I think the most interesting part of this chapter (82) is another two clues about the Harry’s Dark Side/Voldemort connection:
“Why was there a part of him that seemed to get angry at the old wizard beyond reason, lashing out at him harder than Harry had ever hit anyone, without thought of moderation once the rage had been raised, only to quiet as soon as Harry left his presence?”
Hmm, Harry’s dark side mysteriously hates Dumbledore but doesn’t remember why..? This is just one more clue that his dark side is an obliviated Voldemort or a horcrux—Voldemort’s memories influence his dark thinking even if he doesn’t remember why.
Also,
″ ‘Step aside, foolish woman, if you have any sense in you at all -’ An awful chill came over Harry as he spoke those words from his own lips, but he shook it off and continued.”
This could just be a creepy thing to hear yourself say about your mother, but could it be even more creepy if you realized you’d already heard yourself say it? Thinking back to the Remembrall incident, it’s likely Harry has memories of Voldemort that are slowly coming out...
Good insight! This would also explain why “Harry’s worst memory” was something he shouldn’t actually remember. If it was actually Voldemort’s memory passed through Harry’s loyalties and emotional valuation, it might be the thing that popped out. Which also makes Harry having revealed this memory to Dumbledore in Ch 82 pretty significant, and suggests a radically different interpretation to this text:
“It’s a funny thing,” Harry said, his voice wavering like something seen through underwater. “Do you know, the day I went in front of the Dementor, what my worst memory was? It was my parents dying. I heard their voices and everything.”
The old wizard’s eyes widened behind the half-moon glasses.
“And here’s the thing,” Harry said, “here’s the thing I’ve been thinking about over and over. The Dark Lord gave Lily Potter the chance to walk away. He said that she could flee. He told her that dying in front of the crib wouldn’t save her baby. ‘Step aside, foolish woman, if you have any sense in you at all -’” An awful chill came over Harry as he spoke those words from his own lips, but he shook it off and continued. “And afterward I kept thinking, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from thinking, wasn’t the Dark Lord right? If only Mother had stepped away. She tried to curse the Dark Lord but it was suicide, she had to have known that it was suicide. Her choice wasn’t between her life and mine, her choice was for herself to live or for both of us to die! If she’d only done the logical thing and walked away, I mean, I love Mum too, but Lily Potter would be alive right now and she would be my mother!” Tears were blurring Harry’s eyes. “Only now I understand, I know what Mother must have felt. She couldn’t step aside from the crib. She couldn’t! Love doesn’t walk away!”
It was like the old wizard had been struck, struck by a chisel that shattered him straight down the middle.
The eyes widening and seeming to be shattered… what if Harry and the reader are meant to think this is just Dumbledore being all human and weak and sympathetic and stuff, but actually Dumbledore was surprised by learning that Harry is Harrymort in a deeper sense than he’d realized and then covering it with acting?
Though on further reflection, if Harry is Voldemort in a straightforward sense, what is Dumbledore’s interpretation of Harrymort’s motives for saying what he said? Alternative hypothesis: this is the moment when Dumbledore figured out that Harry is a horcrux. Also, Dumbledore may see an important clue in the fact that Voldemort offered Lily a chance to flee. Or Dumbledore figured out the love shield thing. Or a combination of the above.
“Why was there a part of him that seemed to get angry at the old wizard beyond reason...
Because that’s what taboo tradeoffs are all about. You feel a sacred value that cannot be traded for a mundane one. The human response to a threat to a sacred value is anger. Also, at least in Harry’s case, the anger seems to be a defense mechanism of the sacred values against reason. Get pissed off as a means of mental evasion. The part that defends the sacred values will lie, refuse to think, and refuse to see reality. Also, there’s some resentment at Dumbledore at making him see his own inconsistency and self duplicity.
It is interesting. EY is treading perilously close to politics here. As I think about politics, almost all idiocy centers on various Taboo Tradeoffs, where some sacred value is at odds with a seemingly mundane one, and the idiocy floweth.
The sacred values that worked in small bands on the savannah don’t scale to people in societies of hundreds of millions trying to make collective decisions. What are people to do? Is it true that humans can’t live any other way?
I’m interested in seeing what he has to say on this.
I don’t think it has anything to do with magic and horcruxes. It’s a human problem. That’s why it’s interesting.
