very strong, and verify that their length can be changed by transfiguration; arguably the bit in chapter 7 where Harry thinks what a good idea it would be just to decapitate all the Death Eaters; Dumbledore's insistence that partial transfiguration, being a power the Dark Lord knows not, may be vital to his victory.
So... what we should do now is to work out all the things Quirrell should have before this. He couldn't predict partial transfiguration, true. But he knew that Harry had a power he knew not, and had a long time to plan for contingencies.
Personally, I think he should have had the death eaters disillusioned, surround Harry but from a distance, cast holograms to confuse him and then use ventriliquo charms. At the very least disillusionment should be as much of a general tactic as a massed finite and the death eaters could have been hidden.
The massively more o...
Chapter 90:
even a simple Obliviation will stretch the edge of your current stamina. It is a dangerous art, illegal to use without Ministry authorization, and I would caution you not to use it under circumstances where it would be inconvenient to accidentally erase ten years of someone's life. I wish I could promise you that I would obtain one of those highly guarded tomes from the Department of Mysteries, and pass it to you beneath a disguised cover. But what I must actually tell you is that you will find the standard introductory text in the north-northwest stacks of the main Hogwarts library, filed under M.
So there is no defense against Obliviation that Voldemort could have prepared for himself?
I confess I expected paranoid-Moody thinking from Harry, not Far-mode Good thinking. The stakes are so high that anything other than ruthless pragmatism feels insane to me.
One defense against obliviation would be to keep creating old-school horcruxes at regular intervals. As I understand they contain snapshots of current mind-state so should be unaffected by the main copy getting obliviated later. He might not be quite gone yet.
So there is no defense against Obliviation that Voldemort could have prepared for himself?
With perfect sight toward the future, perhaps he could have. It's far from convincing that it would have actually helped, without blocking thirty other vulnerabilities.
Obliviation's particularly interesting because it requires no upkeep, but it's far from the only thing that would bypass Horcruxes. Voldemort's just as vulnerable to being repeatedly stunned, to petrification (hence the murder of the basilisk), to transfiguration, to the Imperius, to pretty much any mind-affecting charm. The biggest defense is, well, the same as anyone else's defense to the Killing Curse -- don't be there. Creating a defense specifically against large-scale Obliviation isn't very valuable if the attacker has countless further options to permanently disable anyone so defenseless as to be vulnerable to an Obliviate.
"the stunbolt leapt out of her wand and -
Does LV really need hands to stop stunbolts? Why did he try to evade?
Am I wrong in thinking that Voldemort had given his gun to one of the Death Eaters, and so Harry should not be seeing it fall alongside Voldemort's wand when he cuts his hands off?
We were told to keep Harry from dying immediately. The actual solution had Harry winning. I guess the moral of the story is that if you figure out how to accomplish what you wanted, don't stop thinking. Figure out how to accomplish more.
Harry said that he had to kill the Death Eaters. I disagree. There are ways he could have incapacitated them. Probably. My plans killed them all too, because their lives weren't worth the increased chance of failure.
I think Harry should have tortured Voldemort to insanity and then obliviated him. That way if the obliviation doesn't stick, Voldemort would still be tortured to insanity.
Isn't Voldemort's body going to die in its Transfigured form? I assume Harry has a way around that, and he has a reasonably long time frame to implement a solution (at least compared to the 60 seconds he had to work with just now), but that dangling loose end is gnawing at me.
No, this is Flitwick's personal dueling version of Stupefy, which is hard to dodge. Chapter 86.
This is Mad-Eye Moody's homing version of the spell, which has a different incantation, as used in Ch 86.
The spell is Flitwick's. It was used by Harry to stun Mad-Eye Moody.
Hm. Was hoping for a talking solution, expecting a combination of Transfiguration and science to feel gimmicky.
But hey, I'm getting ahead of myself, not even 100% sure this is going to be a good end.
Is it my imagination, or is the community more eager to contribute ideas on how to help Voldemort than to contribute ideas on how to save Harry?
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 114, and also, as a special case due to the exceptionally close posting times, chapter 115.
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.)