Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8

Yeah, the I've enjoyed the arc well enough, and there were some great bits in this chapter, but it's been a bit small-potatoes compared to some of what's come before, and there's definitely a sense of "just how many bullies are there at Hogwarts, anyway?". It's almost like SPHEW is literally grinding bullies for XP.

That doesn't sound wildly different from the online troll subculture.

I can agree with your sentiment but there's plenty of evidence from canon that bullying is seriously endemic to Hogwarts, not to mention the Morcanon point of view where slytherins have found themselves gaining status predominantly from racism against and bullying of mudbloods/hufflepuffs. The entire hogwarts system could almost seem to be DESIGNED to generate ingroup/outgroup hostility in huge amounts to layer on top of the basic cliquishness and age-based splitting of regular school.

also, it's strongly implied in this chapter that the enemies hermione is making now are NOT fighting her because they think of themselves as bullies, but because they view themselves as proud slytherins/griffyndors, and see hermione insulting their entire houses.

Are you talking specifically about the bully whom the SPHEW took out (barely) ? Because I'm pretty sure that particular individual was deliberately proclaiming himself to be a bully in order to provoke Hermione's attack. Hermione figured it out, too, but just a second too late...

My impression was that there wasn't a League of Bullies, but that SPHEW might have brought one into existence.

That is, while most of them might not proudly label themselves "bullies", they share a common quality: people who have been embarassed by Granger & co. As it became clear that they would need to band together to redeem themselves, a loose coalition was formed.

So I think of it simply as a bunch of otherwise unaffiliated individuals realizing that they have a common problem and goal, and temporarily banding together to achieve it. Which seems at least more plausible.

No wonder wizards have been pulling off international cooperation since the dark ages!

I always imagined that wizards are pretty much detached from the muggle world and their technological level and standards of living have been roughly constant for at least hundreds of years. And meanwhile their level of societal organization progressed gradually.

I aspire to be a doubly aspiring double rationalist.

Yep, double magic is fantastic. Gonna use that when I hear someone wishing they had magical powers.

And here's the version one level down from regular people wishing they were magic. Note: this information can only be unlocked with the gift of psychometric tracery.

It was great to see a subversion of this trope.

Anyway, I think it's amusing that authors' favorites rarely correlate positively with readers' favorites.

Eliezer has mentioned that he finds dialog hard to write. Maybe authors' favorites don't match readers' favorites because the authors like the ones that came easily and the readers like the ones that took a lot of effort.

Agreed. The chapters were the characters get to really shine are the best. The underwater battle was cool, but the only part I actually CARED about was what happened at the end with Blaise.

Agreed, I've enjoyed reading the thread though.

The thought had occurred to me. And if you were a double witch, wouldn't you think it was pretty darned plausible that there were triple witches?

I was actually wondering more about the “Interlude with the Confessor” part. Is it non-obvious only to me? There’s a chapter with that name in Three Worlds Collide, but other than both containing a private dialogue between two people of different ages I don’t quite see the relation.

Similar reaction here.

I also was left thinking at the end "Where are the sunk costs?"

Since magic in the HP universe has the property of not having to make sense, one could imagine a spell that simply makes guns not work, or that makes all projectiles move slowly, or that causes everyone within the area to miss what they aim at.

The ending battle of Deathly Hallows pretty much treats wands as if they were guns. You could edit the film to replace all the wands with guns and have very few instances where anything looked wrong. So far HP:MoR has made the magic feel more magical than that.

A gun might top a wand for a lethal quickdraw, but magic has a ludicrous number of tactical advantages. A home invader with a gun, for instance, is no longer a threat when you can use charms to make it impossible for them to be aware of the existence of your house.

But still, knowing that you can pull off an assassination at literally zero risk to yourself at any time (Invisibility Cloak + Sniper Rifle + Portkey + Time Turner) has to do something to an actor's willingness to compromise with rivals.

The sniper rifle doesn't make this much easier; it's loud (although it might be quieted magically) and Avada Kedavra is a surer kill. Anti apparation spells probably cover portkeys, or if they don't, there are probably other spells to deal with them. Plus, you can't pull it off "at any time" given that it can be stopped by a standing anti-apparation spell and a closed door, which are pretty minimal precautions for a high profile political leader.

