You sound like you think he doesn’t need capital at all. Why would Harry avoid using a resource that would facilitate reaching his goals? Wouldn’t the rational thing to do be to use the methods that accomplish your goals in an effective and timely manner?
There are times when solutions other than money would be more effective, and there are times when money would be more effective or efficient. So why should he eschew that resource just because he can?
Entirely the wrong question. Harry Potter is planning on taking over both the Muggle and Magical world. That’s going to take some capital!
So, just to clarify, by DIY you mean one person effects the entire genocide rather than many people personally involved in the genocide, doing the killing themselves. In a sense, the Y in your DIY is singular, and the Y in mine is plural.
Also, my general schema of “DIY” is that it’s a cheaper but more difficult alternative to the normal approach—which usually involves hiring someone to do your project for you or buying a ready-made product. Since most genocides tend to be executed the hard way—you can’t buy genocide in a box, although some chemical weapons might come close—I felt that genocide is fundamentally a DIY project. It’s just a … fun … project for the whole community, rather than one person. Like building a playground. That kills people. (This is going to a very bad place isn’t it?)
I’m able to accept your definition of DIY, though I still prefer to think that genocides require a certain degree of personal agency from its participants and that second person pronouns can be plural.
That’s true, but to make the REALLY big bucks, you need to make the bet no one else does a la Trading Places.
I think the idea was that with Harry the requirements of the ritual were fulfilled, though accidentally. One of those requirements is the death of an innocent.
But the HP wiki says that there’s some kind of incantation that goes along with it, so that’s either optional or… whatever. It seems to be like the Goblet of Fire portkey. The rule is the rule except when it isn’t.
The biggest difference between Harry-as-horcrux and Quirrel-as-horcrux is that Voldemort doesn’t seem to have killed anyone (as far as we know) to possess Quirrel. So even if Harry might have accidentally become a horcrux, Quirrel didn’t, although he might have served the same purpose a horcrux does in “keeping the soul anchored to the mortal world.”
I’m definitely not trying to argue that these things are consistent here, though. The point is that when people say something is “effectively” something else, they mean “practically” or “almost” rather than “actually.” Unless someone finds some corpus data that suggests that Rowling’s dialect (or, hell, her ideolect might be workable since she HAS written several rather large books) has a different usage...
Except that observed information can’t be changed using the Time-Turners. So the scope of his actions are somewhat limited. Doesn’t stop him from being able to short a stock, but he can’t single-handedly cause a stock’s fortune to reverse. That still leaves plenty of possibilities to make money, but it wouldn’t be as easy as it sounds. He’d be mixing the complicated natures of stock trading and time travel, and that’s before he starts thinking about avoiding insider trading laws.
“Effective” is not the same as “actual.” Quirrel wasn’t a horcrux in the sense that Harry or Nagini were horcruxes, even with what she’s saying there. She just meant to say that Quirrel was like a horcrux. No ritual was done to make him into a horcrux.
That’s true. Everyone’s talking so much about stealing gold and magical artifacts that I didn’t think of magical services.
I think even simpler than this is the fact that the wizards don’t have anything of worth to trade to the Muggles, since non-magical people have a hard time even seeing magical artifacts, much less using them.
Muggles have plenty of things that would be useful to Wizards, but the reverse isn’t true.
And yet the explanation for the method of the attempted murder of Draco was that the slow cooling of his blood would cause his vitals to drop too slowly to trigger the wards until he died. Which explicitly relies on the common knowledge that Hogwarts DOES have wards that track the vitals of its students and that those wards are keyed to track sudden changes, and the removal of significant portions of the body would certainly constitute a “sudden change” in vitals.
So in the attempted murder of Draco, the wards were circumvented; in the troll attack, they were actively compromised.
I’m morbidly curious to know what forms of genocide aren’t DIY genocide...
Is it certain that the Cloak confers outright immortality? None of the other Hallows seem to quite match that scope of power either in scale or in utility (and number of applications). Maybe that property is more exaggeration than reality, and the Cloak only protects against unnatural death?
