All of Aureateflux's Comments + Replies

Yeah, Harry discovered that you can't transmute something that hasn't already been created through more conventional means.

You sound like you think he doesn't need capital at all. Why would Harry avoid using a resource that would facilitate reaching his goals? Wouldn't the rational thing to do be to use the methods that accomplish your goals in an effective and timely manner?

There are times when solutions other than money would be more effective, and there are times when money would be more effective or efficient. So why should he eschew that resource just because he can?

Entirely the wrong question. Harry Potter is planning on taking over both the Muggle and Magical world. That's going to take some capital!

So, just to clarify, by DIY you mean one person effects the entire genocide rather than many people personally involved in the genocide, doing the killing themselves. In a sense, the Y in your DIY is singular, and the Y in mine is plural.

Also, my general schema of "DIY" is that it's a cheaper but more difficult alternative to the normal approach--which usually involves hiring someone to do your project for you or buying a ready-made product. Since most genocides tend to be executed the hard way-- you can't buy genocide in a box, although some c... (read more)

That's true, but to make the REALLY big bucks, you need to make the bet no one else does a la Trading Places.

I think the idea was that with Harry the requirements of the ritual were fulfilled, though accidentally. One of those requirements is the death of an innocent.

But the HP wiki says that there's some kind of incantation that goes along with it, so that's either optional or... whatever. It seems to be like the Goblet of Fire portkey. The rule is the rule except when it isn't.

The biggest difference between Harry-as-horcrux and Quirrel-as-horcrux is that Voldemort doesn't seem to have killed anyone (as far as we know) to possess Quirrel. So even if Harry ... (read more)

Except that observed information can't be changed using the Time-Turners. So the scope of his actions are somewhat limited. Doesn't stop him from being able to short a stock, but he can't single-handedly cause a stock's fortune to reverse. That still leaves plenty of possibilities to make money, but it wouldn't be as easy as it sounds. He'd be mixing the complicated natures of stock trading and time travel, and that's before he starts thinking about avoiding insider trading laws.

"Effective" is not the same as "actual." Quirrel wasn't a horcrux in the sense that Harry or Nagini were horcruxes, even with what she's saying there. She just meant to say that Quirrel was like a horcrux. No ritual was done to make him into a horcrux.

That's true. Everyone's talking so much about stealing gold and magical artifacts that I didn't think of magical services.

I think even simpler than this is the fact that the wizards don't have anything of worth to trade to the Muggles, since non-magical people have a hard time even seeing magical artifacts, much less using them.

Muggles have plenty of things that would be useful to Wizards, but the reverse isn't true.

And yet the explanation for the method of the attempted murder of Draco was that the slow cooling of his blood would cause his vitals to drop too slowly to trigger the wards until he died. Which explicitly relies on the common knowledge that Hogwarts DOES have wards that track the vitals of its students and that those wards are keyed to track sudden changes, and the removal of significant portions of the body would certainly constitute a "sudden change" in vitals.

So in the attempted murder of Draco, the wards were circumvented; in the troll attack, they were actively compromised.

I'm morbidly curious to know what forms of genocide aren't DIY genocide...

Is it certain that the Cloak confers outright immortality? None of the other Hallows seem to quite match that scope of power either in scale or in utility (and number of applications). Maybe that property is more exaggeration than reality, and the Cloak only protects against unnatural death?

If the Cloak does offer full immortality, you'd certainly expect crafting your Cloak of Immortality to be a coming of age ritual. Maybe there can only be one Cloak for whatever reason, or the materials needed for it are virtually impossible to acquire?

Also, how is th... (read more)

That is the trouble indeed. We only have a few reliable pieces of information regarding Hpmor!Voldemort's character: the incident with Dumbledore's brother and his treatment of Bellatrix. The former is filtered through his enemies and the latter comes from the mouth of one of the most likely suspects. We also have Harry's memory of his mother's death.

The trouble with the ransoming of Dumbledore's brother is that we don't know about his motivations. We just know he did it and we have a report from Snape that he was pleased to force Dumbledore to start ... (read more)

My inference is based on the complaints Dumbledore makes about getting permission to bring a Dementor to Hogwarts and then having to explain its disappearance. You're right, though, it implies that the Ministry makes a firm accounting of the Dementors in Azkaban or otherwise under its control, but it doesn't really say anything about all Dementors everywhere.

