Reading the chapters again, I can’t help feeling that, while Harry’s sudden victory is satisfying from a “we, the fandom, have passed the test” perspective, without that context it is really unnatural. Harry abruptly goes from being utterly emotionally overwhelmed and reeling to the flawless, cold-blooded execution of a perfect plan that fully draws on a number of disparate ideas and abilities.
Edit: Also, I’m far from the first person to say this, but Harry’s sudden spike in competence is preceded by Voldemort becoming a hammier, less intelligent villain. His precautions against Harry attempting to escape, and his plans for how to kill him reliably, are reasonably intelligent, but there are a dozen simpler and/or more effective countermeasures he could have taken, starting with something as obvious as getting rid of Harry’s wand.
If there were more chapters left to go, I’d put money on “Voldemort let all this happen as part of a greater gambit”, but as things stand I’m feeling pessimistic.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. In most stories that involve a final conflict between a hero and a villain, none of those options apply. The villain is stronger, and is defeated through some combination of circumstances and advantages that allow the hero to bypass that strength or temporarily exceed it (typically through significant effort and/or sacrifice, often prior to the confrontation).
The villain is stronger, and is defeated through some combination of circumstances and advantages that allow the hero to bypass that strength or temporarily exceed it (typically through significant effort and/or sacrifice, often prior to the confrontation).
Right, that’s what happened in this story: Harry temporarily got the upper hand on Voldemort. Voldemort allowed Harry to get the upper hand. When Voldemort possessed Quirrell’s body, he didn’t just take over the world over the course of a week. When Voldemort realized that Harry was an existential threat, he didn’t relieve Harry of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Voldemort allowed Harry to be a threat because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a story.
Voldemort allowed Harry to be a threat because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a story.
The problem is that he did so in a way that feels inconsistent with the rest of the story. Most villains in most stories aren’t the type that would relieve their nemesis of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Sauron didn’t seal off the Cracks of Doom, or even post a serious guard around them. The Emperor didn’t place the shield generator on Endor in a hidden underground compound guarded by a small army. A great succession of villains have failed to just shoot James Bond. HPMOR!Voldemort would do all of those things, because from the start his extraordinarily high intelligence and skill at what he does have been cornerstones of his character. When he makes a mistake, many readers will assume (and have assumed, usually correctly) that it is a deliberate ploy. Mistakes as bad as what we’re seeing here aren’t just folly; they verge on character derailment.
As a simple matter of fact, Voldemort is stronger than Harry in basically every way, other than Harry’s (incomplete) training in rationality. If Voldemort were a good enough planner, there’s no way he could lose; he is smarter, more powerful, and has more ancient lore than any other wizard. If Voldemort were also rational, and didn’t fall prey to overconfidence bias / planning fallacy...
Well, you can be as rational as you like, but if you are human and your opponent is a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All, then the story is going to read less like HPMOR, and more like:
″...HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.” Quirinus Quirrell calmly activated the toe ring he had prepared months ago, causing the capsule of sulfuric acid embedded in the top of Harry’s skull (placed there earlier by an Imperiused Madam Pomfrey, in case of emergency) to break open and quickly dissolve the other Tom Riddle. Quirrell shook his head in disappointment as he felt the sense of doom diminish and then disappear, but it had to be done. He turned to walk towards the third floor corridor. The End.
Yup. So the solution is not to make your villain a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All to begin with. Eliezer took the risk of setting up an incredibly powerful villain, and it is to his credit as a writer that up until the very end he made us believe that he was capable of writing a satisfying resolution anyway.
Frankly, he still might. There are four chapters left, and Eliezer is nothing if not capable of surprising his audience. And as a Naruto fan, he might also have come across Bleach (another of the Big Three shounen series), and learned from its author already having made the exact same mistake.
Ah. But he would want to be more careful than that, because there’s a prophecy, and Voldemort got burned the last time a prophecy was involved.
So he goes out of his way to tear it apart, by bringing Hermione back, for instance, which required the stone, and having the other Tom swear an unbreakable vow.
Professor Quirrell will always be a step ahead of you, will always outwit you. You cannot beat him in any game.
That is the characterization of the Defense Professor. A story cannot start with “You can’t beat the Professor Quirrell at any game” and end with “Professor Quirrell has lost the game” without a character break in between.
Dumbledore won during the Battle of the Three Armies. His assault on Azkaban would have gotten him killed (and more seriously, set back his efforts by years) for a stupid communication error, were Harry not willing to risk his own life and invent new magic to save the man. Hermoine outlasted several hours of the Defense Professor’s most aggressive psychological attacks possible, using fairly basic deontology. His ‘lesson plan’ with Ma-Ha-Su in Chapter 16 was bluntly stupid, even if Harry hadn’t used the easy way out. In Chapter 35, he fears that Harry has screwed over his plans because of voicing an obvious disagreement that Harry has repeatedly given privately before.
And that’s before we get to the stupidity that was enforced by canon : testing multiple novel spells (Horcruxes, however he ‘reformated’ the young Harry Potter) without sufficient and verified safeties, the highly fractious Death Eaters, the lackluster war with Dumbledore.
Quirrellmort is smart. He thinks ahead. But his fundamental philosophy is still very restricted. As much as he tries to claim otherwise, he’s running on distilled Command Push—we’ll note that no Death Eater gave him advice in this chapter, nor would we expect them to. His speech in Chapter 34 follows the same philosophy.
But more importantly, he underestimates risks. He’s a partially-formed rationalist, who has heard of Kolmogorov complexity but can’t quite understand why he should shut-up-and-multiply yet. He leaves Harry a wand because wanded Harry is only a threat because of that wand if he has a) wordless, b) motionless, c) wanded, d) magic that can instantly disable Death Eaters, e) can hit him at all and f) threatens an immortal. It’s understandable to not think Harry is a risk. A full-grown wizard in the same environment wouldn’t be a risk—Dumbledore or Mad-Eye Moody would have died, and died quickly. That’s not as unreasonable a mistake as you’d expect.
If you want a retcon that makes it actually reasonable to let Harry keep his wand, let’s say that speaking Parseltongue only makes you tell the truth if you’re also holding a wand at the same time. (Or that you can’t speak it at all without it.)
In Chapter 16, Quirrelmort instructed the class in a very simple hex that caused a small amount of pain and no lasting harm called Ma-Ha-Su. He then selects three students, Hermoine, Draco, and Harry Potter, and then requires them to select a student and fire Ma-Ha-Su at them, taking Quirrel and later House points for non-compliance. The comparisons to the Millgram Experiments become explicit in chapter 63. Hermoine refuses, Draco fires on Hermoine, and Harry fires on himself.
Harry explicitly beats Quirrelmort’s plans, here : “Yes, quite ingenious, but there was a lesson to be taught and you dodged it.” It’s not clear he ever gets the intended lesson, given that Quirrelmort seemed to intend to teach Harry to harm Draco on obedient command.
