WMG / Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Note: Traditional TV Tropes practice is to add new guesses to the bottom of the page.

Now that the fic is over, this page is currently in the process of being sorted for Confirmed and Jossed WMG's.

• Confirmed WMG goes here.
• Jossed WMG goes here.

Harry's Odd sleep Cycle Means something

Perhaps it is a clue about his dark side. Maybe it has something to do with Quirrells zombie mode.

• It's actually a real thing, and probably no more than an excuse to give Harry his time-turner.
  • And have him home-schooled, thus believably making him infinitely more advanced than his fellow eleven-year-olds and also offering a plausible reason why he has so much trouble relating to them.
  • I agree it's probably just an excuse to give him a time turner. Still, I find it easier to believe that they'd give him one when he really required it to function properly (because of a condition that really exists) than I would if he just got one randomly, like happens in some other fan fictions.
  • So I went to check out that page, and sleep cycles are apparently ruled by a region of the brain called the hypothalamus. This region also influences, between other things: fear processing (as in Antipredatory defensive behavior and social defeat), anger, body temperature, and even memory. It reacts to several factors, including stress, heart/breathing rate, some part of the nervous system. So the killing curse may very well have magically screwed up some part of Harry's brain, which could explain the "anger management problem" as well as his disturbed sleep pattern. (I am probably taking this way too seriously, but whatever. XD)
    • Seems entirely reasonable that being hitting with a death bringing killing curse would at least give you some nerve damage. Obviously Lily's sacrifice only meant he would not be killed by Voldemort, not that the Killing Curse wouldn't touch him. He did get that scar. It makes it look like his skull cracked. He was fifteen months old, after all.
  • The author actually has a similar condition (though not as bad as Harry's). So it might be a little bit self insert, a little bit write what you know.
  • Turns out it was an excuse to give him a Time Turner, but it also wasn't natural, but induced on purpose. By Dumbledore, of all people.

Lucius Malfoy thinks Harry is Voldemort.

Reread the conversation in chapter 38 particularly this part: "When I read your response to Professor Quirrell's little speech," said the white-haired man, and chuckled grimly. "I was puzzled, at first, for it seemed not in your own interest; it took me days to understand whose interest was being served, and then it all finally became clear. And it is also obvious that you are weak, in some ways if not others."

• Pretty much confirmed in chapter 97, or at least Harry guesses it out loud and Lucius doesn't correct him.
  • Turns out it Lucius was right after all. Harry is an amnesiatic 11 year old copy of Voldemort.

Quirrell is a basilisk.

• What we know for sure about Quirrell is:
  • He is not a good person; we know that much because he killed Rita Skeeter and the author likely killed off Skeeter specifically so we would know that Quirrell is not a good person.
  • He is amazingly powerful and either very intelligent and clever or in possession of very dependable foreknowledge.
  • He has no history before he applied at Hogwarts. - this is no longer true (maybe)
  • He has some kind of crazy-bad resonance with HJPEV.
  • He has zombie time.
• Quirrell as a horcux has some of the same problems as other proposed horcrux: namely, there are just too damn many of them, the author is skeptical of souls and the author's attitude toward superstition is kind of the point of the fic, and being a horcrux doesn't tell us anything about what he is doing with HJPEV or where he came from.
• Quirrell's purpose is to return all of Voldemort's valuable, critical knowledge to him once he's ready. By obliviating himself, Voldemort more-or-less put his passions into HJPEV. By preparing it to teach himself, Voldemort more-or-less put his intellect into Quirrell. But the passions-vessel has gained intellect and the intellect-vessel has passions. So putting it back together, either by conventional instruction or some mystical-jam-sandwich-making is going result in something other than the original Voldemort.
• Perhaps Quirrell is a construct created by magic, just like the Basilisk. When Voldemort learned everything Salazar knew from Salazar's Basilisk, he also learned how the Basilisk was made.
  • Or maybe Quirrell _is_ Salizar's Basilisk itself.
• The Basilisk lasted a long time and it is reasonable to speculate that it did so by hibernating the centuries away. Quirrell needs to be more active than Salizar's Basilisk, but he still cannot last forever. So he hibernates at every possible moment. That's what zombie time is about.
• Quirrell does state that he finds conversing in Parseltongue somewhat uncomfortable because he is not a true snake. So unless he was lying, which seems unnecessary, I would guess that he's not exactly a basilisk.
• The resonance is a result of HJPEV/Voldemort's magic doing magic. There are issues with that kind of recursion.

So if HJPEV is Voldemort, then who is the antagonist?

Dumbledore is the antagonist.

• He is the most powerful wizard in the world and has done some very nasty things, like:
  • waiting to face Gindelwald until the point where he would gain the maximum power from doing so
  • mercilessly burning Narcissa Malfoy alive
  • sending the infant Harry Potter to live with cruel (although they weren't really all that cruel, he just thought they'd be, which is kind of the same thing) step-parents
  • setting fire to a live chicken
  • sabotaging Snape and Lily's friendship
  • setting up Snape to play James Potter for a Uriah
  • abusing and killing his sister
  • attempting to force Hermione to subjugate or supplicate herself to HJPEV and his needs
  • and generally treating people as though they were pieces on a game board.
  • being willing to let Hermione, but not Grindelwald, go to Azkaban
• Dumbledore is deathist, so there's Author Appeal for him to be the antagonist.
• This would also reflect the way things worked out in The Sword of Good, Mr. Yudkowski's other incomplete fantasy story.
• Dumbledore is not an idiot, he is crazy. Insanity is the antithesis to rationality, not stupidity or 'evil' or even fate.
• Counterpoints, in order:
  • Grindlewald was invincible, due to the elder wand. Dumbledore set out to face him as soon as the blood sacrifices he was receiving from his Muggle allies (I.E. the ovens at the Nazi death camps) had started to taper off enough that he could be outlasted in a duel and rendered unconscious. Dumbledore has been understandably quiet about this to avoid copycats.
  • Her perspective in several recent chapters seems to imply that it was actually Madame Bones of the DMLE who burned Narcissa, out of vengeance for her sister, Susan Bones' mother. Dumbledore's statements on the matter (Harry has noted) are exactly what you would expect if someone else burned Narcissa, and he took credit (for obvious tactical reasons - it stopped the Death Eaters from taking hostages)
  • Of COURSE you send the orphaned hero to live with the excentric/cruel/petty aunt and uncle. It's in every epic fantasy ever! Dumbledore may not approach things from the pure rationalist end of things, but he understands the tropes well enough for that.
  • The complete lack of reaction from the chicken, and the complete absence of any smell of burning in the room, both are taken by Harry to strongly imply (in later chapters, around the Self Actualization arc) that Dumbledore actually set fire, in an invisible magical containment field for safety purposes, to an item that had been transfigured to look like a chicken.
  • We don't know nearly enough about this to know what actually happened. The one item we've read from Lilly's textbook marginalia appears to be the modified beauty potion that Lilly provided Petunia.
  • I don't know The Bible well enough to get that particular reference.
  • I have, to my knowledge, seen nothing to indicate that the death of the youngest Dumbledore child happened differently from Rowlings' canon history as concerns the first split between Dumbledore and Grindlewald. In the absence of evidence to the contrary (which EY likely would have given during the ellided bits of Draco's list of complaints against Dumbledore had there been any relevant information) the law of conservation of detail would imply that there's no difference.
  • Citation needed.
  • Counterpoint: Phoenix's Price/Fate works as strong positive character evidence in both the general and specific cases.
  • Dumbledore's 'Deathism,' like Salazar's blood purism, is not evidence of evil, but merely a youthful prejudice not questioned. This is at worst a weakness for a good character, rather than inherent evidence of villainy.