If you're really creative, you could probably assassinate just about anyone, but this is more or less true in real life, and prevented largely by the extremely small overlap between people with that kind of creativity and people who want to pull off assassinations.

Right after the Azkaban mission, McGonagall, Snape and Dumbledore hold council together. I remember that after Dumbledore shows terror at the idea of a Harry vs. Voldemort war fought with Muggle weapons (he's thinking of nukes), McGonagall thinks something like "firearms aren't that dangerous for a prepared witch".

Part of the time when I was reading Deathly Hallows, and all of the time I was reading MoR I always expected Harry or at least SOMEONE else to act like Kiritsugu from Fate/Zero. Imagine: Enchanted portkeys with no destination yet programmed in attached to home made bombs, flash-bang grenades as a staple in wizarding duels to disrupt aiming/concentration, to say nothing of the videogameesque ability to actually carry around an entire armory with you or heal yourself much quicker EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE MAGIC.

(For those of you who don't know, Kiritsugu is a mage assassin who takes advantage of the Magic Association's technophobia and uses weapons as a regular part of the kit: Mages aren't going to defend against you if you're a mile off with a sniper rifle and they aren't going to defend against landmines if they don't know they exist!)

Edit: Actually, scratch the Kiritsugu idea I just want Neville to cast a shield charm of some sort at his feet so he can rocket jump from staircase to staircase at some point. Pity Quake 2 is five years in the future.

See "Secrecy and Openness". I directly contradicted Rowling in that chapter for exactly that reason. Roughly, a good wizard or witch who knows what's coming can easily raise a shield against bullets. Bombs are more difficult, although e.g. the Castle Hogwarts would just shrug them off. And there are ancient devices and certain old structures that could stand up to point-blank nuclear weapons, but they're rare.

A muggle could easily shoot an unprepared wizard. However, shouldn't there be magical protections against firearms?

Fights between bullies and students rarely end with gunshots even in the real world afterall.

Well, a number of schools in the real world have gangs that do shoot each other with guns, oftentimes in the school's parking lot.

Has there yet been any Word of God on firearms in the Methods of Rationality? I know that the other Word of God has the famous quote, "In a fight between a Muggle with a shotgun and a wizard with a wand, the Muggle will win." I'm curious if this sort of thing still holds for MoR.

That's not how I remember the quote at all. What I remember was more along the lines of "a pure-blood fanatic versus a competent Muggle with a gun would lose," with italics added to indicate which part I'm unsure of the wording on. Which, of course, has completely different implications.

I searched for the original quotation for what I remembered and for the quote that you posted. I couldn't find mine, irritatingly enough, but I couldn't find an original quotation of yours, either. Do you have it?

Possible in-universe explanation: I would guess people suspect that barring emergencies double-wizards keep their abilities secret. So Susan can use her double-wizard abilities just that once when she really needs to. A double-wizard would get in trouble for using their abilities all the time just as a wizard would get in trouble if they used magic around Muggles all the time. Also, what Harry does is so weird that it doesn't even fit what they think a double-wizard might do.

Probable actual explanation: Eliezer didn't think of the double-wizard initially.

Considering that Harry is being taught Legilimency behind the scenes, was given an invisibility cloak and time-turner, has lunch every week with Quirrel, researches the science of magic with Hermione, and probably a bunch of other things I can't think of, I think it's safe to say that he IS a double wizard.

Is this partly a practical in updating estimates?

• I guessed Quirrell for Mr-Hat-and-Cloak after Zabini's interaction and obliviation

Since then

• Snape has been shown to be a player
• I think Quirrell has never been shown using obliviation
• Quirrell comments on Snape's 52 obliviations after the ambush
• Quirrell has been shown to have a very good model of Harry. Assuming that is of importance to him, he would have needed a better model of Hermione that Hat&Cloak has shown and "I do permit myself to read faces".
• House Slytherin Marauder's Map equivalent to simplify logistics?

Though thinking about it, Quirrell's knowledge of the 3rd floor corridor corridor could have been Legimens and Obliviation of the more astute Gryfindors - like Fred & George with their ward breakers monocles...

It's a reference to Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time. Ancient magic, unlimited timetravel, and correspondingly more powerful opponents.

I just like how often not communicating is used in fiction as a false way of creating conflict, but Eliezer shows that you can still have a story (with conflict!) when people try and understand each other.

