I am predicting that Harry has Hermione's body, though I'm not yet sure where. The reason is that Harry, from whose POV we see Chapter 94, does not seem especially concerned or upset that someone has run off with Hermione's body. If someone else had taken it, and thus interfered with his plans, he would be. He'd be thinking hard about who has it, where they've put it, and how to get it back. He'd probably be yelling at the professors for being stupid and incompetent. Instead he barely reacts when the headmaster tells him "Hermione Granger's remains are now missing."
He has probably transfigured the corpse, since that explains all the emphasis on maintaining transfigurations of large objects like his father's rock earlier in the book.
You're right Harry's mood is some evidence for his having the body. And from his behavior I think it's clear where it is:
"The gem upon your ring," Dumbledore said. "It is no longer a clear diamond. It is brown, the color of Hermione Granger's eyes, and the color of her hair." A sudden tension filled the room. "That's my father's rock," Harry said. "Transfigured the same as before. I just did it to remember Hermione -" "I must be sure. Take off that ring, Harry, and place it upon my desk." Slowly, Harry did so, removing the gem and setting the ring off to the other side of the desk. Dumbledore pointed his wand at the gem and -
From this and putting the ring as far away as possible I'm pretty sure the body is the ring and the rock sits on it to fool the magic detector. Someone called it in the comments on last chapter, when I get a chance to check I'll edit their name in so they get the appropriate Bayes points.
Yes. Note this part:
Slowly the boy sat up in bed, his hands momentarily fiddling beneath the covers.
He was putting the ring on, because he was afraid of wearing it while asleep, because the transfiguration might fail. Waking up with a dead girl is better than waking up without a finger and with a dead girl.
Ringmione seems to be the most popular hypothesis at the moment. It strikes me as extremely careless a plan for Harry to attempt; recall Quirrell's comments after the battle with the transfigured armor, and the first battle where passing out ended the transfiguration on the marshmallow he was practicing with.
However, I took "Harry's parents come to Hogwarts" as a completely insane move that Dumbledore/Macgonnagle would be highly unlikely to pull, and yet the elder wizards thought rather differently from me and did it anyway. I still think using the ring involves Harry assigning way too little cleverness to Dumbledore, but in light of the ordeal with his parents I'll give it a little more probability weight.
(Note also that Harry did something under the covers when Flitwick showed up.)
I took "Harry's parents come to Hogwarts" as a completely insane move
Hum, well, if you think like a general wanting to win a war, yes. If you think as a teacher preoccupied about a 11-yo boy's mental health after he literally saw his best friend bleeding to death in his arms, fetching the boy's parents feel like the thing to do. And my own mental model of McGonagall is more that of a teacher preoccupied with a child's mental well-being than of a general.
McGonagall is upgrading herself and questioning her previous stances, but still, she seems like the only one who actually cares for a Harry as a child in distress, nearly as much as she cares about the war.
This is a world where there are potions that can regrow bones in a single night. I think it wouldn't matter that much to Harry if he did lose his finger.
It's not completely any one thing, rather it’s a combination of many things
In Azkaban, Dumbledore walks through and checks every unit. Bella remarks afterward that it was Dumbledore doing the check. That means he was close enough for her to identify him. She was not in great shape at the time and had almost no magic left. He was the most powerful wizard in several centuries doing an active search. It seems very unlikely he didn't notice everyone in the room. So with no tricks or deductions, I think there’s a chance Dumbledore finds out right here, and we see some hints that he did.
Returning from his search Dumbledore remarks that a prisoner had the same magic as a first year. As a Hogwarts prof, he knows very well how much magic a first year has.
Returning from the search Dumbledore changes tune from "Bella must not leave alive" to "let us not be the first to use deadly curses". (Ostensibly because they didn't kill Barry)
But if Dumbledore didn’t find Harry with his search, there are still various clues out there. And Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world, in a world where power comes from solving mysteries, remembering details, and piecing together...
It wouldn't - but it would reduce Harry's risk of losing a finger to a Finite Incantatem in combat. And Harry does take pains to physically separate the ring from the stone before Dumbledore inspects the stone:
Slowly, Harry did so, removing the gem and setting the ring off to the other side of the desk.
Unless that's just an intended second red herring, to make Dumbledore feel even worse about mistrusting Harry a second time. But just like Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape err in completely distrusting the wards when they say the Defense Professor killed Hermione, we can't treat possibly falsified evidence as anti-evidence, this has to shift our belief at least a little bit toward the Ringmione hypothesis.