Dumbledore WAS evil, but went insane/good after fighting Voldemort.

• It explains everything. All the evil acts Malfoy attributes to him happened in the past, before Voldemort's rise to power. Presumably, the realization that such a monster as Voldemort could exist AND Dumbledore himself would be unable to destroy him COMBINED with the fact that he either unwittingly helped or at least failed to prevent Tom Riddle from becoming Voldemort in the first place, yeah, that could cause someone to have a pretty big Heel Face Turn.

Harry is betrothed.

• In Chapter 38 the Quibbler reveals details on the marital snarl that surrounds Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres
  • He is betrothed to Bella in that he is Voldemort and at some point Voldemort made a promise of some sort
  • He is betrothed to Luna in that he told Draco he would marry her.
  • He is betrothed to Hermione in that everyone at Hogwarts knows they're meant for each other.
  • He is betrothed to Draco because all of Sytherin House knows Draco is courting him.
  • He is betrothed to Kimiko Ross. He doesn't know it yet, but it's going to happen.

Magic in MoR-verse comes from Spiral Power.

Yudkowsky definitely knows about the show ("Breaking Drill Hex" has the incantation *Lagann!*), and something like Spiral Power would integrate well with Muggle science while still throwing everything Harry knows about the universe for a complete loop.

It would also explain how Hermione won battles: being someone who makes friends and fights for them, she has access to more Spiral Power than Manipulative Bastard Draco or Chaotic Neutral Harry.

• In continuation of this theory, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann could well be a documentation of the founding of the nation of Atlantis, with Kamina city as it's capital. "Magic" - with the need for the proper incantations and the imposed limits on what can be done with it - was created by Simon some time after the fall of the Anti Spirals so as to stop the Spiral Nemesis without cowing humanity's fighting spirit.
• The Dementors are noted for having absolute despair as their primal effect, and you cast the True Patronus by thinking about the value of human life and the determination to defy all death and despair, forever. The Dementors are Anti-Spirals!

Harry will create a superintelligent friendly AI using magic or magical objects.

Since Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing this fic, it seems highly probable that artificial intelligence will pop up sooner or later. Plus, we already saw early on that magic can create conscious, friendly intelligences (the Sorting Hat). Harry's goal — to discover the secret structure of magic so he can reorganize the universe — may be beyond him as a child, but creating a magical superintelligence to do it for him may not be.

• Magic itself may be generated by a super-intelligent AI. In chapter 25, Harry ponders: "The line of reasoning continued: Atlantis had been an isolated civilization that had somehow brought into being the Source of Magic, and told it to serve only people with the Atlantean genetic marker, the blood of Atlantis. ... So the words and wand movements were just triggers, levers pulled on some hidden and more complex machine."
• That doesn't actually explain anything. Why does she have more spiral power?

Harry will create a superintelligent, seemingly friendly but actually horribly broken AI using magic or magical objects. It eats everyone.

Because Eliezer's thoughts on the subject mostly run to how consistently hard it is to make a safe AI, despite making an AI at all getting easier with every passing year. Harry wouldn't have a prayer, and Eliezer knows it. Harry does not.

The Pioneer Plaque isn't really the most secure place to put a Horcrux.

If wizards can Apparate anywhere, they can Apparate into outer space, too; they just need to wear a spacesuit or its magical equivalent^note Airtight mechanical suit with Air-freshening Charm. Job done., and to know where they're going. Apparition being limited to the speed of light (Quirrell regrets not being able to go to the stars) could be a nuisance, but it shouldn't stop them from getting there.

