This is really the only sense in which I am disappointed in this story. One of the things that really got me excited about HPMOR was that the protagonist did not just shrug and accept that magic is magic, he sought to untangle how it's laws work, and the results were as bewildering as I imagine quantum must have been to scientists of the early 20th century. That is one of the puzzles that I really wanted to solve about this story, almost more than I wanted to know how the cloak and dagger mysteries resolved. It felt to me like we were promised that magi...
I am among those with a sympathetic view of Snape. This was a satisfying chapter for me.
Ideally he has been obliviated of that part of the conversation too. "the most important part of any secret is the knowledge that a secret exists", etc.
It's not nearly that simple. In a nutshell, their brains are very noticeably different from normal brains, the track record of treatment has been not only ineffective but sometimes counterproductive, and the problem is considered by many to be intractable. The studies done were not done well, and there have been some promising results with "decompression treatment" for juveniles who are mild to moderate in their psychopathy, and no other group. It would be a great boon to society if adult psychopaths could be rehabilitated, but no one knows ho...
Harry has to some extent undone the work of Merlin. Merlin's interdict ensures that the most powerful magics slowly die out of the world as wizards and witches die with their secrets. Harry's scheme for immortality in the magical world puts a stop to the losses, and allows magical knowledge to be kept as it is re-discovered, however slowly. Previously the loss rate exceeded the discovery rate. I think that is about to be reversed. And the Interdict of Merlin was put in place to avoid a prophesied destruction of the world.
Ch. 80
...And when (the legend c
Unexplained recoveries are a real thing. Everyone just shrugs and celebrates, or maybe credits God or the ginko biloba. It's been Flamel all along.
Agreed, and add to all of those risks that Harry is an obliviation noob and he may not have gotten the wipe right. We don't know what Voldemort will or will not remember if he wakes.
Even in the medium case of possession by an amnesiac, V might figure out who he probably is, or get briefed by a servant who figures it out. The list of recently deceased epically powered wizards in the world is pretty short.
And Harry is being naive again:
...On Harry's left hand, a tiny emerald glowed bright beneath the morning sun.
Not Heaven, not some faraway star, not a diffe
Also if Hermione wakes up as a copy of Harry:
4 - Harry and most of the HPMOR readers will be extremely dismayed at this development.
I've argued before that HPMOR probably includes some kind of mind/body dualism. It occurs to me that an interesting experiment is about to be performed.
The body of Hermione Granger has been infused with the life and magic of Harry Potter. I assume for narrative reasons that Hermione will wake up as Hermione. But a copy of Harry could wake up in Hermione's body instead.
The mechanisms behind a person' life force, magic force, and mind are unknown to us. We don't also don't know whether or to what extent these aspects of a person are separate or connected...
Yeah, and that make sense. There's also that he may be one of the last remaining repositories for lost knowledge.
But we've seen internal monologue from Harry where he thinks about the intrinsic value of Voldemort's life and the values of the children's children's children and so on. It's incredibly naive. Voldemort is an immortal psychopath who is ridiculously overpowered and very difficult to contain. Taking that guy out is entirely in sync with valuing life in general. I'm not a fan of the death penalty, but his mere existence is threatening enough that I would make an exception with no hesitation and not feel bad about it ever.
Also:
..."Has your confederacy deduced who I really am?" The words were spoken with deceptive mildness.
"Yes, in fact. Now -"
Pure magic, pure power crashed into the room like a flash of lightning, like a thunderclap echoing about her ears that deafened her other senses, the papers on her desk blown aside not by any conjured wind but by the sheer raw force of arcane might.
Then the power subsided, leaving only Hermione Granger's death certificates drifting down through the air to the floor.
"I am David Monroe, who fought Voldemort,"
Would you quote me where Harry used obliviate in Hogwarts on someone that would have tripped wards? I don't recall that.
and since we expect them to be quite extensive, it's very unlikely he never triggered one.
I do not expect this. Time-tuners are fine. Invisibility cloaks are fine. Draco's torture hex was fine. The only thing I can think of that Harry did that might have triggered a ward without permissions was bring in the transfigured unicorn. And that isn't conclusive at all. It was transfigured, and as far as I know the Defense Professor can't just bring magical creatures in to Hogwarts either.
I don't think it's been tested.
No magic burst at death would be one prediction to check, though not conclusive. You could test it with Horcrux 2.0, though no one has had the opportunity to do that before now. The fact that Voldemort has expressed uncertainty about whether he is capable of surviving dementors, and that he is relying upon escaping from Quirrel's body in time to survive dementors points in the direction of him believing that a dementor might be capable of taking out him and his whole horcrux network in one shot.
None of that is conclusive, but it's all suggestive and supports the popular version of what dementors do.
Yeah, I'm thinking separate systems but there's a lot we don't know about how this works and why the discrepancies are there.
Actually, we aren't sure that Harry doesn't have Defense Professor permissions, are we?
That's a good link, thanks. I'm warm to compatibilism. I think I've confused the conversation by using the wrong terms, though. Instead of pointing at a lack of free will I should have pointed at the complete lack of causality, which is more constraining. You can read EY on it here.
My interpretation of this would be that space-time would be a fixed object that exists in it's entirety. In the same sense that you could take a cross sectional scan of a sneaker and play it from rear to front, there would be a logical consistency to how the slides transf...
I'd read it as "Defense Professor" being a role with a package of permissions being assigned to a user. The map shows usernames, so to speak, not what roles or permissions they've been assigned in some other portion of the security system.
I'm skeptical. If dementors really do destroy your soul then having a horcrux may not be helpful against them. I'm a fan of taking V's wand down to the pit, in fact.
So, I don't know how these stable time loops are supposed to work. My working model is that they function by trial and error, that time iterates through a universe until it encounters paradox, at which point it returns to pre-paradox, inserts some change into the world through prophecy or whatever, and tries again. This continues until a stable timeline is found, with an unknown number of them being discarded/destroyed. It appears from within that things worked on the first pass, but they did not. Our viewpoint never follows into one of those dead ends...
Lifting someone does work. Where is that energy coming from?