Yes—I prefer your version to what happened.
MathMage
Karma: 258
And someone did figure it out; congrats to SilentCal.
EDIT: On the other hand, as Reddit is eager to point out, the curse Riddle invoked on his doubles was not exactly foreseeable.
Taking a short break from trying to figure out just what is going on...how do y’all think Hermione would feel if, assuming no levels of deception, she woke up to this scene?
I don’t think that’s the same gun.
And yeah, that line tripped my wires as well, but I think there are two more likely candidates for concealment than lack of intent to kill:
-Lack of ability to kill
-Whether there is a Headmaster of Hogwarts now (one can imagine a magically designated Interim Headmaster being immediately instated for the purpose of the wards)
He already did that. After he absorbed the lesson about being nice. So I still don’t see how being nice explains away these errors.
Not quite an either/or—perhaps he’s also testing the immortality mechanisms he will use on himself. It hadn’t occurred to me, but he may not be as confident as he pretends to be about how the Stone and the troll/unicorn/Horcrux spells will interact. And it closely parallels his previous failure to test his Horcrux system.
Imagine that Eliezer has 100 possible ways to complete this puzzle. 25% means that the combined weight of all the other possibilities outweighs the one I’ve outlined, but I am still privileging the one significantly over a typical possibility. (However, lerjj has convinced me that I was most likely wrong to do so.)
Hm. I did not properly account for that. Specifying “girl-child friend’s counsel and restraint” and “that she is a part of this world for you to care about” is definitive in that Voldemort intends to restore Hermione as Hermione. For my theory to work, this would have to be a long-term gambit that Harry has made immediate; but this would not explain why Voldemort has made so many tactical, i.e. short-term, errors. So I agree this is strong evidence against my prediction. New confidence: 1%.
EDIT: If someone can explain how to add strikethrough to my original confidence, that would be helpful.
This would explain mistakes particular to being nice, like fortifying Hermione’s body first, but it does not explain more general errors like letting Harry keep his wand and pouch.
Prediction: Voldemort ends up in Hermione’s super-immortal body and claims it doesn’t break his promise because Harry was the one who triggered it. This scenario is the only explanation I can think of for why Voldemort is prioritizing Hermione’s body over his own, giving Harry all his options back, advertising his moment of weakness, and generally behaving like a second-rate Hollywood villain. Confidence: 25%.
There’s also the alarm clock he gave Professor Trelawney—as I understand it, readers have assumed that it’s spelled for surveillance. So there is at least one known mechanism by which Dumbledore would have extraordinary access to prophecy.
Blue-sky speculation: Harry’s father’s rock is the real Philosopher’s Stone, and Dumbledore only pretended to believe that Voldemort could locate the Philosopher’s Stone wherever it was. Confidence: far too low to assign a number, given that we’ve already seen what looks to be the real Stone, in the Mirror where it was always thought to be.
The Mirror in canon isn’t limited to the viewer’s knowledge (cf. the appearances of Harry’s extended family); it’s unlikely that the HPMOR version has been given that limitation, so fulfilling that limitation is not a strong indicator. Moreover, Quirrellmort’s CEV probably is not to defeat Dumbledore, so the Mirror should not show it. I think odds are high that this was the real Dumbledore, and that he has been, not killed, but cast out of the time stream. Removed from game, if you will.
Yeah, that’s a good way to turn all this “carefully designed not to destroy the world” stuff on its head.
Prediction: Atlantis wasn’t a catastrophe that the Mirror was too late to avert. Rather, the Mirror was completed, and the Atlanteans removed themselves to a realm of existence within the Mirror. Confidence: 5%.
Well, yes. The False Comprehension Charm is precisely a very narrow Confundus charm that makes a person’s brain unable to process these letters—by substituting a convenient, wrong, preprocessed ‘answer’.
The pigeonhole principle doesn’t say what you want it to. It guarantees that some ancestors will show up multiple times on everyone’s trees; it does not guarantee or even suggest that every ancestor present on anyone’s tree is present on everyone’s trees.
That aside, it’s not clear that the descendants of Salazar Slytherin would mix sufficiently with the rest of magical Britain in 1000 years of wizard generations (possibly longer than Muggle generations, given differing lifespans) for the paper’s findings to apply. Running with general experimental assumptions is not effective for specific and extraordinary cases.
That’s not how ancestry works.
First, generally speaking, exponentiation of ancestry breaks down rapidly (pedigree collapse), otherwise we arrive at the absurd conclusion that any living person has a trillion great-to-the-thirtieth-grandparents. In reality, go back far enough and ancestors start occupying many positions in the tree.
Second, obvious counterexample: suppose Salazar Slytherin marries and has one child, who marries and has one child, etc...and fifty generations later, there is still only one descendant of Salazar Slytherin per generation. This counterexample can be broadened; suppose the descendants of Salazar Slytherin’s second child all died in the Black Plague. In short, it’s not the case that a distant ancestor is either everyone’s ancestor or no one’s...not until you get to mitochondrial Eve and y-chromosomal Adam, anyway, but that’s another story (and much older than 1000 years ago).
Fair points. Hermione had enough information to make getting out rational, though perhaps not enough to trust Quirrell to get her out. And if Quirrell is the culprit, all the more reason for him to consider her failure to leave as assumption of responsibility for her own demise. That said, these may be blind spots for Harry.
Not that I think you reason wrongly, but...