I’m not saying I think Narcissa is alive, but...
There’s no obvious reason not to return her after he thought Voldemort was gone
Except that Narcissa could then testify in front of the Wizengamot that Dumbledore kidnapped her.
or at least to let Lucius know what happened in case she’s alive and didn’t want to return
Dumbledore believes Voldemort will return. This would limit his ability to threaten Death Eaters in the next war.
I would much prefer to have them released all at once. I could read them and re-read them at my own pace. There would still be plenty to discuss. The cliff-hangers mean that I currently think about each update more than is productive. It would be nice if the disruptive effect they have on the rest of my life was more localized.
Mostly, though, I’m happy to read it whenever EY gets around to posting it.
Sorry, apparently I’m illiterate.
Also, I guess “siblings getting killed” isn’t much of a pattern. Given that people were getting killed in the war, and that people have siblings, you can count the people getting killed as siblings.
It’s also difficult to see why Voldemort would want to pretend to die at Godric’s Hollow. He was winning the war. Why pretend to lose, throw away what he had built up to then, and try an entirely different approach to gaining power? I think the more obvious explanation for the burnt body is that whatever ritual magic protected Harry was very destructive to Voldemort. I think it is clear that some ritual magic is involved here; how else can we explain the danger of Harry’s and Quirrell’s magic interacting? And the violence of their magics’ interaction in Azkaban makes it plausible that if Voldemort were to cast a killing curse directly at Harry, he might end up as a burnt corpse.
Perhaps its not such a strange thing to say if you don’t think Mr. Potter knows about the prophecy, and are trying to correct his insubordination. In the following chapters, Dumbledore doesn’t act as though he has decided Harry is unsuitable as a hero. Rather than trying to replace him, Dumbledore begins to confide in him.
Does Nornagest’s explanation of Dumbledore’s relationship with story-book reasoning affect your previous analysis? If you agree that Dumbledore feigns a story-book persona, rather than taking story-book logic seriously, then doesn’t it seem strange that he would hatch such a plot? Note that his manipulation of the last battle in December is consistent with having realistic view of the world. Yes, Dumbledore did manage to acheive a “story-book outcome,” but he clearly didn’t expect this to happen—he had a contingency plan.
You are right, those are both possibilities. Though, one of them has been explicitly presented by the author, and endorsed by Harry. I don’t think we have much reason to doubt the canonical interpretation.
“SO THAT’S HOW THE COMED-TEA WORKS! Of course! The spell doesn’t force funny events to happen, it just makes you feel an impulse to drink right before funny things are going to happen anyway! I’m such a fool, I should have realized when I felt the impulse to drink the Comed-Tea before Dumbledore’s second speech, didn’t drink it, and then choked on my own saliva instead—drinking the Comed-Tea doesn’t cause the comedy, the comedy causes you to drink the Comed-Tea! I saw the two events were correlated and assumed the Comed-Tea had to be the cause and the comedy had to be the effect because I thought temporal order restrained causation and causal graphs had to be acyclic BUT IT ALL MAKES SENSE ONCE YOU DRAW THE CAUSAL ARROWS GOING BACKWARDS IN TIME!”
Harry could still get a false negative. Remember, Harry will feel the impulse to offer a drink to Alice if and only if if Alice is about to be surprised. So not feeling an impulse to offer her a drink would indicate that either that Alice would not be surprised that Voldemort is alive, or that Harry will not actually end up telling her.
If, for example, Harry wishes to test whether or not someone knows that Voldemort is alive, he could see if he has the Impulse to give that person a drink, all while thinking about saying that “The Dark Lord is still alive”. If he gets the Impulse, they don’t know. If he doesn’t, then they already know/has been suspecting that he’s been alive.
Unless he actually followed through with saying that Voldemort is still alive, this wouldn’t be enough.
In the aftermath of the prophecy, his manipulation of Snape and Lily netted him a defeated Dark Lord, a double agent and powerful ally, and a newly horcruxed hero. If the prophecy hadn’t occurred, he’d instead have… a bouncing baby boy. It’s hard to see what he hoped to accomplish by driving Snape and Lily apart if he didn’t intend to prod Voldemort into attacking the Potters.
