EDIT: Spoilers even if you have read all chapters (particularly spoilery to those who have not read the original books). Following post is in rot13. Collapse thread from this comment if you want to avoid said spoilers, as some repliers commented in rot26 before it was established this information qualified as spoilage.
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Gurer unf orra fbzr pbaprea nobhg ubj vg qbrfa’g frrz gb or pbzzba xabjyrqtr gung Dhveery vf orvat cbffrffrq ol Ibyqrzbeg va guvf fgbel (pbeerpg zr vs V’z jebat, ohg V xabj gung nppbeqvat gb gur nhgube’f abgr nepuvir ba uggc://jjj.obk.arg/funerq/skq7ce100m Lhqxbjfxl fgngrq gung “gur ernqre vf fhccbfrq gb xabj ng guvf cbvag gung CD vf YI”). Ubjrire, nf sne nf V haqrefgbbq, gb znal ernqref (zlfrys vapyhqrq) vg fgvyy frrzf fbzrjung nzovthbhf. N cebcbfrq pnhfr bs gur ceboyrz:
N: Dhveeryy vf cbfrffrq ol Ibyqrzbeg.
O: Gur jnl Dhveeryy npgrq va pnaba va sebag bs Uneel, cevbe gb gur erirny gung ur jnf Ibyqrzbeg, jnf trarenyyl cynlvat gur ebyr bs n zvyq-znaarerq cebsrffbe.
P: Gur jnl Dhveeryy npgf va ZbE va sebag bs Uneel vf nf n onqnff cebsrffbe.
Gur xrl nffhzcgvba orvat znqr ol pregnva ernqref vf gung N--->O naq bayl O, naq fb ~O--->~N, naq fb P--->~N. Guvf vf n pyrne snyynpl jura fgngrq rkcyvpvgyl, ohg jura yrsg vzcyvpvg gur vzcebcre ybtvp tbrf haabgvprq ol zbfg. Fbzrguvat gung zvtug uryc va guvf ertneq zvtug or gb unir fbzr nqhyg cbvag bhg gung Dhveeryy unf punatrq fvapr gurl ynfg zrg uvz, rg prgren, nygubhtu ng 50 puncgref vg’f engure uneq gb chg gung va fzbbguyl naq vg jbhyq pbzr bss gb ernqref cerivbhfyl pbaivaprq gung Dhveeryy jnf abg Dhveeryyzbeg (jurgure sebz vaabprapr gb UC pnaba be whfg abg guvaxvat vg nccyvrq va guvf cnegvphyne fgbel) nf urnil-unaqrq sberfunqbjvat, naq gb ernqref jub unq haqrefgbbq gur znggre sebz rneyl ba vg jbhyq frrz gb or znxvat n cyrnfnagyl fhogyr cbvag gbb boivbhf.
I have not read the original Harry Potter series. I first learned that Quirrell was Voldemort when, after finishing the 49 chapters of MoR out at that point, I followed a link from LW to the collected author’s notes and read those.
I think that for those who have not read the source material (though there may not be many of us), it is basically impossible to intuit that Quirrell is Voldemort from the body of the fanfic so far.
That said, I don’t feel like I missed out in any way and don’t see why it necessarily needs to be any more explicit until the inevitable big reveal.
Edit: I just remembered that, as you can see, my prior comment on this post was written after I read chapter 49 but before I learned that Quirrell == Voldemort.
Eliezer planted lots of clues about many facts that are never explicitly revealed, in such a way that noticing correct hypotheses is sufficient to confirm them upon observing enough of those little clues. Now, for some facts, it could be difficult to even locate them, but Quirrell=Voldemort seems to be a good hypothesis to entertain, even if it’s not apparently confirmed from any single passage, and it does get lots of evidence if you know to look for it.
How much of that is hindsight bias? Clues that show a specific hypothesis if you’ve located the hypothesis aren’t necessarily that helpful. For me at least, even knowing the that Q=V, and seeing the clues, they don’t intrinsically point to that. Most of them can be explained simply by the idea that Quirrell is subtle, evil, and likes corrupting people.
