"I wonder how difficult it would be to just make a list of all the top blood purists and kill them.
They'd tried exactly that during the French Revolution, more or less - make a list of all the enemies of Progress and remove everything above the neck..." -Harry's internal monologue, HPMOR Chapter 7
"Amusing, but that was not your first fleeting thought before you substituted something safer, less damaging. No, what you remembered was how you considered lining up all the blood purists and guillotining them. And now you are telling yourself you were not serious, but you were. If you could do it this very moment and no one would ever know, you would." -The Sorting Hat, HPMOR Chapter 10
Well...well I guess it wasn't technically a guillotine. And Harry didn't make a list himself. But Harry did do it, and set it up so no one would ever know.
Other note. Dumbeldore defeated Voldemort. He placed Minerva to intercept any discoveries of Harry and he made Harry swear not to tell anyone about it. This left Voldemort underprepaired against the weapon that got him in the end. Dumbeldore had a million plots going, and this one worked. Sometiems one is all you need.
After sleeping on it, I'd like to raise two problems I have with the last double-update, and see what you guys think.
1. That Harry would be able to cast Partial Transfiguration in those circumstances does not seem clearly and unambiguously established by the story so far.
(unless I'm missing something, in which case please point it out to me.)
I'm not saying it's wrong that he was able to cast it. I'm saying that as a reader, I couldn't know that in advance, and that's bad for a story.
First we're told that you can't transfigure air. And EY repeatedly insists Harry cannot overcome any limitations of magic in 60 seconds, so that felt like a hint not to look for a spellcasting solution, at least not without regaining some freedom of movement first.
We did get an earlier scene where Harry considers the fact that his wand is showing some minor wear and tear, and seems robust against small loss of wood. So yes, that feels like a hint in the other direction, maybe even fairly strong evidence.
But the thing is, magic in Harry Potter universe is arbitrary in so many ways, like that you have to say "Wingardum Leviosa" and not something else if you want to levitate something. HPMoR draw...
Do The Impossible, indeed. Looping a thin thread over someone's head several meters away is tricky business. The slightest bit of wind throws it off. And this must be done without moving the wand or betraying the operation through one's facial expression. I can't imagine it being done without the utmost concentration, allowing of course for effort to be expended talking to Voldemort and maintaining mental blocks against any Legilimens among the Death Eaters (recall that in Half-Blood Prince Snape was able to detect spells forming in Harry's mind). This is all done perfectly the first time around. Thirty-six times, plus Voldemort's wrists.
I suppose one can honestly say A Wizard Did It...
Reading the chapters again, I can't help feeling that, while Harry's sudden victory is satisfying from a "we, the fandom, have passed the test" perspective, without that context it is really unnatural. Harry abruptly goes from being utterly emotionally overwhelmed and reeling to the flawless, cold-blooded execution of a perfect plan that fully draws on a number of disparate ideas and abilities.
Edit: Also, I'm far from the first person to say this, but Harry's sudden spike in competence is preceded by Voldemort becoming a hammier, less intelligent villain. His precautions against Harry attempting to escape, and his plans for how to kill him reliably, are reasonably intelligent, but there are a dozen simpler and/or more effective countermeasures he could have taken, starting with something as obvious as getting rid of Harry's wand.
If there were more chapters left to go, I'd put money on "Voldemort let all this happen as part of a greater gambit", but as things stand I'm feeling pessimistic.
Voldemort allowed Harry to be a threat because otherwise there wouldn't have been a story.
The problem is that he did so in a way that feels inconsistent with the rest of the story. Most villains in most stories aren't the type that would relieve their nemesis of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Sauron didn't seal off the Cracks of Doom, or even post a serious guard around them. The Emperor didn't place the shield generator on Endor in a hidden underground compound guarded by a small army. A great succession of villains have failed to just shoot James Bond. HPMOR!Voldemort would do all of those things, because from the start his extraordinarily high intelligence and skill at what he does have been cornerstones of his character. When he makes a mistake, many readers will assume (and have assumed, usually correctly) that it is a deliberate ploy. Mistakes as bad as what we're seeing here aren't just folly; they verge on character derailment.
As a simple matter of fact, Voldemort is stronger than Harry in basically every way, other than Harry's (incomplete) training in rationality. If Voldemort were a good enough planner, there's no way he could lose; he is smarter, more powerful, and has more ancient lore than any other wizard. If Voldemort were also rational, and didn't fall prey to overconfidence bias / planning fallacy...