If the Cloak does offer full immortality, you’d certainly expect crafting your Cloak of Immortality to be a coming of age ritual. Maybe there can only be one Cloak for whatever reason, or the materials needed for it are virtually impossible to acquire?
Also, how is the immortality conferred to the owner of the cloak? Does having use of the Cloak confer protection or do you have to be master of the Cloak? Does the Cloak protect you only while you’re wearing it? I imagine Ignotus didn’t go around wearing the Cloak every second of every day—it might be hard to convince someone to have children with you that way.
James Potter was surely still considered owner of the Cloak when he was killed, even if he didn’t have it in his possession at the time. But maybe he wasn’t “master” of the Cloak.
If you have to be master of the Cloak for it to make you immortal, Harry couldn’t have saved Hermione with it even if he’d tried. But if, as master, you can extend that property to people you lend it to as you do its invisibility, he might have been able to save her with it assuming “hiding” someone from death works when they’re bleeding out.
That is the trouble indeed. We only have a few reliable pieces of information regarding Hpmor!Voldemort’s character: the incident with Dumbledore’s brother and his treatment of Bellatrix. The former is filtered through his enemies and the latter comes from the mouth of one of the most likely suspects. We also have Harry’s memory of his mother’s death.
The trouble with the ransoming of Dumbledore’s brother is that we don’t know about his motivations. We just know he did it and we have a report from Snape that he was pleased to force Dumbledore to start playing, as it were. We can assume that he had several reasons to take those actions—it’s win-win for him. He either cripples the Order or he strikes a compromising personal blow against its leader. That’s evidence for his tactical acumen, though it doesn’t speak to his character except that he’s capable of following through.
Bellatrix’s situation at least shows that Harry has Voldemort modeled well enough to fool a half-sane, withered and abused Bellatrix into believing he is Voldemort. And her behavior supports everything Quirrel says about how she was treated—which points to him having insider information of some kind. He doesn’t have to be Voldemort to get that information, but it would be one explanation for him knowing. On the other hand, he does seem to be making moral judgements about her treatment that you wouldn’t expect him to make were he Voldemort (reading him talking about it made me think he was focused on Bellatric for more personal reasons).
Speaking of the breakout, Bellatrix does see both Quirrel’s animagus form and his own appearance after the polyjuice has worn off. She didn’t seem like she recognized him at all, so either she didn’t remember him (which she wouldn’t if he was a happy memory), or he was able to signal her somehow not to say anything (not so reliable given her state, but possible). Quirrel doesn’t take polyjuice to maintain his daily form, else it would have worn off when his disguise did (and it seems like a terrible idea to overlay a polyjuice over another one). Of course, he could be a metamorphmagus, which would allow him to pretend to take polyjuice. I should point out here that Eliezer doesn’t appear to be in the habit of changing characters’ abilities except as a direct consequence of an alteration of their personality or mental framework. Voldemort wasn’t an animagus or a metamorphmagus in canon as far as we know; a smarter Voldemort would learn to be the former but can’t learn to be the latter. And we don’t know certain things like, ‘can you be both at the same time?’
My inference is based on the complaints Dumbledore makes about getting permission to bring a Dementor to Hogwarts and then having to explain its disappearance. You’re right, though, it implies that the Ministry makes a firm accounting of the Dementors in Azkaban or otherwise under its control, but it doesn’t really say anything about all Dementors everywhere.
Again the ghost of that statement about the wizards herding them all to Azkaban rises up… I don’t remember if that statement claimed ALL Dementors had been moved there or if it was just all the ones in Britain. I don’t even remember if that was a statement from canon or HPMoR or how reliable the speaker is.
Unfortunately, even those things aren’t particularly strong evidence if you’re really being objective.
