I suspect Quirrell’s closing statements to McGonagall at the end of this chapter are not quite what they seem. I’m thinking of two in particular: the first, that he wants Harry kept away from the Restricted Section, and the second, that he wants McGonagall and Dumbledore to try to restore Harry’s mood by any means necessary.
The trick to the first one is that he hasn’t mentioned sealing off a certain other means of discovering arcane secrets at Hogwarts. Admittedly, Quirrell’s suggested that it’s probably blocked off anyways. But it might not be; even if the basilisk itself is gone, there might still be useful books. So it looks as though Quirrell is trying to push Harry into finding the Chamber of Secrets. There could be any number of reasons why—though the fact that it’s a secret, hidden place at least partially exempt from the Hogwarts wards seems like a good place to start.
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall’s way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry’s parents to Hogwarts. Naturally, this opens up a whole world of possibilities for Quirrell; he could use them as hostages, kill them, Imperius them, or do any number of other nasty things if necessary. Or, if he’s interested in understanding Harry better, he could use Legilimency to learn all about his background.
Also, limiting Harry’s access to knowledge (warning off the other profs, warding the books, etc) makes Quirrell the sole conduit for advanced knowledge for Harry. (Or at least limits the competition). And Quirrell implied to Harry that he was at his nearly-unrestricted service. That gives Quirrell more access to Harry’s thought processes (by the questions he asks) and more capacity to steer his choices.
As to what he’s steering them toward, he pushed Harry off of new spells, which makes me wonder if he has an old one in mind. There was talk about rituals of sacrifice here (the blood-to-fire) and generally recently (Tracy Davis’s invocation). It’s possible that there’s some ritual that Quirrell would like Harry to perform, not for what it manifests, but for the changes it makes to the caster.
He probably also wants to push Harry away from new spells for safety reasons (presumably he thinks Harry might try to science up a dangerous new spell and that’s how he ends the world; he has some experience with Harry attempting to combine magic and science from Azkaban). If he personally steers Harry towards old spells then at least he knows what those spells do.
It’s also possible that the Restricted Section contains enough information for someone like Harry to figure out how to create spells from reading it.
It’s possible that Quirrell himself intends to be Harry’s source of information, but so far he’s only been manifestly unhelpful. Basically every response he gave was a brush-off; he didn’t even name his spell of cursed fire. When directly given an opportunity to suggest spells or rituals of his own choosing (“There’s some magics I mean to learn”), he wasted it. It’s possible that he did so out of concern that he was being listened in on, which would also explain his choice not to switch to Parseltongue; still, it certainly doesn’t seem like he’s trying to point Harry in any particular direction.
In my analysis, I’ve considered this strong evidence that Quirrell is genuinely worried about what Harry will do. This isn’t (just) a plot to get Harry dependent on him so he can feed what he wants into his ear; this is also an actual limitation on Harry’s power, denying him information that he doesn’t intend to tell him personally, either.
… given the Prophecy, I can’t blame him, though we don’t know much about the effects of fighting Prophecies.
hmm. I initially read Quirrell as being legitimately worried by the prophecy and taking what actions he can.
,
Although now that I say that I’m skeptical. If Quirrell was actually afraid of Harry ending the world, then Harry would be dead. Even if Dumbledore can put up serious resistance to killing Harry in Hogwarts, Quirrell would still likely think he has better odds than he does against the end of the world.
Harry is not dead, so its likely Quirrell does not think Harry will destroy the world (at least in the commonly understood sense).
If Quirrell was actually afraid of Harry ending the world, then Harry would be dead.
Quirrell might, in some manner at least, survive the ending of the world (although I note that the resources available to him after the world is gone do not support a convenient resurrection.) But Harry may have usefulness to Quirrell which is worth whatever risks he poses. Even with Quirrell’s great edge in raw power and experience, Harry has already developed magics which Quirrell is not capable of.
One of my pet theories is that the reason Quirrel ever became voldemort is to take over the wizarding world in order to take over the muggle world to prevent them destroying the earth with nuclear war, which is the only thing he views as a serious threat to his long-term continued existence. He might risk harry ending the world if he’s trying to stop another end of the world risk.
Except that Harry is in some way central to Quirrell’s plans for immortality—probably he’s a horcrux, but maybe it’s something else. Quirrell doesn’t want to bump him off.
Yeah, I suppose that if Harry is central enouph to his plans and if the reward is high enouph that he would be willing to accept some level of risk and not act in an irreveserseable way until the last possible moment. Still, it does seem like a lot a risk for someone who is generally pretty careful.
I think it’s more likely that Quirrell is being sincere, and that he is trying to avert the prophecy that he heard at the end of Ch 89. As evidence, I submit:
“You don’t like science,” Harry said slowly. “Why not?” ″Those fool Muggles will kill us all someday!” Professor Quirrell’s voice had grown louder. “They will end it! End all of it!”
Chapter 20
“HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.”
Chapter 89
“… If I have to brute-force the problem by acquiring enough power and knowledge to just make it happen, I will.” Another pause. ”And to go about that,” the man in the corner said, “you will use your favorite tool, science.” ”Of course.” The Defense Professor exhaled, almost like a sigh. “I suppose that makes sense of it.”