The biggest clue is the material about the Horcrux and if one hasn’t read the books that likely goes completely out the window. (In fact, if I were Eliezer, I’d have Harry find out about Horcruxes pretty soon to help the less knowledgable readers.)
The biggest clue is the material about the Horcrux and if one hasn’t read the books that likely goes completely out the window. (In fact, if I were Eliezer, I’d have Harry find out about Horcruxes pretty soon to help the less knowledgable readers.)
Wait, were Horcruxes mentioned explicitly in the text anywhere so far? The one Horcrux we know about is only explicitly stated to be such in the author’s notes; at any rate, I didn’t figure out it was a Horcrux without reading them.
I concluded Q=V early on based on:
Quirrell seems to flip between two wildly different personalities
In canon, his body is housing Voldemort
…which I found to be enough to conclude that he is being intermittently possessed by Voldemort. (OK actually I’m simplifying a little but I don’t think the other details are relevant.)
The only result for CTRL-F “horcrux” is in a private conversation between Dumbledore and McGonagall, and it doesn’t say what it is except that it belongs to Voldemort. Dumbledore does later tell Harry that Voldy achieved immortality through some scary rituals, but says nothing about the method other than that it involves a murder, so a canon-ignorant reader wouldn’t be able to make a confident connection. “Horcrux” could very well be Voldermort’s super-weapon, or a fancy term for “hideout”.
As for clues to Q=V that don’t rely on canon knowledge, the two biggest ones that come to mind are the sense of “doom” that Harry repeatedly perceives when coming physically near Quirrell (when something magical happens to Harry that is unusual or impossible even in the wizarding world, it’s safe to assume that it’s a consequence of his unique battle with Voldemort), and especially the tale he tells about Voldemort and the monastery, which despite his cover story of a deliberate “survivor” should make anyone raise an eyebrow.
On the other side, however, there is the fact that, in a marginally subtler way, Quirrell is NOT Voldemort. Everything we are told about Voldemort in MoR (at least part of which comes from reliable accounts) matches canon Voldemort and suggest an equally cartoonesque villain composed mostly of questionable motives, self-defeating pettiness and pointless cruelty, with zero PR skills and awful fashion sense, not to mention a certain fondness for the Idiot Ball. But if Quirrell is Voldemort, that requires Voldemort being not just far smarter and more patient, but possessing ambitions more sophisticated than being a Dark Lord on his Dark Throne in the land of Britain where the Shadows lie.
Which just so happened to have been the entire core of his character! For all functional and narrative purposes, whatever change Voldemort underwent when he turned into Quirrellmort was so drastic that we might as well say that he is no longer Voldemort.
On the other side, however, there is the fact that, in a marginally subtler way, Quirrell is NOT Voldemort. Everything we are told about Voldemort in MoR (at least part of which comes from reliable accounts) matches canon Voldemort and suggest an equally cartoonesque villain composed mostly of questionable motives, self-defeating pettiness and pointless cruelty, with zero PR skills and awful fashion sense, not to mention a certain fondness for the Idiot Ball.
Eliezer has previously written that a supervillain (meant to be defeated) might do more for world unity than just about anything else. (If the words “I did it thirty-five minutes ago” mean anything to you, you get the idea.)
It’s plausible that MoR Voldemort was a facade put up by Quirrell as part of a strategy to bring the wizarding world together and face the very real threat of Muggleborne nuclear war– and both his speech to Hogwarts and his private discussion with Harry make this more plausible.
If Voldemort’s plan was to cause Britain to unite under a Mark of Britain killing Yermy Wibble and his family was a funny way to accomplish it.
Voldemort may have been operating under the same false assumption that Wibble was (that Wibble’s martyrdom would legitimize his ideas), but a villain that clever could have at least done some better PR work on Wibble during the seventies.