I really liked Hermione and Harry sitting and talking through their issues in an adult manner. Literature could use more of than and less indignant yelling like the fourth-year-girls recommend.

Defnitely. What is the point of getting into yelling matches when the physiological arousal that comes with it cannot even be then channeled into makeup sex?

You can't raise and strengthen very much in the way of advanced shielding and be invisible at the same time, and massed fire from forty-four fifth-year through seventh-year wizards is nothing to sneeze at. Snape would have noticed Quirrell taking him out, but it wasn't necessary for Quirrell to do so.

That makes sense. Additionally, it seemed to me as if the volley of spells hit snape before his sheilds had even formed completely.

He's Quirrell. I more or less assume Quirrell can deduce at least a cynical caricature of any player's motives, resources and actions with a glance or two. Snape trying to double agent Quirrell and Dumbledore just seems absurd!

I'm also not sure I would quite have assigned Quirrell as the guy who needs to know about Snape's loyalties. It seems like it is Lucious who is going to be the Death Eater Lord in this one. Quirrell has a whole other game. This means that Snape still has a chance to be a double agent, so long as Quirrell doesn't meddle for fun and/or profit.

Low, since Hermione likely won't remember any creepy stalkers (or the one particular stalker you seem to be thinking of, at least). C&H will continue obliviating her each time until he either succeeds after presenting himself in a way she does not find creepy, which then would be the only encounter she remembers, or gives up.

I'd think the chances are fair that Harry passed his Chap 6 obliviation signaling method onto his allies. If she is paranoid enough to key it for disorienting encounters with powerful wizards, the chances are high they might end up talking about encounter N.

What would signal would Harry think best? Something you could detect at the time of signalling, like a broken toothpick in your pocket, or a signal detectable safely in the future, like a penmark on the inside of your pocket? Probably both.

This chapter was great. I especially loved the following line:

Daphne abandoned all pretense of aristocratic poise and let her head fall to the desk with a dull thud, as she wondered whether going to the same school as all the other important families was really worth going to the same school as the Chaos Legion.

I'm so glad we'll be seeing regular updates for a while.

I think you can add Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the list. "Acathla" was the name of the demon that the big bads were attempting to summon (or reawaken) at the end of Buffy season 2.

I don't think the part about summoning Death is a reference to anything. After all, we already know what the incarnations of Death are in MOR. And it looks like the conterspell to dismiss Death is lost no more thanks to Harry...

And the example ritual which Quirrel references is if I'm not mistaken the failed attempt to summon Death in The Sandman.

I immediately went to check when I read that passage and no, the sacrifical items don't match at all (although the style is the same). Next I thought it might be from Terry Pratchett's Mort, but it wasn't that either, although this passage is strikingly germane:

The Rite of AshkEnte, quite simply, summons and binds Death. Students of the occult will be aware that it can be performed with a simple incantation, three small bits of wood and 4cc of mouse blood, but no wizard worth his pointy hat would dream of doing anything so unimpressive; they knew in their hearts that if a spell didn’t involve big yellow candles, lots of rare incense, circles drawn on the floor with eight different colours of chalk and a few cauldrons around the place then it simply wasn’t worth contemplating.

Edit: I'm a little worried. We know that a lot of fictional stuff in non-HP fiction turns out to be real in this universe. I hope Harry hasn't accidentally triggered something.

I'm having difficulty parsing this. The only interpretation I can come up with is that people have often written (fantasy?) fiction which turns out to come true, and that doesn't seem accurate.

Well, I'm glad someone got Zelazny, but that leaves at least three references I haven't seen anyone decrypt yet, two obscure and one much more mainstream.

Hogwarts also has modern plumbing, which was presumably not put in by hand considering whoever did it would've found the chamber of secrets in that one place they put a bathroom. I think we can safely assume it will grow new features.

Doesn't McGonnagall mention that the clocks in Hogwarts were most definitely invented by Muggles? That would be an additional datum in favor of this interpretation.

Led by Snape? I relatively certain that Snape engineered this entire scenario from the get-go to cause the situation to escalate to the point that the school would have to crack down hard on bullying. Snape just arranged it in such a way that he could get what he wanted and still come off looking like the bad guy. Snape is, in fact, fanatically anti-bullying.

