If you assume both free will and prescience, it's natural. You cannot see the consequences of a decision that has not yet been made, but once it has been, then you can view it. Think of the visions in Dune, as one of the better-known examples - the visions that the seers see are infinite branches, not single facts, and the branch points are their decisions. (The analogy is not perfect - in Dune, the decisions of non-seers are taken as given - but I hope the idea is clear).

Eliezer seems to be taking a page from Alicorn's book. In Luminosity Alice is plagued by differing visions as Bella constantly changes her mind about her future, and then the actual future snaps into place when a final choice is made.

Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It's not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry's decision doesn't seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.

Ack. I can't believe it took me this long, but I think Quirrellmort's plan has finally fallen into place for me. Quirrellmort's primary goals are:

(1) Attain immortality. (2) Enjoy it.

But he believes a necessary means to those ends is:

(3) Kill Harry Potter.

When Quirrellmort first said that when he made his Evil Overlord list, he realized following it all the time would defeat the purpose of being a Dark Lord. I wondered if he was telling the truth about that. HPMOR is all about playing with things that don't make sense in traditional stories, and the fact the bad guy wants to rule the world in traditional stories is one of those things that rarely makes any sense. It's taken for granted that bad guys want to rule worlds, but why? Wouldn't it be a lot of work?

At first glance, though, having Quirrellmort not want to rule the world (or even just Magical Britain) would have done funny things to the dramatic tension of the story. Probably the story would end up being about whether Harry could think clearly enough to do utopia right, with Quirrellmort acting not as a traditional antagonist but more of a tempter-figure, trying to nudge Harry towards becoming a Dark Lord.

Now I've become convinced that Quirrellmort was very much telling the truth about deciding not to be a Dark Lord. Here's the thing, though: he still wants to be immortal. Remember the scene where Harry realizes that his mysterious dark side is terrified of death, and he needs to coddle it? If his dark side is a piece of Voldemort's soul, that's telling us that Voldemort is terrified of death.

And Voldemort has heard a prophecy saying that either he or Harry must die. He's absolutely terrified of death, so he's going to try to make sure it's Harry. He didn't intend to kill Harry on the Night of Godric's Hollow, but that's because he knew the part of the prophecy that said, "He will mark him as his equal." He realized if he tried to kill Harry directly, according to the prophecy something would go wrong, so he decided to first fulfill the part about marking Harry as his equal intentionally, and then figure out how to kill Harry in a way that nothing would go wrong.

For purposes of the story's plot, his central goal isn't any different than Canon!Voldemort's. Both are focused on killing Harry. But HPMOR!Voldemort, once he's done that, won't try to rule Magical Britain. He'll go off and do whatever the hell he feels like.

I wonder if maybe from '73-'81 Voldemort deliberately avoided winning the war, because he thought fighting a war would be more fun than actually trying to rule after you've won.

Yes. Exactly. That's my point.

(Not sure why you said this.)

If EY originally intended the bait and switch, then regretted it, p>0.8 he would clean out other things that only exist to support his ill conceived tease.

What other things?

That is, if the bait-and-switch was intended, he would've had to come up with an actual character that fit all those facts as well, and it seems like "he spent seven years sleeping in the same room as Voldemort" is a non-trivial detail to change.

I can haz evidences, plz?

But thanks for even just the claims.

Voted down for neither containing new and interesting ideas nor being funny.

Wait, when did we learn anything about the Rita Skeeter prank?