I seem to recall that at some point, Quirrell told Harry that his ultimate plan involved Harry leading Britain. Now Harry tells Draco that his ultimate plan involves Draco leading Britain. I can't wait to see Draco reveal his plan that involves Quirrell leading Britain!
"I had to promise my keepers not to sign anything you gave me. So I made sure to compose this myself, and sign it before I left."
Like hell you did. Mad-Eye Moody just told you not to. But it sure is a game-theoretical advantage to convince the other player that the conditions of the deal cannot be renegotiated at all, and that it's now or never.
"I also promised not to touch a quill while I was in Gringotts,"
Similarly, what a convenient excuse to expose the muggle-hater to a small example of muggle technology just as you're trying to make him realize there may be a lot more to muggles than he thought.
I doubt Lucius was very impressed with a "muggle quill".
But if Harry keeps it up about the wealth of the Muggle world, I wonder if the Malfoys won't end up setting their sights on Muggles and their resources. I'm imagining a "what have I done" on Harry's part when that happens.
There has to be some pre-existing mechanism in place to stop this (and also most plain trade). "Take what you want from other people" is too short a sentence in Human Language not to have occurred to various wizards over time, likewise "Imitate the way that person gained status".
Minerva and Griphook weren't surprised by the idea of taking raw gold and turning into coins. Presumably this happens sometimes; it's not the case that all the Galleons in the world were first minted thousands of years ago. So how did the gold in the wizard economy get there in the first place? And what is the mechanism that prevents it now but didn't prevent it then?
Are all wizards in the world unaware that Muggles possess gold at all? Surely not; Muggles probably own much more gold, and operate many more gold mines, than wizards do. If wizards ever went looking for un-mined gold, they'd encounter Muggle competition.
Wizards have an apparently trivial method of acquiring gold: Apparate into a bank vault, fill your Bag of Holding, Apparate away to Gringotts. It's doable by most wizards, carries no real risk, is unnoticeable by the bank, untraceable when they do notice the gold is missing, and the other wizards and goblins probably don't care if some Muggles were robbed by an unknown wizard.
Hypothesis: The muggles don't possess much gold. Most of the huge stacks of gold in places like Fort Knox are clever magical replicas, and have been for a very long time. Any wizard can easily see through the ruse, but the muggles are clueless.
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere. Or else, maybe fake magic gold is a really good conductor.
If most of the gold we think is in the Muggle economy is really in the wizarding economy, then wizards possess up to 170,000 tons of gold. 100,000 tons of gold divided between 1 million wizards is 100 Kg = 20,000 Galleons per wizard on average.
We actually observe that 100,000 galleons is a princely ransom and a rich fortune. Lord Malfoy is one of the richest people in Britain and he probably has on the order of a million Galleons. This seems compatible but somewhat unlikely; I would estimate less gold in the wizarding economy than 100,000 tons. And yet if they stole all the Muggle gold they'd have closer to 150,000 tons, not counting whatever they may have mined themselves.
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods. So if you want to come up with gold by the tonne, you need to either actually engage muggles in trade (eewww) or go hunting for treasure with no (living) owners.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all. Lucius is a political creature, so he needs ways to bribe idiots, but a wizard that keeps their newt skills up to scratch is pretty much carrying around a cornucopia machine in their pocket. Sure, you could spend a bunch of effort and rob a bank, then use that gold to have a house built.. Or, you know, save yourself the hassle and raise a cute little tower from the bones of the earth/bend space and live like a king in a post office box.. ect.
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods.
That is the first suggestion that would actually work. It's just that I can't believe that the average wizard thinks of muggles as persons (or humans) that can be stolen from. It's less plausible than that they would care about the stability of the economy.
Besides, what magic can create, magic can destroy. People would invest serious effort in developing magic that would erase the "magical signature" of stolen gold if it would help them become billionaires.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all.
The reason bribing people with money works in the first place, is that most people don't have as much money as they would like. If wizards didn't really need money, as you suggest, then they wouldn't care about it and couldn't be bribed.
Since money translates into power over others, Lucius too would always want more money.
More to the point, whatever security Muggle vaults had 100 or 200 years ago definitely wouldn't have stood up to wizards. (Their powers wane by the year, while ours wax.) Since all the Muggle gold didn't vanish long ago, there must be a different explanation than Muggle vault security.
In most societies, there was no remotely adequate solution to the problems of tracking reputations and punishing violations of trust for merchants who operated outside the narrow circle of their own communities. So merchants were largely viewed as scammers because they mostly were; nothing naive about it.
Wizards have plenty to trade to Muggles - by providing services, not products.