Interestingly, this could have not just failed but have gone horribly wrong for Quirrelmort, and he wouldn’t have even understood why. One of the common responses to Millgram-like actions in the last few years of science fiction is to turn on the person giving illegal orders. Harry wouldn’t do that because of his upbringing, but other possible Riddle-clones would wanted to fire Ma-Ha-Su on Quirrelmort and claimed he counted as a student—and either required he flinch or dodge from a trivial spell, or risked publicly triggering the resonance that would have brought Dumbledore down on Quirrelmort’s head. The man’s not exactly been known for his happy subservience, after all.
Even without reaching that unlikely but disastrous possibility, ‘success’ would have had dramatically different results than Quirrelmort expected, given Quirrelmort’s difficulty understanding what Harry was trying to do with Draco even at that point. Blunt, blunt stupidity.
What does this mean?
Command Push is set of force philosophy where commanders give direct orders involving not only a mission’s goal, but also its execution, tools, and specific tactics. It’s very common historically, where communication is slow, or where the commander has much greater understanding of the field than individuals, but it’s highly dependent on commander skill and knowledge, and very vulnerable to subterfuge. Quirrelmort is hugely prone to this, as are Harry Potter and (to a lesser extent) Draco.
This is usually contrasted with Recon Pull, Mission-type Tactics, or Command By Negation, where commanders provide goals, time constraints, and resources, but allow units to develop their own strategies to achieve those goals. This requires more training, faster communications technology, and higher levels of trust in subordinates (less so in Command By Negation, where you at least double-check with a commander), but puts more minds on a problem and can more readily adapt when lines of communication are cut or when situations on the ground change.
((Command Push and Recon Pull are video game terms from the Civilization series: different armies have different terms for these philosophies, usually subdivided into separate generations or divided by recent inspirations. Modern armies tend to use more modernized techniques derived from combinations of the two branches and further IT developments, though they’d not really be practicable in the time frame present here.))
I wondered the same thing. The only thing Google gave me that made sense in context was jargon from a Civilization wiki, meaning a style of military command where orders include implementation details: “here’s the actions you need to take”. The pitfalls of this style are that it places increased cognitive and communications load on the commander, that it can fail to account for local or changing conditions, and that it can lead to poor responsiveness under conditions of imperfect communication.
Current management theory (and, I believe, Western military doctrine, though I’m not an expert) favors objective-based orders: “here’s the goal you need to accomplish”. That leaves implementation details up to subordinates.
Current management theory (and, I believe, Western military doctrine, though I’m not an expert) favors objective-based orders, leaving implementation details up to subordinates.
This makes a lot of sense, thank you. I see the parent comment to mine is right too, that this is Voldemort’s political philosophy. Give me all the power, and then all of my values will be attained.
Which isn’t a problem in HPMOR, because we’ve been given a number of persuasive reasons why Quirrell wanted Harry alive—he didn’t change his mind about this until he heard the prophecy about Harry destroying the world, at which point it seems he decided to kill Harry as soon as he’d used him to obtain the Philosopher’s Stone.
(No, the options I gave in the bullets are not comprehensive. I couldn’t find an airtight but pity way to express conundrum inherent in having strong villains lose).
Remove Harry’s glasses (which could have been a transfigured anything, and Voldemort had just taught Harry how to dispel transfiguration by mere physical contact)
Bind or paralyse Harry, with rope or a Death Eater spell
Have a Death Eater Imperius Harry with a command to obey Voldemort and do nothing else
Have a Death Eater use a Confundus Charm on Harry to make him trust Voldemort and not look for ways to escape
Blind Harry—he doesn’t need his eyes to tell Voldemort his secrets, just his ears and tongue
On the same principle, Voldemort could happily dismember him, as long as magic was used to prevent death from blood loss or shock, and distraction from pain
Drain Harry of magic by forcing him to cast innocuous spells
Use illusions to disguise the number and location of the Death Eaters so that Harry is unable to come up with targeted countermeasures against them (and so are any unexpected rescuers)
Cast a spell on Hermione as a dead man’s switch—something that will not permanently hurt/kill her unless Harry does something to incapacitate Voldemort and prevent him from dispelling it in time (not violating Voldemort’s promise, since he does not expect Harry to do this)
Have one of Voldemort’s innumerable horcruxes and a tied-up victim on hand so that he can come back immediately if killed (if there’s a mandatory time delay, Harry doesn’t know it, so this is at least a powerful bluff)
Bring in some hostages, and kill one each time Harry starts doing anything that sounds like playing for time rather than being maximally cooperative
I posted this as part of my review. I think it explains the wand thing. As so often happens in real life, we don’t see the workings of mind that lead to every decisive factor in an outcome. In real life, we get to the end of a problem and often don’t know why a particular mistake was made.
…
A small disturbance dwelt in my mind for these days, for I had concluded that Eliezer had already contrived a clever solution for Harry, sealed off all other such pathways, and that a strong indicator of what that contrived plan was, was that Voldemort left Harry with his wand after the Vow.
Curious, that, oui? Voldemort specifically forbade Harry to raise his wand, and told his servants to attack him in a flurry of eclectic attacks, the mere thought of which would inevitably have an emotional effect on Harry, clouding his mental acuity.
Since, Voldemort has in his consciousness that Harry has his wand, and has no reason to let him hold it, the clear explanation is that Eliezer could only think of a way for Harry to win if he had his wand, so he made Voldemort make a stupid mistake, it was the best he could do. Still quite good; I did not begrudge him it.
Since victory depends upon the wand, and Harry can’t speak, the obvious answer is wordless, wand-based magic, the only such that Harry knows being transfiguration. Partial transfiguration. This also fits in with the heading of the first chapter, some very thin thing at night related to the sudden death of a great many people.
I notice I am confused.
Let me not be thought to brag, I grant it took me a solid 49 hours or so to so notice.
Voldemort just makes a stupid mistake? Eliezer just couldn’t come up with anything better than Voldemort somehow losing by stupidly just letting the enemy have his wand, when that enemy can cause pain and death to his current form by casting magic on literally anything Voldemort has cast magic on?
At last I notice I am confused.
I re-conceptualize the matter at hand.
We’re going to assume one more time that Voldemort really isn’t stupid, no matter how many times the terrible villain ALWAYS and FRUSTRATINGLY is. If there’s anything to be learned from chapter 113, it’s that Voldemort REALLY is doing it all on purpose, and a bloody, clever purpose ‘e ’as, ‘asn’t ’e?
So. Voldemort obviously is aware of Harry having his wand. I WILL THEREFORE CONCLUDE!
He wants Harry to have his wand.
Why is that?
It is not a mistake, it is a test.
For Harry to submit when there is truly nothing to do, shows nothing. The evil are not good when only good they may choose, and the proud are not humble when only humiliation may they claim.
