1) Those numbers are about American finance in 2011. British finance in 1991 probably did not have salaries quite that ridiculous. But more importantly:
2) As Dumbledore explains, it’s not this rescue price that is the problem, so much as all the cumulative rescue prices Harry’s enemies will now expect him to pay for each of his friends (not necessarily once, either… Hermione could well be attacked again).
Unfortunately, Harry has just shown that he is both able and willing to overcome Dumbledore’s refusal to offer concessions.
If Dumbledore believes that Harry’s action told Voldemort that blackmailing will be effective again, shouldn’t he now proceed to move Harry’s parents to safety at Hogwarts, as Harry suggested when the issue was raised after Azkaban?
I’m going to dismiss this hypothesis because I don’t think Eliezer would be happy to have HPMoR’s discussion threads taken over by the inevitable “How many Galleons is Person X worth?” disputes.
Just a bad film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110216/
Worst comes to worst, he asks Dumbledore to cure some rich muggles with cancer who are willing to pay.
I think that the can of worms of why wizards don’t immediately go cure world hunger etc. is best left to be opened near the end of the fic, if at all.
The next time Eliezer puts up an omake page, he definitely needs to include this.
The math here depends entirely on what the “certain rights” Lucius has over Harry are. Were the debt a purely financial issue, saving Hermione would be a no-brainer. Did those rights allow Lucius to realistically cripple Harry’s efforts to fix the world, not saving Hermione would be a no-brainer.
We still don’t know, although the fact that Dumbledore ultimately went along with it suggests that it’s closer to the former than the latter.
Thank you. Also, sigh.
Re-posting it so you see it in the inbox:
Eliezer, could you please confirm / deny / decline to answer whether the fic is past its halfway point? Anubhav and I have a persistent memory that you did at one point state that it was, but I can’t find that statement so I’m wondering if I just crossed a couple of brain-wires.
Well it does mislead, but since it’s not intentional and the misunderstanding isn’t going to cause any harm, you have no real reason for changing it—unless you find it bothersome you to clarify when it happens to come up.
Yes, he stated very early on (at least a year ago, I think?) that he had only read up to book 3 or 4, tried to pick up the later books, couldn’t get into them, and so relies on the wiki and other references to know how the plot develops.
I do not know if this has since changed.
Eliezer, could you please confirm / deny / decline to answer whether the fic is past its halfway point? I have a persistent memory that you did at one point state that it was, but I can’t find that statement so I’m wondering if I just crossed a couple of brain-wires.
e: while I’m here, I was rereading random chapters and spotted a typo in Ch. 14: “Good heavens, Mr. Potter, do you think these would be allowed to students”.
Someone who isn’t likely to be Veritaserum-proof is probably a better candidate for this plan.
Reveal to everyone the secret of Dementors so that their animal patroni are no longer effective. Wait until the Dementor has taken out most of the room (Harry has already managed to resist Dementors without his patronus), while either protecting Hermione himself or encouraging Dumbledore to grab her and phoenix-flee.
Quirrell said that the best strategy against a Dementor is just to Apparate away, which suggests that, if the Wizengamot room has an anti-Apparition defence like Hogwarts, everyone who has neither a phoenix nor a Patronus (and isn’t Harry) is screwed.
I don’t think this is going to be Harry’s solution, but I think it might be the best of the violent solutions.
About Harry’s darkside. It seems new and weird that his darkside can be hurt by Hermione’s plight. Last time he went over to his darkside strongly (after dementor exposure), he ended up in a state where he hated everyone he cares about and only came out because he didn’t know how to respond to her kissing him, not because he cared.
This is in fact exactly what happened:
Without even thinking he was trying to flee inside himself, flee into his dark side, pull the cold rage over himself like a shield. It took too long, he hadn’t tried to go fully into his dark side since Azkaban. And then when his blood was something like cold, he looked up again, and saw Hermione in the chair again, and discovered that his dark side knew nothing about how to deal with this type of pain, it pierced through the coldness like a knife and didn’t hurt less in the slightest.
I’ve come to think that the 500 comment limit may be unnecessary. Sorting comments by “New” seems to be pretty efficient at putting the interesting stuff (i.e. the reaction to the latest chapter) in highlight.
Same. The part about disappearing in Albania is from canon-Quirrell’s backstory—that’s where he ran into Voldemort’s wandering ghost, so it’s interesting that in MoR he supposedly went there before the war. The rest of the background recounted by Bones and by Quirrell himself don’t really ring a bell with me, the closest thing I can think of is him needing “reconciliation” with the Lady of the House being reminiscent of Sirius Black and his spat with his family, but Sirius already exists in MoR and had a different history.
It might be possible that in MoR the house of Gaunt (the one canon!Voldemort is from) did not fall into poverty and retained their household and Wizengamot influence? If the general ‘powering up’ of characters can go that far back it would be plausible. And now that I think of it, Quirrell initiated talk about witch-on-Muggle magical seduction during the SPHEW arc, which could suggest that that part of his family background was carried over from canon.
(One of the things that annoy me about HPMoR is that when I can’t quickly figure out what a certain passage might be hinting to, I have to assign a frustratingly high probability to the event that it’s simply a reference/homage/in-joke to one of the myriad HP fanfictions.)