I comprehend your nature, you symbolize Death, through some law of magic you are a shadow that Death casts into the world.
If this is true, it’s possible that as long as death exists (for wizards, anyway), it will continue to cast its shadows, and so the dementors can never be all destroyed. Maybe they’ll just respawn or something. In fact, maybe when Harry destroyed that one in Ch 45, a dementor respawned back at Azkaban without anyone noticing. Do the guards keep a count of dementors?
That’s an interesting possibility, but I favour the interpretation that this is the source of dementors:
Even so, the most terrible ritual known to me demands only a rope which has hanged a man and a sword which has slain a woman; and that for a ritual which promised to summon Death itself—though what is truly meant by that I do not know and do not care to discover, since it was also said that the counterspell to dismiss Death had been lost.
Canon makes reference to fog being produced by dementors breeding, which doesn’t sound like a light ritual or a respawning option. I don’t know if Yudkowsky has kept this part.
Given how Dumbledore worries about how to explain losing one to the ministry, and that they’re considered “weapons of war”, I’d say someone keeps count.
Dementors don’t act like death incarnate, though. Death isn’t reactive to human expectations and sensibilities. Death doesn’t go out of its way to try to destroy people. Death is just a force of nature (or, rather, the point at which a force of nature terminates). Dementors act like a superstitious anthropomorphization of death.
We also know that there is a dark ritual that summons Death, which Quirrel knows but is afraid to perform.
We know, too, that spells modify reality based on the caster’s understanding of the natural world, rather than using the most simple and nature-compliant approach.
I have a very strong suspicion that the first dementors were created by the ritual that Quirrel spoke of. They are a fearful, human-imagined depiction of death, created by the spells of primitive wizards who didn’t understand death’s impersonal and causal nature. What I wonder, though, is whether casting that ritual is the ONLY way to create new dementors, or if they are also capable of reproducing on their own once summoned. According to the books, dementors can reproduce via a mysterious process that bathes the countryside in fog, but Yudkowsky’s dementors are already quite different from Rowling’s. It may be that their numbers remain constant unless someone uses that dark ritual to create more of them or a spell like Harry’s ubertronus to destroy some.
The dementors serve at least three purposes in Azkaban: they drain the magic from prisoners to render them helpless, they notify the guards when prisoners escape, and they chase down and incapacitate escaped prisoners and intruders. If Harry destroys 90% of the dementors, there probably won’t be enough left for the first or third purposes. That would make Azkaban much less secure, and the perception of Azkaban’s security would go down if there are hardly any dementors since the dementors are what make it infallible. Even just demonstrating that Dementors CAN be destroyed would probably force them to completely remake Azkaban to not depend on the dementors.
In Ch 45, Harry thinks:
If this is true, it’s possible that as long as death exists (for wizards, anyway), it will continue to cast its shadows, and so the dementors can never be all destroyed. Maybe they’ll just respawn or something. In fact, maybe when Harry destroyed that one in Ch 45, a dementor respawned back at Azkaban without anyone noticing. Do the guards keep a count of dementors?
That’s an interesting possibility, but I favour the interpretation that this is the source of dementors:
It fits very nicely. Dementors (Death) were unkillable (undismissable) because the “true” patronus charm (counterspell) had been lost.
Canon makes reference to fog being produced by dementors breeding, which doesn’t sound like a light ritual or a respawning option. I don’t know if Yudkowsky has kept this part.
Given how Dumbledore worries about how to explain losing one to the ministry, and that they’re considered “weapons of war”, I’d say someone keeps count.
Dementors don’t act like death incarnate, though. Death isn’t reactive to human expectations and sensibilities. Death doesn’t go out of its way to try to destroy people. Death is just a force of nature (or, rather, the point at which a force of nature terminates). Dementors act like a superstitious anthropomorphization of death.
We also know that there is a dark ritual that summons Death, which Quirrel knows but is afraid to perform.
We know, too, that spells modify reality based on the caster’s understanding of the natural world, rather than using the most simple and nature-compliant approach.
I have a very strong suspicion that the first dementors were created by the ritual that Quirrel spoke of. They are a fearful, human-imagined depiction of death, created by the spells of primitive wizards who didn’t understand death’s impersonal and causal nature. What I wonder, though, is whether casting that ritual is the ONLY way to create new dementors, or if they are also capable of reproducing on their own once summoned. According to the books, dementors can reproduce via a mysterious process that bathes the countryside in fog, but Yudkowsky’s dementors are already quite different from Rowling’s. It may be that their numbers remain constant unless someone uses that dark ritual to create more of them or a spell like Harry’s ubertronus to destroy some.
The dementors serve at least three purposes in Azkaban: they drain the magic from prisoners to render them helpless, they notify the guards when prisoners escape, and they chase down and incapacitate escaped prisoners and intruders. If Harry destroys 90% of the dementors, there probably won’t be enough left for the first or third purposes. That would make Azkaban much less secure, and the perception of Azkaban’s security would go down if there are hardly any dementors since the dementors are what make it infallible. Even just demonstrating that Dementors CAN be destroyed would probably force them to completely remake Azkaban to not depend on the dementors.
They also stay in Azkaban, instead of being everywhere else.