Note, too, that if V knew he could ‘die’ and then possess someone, and if he also believed his followers could only lose to a dictator who united magical Britain against them, then he likely figured it didn’t matter if they won or not.
Everything we are told about Voldemort in MoR (at least part of which comes from reliable accounts) matches canon Voldemort and suggest an equally cartoonesque villain composed mostly of questionable motives, self-defeating pettiness and pointless cruelty, with zero PR skills and awful fashion sense, not to mention a certain fondness for the Idiot Ball.
Except we also have Dumbledore describing V as clever like Harry, or words to that effect. The two monastery stories seem consistent with this: first of all, canon!Voldemort would never have sought out a Muggle teacher at all. Second, the two stories together suggest that MoR!Voldemort got what he wanted and then returned without his disguise to get revenge, like he said Harry would do if Harry became like him. Also, what orthonormal said.
Edited to add: and come on, we know MoR!V killed Narcissa Malfoy. Draco told us himself to look at the result and ask who benefits. The plan surely broke an evil overlord rule or three, at least in spirit, but if V couldn’t get Lucius on his side he probably needed to kill the default leader of the pureblood faction anyway. And V, as a skilled Legilimens, could probably count on Lucius responding irrationally to his wife’s death one way or another.
For me at least, even knowing the that Q=V, and seeing the clues, they don’t intrinsically point to that. Most of them can be explained simply by the idea that Quirrell is subtle, evil, and likes corrupting people.
The Law of Conservation of Detail (TV Tropes warning) implies that an important character who is subtle and evil (or even just subtle) has a substantial probability of being the villain.
I hadn’t read the original series either, and so at first I had no idea that Q=V except from the Author’s Notes; however, I suspect that by this point in the story I would have begun entertaining it seriously as a hypothesis. (And of course as long as the story is still being written, there’s always some chance Eliezer could change his mind.)
The Law of Conservation of Detail (TV Tropes warning) implies that an important character who is subtle and evil (or even just subtle) has a substantial probability of being the villain.
But there are a lot of subtle characters in HPMOR; Quirrell might be the most subtle and the most apparently evil, but he’s not the only one. That would imply that Harry, Dumbledore, and Lucius also have substantial probabilities of being the villain.
Edit: Then again… maybe that’s correct.
On the other hand, I think we’ve been told to expect most characters to be substantially smarter than their canon equivalents, and maybe this kind of subtle schemingness just comes automatically when you have a bunch of smart wizards who don’t trust each other and have potentially conflicting goals that they all take seriously as things-to-protect.
I wouldn’t mind one little bit if the story is structured like Lensmen, with several layers of villains that have to be discovered.
Admittedly, this is less likely in the wizarding world—the population is much lower than in a universe with multiple inhabited galaxies.
On the gripping hand, it would be really cool if Quirrel/Voldemort were a claw on a finger of a conspiracy of evil alien wizards. Presumably, Cthulhu is part of the middle layer.
The Law of Conservation of Detail (TV Tropes warning) implies that an important character who is subtle and evil (or even just subtle) has a substantial probability of being the villain.
However, while that gives evidence that Quirrel is the villain, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the villain (the one that is Quirrel) must be Voldemort.
Why does Quirrelmort even have to be a villain? Sure, he was terribly evil in canon, and in the back story, but he’s obviously been through some sort of magical transformative process, and that he may have made him redeemable. Killing Rita Skeeter is a pretty substantial mark against him, but we have very little idea what his real goals are.
I came to realize in time that what I thought was a bug was a feature, however frustrating that may be for me, so please rot13 that comment with the warning “spoilers even if you’ve read all chapters”.
And WOW did I ever get called on it. It leaves a small but ugly hole, too, because now it looks like something that ought to stem from the single point of departure, but was actually meant to be unchanged from canon. I should probably just take the “boyfriend” line out of Ch. 17, or rewrite it or something.
I had assumed the boyfriend was James, since I didn’t remember in which year they got together (and if I had, I would just have assumed a MoR timeline shift rather than another boyfriend).
