I was thinking that as of this chapter, Harry now had enough evidence to promote to attention the hypothesis that Quirrell is actually Voldemort. He has reason to believe that Voldemort has access to a mechanism which allows him to take control of people and give them a portion of his power, and Quirrell’s apparent backstory entails his having undergone a conspicuous increase in apparent competence, much like that which Moody and Dumbledore suspect of having happened to Lockheart. And he has the assurances of the Order of the Pheonix that Voldemort was really smart, no, seriously smart, trust us, you’re still underestimating him. And he knows Quirrell is heavily misanthropic and cavalier with people’s lives, and also he went out of his way to remove Voldemort’s premier servant from Azkaban, who might be useful to other enterprising wizards if she was taught some of the lore of Salazar Slytherin, but also, as Harry has been told, is a key component in restoring Voldemort to power.
But then it occurred to me that given the fact that Quirrell’s sudden spike in competence in his backstory occurred while Voldemort was still around, not after his death, he would have to draw the conclusion that Quirrell was playing both sides back then. I’ve been operating under that assumption for a while, so I’m biased with respect to evaluating how obvious it should be given what Harry knows. This may be enough to drop the hypothesis below the attention-worthy threshold for Harry right now. But Harry does have the information to raise this particular question: if Quirrell is so smart, and was fighting against Voldemort, why didn’t Voldemort lose, the way Harry thinks the Order of the Phoenix would have if they were up against a really creative and powerful wizard?
Primary piece of evidence against: Voldemort tried to kill Harry, Quirrell has passed up multiple opportunities to let Harry die. If it weren’t for this, I’d think Harry was being a bit thick for not having considered the possibility already, but this is awfully strong counterevidence.
Primary piece of evidence against: Voldemort tried to kill Harry,
I don’t think we know that.
I’ve always thought it would have made more sense in the original series to have Voldemort purposely make Harry into a Horcrux.
If making someone else a horcrux transfers some of your power to them, that makes them stronger, and better able to defend your horcrux.
It starts to look like a mutual immortality defense league. A bunch of people get together making each other their horcruxes, so that they all can’t die without all the others being killed first, they all have an interest in protecting each other, and they conserve the power that they’d otherwise lose to the creation of the horcrux by contributing it to another member of the defense league.
We don’t know that Voldemort tried to kill Harry, but Harry has much less reason to doubt it than we do.
An Immortality Defense League sounds much cleverer to me than what we actually see if Voldemort was trying to make Harry into a horcrux, which is a guy making a horcrux out of the infant child of his own enemies. That sounds a lot less tactically sound than willfully perverse; of all the people he could have deliberately made into horcruxes, I don’t think he had good reason to single Harry out as being a good choice to ensure his immortality.
The only reason I can think that he would have had to single him out would be the prophecy, and that the sort of information where I would immediately wonder, in his place, if by horcruxing my own prophesied enemy, I would actually end up screwing myself over.
An Immortality Defense League sounds much cleverer to me than what we actually see if Voldemort was trying to make Harry into a horcrux,
I think so too, if I do say so myself. I hadn’t thought of the IDL until this thread.
Harry as a horcrux seems like a decent idea, though. If Harry were the only guy that could kill you, making it so that he can’t kill you seems like a good idea. Also, he has a bunch of horcruxes in objects. Diversifying your strategy seems like a decent idea to me. Making one of your enemy, who everyone else will be busy protecting, enlists them in protecting your Horcrux.
Also, I just thought canon was dumb having Voldie killed because Mommy unknowingly invoked some “old magic” through her love for Harry. Anything is better than that pap.
EY seems to be rectifying that, writing a more believable plot line. First, he offers a plausible route for Voldie’s destruction through intentional ritual magic by Lily orchestrated by Dumbledore. Second, I don’t think EY will have Voldie destroyed by the unknown thing he did to Harry. I think Voldie recognized Dumbledore’s ritual magic ploy and decided to go along with it and pretend to be destroyed.
Harry as a horcrux seems like a decent idea, though. If Harry were the only guy that could kill you, making it so that he can’t kill you seems like a good idea.
But he only has a prophecy’s word on that, and attempting to cash in on prophecies that way has a tendency to bite youon the ass (tvtropes links).
It’s been implied elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure that in HPMOR, Voldemort has specific plans for Harry that go beyond merely killing him, which included him deliberately being made into a horcrux.
Some evidence for this: the odd italicized text fragments in the early chapters (which Eliezer has emphasized), Harry wondering many times at the convenience of Voldemort’s supposed death, and repetition of the idea that Voldy should have a) known about sacrifice/dark rituals such as are involved in sacrificing yourself for somebody else and b) have had other, better, more guaranteed ways of killing Harry if that’s what he had wanted to accomplish.
Actually, further to that, I really think Voldy was intentional with the whole horcrux thing, as shown by the set-up of giving Lily the chance to escape. One possible reason for this is for Snape’s loyalty; another, which I consider more probable now, is that if she was going to die anyway it wouldn’t have counted as a sacrifice for the purposes of the (horcrux) ritual.
