I just realizied that the trap for voldie might well be Baba Yaga’s hairbrush.
It follows from the curse on the defense position.
Because I just realized that I think it was an accident, and happened because Voldemort moved the goblet of fire out of Baba Yaga’s reach.
Theory: Voldemort is wrong about the Baba Yaga. She faked her death and ran off with her new wife.
This part I am quite confident about. 70% probability? Most of the remainder is that her death was accidental and the reason Perenelle has spent centuries accumulating lore is that she wants her back. Yes, Im assigning under 10% likelyhood to the chance that Voldemort read this story right.
Anyway, given “Baba Yaga is not dead”. A thought occurred to me.
“Did they remember to terminate her employment? Could they in fact even do so without being whammied by the goblet?”
The answers to which is obviously “No.” Unfortunately worded contract is unfortunate, Baba Yaga has magical tenure despite slacking on her job for going on 6 centuries.
This was all well and good as long as the goblet was somewhere Baba could get at it. - Telling the goblet to lay of a new teacher every couple of decades isn’t much of an imposition. But then Voldemort stole the darn thing! and it has been striking down everyone that looked to move from the status of “Temp” to actually taking over her job. Because the job is hers.
.. This also implies she is still keyed into the wards. And still unable to harm any student of hogwarts. If that holds for graduates too, it neatly explains why she never directly opposes most dark lords—they are hogwarts graduates, and would invoke the contract if she fought them.
This was all well and good as long as the goblet was somewhere Baba could get at it. - Telling the goblet to lay of a new teacher every couple of decades isn’t much of an imposition. But then Voldemort stole the darn thing! and it has been striking down everyone that looked to move from the status of “Temp” to actually taking over her job. Because the job is hers.
Doesn’t the fact that the wards record the troll (and therefore probably Quirill too) as the Defence Professor falsify this?
Not as long as they do not hold the job more than a school year.
Bringing in someone to cover an absence temporarily—and she is, after all, never there—doesn’t count as taking the job from her. Certainly not if the goblet judges such things according to prevailing attitudes.
Heck, the fact that Voldemort was explicitly not planning to stay was probably what was keeping him standing.
Hmm. That might be why the job was renamed. If the castle refuses to recognize new hires as “Battle Magic” instructors… Well, Dumbledore would reason out that problem fast enough, but the headmaster that hired a dark lady under terms that make it magically impossible to fire her? That person was not good at logic.
And keeping a situation going in which there is a magically enforced peace between her and all hogwarts graduates at the cost of visiting the goblet when the job has a new hire? That would be absurdly attractive to anyone with a dubious past and a present desire for a peaceful existence.
This still seems unlikely. For starters, a lot of people seem convinced it was Voldie who lay the curse- this implies that they actually saw him do it. It also at least suggests that he acted like it was intentional.
For this to be true need Baba Yaga to intentionally join Hogwarts in order to fake her own death and thus not be able to be ‘fired’. This doesn’t tie in very well with falling in love with Perenelle, although Quirell could be wrong. THEN, we still need our (n+1) level Quirell to decide to figure this all out, steal the Goblet of Fire and lay a curse. Then to pretend to lay the curse in public at some other point in time.
While not all of those constraints are confirmed, the conjunction seems unlikely and it doesn’t really simplify matters. The main thing it solves is why Voldemort doesn’t simply remove the curse on the Defence position and thus save Quirell- he can’t.
There is no need for all of this to be plotted out in advance! In fact, I am pretty sure none of it was.
The wording on the binding is very much what I would expect someone to come up with if they wanted a binding to keep everyone involved safe, and had insufficient training in law and logic.
BY and Perenelle run off, and work out what happened when the replacement battle magic teacher is tragically struck by lighting, realize BY has stumbled into an absurdly broad defense and just keep it going while telling the goblet that they are giving each new teacher the position of her own free will.
Voldemort steals the goblet because he’s a thieving magpie when it comes to artefacts of ancient power, and promptly new teachers of DADA start dropping like flies. He’s credited with the curse, and not being an idiot just goes “Yup, that was me”. It’s not even weird that he doesnt make the connection—The teacher who held the job when he stole it should, if I am correct, have retired normally in his or her own time, so the curse starts quite a while after the theft.
A good bit of what is supporting this whole theory is that the DADA curse is ridiculusly powerful A Great Working. Thus, if it is a possible unintentional consequence of a Great Working which we know to have been preformed, well it likely is. This being more likely than two great workings being aimed at the same job. I mean, teaching at hogwarts is prestigious, but come on..