Again the ghost of that statement about the wizards herding them all to Azkaban rises up... I don't remember if that statement claimed ALL Dementors had been moved there or if it was just all the ones in Britain. I don't even remember if that was a statement from canon or HPMoR or how reliable the speaker is.

Unfortunately, even those things aren't particularly strong evidence if you're really being objective.

• Quirrel's commentary about love potions in Chapter 70 is generic enough that no one objects to it except on the grounds that it's not appropriate for the children present, so clearly his point that it DOES happen is widely recognized enough that to the adults present it's not particularly notable that he points it out.

• That Quirrel has many identities and Dark Wizards sometimes have many identities isn't even really strong evidence that Quirrel should b

In HPMoR, Moody says-- regarding casting AK-- that it's easier to do after the first time, and that might be interpreted as saying that only the first time you cast it do you have to muster up a deep, personal hatred. Afterward, a more generalized hatred seems to work, which would be the case for any of the examples above. He DOES say that you need hatred, though. Again, it seems like a parallel to the Patronus Charm, since that also seems to be easier to cast once you've done it once.

Side note: what characters have been seen to cast both Patronus and A... (read more)

Fair points, though a failed Patronus Charm wouldn't always produce a Dementor if it only happened with a certain subset of wrong kinds of thought. I'm not sure why anyone might be making an attempt to cast a Patronus with a negative thought, but maybe if they use a happy thought that is at its core selfish or harmful to others? In which case, learning to cast the charm would tend to produce a new Dementor every so often as people experiment with finding a suitable memory or thought to use.

As for your last point, I suppose it would only make sense if the... (read more)

Er, it's not like people can't be caught during the second round or after completion. This is also from McGonagall's point of view and could be unreliable. The time she caught them probably wasn't the ONLY time they had sex within the window of time that would have produced Tracey. It could just be a convenient conceit for McGonagall to be thinking it was during the time she caught them that the girl was conceived, since she only knows of one encounter during the appropriate timeframe.

I have to depart from the majority of responses to your question and offer, "There is yet insufficient data to answer the question."

The tendency is to answer a qualified "yes" because that would be the answer in regard to canon. However, this is not canon. It also isn't an alternate history of canon, since Eliezer has modified things where he felt it made more sense to have them changed. For example, there is in this post a comment by Eliezer stating that he places the Peverells before the founding of Hogwarts, whereas canon states t... (read more)

I like this line of reasoning. I've been batting around the idea that Dementors and Patronuses are essentially opposite (anti) versions of one another. Perhaps a dementor is made when someone tries to cast the Patronus Charm with entirely 'the wrong kind of thought to cast a Patronus Charm.'

A dark ritual would explain their persistence compared to the patronuses, but it doesn't adequately explain their number... Also, if the ritual created a dementor, wouldn't people be saying the ritual summons a dementor, rather than Death? Most people in hpmor se... (read more)

I don't think there's really reason to think this new prophecy must be evidence of any hypothesis made for the Trelawney prophecy(s). It's tempting to look at all the threes and see that that makes nice things happen to the parts of your brain that are concerned with pattern recognition, but there's no reason they have to even be referring to the same things at all. And depending on how you look at it, the simpler explanation is that they are just two different prophecies about two different things.

The time pressure explanation for prophecies suggests ... (read more)

I considered the fact that it kills animals and everything with a brain. However, it seems to me that if the target's state of mind can have any effect on the outcome of the spell (and that's a pretty big /if/), then it might well be working under the same principle as the Patronus vs True Patronus-- animal minds don't understand death and therefore don't offer as much protection from death. The obvious linchpin here is 'to what degree do one-and-a-half- year-old infants understand death?' If it's similar to either an animal or an adult human, they woul... (read more)

The name isn't really an issue for a number of reasons. It could have been changed by the family itself to take advantage of political and social conditions, and storytellers also would have reason to update the name to appeal to their audiences.

In fact, considering the centuries-long game of telephone that would be at play, it's more surprising that the modern name is as close as it is to the name that appears in the prophecy itself. This makes it fairly likely that the whole story had been lost and was rediscovered relatively recently and then gallicized.

Well, really, what evidence is there that Avada Kedavra EVER works on infants? There's only one datapoint here as far as we know. It doesn't particularly stretch the imagination that even the inventor of a Killing Curse might have been repulsed at the idea of the spell being used against infants even if they didn't consciously consider the possibility.