The ring is also a significantly less suspect place to hide Hermione than the stone, because transfiguring something into a ring that you wear goes directly contrary to McGonagall's safety advice. Partial transfiguration provides a way around the safety issue, and Dumbledore and McGonagall are unused to thinking about things that can be done with partial transfiguration, so the idea is less likely to occur to them.
I'm about 50% confident that Hermione is in the ring.
(By the way, the wards' identification of Hermione's killer as the Defense Professor is strong evidence for the theory that the Defense Professor was carrying some nasties standing in his pocket when Dumbledore drew a circle around Quirrel to mark the Defense Professor to Hogwarts's wards.)
Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?
On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.
I agree, and suspect a time turner is involved. Reasoning:
If I am reading this correctly, Harry asks about whether or not making Hermione an Infernius would allow her to keep her mind twice, once in Chapter 90, and once in chapter 94. In neither case does his reaction seem to phase the other person much, so it doesn't seem to be a social maneuver.
Harry also needs to urgently go to the bathroom in 94. So he doesn't seem likely to waste time asking questions that he already knows the answer to for no reason.
This strongly implies he has forgotten part of the events of chapter 90 at some point, or that he asked that question for some reason other than curiosity. Also, he has access to an unlocked time turner, and is going to have access to memory charms soon (the moment he gets to have a moment where he's not drowning in social contact and can actually go READ the book). He's also really, really, determined to do something to revive Hermione.
Harry could now suspect that he is GOING to take Hermione's body in the future. Then he can attempt to go back in time, and then steal the body, and then memory charm his past self so his past self didn't remember during the interrogation. It's cha...
I think Harry's second question about Infernius was rhetorical.
...the Dark Lord has taken Hermione Granger's remains, it seems. I cannot think of anything he would gain thereby, except to send her corpse against you as an Inferius. Severus shall give you certain potions to keep about your person. Be warned now, and be prepared for when you must do what must be done."
"Will the Inferius have Hermione's mind?"
"No -
"Then it's not her.
Harry is saying that he's mentally prepared to kill something that looks like and used to be Hermione.
It's also possible that he wanted to confirm the validity of the information he got from Quirrell. If Quirrell and Dumbledore agree on something, it's probably true to the best anyone can tell, or at least that's probably how Harry sees it.
I suspect a time turner is involved for different reasoning. Specifically, I suspect that Harry's wards allow time-turned copies of himself to do things while he is asleep (since future-him knows more). So, my guess is that Harry stole Hermoine's body last night, woke up to find it missing (hence, the fumbling under sheets), goes through the interrogation, goes back in time, and steals Hermoine's body from his sleeping past-self.
I'd been wondering if Harry might have left Hermione's transfigured body with someone else. Probably not Neville or Quirrel, because the professors are already paying attention to them lately and Harry doesn't completely trust Quirrel's intentions. But he could safely leave it with Lesath, as long as no one saw Harry give Lesath the body and reclaim it later. Harry considers Lesath's loyalty a resource now, and no one else thinks Lesath is relevant. It's not typical of Harry to rely on others for help, though, so I'm not confident that he actually did this.
Eh, the theories about the ring is the body and the gem is the decoy seem crazily, unnecessarily risky. They rely on Dumbledore doing an insufficient search. It seems like a much more reliable strategy is that as soon as Dumbledore asked to check the ring, he precommitted to going back in time to swap the body-gem for the rock-gem. Then he goes to the bathroom, drops back an hour, transfigures the rock, swaps the gems on sleeping Harry, then goes back to the bathroom for the handoff.
That said, it's been stated that solids undergo internal changes over time, and so a living thing transfigured into a solid and back would die within hours. There's got to be another piece to the puzzle than just Harry transfigured the body. I considered the possibility that Harry transfigured it into something more stable than wizards are used to dealing with, like a single gold atom, but that presents it's own logistical challenges.
"I very much need to visit the washroom, and I would also like to change out of these pyjamas."
This is where he's going to be using the time-turner to pick up Hermione's transfigured body before Flitwick arrives.
The reason this works this time, is that he has already precommitted to doing so when he spent all those hours thinking until dinner the day before. The ring is a red herring.
I'm reasonably certain time turners can't jump you forwards in time. So far as I can tell everyone who's used a time turner has taken the 'long path' to catch back up with their most advanced present.
