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’d be hard pressed to name a single Dark Lady besides Baba Yaga. Note how that doesn’t say there weren’t any, and indeed many. Maybe, let’s say, the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga masquerading as other people? Do we know anyone else who masquerades as other people? Anyone else with a brain like Harry’s?
I will say this much, Mr. Potter: You are already an Occlumens, and I
think you will become a perfect Occlumens before long. Identity does not
mean, to such as us, what it means to other people. Anyone we can imagine,
we can be; and the true difference about you, Mr. Potter, is that you have an
unusually good imagination. A playwright must contain his characters, he
must be larger than them in order to enact them within his mind. To an
actor or spy or politician, the limit of his own diameter is the limit of who
he can pretend to be, the limit of which face he may wear as a mask. But
for such as you and I, anyone we can imagine, we can be, in reality and
not pretense.
There are 3 and only 3 mentions of Baba Yaga in the book so far, and they tie Harry, the Dark Lord, and Quirrell together.
“Oh, now I see!” said Tracey Davis, speaking up so suddenly that Hermione gave a small startle. “You’re joining our protest because you’re worried that not enough girls are becoming Dark Witches!” There was a half-smile on Professor Quirrell’s face as he replied,...
Probably a good idea to pay close attention to what Quirrell says when he smiles to himself.
EDIT: Guess who else Harry is like?
“Congratulations indeed,” said Dumbledore. “Even I did not make any original discoveries in Transfiguration before the age of fourteen. Not since the day of Dorotea Senjak has any genius flowered so early.
Latest half baked idea. Harry is Quirrell. I’d been operating on the theory that Quirrell is preparing Harry to take over the world, and then take over Harry. He’s actually already taken over Harry as a baby, and lived out a new life as Harry. There are multiple scense of Quirrell comparing events in his life to Harry’s, with the implication that Harry’s life is the new and improved one.
The whole “Sense of Doom” business is the potential coming together of one person in two time turned bodies in the same space time.
With the ridiculously rampant and specific foreshadowing, some kind of time turning solution seems likely. And causality back through time was already set up with the Comed-Tea incident
but it all makes sense once you draw the causal arrows going BACKWARDS IN TIME!”
Here’s a fascinating quote by Dumbledore about Fawkes:
as close to undying as any creature that exists in this world, for whenever their bodies fail them they immolate themselves in a burst of fireand leave behind a hatchling, or sometimes an egg.”
And Harry is discovered as a baby next to the presumed immolated remains of Voldemort.
Reading the PDF and using the search function is very handy. 3 comments on BY doesn’t take a lot of effort to analyze. I was surprised there were so few comments.
A harder piece of analysis would be to look at Quirrell’s views on gender. Harder to search on.
But the SPHEW protests provide some interesting tidbits. First of all, that Quirrell is there at all. Of the faculty, it’s predominantly the female faculty, and Quirrell doesn’t seem your prototypical human rights protester. He even had a button.
“You mean that’s how men would treat us if we didn’t have wands to
defend ourselves?”
There was a short, sardonic laugh from the direction of Professor
Quirrell. When Hermione turned her head to look she saw that the
Defense Professor was still idly toying with the button, not bothering
to glance up at the rest of them, as he said, “Such is human nature, Miss
Clearwater. Rest assured that you would be no kinder, if witches had
wands and men lacked them.” “I hardly think so!” snapped Professor Sinistra. A cold chuckle. “I suspect it happens more often than any dare suggest, in the proudest pureblood families. Some lonely witch spies a handsome Muggle; and thinks how very easy it would be, to slip the man a
love potion, and by him be adored alone and utterly. And since she
knows he can offer her no resistance, why, it is only natural for her to
take from him whatever she pleases—”
Maybe Quirrell speaks with some authority about what women with power would do. EY has a habit of having his characters smile or laugh to themselves when they’re think thing they’re not entirely sharing with others.
“Professor Quirrell was testing Hermione to see if he wanted to be her mysterious old wizard,”
So that Quirrell took Hermione seriously in ways that others didn’t. He also awarded her “100 points for doing what’s right”. And he tried to get her out of Hogwarts before she died. He looks to be another character who values Hermione more than EY’s “feminist” detractors.