• Can you tell me the exact location of the Pioneer Plaque relative to the device you're reading this WMG on, and the velocity at which its moving? Take as long as you like, but come back here with an exact location.
  • See http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pioneer+11+september+1991+distance+from+earth. At the time Harry is having the conversation, 3.13 billion miles (or 280 light minutes) away from earth. Moving away from the sun, at the time, at 12.7 km/s (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pioneer+11+velocity+september+1991).
    • That's the distance, but you have no way of knowing what direction it's currently heading towards, or if it even maintained a straight line.
    • It hasn't.
  • It's at least imaginable that there could be a physical or magical limit on how FAR you can apparate. The Pioneer probe does not seem to be in "walking distance" any more. I doubt if in the books we ever saw anyone apparate more than 1,000 miles. So say a single "jump" can take you once round the earth... 10,000 or 12,000 miles. 3.13 billion miles would add up to a lot of apparitions and need at least a copious amount of stamina and determination to keep it up (and you'll have to keep in mind that you also would want to return sometime). That said you should be able to find out the "where" it is by means magical, as you already have "orientation spells" (Four-Point spell showing North with the help of your wand) and "call-back spells" ("Accio"), it's just not sure any wizard would still be able to reach it by now just depending on apparition. As to the "you can't apparate where you've never been" I'm rather tending to see this as a hazard-minimization rule... anybody not familiar with a place could end up in a floor or in solid rock, under water or in any other potentially lethal situation, so you only ever go where you have already been by other means. So if you were e.g. jumping to the Earth-Moon Lagrangian Point 1 where not much danger of hitting anything dangerous should be found you could go on and follow your magical detection methods up to the horcruxed plaque.
    • According to JKR's paracanonical Quidditch through the Ages, Apparition becomes increasingly unreliable over long distances, and most wizards do well not to attempt Apparating across the Atlantic. It seems reasonable to infer that astronomical distances are Right Out. Of course, you could do a series of shorter hops, but (1) it's a lot of hops, and (2) as it says below, it's now MoR!Canon that you have to have been there first.
  • Yes: see http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi — as of midnight tonight UTC it will be at 18 degrees 45 minutes 51.7964 seconds right ascension, -8 degrees 31 minutes 40.9032 seconds declination at a range of 83.6093107447665 AU from my expected location at that time (and moving approximately away from me with a velocity of 18.4826693 km/s). That's sufficiently accurate to place it within about a kilometer — close enough that it should be visible — but matching that velocity would be ... harder.
• According to Draco in Chapter 7, you can't Apparate to somewhere you've never been.
  • Harry has now been to it.
    • Harry has not been to it; the spell is an illusion on the environment, so Harry has only seen from its perspective. That may or may not be sufficient.
    • I don't think "outer space" is a specific enough destination. How sure are we that the view from space is specifically the view from Pioneer?
    • The sun would still be far brighter than any other star from the distance of Pioneer; Harry probably would have noticed that.
    • Not proof that Harry's been there, but at the distance of Pioneer, the sun would not be noticeable to Harry as anything other than another star, even if he knew exactly which direction to look.
    • Magnitude would be -19.1; I would call that noticeably bright. I do agree though that it's probably the view from Pioneer and the sun is maybe just underneath him or something and that's why he can't see it (I can imagine Quirrel doing this on purpose to avoid hard questions about "hey, what star is that?")
    • This would explain why Q. has always left a disc of the floor/ground visible when casting the "view space" spell, even when he makes himself invisible to improve the view. It's almost surprising that this story's Harry hasn't tried to compare the view to known constellations and deduce his position relative to Sol.
    • It is probable that the spell IS the view from pioneer because it is the spell to see whatever your horcrux sees.
• I don't think anybody knows the position of Pioneer close enough to make a jump within a 10000 miles of it, note that all the numbers you gave give only a rough number.
• In 7 years, I wouldn't be surprised if Harry's magic+science technology could catch up with Pioneer.
• Harry knows about time travel now - another option is to remove whatever safeties are on the Time Turner, drastically alter what is considered 'possible' by the Department of Mysteries, and go back in time to get the Pioneer Plaque before it has left the planet.
  • Time travel in both canon and MoR appears to forbid changing the past. This is why Harry's prime number factoring algorithm fails; the universe doesn't iterate or converge to a stable time loop, instead there is a single self-consistent timeline.
    • I think that's not the reason it failed. The universe doesn't seem to iterate but all that's required is a consistent loop. It was just an out-of-the-box solution to the problem. The correct answer was not the only message that terminated Harry's algorithm.
    • It's still possible. Voldemort KNOWS that he horcruxed the plaque, but he only THINKS that the horocruxed plaque left with Pioneer. If Harry goes back to the point in time after the horocrux, but before the launch, he could destroy or replace the plaque without changing what we KNOW of the timeline.
    • This prospect appeals because Harry could take the opportunity to improve on the plaque, either by enchanting the probe to communicate all human knowledge, or by removing the directions to Earth if he thinks that's more prudent.
• Would it be possible for Harry to just 'Accio' the Pioneer Plaque back to Earth?
  • In GOF, there was a long pause before Harry's broomstick came to him. The broomstick was stationary, and was on the same campus. Now, how long do you think it will take for Harry to both reverse the momentum of a plaque travelling at god-knows-how fast, that is in outer space.
    • In GOF Harry knew the spell for one day, was still rather weak in his magical powers and had not practiced all that much. It might be a thing which goes much faster if done by a well-trained/routined and powerful wizard
    • If I remember correctly, in canon Horcuxes couldn't be accio-ed, because there was a special spell on them. Given that Quirrelmort is at least twice as smart as canon!Voldemort, it's unlikely that he failed to do the same.
    • So? Just Accio the pioneer probe. The probe itself isn't horcruxed, the plaque attached to it is, so it should work. It all depends on how powerful Accio is. Knowing Harry, he'll eventually either try experimenting with Accio, or come up with an equally simple but completely different method of getting the plaque.
    • It doesn't matter how powerful Accio is, just have Harry politely ask the whole of the wizarding world to shout "Accio Pioneer Probe" at the same time. We know many Accios at the same time have a cumulative effect from when Harry was nearly killed by a fall when a load of people simultaneously tried to Summon him.
    • Voldemort is NOT stupid and would've realized that could happen and put the spell on the probe as well
    • Not even Voldemort would be so paranoid as to put an "anti-Accio" spell on the Voyager probe just on the off-chance that some Wizard would summon it back from deep space when the Wizarding community as a whole doesn't even know Muggles have space travel. The only Wizard who could possibly figure out that Pioneer carries a horcrux is Harry, and the only reason he has even a faint chance of figuring it out is because Quirrelmort broke one of his own "Evil Overlord" rules to brag to Harry about it.
    • The Pioneer anomaly is due to someone having tried this.
• How about a portkey?
• Could we not use a switching spell? Get a sticky substance (ball of PVA glue?), switch it with a particle directly to any side of the Pioneer plaque/probe, then accio that glue. Don't try switching directly with the probe/plaque, Voldemort would've thought of that. Or apparate into space, anywhere near the probe, use Point Me, use propulsion spells to get close enough to grab it, apparate back. We could even get a house elf to do that - they can teleport and propel, and it's said that have more powers than wizards give them credit for - send one up, tell 'em to get the plaque, en fin.
• Voldemort probably sent a piece of himself off of Earth because he was concerned about the nuclear weapons destroying the planet and all the other horcruxes anyway.
• Quirrellmort isn't stupid. Remember the Graveyard seen with Mad-Eye and Snape? I doubt he made a horcrux without thinking through all the security procedures first. The stargazing spell does no show the view from his horcrux, it shows the view from some other spacecraft. It's warded against accio and every other spell it's possible to be warded against. There's an anti-apparation jinx on the space surrounding it. And it isn't where the muggles think it is. He changed the trajectory, velocity, etc. magically and false-memory-charmed all the muggles involved. He did something to mess with our observations of it after the launch as well. He's the only one who knows where the real probe is. Even telling Harry he made the second pioneer plaque a horcrux would still be a mistake: the actual horcrux is some other part of either pioneer 10, one of the voyagers, a spacecraft launched independently and magically by Voldemort, or a third pioneer that he legimensed muggles into making and then false-memory-charmed out of existence.