Also, checking that passage, Dumbledore says that the first scrawl was his and the second Lily’s. Is that correct or, as it looks like, an accidental switch? i.e. did Dumbledore claim that he wrote a suggestion to use a toxic ingredient and that Lily, after finding a stranger’s note in her book, proceeded to write a response under it?
There is something like this in canon. When Petunia recognises the name of Azkaban, she says it was ‘something he said’ to her sister. I misinterpreted the referent of that pronoun, and I’ll bet that many others did too.
I consider the thing that you point to a spoiler for future chapters for those readers lucky enough to not have had it spoiled the first time around, and it would be nice if you did not state it explicitly in your comment.
I apologize if you or anyone else reading does in fact feel spoiled by my previous comment. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s really possible to revise the spoilers out of the comment and maintain the meaning; the matter is referred to within the following comments anyway, and since there are following comments it would be disingenuous to remove the comment altogether.
However, I would point out that, considering the matter has been referenced explicitly by the author a long time ago, it would seem that at this point that there is an aspect of the story that isn’t being appreciated by readers without this knowledge. Compare the resolution of chapter 26 for readers not familar with certain aspects of GOF, or certain interesting aspects of who Hermione and Harry’s generals in the armies are.
Hmmmm. Does this count as “inside knowledge of future chapters” or not? It’s stated that any published chapters of MoR as well as HP in general are fair game for no spoilers in these comments, and the public nature of the author’s notes makes the moniker of inside knowledge dubious.
The guidelines in the spoiler warning about what should be rot13′d are just what I came up with when I posted the first discussion thread. My thought was that comments like yours shouldn’t have to be rot13′d, since these threads are supposed to be full of spoilery discussions from people who know the canon or have spotted hints in MoR and are sharing their insights and informed speculation. People who want to figure out MoR on their own probably don’t want to read this discussion, so I put the spoiler warning for them at the top so we wouldn’t have to worry about rot13′ing every other comment.
But it’s Eliezer’s story, so he has final say over what should be rot13′d. Your comment didn’t look any worse than all of the other comments that have referenced the D-I vqragvgl, and I still don’t think it makes sense to rot13 all of the comments that contain those kinds of spoilers, so maybe Eliezer could clarify what guidelines he thinks we should use for rot13 in these threads.
EDIT: Spoilers even if you have read all chapters (particularly spoilery to those who have not read the original books). Following post is in rot13. Collapse thread from this comment if you want to avoid said spoilers, as some repliers commented in rot26 before it was established this information qualified as spoilage.
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Gurer unf orra fbzr pbaprea nobhg ubj vg qbrfa’g frrz gb or pbzzba xabjyrqtr gung Dhveery vf orvat cbffrffrq ol Ibyqrzbeg va guvf fgbel (pbeerpg zr vs V’z jebat, ohg V xabj gung nppbeqvat gb gur nhgube’f abgr nepuvir ba uggc://jjj.obk.arg/funerq/skq7ce100m Lhqxbjfxl fgngrq gung “gur ernqre vf fhccbfrq gb xabj ng guvf cbvag gung CD vf YI”). Ubjrire, nf sne nf V haqrefgbbq, gb znal ernqref (zlfrys vapyhqrq) vg fgvyy frrzf fbzrjung nzovthbhf. N cebcbfrq pnhfr bs gur ceboyrz:
N: Dhveeryy vf cbfrffrq ol Ibyqrzbeg. O: Gur jnl Dhveeryy npgrq va pnaba va sebag bs Uneel, cevbe gb gur erirny gung ur jnf Ibyqrzbeg, jnf trarenyyl cynlvat gur ebyr bs n zvyq-znaarerq cebsrffbe. P: Gur jnl Dhveeryy npgf va ZbE va sebag bs Uneel vf nf n onqnff cebsrffbe.