Nothing of worth? The canon explanation for the Wizarding world's masquerade, from just a few chapters into the series, is that wizards would be in such demand by muggles that it would be too irritating and waste too much time.
By the way, in the Rowling-verse, the Prime Minister is supposed to know about the Ministry of Magic; he's the one official point of contact between Muggles and wizards. I wonder if that's also true in the canonical version?
Did you just upgrade HPMoR to canon, and downgrade the Rowling-verse to non-canon? Bwa-ha-ha!
I really liked this chapter. I've always liked the HPMOR version of Draco, and now I like the HPMOR version of Lucius as well. It's fun to watch smart competent people being awesome at each other.
I wish the chapters with girls in them could be like this too.
I think this is the heart of feminist complaints about this story. Yes, the female characters are honest, and levelheaded, and moral, and quite a bit more realistic than male characters. Yes, the male characters have massive, gaping flaws in their character, and if you tried to have a conversation with them in the real world they would appear unbearably pompous. Yes, clever repartee does not replace genuine kindness. I agree with all that.
But the thing is, this fic (on its surface) doesn't value kindness and morality nearly as much as suave, articulate word-poker and beautifully intricate schemes and counter-schemes and "I know that you know that I know..." insanity. I think you're going to get people accusing you of sexism even if you provide your female characters with traits that are valued and truly matter in the real world, as long as you still hold back the traits that are valued in-story.
In the original Harry Potter, Hermione was quite a bit more immature in her first year than in HPMOR - but the backbone of HP was bold derring-do and wandsmanship and remembering the right spell, and she (and McGonagall and Ginny) was essential in that environment. Intricate conver...
The character who seems to be the best response to this, and whom I hope we will see again shortly, is Amelia Bones. She seems to kick just as much ass as Moody, without the significant aid of a literally all-seeing eye. Watching her Azkaban defense was quite impressive, and I hope that the hints of "Bones" in this chapter mean we'll see her in action again, and not just as a potential signatory.
I would have loved to read a counterfactual HPMOR with Bones in the role of McGonagall (or McGonagall with the personality of Bones). It's true that her personality makes more sense in an Auror than a teacher, and that means we don't get to see her very much. But then again, virtually every major male authority figure in Hogwarts looks like he should belong in an elite war chamber rather than a classroom. Seriously, what are these people doing running a boarding school?
Hogwarts is the entire British magical education system (with the exception of some private tutors). Controlling education is not optional for people who want to control a country. The fact that education is all centralized the most powerful fortress just makes it even more important to control.
Hogwarts is the entire British magical education system (with the exception of some private tutors).
Do we know this for a fact?
Objections:
Going to Hogwarts is prestigious, meaning there must be lower-status options available.
Hogwarts regularly hires apparently British replacement teachers, most of them with at least the appearance of educational experience. It is improbable that said experience comes exclusively from abroad or from being a private tutor.
There are too few pupils at Hogwarts to account for the entire underage wizarding population, given the size of the overall wizarding population and assuming the majority of wizards' children are also wizards (not to mention having to factor in Muggleborns).
It seems improbable that the booming school equipment business of Diagon Alley survives on one school's worth of customers, especially if most of them only shop once a year.
If most of the population of magical Britain have been through the same school, we would expect an extremely high degree of social interconnectedness, with most people knowing everyone of the same age at least by sight. There's no evidence of this.
On the other hand,
It is implied that letter
Canon is fairly clear that Hogwarts is the only game in Britain. It also leads to glaring inconsistencies in scale which you just pointed out. (Rowling originally said that Hogwarts had about 700 students, and then fans started pointing out that that was wildly inconsistent with the school as she described it. And even that's too small to make things really work).
But the evidence, from HP7 (page 210 of my first-run American hardback copy):
Lupin is talking about Voldemort's takeover of Wizarding society, to Harry and the others.
"Attendance is now compulsory for every young witch and wizard," he replied. "That was announced yesterday. It's a change, because it was never obligatory before. Of course, nearly every witch and wizard in Britain has been educated at Hogwarts, but their parents had the right to teach them at home or send them abroad if they preferred. This way, Voldemort will have the whole Wizarding population under his eye from a young age."
"Most wizards" in Britain were educated at Hogwarts, and the exceptions were homeschooled or sent abroad. It's really hard to read that to imply that there's another British wizarding school anywhere.
It seems improbable that the booming school equipment business of Diagon Alley survives on one school's worth of customers, especially if most of them only shop once a year.
It didn't seem to me there were so much school equipment business. If you look at the shops Harry went to the first year, it's a dress shop, a book shop, a wand shop, a potion ingredient shop, a broomstick shop, a pet shop, ... none of them sound dedicated to school equipment. They probably have a lot of school equipment in stock/display during august, like supermarkets do here too, but continue selling their goods to adult wizards the rest of the time.