On the one hand, this is a plausible enough theory, with few enough moving parts that I can legitimately assign it a non-negligible probability.
On the other… from a narrative perspective, this doesn’t feel satisfying. It’s a violation of Knox’s First—we’re bringing barely-mentioned and undeveloped characters in at the last minute and giving them primary roles in the plot.
Well, I suppose if the point is that Quirrell gets taken down by adults and Harry can solve Death in peace, that’s valid...
In this case, Baba Yaga’s signature, and signatures from every student and teacher of Hogwarts, were placed within an ancient device known as the Goblet of Fire. Baba Yaga swore not to shed a drop of students’ blood, nor take from the students anything that was theirs. In return, the students swore not to shed a drop of Baba Yaga’s blood, nor take from her anything that was hers. So they all signed, with the Goblet of Fire to witness it and punish the transgressor.”
Tom Riddle was not a student when Baba Yaga taught, and would not have been part of that pact.
I’m not sure that matters. The Goblet might be open for contracts that cover the student body together.
It seems like a brilliant plan to prevent anyone from stealing your stone from the perspective of Baba Yaga wanting to turn a good wizard.
It seems like a brilliant plan to lay a trap for Voldemort that way.
There simply enough narrativium that I would expect the story to go down that road.
It was specifically said that every student and teacher individually signed the contract, so unless that’s a lie this is probably not what will happen.
The paragraph that speaks about the deal contains the sentence:
But she was not trusted, and so there was invoked a curse. Some curses are easier to cast when they bind yourself and others alike; Slytherin’s Parselmouth curse is an example of such.
There’s no statement that only the people who signed are binded.
Neither were the DADA teachers, and it didn’t save them. It should be noted here that Draco and company probably can pick it up safely, because they would be intending to deliver it to BY, which wouldn’t count as a taking. Don’t think Harry can.
After thinking about this on a more meta-level… I’m coming around to this idea. My primary objection is still that is seems too complicated and, well, somewhat absurd.
However, I just checked and I don’t think Baba Yaga is a canon character at ALL. I can’t even find a source for the “undying Baba Yaga” (although I didn’t look that hard). This does point to some kind of importance. Why would EY dedicate so much of ch.108 to this if it’s just backstory?
So… updating in favour of Baba Yaga being an important plot point to more like 85%. That QQ got some of his story wrong is lower (naturally), more like 60%. The whole complicated edifice you bring up is still quite low I think.
The basic inference chain has gotten a fair bit more solid in the process of bouncing it around here and on reddit.
I started from the argument that the story Voldemort was telling just didn’t seem probable—Any young witch capable of executing the plot he describes ought to be clever enough not to try something so very suicidal. Picking as your very first major plot “I’m going to seduce, trick, murder and rob the most formidable witch or wizard on the planet” and succeeding is just so absurd that I discounted it out of hand.
BY being major girl-crush bait, and in a place in her life where she might go for a romance? Well, she did just decide to take up teaching, despite a fairly forbidding set of conditions - That’s an indicator she wanted to change her life.
So the far more likely set of events is that the romance was real, and that either BY is still alive, or Perenelle is on a 600 year quest to get her girlfriend back from the dead.
I then noticed a second plot point that fit in really well here;
I was a subscriber to the theory that Voldemort was just doing a separate plot to destroy each and every DADA teacher, on the grounds that this seemed like the sort of thing that would amuse him, and take only very moderate levels of effort.
But then we were told that he was out of commission for an extended period of time. Which means there is an actual curse on the DADA job which the combined might of the hogwarts faculty cannot break.
Erh, what?
That would be a working on a level with the interdict or the upgraded horcrux! That sound you are hearing is my belief Voldemort did this shattering into a thousand pieces.
We were also told of a great working being cast on the Battle Magic teaching position. And the exact wording of that working. The wording of the magic is very likely to be accurate just because the entire student body read it. That and the association with a very interesting story should carve the precise phrasing deeply and accurately into the historical record.
And looking at it, yes, that working could be read to preclude giving anyone other than Baba Yaga the job of teaching at hogwarts. If she is still alive. And the curse only starting recently could be down to the goblet being stolen. This is a more probable chain of events than two entirely different curses of enormous power being laid down on a particular schoolteacher position.