One person’s modus ponens is another person’s modul tollens. Reading this chapter made me update that Voldemort actually never tried to kill Harry.
He came for Harry (but he never said he came to kill him), probably motivated by the prophecy.
He killed everyone around (but he gave Lily a chance to leave).
He did something that resulted with scar on Harry’s head.
Then someone (who exactly, if the event had no survivor besides a baby?) spread a story about how reflected death spell killed Voldemort.
And since then, nobody has ever seen Voldemort again.
From more recent history (Quirrel’s description and self-description—although he could have lied to us/Harry) we can reason that:
Quirrel enjoys company of smart people.
Quirrel enjoys role-playing; but he recently prefers role-playing a good guy, because villains naturally attract insane people.
Quirrel does not hesitate to kill people who cross his path, but that is instrumental, not a terminal value.
Quirrel is very, very smart.
So I guess that Voldemort, after hearing the prophecy, did not panic and try to kill Harry (unlike the Canon!Voldemort). Assuming that Voldemort/Quirrel is extremely smart and he knows how the prophecies work, he could expect that trying to kill Harry—without “marking him as his equal” first, whatever that means—would somehow magically fail, and that is an unnecessary risk.
Perhaps the original plan was to simply take Harry and raise him as a Sith apprentice; to make him Voldemort’s equal in skill, but also charm him into a smarter version of Bellatrix Black. (Converting is better than killing, because you gain an ally; like Harry later tried with Draco.) But during the action he realized that people expect him to kill Harry, and that this could be a convenient way to get rid of the Voldemort persona. So he just—made Harry his horcrux? performed on him a brain surgery to raise his IQ? -- and disappeared, pretending to be dead; only to return to Harry later as Quirrel.
I tend to think any line of action which ends up with Riddle losing his body and having to fall back on his horcruxes, given that he apparently wants his old powers back based on his efforts to get at the ingredients to revive himself and/or the Philosopher’s Stone, probably contained some element of accident.
Also, the act of training his prophesied enemy, one of whom is bound to vanquish “all but a remnant” of the other, doesn’t sound like a great way to serve his own interests. It’s not like he’s likely to subvert the prophesy and gain a powerful ally, it’s just another avenue to empowering the person who’s his greatest threat.
If I were in Quirrell’s place, and knew about the prophesy, I would be wondering “in what way can I ensure that whatever person this prophesy refers to will be least likely to be able to defeat me, assuming our conflict is inevitable?” Keeping in mind that if I try too hard to make a candidate into a nonviable threat, the prophesy will probably turn out to be referring to someone else.
I was thinking that as of this chapter, Harry now had enough evidence to promote to attention the hypothesis that Quirrell is actually Voldemort. He has reason to believe that Voldemort has access to a mechanism which allows him to take control of people and give them a portion of his power, and Quirrell’s apparent backstory entails his having undergone a conspicuous increase in apparent competence, much like that which Moody and Dumbledore suspect of having happened to Lockheart. And he has the assurances of the Order of the Pheonix that Voldemort was really smart, no, seriously smart, trust us, you’re still underestimating him. And he knows Quirrell is heavily misanthropic and cavalier with people’s lives, and also he went out of his way to remove Voldemort’s premier servant from Azkaban, who might be useful to other enterprising wizards if she was taught some of the lore of Salazar Slytherin, but also, as Harry has been told, is a key component in restoring Voldemort to power.
But then it occurred to me that given the fact that Quirrell’s sudden spike in competence in his backstory occurred while Voldemort was still around, not after his death, he would have to draw the conclusion that Quirrell was playing both sides back then. I’ve been operating under that assumption for a while, so I’m biased with respect to evaluating how obvious it should be given what Harry knows. This may be enough to drop the hypothesis below the attention-worthy threshold for Harry right now. But Harry does have the information to raise this particular question: if Quirrell is so smart, and was fighting against Voldemort, why didn’t Voldemort lose, the way Harry thinks the Order of the Phoenix would have if they were up against a really creative and powerful wizard?
Primary piece of evidence against: Voldemort tried to kill Harry, Quirrell has passed up multiple opportunities to let Harry die. If it weren’t for this, I’d think Harry was being a bit thick for not having considered the possibility already, but this is awfully strong counterevidence.
I don’t think we know that.
I’ve always thought it would have made more sense in the original series to have Voldemort purposely make Harry into a Horcrux.
If making someone else a horcrux transfers some of your power to them, that makes them stronger, and better able to defend your horcrux.
It starts to look like a mutual immortality defense league. A bunch of people get together making each other their horcruxes, so that they all can’t die without all the others being killed first, they all have an interest in protecting each other, and they conserve the power that they’d otherwise lose to the creation of the horcrux by contributing it to another member of the defense league.
We don’t know that Voldemort tried to kill Harry, but Harry has much less reason to doubt it than we do.