The rest of your objections do hold, but I just fold it into "canon HP isn't very consistent" suspension of disbelief... of course, it makes things tougher for EY when he's making a consistent version of it. But that's part of what makes HPMOR funny/interesting.
On the topic of illogical career paths, Bones has a real job that requires being a very good auror, rather than being an errand-boy for Dumbledore, as Moody seems to be.
And as for "what are these people doing running a boarding school", they run a school based on reward and (mostly) punishment, rather than the growth of their pupils; they teach a rigid curriculum that seems to have remained unchanged for centuries, in spite of advances in both the magical and muggle worlds; and they socially condition people into narrow roles, largely defined by negative attitudes towards others, based solely on the House a piece of fabric sorts them into.
I think you misunderstood. I wasn't claiming to be offended myself, I was trying to get at the cause of people's emotional reactions. Whether or not you believe those emotions are justified, they are almost always triggered by something.
I also specified that HPMOR values wit and scheming on its surface - that is, the scheming is what provides almost all the entertainment value and keeps people in their chairs long enough to hear the deeper ideology. What do we want from characters in a story at their most basic level? We want to have fun watching them. That's why most people read stories, and it's why most people read HPMOR. And the ones who are the most fun to watch are the male characters.
I didn't claim this was intentional, nor that it was wrong, just that it was probably the cause of feminist complaints. It was in part an answer to "But the female characters are good people". Being a good person is not always the same as being good in the story. In Disney movies, you have to be a wide-eyed dreamer. In Tarantino movies you have to be a stone-cold killing machine. In HPMOR (and Death Note) you have to be a hyperintelligent byzantine plotter. And then comes the ideology.
I'm concerned if, this late in the game, Harry's only reason for suspecting the Defense Professor is "just because he's the Defense Professor." It would seem that he has way too many excellent reasons to suspect Quirrell no matter what his title. The sense of doom. The fact that he was able to cast Avada Kedavra on a random guard. The fact that he carried Harry off on a disastrous plot to free Bellatrix Black. The fact that he happened to be there on time to save Draco's life when the wards were disabled. The fact that he is one of only a handful of wizards with the ability to disable Hogwarts' wards. The impassioned speech advocating benevolent fascism. The fact that no one knows who he really is and Harry can think of at least three different identities he's taken on. The weird zombie mode that seems to roughly correlate with Bad Things happening. The excessively harsh and sometimes downright abusive way he runs his class. The lack of empathy and inability to accept or even understand love.
My question is, do you think Harry has realized all this and is really strongly suspecting Quirrell for other reasons, and he only told Lucius that the only reason was the curse on the Defense Professor's position? Or do you think Harry is still reluctant to seriously entertain the possibility that it was Quirrell?
You left out "The wards explicitly say that the Defense Professor killed Hermione."
I mean, it is quite literally spelled out. I'm completely baffled at how both readers and characters are not promoting Quirrell to the top of the suspects list by a mile.
The old witch’s eyebrows rose. “How did he identify you to the Hogwarts wards, then?”
A slight smile. “ “The Headmaster drew a circle, and told Hogwarts that he who stood within was the Defense Professor. Speaking of which—”
Quirrell is Baba Yaga, a "she", and some "he" also in that circle is the Defense Professor. EDIT: The Troll is the Defense Professor.
Past Professors of Defense have included not just the legendary wandering hero Harold Shea but also the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga, yes, I see some of you are still shuddering at the sound of her name even though she’s been dead for six hundred years.
" quote undying unquote Baba Yaga"
Quote hint unquote.
“Here of course we have the Sorting Hat, I believe the two of you have met. It told me that it was never again to be placed on your head under any circumstances. You’re only the fourteenth student in history it’s said that about, Baba Yaga was another one
Gee, Baba Yaga's mind had the same effect on the Hat as Harry's. Do we hypothesize his brain being like anyone else's brain?
And I daresay that most wizards would be hard-pressed to name a single Dark Lady besides Baba Yaga.”
Yes, they'...
Maybe Quirrell speaks with some authority about what women with power would do.
The story Quirrell recounts here seems very much like the canon story of handsome muggle Tom Riddle's seduction by pureblood witch Merope Gaunt — the parents of Tom Riddle, Jr. aka Voldemort.
This only narrows Harry's list to 'The Defense Professor and people who could rig the wards to say the Defense Professor killed her.' Dumbles is easily on that list.
You mean Dumbledore says that the wards say that the Defense Professor killed Hermione. We would have to trust both Dumbledore and the wards for that. But you are right, it leaves only Dumbledore and Quirrel as plausible suspects.