These are the things I have some confidence in. The rest of the details are fill-in, and thus less probable to be precisely accurate.
Unfortunately worded contract is unfortunate, Baba Yaga has magical tenure despite slacking on her job for going on 6 centuries.
Where are you getting this? What Voldemort tells us is:
Baba Yaga swore not to shed a drop of students’ blood, nor take from the students anything that was theirs. In return, the students swore not to shed a drop of Baba Yaga’s blood, nor take from her anything that was hers.
The job is hers. You literally can’t fire her because the goblet would be annoyed. I suppose a hogwarts headmaster not educated at hogwarts could hire a DA teacher also not a graduate of that school and end this whole farce that way, but this not happening by accident so far is perfectly plausible.
I’m still not seeing anything in the text that suggests that the goblet is protecting her job, as opposed to her personal safety and the security of her possessions.
Edit: Ah, I see. You’re suggesting that the job is a thing which is hers. But why do you believe it possible for Baba Yaga to tell the goblet to lay off new teachers? In canon, you can’t undo a goblet contract even if it is accidental/accomplished by cheating/unwanted by all parties.
The wording wasn’t “personal safety and security of possessions” Whoever wrote this in-universe was being very silly. The limit is blood and anything which is hers. That’s not limited to physical objects, but covers things like her life, her liberty, and, yes, her job. For the students, it’s a very secure wording—she really can’t hurt them. Heck, if I was her, I’d feel obliged to ask students at the start of term to freely give up their ignorance, tough maybe that is implied in a contract of teaching.
Edit: She can tell it she gives the new teacher the job freely for the duration. That way it isn’t a taking. It doesn’t alter the contract, it alters the situation.
Similarly, just on a practical level, I am betting the marriage to Perenelle was a declaration of joining in front of the goblet. “All that is mine I freely share with her” sort of thing.
Fair enough. I understand your theory now, and it seems consistent with the evidence. But why do you have 90% confidence that Voldemort’s reading is wrong?
Also, if you’re taking the contract completely literally, then Baba Yaga can harm students all she likes, as long as she doesn’t shed any blood. A powerful Dark Lady should easily have the spell arsenal and creativity. In fact, if killing a student doesn’t count as “taking” their life (which works on a poetic reading, but not on a practical one—a person’s life is who they are, not something separate from them which can be taken), then “there is indeed a certain useful spell which solves the problem” quite nicely.
I am assuming the goblet is borrowing the natural language parsing of the people subject to it, sorting hat style. And no one not being argumentative on the internet would read it that way.
Which means it really is a flawless blanket protection from intentional harm, and the blood part is utterly redundant.
As for why I’m so sure Voldemort is wrong:
Well, there is the outside view, in which I just have trouble with the idea that a 16 year old virgin is a sufficiently supreme plotter, manipulator and cold-blooded killer to pull this off on someone who has been a feared witch for centuries. Not impossible, but very low probability.
A witch who can look like whatever she feels like and who is a byword for “Scary badass” inspiring crushes and devotion in her pupils? Pupils that are utterly safe from her? Odds: Nigh-Unity.
Also, it just doesn’t hang together logically. Baba breaks the contract and then Perenelle kills her? Double-dipping on the causes of death, there.
I could see it being an accident, in which case that counts as one of the most traumatic consensual sexual debut’s I can recall reading about, ever. That is where I put most of the residual probability. 30 some percent.
But as an intentional plot ? It has way to high a chance of going wrong. Anyone able to think it up would know better than to try it.
Your idea caused me to connect two dots. Perenelle and Alissa Cornfoot. They are both students who are attracted to badass professors. On one level, the example Miss Cornfoot provides plausability for Prenelle’s interest. On a more conspiracy-theory-y level, Perenelle is still hanging around near the stone?
Aren’t you simultaneously arguing that the current situation has arisen because of a poorly worded, excessively literal contract and because the goblet is borrowing the natural language parsing of its users in a “do what I mean” fashion?
I am arguing that the contract was made absurdly sweeping because the framers were erring on the side of paranoia in a big way.
Which does work, in that they are safe from all means of harm excepting only that BY is for obvious reasons free to teach any hogwarts graduate anything said graduate or student is capable of learning in the field of battle magic, even if this means one of said students enemies gets his or her ass kicked into orbit.
Flip it around; Do you think the students dropping their names in the original goblet would have considered it a violation of the pact if she had destroyed the noble or ancient status of the family of a hogwarts student?
