I hope that somebody (well, Harry) tells Michael MacNair that his father, alone among those summoned, died in combat with Voldemort. It seems sad for him not to know that.
Does anyone else feel like /r/hpmor (but not LW, thankfully) has been suffering from a lot of hindsight bias lately? First "Dumbledore was stupid with the mirror", then "Harry/Voldemort was stupid with the Riddle curse", then "Voldemort was stupid with letting Harry keep his wand", and now "Harry should've thought to preserve the Death Eaters' heads"? Apart from the wand thing (which I believe was pointed out by a few commenters before Chapter 114 was posted), pretty much all of those complaints were made after the fact. (No one talked about preserving the Death Eaters' heads until after Chapter 117 came out, for example.) I don't post on the subreddit, but I do read the comments there, and some of the complaints have honestly been fairly cringeworthy.
Honestly I think even the wand thing is way overblown.
In story, there was only a few minute or so between the making of the unbreakable vow (which did require Harry to have his wand) and Harry using it to kill the Death Eaters. Voldemort makes the "You have 1 minute to tell me your secrets or you die" offer immediately after the vow, after all.
Voldemort could have reasoned that he wanted to kill Harry as quickly as possible. Forcing him to drop his wand would have taken time. It also would have shown weakness in front of the Death Eaters. And Voldemort probably couldn't imagine anything Harry could have done. He's way too young for any really dangerous magic, despite his skill. Voldemort doesn't know about nano-wires and all that stuff. It's probably unimaginable for him that so little magic could have such a big effect.
Let's not forget that forcing Harry to drop his wand first is not a proposition without any risk either. Voldemort wanted secrets Harry had. If he had demanded that Harry drop his wand, and Harry had refused, he would have been forced to kill him without learning any of his secrets. It's very likely that Voldemort considered this a significant risk.
And le...
Voldemort could have reasoned that he wanted to kill Harry as quickly as possible. Forcing him to drop his wand would have taken time.
This is silly. He'd taken the time to do exactly that before. And now, if he's going to give him a full minute just to think...
The whole thing falls to the "plausible excuse" vs "what you'd expect to happen" problem, which Harry explains in Answers and Riddles:
the laws governing what constitutes a good explanation don't talk about plausible excuses you hear afterward. They talk about the probabilities we assign in advance. That's why science makes people do advance predictions, instead of trusting explanations people come up with afterward. And I wouldn't have predicted in advance for you to follow Snape and show up like that. Even if I'd known in advance that you could put a trace on Snape's wand, I wouldn't have expected you to do it and follow him just then.
If you only knew up to chapter 108 or 110 or so, and someone told you that Voldemort is going to take every precaution to contain Harry's threat that he can think of, running a search of the sort that would generate such ideas as "put up elaborate wards, includin...
In story, there was only a few minute or so between the making of the unbreakable vow (which did require Harry to have his wand) and Harry using it to kill the Death Eaters. Voldemort makes the "You have 1 minute to tell me your secrets or you die" offer immediately after the vow, after all.
Not so. At T-20 seconds, Harry starts verbally stalling while he keeps working on the transfiguration.
It also would have shown weakness in front of the Death Eaters.
After he's already given them lengthy and detailed instructions about all the many different kinds of spell they must be ready to cast at this naked 11-year old boy at the first sign of trouble?
And Voldemort probably couldn't imagine anything Harry could have done. He's way too young for any really dangerous magic, despite his skill. Voldemort doesn't know about nano-wires and all that stuff. It's probably unimaginable for him that so little magic could have such a big effect.
He knows that the Harry is a walking extinction event waiting to happen, and that Harry knows secrets powerful enough to be worth learning (potentially even powerful enough to end him - cf. "power he knows not"). Indeed, these are ...
I don't think Harry really could preserve the Death Eaters' heads. Remember, he was out of magic, totally drained after the "Obliviate". And he had to take of Voldemort first, to not take any chance of letting him escape. So even while Harry is good at "doing the impossible", there is a limit to how much "impossible" he can do a limited time.
I can't give you evidence, but I saw lots of posts about freezing the death eater's heads before today.
The wand objection has been a very good one, and don't give me the "hindsight bias" crap, people were complaining about that in advance. No matter the bizarre excuses the author comes up with, it just doesn't make sense to order 37 death eaters to shoot Harry if he raises his wand, rather than order one Harry to drop the damn wand. It certainly doesn't make sense to be so paranoid as to strip Harry naked and nonetheless let him keep his wand.
If Voldemort is overconfident, then fine, LET HIM BE OVERCONFIDENT. But Eliezer wanted it both ways, both to treat Voldemort as super-ultra-cautious AND let Harry keep his damn wand.