Harry's reason given to the Malfoys for suspecting Quirrell is "just because he's the defense professor." I'm sure he knows all of this other evidence as well, and would consider it appropriately if actually given a chance to sit down and consider the possibilities (though he might be rather distracted by Draco's Dumbledore hypothesis).
Given his extraordinary caution when meeting Quirrell in the woods earlier, he is at least willing to seriously entertain the possibility.
If Dumbledore is Harry's legal guardian and can overrule him, should Harry's 11-year-old signature be worth anything to Lord Malfoy?
Dumbledore may be able to overrule the contract, but that would do little to stop the political effects of Harry's statement that Lucius did not kill Hermione. Since it would also reinstate the debt, it doesn't seem like a net benefit to Dumbledore.
A very good point.
Then again, if Dumbledore contests it, we might just end up with another round of
The Headmaster of Hogwarts, who acted as Harry Potter's legal guardian in the eyes of magical Britain, had overruled his ward's assent.
The Debts Committee of the Wizengamot had overruled the Headmaster of Hogwarts.
The Chief Warlock had overruled the Debts Committee.
The Wizengamot had overruled the Chief Warlock.
After all, Lord Malfoy has already secured the Wizengamot's support in the matter of the blood debt and his right to deal with it as he sees fit. Nor is it likely to defy Harry's attempt to pronounce House Malfoy innocent of Hermione's murder.
I think for the time being Malfoy wants this to happen and chose to accept Harry's right to enter an agreement...but if something goes wrong, I wouldn't put it past Lucius to spin this into an invalid contract due to Harry's age. Or maybe Harry has done so many crazily adult things so far this actually feels perfectly normal, not only to the readers, but the characters.
Even if the other humanoid races are essentially human, it seems like Harry should be talking to them more. Getting different viewpoints and information could be incredibly helpful. If the differences are primarily cultural, well, there can be an awful lot of variation between cultures. Not to mention the differences in magical ability and techniques.
Of course, in canon, Harry didn't catch on to this until the fourth year or so.
"I only used you in ways that made you stronger. That's what it means to be used by a friend."
My favorite line in this chapter.
Which calls back to this bit in Chapter 51:
But then Professor Quirrell had also seen Harry taught Occlumency, he had taught Harry how to lose... if the Defense Professor wanted to make some use of Harry Potter, it was a use that required a strengthened Harry Potter, not a weakened one. That was what it meant to be used by a friend, that they would want the use to make you stronger instead of weaker.
I don't know about the parent, but personally I liked this line because it debunks the cached thought that "using" someone is always wrong. Humans use one another all the time for all sorts of things, from a grad student using his mentor to advance his career to an overworked executive using her goofy laid-back friends to keep her blood pressure down. People tend to only consider one very narrow and destructive meaning of the word "use", and then come to the conclusion that you can't have a genuine caring relationship with someone if you pursue it for personal benefit. The grad student can still admire and love his mentor even though the main point of that relationship is so he can get a PhD. If you do care about the person, you'd try to arrange it so that your use will help them too.
That's one reading, I guess. Another reading is that this is the kind of line you might use to justify the narrow and destructive kind of using to yourself. Seems a little dangerous is all.
Is there a list of currently remaining mysteries/Chekhov's guns/loose ends somewhere? Like, what happened to Hermione's body, what happened to Beatrix Black, who H&C is, who has the marauder map... And maybe a list of solved mysteries, too.
...Thinking..
No. Persuasive theory, but it has flaws in it - specifically, the Troll was too successful at neutralizing Grangers defenses to have been a misfired plot. Arranging for her to be wandering the halls alone? Sure. Sabotaging her broom? sure. Invisibility cloak not doing what it was supposed to? Well, I can see that. Telling the troll to eat her feet first so that the emergency portkey does not work?
That absolutely requires lethal intent. The rest of it all fits, but having Granger get ported out of harms way if Harry flies into a wall while en-route or something does not even require D to put a backup plan in place, it merely requires him to not neutralize a precaution already in place.
The anti-troll weapon.. Well, if the troll got stolen from the philosopher stone defenses...
however, that does not mean D was not hat and cloak. Because, as Harry so ably demonstrated, breaking someone out of askaban is not difficult. Sending Granger there would not require D to intend to leave her there, even if he was expecting the wizengamot to enact a lesser sanction.
I think it's relatively plausible, actually. The troll did not necessarily have specific orders to eat her feet-first.
As a matter of character, Dumbledore does have odd notions of what it takes to be a hero. And he may think Harry needed to see the real toll of wars by having someone close to him die.
Or he really was confident that Harry would save her, and he would use the troll attempt as evidence against Malfoy (which would have worked).