For that matter, considering how important it is for a certain kind of thought to be used for both the AK and the Patronus (or status of the soul), perhaps an infant's innocent outlook on life offers it p... (read more)

I've been leaning away from the idea of Quirrel being Voldemort because there are so many differences between him and canon!Quirrel... They don't appear to be the same person and the details of Quirrel's affliction are different. At the very least, the possession is different, either for a fundamental reason or because HPMOR!Quirrel is more capable of resisting Voldemort.

This leads to a few hypotheses:

1) Quirrel is not possessed at all and suffers from some unrelated affliction, such as the side effects of a dark ritual. (Doesn't discount the possibility... (read more)

Ah yes, sorry!

Na vagrerfgvat vqrn, gubhtu lbh unir gb jbaqre vs gurer ner onaqjvqgu yvzvgngvbaf naq vs nyy gur cbegenvgf naq zntvpny cubgbtencuf chg n fgenva ba vg.

Lbhe vqrn jbexf jvgu gur vqrn bs vg orvat bar-jnl, fvapr vg zvtug or n sbez bs qrfgehpgvir pbclvat (gubhtu gung npghnyyl vzcyvrf zber guna bar zbqr bs bcrengvba fvapr vg qbrf zbfg bs vgf pbclvat erzbgryl).

Vs gung VF ubj vg jbexf, V guvax vg jbhyqa'g or pbzcngvoyr jvgu gur vqrn bs hfvat gur Unyybjf gb npghnyyl RAGRE gur Irvy. Va gung pnfr, lbh'q rkcrpg gb jnyx guebhtu gb nabgure cynar, ohg lbh qba'g gevttre g... (read more)

Pbhagre gb lbhe nethzrag gung gur Irvy unfa'g orra zragvbarq rabhtu gb cynl na vzcbegnag ebyr, jung UNF orra zragvbarq zber guna bapr (rkcyvpvgyl naq vzcyvpvgyl) vf gur zlgu bs Becurhf naq Rhelqvpr.

Jurerva n zna ragref Unqrf gb fnir uvf jvsr sebz Qrngu.

Zl ovttrfg ceboyrz jvgu gur Vqrn bs Uneel Ragrevat gur Irvy gb Fnir Urezvbar vf gung gur cnenyyryf gb gur zlgu ner FB fgebat gung gur nhgube zvtug qrpvqr vg'f whfg gbb ba gur abfr. UCZbE boivbhfyl vf znxvat ab nggrzcgf gb nibvq gur zbabzlgu cnggrea (Nmxnona orvat na boivbhf pnaqvqngr sbe gur Ureb'f nqiragher va gur Haqrejbeyq/Qrngu), gubhtu.

I wonder why the Order is taking the course of poisoning the grave rather than just relocating all the suspected graves? Given that it isn't absolutely certain that this will have an effect (though it seems likely given what Harry learns about potions), wouldn't it be better to just ensure that the ritual won't work at all? At least that way there are fewer avenues of resurrection to defend against.

Vg frrzf snveyl fgenvtugsbejneq gung znfgrel bire gur Qrnguyl Unyybjf (rfcrpvnyyl nf gurl ner va pnaba) zvtug nyfb rkgraq vagb gurve vagrenpgvba jvgu gur Irvy.

Vs gur Irvy vf bar-jnl sbe n abezny crefba, vg zvtug jryy or gjb-jnl sbe fbzrbar va pbageby bs gur Unyybjf. Senaxyl, gur bayl Unyybj lbh zvtug arrq vf gur Pybnx vgfrys, gubhtu V guvax vg jbhyq or zber cehqrag gb znxr gur nggrzcg jvgu gur jubyr frg. Nyy lbh unir gb qb vf qba gur pybnx, ragre gur ynaqf bs gur qrnq, svaq lbhe gnetrg, oevat gurz bhg haqre gur pybnx. Nyfb, zbabzlgu.

I think it's very unlikely that Quirrel in HPMoR is THE Quirrel, since the basic biographical details given of Quirrel's time at Hogwarts line up with those given for the canon Quirrel. I think we can take both the Aurors and Professor Quirrel's assertions at face value on that score.

It seems significant to me that in HPMoR no one has mentioned Quirrel's previous tenure as Professor of Muggle Studies-- they all appear to act as though they didn't know him before his term as Defense Professor. This suggests to me that the original Quirrel has in fact been... (read more)