I think you’re right. If Eliezer is keeping the Harry-as-horcrux plot element, and we’re still living in a world without souls or an afterlife, the horcrux in Harry would be a part of Voldemort’s memories and personality, because that’s what a “soul” really is.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned before, but this probably explains Quirrel’s trances. He has distributed a large part of his mind across several parts of the globe he no longer has access to. This means his mind can’t function properly 100% of the time. (Would his mind function better when he’s near Harry?)
Or, instead of your mind being distributed across multiple processors, a horcrux is a copy. And if you’re killed, you survive not as a ghost, but by virtue of the fact that there’s still a copy of you extant and functioning in the world. The same way uploading counts as survival.
Which means that by filling the world with horcruxes, Voldemort is executing the Hansonian strategy of flooding the labor market with EMs.
ETA: Hey, would Voldemort care what happened to a copy of himself? Perhaps the “power Voldemort knows not” is TDT. :)
Well, I’ve solved the story. Harry defeats Voldemort by tricking him into doing the “rational” thing and defecting against himself. Posting this in a new, unedited comment just in case it turns out to be more than a bad joke.
If a Horcrux is a copy, it’s more of a redundant rather than an independent one. Voldie had several horcruxes, some of them for years, and yet there was exactly one “resurrection”.
A resurrection requires a host body, though. And his other horcruxes didn’t find their way into anyone’s hands. Except, perhaps, for the button he threw to Hermione.
The “diary of Francis Bacon” may also be relevant. (Quirrel had been building up Harry before learning about Harry’s dark side in ch. 20, suggesting he had plans involving Harry before that; in canon, Ginny Weasley is possessed by a diary of Tom Riddle. On the other hand, Quirrel gives the “diary” to Harry in ch. 26, i.e. knowing about Harry’s dark side.)
According to word of God gur qvnel vf abg gur Ubepehk, vg npghnyyl vf gur qvnel Ebtre Onpba. Vg’f n qnatyvat cybg ubbx Ryvmre chg va whfg va pnfr Uneel arrqf gb yrnea fbzr sbetbggra yber.
A resurrection requires a host body, though. And his other horcruxes didn’t find their way into anyone’s hands.
I don’t think the restoration requires the presence of the horcrux. In canon there’s no indication of any horcrux present at Quirell’s possession in Albania (in fact, there’s a vague handwavy indication that Quirell was made into a kind of horcrux), nor at the graveyard resurection.
(AFAIK, no horcrux could have been present at either event. Albania was where he made the diadem into a horcrux, but he hid it in Hogwarts before his death, the diary was destroyed before the resurection, and I don’t think Bellatrix was there, nor that the Hufflepuf cup was taken out of the Lestrange vaults before it was destroyed, and all the others were hidden.)
So, I don’t think it’s required for someone to be near a horcrux for the resurrection.
Or [...] a horcrux is a copy. And if you’re killed, you survive not as a ghost, but by virtue of the fact that there’s still a copy of you extant and functioning in the world. The same way uploading counts as survival.
If a Horcrux is a copy, it’s more of a redundant rather than an independent one. Voldie had several horcruxes, some of them for years, and yet there was exactly one “resurrection”.
A resurrection requires a host body, though. And his other horcruxes didn’t find their way into anyone’s hands.
I don’t think the restoration requires the presence of the horcrux. In canon …
In canon Horcruxes bound the original spirit to survive beyond the death of the body. If Horcruxes are just copies there wouldn’t be an extra spirit floating around to do the possessing / resurrecting.
Granted. But there still needs to be a mechanism for possession, and something simple like a trigger on the horcruxed object, waiting for someone to touch or approach it, does not quite fit the story. It wouldn’t make sense to hide the horcruxes, for one thing. (And, although Quirell didn’t say he hid them, I think Eliezer meant that scene as a hint, not a trick.)
Also, while there might not be souls as metaphysical items, we have here a universe in which magic at least appears responsible for (a) ghosts and portraits, who retain a lot of their originals although in some sense not really alive, (b) a castle that constantly rebuilds itself since centuries ago and seems to have an architectural artistic sense, and (c) a mind-reading hat that became self-aware with surprising ease. Oh, and pouches that burp. It’s not much of a stretch from that to horcruxes being in some sense alive, self-aware and active (e.g. being executed as some sort of simulation on magic substrate rather than just storing a brain state), with some magic ability, though perhaps only after the original dies.
Graveyard resurrection? A misunderstanding. I meant Quirrell. This is not a canon-compliant hypothesis I’m proposing. It’s speculation on how far the rules might be changed to fit the restrictions of a world without souls. As such, it needs to be consistent with the story so far, play to OB/LW themes, and be generally cute. But it depends on facts we haven’t been given and changes that haven’t been established, and I don’t have any strong reason to believe it’s actually the case.