I am pretty sure the answer is yes. Their intent was to prevent all offensive actions. Because the spell is symmetrical, this absurd scope protects her standing as the teacher of battle magic.
OK. That makes sense. I am uncomfortable with your theory because it reaches a long way beyond the few facts we are given in the text, but then I have felt that way about other theories which have recently turned out to be correct.
I just realizied that the trap for voldie might well be Baba Yaga’s hairbrush.
It follows from the curse on the defense position.
Because I just realized that I think it was an accident, and happened because Voldemort moved the goblet of fire out of Baba Yaga’s reach.
Theory: Voldemort is wrong about the Baba Yaga. She faked her death and ran off with her new wife. This part I am quite confident about. 70% probability? Most of the remainder is that her death was accidental and the reason Perenelle has spent centuries accumulating lore is that she wants her back. Yes, Im assigning under 10% likelyhood to the chance that Voldemort read this story right.
Anyway, given “Baba Yaga is not dead”. A thought occurred to me. “Did they remember to terminate her employment? Could they in fact even do so without being whammied by the goblet?” The answers to which is obviously “No.” Unfortunately worded contract is unfortunate, Baba Yaga has magical tenure despite slacking on her job for going on 6 centuries.
This was all well and good as long as the goblet was somewhere Baba could get at it. - Telling the goblet to lay of a new teacher every couple of decades isn’t much of an imposition. But then Voldemort stole the darn thing! and it has been striking down everyone that looked to move from the status of “Temp” to actually taking over her job. Because the job is hers.
.. This also implies she is still keyed into the wards. And still unable to harm any student of hogwarts. If that holds for graduates too, it neatly explains why she never directly opposes most dark lords—they are hogwarts graduates, and would invoke the contract if she fought them.
Doesn’t the fact that the wards record the troll (and therefore probably Quirill too) as the Defence Professor falsify this?
Not as long as they do not hold the job more than a school year.
Bringing in someone to cover an absence temporarily—and she is, after all, never there—doesn’t count as taking the job from her. Certainly not if the goblet judges such things according to prevailing attitudes.
Heck, the fact that Voldemort was explicitly not planning to stay was probably what was keeping him standing.
Hmm. That might be why the job was renamed. If the castle refuses to recognize new hires as “Battle Magic” instructors… Well, Dumbledore would reason out that problem fast enough, but the headmaster that hired a dark lady under terms that make it magically impossible to fire her? That person was not good at logic.
And keeping a situation going in which there is a magically enforced peace between her and all hogwarts graduates at the cost of visiting the goblet when the job has a new hire? That would be absurdly attractive to anyone with a dubious past and a present desire for a peaceful existence.
This still seems unlikely. For starters, a lot of people seem convinced it was Voldie who lay the curse- this implies that they actually saw him do it. It also at least suggests that he acted like it was intentional.
For this to be true need Baba Yaga to intentionally join Hogwarts in order to fake her own death and thus not be able to be ‘fired’. This doesn’t tie in very well with falling in love with Perenelle, although Quirell could be wrong. THEN, we still need our (n+1) level Quirell to decide to figure this all out, steal the Goblet of Fire and lay a curse. Then to pretend to lay the curse in public at some other point in time.
While not all of those constraints are confirmed, the conjunction seems unlikely and it doesn’t really simplify matters. The main thing it solves is why Voldemort doesn’t simply remove the curse on the Defence position and thus save Quirell- he can’t.
There is no need for all of this to be plotted out in advance! In fact, I am pretty sure none of it was.
The wording on the binding is very much what I would expect someone to come up with if they wanted a binding to keep everyone involved safe, and had insufficient training in law and logic.
BY and Perenelle run off, and work out what happened when the replacement battle magic teacher is tragically struck by lighting, realize BY has stumbled into an absurdly broad defense and just keep it going while telling the goblet that they are giving each new teacher the position of her own free will.
Voldemort steals the goblet because he’s a thieving magpie when it comes to artefacts of ancient power, and promptly new teachers of DADA start dropping like flies. He’s credited with the curse, and not being an idiot just goes “Yup, that was me”. It’s not even weird that he doesnt make the connection—The teacher who held the job when he stole it should, if I am correct, have retired normally in his or her own time, so the curse starts quite a while after the theft.
A good bit of what is supporting this whole theory is that the DADA curse is ridiculusly powerful A Great Working. Thus, if it is a possible unintentional consequence of a Great Working which we know to have been preformed, well it likely is. This being more likely than two great workings being aimed at the same job. I mean, teaching at hogwarts is prestigious, but come on..