Well, you can be as rational as you like, but if you are human and your opponent is a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All, then the story is going to read less like HPMOR, and more like:
"...HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD." Quirinus Quirrell calmly activated the toe ring he had prepared months ago, causing the capsule of sulfuric acid embedded in the top of Harry's skull (placed there earlier by an Imperiused Madam Pomfrey, in case of emergency) to break open and quickly dissolve the other Tom Riddle. Quirrell shook his head in disappointment as he felt the sense of doom diminish and then disappear, but it had to be done. He turned to walk towards the third floor corridor. The End.
Is that what we've seen presented so far?
Dumbledore won during the Battle of the Three Armies. His assault on Azkaban would have gotten him killed (and more seriously, set back his efforts by years) for a stupid communication error, were Harry not willing to risk his own life and invent new magic to save the man. Hermoine outlasted several hours of the Defense Professor's most aggressive psychological attacks possible, using fairly basic deontology. His 'lesson plan' with Ma-Ha-Su in Chapter 16 was bluntly stupid, even if Harry hadn't used the easy way out. In Chapter 35, he fears that Harry has screwed over his plans because of voicing an obvious disagreement that Harry has repeatedly given privately before.
And that's before we get to the stupidity that was enforced by canon : testing multiple novel spells (Horcruxes, however he 'reformated' the young Harry Potter) without sufficient and verified safeties, the highly fractious Death Eaters, the lackluster war with Dumbledore.
Quirrellmort is smart. He thinks ahead. But his fundamental philosophy is still very restricted. As much as he tries to claim otherwise, he's running on distilled Command Push -- we'll note that no De...
I think this is a great comment, but could you please expand on two points?
His 'lesson plan' with Ma-Ha-Su in Chapter 16 was bluntly stupid, even if Harry hadn't used the easy way out.
What are you talking about here?
And also
he's running on distilled Command Push
What does this mean?
What are you talking about here?
In Chapter 16, Quirrelmort instructed the class in a very simple hex that caused a small amount of pain and no lasting harm called Ma-Ha-Su. He then selects three students, Hermoine, Draco, and Harry Potter, and then requires them to select a student and fire Ma-Ha-Su at them, taking Quirrel and later House points for non-compliance. The comparisons to the Millgram Experiments become explicit in chapter 63. Hermoine refuses, Draco fires on Hermoine, and Harry fires on himself.
Harry explicitly beats Quirrelmort's plans, here : "Yes, quite ingenious, but there was a lesson to be taught and you dodged it." It's not clear he ever gets the intended lesson, given that Quirrelmort seemed to intend to teach Harry to harm Draco on obedient command.
Interestingly, this could have not just failed but have gone horribly wrong for Quirrelmort, and he wouldn't have even understood why. One of the common responses to Millgram-like actions in the last few years of science fiction is to turn on the person giving illegal orders. Harry wouldn't do that because of his upbringing, but other possible Riddle-clones would wanted to fire Ma-Ha-Su on Quirrel...
Let me have a go at coming up with a dozen:
I posted this as part of my review. I think it explains the wand thing. As so often happens in real life, we don't see the workings of mind that lead to every decisive factor in an outcome. In real life, we get to the end of a problem and often don't know why a particular mistake was made. ...
A small disturbance dwelt in my mind for these days, for I had concluded that Eliezer had already contrived a clever solution for Harry, sealed off all other such pathways, and that a strong indicator of what that contrived plan was, was that Voldemort left Harry with his wand after the Vow. Curious, that, oui? Voldemort specifically forbade Harry to raise his wand, and told his servants to attack him in a flurry of eclectic attacks, the mere thought of which would inevitably have an emotional effect on Harry, clouding his mental acuity. Since, Voldemort has in his consciousness that Harry has his wand, and has no reason to let him hold it, the clear explanation is that Eliezer could only think of a way for Harry to win if he had his wand, so he made Voldemort make a stupid mistake, it was the best he could do. Still quite good; I did not begrudge him it.
Since victory depends upon the wand, an...
I think there may be some hindsight bias here. We know that Harry has partial transfiguration and we know that it turns out poorly for LV. LV himself did not know these things. To the best of his knowledge (which he has good reason to believe is considerable and maybe exhaustive) there is no magic Harry can cast wordlessly with his wand down.
For LV to enact the additional precautions above, magic would be needed. He can't use magic on Harry, so taking them means reducing the size of the death eater guard by 1 or more during the time needed to take those precautions. If you don't know that Harry can do previously unknown to the world wandless magic, than that might actualy not seem like a good trade off.