It struck me last night that, if you really wanted to get good predictions on what will happen in the rest of the story, you can just reread the whole thing, look for any potential plot devices that haven't already been triggered in some central way, and figure out how those things might be used. There's not a lot of story left; Eliezer said this arc, a couple of intermediate chapters, and one final plot arc.
I haven't got the time to do this myself, but it seems doable. If you want to really solve everything, set up a collaborative spreadsheet or something, and start hacking away. :)
General nitpick: can I request that everyone learn how to spell "canon" and "McGonagall" correctly?
In chapter 94, Harry knows about Important Things that we haven't seen him learn.
Harry to Dumbledore:
If the enemy can notice you running off to consult the Weasley twins during class after Hermione was arrested, and find out about their magic map and steal it, then they can wonder why I was guarding Hermione Granger's body.
From Harry's internal monolog:
Obvious problem 1, the Dark Lord is supposed to have made his horcrux in 1943 by killing whatshername and framing Mr. Hagrid.
Harry has never been told about Horcruxes, nor the Marauder's Map. How does he know about them?
Has Harry been busy offscreen?
Or, is this exposition cut from Chapter 86?
(Also, isn't Horcrux capitalized in canon?)
EDIT: Chapter 94 was edited to remove Horcrux references.
Ah, there it is!
Harry time-turned to just before the troll attack. (In the one-and-a-half minutes when he went into Hermione's room.) This is probably pretty clear -- he's been keeping everyone else out of that room, and the centrality of the time-turner in this story more or less demands that Harry do so. Harry would have done this even if he couldn't come up with a plan in his previous six hours, just so he'd have another six hours to think, or do what he deemed needful to preserve Hermione's body.
Somewhere in there, he talked to the twins, and poorly obliviated them. Evidence:
Besides, it'll be a narratively nice, dark moment when Harry uses a spell whose existence he abhors on two of his best remaining friends and allies...
the Dark Lord is supposed to have made his horcrux
Looks like this has been corrected to "the Dark Lord is supposed to have made his lich-phylactery-thingy".
I did not recognise the term "lich phylactery", so did a quick Google. It is basically exactly the same as a horcrux, as defined in Dungeons and Dragons. Did JK Rowling pinch the idea from D+D, or did they both get it from a common source?
The idea of a creature which can preserve its soul or life in an object is very old, and has appeared both in mythological sources and fantasy for a long time. For example, the Chronicles of Prydain were published in the 1960s and had at one point a villain with a similar situation. To a lesser extent, Sauron's relationship to his Ring has aspects of the same idea.
A much older example is the myth of Koschei who kept his soul hidden in a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside an iron chest on a specific island. (Some versions of the story modify the exact details of the nesting and protection.) The oldest documented version of the Koschei story we have is from 1890, but it is likely that the story is much older. So it is hard to say where Rowling got the idea from since so many old versions of this have been floating around.
for Horcrux, Moody lets the word slip in Multiple Hypothesis Testing and Dumbledore had described the concept without the word previously
as for the map....?
There is another point which wasn't discussed much, but does trouble me : the "outpouring of magic" that happened in chapter 89 when Hermione died.
It's the first time we heard about anything like that happening after a wizard death. It's not canon. It wasn't hinted to before, like Dumbledore didn't speak about it in "pretending to be wise", when he tries to convince Harry souls exist. Harry didn't feel it when his parents were killed. Harry didn't feel it when Rita Skeeter is killed by Quirrell. That's a lot of evidence pointing to it not being the common thing that happens when someone dies.
And yet, Harry doesn't ask any question about it, he doesn't try to know if it happens rarely (and then in which circumstances ?) or frequently, or if it's even an entirely new phenomena, it doesn't ask around if it could be faked, ...
Some possibles explanations :
It's the Source of Magic recording the brain state of person when it dies, allowing for resurrection before. But then, why no hint about it before ? Why Harry didn't feel it for Rita ?
It's the Source of Magic recording the brain state of person when it dies, but the Source of Magic didn't use to do it. Harry had
For a moment it seemed like the outpouring of magic might hold, take root in the castle's stone
Hermione tried and failed to become a ghost.
It was, in fact, mentioned in chapter 39, Pretending to be Wise:
(...) they were just afterimages, burned into the stone of the castle by the death of a wizard, like the silhouettes left on the walls of Hiroshima.