Hm.
On the one hand, this is a plausible enough theory, with few enough moving parts that I can legitimately assign it a non-negligible probability.
On the other… from a narrative perspective, this doesn’t feel satisfying. It’s a violation of Knox’s First—we’re bringing barely-mentioned and undeveloped characters in at the last minute and giving them primary roles in the plot.
Well, I suppose if the point is that Quirrell gets taken down by adults and Harry can solve Death in peace, that’s valid...
In canon that’s true but where in HPMOR do you see it?
Harry tells Quirrell to “lift his curse”, and he had to get that common knowledge from somehwere.
Baba Yaga owns the stone. Voldemort was a student in Hogwarts.
Voldemort taking the stone could mean that the Goblet sees Voldemort as violating the agreement and the Goblet goes and kills Voldemort.
Tom Riddle was not a student when Baba Yaga taught, and would not have been part of that pact.
I’m not sure that matters. The Goblet might be open for contracts that cover the student body together.
It seems like a brilliant plan to prevent anyone from stealing your stone from the perspective of Baba Yaga wanting to turn a good wizard. It seems like a brilliant plan to lay a trap for Voldemort that way.
There simply enough narrativium that I would expect the story to go down that road.
It was specifically said that every student and teacher individually signed the contract, so unless that’s a lie this is probably not what will happen.
The paragraph that speaks about the deal contains the sentence:
There’s no statement that only the people who signed are binded.
Neither were the DADA teachers, and it didn’t save them. It should be noted here that Draco and company probably can pick it up safely, because they would be intending to deliver it to BY, which wouldn’t count as a taking. Don’t think Harry can.
After thinking about this on a more meta-level… I’m coming around to this idea. My primary objection is still that is seems too complicated and, well, somewhat absurd.
However, I just checked and I don’t think Baba Yaga is a canon character at ALL. I can’t even find a source for the “undying Baba Yaga” (although I didn’t look that hard). This does point to some kind of importance. Why would EY dedicate so much of ch.108 to this if it’s just backstory?
So… updating in favour of Baba Yaga being an important plot point to more like 85%. That QQ got some of his story wrong is lower (naturally), more like 60%. The whole complicated edifice you bring up is still quite low I think.
The basic inference chain has gotten a fair bit more solid in the process of bouncing it around here and on reddit.
I started from the argument that the story Voldemort was telling just didn’t seem probable—Any young witch capable of executing the plot he describes ought to be clever enough not to try something so very suicidal. Picking as your very first major plot “I’m going to seduce, trick, murder and rob the most formidable witch or wizard on the planet” and succeeding is just so absurd that I discounted it out of hand.
BY being major girl-crush bait, and in a place in her life where she might go for a romance? Well, she did just decide to take up teaching, despite a fairly forbidding set of conditions - That’s an indicator she wanted to change her life.
So the far more likely set of events is that the romance was real, and that either BY is still alive, or Perenelle is on a 600 year quest to get her girlfriend back from the dead.
I then noticed a second plot point that fit in really well here;
I was a subscriber to the theory that Voldemort was just doing a separate plot to destroy each and every DADA teacher, on the grounds that this seemed like the sort of thing that would amuse him, and take only very moderate levels of effort.
But then we were told that he was out of commission for an extended period of time. Which means there is an actual curse on the DADA job which the combined might of the hogwarts faculty cannot break. Erh, what?
That would be a working on a level with the interdict or the upgraded horcrux! That sound you are hearing is my belief Voldemort did this shattering into a thousand pieces.
We were also told of a great working being cast on the Battle Magic teaching position. And the exact wording of that working. The wording of the magic is very likely to be accurate just because the entire student body read it. That and the association with a very interesting story should carve the precise phrasing deeply and accurately into the historical record.
And looking at it, yes, that working could be read to preclude giving anyone other than Baba Yaga the job of teaching at hogwarts. If she is still alive. And the curse only starting recently could be down to the goblet being stolen. This is a more probable chain of events than two entirely different curses of enormous power being laid down on a particular schoolteacher position.
These are the things I have some confidence in. The rest of the details are fill-in, and thus less probable to be precisely accurate.