Harry trusts Hermione. Or Harry finds the idea of failing to signal trust in Hermione even more abhorrent than possibly abandoning the girls to their fates. He needs Hermione to keep his ego sane, whether or not she's guaranteed to be able to keep her ego sane. Saying "I will override you rather than ask you for your opinion" is saying "I will be right and you will be wrong, when we disagree." That's a foolhardy claim for him to make. Hermione stopped him from doing Mad Transmutation Science without so much as doing the magical equivalent of wearing safety goggles, she's an important check to keeping his ego from driving him straight off a cliff.

Now that you mention it, that promise does seem rather off-balance compared to Harry's usual standards.

Boring hypothesis: He's falling in love with Hermione.

Interesting hypothesis: He started out very isolated. His family wasn't abusive, but he didn't connect to anyone. Now he's having to navigate having personal connections, and it's harder for him to make abstractly good choices.

Harry is usually rather good avoiding making reckless commitments but he seems to have thrown that caution away. I refer here, of course, to the non-interference treaty he proposed with Hermione.

Really? His commitment to Draco regarding Dumbledore is at least as reckless.

it probably is more accurate to describe her as having trusted authority.

Indeed, Hermione is practically the embodiment of the Authority/Respect intuition.

Let's not forget that Cannon!Snape was writing instructions for sectumsempra in the margins of his potions textbook when he was a child - a textbook he incidentally rewrote while he was taking the class. Since then he has been rubbing shoulders with Voldemort and Dumbledore. That said he is more powerful than McGonagall then something has changed rather drastically. That girl is badass.

I have to agree that 'only three' is surprising. Dumbledore himself and Quirrel leave only one extra spot...

it seemed like McGonagall had the upper hand.

I don't know -- even in canon, Snape didn't want to win that fight.

But this does leave me slightly confused about his apparent stunning just now.

I donated, because it was a good reminder that I should be donating anyway, but the reward kind of leaves me cold. If Eliezer writes new chapters after 78 at a constant rate while publishing existing chapters, then if he publishes all his existing chapters really quickly he won't get many new chapters done in the interim and we'll have to wait a longer time after 78 for 79. If he publishes existing chapters slowly, he'll have 79 done by the time he gets to 78, and can publish those at a steady rate while working on 80+.

So instead of donating to get more total HPatMOR, donations change the pacing away from "slow and steady" and toward "quick burst of chapters now, then a longer interval", with the end date of the fic not changing at all. Personally, I would prefer the steadier pacing.

I thought the part about "hopefully Ch. 78 will be finished by the time the Interlude is posted" ought to clearly imply that the schedule only applies until I run out of completed chapters.

For some reason I interpreted the commitment as lasting until the Singularity Summit. I have no idea how that happened though, there's not really anything in the language to suggest that.

If it's the stronger form of the pledge, I doubt anyone will complain -- though I'm a bit skeptical that it's wise to make a promise as hard as "a chapter every three days".

Eliezer has had success with imposing such commitments on himself in the past (OB sequence). Given that the money involved puts the endevour on the path to his save-the-world mission I expect Eliezer would pull off the commitment. (That said I wouldn't necessarily contradict an unwise claim.)

It might work out ok for him - he's got the author on his side

I say the opposite. The spiraling negative consequences for standing up to petty bullying are utterly absurd in scope and even in direction. And either Dumbledore is totally miscalibrated regarding the importance of house points or the world is even more artificially hostile. A civil war because an 11 year old girl didn't lose fifty house points as well as the detention she got as punishment for being attacked by 44 students? When, mind you, Lucious's son had been backing Hermione himself? That's just absolutely absurd.

I don't necessarily agree with Harry's eagerness to start targetting powerful non-Hogwarts adults with schemes but the "ask teacher to stop girls being severely beaten" was a no-brainer.

Smartest thing said in the entire chapter:

"You shouldn't be Headmaster," Harry said through the burning in his throat. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but you shouldn't try to be a school principal and run a war at the same time. Hogwarts shouldn't be part of this."

Dumbledore's depiction reminds the confessor in three worlds collide. He mentions that there are very few humans who need help to be more optimistic, and his experience leads him to see all the ways that things can go wrong, so makes him suited for being rational. Similarly with Dumbledore, his experiences have made him highly risk averse, often to good, but it does result in him being unwilling to change things. (As a contrast to the more reckless/innovative Harry).

