Telling the troll to eat her feet first so that the emergency portkey does not work?
To be fair, it ate her legs, not just her feet. It seems likely enough that if a troll is trying to kill you, it might as well eat your legs as any other part of you.
On the other hand...
The powerful and enigmatic Defense Professor was ‘resting’ or whatever-the-heck-was-wrong-with-him, his hands making fumbling, hesitant grabs at a chicken-leg that seemed to be eluding him on the plate.
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 they are one of the good guys.
But the troll plot? Uhm. Not so much. At some point while disabling Hr’s defences and buffing the troll to the heavens, some niggling little thought along the lines of “Ehh.. this is quite likely to end up with a corpse on the ground” would have to present itself to the most senile Dumbledore I can plausibly model. It reeks of malice.
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.
And he made it sound like the wards only alert him when a student has died. It’s reasonable to expect them to warn ahead of time, after serious injury or something, but going by canon Dumbledore had no external alarm when Harry broke however many bones however many times on the Quidditch pitch.
Dumbledore placed a ward on Hermione that alerted him to any “hostile magic” or “evil spirit” that touched her. Someone either got very lucky, or knew about the wards.
And yet the explanation for the method of the attempted murder of Draco was that the slow cooling of his blood would cause his vitals to drop too slowly to trigger the wards until he died. Which explicitly relies on the common knowledge that Hogwarts DOES have wards that track the vitals of its students and that those wards are keyed to track sudden changes, and the removal of significant portions of the body would certainly constitute a “sudden change” in vitals.
So in the attempted murder of Draco, the wards were circumvented; in the troll attack, they were actively compromised.
My grandparent is working on the assumption that Dumbledore is the culprit and would have had simple ways to make sure Hermionie doesnt die by mistake as a result of the attack he coordinated.
Ah, I see. I was also working on the assumption that McGonagall was correct; no reason Dumbledore couldn’t say he was leaving, head to his office, sit back, and watch.
If it was him and he wanted Hermione to die, then he also had an excellent excuse to watch the battle with wards without acting on it, namely that he supposedly timeturned back after the fact and couldn’t change anything.
To be fair, it ate her legs, not just her feet. It seems likely enough that if a troll is trying to kill you, it might as well eat your legs as any other part of you.
On the other hand...
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 they are one of the good guys.
But the troll plot? Uhm. Not so much. At some point while disabling Hr’s defences and buffing the troll to the heavens, some niggling little thought along the lines of “Ehh.. this is quite likely to end up with a corpse on the ground” would have to present itself to the most senile Dumbledore I can plausibly model. It reeks of malice.
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.
Dumbledore was absent from the castle.
And he made it sound like the wards only alert him when a student has died. It’s reasonable to expect them to warn ahead of time, after serious injury or something, but going by canon Dumbledore had no external alarm when Harry broke however many bones however many times on the Quidditch pitch.
Dumbledore placed a ward on Hermione that alerted him to any “hostile magic” or “evil spirit” that touched her. Someone either got very lucky, or knew about the wards.
And yet the explanation for the method of the attempted murder of Draco was that the slow cooling of his blood would cause his vitals to drop too slowly to trigger the wards until he died. Which explicitly relies on the common knowledge that Hogwarts DOES have wards that track the vitals of its students and that those wards are keyed to track sudden changes, and the removal of significant portions of the body would certainly constitute a “sudden change” in vitals.
So in the attempted murder of Draco, the wards were circumvented; in the troll attack, they were actively compromised.
Or the wards only detect sudden vital changes caused by hostile magics.
My grandparent is working on the assumption that Dumbledore is the culprit and would have had simple ways to make sure Hermionie doesnt die by mistake as a result of the attack he coordinated.
Ah, I see. I was also working on the assumption that McGonagall was correct; no reason Dumbledore couldn’t say he was leaving, head to his office, sit back, and watch.
If it was him and he wanted Hermione to die, then he also had an excellent excuse to watch the battle with wards without acting on it, namely that he supposedly timeturned back after the fact and couldn’t change anything.
To be even fairer, that might be just because the legs were bite-sized, and polite trolls are taught by their mothers not to nibble their food.