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.
Reading the PDF and using the search function is very handy. 3 comments on BY doesn’t take a lot of effort to analyze. I was surprised there were so few comments.
I think it’s more that I never took the idea seriously enough to note the links between the Sorting Hat, Occlumency descriptions, etc all formed a reasonably persuasive picture.
You make really good points. The ‘laws’ of storytelling go against it, though, in the sense that with only 3 mentions, Baba Yaga being important would be unsatisfying.
In any case, if this were true there must be other things on top of it that are more meaningful (i.e. Quirrel is Voldie who is BY, or whatever...)
Quirrell aka Baba Yaga aka Voldemort is Harry’s biological mother. (James Potter is his father.) That would explain their similarities better than the hypothetical brain surgery / horcrux thing.
That’s interesting. Baba Yaga, traveling through time by uploading her mind into host after host, decides to make a more compatible host, and produces a child to be her next host.
My position for a while is that Quirrell is grooming Harry to be his next host, and who better for the Dark Lord to move into, than the Boy Savior as he defeats the Dark Lord?
Though as Quirrell, presumably “he” could have fathered Harry through Lily. However, it kind of fits the story of that Munroe guy that Harry is actually a replacement baby left behind when the Potter family was exterminated. That would be the 2nd Old House that was killed off and left with a single replacement survivor.
But the thing is, if uploading is an integral part of the story, he’s already committed to that complication, and so it adds little further complexity to say that he uploaded some chunk of himself to Harry, and a biological explanation becomes superfluous.
Probably just pattern matching on it, and Quirrell is ridiculously powerful, but he was the one to notice and stun 100+ females summoning Harry to the ground.
“I should have foreseen it myself,” Professor Quirrell said,
He thinks he should have anticipated the actions of young girls taking actions based in romance. That’s about the last context a grown man expects to be able to anticipate events.
Pattern matching as well, but the pattern matches quite a lot.
On the original point, of who the Defense Professor is, I saw a great idea on Reddit—the Troll is the Defense Professor.
“Not so,” said Dumbledore. “If Voldemort has not fully mastered
the wards, then the wards had to believe that some Professor’s hand was
at work. Else they would have cried out at Miss Granger’s injury, and
not only upon her death.”
So if you need an agent in Hogwarts to kill a student, you want the wards to think that they’re a Professor.
Also, about Quirrell stealing bodies
The smile that the Auror gave had absolutely no mirth in it. “So
where’s the real Quirinus Quirrell, eh? Under an Imperius in the bottom
of a trunk somewhere, while you take a hair now and then for your
illegal Polyjuice?” “You are making highly questionable assumptions,” the Defense Professor said with an edged voice. “What makes you think I did not steal his body outright using incredibly Dark magic?”
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.
Yes, but “The Defense Professor” and “anyone else who can rig the wards” shouldn’t have the same probability in his mind. What with all the rest of Quirrell’s strange behavior and the curse on the position, “The Defense Professor” should be allotted a massive probability, with a comparatively smaller piece left for “whoever else has the ability to do this.” He should be suspect number one by far.
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.
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.
Quirrell is Baba Yaga, a “she”, and some “he” also in that circle is the Defense Professor. EDIT: The Troll is the Defense Professor.
″ quote undying unquote Baba Yaga”
Quote hint unquote.
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?
Yes, they’d be hard pressed to name a single Dark Lady besides Baba Yaga. Note how that doesn’t say there weren’t any, and indeed many. Maybe, let’s say, the quote undying unquote Baba Yaga masquerading as other people? Do we know anyone else who masquerades as other people? Anyone else with a brain like Harry’s?
There are 3 and only 3 mentions of Baba Yaga in the book so far, and they tie Harry, the Dark Lord, and Quirrell together.
Probably a good idea to pay close attention to what Quirrell says when he smiles to himself.
EDIT: Guess who else Harry is like?
Latest half baked idea. Harry is Quirrell. I’d been operating on the theory that Quirrell is preparing Harry to take over the world, and then take over Harry. He’s actually already taken over Harry as a baby, and lived out a new life as Harry. There are multiple scense of Quirrell comparing events in his life to Harry’s, with the implication that Harry’s life is the new and improved one.