But! For Harry to submit, and this of his own free will, this despite his apparent Plot-Induced Loophole, this is a proof of his self-mastery, and of his rationality. For to submit for lack of spirit is not the same as to submit for the understanding of its ideal nature.
Voldemort shall ask Harry in Parseltongue at the end of their discussion if he tried trickery, if he concealed secrets. Only if Harry can answer no shall he show himself sufficiently impressed with the absolute dominance of Voldemort to be worth keeping around.
Harry shall disclose all secrets, I need not enumerate them specifically here. He shall at the end ask permission to drop his wand.
…
All that being said, Voldemort probably really DOESN’T know about partial transfiguration. While we do need a plausible explanation for him not forcing Harry to rid himself of his wand after the Vow, so that Voldemort isn’t stupid, we can still take advantage of his ignorance and pride. (The plan I gave involved exploding the DE’s, not cutting them, disabling Voldemort’s gun, not his hands, and neutralizing Voldemort by casting magic on everything Voldemort had affected, obelisks, Hermione, etc, forcing him by resonance to go snake form, to be kept there by having Harry’s magicked cloth on the snake at all times so it couldn’t transform without suffering from the resonance).
…
Such was my review. As I consider the matter, transfiguration was the only wordless magic Harry knew, and without partial transfiguration, he could never have attained the wand contact with anything to transfigure.
Was Voldemort really taking unnecessary risks, or is it reasonable to say that there was no danger to letting Harry keep his wand that Voldemort could reasonably have known about?
Still, a thorough genius would have made sure, so there must have been at least some reason for which it was worth taking even an unimaginable risk, hence the reasoning given above.
So. Voldemort obviously is aware of Harry having his wand. I WILL THEREFORE CONCLUDE! He wants Harry to have his wand. Why is that? It is not a mistake, it is a test.
If letting Harry have the wand is out of character as a mistake, but in character as a test, not only does that mean that letting him have the wand is a test, it also means that Harry should be able to figure out that letting him have the wand is a test. This ruins the usefulness of the test as a test.
I’m not positive I understand. You think that letting Harry have his wand either is or isn’t a sufficient clue to deduce that it is a test, and that
If it is a sufficient clue, Harry will know it’s a test. Harry’s knowing it is a test will ruin the nature of the test.
It if is not a sufficient clue, Harry cannot be tested by it, as nobody can be expected to deduce such a thing.
Therefore, neither option aligns with Voldemort’s goals, and the test is out of character for him as a rational being.
If I do understand, I think the this part of my post implies the response I will now clarify:
“But! For Harry to submit, and this of his own free will, this despite his apparent Plot-Induced Loophole, this is a proof of his self-mastery, and of his rationality. For to submit for lack of spirit is not the same as to submit for the understanding of its ideal nature.”
Allowing Harry to keep his wand is a sufficient clue that something is wrong. If it’s enough to make me feel confused, it’s enough for the more rational being Harry can become in this circumstance.
Harry’s deducing that it is a test does not destroy the test, because that is the test! ;)
To deduce such a thing is a test of rationality.
For him to be able to lose in such a situation is a further test of the great limit to his rationality throughout, his emotions, especially his pride, his disproportionate value of his own social dominance.
So it was a feasible test of his rationality on two important levels.
I think there may be some hindsight bias here. We know that Harry has partial transfiguration and we know that it turns out poorly for LV. LV himself did not know these things. To the best of his knowledge (which he has good reason to believe is considerable and maybe exhaustive) there is no magic Harry can cast wordlessly with his wand down.
For LV to enact the additional precautions above, magic would be needed. He can’t use magic on Harry, so taking them means reducing the size of the death eater guard by 1 or more during the time needed to take those precautions. If you don’t know that Harry can do previously unknown to the world wandless magic, than that might actualy not seem like a good trade off.
Additionally, regardless of if trading 1 guard for additional precautions is actualy a good security trade, it is totaly in character that the kind of mind that created horcrux number 107 after allready having over a hundred redundant horcruxes would think the additional redundancy of guard 36 over guard 35 to be valuable.
I take your general point, but part of Voldemort’s character as we have seen it is that he is Crazy Prepared, building in failsafes and backup options and safety margins well beyond the reasonable minimum. He is not merely capable of dealing with whatever challenges the narrative throws at him; he is comfortable, even leisurely, in the manner in which he deals with them.
He can’t use magic on Harry, so taking them means reducing the size of the death eater guard by 1 or more during the time needed to take those precautions. If you don’t know that Harry can do previously unknown to the world wandless magic, than that might actualy not seem like a good trade off.
I doubt the cost of temporarily reducing the Death Eater guard from 36 to 35 is greater than the benefit of a given precaution.
Additionally regardless of if its is actualy a good security trade, it’s totaly in character for the kind of mind that made horcrux number 107 to think that it needs gsurs number 32
I don’t understand this sentence. Would you mind rephrasing?
Fair enough. In regard to that, I would also observe that Voldemort (likely correctly) thinks his Death Eaters are idiots, which mitigates their perceived value to him versus precautions he personally would think up.
If you don’t know that Harry can do previously unknown to the world wandless magic, than that might actualy not seem like a good trade off.
But Voldemort does know that Harry can cast one particular type of wordless, wandless magic—he knows it because he taught him. Harry can end transfigurations. And he still has his glasses. Can Voldemort sense transfigurations that Harry is maintaining? If not, Harry could have a piece of Scotch tape stuck someplace it wouldn’t be noticed, or a booger hidden up his nose, or a capsule up his butt like a drug smuggler, or a tooth, or a fingernail, or a toenail, or...
If Voldemort can’t sense Harry’s transfigurations, he should be operating under the assumption that Harry has a capsule up his butt that he can excrete and untransfigure into a deus ex machina. He doesn’t need his hands to end a transfiguration, and he doesn’t need his hands to poop. (If you prefer it to be a tooth, say it’s a tooth. That’s what Voldemort did.)
Of course, Voldemort doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who would do that. He goes through the motions of being careful, but constant vigilance is not one of his strong points. And that’s not, narratively speaking, a character flaw: if you think everyone else is a stupid NPC, you’re not going to see a point in paranoia.
He should’ve kicked himself in the face as soon as he taught Harry how to do that. But he’s not the sort of person who would.
Also, Harry should start carrying some transfigured teeth. A gun, a knife, and a broomstick, maybe? But I think I’m not being paranoid enough.
I’m with everyone else on the wand thing. It would have been simple enough to have him drop it. One narrative explanation for getting the wand back into Harry’s hand would have been V asking for a demonstration of PT after Harry told him of it. Another would be to throw away the simplest timeline thing and let time-turned Harry come to the rescue with that solution, wand, cloak, etc. in hand. Though I don’t know why V left him an hour on the time-turner either.
But:
My real confusion starts way before all of this. You have the idiot-child of prophesied destruction, and what you do not do is back him into a corner where he may decide to do something desperate. Making Harry feel threatened was a big risk to take with that prophecy.
