Um.. I feel like I’m in the out-group now. What does this (and the stuff below) mean?
Lambda
Karma: 167
Was this the “PUA Controversy”?
The fanfiction.net mirror has chapter 81 posted. Meanwhile, hpmor.com has today’s Author’s Note up, but not #81 itself. This is a shame, since I think that hpmor.com provides a substantially better reading experience...
Edit: And now it has #81 up too. Sorry about that.
Would you mind giving a few more details? Curiosity striking...
I’ve been lurking for a while, and this is my first post, but:
Would you mind giving far fewer details? Consciously imposed conjunction-aversion striking...
FTFY. Instead of asking for a single detailed story, we should ask for many simple alternative stories, no?
Obviously, this doesn’t countermand your complaint about inferential distance, which I totally agree with.
Mmhmm… Borges time!
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”
But what about Dumbledore? If there were anyone in such a Soul Sect, I’m pretty sure Dumbledore would be one of them. Wouldn’t you agree?
But as “Pretending to be Wise” suggests, and as Dumbledore’s room of broken wands makes clear, Dumbledore does not, in fact, behave as if souls are real. Now “perhaps” this is all an elaborate ruse on the part of Dumbledore, and he is just pretending to behave-as-if souls are not real. Regardless of how twisty and deceptive Dumbledore is, this particular deception seems wildly out of character for him.
(Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Dumbledore does not behave as if the afterlife is real. It’s quite possible to have souls without an afterlife; perhaps they just get garbage-collected if not attached to the world in some matter (whether it’s a person’s body, or a horcrux, etc.). In fact, I regard this as a likely enough scenario to be worth thinking about (p = 0.6, say?).)