Emulated human (see Robin Hanson’s http://overcomingbias.com for lots of material), Timeless Decision Theory (which includes “I’ll cooperate with copies of myself”; search LW for much more.)
I think it’s more likely that the Horcruxes are static copies, like system backups, and Quirrel’s zombie periods are because the original Quirrel is, in fact, still present in some lobotomized form, and Voldemort is merely imposing his soul / brain state onto the tissue by force of magic. While he can maintain it, it is costly, and he conserves strength by letting the damaged brain run the body most of the time. It might also be the case that this is to preserve the livespan of the possession, since Voldemort’s presence in Quirrel’s body appears to be slowly killing him.
A static copy couldn’t learn, think, or experience time. A static copy is inert. I could imagine horcrux-magic automatically overwriting the brains of people who come into contact with them, so that Quirrell would become Voldemort, but the horcrux can’t be static if Quirrell is still present in lobotomized form. In that scenario, neither one is a running copy of Voldemort.
But the idea of horcruxes as copies may be correct.
“Harry, how could Voldemort have survived the death of his body if he did not have a soul?”
[...]
“Good question,” Harry said, after some internal debate about how to proceed. “Maybe he found some way of duplicating the power of the Resurrection Stone, only he loaded it in advance with a complete copy of his brain state. Or something like that.”
If he didn’t die at Godric’s Hollow, perhaps he rescued Bellatrix to create a flesh and blood copy of himself from one of his horcruxes, and we really will be treated to the sight of two Voldemorts betraying each other. I’d like that.
Interestingly, the copy of Voldemort we get to see in canon is very much a static copy. He comes back fifty years later with the exact same plan that he abandoned before. It’s not even a good plan; his older self abandoned it since it would arouse suspicion and wouldn’t particularly help him in his goals. Hell, diary-riddle could have just not written on the walls in blood and succeeded easily. It’s like that instance of him had not only failed to grow at all since he created the diary horcrux, but it was perpetually fixated on the state of mind it’s creator had at the exact moment of creation.
Obviously HPMoR is different from canon, but it seems like an interesting parallel.
‘HPMOR Voldemort’ - you mean the original taking-over-England-and-meeting-an-unexplained-fate-at-the-Potters’ Voldemort? That’s odd… but why would Tom Riddle let one of his Horcruxes go wild like that, and whose body did it steal?
I don’t think I have enough info to generate good hypotheses yet, but it seems odd that the original would be intellectually more degraded than, e.g. Quirrelmort (unless the Quirrel himself has/had a formidable brain already). The “pretending to be brutish and lose” plan is also improbable because it violates Malfoy’s Rule of Three. (OTOH Lucius, while clever, is not the smartest plotter around, and knows this, so perhaps the rule doesn’t apply to truly superior plotters.)
The original might not necessarily be ‘degraded’ compared to Quirrel—he had different strategies, yes, but Quirrel has observed a lot of things since ‘his’ defeat. Those could explain his change in strategy.
old, old tales of wizards possessed, doing mad deeds, claiming the names of Dark Lords thought defeated; and there is usually a device, of that Dark Lord, which they wield
So the mind-state-thing is backed up to some kind of sustained magic on an object. And then whoever possesses that object is possessed by the mind-state-thing.
Yes, I’ve suggested that myself elsewhere in the thread. I was pointing out here that if it’s possessing Quirrell, not overwriting him, it can’t be a static copy. A Voldemort emulation has to be running on either the horcrux or Quirrell.
Would his mind function better when he’s near Harry?
I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of that; in fact, we have seen the opposite, since Harry (and possibly Quirrel as well) experiences an overwhelming sense of doom whenever they’re in close proximity,
Thinking back to the Remembrall incident, it’s likely Harry has memories of Voldemort that are slowly coming out...
The far easier explanation for this, which does not have all the problems of being an ridiculousness easy and yet unknown method for detecting of Obliviation having occured is that Harry forgot that he is strictly forbidden to use a Time-Turner in view of the public!
That makes sense.. but immediately afterward both Harry and McGonnagal thought it was unusual how bright the remembrall shined; neither seemed to think it was solely due to the use of the Time Turner:
“The Remembrall was glowing bright red in his hand, blazing like a miniature sun that cast shadows on the ground in broad daylight.”
and
“”More importantly, why did the Remembrall go off like that?” Harry said. “Does it mean I’ve been Obliviated?”