V transforms into a super scary villain, putting Harry under massive duress, the exact kind of thing that would possibly cause him to destroy the world through time paradox or some other unknown power. It would have made more sense to bind him with an unbreakable vow long before then, to maintain the pretense of friendship throughout. So he guessed you’re Voldemort, fine. Come clean, acknowledge what your plan to rule Britain was, and that you have been planning to place Harry as the ruler this time. Have that discussion. Come clean about the existence of a prophecy. Tell him you intend to resurrect Hermione. That you need to know what secret power he has so you can help him avoid the inadvertent destruction of the entire universe. Remind him of the centaur prophecy. Get him on your side that he is a serious risk to everyone. Brief the Death Eaters ahead of time, have a few that Harry doesn’t know present out of uniform for a fake ritual of divination that supposedly requires him to be completely nude and holding no objects. At the agreed upon time in the ritual they all just AK him and Harry dies with his eyes wide going “Wait, WHAT?” and thinking you were his friend until the last.
V broadcasts his betrayal so far in advance, and that seems downright unsafe given what is at stake and what a giant question mark this boy is. You underestimate a 1st year, sure. But you don’t underestimate a 1st year who is prophesied to destroy the stars and you, who you know has unknown powers.
I’m not hating though, EY. You’re writing the story, not me. I know it’s taken a lot of effort and I’ve enjoyed it immensely and I thank you for taking all of this time to write what has essentially been a free novel for all of us to consume and form a community around. I don’t usually even think that hard about the fiction I read, but your story invites me to do so. It’s been a great experience and I look forward to the finish.
I’m not hating though, EY. You’re writing the story, not me. I know it’s taken a lot of effort and I’ve enjoyed it immensely and I thank you for taking all of this time to write what has essentially been a free novel for all of us to consume and form a community around. I don’t usually even think that hard about the fiction I read, but your story invites me to do so. It’s been a great experience and I look forward to the finish.
Definitely worth saying. I know I’m being very critical in this thread, but that’s largely because I’m so emotionally invested in this story, which in turn is because it’s an extraordinarily good story.
I missed when writing this that there was the curse preventing V from killing H. But he still could have just let the centaur kill him. If the curse also stopped him from allowing the death of H then he still could have tried to get the Unbreakable Vow from Harry before making shit hit the fan.
Cast a spell on Hermione as a dead man’s switch—something that will not permanently hurt/kill her unless Harry does something to incapacitate Voldemort and prevent him from dispelling it in time (not violating Voldemort’s promise, since he does not expect Harry to do this)
He made a point to have Hermione alive in case Harry get out of the situation. It’s no mistake that he doesn’t.
Hmm… the blinding one is potentially interesting, if Harry partially-Transfigures himself eyeballs using the fact that his hand is touching the wand, and uses the Stone to make them permanent later… but he’d have to avoid Voldemort noticing that his eyes were back.
I feel I should reiterate that I agree with you. I’m not seeing an in-universe reason for Voldemort’s behavior in these two chapters either, except for maybe “He was overconfident and didn’t see the need to take such excessive precautions”, which isn’t all that narratively satisfying, though it is somewhat realistic. (The planning fallacy is a thing, after all, and even Tom Riddle Jr. Sr. isn’t immune.)
I don’t think there a good reason for Voldemort to think that giving Harry another minute with his wand adds much on top of what Harry could already do before.
Look at it from another perspective: Voldemort’s actions are based on the belief that Harry has powerful secrets unknown to him. One or more of those secrets may well lead to the end of the world if Harry lives. Given that Voldemort is acknowledging his ignorance of Harry’s full capabilities, is there any possible excuse for not trying to limit those capabilities as much as possible?
Half of those would either have prevented Harry for reveling his secrets to LV (paralyze, Imperius) or not changed anything in that case (bind with a rope, remove glasses, horcrux, hostages).
Some are doubtful : confudus I’m not sure it would have worked since Harry is an Occlumens, illusions to hide a few Death Eaters, I’m not sure the remaining hidden Death Eaters would have done anything when seeing all Death Eaters dropping dead and LV collapsing. Death Eaters aren’t especially loyal nor courageous, they obey by fear, and a 11 years old boy able to kill a dozen without moving (and who is known to scare dementors, and …) is as scary as Voldemort.
Now, sure, it’s always possible to imagine in hindsight ways Voldemort could have used to save the day for himself. As it is for Dumbledore before, and for Harry earlier (see the lack of recognition code, …).
But if you nitpick that way, is there any fiction that is satisfying for you ? People do mistakes, even very smart people. The only real mistake Voldemort did was the wand thing, the rest is pretty much nitpicking. And one mistake, which with Voldemort knowledge was very low-risk, can happen without hurting too much the suspension of disbelief.
It doesn’t matter so much that Voldemort didn’t see the exact means of his downfall coming. What bothers me most is that he was sloppy.
The point of my post is that I am much less intelligent than Voldemort, and vastly less experienced in cunning and subterfuge, yet I was able to think of a dozen relatively practical means of reducing risk from Harry in 20 minutes. How many would Voldemort have thought of and implemented if he’d tried?
Maybe they wouldn’t have worked against the actual solution Harry chose. That only makes the story better. It means Harry successfully defeats the Voldemort we know and love, Voldemort at the top of his game, not a cut-down Voldemort shacked by a sudden Idiot Ball.
A satisfying way to defeat Voldemort would take advantage of his genuine weaknesses—his despair in humanity, his loneliness, his arrogance, his inability to comprehend genuine compassion, his need for a worthy foe. But until the latest chapters, he had not been shown to have the weaknesses of carelessness, poor planning, or leaving a dangerous enemy armed when they are in his power.
Why assume you’re “much less intelligent than Voldemort,” in addition to the gap in experience? As others have noted, he makes mistakes all the time. (I was surprised by the news that he actually died and was actually trapped for years, but not by him leaving Harry’s wand alone given this previous information.) We know that V had vast experience with magic and secret information about the same, which could support your view but could also be a disadvantage when it came to partial transfiguration. Note that the mistake he knew about with the Horcrux network (and would perhaps have updated on) partly consisted of thinking he could overcome a long-established magical limitation without testing it. Maybe the actual complaint should be that Harry’s use of partial transfiguration shouldn’t have worked without more testing—though here we know that he based it on vast civilizational knowledge which V had only begun to assimilate.
A satisfying way to defeat Voldemort would take advantage of his genuine weaknesses—his despair in humanity, his loneliness, his arrogance, his inability to comprehend genuine compassion, his need for a worthy foe. But until the latest chapters, he had not been shown to have the weaknesses of carelessness, poor planning, or leaving a dangerous enemy armed when they are in his power.
So, up until the prophecy, Voldemort can coexist with Harry. (The reverse may not be true.) So why did Eliezer add the prophecy to the mix? Was it just to set up the eventual duel between H and V?