Quirrel’s commentary about love potions in Chapter 70 is generic enough that no one objects to it except on the grounds that it’s not appropriate for the children present, so clearly his point that it DOES happen is widely recognized enough that to the adults present it’s not particularly notable that he points it out.
That Quirrel has many identities and Dark Wizards sometimes have many identities isn’t even really strong evidence that Quirrel should be considered a Dark Wizard (even though he seems pretty damn Darkish a lot of the time). It’s only evidence that he has many identities.
Plots reminding people of Voldemort’s plots is susceptible to confirmation bias, just like most of the evidence I mentioned in the earlier post.
Demonstrating a strong interest in Harry Potter prophecies is a matter of course/survival for ANYONE acquainted with Harry Potter, since he’s Harry Potter and they might get caught up in said prophecies.
This is probably the strongest evidence of Quirrel being Voldemort, but it’s still circumstantial since we don’t know where Quirrel actually went. He might also have just realized that Dumbledore’s wand is the Elder Wand… or have been a Death Eater who saw the stone in question, or have otherwise deduced the location of the ring. Still, the simplest answer here appears to be him knowing about it because he’s Voldemort… but that isn’t as simple if you don’t automatically assume he’s been possessed by Voldemort as the canon!Quirrel was.
Voldemort does have an obvious motivation to rescue Bellatrix, but Quirrel does actually take Bellatrix to a Healer (which you wouldn’t expect Voldemort to do), and Bellatrix hasn’t been sent on any missions since her rescue… that we’ve heard of. In canon, Voldemort basically just sets her loose. Also, Quirrel acknowledges that what was done to Bellatrix was wrong (much more strongly and genuinely than anyone else in either HPMoR or Canon, all of whom are happy to judge her on her actions), which looks more like a connection to Bellatrix rather than Voldemort, who certainly wouldn’t be remorseful for abusing her. Of course, that could be a ruse.
The fact is, we aren’t going to get any concrete evidence of this until we actually see Voldemort in the flesh. And when it comes down to it, I’m not exactly offering any counter-evidence that he isn’t Voldemort. But the evidence certainly isn’t strong enough to be as sure of it as most of the people talking about Quirrel and Voldemort in these discussions are. And frankly I keep thinking that Quirrel seems to actually care about things more than you’d expect Voldemort to be capable of emulating.
In HPMoR, Moody says—regarding casting AK—that it’s easier to do after the first time, and that might be interpreted as saying that only the first time you cast it do you have to muster up a deep, personal hatred. Afterward, a more generalized hatred seems to work, which would be the case for any of the examples above. He DOES say that you need hatred, though. Again, it seems like a parallel to the Patronus Charm, since that also seems to be easier to cast once you’ve done it once.
Side note: what characters have been seen to cast both Patronus and AK? Snape does it in canon I think? Does he ever cast his Patronus after he kills Dumbledore?
I realize that doesn’t particularly help my argument that AK’s casting requirements might prevent its use on infants and it can’t be taken as any kind of explanation for how AK is shown to work in canon. But I think you do still need to want the target to be dead, and that might be a higher bar to reach with an infant.
I just wanted to point out that we don’t really have a lot of data on how AK works or if it works on infants specifically. So in order to explain what we see as an anomaly (an infant surviving the unsurvivable Killing Curse), we don’t necessarily need an explanation like a mother’s love protecting the infant or an unknown and mysterious new Deathly Hallow. The AK having a built-in protection against its use against infanticide is no more complicated than any of those explanations. Rather than settling on any of those explanations, I wanted to encourage people to keep thinking, because none of them sound completely right!
Fair points, though a failed Patronus Charm wouldn’t always produce a Dementor if it only happened with a certain subset of wrong kinds of thought. I’m not sure why anyone might be making an attempt to cast a Patronus with a negative thought, but maybe if they use a happy thought that is at its core selfish or harmful to others? In which case, learning to cast the charm would tend to produce a new Dementor every so often as people experiment with finding a suitable memory or thought to use.