I completely missed that looping thing too - I had assumed the aching thing was the usual fight-or-flight response ('the gun felt like it weighed a hundred pounds and shook like a sick puppy as I pointed it at him').

I do, however, give myself credit for thinking, 'surely Hermione isn't stupid enough to buy that Merlin story based on a shapeshifter changing their appearance immediately after telling that someone they were distrusted because of their appearance.'

The interesting thing to me is that Cloak-and-Hat's claim he can make arrangements at other schools ties in with Harry's standing offer from the letter-leaver to take a Portkey to that American school, which sounded like a Quirrel thing to do, and that odd bit about 'time' - well, wizards already have time travel on the scale of hours, why not years?

Quirrel being a time traveler (I am sure someone must have thought of this before) would explain a lot. His sickness could be due to the time travel (maybe sharing with an uncooperative body?), it'd explain his power, it'd also explain his very good priors for what is going on, and out of universe, Eliezer has recommended time travel Harry Potter fanfiction. Whether Quirrel is a time-traveling Harry himself, I'm not sure. That may be a step too far, although it would explain the 'don't cross the streams' stuff with HarryxQuirrel.

I've been pondering this. I was really glad when Hermione started getting to take the spotlight, and a lot of my appreciation was from a straight-forwardly-feminist perspective. I posted a mini review talking about how Hermione had been lacking as a character, the hints Eliezer had dropped about her future development, and my appreciation for the way he eventually handled it. Apparently this comment played a role in Eliezer coming up with the SPHEW acryonym. I'm not sure if it ended up otherwise shaping the arc. He also noted that the initial setup (where Dumbledore basically tells Hermione she can't be a hero because she just can't) was intended to be a critique, but not about feminist issues.

A few months later, I think this section is an interesting case study in meta-token-feminism. I think that Eliezer in general agrees with most goals of the movement, but is probably actually opposed to token feminism. (This is based off of a few vague statements he made, I'm only 65% confident). I also think that SPHEW was originally intended to sort of lampshade the issue, addressing some real issues but in a tongue-in-cheek way. (The issues - mostly about the power imbalance that he created between Hermione and Harry - aren't inherently feminist-oriented, but they happened to interact with the gender dynamics of the original story in a way that made attempt to fix them look like token feminism. I think it could have been pulled off it a much subtler way, but in general MoR isn't particularly subtle anyway. (Or rather, it IS subtle, but you can't hear the subtlety over the sound of how awesome Harry is, unless you're actually looking for it).

And then it turned out to be a lot harder to write than he thought and it dragged on for a long time which made it seem even more long and intense than it actually was. If we were reading this story through all at once, I think the section would still be long, but wouldn't have generated the complaints it's gotten.

The important thing to remember about all of this is that this entire segment takes place before the end of year one. Hermione just leveled up dramatically. Yes, Harry got a surprise visit to Azkaban, but I'm pretty sure by the time year one ends, she and Harry will be participating side by side against serious, life threatening issues.

By the end of the section, I'm less worried about how the gender issues played out and more concerned about how the "Hermione and friends are level-grinding by picking fights with bullies" vibe.

Regardless, I think MoR definitely needed a less serious intermission before the next Dark Serious Thing, and I think some over-the-top token feminism and silly level-grinding isn't too bad a way to do that if it is also addresses some issues with the character-power-dynamics. It would definitely feel out of place in a traditional novel, but with the TV-series pacing, it's an okay diversion.

Huh. My first thought was simply to argue that a work of fiction is rarely improved by attempting to make it meet certain moral standards; The Kreutzer Sonata isn't any less great for espousing despicable beliefs, and plenty of terrible novels inspire laudable ideas of human society. So, if artistic quality and moral quality are unrelated, better that an author write what comes from their heart rather than attempt to teach what they haven't yet interiorised themselves, and risk coming off as insincere or overzealous.

However, MoR is ostensibly meant to be an educational and inspirational story as much as an entertaining one, so in that particular light the suggestion carries more weight. Even so, it wasn't Eliezer's decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female. Perhaps more importantly, had Ron kept his canon role instead of being replaced by Draco, there would have been a second, male WMBOHH companion, Hermione's frustration would not have been framed in terms of perceived sexism in the first place, and there probably would not have been a S.P.H.E.W..