It seems to me that that’s the place to do an Author’s Saving Throw, if there is one; if people reason about V as an optimization process rather than a character, they will never be satisfied by V losing a duel because V is defined by his duel-winning property. So the only winning move is not to play, but there are satisfying ways for that to happen. (In fact, I think I might write that up in long form.)
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres only exists because of the prophecy!
I am referring to the prophecy that Trelawney gives in chapter 21, that is original to Eliezer, not the prophecy that Snape hears and leaks to Voldemort that was written by Rowling.
Oh yes, that does seem like the pivotal moment in retrospect. It also seems central to the story. And it extends the Chosen One theme in canon, taking it up to Aleph-Null.
Reading the chapters again, I can’t help feeling that, while Harry’s sudden victory is satisfying from a “we, the fandom, have passed the test” perspective, without that context it is really unnatural. Harry abruptly goes from being utterly emotionally overwhelmed and reeling to the flawless, cold-blooded execution of a perfect plan that fully draws on a number of disparate ideas and abilities.
Edit: Also, I’m far from the first person to say this, but Harry’s sudden spike in competence is preceded by Voldemort becoming a hammier, less intelligent villain. His precautions against Harry attempting to escape, and his plans for how to kill him reliably, are reasonably intelligent, but there are a dozen simpler and/or more effective countermeasures he could have taken, starting with something as obvious as getting rid of Harry’s wand.
If there were more chapters left to go, I’d put money on “Voldemort let all this happen as part of a greater gambit”, but as things stand I’m feeling pessimistic.
The villain allows the hero to win
The villain is weaker than the hero
Deus ex machina
The hero doesn’t win
Take at least one.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. In most stories that involve a final conflict between a hero and a villain, none of those options apply. The villain is stronger, and is defeated through some combination of circumstances and advantages that allow the hero to bypass that strength or temporarily exceed it (typically through significant effort and/or sacrifice, often prior to the confrontation).
Right, that’s what happened in this story: Harry temporarily got the upper hand on Voldemort. Voldemort allowed Harry to get the upper hand. When Voldemort possessed Quirrell’s body, he didn’t just take over the world over the course of a week. When Voldemort realized that Harry was an existential threat, he didn’t relieve Harry of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Voldemort allowed Harry to be a threat because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a story.
The problem is that he did so in a way that feels inconsistent with the rest of the story. Most villains in most stories aren’t the type that would relieve their nemesis of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Sauron didn’t seal off the Cracks of Doom, or even post a serious guard around them. The Emperor didn’t place the shield generator on Endor in a hidden underground compound guarded by a small army. A great succession of villains have failed to just shoot James Bond. HPMOR!Voldemort would do all of those things, because from the start his extraordinarily high intelligence and skill at what he does have been cornerstones of his character. When he makes a mistake, many readers will assume (and have assumed, usually correctly) that it is a deliberate ploy. Mistakes as bad as what we’re seeing here aren’t just folly; they verge on character derailment.
As a simple matter of fact, Voldemort is stronger than Harry in basically every way, other than Harry’s (incomplete) training in rationality. If Voldemort were a good enough planner, there’s no way he could lose; he is smarter, more powerful, and has more ancient lore than any other wizard. If Voldemort were also rational, and didn’t fall prey to overconfidence bias / planning fallacy...
Well, you can be as rational as you like, but if you are human and your opponent is a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All, then the story is going to read less like HPMOR, and more like:
Yup. So the solution is not to make your villain a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All to begin with. Eliezer took the risk of setting up an incredibly powerful villain, and it is to his credit as a writer that up until the very end he made us believe that he was capable of writing a satisfying resolution anyway.
Frankly, he still might. There are four chapters left, and Eliezer is nothing if not capable of surprising his audience. And as a Naruto fan, he might also have come across Bleach (another of the Big Three shounen series), and learned from its author already having made the exact same mistake.
Ah. But he would want to be more careful than that, because there’s a prophecy, and Voldemort got burned the last time a prophecy was involved.
So he goes out of his way to tear it apart, by bringing Hermione back, for instance, which required the stone, and having the other Tom swear an unbreakable vow.
There wouldn’t have been such a prophecy if Voldemort had been sufficiently rational
Professor Quirrell will always be a step ahead of you, will always outwit you. You cannot beat him in any game.
That is the characterization of the Defense Professor. A story cannot start with “You can’t beat the Professor Quirrell at any game” and end with “Professor Quirrell has lost the game” without a character break in between.
Is that what we’ve seen presented so far?
Dumbledore won during the Battle of the Three Armies. His assault on Azkaban would have gotten him killed (and more seriously, set back his efforts by years) for a stupid communication error, were Harry not willing to risk his own life and invent new magic to save the man. Hermoine outlasted several hours of the Defense Professor’s most aggressive psychological attacks possible, using fairly basic deontology. His ‘lesson plan’ with Ma-Ha-Su in Chapter 16 was bluntly stupid, even if Harry hadn’t used the easy way out. In Chapter 35, he fears that Harry has screwed over his plans because of voicing an obvious disagreement that Harry has repeatedly given privately before.
And that’s before we get to the stupidity that was enforced by canon : testing multiple novel spells (Horcruxes, however he ‘reformated’ the young Harry Potter) without sufficient and verified safeties, the highly fractious Death Eaters, the lackluster war with Dumbledore.
Quirrellmort is smart. He thinks ahead. But his fundamental philosophy is still very restricted. As much as he tries to claim otherwise, he’s running on distilled Command Push—we’ll note that no Death Eater gave him advice in this chapter, nor would we expect them to. His speech in Chapter 34 follows the same philosophy.
But more importantly, he underestimates risks. He’s a partially-formed rationalist, who has heard of Kolmogorov complexity but can’t quite understand why he should shut-up-and-multiply yet. He leaves Harry a wand because wanded Harry is only a threat because of that wand if he has a) wordless, b) motionless, c) wanded, d) magic that can instantly disable Death Eaters, e) can hit him at all and f) threatens an immortal. It’s understandable to not think Harry is a risk. A full-grown wizard in the same environment wouldn’t be a risk—Dumbledore or Mad-Eye Moody would have died, and died quickly. That’s not as unreasonable a mistake as you’d expect.
THANK YOU.
If you want a retcon that makes it actually reasonable to let Harry keep his wand, let’s say that speaking Parseltongue only makes you tell the truth if you’re also holding a wand at the same time. (Or that you can’t speak it at all without it.)
I think this is a great comment, but could you please expand on two points?
What are you talking about here?
And also
What does this mean?
In Chapter 16, Quirrelmort instructed the class in a very simple hex that caused a small amount of pain and no lasting harm called Ma-Ha-Su. He then selects three students, Hermoine, Draco, and Harry Potter, and then requires them to select a student and fire Ma-Ha-Su at them, taking Quirrel and later House points for non-compliance. The comparisons to the Millgram Experiments become explicit in chapter 63. Hermoine refuses, Draco fires on Hermoine, and Harry fires on himself.