The Pioneer Plaque is no longer viable as a Horcrux for Voldemort.

As has been stated, at the start of Harry's first year the thing was already 280 light-minutes away. If magic in the Potter-verse is, as apparation limits seem to suggest, Slower Than Light, then the Horcruxes ability to tether a soul to the mortal world must also be Slower Than Light. Furthermore, there could be any number of space objects to block the signal somehow, even if the Horcruxes are somehow all on a Subspace Ansible style setup.Long story short? Whatever maximum range of effectiveness the Horcruxes have, the Plaque has long since left it.

Alternatively, the Pioneer horucrux still works correctly, but after all the other horucux have been destroyed, and Voldemort is killed, his disembodied spirit is drawn to his last remaining horucrux. He will spend the next several millenia wandering in interstellar space with the pioneer probe. Arguably, Voldemort might not consider this a bad fate.

• He still might be able to return by apparition as he would only have to go one way; it even would be much easier than Harry's task to kill off the plaque. But there is a point of doubt: how does magic work and is the mean that does make it possible really given 3.13 billion miles out there? If e.g. it would depend on proximity to earth like let's say gravity, Voldemort could find himself quite squibby out there, a lot of risk if you ask me just for staying "alive".
• Uuuh.... guys? Read the caption for the main Tropes page for MoR. Removing the Conservation of Energy gives us faster-than-light signalling according to Science... so why the hell couldn't we get some kind of faster-than-light magical transport by building on that?
• I fail to see why the function of a horcrux would require some sort of "signal", faster-than-light or not. From what I understand of phylacteries and horcruxes, the devices work by creating an anchor for a person's soul to prevent it from moving on to the afterlife. When Voldemort was killed, a portion (perhaps even the majority) of his soul was still tied to the physical realm, so the last bit of his soul couldn't move on. No matter where the Pioneer horcrux is, or how far away from the rest of Voldemort's soul it is, it still anchors a portion of that soul to the physical universe. It prevents the complete death of the wizard by simply existing in the universe, not by casting some sort of spell as they die.
  • It wouldn't stop working. It would bring Voldemort back to life. It's just that then he needs some way for his soul to reach Earth. Which it won't.
    • Is it ever mentioned in canon that a soul is drawn to its Horcrux upon death? Voldemort only mentioned being blasted away from his body and settling in an Albanian forest, far away from any of his Horcruxes.
  • Your soul is NOT drawn to a Horcrux on death: Horcruxes are NOT used up. Let's look a a Dark Wizard with a Horcrux. He has split his soul in two and put one half in an object, making the Horcrux. If he is killed - hit with an Avada Kedavra for example - the soul fragment in his Horcrux is not affected. The soul fragment in his body cannot move on, i.e. cannot die, because part of it is safe. with the Dark Rituals used by Voldemort in Goblet of Fire, the soul fragment which was in the Dark Wizard's body can be reintegrated into a new body. In canon, it was Voldemort's in-body soul fragment which hung around Albania as Vapormort for a decade or so before finally resurrecting into a new body. It makes no difference whatsoever where your Horcrux is, so long as the soul fragment within is safe.
• Not so. It is the fragment he won't destroy, and it is headed for another world.

Canon!Harry would have been this smart if his aunt and uncle hadn't abused him.

Child abuse isn't good for your brain development, but canon!Harry doesn't show too many signs of it. This is because instead of starting out normal and ending up with big problems, he started out as a genius and ended up Brought Down to Normal.

• Not only child abuse, but an ignorance of his rotating sleep cycles, sleep is one of the most important things when it comes to intellectual development and absorbing knowledge, and a lack of this fundamental resource would certainly stunt intellectual ability to perform.
• Also lack of two professors for parents. canon!harry suffered in a state of close-minded neglect. MoR!Harry was taught and encouraged to learn from a very young age, that and an admiration for an auto-didactic way of life, make this theory highly possible.
• Also, canon!harry had notably bad experiences in the public school system: he was good at school, but didn't particularly like it or care because he was more worried about his cousin Dudley's bullying. At the age of eleven, he was taken out of Muggle education and to Hogwarts, where Mo R says that the highest math taught is Arithmancy, which is about at Algebra One or Two level. Coursework at Hogwarts seems to consist mainly of essays - if canon!Harry is not good at writing, for instance, then he may be unknowingly compensating for his difficulties via nurture through his brilliance via nature.

Quirrellmort isn't trying to kill Harry because he already tried it, and it didn't work. That, and he figured out that he accidentally turned Harry into a Horcrux.