“That puzzles me as well,” Professor McGonagall said slowly. “If it were that simple, I would think that the courts would use Remembralls, and they do not. I shall look into it, Mr. Potter.”″
And then of course she doesn’t. Perhaps the courts simply don’t use Remembralls because they would never definitively prove obliviation—only that something was forgotten. Harry’s remembrall “blazing like a miniature sun” may be due to an overwhelmingly large obliviation—like an entire life as a Dark Lord? Obliviating a day or week may just produce a normal glow...
I think he’s referring to JoeA’s Obliviated-Voldimort-Memories theory. I agree that forgetting about the Time-Turner rules is a more likely explanation of the phenomena.
I’d place a very low probability on that possibility, speaking strictly from a narrative point of view. It has been far too long since that event for the answer to be that mundane.
I think the most interesting part of this chapter (82) is another two clues about the Harry’s Dark Side/Voldemort connection:
“Why was there a part of him that seemed to get angry at the old wizard beyond reason, lashing out at him harder than Harry had ever hit anyone, without thought of moderation once the rage had been raised, only to quiet as soon as Harry left his presence?”
Hmm, Harry’s dark side mysteriously hates Dumbledore but doesn’t remember why..? This is just one more clue that his dark side is an obliviated Voldemort or a horcrux—Voldemort’s memories influence his dark thinking even if he doesn’t remember why.
Also,
″ ‘Step aside, foolish woman, if you have any sense in you at all -’ An awful chill came over Harry as he spoke those words from his own lips, but he shook it off and continued.”
This could just be a creepy thing to hear yourself say about your mother, but could it be even more creepy if you realized you’d already heard yourself say it? Thinking back to the Remembrall incident, it’s likely Harry has memories of Voldemort that are slowly coming out...
Good insight! This would also explain why “Harry’s worst memory” was something he shouldn’t actually remember. If it was actually Voldemort’s memory passed through Harry’s loyalties and emotional valuation, it might be the thing that popped out. Which also makes Harry having revealed this memory to Dumbledore in Ch 82 pretty significant, and suggests a radically different interpretation to this text:
The eyes widening and seeming to be shattered… what if Harry and the reader are meant to think this is just Dumbledore being all human and weak and sympathetic and stuff, but actually Dumbledore was surprised by learning that Harry is Harrymort in a deeper sense than he’d realized and then covering it with acting?
Very good point. Will be looking for evidence of this theory in the future.
Though on further reflection, if Harry is Voldemort in a straightforward sense, what is Dumbledore’s interpretation of Harrymort’s motives for saying what he said? Alternative hypothesis: this is the moment when Dumbledore figured out that Harry is a horcrux. Also, Dumbledore may see an important clue in the fact that Voldemort offered Lily a chance to flee. Or Dumbledore figured out the love shield thing. Or a combination of the above.
Because that’s what taboo tradeoffs are all about. You feel a sacred value that cannot be traded for a mundane one. The human response to a threat to a sacred value is anger. Also, at least in Harry’s case, the anger seems to be a defense mechanism of the sacred values against reason. Get pissed off as a means of mental evasion. The part that defends the sacred values will lie, refuse to think, and refuse to see reality. Also, there’s some resentment at Dumbledore at making him see his own inconsistency and self duplicity.
It is interesting. EY is treading perilously close to politics here. As I think about politics, almost all idiocy centers on various Taboo Tradeoffs, where some sacred value is at odds with a seemingly mundane one, and the idiocy floweth.
The sacred values that worked in small bands on the savannah don’t scale to people in societies of hundreds of millions trying to make collective decisions. What are people to do? Is it true that humans can’t live any other way?
I’m interested in seeing what he has to say on this.
I don’t think it has anything to do with magic and horcruxes. It’s a human problem. That’s why it’s interesting.
It sounded to me like he was speaking far more broadly about their interactions than just the one after the “trial.”
I think you’re right. If Eliezer is keeping the Harry-as-horcrux plot element, and we’re still living in a world without souls or an afterlife, the horcrux in Harry would be a part of Voldemort’s memories and personality, because that’s what a “soul” really is.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned before, but this probably explains Quirrel’s trances. He has distributed a large part of his mind across several parts of the globe he no longer has access to. This means his mind can’t function properly 100% of the time. (Would his mind function better when he’s near Harry?)
Or, instead of your mind being distributed across multiple processors, a horcrux is a copy. And if you’re killed, you survive not as a ghost, but by virtue of the fact that there’s still a copy of you extant and functioning in the world. The same way uploading counts as survival.