Harry explicitly beats Quirrelmort’s plans, here : “Yes, quite ingenious, but there was a lesson to be taught and you dodged it.” It’s not clear he ever gets the intended lesson, given that Quirrelmort seemed to intend to teach Harry to harm Draco on obedient command.
Interestingly, this could have not just failed but have gone horribly wrong for Quirrelmort, and he wouldn’t have even understood why. One of the common responses to Millgram-like actions in the last few years of science fiction is to turn on the person giving illegal orders. Harry wouldn’t do that because of his upbringing, but other possible Riddle-clones would wanted to fire Ma-Ha-Su on Quirrelmort and claimed he counted as a student—and either required he flinch or dodge from a trivial spell, or risked publicly triggering the resonance that would have brought Dumbledore down on Quirrelmort’s head. The man’s not exactly been known for his happy subservience, after all.
Even without reaching that unlikely but disastrous possibility, ‘success’ would have had dramatically different results than Quirrelmort expected, given Quirrelmort’s difficulty understanding what Harry was trying to do with Draco even at that point. Blunt, blunt stupidity.
Command Push is set of force philosophy where commanders give direct orders involving not only a mission’s goal, but also its execution, tools, and specific tactics. It’s very common historically, where communication is slow, or where the commander has much greater understanding of the field than individuals, but it’s highly dependent on commander skill and knowledge, and very vulnerable to subterfuge. Quirrelmort is hugely prone to this, as are Harry Potter and (to a lesser extent) Draco.
This is usually contrasted with Recon Pull, Mission-type Tactics, or Command By Negation, where commanders provide goals, time constraints, and resources, but allow units to develop their own strategies to achieve those goals. This requires more training, faster communications technology, and higher levels of trust in subordinates (less so in Command By Negation, where you at least double-check with a commander), but puts more minds on a problem and can more readily adapt when lines of communication are cut or when situations on the ground change.
((Command Push and Recon Pull are video game terms from the Civilization series: different armies have different terms for these philosophies, usually subdivided into separate generations or divided by recent inspirations. Modern armies tend to use more modernized techniques derived from combinations of the two branches and further IT developments, though they’d not really be practicable in the time frame present here.))
That was very interesting, thanks.
I wondered the same thing. The only thing Google gave me that made sense in context was jargon from a Civilization wiki, meaning a style of military command where orders include implementation details: “here’s the actions you need to take”. The pitfalls of this style are that it places increased cognitive and communications load on the commander, that it can fail to account for local or changing conditions, and that it can lead to poor responsiveness under conditions of imperfect communication.
Current management theory (and, I believe, Western military doctrine, though I’m not an expert) favors objective-based orders: “here’s the goal you need to accomplish”. That leaves implementation details up to subordinates.
The term of art is mission-type tactics or mission command.
This makes a lot of sense, thank you. I see the parent comment to mine is right too, that this is Voldemort’s political philosophy. Give me all the power, and then all of my values will be attained.
...or character growth in the protagonist, theoretically.
Perhaps, but you have to get around why the villain doesn’t destroy the growing threat while it’s still weak.
Which isn’t a problem in HPMOR, because we’ve been given a number of persuasive reasons why Quirrell wanted Harry alive—he didn’t change his mind about this until he heard the prophecy about Harry destroying the world, at which point it seems he decided to kill Harry as soon as he’d used him to obtain the Philosopher’s Stone.
That… sounds dangerously close to “did it because of Plot”, which isn’t supposed to happen in a rational story.
(No, the options I gave in the bullets are not comprehensive. I couldn’t find an airtight but pity way to express conundrum inherent in having strong villains lose).
While I wouldn’t go quite that far, I do agree with you on one thing: leaving Harry his wand was really stupid. Why did he let Harry keep his wand?
Let me have a go at coming up with a dozen:
Get rid of Harry’s wand (as mentioned)
Remove Harry’s glasses (which could have been a transfigured anything, and Voldemort had just taught Harry how to dispel transfiguration by mere physical contact)
Bind or paralyse Harry, with rope or a Death Eater spell
Have a Death Eater Imperius Harry with a command to obey Voldemort and do nothing else
Have a Death Eater use a Confundus Charm on Harry to make him trust Voldemort and not look for ways to escape
Blind Harry—he doesn’t need his eyes to tell Voldemort his secrets, just his ears and tongue
On the same principle, Voldemort could happily dismember him, as long as magic was used to prevent death from blood loss or shock, and distraction from pain
Drain Harry of magic by forcing him to cast innocuous spells
Use illusions to disguise the number and location of the Death Eaters so that Harry is unable to come up with targeted countermeasures against them (and so are any unexpected rescuers)
Cast a spell on Hermione as a dead man’s switch—something that will not permanently hurt/kill her unless Harry does something to incapacitate Voldemort and prevent him from dispelling it in time (not violating Voldemort’s promise, since he does not expect Harry to do this)
Have one of Voldemort’s innumerable horcruxes and a tied-up victim on hand so that he can come back immediately if killed (if there’s a mandatory time delay, Harry doesn’t know it, so this is at least a powerful bluff)
Bring in some hostages, and kill one each time Harry starts doing anything that sounds like playing for time rather than being maximally cooperative
That took me about 15-20 minutes.
I posted this as part of my review. I think it explains the wand thing. As so often happens in real life, we don’t see the workings of mind that lead to every decisive factor in an outcome. In real life, we get to the end of a problem and often don’t know why a particular mistake was made. …
A small disturbance dwelt in my mind for these days, for I had concluded that Eliezer had already contrived a clever solution for Harry, sealed off all other such pathways, and that a strong indicator of what that contrived plan was, was that Voldemort left Harry with his wand after the Vow. Curious, that, oui? Voldemort specifically forbade Harry to raise his wand, and told his servants to attack him in a flurry of eclectic attacks, the mere thought of which would inevitably have an emotional effect on Harry, clouding his mental acuity. Since, Voldemort has in his consciousness that Harry has his wand, and has no reason to let him hold it, the clear explanation is that Eliezer could only think of a way for Harry to win if he had his wand, so he made Voldemort make a stupid mistake, it was the best he could do. Still quite good; I did not begrudge him it.
Since victory depends upon the wand, and Harry can’t speak, the obvious answer is wordless, wand-based magic, the only such that Harry knows being transfiguration. Partial transfiguration. This also fits in with the heading of the first chapter, some very thin thing at night related to the sudden death of a great many people.
I notice I am confused.
Let me not be thought to brag, I grant it took me a solid 49 hours or so to so notice.
Voldemort just makes a stupid mistake? Eliezer just couldn’t come up with anything better than Voldemort somehow losing by stupidly just letting the enemy have his wand, when that enemy can cause pain and death to his current form by casting magic on literally anything Voldemort has cast magic on?
At last I notice I am confused.