• If Harry survived the Killing Curse the same way he did in canon, then Lily Potter's sacrifice would still be protecting him, just as it did at the end of the first novel. In other words, even though he thinks it's unlikely, Harry really does have a special "defeat Voldemort" power that he doesn't know about, and this Voldemort, being smart, isn't about to make the same mistake twice. Similarly, if Voldemort realized that Harry is now a Horcrux of his, he would want to keep that Horcrux intact.
• Furthermore, Voldie subscribes to the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" school of thought and is actively recruiting Harry.
• Voldemort learned from his experience at the dojo not to let his anger undermine his real goals. His real goal isn't dominance — it's immortality. (A goal which he shares, by the way, with the fic's author!) Like the author, Voldemort actively seeks to become a more rational person. His earlier attempts to do this through dominance *failed*, and he has *learned* from them ... as he did with the dojo incident.
  • What's this about Voldie undermining his goals at the dojo? As far as I can tell, he succeeded. He not only learned the martial arts he wanted to learn at the best dojo in the world, he then killed everyone else there so that he'd be the last man on earth that knew martial arts as well as he does.
    • He didn't learn any martial arts. That was the entire point of the story. Quirrell says both of those things in unmistakable black-and-white terms.
    • However, Quirrell is not a reliable narrator. In his story, he claims that he learned martial arts from the dojo, but Voldemort failed to because he killed everyone in the dojo. But if (as we're all assuming) Quirrell is Voldemort, then both parts of the story cannot be true: either Voldemort killed the Master and students (and subsequently learned from his error), or he did not kill them because he realized that his prior methods (the "Voldemort" methods, as opposed to the "Quirrell" methods) were flawed. Since Quirrell does know martial arts, the latter would seem to be most likely. In this scenario, the "Voldemort" part of the story never actually happened, because Quirrellmort realized that it would be futile.
    • Both parts of the story can be true. Voldemort, using some sort of a false identity, goes to the dojo. He attacks his sparing partner, hears what the master has to say, and does just what he tells people Harry will do. He pretends to lose, learns martial arts, and then comes back later to kill everyone except one student, who was a friend of his. This accomplishes a number of things: it lets him learn martial arts, it keeps anyone else from learning from the same school, it lets him kill everyone who he "lost" to, and it helps to give the false impression that he cannot control his temper.
    • Both parts of the story can be true another way. Quirrel learned martial arts at the dojo, and Voldemort also acted as described. This happened before Quirrelmort appeared. Quirrelmort now knows martial arts because of the Quirrel part, not the Voldemort part.
• We have no proof that Harry is even a Horcrux in MoR. There are other changes to canon though out the story as well — significant ones — and the Sorting Hat specifically said that there are no other minds in Harry's head, or the Sorting Hat would be able to talk to them. If you put the sorting Hat on Tom Riddle's Diary, the Hat probably would be able to talk to him, since a Horcrux is a portion of a person. (If Diary Tom Riddle can talk to people, it should be able to talk to the Hat.) "I can go ahead and tell you that there is definitely nothing like a ghost - mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings - in your scar. Otherwise it would be participating in this conversation, being under my brim." (chapter 10) Of course, the Sorting Hat could be wrong about that. However, I don't think it would deliberately mislead Harry about the presence of a Horcrux on his person based on it's other actions during the sorting.
  • On the other hand, Canon!Harry had no guest during his canon!sorting, and he absolutely was a horcrux. The same absence exists in both canon and MoR, so the same horcrux could be there.
    • Except that in canon A) The hat didn't check for those things, and B) the hat in MoR is completely different than the Hat in Canon. That's rather like saying MoR is proof that Quirrell was acting in The Sorcerers Stone.
  • During the prison breakout in chapter 56, Harry's "mysterious dark side" seemed suspiciously independent of the rest of his mind. To me, it's at least a strong hint that he's a Horcrux, though what that actually means in the MoR universe is still up for grabs.
    • The mysterious dark side was also absolutely terrified of death during that scene, unable to think or function until Harry comforted him. Tom Riddle was terrified of death as well. Not to mention the apparent similarity of their personalities.

The rock that Dumbledore gave Harry is actually the Philosopher's Stone.

The heavily guarded hallway is just a decoy. This Dumbledore is hiding it where nobody would think to look.

• CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!
• The "Rock" is actually a shell/protection the philosopher's stone is actually hidden inside it as a camouflage

The rock is a perfectly ordinary rock

Dumbledore wanted Harry's efforts diverted from wreaking chaos. He may have anticipated Harry's transfiguration plans, and believed that this would be an excellent exercise to improve Harry's magical prowess.

• ...and the purpose of giving it to him is so that he will learn to maintain a tranfiguration like that for a long time, later allowing him to carry a huge arsenal of muggle weapons and explosives on his finger.
  • It cannot be coincidence that the big rock Dumbledore insisted Harry carry on his person at all times eventually allowed Harry to almost casually kill the troll using nothing more than three first-year spells.
  • (Though the rock itself didn't kill the troll; the head would have regenerated - we saw that process starting. The rock trick gave Harry time to transfigure the killing acid; and partial transfiguration was the method used, which definitely isn't a first-year spell.)

The rock that Dumbledore gave Harry is in fact the Resurrection Stone

Dumbledore tells Harry it is his father's, i.e. James Potter's, rock. And the Peverell brothers were brothers. The third brother explicitly was the last to die. Most inheritance laws anywhere ever have given possessions of the deceased to relatives, especially men. Why wouldn't Deathly Hallows run in the family?

"One killing curse will bring it down!"

A critical scene in the first book is that of the trio taking down the troll in the girl's restroom. As Draco has largely supplanted Ron's role in this fic, his method for surviving such an encounter may provide an interesting twist in the future narrative. What's an Avada Kedavra amongst friends, after all? "There is a time and a place for taking your enemy alive, and inside a Hogwarts classroom is usually one of those places." If Draco leaves her be, there's no reason for Hermione to get cornered in a bathroom this time, after all...

• Inevitably, the Killing Curse will be cast through REASON and RATIONALISM.
  • Extending this: Harry will be able to cast it through reason and rationalism, but only when taken over by his dark side. We've already seen that it has the necessary priors to develop a logical proof that "anyone who annoys me needs to die", which is not something Normal!Harry is likely to decide.
• Unlikely, as Halloween has passed and Draco is no longer at Hogwarts.

The Incident with the Science Fair Project involved showing up with a nuclear bomb.

Not only would this be an appropriate pop-culture reference to allude to for a Child Prodigy, it would also actually be about twice as severe as what he inflicted upon poor Deputy Headmistress McGonagall. And Harry's crazy enough to do it.

• Or just a nuclear reactor. There actually was a teenager who literally built a nuclear reactor in his backyard by getting lots of old radioactive paint and putting it all in one place.
  • One of the more famous episodes in the history of the University of Chicago scavenger hunt was when two students built a nuclear reactor and earned both a lifetime scav ban and eternal fame. Moral: if it's on the scav list someone will show up with it.
    • Scav ban? No way! Those guys were heroes!
  • I think the story about the Teenager had him getting his radioactive material from smoke detectors. He was able to buy large numbers wholesale and extract the very small amount of material in each.
    • That would be this guy, for those who may think that is too weird to be true. Nope.
    • Point of order: Making a nuclear reactor is easy: You find a bunch of a special kind of rock, pile it up, and run water through it. When the water comes out, it's hot. You can build a nuclear reactor with stone age technology, if you don't mind contaminating the site, and with bare hands, if you don't care how long your workers live. David Hahn made his reactor out of americium disks and aluminum foil. But a nuclear weapon requires precise machining of radioactive metals under inert gas and very accurately timed explosives. If you don't already have the material, it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.
    • Actually, not so. A lens-type weapon (can be used with either plutonium or uranium, higher yield) requires precision-machined slugs and timed explosive, but a gun-type (lower yield, uranium only) can be made easily with standard machine tools, assuming you have no regard for your own life.
    • To summarize, it's plausible that Harry built a reactor, and freaked out the authorities; but it is not at all plausible that he built a nuclear weapon with then becoming imprisoned.

How Rita Skeeter was fooled

The twins told Rita that they had the scoop of a lifetime, and gave her some of the highlights of the insane theory they were peddling, then told her they had evidence to back it up but it was all highly sensitive and they'd have to obliviate her after she saw it, so she wouldn't know who they were or how they'd found the information. After being allowed to write down that plan, she agreed. The twins first asked her write down all the details before providing evidence, so she would know what the evidence was supposed to spport. After this, when they were supposed to give her evidence, they obliviated her. Rita awoke thinking she must've had one hell of a reason to write all that down so, rather than second guessing herself, she assumed she must've been shown the evidence as promised.