Which means that by filling the world with horcruxes, Voldemort is executing the Hansonian strategy of flooding the labor market with EMs.
ETA: Hey, would Voldemort care what happened to a copy of himself? Perhaps the “power Voldemort knows not” is TDT. :)
Well, I’ve solved the story. Harry defeats Voldemort by tricking him into doing the “rational” thing and defecting against himself. Posting this in a new, unedited comment just in case it turns out to be more than a bad joke.
If a Horcrux is a copy, it’s more of a redundant rather than an independent one. Voldie had several horcruxes, some of them for years, and yet there was exactly one “resurrection”.
A resurrection requires a host body, though. And his other horcruxes didn’t find their way into anyone’s hands. Except, perhaps, for the button he threw to Hermione.
The “diary of Francis Bacon” may also be relevant. (Quirrel had been building up Harry before learning about Harry’s dark side in ch. 20, suggesting he had plans involving Harry before that; in canon, Ginny Weasley is possessed by a diary of Tom Riddle. On the other hand, Quirrel gives the “diary” to Harry in ch. 26, i.e. knowing about Harry’s dark side.)
Roger Bacon.
According to word of God gur qvnel vf abg gur Ubepehk, vg npghnyyl vf gur qvnel Ebtre Onpba. Vg’f n qnatyvat cybg ubbx Ryvmre chg va whfg va pnfr Uneel arrqf gb yrnea fbzr sbetbggra yber.
I don’t think the restoration requires the presence of the horcrux. In canon there’s no indication of any horcrux present at Quirell’s possession in Albania (in fact, there’s a vague handwavy indication that Quirell was made into a kind of horcrux), nor at the graveyard resurection.
(AFAIK, no horcrux could have been present at either event. Albania was where he made the diadem into a horcrux, but he hid it in Hogwarts before his death, the diary was destroyed before the resurection, and I don’t think Bellatrix was there, nor that the Hufflepuf cup was taken out of the Lestrange vaults before it was destroyed, and all the others were hidden.)
So, I don’t think it’s required for someone to be near a horcrux for the resurrection.
In canon Horcruxes bound the original spirit to survive beyond the death of the body. If Horcruxes are just copies there wouldn’t be an extra spirit floating around to do the possessing / resurrecting.
Granted. But there still needs to be a mechanism for possession, and something simple like a trigger on the horcruxed object, waiting for someone to touch or approach it, does not quite fit the story. It wouldn’t make sense to hide the horcruxes, for one thing. (And, although Quirell didn’t say he hid them, I think Eliezer meant that scene as a hint, not a trick.)
Also, while there might not be souls as metaphysical items, we have here a universe in which magic at least appears responsible for (a) ghosts and portraits, who retain a lot of their originals although in some sense not really alive, (b) a castle that constantly rebuilds itself since centuries ago and seems to have an architectural artistic sense, and (c) a mind-reading hat that became self-aware with surprising ease. Oh, and pouches that burp. It’s not much of a stretch from that to horcruxes being in some sense alive, self-aware and active (e.g. being executed as some sort of simulation on magic substrate rather than just storing a brain state), with some magic ability, though perhaps only after the original dies.
Graveyard resurrection? A misunderstanding. I meant Quirrell. This is not a canon-compliant hypothesis I’m proposing. It’s speculation on how far the rules might be changed to fit the restrictions of a world without souls. As such, it needs to be consistent with the story so far, play to OB/LW themes, and be generally cute. But it depends on facts we haven’t been given and changes that haven’t been established, and I don’t have any strong reason to believe it’s actually the case.
Oh, OK. I took that “requires” as statement of (in-universe) fact.
Care to give the long version of EM and TDT?
Emulated human (see Robin Hanson’s http://overcomingbias.com for lots of material), Timeless Decision Theory (which includes “I’ll cooperate with copies of myself”; search LW for much more.)
I think it’s more likely that the Horcruxes are static copies, like system backups, and Quirrel’s zombie periods are because the original Quirrel is, in fact, still present in some lobotomized form, and Voldemort is merely imposing his soul / brain state onto the tissue by force of magic. While he can maintain it, it is costly, and he conserves strength by letting the damaged brain run the body most of the time. It might also be the case that this is to preserve the livespan of the possession, since Voldemort’s presence in Quirrel’s body appears to be slowly killing him.
A static copy couldn’t learn, think, or experience time. A static copy is inert. I could imagine horcrux-magic automatically overwriting the brains of people who come into contact with them, so that Quirrell would become Voldemort, but the horcrux can’t be static if Quirrell is still present in lobotomized form. In that scenario, neither one is a running copy of Voldemort.
