Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 111

Or this is a big setup by Voldemort. Saying "I must make a Horcrux" out loud is the giveaway; I doubt even Harry's fantasy of a beatable Voldemort would be that stupid.

My guess (conditioned on this not being the mirror) is that Voldemort gave Harry his pouch and wand and then faked weakness to trick Harry into attacking him so that he could kill Harry without violating his prior promise. He resurrected a nearly-immortal Hermione to dissuade Harry from ripping the stars apart in case killing him failed, as part of his defense-in-depth strategy against the prophecy. Since he could have tricked Harry by much simpler means if that were the only goal, he can say in Parseltongue that restoring her counsel is the greater part of his motivation.

No, you've got it completely backwards, he just used some ancient pre-rolled dice, now he can't buy lottery tickets for like a zillion years until he builds that used up luck back.

In other news, the chapter is titled Failure part 1. So we're still in for more Failure.

Meta-level evidence for this: Eliezer doesn't usually post two chapters, short or not, in one day.

Not wasting his readers time speculating about a "dream" would be a good motive for that.

Either this is still all in the mirror

I think it's more plausible that the mirror acts like it does in canon; that is, you see the room you're in, plus some features that you deeply desire; you don't see yourself leave the room unless you actually leave the room.

Harry needs to buy lottery tickets right away.

I see three broad paths the next chapter could take:

1. Hermione, wake up! We won and now we have to rescue Dumbledore!
2. "You thought that would stop me? Now we fight!"
3. "You thought that would stop me? I had just made a horcrux for her, and your Patronus plus my horcrux is how we're going to solve the death problem. You've failed my loyalty test. And after all I did for you!"

(As always, there is the category of "everything else.")

Voldemort believes that Harry “WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN” without Hermione. What wouldn't you do to protect the person preventing that, given that you are willing to murder unknown hundreds for Horcruxes.

Further speculation along this line: Even if this is a dream, what has Harry gained from this vision?

• A reasonably non-Dark way of resurrecting Hermione. (!)
• Insight into the Dark Lord's motives, assuming that this is all things he "might have" said.
• A hint into how he might be killed.

Not quite an either/or--perhaps he's also testing the immortality mechanisms he will use on himself. It hadn't occurred to me, but he may not be as confident as he pretends to be about how the Stone and the troll/unicorn/Horcrux spells will interact. And it closely parallels his previous failure to test his Horcrux system.

Before that meeting Harry fiddled briefly under his sheets. Maybe he took the Transfigured ring off and put the real one on at that time?

Alternatively, he might have used a different hiding-place for Hermione back then and only Transfigured her into the toe-ring later.

The primary alternate hypothesis--that Hermione was transfigured to be his glasses--also requires there to be a transfigured object in his room that no one notices. It's not a contradiction (since he would have the real ring and the Hermione ring, and wear the real one to visiting Dumbledore).

I still hold out hope that 'the power he knows not' is an actual power. Friendship, or Love is so clichéd as to be actively off-putting. But yay for Hermiocorn!

Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my body to me (to me).

I wish I'd made that connection myself, but actually I got it from Reddit.

... oh dear gods I wish I had not made that connection.

Um. I really really hope that's not indicative of how horrible what he did to Snape was...

What's interesting is the irony- he seems to think that Hermione can stop Harry making world domination choices. Harry. This is Voldemort here, and he genuinely believes that his nemesis, who is very much against death (even more so than him) is a greater threat to the world.

And his solution: make sure he has friends. I neither see how Voldermort sees Harry as a more credible threat than himself, nor why he thinks Hermione is a better option than simply killing Harry.

It's interesting that Voldemort is so attached to the idea of this restraining power Hermione has over Harry. Does Voldemort believe that this restraint weakens Harry significantly, by restricting him from making morally ambiguous choices? There's strong evidence that Harry shies away from evil solutions (Horcruxes are not a valid immortality method while they require human sacrifice), but he is certainly capable of morally neutral solutions. Hermione's emphasis on doing the Right Thing in all cases might strike Voldemort as a weakness he can then go on to exploit in his counterpart.

Assume Voldemort is pretending his Horcrux network became Hermione's, and then lets Harry kill him. When Hermione wakes up, she will tell Harry she senses no Horcrux network. Granted, they won't kill her to test this, and because they don't know Voldemort's Horcrux rituals (and don't even have the Resurrection Stone ring), they will never be sure. But they will (should) suspect.

I wonder if there is any way to test if someone has a Horcrux 2.0?

