relevant (Benford's law)

I've forgotten.

I'm sorry I might have missed it, but where did the notion of humans being turned into house elves come from?

Maybe he got it from you? I know I sure didn't consider it likely enough to be worth recording.

Surely Quirrelmort wouldn't give Harry that diary, right?

I thought it was fairly obviously that diary, and thus an effort by Quirrelmort to take over/destroy Harry the way Ginny was (almost) in canon. Harry has apparently avoided the trap entirely because he is under the logically reasonable impression that he needs to learn Latin to read Roger Bacon's diary. I'm pretty sure other people have reached the same conclusion in previous threads.

We then see a second effort to approximately the same end with the Dementor brought on school grounds (at Quirrelmort's instigation) with Harry's wand "accidentally" being left near the cage.

You would think that Harry, on hearing a mysterious voice, would mention something. Harry turned around expecting McGonagall, not expecting some random person. Harry heard McGonagall.

The author would also mention that the voice changed owners or sounded strange. It's clever writing to drop clues in plain sight to the reader. It's not clever writing for your story to omit sensory experiences that are immediately apparent to all the involved characters, but are not conveyed to the reader.

"Squib" is a nonmagical child of magical parents, at least in canon. MoR seems to be using it as a genetic marker, which I'm honestly not sure is compatible with canon.

(Now that I think about it, if Harry's genetic theory is correct, doesn't a squib child of a wizarding couple imply that Mom was getting some on the side?)

IMO, new thread for Ch 82, not before - the "show all" button is still here, and the thread proliferation is getting silly, this is the third in a week. Alternately, can we get better forum software?

I would actually suspect parents of a half blood (is there a name for this?) would be the weak link, rather than muggle-born children.

You've got people who have lived their whole lives as muggles, then suddenly they fall in love and get married and find out their spouse is a wizard. They've spent ~20 years in the muggle world and probably have a career of their own. No way they don't ask their spouse to spend a couple hours and let them both live like kings for the rest of their lives. And if they don't even get that much information about their other's life, that's some seriously messed up power dynamics in that household.

So, Dementors Part Deux.

First, because someone had to say it:

Harry took all the silver emotion that fueled his Patronus Charm and shoved it at the Dementor; and expected Death's shadow to flee from him -

-and as Harry did that, he flung his hands up and shouted "BOO!"

The void retreated sharply away from Harry until it came up against the dark stone behind.

In the hall there was a deathly silence.

...And to everyone but Harry, that deathly silence seemed to say "Please do not punish this one, my Dark Liege!"

Harry turned his back on the empty void, and had a moment to wonder why Dumbledore and Lucius were making such odd faces before the Aurors acted on reflex.

(I guess Dementors aren't that smart.)

Secondly, I noticed that Harry's first Transfiguration lesson includes a photograph of a Dementor. What would that look like? What does Harry see, compared to everyone else? Why was he asking all the other students what they saw in the Patronus lesson without ever once thinking of that photograph?