As for your last point, I suppose it would only make sense if the Dementors aren’t created at the place in which the failed casting occurs. This might be an explanation of why the Dementors seem to be concentrated at Azkaban… fail to cast a Patronus and something produces a Dementor there. Although I don’t think this is right because it seems too complicated, and I seem to recall something saying that wizards gathered/herded the Dementors to their nest in Azkaban.
Alternatively, the initial product of the failed Patronus Charm is undetected or unrecognized and only later grows into a Dementor. But if all the Dementors are rigidly controlled by the government, you might expect them to notice new Dementors being created outside their control even if it isn’t obvious what is creating them.
Er, it’s not like people can’t be caught during the second round or after completion. This is also from McGonagall’s point of view and could be unreliable. The time she caught them probably wasn’t the ONLY time they had sex within the window of time that would have produced Tracey. It could just be a convenient conceit for McGonagall to be thinking it was during the time she caught them that the girl was conceived, since she only knows of one encounter during the appropriate timeframe.
I have to depart from the majority of responses to your question and offer, “There is yet insufficient data to answer the question.”
The tendency is to answer a qualified “yes” because that would be the answer in regard to canon. However, this is not canon. It also isn’t an alternate history of canon, since Eliezer has modified things where he felt it made more sense to have them changed. For example, there is in this post a comment by Eliezer stating that he places the Peverells before the founding of Hogwarts, whereas canon states that Hogwarts was founded first (the decision makes sense, considering that Hogwarts itself seems to offer enough continuity of knowledge to make strange the idea that the Peverell story could have been reduced to myth given that their artifacts actually exist).
In short, the only reason people are so sure that Quirrel is Voldemort is because he was Voldemort in canon.
I don’t think there is very strong evidence for it, but there isn’t really sufficient evidence against the hypothesis either. Canon!Quirrel and HPMOR!Quirrel don’t even appear to represent the same character (they use the same name, but there the differences basically stop, and the HPMOR version appears to be a case of identity theft). So in that sense, not only is what we know from canon unreliable, but we’re not even really talking about a character that is derivative of his counterpart in canon, so all bets are off.
What people might point to as evidence (the zombie state, the feeling of dread, and the danger of Harry and Quirrel casting spells on each other) are things that invoke enough similarity to canon to encourage people to think of them as evidence that the situations are identical, but those pieces of evidence are fundamentally different between canon and HPMOR.
In canon, Quirrel usually acts rather normal with no hint of a zombie state and actually isn’t even possessed when Harry sees him in the Leaky Cauldron (he seems to give Harry the dread feeling in that scene in HPMOR)-- because we know in retrospect that he was possessed for most of the book, we have a tendency to incorrectly match that with the zombie state in HPMOR.
In canon, Harry’s scar physically hurts when Quirrel turns away from him while he’s possessed. In HPMOR there is the the ‘feeling of dread,’ which isn’t reliant on Quirrel’s orientation to Harry at all, but rather it is reliant on proximity and the state of Quirrel’s mind (it is reduced in both Quirrel’s zombie state and in his animagus form).
In canon, the resonance between Harry and Voldemort is between their wands, not between themselves (Voldemort is able to cast torture spells on Harry just fine). The encounter between Harry’s Patronus and Quirrel’s Avada Kedavra did not create a Priori Incantatum event in HPMOR. It also affected Quirrel rather more severely than it did Harry.
From this, one has to conclude that this evidence that Quirrel is Voldemort is inconclusive at best and is generally misleading. It doesn’t discount the possibility that HPMOR!Quirrel is possessed by Voldemort in a way that results in somewhat different symptoms, and it doesn’t discount the possibility that Quirrel is actually Tom Riddle in the physical and mental sense.
So, insufficient data to answer the question. But add in author agency and you have to really question the obvious solution that we’re being led to by things that only seem similar to canon. And I should note that “author agency” may also freely apply to comments the author has made outside the story as himself.
Yeah, Harry discovered that you can’t transmute something that hasn’t already been created through more conventional means.