One possibility is that he didn’t intentionally drive Snape and Lily apart. I don’t think there’s enough evidence of that to overcome the prior probability that Trelawney’s prophecy was genuine. Note that Dumbledore himself seems to regard the prophecy as genuine—witness, for example, his apparently genuine interest in discovering the “power [Voldemort] knows not.”
Here’s another way of looking at it. Assume Dumbledore planned in advance to defeat Voldemort by (i) convincing Voldemort of a false prophecy that would lead him to attempt the murder of a baby, and (ii) somehow manipulating the baby’s mother into either performing ritual magic herself, or causing Voldemort to perform ritual magic that would bring about Voldemort’s death when he attempted to kill the baby. We might now ask, is there a simpler way that Dumbledore might have tried to enact (i) and (ii), other than the means you have suggested?
Note that a priori, assuming that Dumbledore is primarily concerned with defeating Voldemort, there is no reason for Dumbledore to deliver the false prophecy to Voldemort via an agent who is in love with the mother in question. He must then rely on the agent not understanding the prophecy in time. Furthermore, if the agent figures out the prophecy after relaying it to Voldemort, Dumbledore must then rely on Voldemort disregarding the agent’s request to spare the mother. So going out of his way to push Snape and Lily apart, and then using Snape as a messenger, seems like a very unintuitive way for Dumbledore to execute this plot. Why not keep Snape and Lily together, see that they have a child, and then deliver the false prophecy to Voldemort via some other agent?
Now, personally, I do think it’s a possibility that Snape and Lily were driven apart by Dumbledore, maybe even intentionally. But I don’t think it was for this reason.
You’re right, I misremembered. Still, I think there is a lot to suggest that interacting directly with one’s time-clones (as opposed to waiting with one’s eyes closed while a clone drops off a message, for example), particularly in battle, is a bad idea. You would never observe a future-you doing something ineffective in combat—failing to dodge or block, or casting an ineffective spell, for example—since, after observing that mistake, you would be prepared for it in the future. So the only consistent possibilities involve losing or running away before you can go back in time, or winning right away.
But, since you know these are the only consistent possibilities, if you showed up to a battle intending to use a Time Turner and didn’t see your time clones appear at the very beginning, you would deduce that you would not win, and therefore (if you could) you would run away. So, I expect that from Time’s perspective, the most stable solution for people who intend to use Time Turners in battle is for them to not do battle at all.
He has never interacted directly with himself in a way that involves seeing a copy of himself, or coordinating actions in real-time, as would be the case in a battle. Harry has so far always heeded Professor McGonnagal’s advice, and looked the other way when his time clones are around. Though, as pedanterrific points out, I have overstated the severity of McGonnagal’s warning.
Seems unlikely that the original prophecy was caused by Dumbledore, at least by the method of the magical clock. As in canon, Trelawney seems to have made the prophecy during a job interview, presumably before she was regularly sleeping with the clock. I expect that if Dumbledore wanted her to make a false prophecy at a specific time, something like an Imperius folled by Obliviation would be more expedient. Furthermore, we have seen Trelawney spontaneously prophecy in the dining hall; this prophecy at least appeared unplanned by Dumbledore.
Sure, though my impression is that people don’t think graph isomorphism actually is in P. And integer factorization turned out to be a problem for Harry. But you’re right, we can actually just simulate a nondeterministic Turing machine this way: every time you have a choice for which state to visit next, just listen as future you tells you which ones not to visit.
Sorry, I’m really not following your pie argument. Harry would learn about the pies in the near future; since it is his style, he would think about throwing them to frighten the bullies. So, his observation of Harry+1 throwing the pies is not necessary for him to think to throw pies anyway.
What do you mean by “they don’t recurse”? Surely the fact that this procedure results in fast graph isomorphism testing shows that it is not a particularly “stable” solution? Or, do fast integer factorization by writing down the first digit for the least factor greater than 1, listen as future you says “no, no, maybe,” and change it to whatever, and then figure out the second digit, and so forth. The scenario you’ve outlined results in nearly instant integer factorization (or password guessing, or whatever), so it is probably illegal.
I hope you write the ending you want, rather than playing games to see which ending we will earn.
that doesn’t follow. Where would Harry have gotten the pies if not from Harry+1?
He got them from the breakfast table. Where did he get the idea to get them? Well, he would have seen the pies later on anyway. Just like he would have learned about time turners later on in the day anyway, but a more stable scenario was obtained by learning about them earlier.