• It has been confirmed that false memories were involved, but these are both plausible ways for how it could have been done, if more complicated than just having _her_ False-Memory-Charmed.

Bill Weasley isn't a Peggy Sue

His delusions are actually caused by Peter Pettigrew, possible because Bill find out his secret or something similar, so Peter altered his mind to make him look crazy and faked his own death afterwards, not many people would take time to exam a rat's corpse when a family member went crazy.

• Word of God dismisses this. In the Author's Note to (IIRC, have since been deleted) Chapter 32-33, Eliezer states (quoting from memory) "for Peter Pettigrew to go into hiding, of all places, as a pet rat in an enemy wizard family would require him to be holding the Idiot Ball".
  • Alternately, Bill discovered Peter was alive somewhere else, and Peter managed to alter his mind to have Bill think he'd discovered him as Scabbers, which has the result of Bill thinking he'd killed Peter, everyone else thinking Bill is nuts, and Peter undiscovered.
• My guess is that, in this universe, when Sirius Black went after Peter Pettigrew, he succeeded in killing him before getting taken away to Azkaban. Pettigrew died in that magic explosion, and Scabbers was just an ordinary rat all along.
  • In canon, Pettigrew cast the explosion, not Sirius. There's no plausible reason for that to change in Methods.
    • Sirius did do it. In HPMOR, Pettigrew wasn't an animagus but a metamorphmagus. Sirius confunded Pettigrew into thinking he was Sirius. This lasted long enough for him to get thrown into Azkaban, where he lost his magic and ability to morph back into his own shape. The guards never believed him when he said, "I'm not Sirius!"

Bill is a Peggy Sue from a universe similar to canon

In the universe that Bill is from, the rat really was Pettigrew, so Bill isn't insane, but in this universe the rat is just a rat (and a bunch of other things are also different), so Bill looks completely insane to everyone else.

Harry Potter is Shinji Ikari

Lets go over the signs:

• Harry Potter and Shinji Ikari are around the same age.
• Harry Potter and Shinji Ikari are both exceedingly intelligent child prodigies, with a knack for Gambit Roulettes. And megalomania.
• They both try to avoid becoming megalomaniacs.
• Shinji Ikari has four internal advisers, representing orks, eldars, chaos and the empire.
• Harry Potter has four internal voices, representing Hufflepuff, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Gryffindor
• Harry Potter is popular with the girls
• Shinji Ikari has a harem
• Shinji Ikari has been responsible for critical industrial and scientific advancement in his vicinity.
• Harry Potter is trying to create critical industrial and scientific advancement in his vicinity.
• Harry Potter and Shinji Ikari are both trying to save the world by going Serial Escalation by utilizing reason as a cold steel bludgeon.
• Harry Potter has created a Legion of Chaos. It consists of young kids.
• Shinji Ikari has created an entire ork waaagh. It consists of young kids. Also? Space Marine army.

Quirrelmort is only as smart as he is because Harry's horcrux redirects some of Harry's I.Q. to Voldemort.

And this competency explains every other discrepancy in the fanfic. Except Dumbledore's silliness. That was always there.

• It doesn't solve the discrepancies of events before Harry was born. For example the horcrux choice. It does however lead to a legitimate reason for Voldemort to be stronger in areas than Harry.

Harry's father's rock is actually Harry's father.

James, either mortally wounded or otherwise doomed, transfigured himself into a rock.

• McGonagall claims this would be possible, but the transfiguration would have to be maintained and the subject would probably die after being untransfigured. Not necessarily a good idea, but not outside the abilities of James Animagus-by-Sixteen Potter.
• Dumbledore, desperately searching for "The power the dark lord knows not," can tell that James performed powerful magic on the rock and assumes that it is important. Otherwise, he knows that James is the rock, and knows that James will untransfigure at some crucial moment to save his son's life. The second would explain why no-one misses James' corpse.
• Alternatively, James can't untransform because rocks aren't conscious, and will only be put right (and then die, after a couple of days) when Harry tries to transfigure the rock into a gem.
• This theory echoes quite well with the author's view on cryonics.
• This would explain why being in the bag and thus in Harry's reach is not good enough—the point isn't that the rock will protect Harry, it's that Dumbledore was told what the rock is and between him and James they decided that on the off chance that James was conscious he should try to arrange it so that James could "watch over" Harry by being present with him as much as possible.
• Alternatively, James has a different Animagus transformation is this world: A rock. Or he has several Animagus transformations.
  • A pet rock! Harry's pet rock, the one that died! The rock at this time in the story is the pet rock future-Harry resurrects with the power of science-magic and sends back in time with a souped-up Time-Turner to help himself!
• This is unlikely. Harry has cast Finite Incantatem on the rock while it was transfigured into something else. It reverted to the form of a rock, not the form of James Potter.

Luna can see beyond the fourth wall

Think about it. She tells her father what she sees, events that are happening in a relative 'future', in other Harry Potter fanfics. Being a girl on the cusp of puberty, her sight naturally gravitates towards yaoi in her early attempts to control the ability. Her father takes her visions to be that of a Seer, and publishes them front page every time she shares one.

• The author commented that if Luna turns out to be a seer, she won't be crazy, but her father will interpret her visions in his... odd manner. The whole "Draco malfoy is pregnant" would come from something like "Light will plant a seed in the heart of the darkness"
  • That's pretty close to being confirmed. If he wanted to Joss it, he could have simply said "Luna isn't a seer".

Quirrell's master plan is to set up a recursive Horcruxing

To elaborate: Quirrell is aware that Harry is a Horcrux. He wants to somehow get Harry to use HIM as a horcrux. Then it will be logically impossible for either of them to die. So he gets eternity to enjoy torturing and/or ruling the world with the boy who lived.

• Except if a third party stabs them with a basilisk fang or the sword of Gryphindor or something...
  • Only with a basilisk fang. The sword of Gryffindor became capable of destroying horcruxes after it came into contact with the basilisk venom. And as Quirrel killed the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, something which would make no sense for Tom Riddle unless the basilisk's existence was a liability, this WMG still isn't out.

Harry is going to discover a way to mass-produce Philosopher's Stones

Being the only source of non-evil life extension in canon, the Philosopher's Stone is exactly the kind of thing that MoR!Harry would be desperate to get his hands on and then give to everyone else.