Gur xrl nffhzcgvba orvat znqr ol pregnva ernqref vf gung N--->O naq bayl O, naq fb ~O--->~N, naq fb P--->~N. Guvf vf n pyrne snyynpl jura fgngrq rkcyvpvgyl, ohg jura yrsg vzcyvpvg gur vzcebcre ybtvp tbrf haabgvprq ol zbfg. Fbzrguvat gung zvtug uryc va guvf ertneq zvtug or gb unir fbzr nqhyg cbvag bhg gung Dhveeryy unf punatrq fvapr gurl ynfg zrg uvz, rg prgren, nygubhtu ng 50 puncgref vg’f engure uneq gb chg gung va fzbbguyl naq vg jbhyq pbzr bss gb ernqref cerivbhfyl pbaivaprq gung Dhveeryy jnf abg Dhveeryyzbeg (jurgure sebz vaabprapr gb UC pnaba be whfg abg guvaxvat vg nccyvrq va guvf cnegvphyne fgbel) nf urnil-unaqrq sberfunqbjvat, naq gb ernqref jub unq haqrefgbbq gur znggre sebz rneyl ba vg jbhyq frrz gb or znxvat n cyrnfnagyl fhogyr cbvag gbb boivbhf.
I have not read the original Harry Potter series. I first learned that Quirrell was Voldemort when, after finishing the 49 chapters of MoR out at that point, I followed a link from LW to the collected author’s notes and read those.
I think that for those who have not read the source material (though there may not be many of us), it is basically impossible to intuit that Quirrell is Voldemort from the body of the fanfic so far.
That said, I don’t feel like I missed out in any way and don’t see why it necessarily needs to be any more explicit until the inevitable big reveal.
Edit: I just remembered that, as you can see, my prior comment on this post was written after I read chapter 49 but before I learned that Quirrell == Voldemort.
Eliezer planted lots of clues about many facts that are never explicitly revealed, in such a way that noticing correct hypotheses is sufficient to confirm them upon observing enough of those little clues. Now, for some facts, it could be difficult to even locate them, but Quirrell=Voldemort seems to be a good hypothesis to entertain, even if it’s not apparently confirmed from any single passage, and it does get lots of evidence if you know to look for it.
How much of that is hindsight bias? Clues that show a specific hypothesis if you’ve located the hypothesis aren’t necessarily that helpful. For me at least, even knowing the that Q=V, and seeing the clues, they don’t intrinsically point to that. Most of them can be explained simply by the idea that Quirrell is subtle, evil, and likes corrupting people.
The biggest clue is the material about the Horcrux and if one hasn’t read the books that likely goes completely out the window. (In fact, if I were Eliezer, I’d have Harry find out about Horcruxes pretty soon to help the less knowledgable readers.)
Wait, were Horcruxes mentioned explicitly in the text anywhere so far? The one Horcrux we know about is only explicitly stated to be such in the author’s notes; at any rate, I didn’t figure out it was a Horcrux without reading them.
I concluded Q=V early on based on:
Quirrell seems to flip between two wildly different personalities
In canon, his body is housing Voldemort …which I found to be enough to conclude that he is being intermittently possessed by Voldemort. (OK actually I’m simplifying a little but I don’t think the other details are relevant.)
The only result for CTRL-F “horcrux” is in a private conversation between Dumbledore and McGonagall, and it doesn’t say what it is except that it belongs to Voldemort. Dumbledore does later tell Harry that Voldy achieved immortality through some scary rituals, but says nothing about the method other than that it involves a murder, so a canon-ignorant reader wouldn’t be able to make a confident connection. “Horcrux” could very well be Voldermort’s super-weapon, or a fancy term for “hideout”.
As for clues to Q=V that don’t rely on canon knowledge, the two biggest ones that come to mind are the sense of “doom” that Harry repeatedly perceives when coming physically near Quirrell (when something magical happens to Harry that is unusual or impossible even in the wizarding world, it’s safe to assume that it’s a consequence of his unique battle with Voldemort), and especially the tale he tells about Voldemort and the monastery, which despite his cover story of a deliberate “survivor” should make anyone raise an eyebrow.