And my favourite part of your comment:
"Invisibility cloak not doing what it was supposed to? Well, I can see that."
Yes; that's the problem :)
Exactly like that. [sigh]
While your example is undeniable, Santa Claus does instruct Harry to get outside Hogwarts before using his playing card portkey, and I'm fairly confident there are other instances to the same effect. It seems that the state of the evidence, both in canon and MoR, roughly amounts to "Portkeys and Apparition do not work within Hogwarts wards except when they do".
Try thinking the plots through from the perspective of whoever plotted them. The hat-and-cloak plot? That all fits someone who is reluctant to kill or overtly coerce, but free with memory charms. (Hi there Snape. Welcome to the suspect pool!) If the assumption is that the alarm on Draco was known, then at no point is anyone in serious danger. Worst case scenario, Hr gets to spend a night in azkaban before being quietly extracted. Heck, if Harry goes ballistic and kills off the dementors? Win for the light! .. and the fact that this might kill Harry is severely non-obvious. The standard patronus does not tax the caster.
.. Checking chapter 46. Right, first question. Dumbledore asks is what the toll of Patronus 2.0 is. Given Harrys answer, I think he may well be under the impression that Harry could safely kill off every dementor in britain if backed up by a phoenix. That could have been the entire point. Getting azkaban purified by Ûber-patronus..
So, yhea, this could all be the work of Dumbledore. If it was the work of someone else, the plotter still exercised some restraint. The plotter still fails actual etics, of course, but this could all be the work of someone who thinks t...
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.
Hmm...a few thoughts.
I'd always read this series as Rationalist propoganda, and this chapter doesn't really work in that light.
Dumbledore, I'd figured, represented the world's Conventional Wisdom. Benevolent, on the whole, deranged, absolutely, and far more powerful than Harry could ever be. Harry and Co. can no more overcome him than the LW's readership can defeat the billions of non-rationalists.
With that interpretation in mind I didn't really doubt that Dumbledore could ever be guilty of something, but figured Harry would have to let him off the hook. People with good intentions do bad things but you can't go all Steerpike, ya know? I sort of figured that this was confirmed in Harry's speech to McGonagall about blaming Voldemort vs. himself. Heroic responsibility means save even those who have erred (and I can't really conceive of Dumbledore/humanity being judged to have sinned save by error).
But now we have Harry teaming up with Lucius and Draco, ostensibly to take down Dumbledore. I figured Draco represented your smart friend that you are trying to get to be a rationalist, and Lucius their peer structure. Inducting them into the Conspiracy shouldn't allow you to overcom...
Dumbledore is the big character we have left who hasn't had a 'meeting' with Harry
"The first meeting:
...
...Harry found himself, still in his pajamas, facing Albus Dumbledore..."
Malfoy Manor exuded all the subtlety of a Baroque castle, overstuffed with the trappings of power, filled to the brim with trinkets, tapestries and timeless artifacts. It seemed excessive even in the dark of night, with only some of the item galleries illuminated.
Harry didn't care for any of them. Politics, let Draco deal with all this signalling nonsense.
Yet Draco was absent, it was only him and Lucius Malfoy, his unlikely new ally, planning and plotting over minutiae, phrasings, contracts.
Laying a foundation for the next decades of Magical Britain, a blueprint for a saner Magical world, even?
That didn't help in devising the statement to be read in the Wizengamot, at least not after the first few hours. Harry couldn't help but think that Lucius enjoyed being the superior mind for once, and dragged it out just to non-so-subtly remind Harry how out of his element he truly was.
They had already used the Time Turner to its fullest effects, working in the Witching Hours of the morning, to get the most out of the Borrowed Time. As far as Dumbledore was concerned, Harry was soundly sleeping in the Ravenclaw quarters.
Muffled sounds were coming from outside Malfoy's private study, in which...
Malfoy was staring transfixed at Quirrell, his cane quivering, as if he had suddenly lost his confidence in all those barriers.
"I am running out of time, I give you this one chance. You know what I can do, you know how little I care about your trinket. Remove all your barriers immediately, bow to me, bow to your Lord, to your God, to me, Voldemort!"
There was a deadly silence in the room. Quirrell -- Voldemort? -- Quirrell apparently did not see the need to add anything, Harry couldn't speak -- could barely think! -- Lucius might as well be a deer staring into a truck's headlights, his eyes flickering back and forth between his cane, Quirrell standing there with a seemingly relaxed poise, and the hearth. The hearth across the room, it could as well have been on another floor, impossibly far away.
The cane cluttered to the floor, Lucius Malfoy's forehead followed immediately as he prostrated himself on the floor, voice quavering. "Forgive me, my Lord, for I have sinned. I am yours, now and forever, I will prove my loyal - "
There was a flash, Harry didn't see Quirrell so much as move his lips, yet Lord Malfoy, of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Malfoy, became pa...