• The Philosopher's Stone works differently and is unique, but this isn't out of the picture.

Harry isn't going to be able to get the stone like in the first book

The spell that Dumbledore used, had the restriction that it should be someone that didn't want to use the Philosopher's Stone. Harry would every much like the idea of using one.

• Yes, but he doesn't want to use it for solely personal gain. He wouldn't see himself drinking Elixir, he'd see himself turning the Atlantic Ocean into Elixir. Only time will tell whether that will allow him last the enchantment though.
• The restriction was "get but not use", not "use for personal gain"

Harry's father's rock is just a rock

I can easily see James setting up a situation that would make his son carry around an ordinary rock for the rest of his life.

• Alternately, one of the trials will be solvable with an enormous rock.
  • [[spoiler: Confirmed. And Dumbledore's giving of it to Harry puts suspicion on Dumbledore for something awful.]

Why Harry and Hermione can't cast an animal Patronus, but can't tell anyone why

Dementors represent Death and its power to inspire fear, hopelessness, and despair. Animal Patronuses represent irrational faith in life after death; they are symbols of the wizard or witch's self-image of their immortal soul. (For comparison, see the Egyptian depictions of the soul as a bird.)

• Or The animal Patronus is the result of ignorance (Willful in the case of Draco, but perhaps others can do so merely by being happy-go-lucky); note how Harry teaches Draco to cast the Patronus (the hints about imagining that the dementor is the fear he experienced when he thought he might die; and to imagine the life-affirming quality of his father coming to to the rescue as the basis for the Patronus). If ignorance is the basis, then it easily explains the limitations of the animal Patronus (people still being affected by dementors while a Patronus is up) and why if the basis for the True Patronus were taught that people would be left defenseless; not everyone is ready and able to overcome ignorance. Godric Griffyndor possessed the necessary courage to take the next step, but he lacked the core idea (he did not recognize the dementor as being death).
  • Actually, Harry decides Godric likely did know Dementors were death. Unlike Harry however, Godric would never have thought of DEATH as something that could be defeated. He probably didn't tell anyone for the same reasons as Harry: doing so would take away the ability to cast Patronuses.

Rationalists don't have irrational faith, or at least don't want to have any; and they don't believe in immortal souls. Neither did grizzled war-veteran Godric Gryffindor, who'd seen too much blood: he'd seen his friends die, and killed his enemies, knowing that was the end for them. Hence, neither rationalists nor Gryffindor could cast a Patronus.

Harry's human Patronus represents his faith in humanity (hence the chapter title, "Humanism"), and specifically his faith in humanity's ability to conquer Death through reason. However, in order to explain this to someone who uses an animal Patronus, he would have to convince them that their faith in life after death is wrong — thus, taking away their ability to cast the animal Patronus.

• This troper feels that this idea was explained in the story and shouldn't be considered a guess.
  • This troper feels that, while this explanation seems prima facie correct, the portion of the theory based on life after death is incorrect. Most people who cast patronuses are not focusing on feelings that correspond to life after death let alone memories or ideas that indicate life after death. Yes, it is clearly indicated in Harry's "explanation to Draco" that conquering death is a key to the Patronus 2.0, but that is because Harry has a key component that almost everyone else lacks. He knows that Dementors are Death. And I would posit that it is far more likely that it is the ignorance of this fact that allows the animal patronus to work (while being flawed). Just how many people would, when faced with a stand in for the Grim Reaper, have the courage to tell Death to buzz off?

  • I though it could have been more like comfort vs. confidence. The comfort makes you feel better, but the confidence blocks you from feeling bad in the first place (the dementor-harming property of the light is the same as the original, just a lot stronger and more purified without the interference getting through). As to why Harry and Hermione aren't allowed to tell others about the Patronus 2.0, I always thought it was more about the dangers of incomplete knowledge escaping. Until the Hogwarts admins, Harry, and Hermione know more about Patronuses and the Patronus 2.0 (and possibly even then), the information will be suppressed to keep it out of the hands of those competent enough to use it incompetently (and probably those who are thought to be the opposition by Dumbledore).

• The animal patronus could be from simply using a memory that states that you are currently alive. The Dementor then cannot kill you until it overcomes the patronus memory. This is why the Dementor can still be felt from beyond the patronus: While you know you are alive, you don't know about anyone else. Harry and Hermione are unable to produce an animal patronus because they do not have any memory that shows they are alive: Their rationalism does not even allow them to admit their existence. However they can likewise imagine that death is an illusion which allows it to be defeated. In order for Dumbledore to cast Patronus 2.0 he would have to give up on more than hope for life after death: he would have to admit he possibly never existed at all. This could prove fatal considering life extension techniques may depend on one believing they are alive.

Lily didn't use a potion to help Petunia.

When Lily said that there wasn't a potion that could help Petunia lose weight and become more beautiful, she was pretty much on the mark. When Petunia got to the point of saying risking death was worth it... Lily brewed up a potion that was generally placebo... and applied a self-improvement Imperius.

• Harry believes he sees the signs of a powerful magic potion on her when his parents pick him up from the train station. Of course, she's told him she thinks a potion has been used on her, biasing his observations...

• Lilly DID use a potion to help putunia. That potion is, in fact, the potion of "eagle's splendour" Dumbledore referred to in her fifth year potion book. Dumbledore added a note there "I wonder what would happen if you used Thestral blood here instead of blueberries?", which is what encouraged/allowed Lilly to make Petunia better looking. As such, Dumbledore assured that Harry's step parents wouldn't be wicked, and as Petunia ended up marrying a much smarter person because of this, Harry ended up as rational as he is as a result. It's all part of Dumbledore's master plan.

Vold!Quirrell is Harry

Vold!Quirrell is actually an old Harry, who has removed the limitations on the Time Turner. He attempts to kill himself as a kid (perhaps some kind of crisis of consciousness, knowing he's failed at becoming a god/attempting to unify the Muggle and Magic worlds) to break the Stable Time Loop but fails because, well, it's stable. He's now showed up to Hogwarts at the same time as his kid self in an attempt to mentor himself and, in a kinder-gentler-subtler fashion, break the Stable Time Loop, or perhaps he realizes he must fulfill it.

Explains why he's always so dang curious about what Harry thinks about things, especially off the top of his head; relates to Harry's horror at watching himself pull Neville out of the ring of bullies.

Or, yeah, I'm seeing how time travel is so stupidly powerful that it lets you explain anything however you like. It's limited by Stable Time Loops, but barring attempting to do things the Author hasn't made up his mind on yet (P = NP) you get to do anything you want to the world. - AF802CAA

Quirrellmort is hedging his bets, both recruiting and trying to eliminate Harry.