And of course I forgot the mundane explanation, the one that I would use in the real world : it's just the too vivid imagination of an overstressed 11-yo boy on the verge of emotional breakdown after seeing the most horrible scene of his life. Nothing actually happened, but Harry's mind created the special effects that "should" come with such a tragic event as the death of Hermione.
Remember in chapter 6 : « I, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, do now claim this territory in the name of Science.
Lightning and thunder completely failed to flash and boom in the cloudless skies.
"What are you smiling about?" inquired Professor McGonagall, warily and wearily.
"I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution," explained Harry. »
This clearly shows that part of his mind is thinking that dramatic events "should" get a dramatic special effects, and while in normal time he's perfectly aware that's not how the world works, when he's crumbling under stress, guilt and pain, he could confuse it for reality.
But while that seems a plausible hypothesis in absolute, it just doesn't feel right from a story-telling point of view.
Surprised no one has commented on this so far:
"Do you in fact assign greater than fifty percent subjective probability that there is something like a Heir of Gryffindor and one or both Weasley twins are it. >Yes or no, evasion means yes. You're not going to succeed in distracting me, no matter how much I have to go to the bathroom."
The old wizard sighed. "Yes, Fred and George Weasley are the Heir of Gryffindor. I beg you not to speak of it to them, not yet."
Harry nodded, and turned to go, retrieving the Cloak from his pouch as he did. "I'm surprised," Harry said. "I read a little about Godric Gryffindor's historical life. The Weasley twins are... well, they're awesome in various ways, but they don't seem much like the Godric in the history books."
"Only a man exceedingly proud and vain," Dumbledore said quietly, as he turned back to the Floo roaring up again with green flames, "would believe that his heir should be like himself, rather than like who he wished that he could be."
Two comments:
1) the last bit seems like Dumbledore in senitmental yet serious and regretful wise wizard mode. Harry is Dumbledore's hero and ...
Harry is Dumbledore's hero and 'heir' if you will.
I interpreted this (with p<0.1) as foreshadowing Harry being Voldemort's heir, and Harry being Voldemort's idea of a better self (with power Voldemort knows not).
1) the last bit seems like Dumbledore in senitmental yet serious and regretful wise wizard mode. Harry is Dumbledore's hero and 'heir' if you will. Does Dumbledore wish he had some of Harry's cold intelligence? Does he think many of his dead friends and dead family could have been saved by someone who was harder than he was from the very beginning?
I think you are forgetting the context here of MoR: Godric Gryffindor has been set up as a quasi-emo/existentialist Hero, and heroism a painful uncertain path to travel, with countless sacrifices along the way. A life spent fighting and sacrificing beats out of one vanity and arrogance and certainty, as indeed Dumbledore himself has lost conviction and certainty. To quote the relevant passage in ch43:
...Godric had defeated Dark Lords, fought to protect commoners from Noble Houses and Muggles from wizards. He'd had many fine friends and true, and lost no more than half of them in one good cause or another. He'd listened to the screams of the wounded, in the armies he'd raised to defend the innocent; young wizards of courage had rallied to his calls, and he'd buried them afterward. Until finally, when his wizardry had only just begun to f
if he has the body he lied about it outright and without hesitation
But not if he only has her brain.
My first thought was that Dumbledore was referring to Salazar Slytherin. However, there can certainly be additional interpretations.
Some theories of how the wards could (a) not detect Hermione was wounded and (b) claim that the Defense Professor killed Hermione.
Wounding wards:
Defense Professor killer ward:
If Quirrell were female, "he who stands within" would refer to someone else, since "he" is masculin.
That's pretty unlikely, though, since he's apparently keyed into the wards as a professor, so far as anyone can tell.
(Quirrell keeping a troll shrunken/in hammerspace on his person at all times is my favorite explanation at present, even though it sounds like it should have a silliness penalty. He did mention the Hungarian Horntail in the same lecture where he mentioned the troll, and this particular theory would give more credence to the idea that he has one of those hidden somewhere as well.)
A troll is unlikely to have any last words at all. Specifically not "not your fault."
Also a troll is unlikely to die with the feeling of a thousand books.
I think this is a very low likelihood guess.
I hate to bring it up - it's not weird enough to be interesting - but
"We have seen only that Godric left his Sword to the defense of Hogwarts, if a worthy student ever faced a foe they could not defeat alone."
