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
But then, Dumbledore seemed to think, after listening to all the prophecies, that the end of the world was inevitable, and that the optimal goal was not about preventing it.
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...
Ch. 107
"Life-eaterss cannot desstroy me, I think," hissed Professor Quirrell. "And I will ssimply abandon thiss body if they approach too closse."
Warning Lucius would risk paradox, particularly since Mr. Counsel was probably Lucius.
"I might think more kindly of such neglect, if you had pursued my agenda by other means... Mr. Counsel. Yet I return to find - what? A country conquered in my name?" The high voice climbed higher. "No! I find you playing ordinary politics in the Wizengamot! I find your brothers still abandoned in Azkaban! It is a disappointment to me... I confess myself disappointed... You thought I was gone, the Dark Mark dead, and you forsook my purpose. Is that right, Mr. Counsel?"
Since time loops are stable, no reason not to try. Even if Mr. Counsel is Lucius, the most stable time loop is that Lucius doesn't believe the Patronus and gets killed anyway, and then Harry can at least truthfully tell Draco he tried.
I was thinking the same thing. If I were Harry I would call Moody and McGonagall to the headmistress' office and spill everything. As a side-note, I think Moody would rather appreciate Voldemort being taken down by stuporfy.
Snape isn't, because he can't apparate from Hogwarts. Amusingly, Snape may interpret his exclusion from the mass sacrifice as a deliberate "kindness" from the Dark Lord.
I missed when writing this that there was the curse preventing V from killing H. But he still could have just let the centaur kill him. If the curse also stopped him from allowing the death of H then he still could have tried to get the Unbreakable Vow from Harry before making shit hit the fan.
I'm with everyone else on the wand thing. It would have been simple enough to have him drop it. One narrative explanation for getting the wand back into Harry's hand would have been V asking for a demonstration of PT after Harry told him of it. Another would be to throw away the simplest timeline thing and let time-turned Harry come to the rescue with that solution, wand, cloak, etc. in hand. Though I don't know why V left him an hour on the time-turner either.
But:
My real confusion starts way before all of this. You have the idiot-child of prophesied ...
Voldemort had the ability fly free from his body. The last sentence you quote is Harry thinking that he mustn't allow that to happen, not that V doesn't have the capability. If V goes free then he must be defeated again; Harry is avoiding that outcome.
So... Quirrel told McGonagal that he was David Munroe, and it was implied with Madam Bones. It looks like David Munroe was killed in a battle with Voldemort, ending that noble and most ancient line, which has now been avenged by Hermione destroying Voldemort with her magic Girl-Who-Lived powers.
Are we going to get the Noble House of Granger? Does the House of Potter lose its noble status since David Munroe was apparently not previously dead to be avenged by Harry? Will they both be noble because the Wizengamot doesn't know what to do with the ambiguity?
I didn't meant to retract the whole thing. Sorry, I'm new to the site and there doesn't appear to be an undo.
Imagine the the myths that will come up around this. "Man, if you try to use magic to kill a kid magic will fuck you up, I don't care who you are."
But it was transfigured by Harry's magic. There does not appear to have been a resonance from it, though, which surprised me.
His irrational certainty is explained by the buried memories of Tom Riddle. I imagine Dumbledore steered him towards Hermione.
Agreed. This result wasn't my first guess about the nature of it. I'd assumed that it probably affected V most strongly regardless.
There's a parallel between Dumbledore and Reddit's approach to the Ch. 113 solution: put a plethora of plots into motion, you only need one to work out.
This sounds less safe because you'd need to wake him up to torture him into insanity. If you wanted the multiple layers you could torture the obliviated version into insanity, but I think I prefer the transfiguration. I'd even consider making it permanent with the Stone of Transfiguration, but this would result in a lot of lost knowledge and it's also possible that the horcrux network would consider it a death.
ETA: I rather liked the wand-in-a-dementor-pit idea.
They all showed up when the Dark Mark was called, only one of them has a transfigured mask replica, and no Death Eaters are likely to be allies to Harry since Voldemort can apparently just will them into seven smoldering pieces at any time.
Ch. 28:
...Harry's knuckles had gone white on his wand by the time he stopped trying to Transfigure the air in front of his wand into a paperclip. It wouldn't have been safe to Transfigure the paperclip into gas, of course, but Harry didn't see any reason why it would be unsafe the other way around. It just wasn't supposed to be possible. But why not? Air was as real a substance as anything else...
Well, maybe that limitation did make sense. Air was disorganized, all the molecules constantly changing their relation to each other. Maybe you couldn't impose a n
The Lucius factor is really interesting to me. What will his calculus be between his son, his word to Harry, and the expected dominance of the Dark Lord Voldemort?
Yeah, no one has actually consulted Hermione on whether she would like to be immortal. She might take it poorly even without factoring in her disapproval of the dark arts used to accomplish it. Adding that in, I don't think her reaction is going to be any version of "THIS IS AWESOME!"
EY could fairly express that frustration at unexpected and seemingly inconsistent reader reactions whether we're in the mirror or not. 111 was less believable than 110 to me, so I see where he's coming from there. But whether we're in the mirror is a question of what level the author is playing us at, and it's a separate thing from this. That comment isn't a Word of God about whether we're in the mirror. Those chapters were both written to signal that we were in the mirror. I don't know if that's a true hint or a deception, but EY can be surprised by the differential reactions regardless. That doesn't seem to be evidence either way.
I though this initially as well, but I'm not so sure. Bellatrix is not very powerful anymore after the dementors ate most of her magic. Flamel is a pretty serious target. It could have been some other Death Eater, or someone else entirely.
I would not assume that Voldemort doesn't know about it. He watched Harry do it during the temper tantrum in the woods just before the centaur attack, and there was also the Azkaban escape. Quirrel would not have missed that such a hole should be beyond a first year's magic, and Harry straight up told him that it was something that would ID Harry. Azkaban alone would not have been enough to tell him what exactly had been done, though he might guess, but it would certainly prime him to be paying close attention when Harry started silently slicing a bunch...
VM said he broke into Azkaban to find out where his wand was; there's also the flesh of the servant thing. Using her Dark Mark is a secondary benefit.
Reduce, re-use, recycle.
Why would he switch from Parseltongue to English and back to Parseltongue?
If Voldemort can lie in Parseltongue, then it's a ruse to conceal that fact. This has the dual effect of causing Harry to accept the literal truth of what VM says in Parseltongue without question, as well as persuading Harry to not even attempt to tell any direct lies to VM in Parseltongue. Those are both strong advantages manufactured from thin air, and VM is clever enough to spin such a deception.
And "snakes can't lie", really? That's a pretty odd inversion of collo...
Ch. 108
"What did you do with Bellatrix once she was out?"
"Ssent her to a peaceful place to recover sstrength," Professor Quirrell said. A cold smile. "I had a use remaining for her, or rather a certain portion of her, and on my future plans I shall not answer questions."
Ch. 112
...For a second Harry's mind couldn't process what he was seeing, and then he saw that Voldemort was holding a human arm, severed near the shoulder; it seemed too thin, that arm.
The Dark Lord pressed his wand to the flesh above the severed arm's elbow
And Voldemort is going to be so paternally proud he won't even get pissed off about it.
Lifting someone does work. Where is that energy coming from?