Perhaps, but you have to get around why the villain doesn’t destroy the growing threat while it’s still weak.
solipsist
Karma: 3,073
Professor Quirrell will always be a step ahead of you, will always outwit you. You cannot beat him in any game.
That is the characterization of the Defense Professor. A story cannot start with “You can’t beat the Professor Quirrell at any game” and end with “Professor Quirrell has lost the game” without a character break in between.
The villain is stronger, and is defeated through some combination of circumstances and advantages that allow the hero to bypass that strength or temporarily exceed it (typically through significant effort and/or sacrifice, often prior to the confrontation).
Right, that’s what happened in this story: Harry temporarily got the upper hand on Voldemort. Voldemort allowed Harry to get the upper hand. When Voldemort possessed Quirrell’s body, he didn’t just take over the world over the course of a week. When Voldemort realized that Harry was an existential threat, he didn’t relieve Harry of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Voldemort allowed Harry to be a threat because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a story.
The villain allows the hero to win
The villain is weaker than the hero
Deus ex machina
The hero doesn’t win
Take at least one.
I agree. Wizards would have caps on the ends of their wands for this sort of weapon if this were the case.
If you can tell me exactly how to do something, Harry is allowed to think of it. But it does not serve as a solution to say, for example, “Harry should persuade Voldemort to let him out of the box” if you can’t yourself figure out how.
Mathematical progress ground to a standstill in March of 2015, when thousands of researches abandoned their work to search for a constructive proof of the Banach–Tarski theorem.
I was going to correct you
Some of these items are expensive even in the Muggle world, and your contact may have to go outside Britain; but one hundred Galleons will be enough to pay for it all
But then I remembered—no handguns in Britain! That was a clue I missed right there!
Evidence we have the Harry doesn’t
Harry’s recently studied on shaped transfiguration made it to his published thought bubbles at the beginning of the final arc—it will be used.
Mr. Grim will probably survive, or have a dying aria, or in some other fashion reveal the story of Peter and Sirius. EDIT I suppose someone could just recognize his dead body.
Snape can’t just die—he doesn’t love Lilly anymore, which means something, and Voldemort returned a favor—he’s got stuff to sort out.
Harry hasn’t used the Foreshadowed Weasley Loot in his pouch. He can use the pouch now, or use it later, but he cannot simply let the pouch fall into Voldemort’s hands. Maybe Hermione could retrieve it?
Unusually, there is not a literary constraint that Harry survive more than to “evade immediate death”. That’s explicit in the author’s challenge, and I think we have a good method of reviving Harry. The explicit lack of constraint is medium evidence Harry’s solution will be fatal.
Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...
(black robes, falling)
...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.
The earlier experiment had measured whether Transfiguring a long diamond rod into a shorter diamond rod would allow it to lift a suspended heavy weight as it contracted, i.e., could you Transfigure against tension, which you in fact could.
Posting write-only. EDIT I am no longer write-only
Recall Harry’s transfiguration power:
Last week, when the graduating Ravenclaws were discussing their N.E.W.T. scores, Harry had overheard that upper-year Transfiguration practice involved several ‘shaping exercises’ that relied more on control and precise thinking than raw power; and Harry had promptly set out to learn those, whacking himself hard on the forehead for not trying to read all the later-year textbooks earlier. Professor McGonagall had approved Harry doing a shaping exercise that involved controlling the way in which a Transfiguring object approached its final form—for example, Transfiguring a quill so that the shaft grew out first, then the barbs. Harry was doing an analogous exercise with pencils, growing out the lead first, then surrounding it with wood and finally having the eraser form on top. As Harry had suspected, focusing his attention and magic into a particular part of the pencil’s ongoing transformation had proven similar to the mental discipline used in partial Transfiguration—which could indeed have been used to fake the same effect, by partially Transfiguring only the outer layers of the object. This way was proving relatively easier, though.
With this Harry can:
Partially transfigure his leg into a winding worm. With this leg-worm he could:
Touch his transfigured self to Voldemort’s magic, thereby causing Voldemort to collapse.
Seek out the time-turner . Since the leg is part of his body, twising the time turner would make him go back in time. This is a win, if none of the Death Eaters have cast anti time-turner charms, and Voldemort hasn’t either. The death eaters haven’t had much time and were immediately given orders. It is unclear if Voldemort would cast wards that could interact with Harry.
Transfigure all of himself into the adult form of Voldemort and give counter orders. “That’s Mad-eye Moody, you nitwits!”