Harry first heard of this sword
"Where Salazar and Godric and Rowena and Helga once raised Hogwarts by their power, creating the Locket and the Sword and the Diadem and the Cup, no wizard of these faded days has risen to rival them."
in the context of three other artifacts. As far as we know, he never learned anything else about the Diadem, but that may change now that the castle is handing out quest items and Harry faces a foe he can't defeat alone. I'd call that line another point in favor of the IA hypothesis.
This depends - even if the diadem really does make you smarter, it is entirely possible that Rovena exhausted all the low-hanging fruit available for using magic to improve cognition - For example: If what the diadem does is use healing and vertiaserum type effects to keep your brain in peak working condition (ideal blood sugar, magically eliminating waste toxins, ect, ect) and force you to be intellectually honest, that would allow you to think as quickly and as well as you do at your best all the time - which would be a huge upgrade - but it would not allow recursive improvements.
Upon reading these past few chapters I think that Harry has invented a spell to download Hermiones brain state just before her death and this is what we are seeing with the whole soul explosion when she dies.
We have never seen this happen so far at all in HPMOR, and I would think if this is a common thing then when Dumbledore is trying to prove to Harry the existence of souls this is the evidence he would use to try and prove it to him. The fact that he did not and this only seems to have happened during this one particular incident suggests to me there is...
It's not unique, and Dumbledore did bring it up, actually:
"How can you not believe it? " said the Headmaster, looking completely flabbergasted. "Harry, you're a wizard! You've seen ghosts! "
"Ghosts," Harry said, his voice flat. "You mean those things like portraits, stored memories and behaviors with no awareness or life, accidentally impressed into the surrounding material by the burst of magic that accompanies the violent death of a wizard -"
[...]
I asked Hermione and she said that they were just afterimages, burned into the stone of the castle by the death of a wizard, like the silhouettes left on the walls of Hiroshima.
Compare:
For a moment it seemed like the outpouring of magic might hold, take root in the castle's stone; but then the outpouring ended and the magic faded, her body stopped moving and all motion halted as Hermione Jean Granger ceased to exist -
It seems highly likely that Harry has time turned to hide Hermione's body and possible accomplish other objectives to which we are not yet privy. Evidence for this being that Harry now knows about the map when he did not before, and that he reacts to Hermione's body going missing with no emotional response whatsoever. He broadly speculates on the likely suspects for body snatching, but if he cared (which, for resurrection purposes, he surely would), then he would be far more animated: after all, he has previously.
There are some interesting wriggles in this...
I very much hope that no significant use of time-turners is required to resolve Hermione's disappearance or any other events transpired in the last few chapters. These [plot] devices are way too much like deus ex machina and have been overused in this fic quite a bit already.
Many people seem to suggest time-turner tricks for Harry to hide Hermione body. But that raises a few issues to me :
Do we have any evidence for or against the fact that the Hogwarts wards, or more generally a spell that Dumbledore could cast, would inform him of the usage of time-turner inside Hogwarts ? There is mention of "anti-time-loop ward", could there be "time-loop detecting wards" ?
Dumbledore didn't seem to check if Harry used his time-turner or not, and he didn't even ask him if he did. That's suspicious. It seems surprisin
High confidence prediction, based on the feminism rant. Rot13 because, while Eliezer has not retracted it, he recommended people not read it:
Va uvf enag ba UCZBE naq srzvavfz, Ryvrmre fnvq Urezvbar jbhyq pbzr onpx nf na nyvpbea cevaprff. Gurer jnf fbzr qvfphffvba bs jurgure ur jnf wbxvat va gur ynfg guernq. Gur snpg gung gur zbfg erprag nhgube'f abgr qvq abg rkcynva gung ur jnf wbxvat gb zr engure fgebatyl pbasvezf gung ur jnfa'g.
Two points:
About horcruxes
Magic itself seems predisposed to keeping wizards in existence, what with ghosts and resistance to blunt trauma, and Avada Kedavra requiring they be very sure about the outcome, and all that. A ritual that requires murder seems to be opposing that spirit. Can't magic make up it's mind? Or was it designed by multiple, competing purposes?
It occured to me that horcrux might be more of a late addition to magic; a hack, a twisting of an existing function. If so, the requirement may not be there for the usual reasons (to represent the making of a ...