On the other side, however, there is the fact that, in a marginally subtler way, Quirrell is NOT Voldemort. Everything we are told about Voldemort in MoR (at least part of which comes from reliable accounts) matches canon Voldemort and suggest an equally cartoonesque villain composed mostly of questionable motives, self-defeating pettiness and pointless cruelty, with zero PR skills and awful fashion sense, not to mention a certain fondness for the Idiot Ball. But if Quirrell is Voldemort, that requires Voldemort being not just far smarter and more patient, but possessing ambitions more sophisticated than being a Dark Lord on his Dark Throne in the land of Britain where the Shadows lie.
Which just so happened to have been the entire core of his character! For all functional and narrative purposes, whatever change Voldemort underwent when he turned into Quirrellmort was so drastic that we might as well say that he is no longer Voldemort.
Eliezer has previously written that a supervillain (meant to be defeated) might do more for world unity than just about anything else. (If the words “I did it thirty-five minutes ago” mean anything to you, you get the idea.)
It’s plausible that MoR Voldemort was a facade put up by Quirrell as part of a strategy to bring the wizarding world together and face the very real threat of Muggleborne nuclear war– and both his speech to Hogwarts and his private discussion with Harry make this more plausible.
However, it looks like the Boy-Who-Lived ruined his original plan somehow, and he’s trying Plan B now by mentoring Harry.
If Voldemort’s plan was to cause Britain to unite under a Mark of Britain killing Yermy Wibble and his family was a funny way to accomplish it.
Voldemort may have been operating under the same false assumption that Wibble was (that Wibble’s martyrdom would legitimize his ideas), but a villain that clever could have at least done some better PR work on Wibble during the seventies.
Note, too, that if V knew he could ‘die’ and then possess someone, and if he also believed his followers could only lose to a dictator who united magical Britain against them, then he likely figured it didn’t matter if they won or not.
Except we also have Dumbledore describing V as clever like Harry, or words to that effect. The two monastery stories seem consistent with this: first of all, canon!Voldemort would never have sought out a Muggle teacher at all. Second, the two stories together suggest that MoR!Voldemort got what he wanted and then returned without his disguise to get revenge, like he said Harry would do if Harry became like him. Also, what orthonormal said.
Edited to add: and come on, we know MoR!V killed Narcissa Malfoy. Draco told us himself to look at the result and ask who benefits. The plan surely broke an evil overlord rule or three, at least in spirit, but if V couldn’t get Lucius on his side he probably needed to kill the default leader of the pureblood faction anyway. And V, as a skilled Legilimens, could probably count on Lucius responding irrationally to his wife’s death one way or another.
The Law of Conservation of Detail (TV Tropes warning) implies that an important character who is subtle and evil (or even just subtle) has a substantial probability of being the villain.
I hadn’t read the original series either, and so at first I had no idea that Q=V except from the Author’s Notes; however, I suspect that by this point in the story I would have begun entertaining it seriously as a hypothesis. (And of course as long as the story is still being written, there’s always some chance Eliezer could change his mind.)
But there are a lot of subtle characters in HPMOR; Quirrell might be the most subtle and the most apparently evil, but he’s not the only one. That would imply that Harry, Dumbledore, and Lucius also have substantial probabilities of being the villain.
Edit: Then again… maybe that’s correct.
On the other hand, I think we’ve been told to expect most characters to be substantially smarter than their canon equivalents, and maybe this kind of subtle schemingness just comes automatically when you have a bunch of smart wizards who don’t trust each other and have potentially conflicting goals that they all take seriously as things-to-protect.
I wouldn’t mind one little bit if the story is structured like Lensmen, with several layers of villains that have to be discovered.
Admittedly, this is less likely in the wizarding world—the population is much lower than in a universe with multiple inhabited galaxies.
On the gripping hand, it would be really cool if Quirrel/Voldemort were a claw on a finger of a conspiracy of evil alien wizards. Presumably, Cthulhu is part of the middle layer.
However, while that gives evidence that Quirrel is the villain, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the villain (the one that is Quirrel) must be Voldemort.
