And I already remarked in the Luminosity thread that that makes no sense. It makes even less sense in a universe with time turners.
FAWS
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Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It’s not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry’s decision doesn’t seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.
It’s definitely not just that, otherwise he’d have tossed Harry a knut port key into an active volcano or the like. His plan seems to involve Harry’s “dark side” taking permanent control (like he expected to be the case before he was surpised by the news that there was a separate dark side in the first place rather than just Harry sometimes pretending to be non-dark).
(I lost track of what you were trying to argue, and the comment in isolation seemed to suggest that the non-trivial change had happened. A clause like “so the fact that this was carefully kept constant is evidence in favor of …” would have helped. )
That would only have changed if the year he started Hogwarts changed, which it did not. The birth date didn’t change by a whole year, just from late enough in 1926 to enter Hogwarts in 1938 to early enough in 1927 to enter Hogwarts in that same year.
In addition to what the others have said there are numerous other passages and oddities that hint at Quirrel = Voldemort = Harry’s dark side. Harry and Quirrel describing a Horcrux between them when they talk about the Pioneer plate. Quirrel saying he “resolved his parental issues to his satisfaction” long ago, just after saying being grateful for his parents could never have occured to him. Quirrel having a much better model of Harry than of Draco or Hermione, particularly when Harry’s dark side is involved. Harry’s dark side and Quirrel both being extremely vulnerable to Dementors. Harry’s dark side and Quirrel both being very good at pretending to be other people. Quirrel’s extremely odd reaction when Harry talks about having a mysterious dark side and his going along with the convenient conclusion that it’s just another part of Harry. Dumbledore and Snape recognizing Voldemort’s hand in Quirrels actions. Harry’s dark side hating Dumbledore. And so on.
The strongest piece of evidence for Lucius believing Harry to be Voldemort is his “I know it was you” message after breaking out Bellatrix.
Voted down for neither containing new and interesting ideas nor being funny.
Harry concluded that it must have been a false memory charm. That was one of the more popular theories before, and Harry agreeing is probably as much confirmation as we are going to get in-story.
Quirrel is pretty much universally agreed to be Voldemort, likely with the 5 places Harry names in chapter 46 as his Horcrux hiding places, among them the Pioneer plate, and probably Harry himself as in canon.
Surius Black is generally agreed not to ever have been taken to Azkaban, most likely by somehow making Peter Pettigrew take his place.
Lucius is agreed to think that Harry is Voldemort (and be right with respect to Harry’s dark side).
There were a bunch of theories regarding the identities of Hat and Cloak and Santa Claus and the details of the prank on Rita Skeeter, but those were mostly settled in recent chapters.
The Hugo is a reader award, voted on by the attendees of Worldcon.
Ranked preference voting, though. I’d expect a significant numbers of voters to rank “no award” ahead of any fanfic just on general principles. If it was just a single round of single preference voting the odds would look much better.
I don’t have any saved copy, but clear memory of the bolded part not being there. I think the wording is otherwise identical.
“But I—” Her excellent memory helpfully replayed it for the thousandth time, Draco Malfoy telling her with a sneer that she’d never beat him when he wasn’t tired, and then proceeding to prove just that, dancing like a duelist between the warded trophies while she frantically scrambled, and dealing the ending blow with a hex that sent her crashing against the wall and drew blood from her cheek—and then—then she’d -
This seems to suggest that her memories of the duel are a fabrication (or the “Draco” she was fighting was someone else under the influence of polyjuice). Draco has no particular reason to further provoke her and was genuinely unsure whether he could beat her. It doesn’t seem obvious why anyone would do that if there was going to be a genuine duel anyway, though. Maybe the the genuine memories were just touched up a bit? Alternatively, why might Draco behave as in that memory when there’s no one else around? (the behavior would have made more sense for the second, public duel)
The edit to 53 recently mentioned seems to be here:
“Your wand,” murmured Bellatrix, “I took it from the Potters’ house and hid it, my lord… under the tombstone to the right of your father’s grave… will you kill me, now, if that was all you wished of me… I think I must have always wanted you to be the one to kill me… but I can’t remember now, it must have been a happy thought...”
Harry nodded. ” At least nobody’s going to try hexing you, not after what the Headmaster said at dinner tonight. Oh, and Ron Weasley came up to me, looking very serious, and told me that if I saw you first, I should tell you that he’s sorry for having thought badly of you, and he’ll never speak ill of you again.”
“Ron believes I’m innocent?” said Hermione.
“Well… he doesn’t think you’re innocent, per se...”
Ron approves of trying to murder Draco Malfoy?
As of last week Eliezer didn’t have any plans to include an allegory to FAI, and expected any such allegory to work very badly in story terms (“suck like a black hole”).
Wait, that doesn’t work, for Voldemort being a known parselmouth to allow Hagrid a retrial after discovering the charm on the Sorting Hat Tom Riddle and Voldemort have to be known to be the same person.
EDIT: Eliezer jossed heroic Riddle in the mean time anyway.
Thomas Marvolo Gaunt-Riddle, hero of wizarding Britain? Though since Dumbledore knows that Tom Riddle is Voldemort that seems like quite the narrow escape; his game would be up if Bones and Dumbledore talked openly to each other.
Why wasn’t one of the first things Harry did when returning from the trial exposing Hermione to the light of the True Patronus while she was still unconscious (it looks like it didn’t happen at least)? He already knows it restores recent Dementor damage, has a plausible reason to know in that he experienced it himself under Dumbledore’s eyes and could have told Dumbledore to secure his cooperation. Is his anger at Dumbledore getting in the way?
Are you saying that the demographic you are talking about is special in using prejudice as the marker of evilness (as opposed to religious affiliation or whatever), or in taking that sort of attitude at all?
You mean libertarian free will, which already doesn’t make sense all by itself, and even then the combination doesn’t make sense for additional reasons, starting with that seeing anything would usually require that only main characters have free will.