The whole “Sense of Doom” business is the potential coming together of one person in two time turned bodies in the same space time.
With the ridiculously rampant and specific foreshadowing, some kind of time turning solution seems likely. And causality back through time was already set up with the Comed-Tea incident
Here’s a fascinating quote by Dumbledore about Fawkes:
And Harry is discovered as a baby next to the presumed immolated remains of Voldemort.
You make a better case for Quirrel=BY than anyone I’ve seen to date.
Reading the PDF and using the search function is very handy. 3 comments on BY doesn’t take a lot of effort to analyze. I was surprised there were so few comments.
A harder piece of analysis would be to look at Quirrell’s views on gender. Harder to search on.
But the SPHEW protests provide some interesting tidbits. First of all, that Quirrell is there at all. Of the faculty, it’s predominantly the female faculty, and Quirrell doesn’t seem your prototypical human rights protester. He even had a button.
Maybe Quirrell speaks with some authority about what women with power would do. EY has a habit of having his characters smile or laugh to themselves when they’re think thing they’re not entirely sharing with others.
So that Quirrell took Hermione seriously in ways that others didn’t. He also awarded her “100 points for doing what’s right”. And he tried to get her out of Hogwarts before she died. He looks to be another character who values Hermione more than EY’s “feminist” detractors.
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.
Very good catch. It lessens the support of that particular response to my thesis, but I still think the scene as a whole still does lend some support.
Twist: Quirrell is Voldemort’s mother.
aka Baba Yaga
I think it’s more that I never took the idea seriously enough to note the links between the Sorting Hat, Occlumency descriptions, etc all formed a reasonably persuasive picture.
You make really good points. The ‘laws’ of storytelling go against it, though, in the sense that with only 3 mentions, Baba Yaga being important would be unsatisfying. In any case, if this were true there must be other things on top of it that are more meaningful (i.e. Quirrel is Voldie who is BY, or whatever...)
Quirrell aka Baba Yaga aka Voldemort is Harry’s biological mother. (James Potter is his father.) That would explain their similarities better than the hypothetical brain surgery / horcrux thing.
Boy-Who-Lived Gets Draco Malfoy Pregnant
Given the extreme and multiple foreshadowing EY indulges in, I wouldn’t count it out.
That’s interesting. Baba Yaga, traveling through time by uploading her mind into host after host, decides to make a more compatible host, and produces a child to be her next host.
My position for a while is that Quirrell is grooming Harry to be his next host, and who better for the Dark Lord to move into, than the Boy Savior as he defeats the Dark Lord?
Though as Quirrell, presumably “he” could have fathered Harry through Lily. However, it kind of fits the story of that Munroe guy that Harry is actually a replacement baby left behind when the Potter family was exterminated. That would be the 2nd Old House that was killed off and left with a single replacement survivor.
But the thing is, if uploading is an integral part of the story, he’s already committed to that complication, and so it adds little further complexity to say that he uploaded some chunk of himself to Harry, and a biological explanation becomes superfluous.
Probably just pattern matching on it, and Quirrell is ridiculously powerful, but he was the one to notice and stun 100+ females summoning Harry to the ground.
And note Quirrell’s comment:
He thinks he should have anticipated the actions of young girls taking actions based in romance. That’s about the last context a grown man expects to be able to anticipate events.
Pattern matching as well, but the pattern matches quite a lot.
On the original point, of who the Defense Professor is, I saw a great idea on Reddit—the Troll is the Defense Professor.
So if you need an agent in Hogwarts to kill a student, you want the wards to think that they’re a Professor.
Also, about Quirrell stealing bodies
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.
Yes, but “The Defense Professor” and “anyone else who can rig the wards” shouldn’t have the same probability in his mind. What with all the rest of Quirrell’s strange behavior and the curse on the position, “The Defense Professor” should be allotted a massive probability, with a comparatively smaller piece left for “whoever else has the ability to do this.” He should be suspect number one by far.
For that, I’d point to undermind’s comment that this is only what Harry wants the Malfoys to know.
There might also be an element of Harry’s art as a rationalist being forgotten when he needs it most.
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.