Probably my last prose contribution, judging by the reception.
Speaking as one individual, it's not that I dislike what you've written, or do not find it interesting in its own right.
It's just that I come here, to a discussion and analysis thread, for information-dense texts which present their ideas clearly and concisely, because I find they give me the most value relative to time spent reading. Accordingly, when I see here a long prose text which is written to prioritise quality of narrative over efficiency of communication, I skim it quickly or not at all, and move on to other posts. They will contain a similar amount of value, but take a tiny fraction of the time to read and comprehend.
Also, I speculate that some people will think it inappropriate for you to "showcase" your own writing in a thread meant for discussion of someone else's work, though I realise that's not your intention.
What a clusterfuck. I love it. Reminds me of how Sam Hughes made his heroine summon a demon into her bed, explaining that stories are more interesting when characters don't have perfect reasoning.
Would you believe I was expecting more of what we've gotten since Chapter 90, only starring Draco? I'm pretty sure Hermione would/will not like that contract one bit.
The transition from "Now I'm going to defeat death!" to "These are my plans to overthrow the government" was... actually pretty believable. I would like to know what Moody thought of Harry out-preparing him (and kinda wonder if someone in the wizarding world is going to invent a magical equivalent of the ball point pen--it shouldn't be that hard, just use a space-folded inkwell and maybe apparate it to the tip. Maybe the Weasely twins could do it in a couple years, if not already.).
Moody should have expected Harry to outprepare him (and probably did) - based on past experiences, plus general caution. What Moody completely missed was the direction of Harry's preparation - of having set up the meeting with his own goal in mind.
He did. He also has never seen Harry without those things on him. I mean, really now? Harry is not going to go anywhere without pen and paper on his person. The real question is why he did not read it.
It doesn't look like he can read it while it's folded up, for whatever reason, or the reveal at the end of the chapter couldn't have gone as it did.
Presumably while they're folded up, he's seeing two overlapping sets of writing at the same time, and they interfere with each other, like overlapping OHP slides. To overcome this effect, he'd have to spontaneously tune his x-ray vision to the fineness of a millimetre or so (the thickness of the parchment), which may plausibly be difficult or impossible.
Lucius Malfoy nodded distantly. "I could not think of any reason why you would pay a hundred thousand Galleons to save a mudblood's life. No reason save one, which would account for her power and bloodthirst alike; but then she died at the hands of a troll, and yet you lived.
What was the reason Lucius Malfoy thought of?
That Voldemort is her father, and her muggle background a lie. "Secretly a pureblood" really is a very credible explanation if you actually believe in blood purism.
Fostering her out would be insurance against defeat. Placing her with pure-blood allies would not suffice for that eventuality, as such allies would most likely be going down with the ship too. Placing her with muggles takes her out of the war entirely, and the trace means she gets back into the wizarding world 11 years later no matter what happens..
Uhm. This is spookily compatible with Canon. For a girl with supposedly loving parents, she spends an inordinate number of holidays at hogwarts and the burrow. Worse, we never actually meet said parents at all in canon. We are told. By Hermione, that they get shipped to Australia with a case of amnesia. And I mean, "my parents are dentists" is exactly the kind of lie a clever 11 year old orphan might tell people to get them to iose all interest in further enquiries. So, basically, her family could oh-so-easily be entirely fiction in-universe.
Perhaps that Hermione is also Voldemort in the same way HJPEV is Voldemort (since, Horcrux or not, that seems the likely explanation for Harry's power and bloodthirst)?
None of the theories suggested thus far explain the last part of the quote:
but then she died at the hands of a troll, and yet you lived.
The way I see it, Lucius could have been thinking one of two things (originally, before Hermione's death) to say that:
Killing Hermione would also kill Harrymort (e.g. Hermione is some quasi-Horcrux Lucius may have heard of).
Hermione would certainly survive anything that Harrymort survives (e.g. Hermione also has all the magic skill of Voldemort).
For those of you confused by this comment: I believe Manfred assumes Lucius suspected that Hermione was replaced by a polyjuiced Bellatrix Black. Lucius implies that he believes Harry to be a de-powered Voldemort in their discussion at the train station, and also believes Harry to be behind the rescue of Bellatrix from Azkaban. If you rescued your powerful minion, you would want to keep her close about you for your own protection and to accomplish tasks beyond your magical abilities. Hermione Granger is known to associate with Harry Potter, so she would be the ideal candidate for someone to replace with Bellatrix.
Well, Slytherin and Ravenclaw may both "win" the house cup now. But how is this going to result in the removal of the Snitch? A security measure?