Harry isn't dealing with any life threatening issues now, except internally. I'd be surprised if the story reaches its conclusion without her being made aware of the issue of Voldemort and playing an active role in the conflict.

I'd been meaning to raise that question, too.

Dumbledore is talking like a typical administrator from Mediocristan [1]. It's easier in the short run, and the medium run, and sometimes the rather long run, to tolerate bullying if you aren't subject to it. However, every once in a while, you get a civil rights movement or an Arab Spring.

On the other hand, Harry isn't exactly dealing in non-violence, and it's possible that his faith in the effectiveness of punishment is naive. I await further chapters.

[1]Nassim Taleb's name for the condition of being able to make pretty good predictions about tomorrow by simply saying that it will be like today.

I think any reader with a few ounces of rationality should be spotting the obvious false dichotomy between Harry's "fight bullies" and Dumbledore's "don't fight bullies". I predict that by the end of the Self-Actualisation arc, Harry will have come to this realisation, potentially through discovering a third way to deal with bullies.

I don't quite understand why Harry didn't suggest to Dumbledore that if he's so concerned about further escalation by the bullies he should expel them. It's not as if that would be so difficult to justify. (Though there are a number of possible downsides.)

She's not definitely called out as Tonks, and I'm not sure the years match up, but from chapter 29:

"Did you know there's a fourth-year girl in Hufflepuff who's a Metamorphmagus?" said Hermione as they headed toward the Great Hall. "She makes her hair really red, like stopsign red not Weasley red, and when she spilled hot tea on herself she turned into a black-haired boy until she got it under control again."

I just did a quick search. She's been mentioned once before, but there was no mention of her ability.

It's also an invalid conclusion for other reasons. Harry hasn't actually done anything uncomputable with a time turner, and the one occasion that he came close (trying something computable but slow), all that he got for his pains was ‘DO NOT MESS WITH TIME’. It's very easy to compute this.

Even if Harry does something that seems uncomputable, that proves nothing [ETA: although of course it is evidence and Harry's estimate of simulation should go down in accordance with Bayes's Rule], since he only observes finitely many experiments, and any finite result is (trivially) computable. It's always possible that the system could break down when you push it further. (Presumably it has an error catcher that outputs ‘DO NOT MESS WITH TIME’ when this happens.)

As far as we know, the real world is computable, and it's computed this story. Therefore nothing in it is definitely uncomputable.

There's actually, unless I've made a stupid mistake, an even better algorithm that is Truing computable, if very slow:

every time the value of a bit may depend on future events, split the universe and calculate both possibilities. If a branch ever implies a paradox prune that branch and pretend it never happened.

Actually, while this indeed would require a ludicrous amount of branching for an universe where arbitrary chunks of matter can be transported back to any given plank time, all those branches would need to be computed anyway for MWI quantum mechanics. So all you're really doing is tweaking the MEASURE of each branch.

Eventually someone will be an animagus who turns into a human.

That seems like it would just be a much weaker form of Metamorphmagus; and as such, largely uninteresting.

Or it was Tonks or another metamorphagus?

Fred and George didn't do it. They planted a story about Quirrel. Quirrel read the story and, seeking a way to get back at Skeeter, found out that Fred and George were trying to get back at Skeeter on Harry's behalf – but not that they had planted the story about Quirrel. So he offered to help them, and set everything up for Skeeter, then wiped their memory of everything they'd done to plant the story, which included the memory of planting the story about Quirrel.

A.T. Field. What do you mean, Hammertime?

This isn't necessarily a "competition" that anyone has to lose. Harry could always take a third option and attempt to make a rationalist polyhack on the problem. He's shown the ability to get along well magically with more than one different person and it doesn't seem likely that he would distance himself from one if history had shown he could use their help for important tasks. Also, my understanding is that Harry hates disappointing people. Considering that, it's a little hard to imagine him turning down Tracy without at least considering a way to keep them both her and Hermione happy simultaneously. It would also come in handy in the future if the story extends long enough for him to meet Luna Lovegood.

And the fact that I think this would be an idea that I would really like to read now that I have thought of it seems like pretty good evidence that I am shipping.

I reread it a lot recently and once SPHEW got attacked by the whole huge army of bullies and Harry pulled that ritual awesomeness i enjoyed the arc much more in retrospect.