An Immortality Defense League sounds much cleverer to me than what we actually see if Voldemort was trying to make Harry into a horcrux, which is a guy making a horcrux out of the infant child of his own enemies. That sounds a lot less tactically sound than willfully perverse; of all the people he could have deliberately made into horcruxes, I don’t think he had good reason to single Harry out as being a good choice to ensure his immortality.
The only reason I can think that he would have had to single him out would be the prophecy, and that the sort of information where I would immediately wonder, in his place, if by horcruxing my own prophesied enemy, I would actually end up screwing myself over.
I think so too, if I do say so myself. I hadn’t thought of the IDL until this thread.
Harry as a horcrux seems like a decent idea, though. If Harry were the only guy that could kill you, making it so that he can’t kill you seems like a good idea. Also, he has a bunch of horcruxes in objects. Diversifying your strategy seems like a decent idea to me. Making one of your enemy, who everyone else will be busy protecting, enlists them in protecting your Horcrux.
Also, I just thought canon was dumb having Voldie killed because Mommy unknowingly invoked some “old magic” through her love for Harry. Anything is better than that pap.
EY seems to be rectifying that, writing a more believable plot line. First, he offers a plausible route for Voldie’s destruction through intentional ritual magic by Lily orchestrated by Dumbledore. Second, I don’t think EY will have Voldie destroyed by the unknown thing he did to Harry. I think Voldie recognized Dumbledore’s ritual magic ploy and decided to go along with it and pretend to be destroyed.
But he only has a prophecy’s word on that, and attempting to cash in on prophecies that way has a tendency to bite you on the ass (tvtropes links).
It’s been implied elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure that in HPMOR, Voldemort has specific plans for Harry that go beyond merely killing him, which included him deliberately being made into a horcrux.
Some evidence for this: the odd italicized text fragments in the early chapters (which Eliezer has emphasized), Harry wondering many times at the convenience of Voldemort’s supposed death, and repetition of the idea that Voldy should have a) known about sacrifice/dark rituals such as are involved in sacrificing yourself for somebody else and b) have had other, better, more guaranteed ways of killing Harry if that’s what he had wanted to accomplish.
Actually, further to that, I really think Voldy was intentional with the whole horcrux thing, as shown by the set-up of giving Lily the chance to escape. One possible reason for this is for Snape’s loyalty; another, which I consider more probable now, is that if she was going to die anyway it wouldn’t have counted as a sacrifice for the purposes of the (horcrux) ritual.
One person’s modus ponens is another person’s modul tollens. Reading this chapter made me update that Voldemort actually never tried to kill Harry.
He came for Harry (but he never said he came to kill him), probably motivated by the prophecy.
He killed everyone around (but he gave Lily a chance to leave).
He did something that resulted with scar on Harry’s head.
Then someone (who exactly, if the event had no survivor besides a baby?) spread a story about how reflected death spell killed Voldemort.
And since then, nobody has ever seen Voldemort again.
From more recent history (Quirrel’s description and self-description—although he could have lied to us/Harry) we can reason that:
Quirrel enjoys company of smart people.
Quirrel enjoys role-playing; but he recently prefers role-playing a good guy, because villains naturally attract insane people.
Quirrel does not hesitate to kill people who cross his path, but that is instrumental, not a terminal value.
Quirrel is very, very smart.
So I guess that Voldemort, after hearing the prophecy, did not panic and try to kill Harry (unlike the Canon!Voldemort). Assuming that Voldemort/Quirrel is extremely smart and he knows how the prophecies work, he could expect that trying to kill Harry—without “marking him as his equal” first, whatever that means—would somehow magically fail, and that is an unnecessary risk.
Perhaps the original plan was to simply take Harry and raise him as a Sith apprentice; to make him Voldemort’s equal in skill, but also charm him into a smarter version of Bellatrix Black. (Converting is better than killing, because you gain an ally; like Harry later tried with Draco.) But during the action he realized that people expect him to kill Harry, and that this could be a convenient way to get rid of the Voldemort persona. So he just—made Harry his horcrux? performed on him a brain surgery to raise his IQ? -- and disappeared, pretending to be dead; only to return to Harry later as Quirrel.
I tend to think any line of action which ends up with Riddle losing his body and having to fall back on his horcruxes, given that he apparently wants his old powers back based on his efforts to get at the ingredients to revive himself and/or the Philosopher’s Stone, probably contained some element of accident.
Also, the act of training his prophesied enemy, one of whom is bound to vanquish “all but a remnant” of the other, doesn’t sound like a great way to serve his own interests. It’s not like he’s likely to subvert the prophesy and gain a powerful ally, it’s just another avenue to empowering the person who’s his greatest threat.
If I were in Quirrell’s place, and knew about the prophesy, I would be wondering “in what way can I ensure that whatever person this prophesy refers to will be least likely to be able to defeat me, assuming our conflict is inevitable?” Keeping in mind that if I try too hard to make a candidate into a nonviable threat, the prophesy will probably turn out to be referring to someone else.