Where are you getting this? What Voldemort tells us is:
The job is hers. You literally can’t fire her because the goblet would be annoyed. I suppose a hogwarts headmaster not educated at hogwarts could hire a DA teacher also not a graduate of that school and end this whole farce that way, but this not happening by accident so far is perfectly plausible.
I’m still not seeing anything in the text that suggests that the goblet is protecting her job, as opposed to her personal safety and the security of her possessions.
Edit: Ah, I see. You’re suggesting that the job is a thing which is hers. But why do you believe it possible for Baba Yaga to tell the goblet to lay off new teachers? In canon, you can’t undo a goblet contract even if it is accidental/accomplished by cheating/unwanted by all parties.
The wording wasn’t “personal safety and security of possessions” Whoever wrote this in-universe was being very silly.
The limit is blood and anything which is hers. That’s not limited to physical objects, but covers things like her life, her liberty, and, yes, her job. For the students, it’s a very secure wording—she really can’t hurt them. Heck, if I was her, I’d feel obliged to ask students at the start of term to freely give up their ignorance, tough maybe that is implied in a contract of teaching.
Edit: She can tell it she gives the new teacher the job freely for the duration. That way it isn’t a taking. It doesn’t alter the contract, it alters the situation. Similarly, just on a practical level, I am betting the marriage to Perenelle was a declaration of joining in front of the goblet. “All that is mine I freely share with her” sort of thing.
Fair enough. I understand your theory now, and it seems consistent with the evidence. But why do you have 90% confidence that Voldemort’s reading is wrong?
Also, if you’re taking the contract completely literally, then Baba Yaga can harm students all she likes, as long as she doesn’t shed any blood. A powerful Dark Lady should easily have the spell arsenal and creativity. In fact, if killing a student doesn’t count as “taking” their life (which works on a poetic reading, but not on a practical one—a person’s life is who they are, not something separate from them which can be taken), then “there is indeed a certain useful spell which solves the problem” quite nicely.
I am assuming the goblet is borrowing the natural language parsing of the people subject to it, sorting hat style. And no one not being argumentative on the internet would read it that way. Which means it really is a flawless blanket protection from intentional harm, and the blood part is utterly redundant.
As for why I’m so sure Voldemort is wrong:
Well, there is the outside view, in which I just have trouble with the idea that a 16 year old virgin is a sufficiently supreme plotter, manipulator and cold-blooded killer to pull this off on someone who has been a feared witch for centuries. Not impossible, but very low probability.
A witch who can look like whatever she feels like and who is a byword for “Scary badass” inspiring crushes and devotion in her pupils? Pupils that are utterly safe from her? Odds: Nigh-Unity.
Also, it just doesn’t hang together logically. Baba breaks the contract and then Perenelle kills her? Double-dipping on the causes of death, there.
I could see it being an accident, in which case that counts as one of the most traumatic consensual sexual debut’s I can recall reading about, ever. That is where I put most of the residual probability. 30 some percent.
But as an intentional plot ? It has way to high a chance of going wrong. Anyone able to think it up would know better than to try it.
The story does feel like voldy saying ‘when I was 16 I seduced a teacher, I bet that’s how Baba Yaga died too.’
He means that Perenelle killed her by luring her into breaking the contract.
Your idea caused me to connect two dots. Perenelle and Alissa Cornfoot. They are both students who are attracted to badass professors. On one level, the example Miss Cornfoot provides plausability for Prenelle’s interest. On a more conspiracy-theory-y level, Perenelle is still hanging around near the stone?
Aren’t you simultaneously arguing that the current situation has arisen because of a poorly worded, excessively literal contract and because the goblet is borrowing the natural language parsing of its users in a “do what I mean” fashion?
I am arguing that the contract was made absurdly sweeping because the framers were erring on the side of paranoia in a big way.
Which does work, in that they are safe from all means of harm excepting only that BY is for obvious reasons free to teach any hogwarts graduate anything said graduate or student is capable of learning in the field of battle magic, even if this means one of said students enemies gets his or her ass kicked into orbit.
Flip it around; Do you think the students dropping their names in the original goblet would have considered it a violation of the pact if she had destroyed the noble or ancient status of the family of a hogwarts student?
I am pretty sure the answer is yes. Their intent was to prevent all offensive actions. Because the spell is symmetrical, this absurd scope protects her standing as the teacher of battle magic.
OK. That makes sense. I am uncomfortable with your theory because it reaches a long way beyond the few facts we are given in the text, but then I have felt that way about other theories which have recently turned out to be correct.