Chapter 90
I’m actually impressed with Quirrell’s control, here. We can judge how great his fear of death is from his response to Dementor exposure, and here we have a prophecy which (to him, at least) is signalling the end of the entire universe. He’s spent decades desperately trying to find a way to avoid death, and now he thinks he’s looking it straight in the face. And nobody in the story has even noticed that he’s concerned, although I’m pretty sure he was showing his fear a little at the end of 90 there. He must be gibbering on the inside, and holding it together out of sheer determination.
Of that much I’m fairly confident. This next bit is speculation on my part. I’m not going to give a percentage, it’s just a hunch, but it is my pet hunch which I’ve had for a long time.
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality. Merlin was the last wizard to know that the universe was a sim and he patched it to stop people breaking it. Unfortunately this resulted in the loss of a whole lot of useful stuff which may very well have been grandfathered in.
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality.
I doubt it, on the basis that this is something that’s unlikely to appeal to many audiences as a realistic application of rationality, and would probably cheapen the plot for a lot of readers.
HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality
The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn’t any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That’s a bit of a special case, though.
In book 2 of Don Quixote, book 1 is mentioned quite a bit and a lot of characters seem to have read it. I was actually surprised at how interesting and original Don Quixote was.
The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey.
Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I think it comes off a little awkward—more a reminder that Vonnegut was himself in Dresden than anything pertaining to the story.
The film ‘Adaptation’, by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had a lot of trouble adapting a certain book into a film… And so the film is about Charlie Kaufman having difficulty turning the book into a film.
I’ve seen obvious knockoffs of reality and other pseudoautobiographical material done well. There’s lots of those. But explicitly having the characters talking to the author, without any pretense, tends strongly towards ham-fistedness. And having the characters inside any other form of nested reality would simply be bizarre.
It’s still a fun theory, but I will be greatly surprised to see it, largely because I don’t think it can be made good enough to make EY think it’s worth printing. Maybe a standalone story with that premise, but not as a tacked-on bit at the end.
But that is almost entirely due to how hokey the books already were. (I read lots of Cussler when I was younger, and it was an example that came to mind of author inserts. It was not exactly a positive example, however. It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
Wait, that sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
It was within ten pages of the end of a very serious trilogy, full of interplanar warfare and dark moral decisions. Then that came right out of left field. It was possibly the most immersion-breaking thing I have ever seen in fiction.
The “author” in question was a relatively minor character, with the quirk of writing everything down as though it were a story. Near the end of the trilogy, he tells some others that he’s already written the ending, and the bad guys are going to win. They respond that if the bad guys win, there won’t be anyone around to read his book—so he changes his mind and frantically erases the ending as the bad guys close in around him. The character is never mentioned again.
Oddly enough, if you look at the Prophecy in terms of science fiction, it’s not too bad. Star-lifting is a thing, and a Singularity of any type would look awfully apocalyptic to a civilization in medieval stasis.
scary things which had heard of David Criswell’s ideas about star lifting.
Is long for “Harry James Potter Evans Verres”. Of course, he gave plausible explanation for why it couldn’t refer to him at the time, and all he had to go on was the letter s, so of course that hypothesis wouldn’t have elevated itself to his attention at the time.
I believe in general Internet parlance its usage is closest to A, and more rarely C. Obviously, since A could be made about pretty much anything, it is typically restricted to “the concept exists, and is acknowledged by a sufficient number of people” (e.g. “Rule 34 is a thing”).
And since the phrase “is a thing” is acknowledged by many people, we could say that “is a thing” is a thing. Unfortunately, “”is a thing” is a thing” is not yet a thing.
Saying “x is a thing” is a way of reminding people of a relevant concept that may have been overlooked. Whether it’s an actual physically existing thing or not depends on context.
Several people have latched onto the idea that “in fact, harry is in a simulation [because it’s fiction]”. This is a deeply confused statement. [edit: I misread Argency; he’s just speculating—no [because it’s fiction] implied—I replied to the wrong comment]
A story can be about anything, and is exactly as meta as its author wants it to be. We’ve seen Harry use the idea that he’s like a hero in a story as an intuition pump, but that’s part of the very non-simulated [fictional] world he inhabits :)
I mean, the story events so far could turn out to have been simulated, or we could end up with a story where self-aware fictional characters negotiating with their creator, but I’ve seen no indication of that so far.
That prophecy is too easy to see the trick on from where I sit.
Harry will supercede most current mortality limits, do many of the soft science-fiction things (tear apart the very stars in heaven), but will fail to prevent the final end of the useful universe an eternity from now despite surviving it (he is the end of the world)
Actually, most nuclear weapons get roughly comparable amounts of their force from fission and fusion, usually a little more from fission. Fission-only bombs are so much less powerful not because fission is but because they have very incomplete fission (around 1% for the Hiroshima bomb design, for example). The fusion reactions used in bombs produce a lot of excess neutrons, by design; all those neutrons flying around mean a lot more fission ends up happening. The only bombs that get most of their power from fusion are neutron bombs (which use a lot less fissionable material, and use the excess neutrons to increase the radiation damage) and clean bombs (which also use a lot less fissionable material, but replace it with lead to absorb the excess neutrons; clean is of course a relative term here).
The biggest difference as regards fission is that fusion bombs use U-238 as a power source, which is capable of releasing energy from fission, but which doesn’t produce enough neutrons to sustain a chain reaction. But when fed excess neutrons from a fusion reaction, you get an immense energy release from a very cheap material that’s used as the bomb casing.