I re-conceptualize the matter at hand. We’re going to assume one more time that Voldemort really isn’t stupid, no matter how many times the terrible villain ALWAYS and FRUSTRATINGLY is. If there’s anything to be learned from chapter 113, it’s that Voldemort REALLY is doing it all on purpose, and a bloody, clever purpose ‘e ’as, ‘asn’t ’e?
So. Voldemort obviously is aware of Harry having his wand. I WILL THEREFORE CONCLUDE! He wants Harry to have his wand. Why is that? It is not a mistake, it is a test. For Harry to submit when there is truly nothing to do, shows nothing. The evil are not good when only good they may choose, and the proud are not humble when only humiliation may they claim.
But! For Harry to submit, and this of his own free will, this despite his apparent Plot-Induced Loophole, this is a proof of his self-mastery, and of his rationality. For to submit for lack of spirit is not the same as to submit for the understanding of its ideal nature.
Voldemort shall ask Harry in Parseltongue at the end of their discussion if he tried trickery, if he concealed secrets. Only if Harry can answer no shall he show himself sufficiently impressed with the absolute dominance of Voldemort to be worth keeping around.
Harry shall disclose all secrets, I need not enumerate them specifically here. He shall at the end ask permission to drop his wand. … All that being said, Voldemort probably really DOESN’T know about partial transfiguration. While we do need a plausible explanation for him not forcing Harry to rid himself of his wand after the Vow, so that Voldemort isn’t stupid, we can still take advantage of his ignorance and pride. (The plan I gave involved exploding the DE’s, not cutting them, disabling Voldemort’s gun, not his hands, and neutralizing Voldemort by casting magic on everything Voldemort had affected, obelisks, Hermione, etc, forcing him by resonance to go snake form, to be kept there by having Harry’s magicked cloth on the snake at all times so it couldn’t transform without suffering from the resonance).
… Such was my review. As I consider the matter, transfiguration was the only wordless magic Harry knew, and without partial transfiguration, he could never have attained the wand contact with anything to transfigure. Was Voldemort really taking unnecessary risks, or is it reasonable to say that there was no danger to letting Harry keep his wand that Voldemort could reasonably have known about? Still, a thorough genius would have made sure, so there must have been at least some reason for which it was worth taking even an unimaginable risk, hence the reasoning given above.
If letting Harry have the wand is out of character as a mistake, but in character as a test, not only does that mean that letting him have the wand is a test, it also means that Harry should be able to figure out that letting him have the wand is a test. This ruins the usefulness of the test as a test.
I’m not positive I understand. You think that letting Harry have his wand either is or isn’t a sufficient clue to deduce that it is a test, and that
If it is a sufficient clue, Harry will know it’s a test. Harry’s knowing it is a test will ruin the nature of the test.
It if is not a sufficient clue, Harry cannot be tested by it, as nobody can be expected to deduce such a thing.
Therefore, neither option aligns with Voldemort’s goals, and the test is out of character for him as a rational being.
If I do understand, I think the this part of my post implies the response I will now clarify:
“But! For Harry to submit, and this of his own free will, this despite his apparent Plot-Induced Loophole, this is a proof of his self-mastery, and of his rationality. For to submit for lack of spirit is not the same as to submit for the understanding of its ideal nature.”
Allowing Harry to keep his wand is a sufficient clue that something is wrong. If it’s enough to make me feel confused, it’s enough for the more rational being Harry can become in this circumstance. Harry’s deducing that it is a test does not destroy the test, because that is the test! ;) To deduce such a thing is a test of rationality. For him to be able to lose in such a situation is a further test of the great limit to his rationality throughout, his emotions, especially his pride, his disproportionate value of his own social dominance.
So it was a feasible test of his rationality on two important levels.
I think there may be some hindsight bias here. We know that Harry has partial transfiguration and we know that it turns out poorly for LV. LV himself did not know these things. To the best of his knowledge (which he has good reason to believe is considerable and maybe exhaustive) there is no magic Harry can cast wordlessly with his wand down.
For LV to enact the additional precautions above, magic would be needed. He can’t use magic on Harry, so taking them means reducing the size of the death eater guard by 1 or more during the time needed to take those precautions. If you don’t know that Harry can do previously unknown to the world wandless magic, than that might actualy not seem like a good trade off.
Additionally, regardless of if trading 1 guard for additional precautions is actualy a good security trade, it is totaly in character that the kind of mind that created horcrux number 107 after allready having over a hundred redundant horcruxes would think the additional redundancy of guard 36 over guard 35 to be valuable.
I take your general point, but part of Voldemort’s character as we have seen it is that he is Crazy Prepared, building in failsafes and backup options and safety margins well beyond the reasonable minimum. He is not merely capable of dealing with whatever challenges the narrative throws at him; he is comfortable, even leisurely, in the manner in which he deals with them.
I doubt the cost of temporarily reducing the Death Eater guard from 36 to 35 is greater than the benefit of a given precaution.
I don’t understand this sentence. Would you mind rephrasing?
You’re right about the last sentence. Perils of typing on a cell phone. I’ve edited it to make sense.
Fair enough. In regard to that, I would also observe that Voldemort (likely correctly) thinks his Death Eaters are idiots, which mitigates their perceived value to him versus precautions he personally would think up.
But Voldemort does know that Harry can cast one particular type of wordless, wandless magic—he knows it because he taught him. Harry can end transfigurations. And he still has his glasses. Can Voldemort sense transfigurations that Harry is maintaining? If not, Harry could have a piece of Scotch tape stuck someplace it wouldn’t be noticed, or a booger hidden up his nose, or a capsule up his butt like a drug smuggler, or a tooth, or a fingernail, or a toenail, or...
If Voldemort can’t sense Harry’s transfigurations, he should be operating under the assumption that Harry has a capsule up his butt that he can excrete and untransfigure into a deus ex machina. He doesn’t need his hands to end a transfiguration, and he doesn’t need his hands to poop. (If you prefer it to be a tooth, say it’s a tooth. That’s what Voldemort did.)
Of course, Voldemort doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who would do that. He goes through the motions of being careful, but constant vigilance is not one of his strong points. And that’s not, narratively speaking, a character flaw: if you think everyone else is a stupid NPC, you’re not going to see a point in paranoia.
He should’ve kicked himself in the face as soon as he taught Harry how to do that. But he’s not the sort of person who would.
Also, Harry should start carrying some transfigured teeth. A gun, a knife, and a broomstick, maybe? But I think I’m not being paranoid enough.
Only 3 transfigured teeth? Not paranoid enough! He’s got room in his mouth for 28 items. (Or 32 if he has a big mouth.)
I’m with everyone else on the wand thing. It would have been simple enough to have him drop it. One narrative explanation for getting the wand back into Harry’s hand would have been V asking for a demonstration of PT after Harry told him of it. Another would be to throw away the simplest timeline thing and let time-turned Harry come to the rescue with that solution, wand, cloak, etc. in hand. Though I don’t know why V left him an hour on the time-turner either.