Quirrell, Dumbledore, Snape, Harry, and (increasingly) Draco have something in common. They are all creepy. These characters are intentionally inauthentic - acting as though they posses the specific beliefs, preferences, and abilities that they want others to attribute to them.
I feel unusually strong revulsion about this kind of deception - more than toward someone hiding their faults to manage their appearance, much more than toward someone being tactful and withholding or biasing sensitive claims to avoid conflict.
When I try to unpack "creepy",...
Harry was thinking about the Goblin Rebellions and goblins' ongoing resentment at not being allowed to own wands and certain facts which hadn't been in the first-year History textbook, which Harry had guessed at by pattern-matching and which Professor Flitwick had confirmed in a very quiet voice. Lord Voldemort had killed goblins as well as wizards - an incredibly stupid move on Lord Voldemort's part, unless Harry was really missing something.
Of course, Harry is really missing something; and he should be noticing his confusion about this. It's a failing...
Two things made me confused in this chapter.
First, the false dichotomy: it is obviously unlikely for Lucius to not know that Draco was framed, and yet kill Hermione - it presumes two people capable of evading and manipulating Hogwart's wards - but why is it unlikely for him to have not known, and also not been responsible for killing her?
(A caveat is that whatever the answer is, it needs to make sense from the perspective of a random person reading the Daily Prophet.)
The second: what is Harry's plot with the pen, or alternatively with whatever's happening as Lucius signs the paper? What is he really up to here?
unlikely for him to have not known, and also not been responsible for killing her?
It's unlikely for him to currently not know, and also not be responsible for killing her, since the fact that she was murdered shortly afterwards shows that someone wanted her dead, and is powerful evidence that she was framed.
That line confused me - I think we were expected to draw a lot of subtle inferences to figure out why it would make sense in this context.
On a side note, it is really jarring not to know everything Harry knows this late in the game. I always just read the third-person point of view as a matter of convenience, and accepted that we were fully immersed into the head of the current speaker. This distant outsiders' perspective ("I've done some research", "I have a plan") is making it really hard for me to draw conclusions.
It's also showing me just how much I relied on Harry running me through all the steps of some ridiculously complicated deduction. I wonder - does having a character who is both very intelligent and very honest mean that the reader has to be significantly less intelligent and active to follow along?
A short time later Harry Potter handed his wand over to an armored goblin guard who frisked him with all manner of interesting-looking probes,
Huh. With all the "the goblins aren't allowed to have wands" stuff, I wouldn't expect that this is how they'd have done it. It is true that all in all, the goblins couldn't do all that much of practical value with the borrowed wands of those in Gringotts meetings, but still... It means that the prohibition on goblins using wands is far from absolute.
You have to spend time practicing with a wand in order to effectively use one. This is like handing your laptop to someone who's literally never used a computer or even a keyboard before — they aren't going to guess your password and read your email; they'll have a hard enough time knowing what parts do something.
I believe this is a misreading; Winky was there, but the Dark Mark was cast by Barry Crouch Jr. From the climax of Book 4, towards the end of Chapter 35:
I wanted to attack them for their disloyalty to my master. My father had left the tent; he had gone to free the Muggles. Winky was afraid to see me so angry. She used her own brand of magic to bind me to her. She pulled me from the tent, pulled me into the forest, away from the Death Eaters. I tried to hold her back. I wanted to return to the campsite. I wanted to show those Death Eaters what loyalty to the Dark Lord meant, and to punish them for their lack of it. I used the stolen wand to cast the Dark Mark into the sky.
I don't quite understand: why is Draco so upset in this chapter? Is it because he's playing the role his father expects of him? It's not like he obtained any new information about what Harry was trying to do since the Self Actualization chapters. He already knew that he was being manipulated to give up blood purity. So what's the issue?
The fourth is a catchall category called Everything Else."
Harry has been reading his Jaynes, keeping a "something else" alternative hypothesis.
I like that Harry's gloves have come off, and he's planning on making full use of transfiguration as a weapon. About time.
Harry had by now caught the general rhythm of Professor Quirrell's cynicism and was able to generate it independently.
Lot's of Quirrellness coming out.
And bear in mind that sulfuric acid is only one possibility among several!
Liquid oxygen, which is also pretty easy to produce or acquire, expands quite a bit when it evaporates, and rapidly oxidizes all of your pretty organic chemistry. If you could ship enough liquid oxygen (transfigured into something else) inside a human, they would burn and explode when the transfiguration wears off.
Botulinum toxin was also mentioned in the fic and is the weapon of choice for DIY genocide.
Pyrophoric substances, transfigured and then finely ground, will start burning in an oxygen-containing atmosphere.
