… Huh.
The power that the Dark Lord knows not… might end up being love after all.
linkhyrule5
Karma: 1,704
Elaborate?
More than that, it’s trivial to nullify that possibility. Just watch the battle. If you know it’s happening, and you know where it is, then just use one of the many, many scrying implements we know Dumbledore has to watch the battle. The moment the troll ate her legs Dumbledore should’ve been there; even if he wanted Harry to save her or something he could’ve discreetly stabilized her, Harry had no way to notice.
… Unicorn blood is known to be useful in life extension.
Alternatively, Harry sadly fails at resurrection and memorializes her in the wildly successful edutainment cartoon My Little Pony: Rationality is Magic.
The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities
Fundamentally, regardless of out-of-universe complaints, McGonagall was wrong in the way she dealt with this problem, and by extension in how she dealt with Gryffindor House.
She has taken the first step towards becoming a PC in this universe, which is being rational and changing yourself to fix your mistakes.
… she may also have just learned how to lose.
No, I think we’ll be seeing much more of intelligent!McGonagall starting now...
It strikes me that this is even more obviously a turning point than it already is.
First: This is the first hint to Harry that he is not alone. All this story, Harry has been defined by his aloofness; the one person as “sane” as he is cannot be trusted, and for all that Hermione tries she’s just more of a apprentice than a co-hero, she’s not on the same scale that Harry acts on.
No longer. Harry knows, now, that there are more like him, and they too are smart, and competent, and they have gifts for him from hundreds of years in the past.
Second: This also solves one of the problems I had been worrying about, which was: How can Harry solve Death without it looking like a Deus ex Machina? Sanderson’s First Law: magic cannot be used to solve a problem except where it is foreshadowed and constructed from existing effects. There’s been a few ideas tossed around—Summon Death + True Patronus and the like—but they all seem to have… unhelpful side effects. (In particular, actually ending “Death” would be a bad thing, because Death kills bacteria as much as it kills humans. You want to destroy “Death of Humans” or come up with a mass-producible immortality elixir, not kill Death outright.)
In my analysis, I’ve considered this strong evidence that Quirrell is genuinely worried about what Harry will do. This isn’t (just) a plot to get Harry dependent on him so he can feed what he wants into his ear; this is also an actual limitation on Harry’s power, denying him information that he doesn’t intend to tell him personally, either.
… given the Prophecy, I can’t blame him, though we don’t know much about the effects of fighting Prophecies.
… Hm.
This isn’t the chain of logic I followed—for the sake of authenticity I’ll put that at the end, but -
Isn’t a little… strange, that artifacts designed and destined to defeat death transfer primarily by death?
I mean, even aside from the “kill the previous owner and take their stuff” method, the other option—inheriting it—is also heavily tied to death, as powerful artifacts like these are unlikely to be permanently given away until the original owner has no further use of it.
Backing away from plot for a minute—if you don’t expect to manage to destroy death yourself, you should really program your powerful artifacts to seek out the most effective owners, anyway. Inheritance is very unreliable, and murder is entirely counterproductive—both would be backup selectors to anyone designing such a thing. So what’s the primary determinant?
I think we’ve seen it. The prophecy stone, that responded to Harry’s oath to end death, engraved with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows, and completely unmentioned since—if I were going to design such a thing, gifting the Hallows to someone who had sworn an honest oath against death would be a good start, particularly if I could somehow tie it into True Patronus capability (as the silvery light suggests.)
If that’s the case, then Harry has a stronger claim on the Hallows than their current physical possessors. Most importantly, this includes the Resurrection Stone. Further, magic seems to register HJPEV as “Tom Riddle”—at any rate, the ancient Hogwarts wards do. So unless magic has multiple names for Harry Potter, then HJPEV may really count as the same person as Voldemort—in which case he would have access to his Horcrux network. Voldemort may even have anticipated this—but since literally nobody knows both the existence and the significance of that glowing stone, he can’t anticipate losing control over the Stone.
So, predictions:
Links go to PredictionBook pages.
(My actual chain of logic started from noticing that I was confused about the Death prophecy—since I didn’t really see how the Hallows would play much of a part in the climax of the story—which lead to the realization that the prophecy might reassign ownership of the Hallows.)
On a side note -
“But what I must actually tell you is that you will find the standard introductory text in the north-northwest stacks of the main Hogwarts library, filed under M.”
First, I rather appreciate the comic relief, Eliezer.
… But second, what the heck are Memory Charms doing outside the--
Right. Hogwarts. Crazies. Nevermind.
If Parseltongue depended only on the actual truth of the world, Voldemort would have won already, because you can then pull single bits of arbitrary information out of the aether one at a time.
Honestly, I’m more worried about this. See the Ethical Injunction mini-Sequence.
There are options now available to him that genuinely are more powerful, but… even Harry makes mistakes, and even Harry falls prey to overconfidence sometimes.
After this chapter I’ve updated heavily in favor of Quirrell being genuinely terrified and trying to run damage control. That means giving him more emotional lifelines.
Admittedly, it also probably means making Harry dependent on an information source Quirrell can trust not to say too much, i.e. himself, but…
Rowling made a mistake and gave Dudley a PS in 1993.
… On a side note.
That’s a prophecy. Which means it’d be recorded in the Hall of Prophecy.
I’m starting to wonder exactly how many very good reasons Dumbledore had for keeping Harry out of that Hall.
Did he update on humanity in general, or Harry in particular?
Sunk cost. Someone has taken the Marauder’s Map; might as well be him.
Wait, you can violate the six-hour limit on backward movement of information with Playstations?
Does that mean the Department of Mysteries has a Playstation department?
plots evilly
Essentially? It has to happen at some point along the timeline, and whatever engine runs magic finds it simplest to give visions simultaneous to the decisions that cause them. (Or at least, contribute in some major way to them.)
Or, in other words, enforced narrative causality.
No, I don’t read instructions and am going to ruin the survey results for everyone.
snicker
Also, wow, the population of Europe is wildly lower than I thought it was, it’s outside my 90% range...
Random math: one way of deciding whether or not to cooperate in the reward question is plot reward versus percentage-UDT-users in the LW community (under the assumption that everyone in that set will do the same thing you do, and everyone else splits 50-50). If that percentage is larger than about 65% (which I’m 70% sure it is), cooperating is superior to defection, but defection actually has the higher maximum expected value—if the entire community chooses randomly, anyway.
...
blink blink
Aw, darn it, I should’ve flipped a coin...
Edit: No, wait, nevermind, that would halve my expected reward.