“Hm,” Harry said. “Suppose you threw it into the Sun? Would it be
destroyed?” ... “It seems unlikely, Mr. Potter,” Professor Quirrell said dryly. “The
Sun is very large, after all; I doubt the Dementor would have much effect
on it. But it is not a test I would like to try, Mr. Potter, just in case.”
Also, on Quirrell’s particular attitude toward the sun:
Harry had lost. There had been moments when the cold anger had
faded entirely, replaced by fear, and during those moments he’d begged
the older Slytherins and he’d meant it... “Is the Sun still in the sky?” said Professor Quirrell, still with that
strange gentleness. “Is it still shining? Are you still alive?
Harry lost, and Quirrell’s is basically asking “was it the end of the world to lose?”
I’d be very disappointed if this were actually plot relevant. The only hint that this might be where we’re going is in Chapter 14 and that rules it out:
You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy ISN’T TURING COMPUTABLE! A Turing machine could simulate going back into a defined moment of the past and computing a different future from there, an oracle machine could rely on the halting behavior of lower-order machines, but what you’re saying is that reality somehow self-consistently computes in one sweep using information that hasn’t… happened… yet...”
Ironically Harry is wrong about this. In point of fact his world is a simulation, as are all novels and fictional universes (though I have to consider the possibility that Harry’s world is still not Turing computable. We don’t yet have an existence proof of a computer program that can write fiction.)
What we see of Harry’s world is a simulation and therefore (given a bunch of plausible hypotheses) computable. It doesn’t follow that there is any “completion” of Harry’s world, filling in all the stuff we don’t see, that’s computable, still less that there’s any “reasonable” completion with that property. So I’d be hesitant to say that Harry’s world, simpliciter, is a computable simulation.
A lack of a “reasonable” completion with that property I agree with. But one could easily construct a computable completion. Specifically, the null completion. In other words, everything that that we don’t see and is irrelevant to the story simply does not exist. (Until or unless it does at a future point have an effect on the story.)
In fact, you could argue that this completion is the “real” one: Until Eliezer includes something into the story, how can we say that it exists?
Harry’s universe may not be Turing computable in the absolute sense assuming that arbitrary time travel is possible, but with even minor limits you can come up with algorithms that largely work, or will work most of the time.
As an example, run the simulation forward taking snapshots at every point until a backward looking event occurs. Take the snapshots of the two time periods and brute force search for a solution (any solution) that can link the two time periods together without breaking constraints. If a solution is found, throw all the intermediate snapshots away and replace them with the found solution. Otherwise, keep the existing data and fail the time travel event in some fashion.
My understanding is that it is possible to find solutions to these kinds of problems (otherwise we wouldn’t know and busy beaver numbers.) It’s just not possible to find them via some general, easily computable algorithm.
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall’s way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry’s parents to Hogwarts.
Really? That doesn’t sound like something I’d expect Dumbledore to do. It sounds transparently tactically dangerous given that someone close to Harry has already just died at Hogwarts, and his parents have no idea how to relate to what he’s going through now anyway.
It might be dangerous; Dumbledore, however, will blame his own absence for the danger and rationalize that nothing will happen with him there. He kept on overrating Hogwarts’ security after the last incident; this one seems no different. Anyways, as McGonagall put it, “What now, Albus? If he will not listen to me, then who?”
His parents don’t seem like the obvious answer to that question, to me. Sure, he’s known them longer than anyone else, but they never really understood or took him seriously. Pretty much the only person who he was fully able to relate to and trust is the one he just lost.
Yes, I agree that his parents are not necessarily the perfect solution to this problem. However, you must consider that there is no one else to turn to, unless Draco returns or Harry brings Hermione back. What other plan do you think has a higher probability of success?
(Note that bringing Harry’s parents to Hogwarts is also foreshadowed; Dumbledore tells Harry that he will try to have them see him at Hogwarts all the way back in Chapter 62, and yet they apparently haven’t visited yet this Easter break.)
I really wish that were so, but it just doesn’t make much sense to me. Draco left because of both politics and security concerns; while Hermione’s death may make the politics a little bit easier, the first death at Hogwarts in fifty years isn’t going to soothe Lucius’ nerves any.
I suppose that sending Draco back to Hogwarts might be a way for Lucius to signal that he was behind the attack on Hermione, but I think Lucius cares about Draco’s safety rather more than signaling. He also has many other, less dangerous ways to signal that; I wouldn’t be surprised if he forgave Harry’s debt, for instance.
Like I said in another post, I suspect Quirrel simply wants Dumbledore and Minerva to get in Harry’s way in order to get him to distrust them. Or perhaps I should say, to maintain the distrust that currently exists. Asking them to cheer Harry up will only have them keep treating Harry’s feelings as a problem to be solved, like what he yelled at Fawkes for, and Quirrel knows this.
He’s cut him off from Draco, Hermione, and now he’s working on Minerva.
I don’t think this will drive Minerva from Harry. Despite the unpleasantness, I think this has decreased her loyalty to Dumbledore and increased it to Harry. Dumbledore was complacent about the lapse and didn’t think she was worth blaming. Harry gave her a sense that more is possible (even if he doesn’t think she can pull it off) and I think she’ll surprise him.
Dumbledore and Harry don’t actually do anything very different from each other in that scene. They’re both blaming themselves instead of McGonagall. What’s different is in how they express that. Harry is very clear about who he is blaming, and why; he tells McGonagall exactly what she did wrong when she asks to be blamed, although he still does not in fact blame her. Dumbledore, on the other hand, offers only comfort; he doesn’t even tell McGonagall that he’s going to blame himself, although she can very well guess.
It’s also worth noting that Harry chooses an interesting fault to explain to Professor McGonagall. He doesn’t suggest that, like Quirrell, she should have checked on all the high-value targets before leaving the room. Instead, he told her to trust her students more. This is something that McGonagall could actually do; it’s much better suited to her than the more complicated, strategic options Harry would suggest for himself or Quirrell. So, although it’s definitely not explicitly said this way, it’s pretty easy to read Harry as giving advice here, which Dumbledore notably fails to do.
The only obvious purpose would be to delay Harry, and it seems like a singularly inefficient way of doing that—I think anyone trying to predict his actions would have assigned good odds to him ignoring everyone and everything else and zooming out of there the second he thought Hermione was in trouble.
Furthermore, there are all kinds of ways trying to magically influence a professor could have backfired. The benefit doesn’t seem worth the risk.
I suspect Quirrell’s closing statements to McGonagall at the end of this chapter are not quite what they seem. I’m thinking of two in particular: the first, that he wants Harry kept away from the Restricted Section, and the second,
He set up a situation where Harry wants in the restricted section but McGonagall is trying to stop Harry. The result will be that Harry will get annoyed at McGonagall and Dumbledore for forbidden him access to the restricted section.
that he wants McGonagall and Dumbledore to try to restore Harry’s mood by any means necessary.
Harry asked Quirrell to tell McGonagall that he shouldn’t be disturbt. From Quirrell’s perspective McGonagall is likely to do something that annoys Harry when she tries to restore his mood.
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall’s way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry’s parents to Hogwarts.
Huh. I assumed that Quirrell was trying to manipulate someone from the Order into to obliviating Harry to further alienate Harry from Dumbledore’s side. Harry hasn’t detected himself being obliviated yet, and that needs to happen in the next few chapters. But memory charming Harry to happiness a high entropy guess so I don’t have much confidence in it.
One thing I am reading out of this is that Quirrell is (understandably) genuinely worried about what Harry might do, after the Prophecy.
Part of this is making him dependent on Quirrell for information, obviously, but part of this also seems to be a genuine desire to keep certain knowledge out of his hands—I’m 90% sure that the stock answer Vector and Flitwick will tell Harry about spell creation is the same one that Quirrell just gave, for example.
He doesn’t necessarily learn anything regarding the Restricted Section in his conversation with Harry; however, immediately after his conversation is probably his best chance to have McGonagall listen to him about the Restricted Section.
Dumbledore and McGonagall don’t really have very many options to cheer Harry up. It’s suggested that they already tried other students. Regarding friends, his closest would be McGonagall and Quirrell, neither of whom worked, Hermione and Draco, who are both inaccessible for obvious reasons, and his parents. Of all of these, the last seem like the best option. This is particularly so considering that Harry would very likely want to shield his parents from his present emotions in a way that is not true of Dumbledore and McGonagall. We can debate how well it would work, but short of explicitly using magic on Harry (which might not even be possible, now that he’s an Occlumens) it’s the only thing McGonagall and Dumbledore could do that would have any kind of chance of success.
This post makes me think Dumbledore might try to procure Draco to cheer up Harry, but that might not be practical without great cost (political and otherwise)
Harry’s parents seem like a bad option for cheering him up. As I recall, he despises them as much as he despises most people.
However, I can easily believe bringing them to Hogwarts will seem like a good idea to someone who’s running on automatic. It might even be a good idea—not emotionally—but because they’d be safer at Hogwarts than at home.
Really? What attempt to enter the restricted section would be foiled by that countermeasure that wouldn’t be foiled by the factors inherent in “restricted section”?
Okay, in a very strict sense it does make it harder to access. Harry was unlikely to get permission if he asked before, and now he’s more unlikely to get permission.
He still has a time-turner and the Invisibility Cloak. If he can get behind a stack long enough to put the cloak on and take it off, he can defeat ‘keep an eye on him’.
Now, putting a door on the restricted section would actually provide a hindrance, but would also tip him off that there were probably new wards.
Tangent speculation: What are the odds that Harry will find the Room of Requirements and learn about its nature and then determine the limits of its capabilities?
I read QuirrellMort as being honestly horrified by Harry’s conclusions from Hermione’s death. My take is that Quirrell engineered the troll to kill Hermione in order to get Harry to become an agent of death, not of life. He thinks Harry could possibly find a way to achieve his goals and wants to prevent both Harry from getting Hermione back and from inventing “universal healthcare”. There is also the side benefit of driving a wedge between Harry and Albus / Minerva.
I suspect Quirrell’s closing statements to McGonagall at the end of this chapter are not quite what they seem. I’m thinking of two in particular: the first, that he wants Harry kept away from the Restricted Section, and the second, that he wants McGonagall and Dumbledore to try to restore Harry’s mood by any means necessary.
The trick to the first one is that he hasn’t mentioned sealing off a certain other means of discovering arcane secrets at Hogwarts. Admittedly, Quirrell’s suggested that it’s probably blocked off anyways. But it might not be; even if the basilisk itself is gone, there might still be useful books. So it looks as though Quirrell is trying to push Harry into finding the Chamber of Secrets. There could be any number of reasons why—though the fact that it’s a secret, hidden place at least partially exempt from the Hogwarts wards seems like a good place to start.
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall’s way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry’s parents to Hogwarts. Naturally, this opens up a whole world of possibilities for Quirrell; he could use them as hostages, kill them, Imperius them, or do any number of other nasty things if necessary. Or, if he’s interested in understanding Harry better, he could use Legilimency to learn all about his background.
Also, limiting Harry’s access to knowledge (warning off the other profs, warding the books, etc) makes Quirrell the sole conduit for advanced knowledge for Harry. (Or at least limits the competition). And Quirrell implied to Harry that he was at his nearly-unrestricted service. That gives Quirrell more access to Harry’s thought processes (by the questions he asks) and more capacity to steer his choices.
As to what he’s steering them toward, he pushed Harry off of new spells, which makes me wonder if he has an old one in mind. There was talk about rituals of sacrifice here (the blood-to-fire) and generally recently (Tracy Davis’s invocation). It’s possible that there’s some ritual that Quirrell would like Harry to perform, not for what it manifests, but for the changes it makes to the caster.
He probably also wants to push Harry away from new spells for safety reasons (presumably he thinks Harry might try to science up a dangerous new spell and that’s how he ends the world; he has some experience with Harry attempting to combine magic and science from Azkaban). If he personally steers Harry towards old spells then at least he knows what those spells do.
It’s also possible that the Restricted Section contains enough information for someone like Harry to figure out how to create spells from reading it.
It’s possible that Quirrell himself intends to be Harry’s source of information, but so far he’s only been manifestly unhelpful. Basically every response he gave was a brush-off; he didn’t even name his spell of cursed fire. When directly given an opportunity to suggest spells or rituals of his own choosing (“There’s some magics I mean to learn”), he wasted it. It’s possible that he did so out of concern that he was being listened in on, which would also explain his choice not to switch to Parseltongue; still, it certainly doesn’t seem like he’s trying to point Harry in any particular direction.
In my analysis, I’ve considered this strong evidence that Quirrell is genuinely worried about what Harry will do. This isn’t (just) a plot to get Harry dependent on him so he can feed what he wants into his ear; this is also an actual limitation on Harry’s power, denying him information that he doesn’t intend to tell him personally, either.
… given the Prophecy, I can’t blame him, though we don’t know much about the effects of fighting Prophecies.
hmm. I initially read Quirrell as being legitimately worried by the prophecy and taking what actions he can. , Although now that I say that I’m skeptical. If Quirrell was actually afraid of Harry ending the world, then Harry would be dead. Even if Dumbledore can put up serious resistance to killing Harry in Hogwarts, Quirrell would still likely think he has better odds than he does against the end of the world.
Harry is not dead, so its likely Quirrell does not think Harry will destroy the world (at least in the commonly understood sense).
Quirrell might, in some manner at least, survive the ending of the world (although I note that the resources available to him after the world is gone do not support a convenient resurrection.) But Harry may have usefulness to Quirrell which is worth whatever risks he poses. Even with Quirrell’s great edge in raw power and experience, Harry has already developed magics which Quirrell is not capable of.
One of my pet theories is that the reason Quirrel ever became voldemort is to take over the wizarding world in order to take over the muggle world to prevent them destroying the earth with nuclear war, which is the only thing he views as a serious threat to his long-term continued existence. He might risk harry ending the world if he’s trying to stop another end of the world risk.
Except that Harry is in some way central to Quirrell’s plans for immortality—probably he’s a horcrux, but maybe it’s something else. Quirrell doesn’t want to bump him off.
Yeah, I suppose that if Harry is central enouph to his plans and if the reward is high enouph that he would be willing to accept some level of risk and not act in an irreveserseable way until the last possible moment. Still, it does seem like a lot a risk for someone who is generally pretty careful.
Except that we don’t know how Prophecies work.
I think it’s more likely that Quirrell is being sincere, and that he is trying to avert the prophecy that he heard at the end of Ch 89. As evidence, I submit:
I’m actually impressed with Quirrell’s control, here. We can judge how great his fear of death is from his response to Dementor exposure, and here we have a prophecy which (to him, at least) is signalling the end of the entire universe. He’s spent decades desperately trying to find a way to avoid death, and now he thinks he’s looking it straight in the face. And nobody in the story has even noticed that he’s concerned, although I’m pretty sure he was showing his fear a little at the end of 90 there. He must be gibbering on the inside, and holding it together out of sheer determination.
Of that much I’m fairly confident. This next bit is speculation on my part. I’m not going to give a percentage, it’s just a hunch, but it is my pet hunch which I’ve had for a long time.
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality. Merlin was the last wizard to know that the universe was a sim and he patched it to stop people breaking it. Unfortunately this resulted in the loss of a whole lot of useful stuff which may very well have been grandfathered in.
I doubt it, on the basis that this is something that’s unlikely to appeal to many audiences as a realistic application of rationality, and would probably cheapen the plot for a lot of readers.
The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn’t any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That’s a bit of a special case, though.
In book 2 of Don Quixote, book 1 is mentioned quite a bit and a lot of characters seem to have read it. I was actually surprised at how interesting and original Don Quixote was.
http://www.undefined.net/1/0/
Animal Man by Grant Morrison Of course, that story eventually became exclusively about the character talking to the author.
Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I think it comes off a little awkward—more a reminder that Vonnegut was himself in Dresden than anything pertaining to the story.
Although only tangentially related,
The film ‘Adaptation’, by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had a lot of trouble adapting a certain book into a film… And so the film is about Charlie Kaufman having difficulty turning the book into a film.
I’ve seen obvious knockoffs of reality and other pseudoautobiographical material done well. There’s lots of those. But explicitly having the characters talking to the author, without any pretense, tends strongly towards ham-fistedness. And having the characters inside any other form of nested reality would simply be bizarre.
It’s still a fun theory, but I will be greatly surprised to see it, largely because I don’t think it can be made good enough to make EY think it’s worth printing. Maybe a standalone story with that premise, but not as a tacked-on bit at the end.
Clive Cussler manages to write a lot of books that don’t become more hokey when he shows up as a DEM.
But that is almost entirely due to how hokey the books already were. (I read lots of Cussler when I was younger, and it was an example that came to mind of author inserts. It was not exactly a positive example, however. It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
Wait, that sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
It was within ten pages of the end of a very serious trilogy, full of interplanar warfare and dark moral decisions. Then that came right out of left field. It was possibly the most immersion-breaking thing I have ever seen in fiction.
The “author” in question was a relatively minor character, with the quirk of writing everything down as though it were a story. Near the end of the trilogy, he tells some others that he’s already written the ending, and the bad guys are going to win. They respond that if the bad guys win, there won’t be anyone around to read his book—so he changes his mind and frantically erases the ending as the bad guys close in around him. The character is never mentioned again.
More details.
What am I missing?
In Homestuck, gur fhcreivyynva xvyyf gur nhgube naq gnxrf bire gur pbzvp. Hasbeghangryl ur pnaabg qenj.
Oddly enough, if you look at the Prophecy in terms of science fiction, it’s not too bad. Star-lifting is a thing, and a Singularity of any type would look awfully apocalyptic to a civilization in medieval stasis.
Star lifting is not only a thing, it’s a thing that has been mentioned in HPMOR… by Harry… in response to Trelawney’s prophecy.
Chapter 21, after Trelawney says “HE IS COMING. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY—” and is whisked away:
Pointing out the obvious, but
Is long for “Harry James Potter Evans Verres”. Of course, he gave plausible explanation for why it couldn’t refer to him at the time, and all he had to go on was the letter s, so of course that hypothesis wouldn’t have elevated itself to his attention at the time.
Question: what does it mean to say “X is a thing”?
Does it mean:
A) The concept exists? (e.g. Unicorns are a thing)
B) The concept may not exist yet, but it could exist? (E.g. lunar colonization is a thing; but unicorns are not a thing.)
C) the concept actually exists (Space stations are a thing.)
I believe in general Internet parlance its usage is closest to A, and more rarely C. Obviously, since A could be made about pretty much anything, it is typically restricted to “the concept exists, and is acknowledged by a sufficient number of people” (e.g. “Rule 34 is a thing”).
And since the phrase “is a thing” is acknowledged by many people, we could say that “is a thing” is a thing. Unfortunately, “”is a thing” is a thing” is not yet a thing.
“”is a thing” is a thing” is a thing in sense C.
Saying “x is a thing” is a way of reminding people of a relevant concept that may have been overlooked. Whether it’s an actual physically existing thing or not depends on context.
Context dependent, and possibly the distinction between the three is not really a thing.
Several people have latched onto the idea that “in fact, harry is in a simulation [because it’s fiction]”. This is a deeply confused statement. [edit: I misread Argency; he’s just speculating—no [because it’s fiction] implied—I replied to the wrong comment]
A story can be about anything, and is exactly as meta as its author wants it to be. We’ve seen Harry use the idea that he’s like a hero in a story as an intuition pump, but that’s part of the very non-simulated [fictional] world he inhabits :)
I mean, the story events so far could turn out to have been simulated, or we could end up with a story where self-aware fictional characters negotiating with their creator, but I’ve seen no indication of that so far.
That prophecy is too easy to see the trick on from where I sit.
Harry will supercede most current mortality limits, do many of the soft science-fiction things (tear apart the very stars in heaven), but will fail to prevent the final end of the useful universe an eternity from now despite surviving it (he is the end of the world)
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Actually, the process in stars is fusion. The same as modern atom bombs, too.
Fission is used in nuclear power plants, and only really used to reach the conditions for fusion in bombs.
Actually, most nuclear weapons get roughly comparable amounts of their force from fission and fusion, usually a little more from fission. Fission-only bombs are so much less powerful not because fission is but because they have very incomplete fission (around 1% for the Hiroshima bomb design, for example). The fusion reactions used in bombs produce a lot of excess neutrons, by design; all those neutrons flying around mean a lot more fission ends up happening. The only bombs that get most of their power from fusion are neutron bombs (which use a lot less fissionable material, and use the excess neutrons to increase the radiation damage) and clean bombs (which also use a lot less fissionable material, but replace it with lead to absorb the excess neutrons; clean is of course a relative term here).
The biggest difference as regards fission is that fusion bombs use U-238 as a power source, which is capable of releasing energy from fission, but which doesn’t produce enough neutrons to sustain a chain reaction. But when fed excess neutrons from a fusion reaction, you get an immense energy release from a very cheap material that’s used as the bomb casing.
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Also harkens back to:
Also, on Quirrell’s particular attitude toward the sun:
Harry lost, and Quirrell’s is basically asking “was it the end of the world to lose?”
Or material. Stars are great sources of raw matter, if you can get at it safely.
I’d be very disappointed if this were actually plot relevant. The only hint that this might be where we’re going is in Chapter 14 and that rules it out:
Ironically Harry is wrong about this. In point of fact his world is a simulation, as are all novels and fictional universes (though I have to consider the possibility that Harry’s world is still not Turing computable. We don’t yet have an existence proof of a computer program that can write fiction.)
What we see of Harry’s world is a simulation and therefore (given a bunch of plausible hypotheses) computable. It doesn’t follow that there is any “completion” of Harry’s world, filling in all the stuff we don’t see, that’s computable, still less that there’s any “reasonable” completion with that property. So I’d be hesitant to say that Harry’s world, simpliciter, is a computable simulation.
Harry’s world isn’t Turing Computable from within his world, because it relies on information that hasn’t happened yet.
However, in our world, Harry’s world doesn’t come into existence in the same order that it does in his.
A lack of a “reasonable” completion with that property I agree with. But one could easily construct a computable completion. Specifically, the null completion. In other words, everything that that we don’t see and is irrelevant to the story simply does not exist. (Until or unless it does at a future point have an effect on the story.)
In fact, you could argue that this completion is the “real” one: Until Eliezer includes something into the story, how can we say that it exists?
Harry’s universe may not be Turing computable in the absolute sense assuming that arbitrary time travel is possible, but with even minor limits you can come up with algorithms that largely work, or will work most of the time.
As an example, run the simulation forward taking snapshots at every point until a backward looking event occurs. Take the snapshots of the two time periods and brute force search for a solution (any solution) that can link the two time periods together without breaking constraints. If a solution is found, throw all the intermediate snapshots away and replace them with the found solution. Otherwise, keep the existing data and fail the time travel event in some fashion.
My understanding is that it is possible to find solutions to these kinds of problems (otherwise we wouldn’t know and busy beaver numbers.) It’s just not possible to find them via some general, easily computable algorithm.
This could explain the six-hour limit on Time-Turners—that’s the maximum lookback the Atlantis algorithm allows.
Really? That doesn’t sound like something I’d expect Dumbledore to do. It sounds transparently tactically dangerous given that someone close to Harry has already just died at Hogwarts, and his parents have no idea how to relate to what he’s going through now anyway.
It might be dangerous; Dumbledore, however, will blame his own absence for the danger and rationalize that nothing will happen with him there. He kept on overrating Hogwarts’ security after the last incident; this one seems no different. Anyways, as McGonagall put it, “What now, Albus? If he will not listen to me, then who?”
His parents don’t seem like the obvious answer to that question, to me. Sure, he’s known them longer than anyone else, but they never really understood or took him seriously. Pretty much the only person who he was fully able to relate to and trust is the one he just lost.
Yes, I agree that his parents are not necessarily the perfect solution to this problem. However, you must consider that there is no one else to turn to, unless Draco returns or Harry brings Hermione back. What other plan do you think has a higher probability of success?
(Note that bringing Harry’s parents to Hogwarts is also foreshadowed; Dumbledore tells Harry that he will try to have them see him at Hogwarts all the way back in Chapter 62, and yet they apparently haven’t visited yet this Easter break.)
I think you may have inadvertently put your finger on it. This is how Draco returns.
I really wish that were so, but it just doesn’t make much sense to me. Draco left because of both politics and security concerns; while Hermione’s death may make the politics a little bit easier, the first death at Hogwarts in fifty years isn’t going to soothe Lucius’ nerves any.
I suppose that sending Draco back to Hogwarts might be a way for Lucius to signal that he was behind the attack on Hermione, but I think Lucius cares about Draco’s safety rather more than signaling. He also has many other, less dangerous ways to signal that; I wouldn’t be surprised if he forgave Harry’s debt, for instance.
Like I said in another post, I suspect Quirrel simply wants Dumbledore and Minerva to get in Harry’s way in order to get him to distrust them. Or perhaps I should say, to maintain the distrust that currently exists. Asking them to cheer Harry up will only have them keep treating Harry’s feelings as a problem to be solved, like what he yelled at Fawkes for, and Quirrel knows this.
He’s cut him off from Draco, Hermione, and now he’s working on Minerva.
I don’t think this will drive Minerva from Harry. Despite the unpleasantness, I think this has decreased her loyalty to Dumbledore and increased it to Harry. Dumbledore was complacent about the lapse and didn’t think she was worth blaming. Harry gave her a sense that more is possible (even if he doesn’t think she can pull it off) and I think she’ll surprise him.
Yeah, that was kind of a dick move on Dumbie’s part, right there. Really disappointing.
Dumbledore and Harry don’t actually do anything very different from each other in that scene. They’re both blaming themselves instead of McGonagall. What’s different is in how they express that. Harry is very clear about who he is blaming, and why; he tells McGonagall exactly what she did wrong when she asks to be blamed, although he still does not in fact blame her. Dumbledore, on the other hand, offers only comfort; he doesn’t even tell McGonagall that he’s going to blame himself, although she can very well guess.
It’s also worth noting that Harry chooses an interesting fault to explain to Professor McGonagall. He doesn’t suggest that, like Quirrell, she should have checked on all the high-value targets before leaving the room. Instead, he told her to trust her students more. This is something that McGonagall could actually do; it’s much better suited to her than the more complicated, strategic options Harry would suggest for himself or Quirrell. So, although it’s definitely not explicitly said this way, it’s pretty easy to read Harry as giving advice here, which Dumbledore notably fails to do.
Flash of insight: Professor McGonagall has (had?) the identity feature “I know better than students what is good for them.”
She’s a teacher. This is a default state for anyone who spends their life around 11-17 year olds, because about 90% of the time it’s true.
It’s a high prior, but she has it as an intrinsic part of her identity.
Well, it always worked before. He doesn’t have a good reason to think it won’t work again.
OR, perhaps he is supporting Harry by “discouraging” a hero-to-be, like he did with Hermione.
Hypothesis: Minerva gave those really bad orders under magical influence.
Some of those really bad orders match the ones she gave in canon, and Dumbledore doesn’t seem to think they’re out of ordinary for her.
Is MinervaMOR supposed to be more rational than cannon Minerva?
The only obvious purpose would be to delay Harry, and it seems like a singularly inefficient way of doing that—I think anyone trying to predict his actions would have assigned good odds to him ignoring everyone and everything else and zooming out of there the second he thought Hermione was in trouble.
Furthermore, there are all kinds of ways trying to magically influence a professor could have backfired. The benefit doesn’t seem worth the risk.
He set up a situation where Harry wants in the restricted section but McGonagall is trying to stop Harry. The result will be that Harry will get annoyed at McGonagall and Dumbledore for forbidden him access to the restricted section.
Harry asked Quirrell to tell McGonagall that he shouldn’t be disturbt. From Quirrell’s perspective McGonagall is likely to do something that annoys Harry when she tries to restore his mood.
Huh. I assumed that Quirrell was trying to manipulate someone from the Order into to obliviating Harry to further alienate Harry from Dumbledore’s side. Harry hasn’t detected himself being obliviated yet, and that needs to happen in the next few chapters. But memory charming Harry to happiness a high entropy guess so I don’t have much confidence in it.
One thing I am reading out of this is that Quirrell is (understandably) genuinely worried about what Harry might do, after the Prophecy.
Part of this is making him dependent on Quirrell for information, obviously, but part of this also seems to be a genuine desire to keep certain knowledge out of his hands—I’m 90% sure that the stock answer Vector and Flitwick will tell Harry about spell creation is the same one that Quirrell just gave, for example.
Why does he think of beefing up the restricted section’s security only after his conversation with Harry? What did he learn?
I also don’t see bringing Harry’s parents to Hogwarts as being terribly predictable.
He doesn’t necessarily learn anything regarding the Restricted Section in his conversation with Harry; however, immediately after his conversation is probably his best chance to have McGonagall listen to him about the Restricted Section.
Dumbledore and McGonagall don’t really have very many options to cheer Harry up. It’s suggested that they already tried other students. Regarding friends, his closest would be McGonagall and Quirrell, neither of whom worked, Hermione and Draco, who are both inaccessible for obvious reasons, and his parents. Of all of these, the last seem like the best option. This is particularly so considering that Harry would very likely want to shield his parents from his present emotions in a way that is not true of Dumbledore and McGonagall. We can debate how well it would work, but short of explicitly using magic on Harry (which might not even be possible, now that he’s an Occlumens) it’s the only thing McGonagall and Dumbledore could do that would have any kind of chance of success.
This post makes me think Dumbledore might try to procure Draco to cheer up Harry, but that might not be practical without great cost (political and otherwise)
Harry’s parents seem like a bad option for cheering him up. As I recall, he despises them as much as he despises most people.
However, I can easily believe bringing them to Hogwarts will seem like a good idea to someone who’s running on automatic. It might even be a good idea—not emotionally—but because they’d be safer at Hogwarts than at home.
Harry does not despise his parents. It is made very clear that he loves them dearly and vice versa.
What evidence do we have that security on the restricted section is actually going to be improved?
Just by telling everyone to keep Harry away from it improves the security
Really? What attempt to enter the restricted section would be foiled by that countermeasure that wouldn’t be foiled by the factors inherent in “restricted section”?
“I need access to the restricted section, I don’t want another one of my friends to die”
I would suspect that an argument along those lines would be much more likely to succeed if Quirrell hadn’t given his instructions.
Okay, in a very strict sense it does make it harder to access. Harry was unlikely to get permission if he asked before, and now he’s more unlikely to get permission.
He still has a time-turner and the Invisibility Cloak. If he can get behind a stack long enough to put the cloak on and take it off, he can defeat ‘keep an eye on him’.
Now, putting a door on the restricted section would actually provide a hindrance, but would also tip him off that there were probably new wards.
Tangent speculation: What are the odds that Harry will find the Room of Requirements and learn about its nature and then determine the limits of its capabilities?
I read QuirrellMort as being honestly horrified by Harry’s conclusions from Hermione’s death. My take is that Quirrell engineered the troll to kill Hermione in order to get Harry to become an agent of death, not of life. He thinks Harry could possibly find a way to achieve his goals and wants to prevent both Harry from getting Hermione back and from inventing “universal healthcare”. There is also the side benefit of driving a wedge between Harry and Albus / Minerva.