This seems viable. The line immediately preceding:

For I would never want you to be deprived of Hermione Granger's counsel and restraint, not ever while the stars yet live.

This strongly suggests to me that he wanted to make Granger a horcrux (as in, a horcrux for Granger). This helps to pattern match with 'practising being nice' but as before, we meet the same confusion: If Voldemort is going to kill HP, why is he trying to make Hermione invincible?

At least if this all ends well, Hermione really will be the stand-out witch of her generation. And the next.

Voldemort is unaware that it's limited to one inhabitant--and so when he introduces Hermione, he evicts himself.

One obvious possible implication of this is that if Harry did kill Voldemort's current body with the gun, Voldemort may be permanently dead. I guess we'll find out in 22 minutes...

I also 50% expect, that when Harry surveys the scene, an unbelievably improper voice in Harry's head says "Hey, we've got our primary companion back... and we've got some phat loot!" and then gets silenced with great prejudice.

Why the 'true form' with the weird appearance? Unless perhaps that form came about via sacrificial rituals and thus must contain evidence of such sacrifices to retain power.

For whatever reason, Riddle seems to be planning to do some more stuff with his Voldemort persona; otherwise he wouldn't have summoned his Death Eaters etc. It follows that he needs to keep his pantomime-villain appearance at least in the short term, since that's what his followers expect.

I gather from the last few chapters (though I've suspected for a long time) that he didn't originally intend to look or behave like that long-term, that the form was chosen to match his deliberately over-the-top villain persona, but that he's stuck with it for the time being since the Death Eater thing has evolved beyond his expectations. Perhaps he'll eventually alter himself not to look like Nosferatu crossed with an extra from David Lynch's version of Dune, but that's something you'd want to do after you've reestablished your authority, not immediately after returning from a long absence and the decay of most of your network. Right now, the more Voldemort he can seem, the better.

He looks like that in canon, for which I think the underlying meaning was from the idiom "cutting off ones' nose to spite ones' face". Not sure if it applies to HPMOR.

At least now he can change his body any time he wants, with the Stone.

There may be no more basilisks.

It does seem very unlikely that there is no magic which can kill both unicorns and trolls other than Fiendfyre and AK.

Where's he getting the spirit?

Harry's Patronus appears to have solved that problem, although we don't know how. "Not another Tom Riddle" suggests that it worked.

How does the Stone help?

Hermione's body needs significant repair, and the only way we know of for the repairs in question (once the person is dead) is permanent Transfiguration.

The body still needed to be restored to the state of a complete and healthy body, and the Stone made it permanent.

Presumably, the body was repaired to true health - which also means that the brain was restored to its original state, that is, functional.

At that point, a Muggle can be revived by simply restarting her heart. A witch, apparently, requires a bit of magic.

The brain contains all the necessary information, I don't think a "soul" is needed.

Trolls grow up, so..

A troll heals by continuously transforming into its form. Does this mean Hermione will never age, because she will always transform into a 12-year-old body? On the plus side, she wouldn't fear old age...

I don't there's a mention of trolls not aging.

I wonder if she will be able to sense all of Voldemort's horcruxes right away when she wakes up

Given that Voldemort doesn't know how many horcruxes he has, I don't think he senses all of the horcruxes.

And unless it has a limited store of energy, he will have defeated Death at that point.

Even without an unlimited store of energy it's not clear that the process is fast enough to keep 6 billion humans alive.

Hermione can always transfigure herself older - possibly with help from the stone - if that becomes a problem.

Nnnnot quite. Remember, for Harry, part of defeating death is mass true resurrection. And the only method of resurrection Harry knows of requires a finite amount of his own life-force. (I suppose that may not apply to Muggles, though.)

Also, he needs the body, which doesn't usually exist for anyone dead too long ago...

Not killing Harry has been confusing me for a long time now. I still don't get it.

One does not get put back 49 years hard work toward immortality every day.

If it wasn't, then Hermione may now be very hard to kill indeed.

Except by AK and fiendfyre, both of which come easily to Voldemort, and the former can be cast by many experienced fighters.

This can only be a good thing.

You clearly haven't read some of the same manga as I have.

(Though I won't be more specific because, well, infohazard.)

"Hi Hermione!" said Harry. "You remember the troll killing you, right? I swore a mighty oath to bring you back to life. To fulfill it I consulted with the world's foremost immortality expert. I'd like you to meet Dr. Tom Riddle."

Extremely confused.

Worried for Harry, worried for Harry's morality, which immediately leads into "wait what exactly did they do to me*"?

Heavily disoriented.