Why does Quirrelmort even have to be a villain? Sure, he was terribly evil in canon, and in the back story, but he’s obviously been through some sort of magical transformative process, and that he may have made him redeemable. Killing Rita Skeeter is a pretty substantial mark against him, but we have very little idea what his real goals are.
He just tried to kill an innocent man, so that settles that.
I came to realize in time that what I thought was a bug was a feature, however frustrating that may be for me, so please rot13 that comment with the warning “spoilers even if you’ve read all chapters”.
Edit has been made. My apologies for having missed the note where you retracted the statement on which I based my previous comment.
Also… (rot13 for potential spoilers) abgr sbe puncgre 18 pynvzrq gung Fancr “jnf qngvat Yvyl Rinaf”, nppbeqvat gb gur Rireabgr nepuvir. Zl zrzbevrf bs pnaba nf jryy nf uggc://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Frirehf_Fancr pynvz gurl jrer whfg sevraqf, gubhtu Fancr jnf va ybir jvgu ure. Jnf guvf na reebe gung jnf ergenpgrq yngre, na reebe gung jnf arire ergenpgrq, be qryvorengr?
It was acknowledged as an error in a later Author’s Note.
And WOW did I ever get called on it. It leaves a small but ugly hole, too, because now it looks like something that ought to stem from the single point of departure, but was actually meant to be unchanged from canon. I should probably just take the “boyfriend” line out of Ch. 17, or rewrite it or something.
I had assumed the boyfriend was James, since I didn’t remember in which year they got together (and if I had, I would just have assumed a MoR timeline shift rather than another boyfriend).
Also, checking that passage, Dumbledore says that the first scrawl was his and the second Lily’s. Is that correct or, as it looks like, an accidental switch? i.e. did Dumbledore claim that he wrote a suggestion to use a toxic ingredient and that Lily, after finding a stranger’s note in her book, proceeded to write a response under it?
There is something like this in canon. When Petunia recognises the name of Azkaban, she says it was ‘something he said’ to her sister. I misinterpreted the referent of that pronoun, and I’ll bet that many others did too.
I consider the thing that you point to a spoiler for future chapters for those readers lucky enough to not have had it spoiled the first time around, and it would be nice if you did not state it explicitly in your comment.
I apologize if you or anyone else reading does in fact feel spoiled by my previous comment. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s really possible to revise the spoilers out of the comment and maintain the meaning; the matter is referred to within the following comments anyway, and since there are following comments it would be disingenuous to remove the comment altogether.
However, I would point out that, considering the matter has been referenced explicitly by the author a long time ago, it would seem that at this point that there is an aspect of the story that isn’t being appreciated by readers without this knowledge. Compare the resolution of chapter 26 for readers not familar with certain aspects of GOF, or certain interesting aspects of who Hermione and Harry’s generals in the armies are.
Hmmmm. Does this count as “inside knowledge of future chapters” or not? It’s stated that any published chapters of MoR as well as HP in general are fair game for no spoilers in these comments, and the public nature of the author’s notes makes the moniker of inside knowledge dubious.
The guidelines in the spoiler warning about what should be rot13′d are just what I came up with when I posted the first discussion thread. My thought was that comments like yours shouldn’t have to be rot13′d, since these threads are supposed to be full of spoilery discussions from people who know the canon or have spotted hints in MoR and are sharing their insights and informed speculation. People who want to figure out MoR on their own probably don’t want to read this discussion, so I put the spoiler warning for them at the top so we wouldn’t have to worry about rot13′ing every other comment.
But it’s Eliezer’s story, so he has final say over what should be rot13′d. Your comment didn’t look any worse than all of the other comments that have referenced the D-I vqragvgl, and I still don’t think it makes sense to rot13 all of the comments that contain those kinds of spoilers, so maybe Eliezer could clarify what guidelines he thinks we should use for rot13 in these threads.
No, Eliezer has policy over rot13 on all stories because he is a utility monster.