Right, okay, I'm back, and on further reflection, I think I've actually decided that leaving Harry his wand isn't even that bad of a mistake. So, let's get started on why:
it just doesn't make sense to order 37 death eaters to shoot Harry if he raises his wand, rather than order one Harry to drop the damn wand.
If Harry needed his wand to demonstrate something (which he very plausibly might have), it would have made no sense to take it away. From Voldemort's perspective, the threat from letting Harry keep his wand (as opposed to, say, his Time-Turner or a hidden Portkey on his person) is close to none; with the precautions he took against Harry, Harry would have needed to pull off a wordless, movement-free, multi-targeting, incapacitating, direction-neutral attack, which is a tall order even for most grown wizards, much less a first-year at Hogwarts. If the threat is minimal and the benefit is high (demonstrating a secret spell), simple cost-benefit analysis would tell Voldemort to let Harry keep his wand. And so he did. The fact that Harry had an attack that just happened to fulfill all the aforementioned criteria is pure coincidence (I would have called it authorial fiat, if i...
If Harry needed his wand to demonstrate something (which he very plausibly might have), it would have made no sense to take it away.
So have him drop it and a Death Eater confiscate it, and if he says he needs it to demonstrate something, Voldemort can ask "do you plan to usse it to attack me, sservantss, or to esscape?" before returning it to him. Then as soon as he's done, confiscate it again. That's an extra 10 seconds; which is a small price to pay to hedge against a Black Swan.
Voldemort doesn't know about Partial Transfiguration, but he does know Harry has powers he knows not, which is what this entire charade was about in the first place! I would've done it it just in case.
No one talked about preserving the Death Eaters' heads until after Chapter 117 came out, for example.
I'm pretty sure some people did, actually.
Why on earth is Prof McGonagall announcing in public that a bunch of children's parents are dead and were evil? That seems a really, really terrible way to break the news to them.
I'd expect at the very least she'd tell them privately in advance, and probably wouldn't say it in public at all, except in very general terms.
From her perspective, there are advantages to announcing it in public - for example, there will no be no witch hunt of "which Slytherins turned out to have active Death Eater parents?", and McGonagall also firmly tied the listing of the orphaned children's names to pronouncements of sympathy and solidarity in her listeners' minds.
I still don't think there was any good reason not to break it to them in private first.
I still don't think there was any good reason not to break it to them in private first.
In a perfect world, I completely agree.
In a real world, I can see that McGonagall did not have time before breakfast to talk to all of the orphaned children. I can also see that she might strongly prefer to quench the early rumors and avoid starting new rumors by calling a number of students into her office. (Delegating it to Snape, the Head of Slytherin House, was not an option; and delegating it to any other teacher would have sent a signal of McGonagall not caring enough to do it herself, making this a non-option, too.)
Given all this, I still think she should have delayed the announcement to talk to the children beforehand; but I don’t think it’s a simple choice for her.
When Quirrell learned about Harry's "sense of doom", did he do anything to stop the information from getting to Dumbledore? It looks like pure accident that Dumbledore never learned about it. McGonagall could have told him as well, when things got serious.
It looks like pure accident that Dumbledore never learned about it.
The injunction against anyone bringing up issues about Quirrell only makes sense within the story as a way for Dumbledore and McGonagall to maintain a pretense that they don't know that Quirrell is Voldemort. In particular, preventing the Boy Who Lived from communicating his doubts makes no sense at all except in those terms. They've known about horcruxes for a while. They know Voldemort can come back. Fairly early on, Dumbledore see's that Harry is the Good Voldemort. If they really didn't know where Voldemort was, it would just be Idiot Ball for Narrative Convenience to shush Harry's reservations about the Defense Professor.
If Dumbledore was meant to be a PC, he had to know.
McGonagall in fact prevented Harry from spilling the beans about the Sense of Doom. I remember at least one such scene, and don't recall any where McGonagall actually let Harry tell her about the Sense of Doom.
It seems likely...that some of our students will also have been stripped last night of those named as their guardians.
I'm a little worried about Harry's parents.
Hm. To be honest, I'd hoped that this chapter would include a scene of Harry explaining events (or at least a version closer to the truth) to McGonagall, Snape and Moody, since it seemed unlikely they would fall for his melodramatic psychic display. (And because keeping secrets has NOT worked well so far, as Harry recently realized.)
I though that Death Eaters mostly had only one child, not 2-3.
"Sheila, Flora, and Hestia Carrow. Lost both their parents last night. Students who have lost their fathers include Robert Jugson. Ethan Jugson. Sara Jugson. Michael MacNair. Riley and Randy Rookwood. Lily Lu. Sarah Sproch. Daniel Gibson. Jason Gross. Elsie Ambrose..."
Alecto and Amycus Carrow are siblings, and Flora and Hestia are twins (see ch 46). That means one birth per each of their marriages.