Additionally, regardless of if trading 1 guard for additional precautions is actualy a good security trade, it is totaly in character that the kind of mind that created horcrux number 107 after allready having over a hundred redundant horcruxes would think the additional redundancy of guard 36 over guard 35 to be valuable.
I'm so disappointed that the Partial Transfiguration faction turned out to be correct.
Yeah, this is one of those solutions that, had I been writing, I would have ruled as not actually workable. Takes too long, Voldemort or a Death Eater sees the threads and breaks them on general principles, nanotubes don't actually have enough tensile strength to reasonably slice up everybody at once consistently, and so forth. I pretty much filed any tactical violence plan under "not practical".
Still, not my story. It's not out of keeping with the rest of the stuff in HPMOR.
High odds that Voldemort escaped. He's been extraordinarily hammy this whole time, and he called all the Death Eaters together, killed or crippled a few, and then explained his evil scheme to the hero before giving him a countdown to his inevitable death, while leaving him armed. It seems very plausible that Tom Riddle was tired of Lord Voldemort, and decided to retire him via dramatic massacre. Why make his new body a snaky freak-show, after all?
On the pedantic nitpicker trivia side of things, you don't have a tank of "oxyacetelene". An oxy-acetylene rig uses a tank of oxygen, and a tank of acetylene. But Harry is probably not a welder, and neither are the Weasely twins, so nobody involved was equipped to notice the problem.
Me too. I didn't say this a couple of days ago, owing to a lack of confidence that I now see to have been misguided; but while the nanowire PT solution is reasonable and effective and exactly the sort of thing that a sci-fi fan who fancies themselves clever would come up with, it's narratively shallow. And I can't see messily killing thirty-six people as in character for Harry at this moment, however much noise has been made about killing intent. Coming up with creative ways to kill people is one thing; actually going through with it in anger, or even thinking of it when faced with real hostility, is quite another.
(I'm also not totally sure it would work, but that depends on messy materials-science math that I can't be bothered with right now.)
Lest I be accused of being overly negative, though, the Obliviation bit does have a certain elegant symmetry to it.
Voldemort doesn't want the world destroyed, and he just made Harry into a world-destruction-preventer. Pointing this out — and pointing out that Harry is now a better world-destruction-preventer than Voldemort could become — doesn't involve changing Voldemort's utility function.
(Voldemort can't swear an Unbreakable Vow akin to Harry's because nobody has trust in him that could be sacrificed to power it.)
I feel like the problem turned out to be unnecessarily easier than it had to, that too much of the credit is due to luck, and some things could've been done better (Death Eaters could be saved). It's somewhat of a theme with all these spells and rituals being performed in unique situations and working on the first try, with little precaution taken to test them or theoretical grounds to expect reliability. For example, Hermione still wasn't tested. It's the first resurrection ever performed, at least by the people present. It involved further effects that might've never been combined in this way before. The person who knows the details is now defunct. He didn't plan to test it either, for the primary use case intended. Hermione's brain is warm and might be losing information or she might get terminally sick soon, with brain damage. We just assume everything worked.
One problem is that Harry didn't know that he can remain conscious after directly casting a spell at Voldemort, so it should've been planned around, with the less direct transfiguration being plan A for rendering Voldemort unconscious. We now know that this might've failed (more likely than before Ch. 114), and there had t...
My criteria for whether a character acts smart or stupid is whether I can see a glaring issue immediately. Like many others, I had asked right after ch.113 "why does Harry still have his wand and his glasses"? And, sure enough. Whatever trope describes the villain suddenly going into the Stupid and Careless mode at a critical time, it sure applies here. LV probably broke a few rules from the Evil Overlord's list, too.
Wow, I was expecting more of a pure Talking His Way Out of the Box solution, instead of a partial transfiguration solution. I'm curious as to whether or not this is the bad ending. I do think Voldemort was a bit stupid to not just kill Harry instantly instead of quizzing him for the Powers He Knows Not. As he said himself, given an eternity of immortality it is likely he would stumble across everything Harry has read, thought, and figured out.
Next chapter should be up any minute now...
Edit: It's up.
A lot of people think that Voldemort was going too easy on Harry, making this a "Coil vs. Taylor in the burning building" violation of suspension-of-disbelief for some of them. I am considering rewriting 113 with the following changes:
[pollid:840]
I would add a reason for Harry to have the wand.
Like, instead of, "You will not raise your wand", "You will only raise your wand when and how I permit it. Do not demonstrate a spell unless ordered."
That would imply that Voldemort was open to the possibility that Harry might demonstrate something, which would require arming him.
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 114, and also, as a special case due to the exceptionally close posting times, chapter 115.
There is 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.)