Obtain nuclear weapons material (the hard part) and transfigure several subcritical pieces into iron, assemble them to give one large ball, drop it (or bury it underground), and run.
Certainly not all of these are practical, but all of them sound awesome.
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.
Counterpoint: it appears that Harry is now serious about using Transfiguration as a weapon. However, he has not recently been considering very much else, meaning that he has fewer backups than perhaps he should, in the case where someone counters his Transfigurations (e.g. with good shields, or casting finite on Harry before a fight).
What steps has Harry taken to investigate the characters of those killed by Voldemort? You'd think that he'd kill/order killed, in particular, people that he did not care to have around in his future realm, once he took power. I'm assuming that the Dark Mark comes with its own self-destruct switch, so he does not have make sure any Death Eater dies. People killed by Death Eaters in self defence do not count.
This might explain why, for example, he did not kill Dumbledore, or any of the truly awesome people in the OOTP (Moody, et al), because he knew that they would be reasonable subjects.
It occurs to me to wonder if Dementors=death can be tested experimentally by bringing a dementor into the Hall of Prophecy. Of course, if the Dementor isn't attacked by orbs about death, that could mean that there aren't any death-prophecies, they only react to Death rather than a single wound in the world, or something else; but if a dementor does run into a prophecy that is about death, that would determine that the hall recognizes them as death for the purposes of prophecies.
(Alternatively: if prophecies about something different, such as fear / depression / whatever show up, that'd be pretty strong evidence against.)
So, would someone explain to me the exonerate/indemnify subplot? I don't understand the drama over the wording first being "indemnify" and then later changing to "exonerate" even after Harry makes it sound like Malfoy was pulling a fast one by suggesting "exonerate".
EDIT: I misread the relevant sentence. Harry originally wrote "exonerate", not "indemnify." It seems likely writing the latter would have given Malfoy room to claim compensation at a later date.
Theoretically, indemnity implies compensation which makes the person indemnified as well-off as they would have been before the harm occurred. At the least, this change could have later been construed as a debt owed to Malfoy from Potter.
If Harry Potter already had the contract written before going into Gringotts, how did Moody's eye not see it? I suppose it is possible that Moody's eye cannot see into the folded space of Harry's pouch, but Harry has no reason to assume as much, and is smart enough not to take the risk. And whether or not Moody can see into folded pouch-space, this line makes no sense at all: "Moody paused as his Eye caught sight of the second half of the document as Harry Potter slowly, as though reluctantly, began to unfold the top upward." Moody's eye can e...
[...] with Moody's bright-blue eye rotating wildly in every direction, as though to signal to any possible attacker that he was On Guard and Constantly Vigilant
Why does he advertise it? Why not hide it behind an eyepatch, as a secret advantage in a fight?
He does hide it. In the part in the graveyard where he is talking to Snape while they are poisoning Riddle Sr's grave, he keeps spinning around, despite the fact that the eye lets him see 360 degrees regardless of where it is pointing.
If he's escorting Potter around, everyone KNOWS he'd be on high alert, so they expect to see the thing whizzing around. Then they expect that when it isn't whizzing around, it means he can't see behind him.
And when they try to exploit that, that's how he catches them.
You miss the point - he is still hiding it. The eye provides full 360-degree vision at all times, but few people know this, so he maintains an appearance of some level of vigilance.
This means that anyone who sees him respond quickly to a threat (i.e. evidence of vigilance) will have an immediate explanation of how he was able to do so (being vigilant), and not look beyond it to find out the extent of his abilities.
Quite well thought out, really.
Observations from Chapter 98:
it turned out that sulfuric acid would freeze at just ten degrees Celsius
That does not appear to be correct. If http://science.howstuffworks.com/sulfuric-acid-info.htm is accurate, then frozen sulfuric acid ice cannot get much warmer than frozen water and the more usual concentrations freeze at much lower temperatures. However, high concentrations (98%, freezing at 3°C), while more expensive, are easily available online http://www.sciencecompany.com/Sulfuric-Acid-Concentrated-1L-P6550.aspx (plus it doesn't seem hard to concentrate yourself http://chem...
I'm confused: why does the amount owed to the Malfoys seem to keep changing? I read first 58,203, then 100,000, then 40,000 Galleons.
Why did Harry admit he had a pen he could use? He wasted his advantageous bargaining position. Perhaps poison.
Also, Harry seems to have lost a lot in this chapter. All he's gotten out of Malfoy
but Lucius already wanted Draco to be King! On top of that, Harry has given away much information:
and Draco can attest to these under Veritaserum!
Giving away the information that you're NOT voldemort is actually pretty useful when you're trying to cooperate with people
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 97. The previous thread is at nearly 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
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