Now that I think of it, Quirrel watched over Harry as he felled a bunch of trees in Precautionary Measures pt.2. And that involved partial Transfiguration.
So was Voldemort really unaware that Harry could Partially Transfigure Things? Or did he only underestimate what could be done with that?
Quirrel had seen Harry use /Diffendo/ on some trees, and later that the trees have been cut. He was unconscious (and in an extradimensional bag) when Harry had cut through the wall in Azkaban, and only saw a cut circle of wall. He may not have known that Harry had anything up his sleeve more complicated than a Cutting Charm; he certainly had no reason to believe that Harry could wordlessly transfigure the tip of his wand into well over a hundred feet of braided carbon nanotubes. Quirrelmort has never seen -- only Dumbledore, Hermoine, and Professor McGonagall have.
But that's really not the part that got him.
Quirrelmort had accepted the risk that Harry could have escaped, or killed everyone present, just as he accepted the possibility that the Unbreakable Vow wouldn't have been enough to stop Harry from destroying the world. If he were absolutely certain, he'd not have bothered with backup plans. He did not care about the deaths of the present Death Eaters, and losing his own body was merely a minor setback. It's Harry's ability to instantly and permanently incapacitate without letting Quirrelmort's spirit loose that made the threat serious. That's a problem Dumbledore was relying on an ancient and frighteningly powerful artifact to implement, and Quirrelmort's mode of thinking doesn't exactly encourage thinking of these matters..
Especially knowing that Harry almost offered to explain it to him (after Azkaban). Quirrel's answer :
it is too rare that I find a person whom I cannot see through immediately, be they friend or foe. I shall unravel the puzzles about you for myself, in due time.
I begin to wonder if we (the community) really found the best plan or if we are reading a sadder ending. Maybe there was a plan that saved everyone.
According to a post on /r/HPMOR:
[EY] posted a comment a while ago that the short sad ending would have been Harry blowing himself up Transfiguring antimatter.
ETA: Found EY's relevant comment:
In the profoundly improbable event that I'd needed to write [a sad ending], it would have just been Harry suiciding via antimatter (that went off prematurely as soon as it started to Transfigure) and Hermione waking up among the flaming ruins.
If Eliezer had written the antimatter ending, it would indeed have implied that Voldemort would later take over the world, since the antimatter would not have been able to destroy his horcrux network.
Because children are not fully capable of taking care of themselves, and so there is a norm that all adults (and older children) have a duty of helping and protecting them (even against themselves).
And also because if an adult harms a child, it is much more likely that the victim is innocent and didn't "deserve" that harm than if the victim is an adult.
(and I don't think "greater moral value" accurately describes the situation)
OK, I agree with the "sad" part (though not the "sadder" part). It was unfortunate that people had to die. I don't think HP should torment himself for not having thought of saving them.
As I also posted on David Brin's site, I don't think it makes sense for Voldemort to let Harry have the wand just because he believed Harry was unable to use it. Precautions don't work that way--taking precautions means that you have to try to stop some things even if you don't believe they'll happen. Just saying "I don't think he can do X" is insufficient reason to avoid taking precautions against it. Proper precautions depends on the size of the mistake you'd have to make in order for X to be a danger. And "I don't think he can use this weapon" has a lot smaller mistake connecting it to danger than "I don't think he can use this non-weapon as a weapon".
Timing note: While this update was at 12pm Pacific, this is no longer the same as 8pm UTC, due to daylight savings time beginning in the US. I'm assuming tomorrow will be the same (at 19:00/7pm UTC)?
Lies! " shrieked a tall Slytherin, who'd risen up from that table. "Lies! Lies! The Dark Lord will return, and he'll, he'll teach you all the meaning of -"
What did he mean to say before Snape interrupted him?
"Fourth. One piece of exceedingly unexpected and happy news. Hermione Granger is alive and in full health, sound of body and mind. Miss Granger is being observed at St. Mungo's to see if there are any unexpected afteraffects from whatever happened to her, but she appears to be doing astonishingly well considering her previous condition."
Should be "aftereffects".
I wonder if Harry can help Draco by teaching him the True Patronus (possibly to have Draco resurrect Lucius). It would be a nice callback to their early scientific discoveries and Harry teaching Draco Patronus 1.0, although Harry might have to be very careful about how he does it.
I also notice that Lesath wasn't among the kids who'd lost parents, so they didn't find Bellatrix among the Death Eaters at the graveyard. Where is Bellatrix?
Poor Harry, not since feeling guilty about not being able to help Lesath get his mother out of Azkaban has his inflated sense of responsibility hit him so hard. He already had this discussion in his mind, he's not Batman, but he can't help feeling it.
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 117.
Plans for next chapter release:
There is 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.)