But:
My real confusion starts way before all of this. You have the idiot-child of prophesied destruction, and what you do not do is back him into a corner where he may decide to do something desperate. Making Harry feel threatened was a big risk to take with that prophecy.
V transforms into a super scary villain, putting Harry under massive duress, the exact kind of thing that would possibly cause him to destroy the world through time paradox or some other unknown power. It would have made more sense to bind him with an unbreakable vow long before then, to maintain the pretense of friendship throughout. So he guessed you’re Voldemort, fine. Come clean, acknowledge what your plan to rule Britain was, and that you have been planning to place Harry as the ruler this time. Have that discussion. Come clean about the existence of a prophecy. Tell him you intend to resurrect Hermione. That you need to know what secret power he has so you can help him avoid the inadvertent destruction of the entire universe. Remind him of the centaur prophecy. Get him on your side that he is a serious risk to everyone. Brief the Death Eaters ahead of time, have a few that Harry doesn’t know present out of uniform for a fake ritual of divination that supposedly requires him to be completely nude and holding no objects. At the agreed upon time in the ritual they all just AK him and Harry dies with his eyes wide going “Wait, WHAT?” and thinking you were his friend until the last.
V broadcasts his betrayal so far in advance, and that seems downright unsafe given what is at stake and what a giant question mark this boy is. You underestimate a 1st year, sure. But you don’t underestimate a 1st year who is prophesied to destroy the stars and you, who you know has unknown powers.
I’m not hating though, EY. You’re writing the story, not me. I know it’s taken a lot of effort and I’ve enjoyed it immensely and I thank you for taking all of this time to write what has essentially been a free novel for all of us to consume and form a community around. I don’t usually even think that hard about the fiction I read, but your story invites me to do so. It’s been a great experience and I look forward to the finish.
Definitely worth saying. I know I’m being very critical in this thread, but that’s largely because I’m so emotionally invested in this story, which in turn is because it’s an extraordinarily good story.
I missed when writing this that there was the curse preventing V from killing H. But he still could have just let the centaur kill him. If the curse also stopped him from allowing the death of H then he still could have tried to get the Unbreakable Vow from Harry before making shit hit the fan.
He made a point to have Hermione alive in case Harry get out of the situation. It’s no mistake that he doesn’t.
Hmm… the blinding one is potentially interesting, if Harry partially-Transfigures himself eyeballs using the fact that his hand is touching the wand, and uses the Stone to make them permanent later… but he’d have to avoid Voldemort noticing that his eyes were back.
So he regains his eyesight and then notices that there’s a black-painted bubble-head charm on him, just in case. x)
Voldie really should have gotten Moody as an advisor.
I feel I should reiterate that I agree with you. I’m not seeing an in-universe reason for Voldemort’s behavior in these two chapters either, except for maybe “He was overconfident and didn’t see the need to take such excessive precautions”, which isn’t all that narratively satisfying, though it is somewhat realistic. (The planning fallacy is a thing, after all, and even Tom Riddle Jr. Sr. isn’t immune.)
I don’t think there a good reason for Voldemort to think that giving Harry another minute with his wand adds much on top of what Harry could already do before.
Look at it from another perspective: Voldemort’s actions are based on the belief that Harry has powerful secrets unknown to him. One or more of those secrets may well lead to the end of the world if Harry lives. Given that Voldemort is acknowledging his ignorance of Harry’s full capabilities, is there any possible excuse for not trying to limit those capabilities as much as possible?
Half of those would either have prevented Harry for reveling his secrets to LV (paralyze, Imperius) or not changed anything in that case (bind with a rope, remove glasses, horcrux, hostages).
Some are doubtful : confudus I’m not sure it would have worked since Harry is an Occlumens, illusions to hide a few Death Eaters, I’m not sure the remaining hidden Death Eaters would have done anything when seeing all Death Eaters dropping dead and LV collapsing. Death Eaters aren’t especially loyal nor courageous, they obey by fear, and a 11 years old boy able to kill a dozen without moving (and who is known to scare dementors, and …) is as scary as Voldemort.
Now, sure, it’s always possible to imagine in hindsight ways Voldemort could have used to save the day for himself. As it is for Dumbledore before, and for Harry earlier (see the lack of recognition code, …).
But if you nitpick that way, is there any fiction that is satisfying for you ? People do mistakes, even very smart people. The only real mistake Voldemort did was the wand thing, the rest is pretty much nitpicking. And one mistake, which with Voldemort knowledge was very low-risk, can happen without hurting too much the suspension of disbelief.
It doesn’t matter so much that Voldemort didn’t see the exact means of his downfall coming. What bothers me most is that he was sloppy.
The point of my post is that I am much less intelligent than Voldemort, and vastly less experienced in cunning and subterfuge, yet I was able to think of a dozen relatively practical means of reducing risk from Harry in 20 minutes. How many would Voldemort have thought of and implemented if he’d tried?
Maybe they wouldn’t have worked against the actual solution Harry chose. That only makes the story better. It means Harry successfully defeats the Voldemort we know and love, Voldemort at the top of his game, not a cut-down Voldemort shacked by a sudden Idiot Ball.
A satisfying way to defeat Voldemort would take advantage of his genuine weaknesses—his despair in humanity, his loneliness, his arrogance, his inability to comprehend genuine compassion, his need for a worthy foe. But until the latest chapters, he had not been shown to have the weaknesses of carelessness, poor planning, or leaving a dangerous enemy armed when they are in his power.
Why assume you’re “much less intelligent than Voldemort,” in addition to the gap in experience? As others have noted, he makes mistakes all the time. (I was surprised by the news that he actually died and was actually trapped for years, but not by him leaving Harry’s wand alone given this previous information.) We know that V had vast experience with magic and secret information about the same, which could support your view but could also be a disadvantage when it came to partial transfiguration. Note that the mistake he knew about with the Horcrux network (and would perhaps have updated on) partly consisted of thinking he could overcome a long-established magical limitation without testing it. Maybe the actual complaint should be that Harry’s use of partial transfiguration shouldn’t have worked without more testing—though here we know that he based it on vast civilizational knowledge which V had only begun to assimilate.
So, up until the prophecy, Voldemort can coexist with Harry. (The reverse may not be true.) So why did Eliezer add the prophecy to the mix? Was it just to set up the eventual duel between H and V?
It seems to me that that’s the place to do an Author’s Saving Throw, if there is one; if people reason about V as an optimization process rather than a character, they will never be satisfied by V losing a duel because V is defined by his duel-winning property. So the only winning move is not to play, but there are satisfying ways for that to happen. (In fact, I think I might write that up in long form.)
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres only exists because of the prophecy!
I am referring to the prophecy that Trelawney gives in chapter 21, that is original to Eliezer, not the prophecy that Snape hears and leaks to Voldemort that was written by Rowling.
Oh yes, that does seem like the pivotal moment in retrospect. It also seems central to the story. And it extends the Chosen One theme in canon, taking it up to Aleph-Null.