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Subbak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 03 March 2015 06:02PM

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Comment author: Phigment 03 March 2015 07:24:07PM 13 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Subbak 03 March 2015 07:43:14PM 2 points [-]

We know for a fact that the Hogwarts wards do not raise an alarm when they should, because they did not detect Draco being under a Blood-Cooling Charm. And we also know that Voldie had a better idea regarding those wards (whether he actually had said wards in place around Draco is debatable, but still, he had the idea).

So I think it's extremely probable that the wards he has to detect his own death are more efficient than the Hogwarts wards, and he's currently riding Bella's body and kicking himself for once more not having just used Avada Kedavra.

Comment author: Phigment 03 March 2015 07:56:26PM 3 points [-]

Or he and Bella are kicking back on a beach in the Caribbean, drinking alcohol from coconuts and murdering anyone who plays loud music nearby or fails to clean up after their dogs.

Rematch in twenty years.

Comment author: MathMage 03 March 2015 07:55:50PM 0 points [-]

The Blood-Cooling Charm was invented for the story specifically to offer a means of murder that didn't set off the wards until the point of death; furthermore, if a professor (Quirrell) cast it, the wards wouldn't trigger anyway.

Comment author: Subbak 03 March 2015 08:14:10PM 3 points [-]

Well, yes, but it had to be believable that Hermione had cast it, therefore we can assume that it would not have triggered the wards even if Quirrel had not cast it.