Partially transfigure his nose to cover his mouth, then cast non-wordless spells
Dumbledore can cast the Patronus wordlessly (chapter 57). Maybe Harry can too, and
will the Patronus to cover his body (as seen in chapter 100)
will the Patronus to charge Voldemort
will the Patronus to Hug Voldemort, changing his utility function with the unknown power...of love!
Of course, there are lots of solutions if you allow Harry to have done stuff off-camera. “Cedric, if I don’t meet you at 11:59 tonight carrying a mayonnaise-infused gerbil, please use your time turner to cause a paradox”. Harry could turn into his hitherto unseen animagus form ETA which might be a peregrine falcon, the fastest of birds.
And the rest of you, you must fire if Harry Potter tries to run, even if it means striking at your fellow Death Eaters.
Useful
Another question for Eliezer: can this solution involve some past preparations not explicitly seen on camera? Like, can we say “Harry has a Weasley-provided pink plastic flamingo in his pouch, which he can use to defeat 37 Death Eaters in the obvious fashion.”
On the lack of foreshadowing for the “Riddle can’t kill Riddle” curse, there was enough stuff around for me to generate a similar hypothesis last year (admittedly with prompting).
The great-grandparent comment did make me consider unbreakable vows as a theory of what happened on Halloween. E.g. to prevent one of his Horcruxes from later killing him, Voldemort made an unbreakable vow not to magically interact with his alter egos (this causing Harry’s sense of Doom around Quirrell). Doesn’t seem necessary, though.
That was my interpretation.
Counters to this hypothesis: Harry knows the procedure is safe because of Parseltongue. Hermione does not, and it would be hard for Harry to communicate that information to her if he were dead.
They have the instructions
Thiss iss ritual for ressurrecting her, if it musst be done again. Insstructionss are honesst, no trapss.
They have the flesh of his servant, who will willingly give
And Hermione, without waiting for any further instructions, said, the words spilling out of her in a rush, “I swear service to the House of Potter....
She has the means to find his foe, and forcibly take its blood
> I figured out why we couldn’t cast the Patronus Charm, Hermione, it doesn’t have anything to do with us not being happy enough. But I can’t tell you. I couldn’t even tell the Headmaster. It needs to be even more secret than partial Transfiguration, for now, anyway. But if you ever need to fight Dementors, the secret is written here, cryptically, so that if someone doesn’t know it’s about Dementors and the Patronus Charm, they won’t know what it means...
And Harry also knew that it was Thestral blood which painted the symbol of the Deathly Hallows on the inside of the Cloak, binding into the Cloak that portion of Death’s power, enabling the Cloak to confront the Dementors on their own level and block them. It had felt like guessing, and yet a certain guess, the knowledge coming to him in the instant of solving the riddle.
With the bones of an ancestor (Potter, Slytherin heir, or Peverell), unknowingly bequeathed, they will have the final ingredient.
Prediction: Harry will die, and Hermione will resurrect him
Me too. I did not doubt chapter 110 was veridical until chapter 111 ate my suspension of disbelief.
Anyone else thinking that Dumbledore’s divination power comes from a reflective “what if?” machine?
More than any chapter so far, this one makes me worry that the story will not have a happy ending.
Then Harry took off his left shoe, and his left sock, and took off the toe-ring that was Hermione Granger, the Transfigured shape identical to the toe-ring that had been given Harry as an emergency portkey.
(Chapter 111)
“Dumbledore resumed his examination. Harry had to remove his left shoe, and take off the toe-ring that was his emergency portkey if someone kidnapped him and took him outside the wards of Hogwarts (and didn’t put up anti-Apparition, anti-portkey, anti-phoenix, and anti-time-looping wards, which Severus had warned Harry that any inner-circle Death Eater would certainly do). It was verified that the magic radiating from the toe-ring was indeed the magic of a portkey, and not the magic of a Transfiguration. The rest of Harry was deemed clear.”
(Chapter 94)
Could be prophecies, could be “patterns”
> You start to see the pattern, hear the rhythm of the world. You begin to harbour suspicions before the moment of revelation.
> And being mysterious at people, knowing things I have no way of knowing, making cryptic statements which can only be understood in hindsight, and all the other small ways in which powerful wizards amuse themselves after they have left the part of the pattern that allows them to be heroes.
“My stepparents aren’t wicked!” blurted Harry. “My parents, I mean!”
“They aren’t?” Dumbledore said, looking surprised and disappointed. “Not even a little wicked? That doesn’t fit the pattern...”
Could be anthropic bias, could be that universes with magic have more measure if they make good stories, could be lots of stuff.
I read this as metaphorical, with Harry the Slytherin-just-kidding-Ravenclaw going Slytherin, but I don’t see exactly how that fits.