The recursion is non-iterative beyond the number of loops actually manifested, however.
I’m not quite sure how to parse this. If you would think about an idea at time T, but don’t because future you tells you it won’t work out, that means your whole thought process going forward has completely changed. But maybe the thing you start thinking about instead doesn’t work out, so someone warns you about the idea at time T+epsilon. And so on. So if you are proposing that Time works by iterating through a number of scenarios until you get to something stable, the situation you’ve pointed to “requires recursion.” (It’s worth pointing out that Harry, when he gets his Time Turner, doesn’t think this is a likely answer to how Time works.) But perhaps I am not understanding you correctly?
My main objection to the scenario you are proposing, though, is that you are gaining information as a result of some work, but that work is never performed. Try taking your scenario to its logical extreme. You sit in a room with one copy of future-you, and a large composite number N on a sheet of paper. On scrap work hidden from future-you, you write down an integer K. If you are not told that K does not divide N, you check. If it does, you keep track of the factor of N you have found. In any case, you then systematically select a new integer K’ to check for divisibility. Once you have a complete factorization, you sit quietly, and at the end of the hour you go back in time. Then, you let past-you know the “keys” for all of the integers that weren’t factors. Thus, you must have ended up only trying actual factors. So, you have a slightly more complicated version of Harry’s factorization algorithm.
Edit to add: I guess this situation actually still is still an exponential time algorithm, since you still have to consider every possibly integer. But you could do, for example, graph isomorphism testing in polynomial time with a similar method: try constructing a map by first finding what vertex 1 should map to. Future you says “nope, nope, maybe,” and on “maybe” you try to figure out where to put vertex 2, given that vertex 1 maps to whatever. If the graphs are not isomorphic, future you will say “no” to every choice for vertex 1, so you have your answer in polynomial time. Otherwise, you will construct the isomorphism in polynomial time.
There is one offhand remark, vengeance, and a practical cold-heartedness favoring Bones. “Why not Bones?” is only a little better than no argument at all.
Also there is the fact (mentioned by someone else, sorry I forget who) that Narcissa’s sister, Bellatrix, murdered Bones’ brother. Edit: I am an idiot, you already mentioned this.
Bringing in Aberforth is a really interesting idea. Now that I think about it, even given the wizarding wars, it is remarkable that so many siblings have died or nearly died:
Albus/Aberforth
Bellatrix/Narcissa
Bones/her brother (who, exactly?)
Petunia/Lily
The last one is interesting with the role of survivor exchanged as well, since there is a hint that Petunia may have threatened suicide in order to convince Lily to brew the beauty potion.
I think Lucius may have been playing very high speed chess when he picked the amount. The point isnt to have Harry in debt to him, the point is to afford ex-deatheaters loyal to Lucius the oppertunity to trade in a blood debt to Harry for a monetary one to him.
I don’t think so. It’s clear from his reaction that he did not want Harry to accept the trade:
It was clear that Lucius Malfoy had not been expecting that reply.
And later:
“I withdraw my offer!” shouted the Lord of Malfoy. “I will not accept the debt to House Potter in payment, not even for a hundred thousand Galleons! The girl’s blood debt to House Malfoy stands!”
Indeed, it is a taboo tradeoff from Lucius perspective. He has traded justice for his son for money and the resolution of a political (though not moral) debt to Harry. He picked the amount because he thought there was no possibility that Harry would accept such a large amount.
I don’t get how a cunning Slytherin like him can discard such an advantage for pure vengeance over an “attempt” which didn’t do any real harm.
On the contrary:
And Draco was getting angry again. “Dumbledore killed Mother, it’s not enough to just say it’s sad! I don’t understand what you think you have to do, but the Malfoys have to take revenge!” Not avenging the deaths of family went beyond weakness, beyond dishonor, you might as well not exist.
Lucius never meant for Harry to accept the monetary bargain. This is clear from his reaction. He wanted his revenge, and Harry was interfering.
I downvoted the previous post because it was a needlessly complicated, poorly justified plan. Crucially, there was little indication of why Voldemort would want to pretend to lose, when he was already winning the war. By contrast, your more recent post is a good analysis of the new insight into Voldemort’s history and motivations provided by the latest chapter.