But the idea of horcruxes as copies may be correct.
If he didn’t die at Godric’s Hollow, perhaps he rescued Bellatrix to create a flesh and blood copy of himself from one of his horcruxes, and we really will be treated to the sight of two Voldemorts betraying each other. I’d like that.
Interestingly, the copy of Voldemort we get to see in canon is very much a static copy. He comes back fifty years later with the exact same plan that he abandoned before. It’s not even a good plan; his older self abandoned it since it would arouse suspicion and wouldn’t particularly help him in his goals. Hell, diary-riddle could have just not written on the walls in blood and succeeded easily. It’s like that instance of him had not only failed to grow at all since he created the diary horcrux, but it was perpetually fixated on the state of mind it’s creator had at the exact moment of creation.
Obviously HPMoR is different from canon, but it seems like an interesting parallel.
Now I’m wondering whether the HPMOR Voldemort is not the original Tom Riddle, but just another Horcrux, and a rather degraded one, at that.
‘HPMOR Voldemort’ - you mean the original taking-over-England-and-meeting-an-unexplained-fate-at-the-Potters’ Voldemort? That’s odd… but why would Tom Riddle let one of his Horcruxes go wild like that, and whose body did it steal?
I don’t think I have enough info to generate good hypotheses yet, but it seems odd that the original would be intellectually more degraded than, e.g. Quirrelmort (unless the Quirrel himself has/had a formidable brain already). The “pretending to be brutish and lose” plan is also improbable because it violates Malfoy’s Rule of Three. (OTOH Lucius, while clever, is not the smartest plotter around, and knows this, so perhaps the rule doesn’t apply to truly superior plotters.)
The original might not necessarily be ‘degraded’ compared to Quirrel—he had different strategies, yes, but Quirrel has observed a lot of things since ‘his’ defeat. Those could explain his change in strategy.
From chapter 79:
So the mind-state-thing is backed up to some kind of sustained magic on an object. And then whoever possesses that object is possessed by the mind-state-thing.
Yes, I’ve suggested that myself elsewhere in the thread. I was pointing out here that if it’s possessing Quirrell, not overwriting him, it can’t be a static copy. A Voldemort emulation has to be running on either the horcrux or Quirrell.
To clarify, by ‘static copy’ I didn’t mean permanently static, I meant ‘inert until activated.’
Though I guess there’s no evidence that they aren’t alive (in a ghostly, and mostly useless state) at all times.
EDIT: Actually, thinking of canon, the horcruxes did seem decently alive. Enough so to mess with Ginny Weasely a lot.
I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of that; in fact, we have seen the opposite, since Harry (and possibly Quirrel as well) experiences an overwhelming sense of doom whenever they’re in close proximity,
Definitely Quirrel as well:
That’s interesting. Are Harry and Quirrell sharing the Dark Side module in Harry’s head, so that only one can use it at a time?
The far easier explanation for this, which does not have all the problems of being an ridiculousness easy and yet unknown method for detecting of Obliviation having occured is that Harry forgot that he is strictly forbidden to use a Time-Turner in view of the public!
That makes sense.. but immediately afterward both Harry and McGonnagal thought it was unusual how bright the remembrall shined; neither seemed to think it was solely due to the use of the Time Turner:
“The Remembrall was glowing bright red in his hand, blazing like a miniature sun that cast shadows on the ground in broad daylight.”
and
“”More importantly, why did the Remembrall go off like that?” Harry said. “Does it mean I’ve been Obliviated?”
“That puzzles me as well,” Professor McGonagall said slowly. “If it were that simple, I would think that the courts would use Remembralls, and they do not. I shall look into it, Mr. Potter.”″
And then of course she doesn’t. Perhaps the courts simply don’t use Remembralls because they would never definitively prove obliviation—only that something was forgotten. Harry’s remembrall “blazing like a miniature sun” may be due to an overwhelmingly large obliviation—like an entire life as a Dark Lord? Obliviating a day or week may just produce a normal glow...
That would make sense, except that it was really bright, I was under the impression that McGonnagal was puzzled about it.
What Obliviation?
I think he’s referring to JoeA’s Obliviated-Voldimort-Memories theory. I agree that forgetting about the Time-Turner rules is a more likely explanation of the phenomena.
I’d place a very low probability on that possibility, speaking strictly from a narrative point of view. It has been far too long since that event for the answer to be that mundane.