I may have shared this theory on what Voldemort's plan is, but I want to toss it out there for feedback: what if Voldemort heard the prophecy and inferred that it meant that Fate wouldn't let him kill Harry until after he had "marked Harry as his equal," and his plan is as simple as fulfilling that by setting up Harry as a Dark Lord (what Voldemort interprets as "mark him as his equal") and then killing him? I feel like it has to be more complicated than that, but it seems to fit all available data.
Why didn't Harry acquire a working Time Turner / make someone else use a Time Turner as soon as he found out Hermione was missing? Why did Dumbledore make sure it was actually Hermione who died, making the use of Time Turners to alter events that much harder?
If this story wasn't constrained by any story telling concerns, Time Turners would just dominate everything. "How do I use my Time Turner to cheat?" would be the first and last thought of a rationally empowered Harry whenever he has an inkling of something bad happening, and not something he ...
A retraction. A couple of days ago, I posted what I thought looked like hints that Dumbledore was beginning to suffer the effects of age-related cognitive decline.
It was a lovely hypothesis and it's hard to let it go. Voldemort was Demented, Dumbledore was demented, and that sort of symmetry in fiction feels beautiful and true. It gave the author a way to engage with the deathism of the pivotal scene of the original novels, the most important death in a series about death. Rowling's allegory of a creeping curse would become the thing it represents. It woul...
It occurs to me that I've seen very little mention of one major dangling plot thread: The Interdict of Merlin. Bypassing the interdict may get Harry sufficient power, without necessarily getting at 'the source of magic' or becoming omnipotent.
There's some precedent for this: partial transfiguration, patronus 2.0, and acorn brewing were all made possible by understanding something others did not. It's possible that the Interdict is something similar, and that Harry will be able to understand his way through it.
This mechanism appears to have been used in other of Eliezer's works as well, for example the "Jeffreyssai" stories in the Sequences.
The problem is that "bypassing the Interdict" is not, on its own, useful; it's only valuable if Harry happens to have written notes on powerful magic spells that are censored by the Interdict. Apparently, there's a loophole allowing Interdict-restricted material to exist (wizards can keep notes for themselves, implied by chapter 23), but it seems unlikely that Harry would be able to get ahold of much of it. (Possible exception: Bacon's diary? Quirrell didn't think Bacon found much of interest, but he could be wrong.)
Related: since Muggle physics can apparently contribute to powerful magics (see: partial transfiguration) would the Interdict apply if Harry ever wrote a physics book? What would the Interdict do if a Muggle happened to accidentally write (presumably as fiction) the details of a powerful magic spell? Can Muggles read Interdict-restricted works?
... Sudden idea.
The limitation on Time Turners is that they cannot send information back farther than six hours, through any sequence of people or Time Turners.
However, "information" here has been shown to have a very loose, non-physical definition - in the same way that brooms are Aristotelian, magical "information" has an intuitive definition. Bones is able to tell Dumbledore about the existence of future information (presumably) without automatically barring Dumbledore from then traveling back himself, for example.
So it's possible, ...
Predictions: Tom Riddle is Hat-n-Cloak (95%). Tom Riddle is female (35%). Tom Riddle was Voldemort, but the title was taken over by Qmort who is not TR (20%). The feeling of doom between HP and Qmort is because of time travel (95%). Qmort is an older HP, sent back in time with memories removed (30%).
On the Wild Mass Guessing page on TVTropes, someone made the following prediction: "Hermione is the enemy Voldemort will use in his resurrection... which will result in female!Voldemort(e), after using his mother's bone in the ritual." (They also mentioned that he would use Bellatrix's flesh for said ritual.) When I first read this, it seemed rather silly. However, now I'm starting to wonder if it's an actual possibility. Hermione's body is missing, and although I think it's more likely that Harry took it to resurrect Hermione, there's definitely...
Regarding Quirrell's motives.
Quirrell is hoping that Harry has now "discarded his foolish little reluctances".
Which suggests a motive for framing Hermione: he was hoping Harry would assassinate Lucius.
What is the effect on Harry of the attacks on Hermione?
To make him stronger and more resolute.
Therefore, why is someone attacking Hermione?
Because they want Harry to be stronger and more resolute.
Dumbledore and Quirrell want that. They have both been specifically training him for it, each in their own way. Did they arrange H's death?
No. Quirrell's dash to the scene and the conversation of Dumbledore and Quirrell about Harry after H's death indicate that they are afraid of what this experience will do to Harry. Therefore they are not the ones who arrang...
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 94. The previous thread has passed 200 comments.
There is now 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.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: