Would you want to give the reader closure for the arc of a character who is, as the protagonist states, going to be coming back to life?
Personally, this reminds me more than anything of Crono’s death in Chrono Trigger. Nobody mourns him—mourning is something to do when you don’t have control over space and time and the absolute resolve to harness that control. And so the audience, also, doesn’t get a break to stop and think about the death. They just hurl themselves, and their avatar, face-first into solving it.
I do not, for one second, that Harry Potter is going to pull that off in his first year at Hogwarts. Or ever. I’d find it easier to believe that he beat Entropy than that he figured how to bring back the dead.
While it’s true that he’s already done things Beyond The Impossible before, all the rules of the setting seem to indicate that Death Is Final. Even his dreams of “immortality for everyone” seemed to be about stopping people from dying, not bringing them back.
Not wanting to give anything away, I would remind you that what we have seen of Harry so far in the story was intended to resemble the persona of an 18-year-old Eliezer. Whatever Harry has done so far that you would consider to be “Beyond The Impossible”, take measure of Eliezer’s own life before and after a particular critical event. I would suggest that everything Harry has wrought until this moment has been the work of a child with no greater goal—and that, whatever supporting beams of the setting you feel are currently impervious to being knocked down, well, they haven’t even had a motivated rationalist give them even a moment of attention, yet.
I mean, it’s not like Harry can’t extract a perfect copy of Hermione’s material information-theoretic mass (both body and mind) using a combination of a fully-dissected time-turner, a pensieve containing complete braindumps of everyone else she’s ever interacted with, a computer cluster manipulating the mirror of Erised into flipping through alternate timelines to explore Hermione’s reactions to various hypotheticals, or various other devices strewn about the HP continuum. He might end up with a new baby Hermione (who has Hermione’s utility function and memories) who he has to raise into being Hermione again, but just because something doesn’t instantly restore her, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Or he might end up with a “real” copy of Hermione running in his head, which he’ll then allow to manifest as a parallel-alter, using illusion charms along with the same mental hardware he uses for occlumency.
In fact, he could have probably done either of those things before, completely lacking in the motivation he has now. With it? I have no idea what will happen. A narrative Singularity-event, one might say.
Okay, I’m sold. Shame on me, I was too busy going through the Five Stages of Grief to stop and think about it for five minutes. Of course he’ll bring her back.
Also, that’s why EY didn’t give her final moments the propertreatment a Killed Off For Real protagonist deserves; not if but when she is resurrected, that treatment would appear like a cheat and a red herring and a waste of time. And there are no red herrings in this fic.
Would you want to give the reader closure for the arc of a character who is, as the protagonist states, going to be coming back to life?
Personally, this reminds me more than anything of Crono’s death in Chrono Trigger. Nobody mourns him—mourning is something to do when you don’t have control over space and time and the absolute resolve to harness that control. And so the audience, also, doesn’t get a break to stop and think about the death. They just hurl themselves, and their avatar, face-first into solving it.
I do not, for one second, that Harry Potter is going to pull that off in his first year at Hogwarts. Or ever. I’d find it easier to believe that he beat Entropy than that he figured how to bring back the dead.
While it’s true that he’s already done things Beyond The Impossible before, all the rules of the setting seem to indicate that Death Is Final. Even his dreams of “immortality for everyone” seemed to be about stopping people from dying, not bringing them back.
Not wanting to give anything away, I would remind you that what we have seen of Harry so far in the story was intended to resemble the persona of an 18-year-old Eliezer. Whatever Harry has done so far that you would consider to be “Beyond The Impossible”, take measure of Eliezer’s own life before and after a particular critical event. I would suggest that everything Harry has wrought until this moment has been the work of a child with no greater goal—and that, whatever supporting beams of the setting you feel are currently impervious to being knocked down, well, they haven’t even had a motivated rationalist give them even a moment of attention, yet.
I mean, it’s not like Harry can’t extract a perfect copy of Hermione’s material information-theoretic mass (both body and mind) using a combination of a fully-dissected time-turner, a pensieve containing complete braindumps of everyone else she’s ever interacted with, a computer cluster manipulating the mirror of Erised into flipping through alternate timelines to explore Hermione’s reactions to various hypotheticals, or various other devices strewn about the HP continuum. He might end up with a new baby Hermione (who has Hermione’s utility function and memories) who he has to raise into being Hermione again, but just because something doesn’t instantly restore her, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Or he might end up with a “real” copy of Hermione running in his head, which he’ll then allow to manifest as a parallel-alter, using illusion charms along with the same mental hardware he uses for occlumency.
In fact, he could have probably done either of those things before, completely lacking in the motivation he has now. With it? I have no idea what will happen. A narrative Singularity-event, one might say.
Okay, I’m sold. Shame on me, I was too busy going through the Five Stages of Grief to stop and think about it for five minutes. Of course he’ll bring her back.
Also, that’s why EY didn’t give her final moments the proper treatment a Killed Off For Real protagonist deserves; not if but when she is resurrected, that treatment would appear like a cheat and a red herring and a waste of time. And there are no red herrings in this fic.
We’ll get her back.
Well, good, now I can relax and wait to see how Harry pulls it off and at what cost. Good mood, good moo-ood, good moo-ood
While I’m putting it at over 90% that Hermione will be resurrected somehow, someway, it doesn’t need to be in his first year.