Voldemort would not have given the properties to his body before now, because he had not had the Stone, and without its permanence effect, after a few hours the transferred properties would wear off.

He was overconfident in giving them to Hermione now, instead of to himself.

I suspect that Hermione goes first, because that's how you test that this is a safe idea: you do something 'nice'. I dispute the use of others as guinea pigs as actually being nice, though. Even when there are positives to them.

remember that spell is considered temporary without the P.stone according to Voldemort.

I don't expect the gun to work; it seems to me that if Voldemort had a ritual to give people properties of magical creatures, he would have given them to himself, and firing a gun at a troll three times would not be terribly effective

The ritual only works permanently because he has the stone. He likely would have later transfered troll power to himself but I don't think he has the time at the moment.

That might still just be an ordinary rock, though my confidence in that is not very high as my past results at predicting hpmor have been rather unsuccesful.

Red herring.

That's the only one I recognized instantly. Good old Star Trek...

Remember back when Harry asked the Weasley twins to get him an unspecified muggle artifact? Many have speculated that it might have been a gun.

There was a section about him sending out someone else to buy Muggle items. A gun seems a straightforward item.

I'm curious where Harry got the gun.

It's probably one of the Muggle items that Fred and George provided for him.

He ordered it from Fred and George earlier when he handed them a huge list of stuff for contingencies.

There was a vote on this a few threads back. It's not clear that we need a revote.

The current arrangement is the result of a previous suggestion for more threads, fewer chapters per thread.

They are now outside the castle. Quirrel should just Apparate away, kill a random wizard, create a horcrux, and take his network back.

This scenario is the only explanation I can think of for why Voldemort is prioritizing Hermione's body over his own, giving Harry all his options back, advertising his moment of weakness, and generally behaving like a second-rate Hollywood villain. Confidence: 25%.

So, Voldemort has two approaches to the "prevent Harry from destroying the universe" plan. First is killing Harry, second is turning Harry away from destructive paths.

He might reasonably be uncertain of how the first plan will work. Harry is Tom Riddle, and that means killing Harry might just put him in the Horcrux system, and now Good Tom and Bad Tom are having a psychic battle instead of a physical or a magical one. Given that Bad Tom has the upper hand in physical and magical battles, being reluctant to fight a psychic battle instead seems appropriately cautious.

The second plan involves niceness, which Voldemort is not very practiced at. It does have the upside of having another sane individual to play chess with, and with Hermione keeping Harry from doing anything too crazy the stars are safe (indeed, safer, because now there's a second Riddle working to improve things). But, more importantly, because Voldemort hasn't tried this one much before, he doesn't know how and when to expect it to go wrong. So he makes rookie mistakes.

If he wanted that, he could have achieve it directly by transfiguring his own body to look like Hermione's and using the troll and unicorn on himself.

He says in Parseltongue that his reason is to for her to help Harry. I don't believe Harry's fears about perfect Occlumens, because Slytherin would have known about their existence and not made such a mistake (I'm putting 90% on Parseltongue being a secure communications method between Voldie and Harry).

Confidence: 25%.

Hm... this isn't a dig at you or anything, just a thought I'm having trouble answering for myself right now, but how low does one get to set the probability of a prediction, and still call it a prediction? At which point - seems it's not 50% - should you rather say "I'm predicting this won't happen?"

Harry cast a spell on Hermione just minutes prior.

A spell imbuing her with his magic and life force, which would never return to him.

I imagine that's what cause the resonance reaction.

Maybe the final spell is the alicorn Princess spell, and the resonance was caused on a meta-level by the literary gods.

Why does he need to create a Horcrux immediately? Theory :

Each horcrux, even with Voldemort's modified ritual, is just a snapshot of Voldemort's mind-state at the instant the horcrux was made. What Voldemort has somehow managed using magic is to interconnect all these Horcruxes into a network, and build some kind of non-biological system to "run" his personality based on the snapshots.

This explains why he was able to observe the stars and think about his mistakes for 8 years until someone touched one of his horcruxes. Somehow, his network sends only the presentMindState to the body it hijacks.

This is how I assumed, previously, that Harry might defeat him. Since magic thinks he's got the same identifiers as Voldemort, is Harry is killed a moment after voldemort is, his mind should become the "top" element in the stack of memory states that is Voldemort's horcrux network. I would assume that he would have access to all of the knowledge in the lower states, but as the top, canonical state, he would have control when Voldemort respawns.

As it is, I'm guessing the respawned Voldemort after he's killed by magical resonance will lack the mind state changes since his last horcrux.