Better yet, Nott is the power that Voldemort knows!
MathMage
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%.
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.
“For defeating the Dark Lord, we award Hermione...wait, what was the difference in score again?...four hundred and twenty points.”
Therefore, LV needs him for something right now.
Awww.
Awww.
The interpretation where the Slytherins are playing to honor their fallen professor is much more straightforward.
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’.
...or character growth in the protagonist, theoretically.
He doesn’t have to be persuaded to be good, he just has to be persuaded to let Harry out of the box. If he lets Harry out of the box for non-good reasons, that still counts.
Because it is unlikely that Harry would have precommitted to blowing himself up as a general emergency countermeasure.
It is not humility to note that extrapolating models unimaginably far beyond their normal operating ranges is a fraught business. Just because we can apply a certain utility approximation to our monkeysphere, or even a few orders of magnitude above our monkeysphere, doesn’t mean the limiting behavior matches our approximation.
Native speaker—it’s not wrong, but it is somewhat awkward. That said, the whole excerpt is redundant, so I’d be making more extensive changes than replacing “insofar as” with something else if I were editing. (Also: “He tried not to shiver in the falling night temperatures, for...it was getting colder.”)
BABA YAGA FAKED HER DEATH AND POSSESSED PERENELLE, TRUE STORY
Sorry, I think I’ve read too much Reddit today.
From 113:
This is the order in which the next acts shall be done. First Harry Potter shall be stunned, then his limbs severed and the wounds cauterized. Mr. Friendly and Mr. Honor will examine him for any trace of unusual magics. One of you shall shoot the boy many times with my Muggle weapon, and then as many of you as can shall strike him with the Killing Curse. Only then will Mr. Grim crush his skull and brains with the mundane substance of a tombstone.
So it was planned, but never executed. All other references to the gun have it in Voldemort’s hand.
I wonder how Harry would react to Death as written by Terry Pratchett?
Ch. 84:
“I shall not name any names,” said the old witch. “But I shall tell a story, and see if it sounds familiar.” Amelia Bones looked back down, turning to the next parchment. “Born 1927, entered Hogwarts in 1938, sorted into Slytherin, graduated 1945.
Because it wasn’t a throwaway anymore. His plan was to take over magical Britain as Voldemort, and have both the ‘true’ respect that comes from fear of what he can do to people and the pleasure of killing idiots whenever he wants. (And possibly to exterminate the Muggle world, but first things first.)
I would watch this.
Sad ending:
All the students agree to take on the position of Defense Professor de facto.
Next year, all the students die.