• When Draco dropped Harry, Quirrellmort tried to kill Harry and frame Lupin. We know it was Quirrell who asked Lupin to come. As a werewolf with previous ties to Sirius Black, Lupin is vulnerable to such accusations. Quirrell cast a super-gravity spell that pulled down everyone in the area - Harry, himself, the 200 girls - everyone except Lupin. When Harry survived, Quirrell stayed on the ground until he could decide on the best course of action.
• Quirrell knew how the dementor was reaching Harry because Quirrell engineered the situation. The reason Quirrell saved Harry from the dementor was that Hermione was about to go in front of it, at which point the dementor would have revealed Quirrell's plan.
• That Quirrell is working to win Harry's trust is not exactly a wild guess. Quirrell has just received some data that indicates his plan is working: Harry protects Quirrell from threats, such as the dementor. Harry has even picked up Quirrell's characteristic gesture: in Humanism Pt. 4, we see him tap his cheek thoughtfully.

Dumbledore broke up Lily and Severus.

Lilly used to date Severus, but Dumbledore deliberately broke them up by writing helpful notes in her potions textbook.

"Lily thought her boyfriend was the one writing them and they had the most amazing fights."

• In a recent Author's notes: 'Ch. 17 has now been retconned so that Dumbledore now speaks of Lily's "friend" instead of "boyfriend", since the original was an error on my part rather than an intended departure from canon.' Thus, it appears that the author previously believed that Lily and Severus were dating, but then discovered that they were only friends, so he changed things to make them more canon-compliant. However, this DOES back up the theory.
• This is the "Terrible Secret" that Dumbledore shares with Harry as a show of confidence (even if Harry doesn't understand it at the time). Even if Lily and Severus were just friends, sowing discord between them was a horribly nasty thing for him to do. Dumbledore probably had his reasons, but they would have to be REALLY good reasons to even begin to justify his actions.
  • He did have a really good reason. That one act allowed him to defeat Voldemort and save the world. By breaking Snape up with Lilly, Snape finally went off and joined the death eaters. This caused him to bring the prophesy to Voldemort, which caused Voldemort to target Potter, which caused him to be destroyed. And Dumbledore got Snape back on his side anyway, as Voldemort ended up killing Lilly, just as Dumbledore knew he would. At the same time, he ensured that Lilly ended up helping petunia with the "potion of eagle's splendour", thus ensuring that Harry would have a much better upbringing, so that Harry (who is actually Voldemort) ends up as a good guy. He really is a magnificent bastard.

The "hint" in chapter 45 is...

Harry can't hear dementors

• Although, since he can’t see them either (the fic claims directly that his brain “refuses to be mislead by their illusion”), this might be just “natural”.

the "important task" McGonagall got called away from

• Conservation of detail would suggest that’s a hint, but since it doesn’t seem related to anything else it might be just a future reference.
  • Guarding the Philosopher's Stone, I'd bet. Along with Snape, who (Quirrell mentions later) cancelled all his classes for the day. Dumbledore thought that was the real plot the Dementor was supposed to distract security from.
  • (Same as previous troper, you know how it is when you write something and think of new implications five minutes later) ...Dumbledore (ch. 40) "And I do believe I know what it might be a distraction from, if Professor Quirrell means ill... thank you, Harry." How much more does Dumbledore know about Quirrell than he's let on?

How come the Dementor knows and singles out Quirell for hunting him?

• The obvious thing would be “punishment” for trying to escape death, but it really sounds as if they had met before. If the Dementor is just borrowing memories and processing ability from the viewers’ brains, it might mean that it’s not necessarily this same Dementor, but Quirrell would have met one and annoyed it. So how exactly did Quirellmort meet a Dementor, and annoyed it, and survived, without apparently being able to cast a Patronus (and with most Slytherins in the same situation)? Is his line about the attempts to destroy Dementors a personal history hint or just informative?
  • If Quirrell encountered a Dementor in the past, he probably just did what he told his students to do in his "One Killing Curse will bring it down!" rant at the start of his first lesson (ch. 16). "You just Apparate away!"

What happened to Fawkes?

• The bird launched itself at a Dementor and poofed. No one remarks on it. What happened to Fawkes? Additionally, Dumbledore is shocked that Harry can hear Fawkes. (If phoenixes are immortal, perhaps they are created by tearing something out of the world? The phoenix is undying and the Dementor is the wound they leave behind? Note that if this is the case, you may have to chuck a phoenix at any Dementor before Harry could do his thing.)
• It was made pretty clear in the story the Fawkes told Harry to take another stab at casting a Patronus for the sake of not letting the Dementor get away with that crap. Since Phoenices cannot talk, Fawkes stooped at the Dementor to indicate "attacking." Then...it poofed back to Dumbledore's office. We know nothing bad happened since Fawkes is seen again later in Azkaban. Thus, YOU CAN BE QUITE SURE that it is the One True Patronus that killed the Dementor and could do so again at any time.

Quirrelmort is intelligent not because of some complex Peggy Sue or leeching of IQ...

But because like pretty much everyone else he was upgraded significantly. This isn't a for-want-of-a-nail fic, this is a fullblown AU. Harry is not the only character changed from Canon, and it clearly does not all originate from harry himself. If Voldemort was as incompetent as Rowling wrote him, then Improved!Dumbledor would've beaten him the first time around, and if not, Harry would've already defeated him. Similarly, this is why many other parts of The Sorcerers Stone are no longer applicable: they're incredibly stupid and don't fit with the message, theme, or modified characters of MoR.

---

The "quote" right before chapter 1 is about...

• I can’t believe I didn’t think about it before; all the hints about hints in the author’s notes attracted attention finally. The other chapter-quotes seem well related to their chapter, but that one is a bit cryptic. Might it be a hint to the point-of-departure of the fic? A hint about the future story? What’s the tiny silver fragment? An assassin’s blade would work, but daggers don’t quite spill liters of blood. And whose blood spills? (Wizards don’t spill that much blood usually.) Who screams what? (It’s after the spill, so it’s not the spell that caused it.) Could it be when Voldemort spills the unicorn’s blood to reincarnate? (I can’t remember from canon when that happened, but IIRC it would have been around the time Harry started going to Hogwarts.) And why is it so important to hide it so in plain view?

• The silver fragment is the buckyball transfiguration.
  • I read this and thought "Now that's just silly". Then I reread the opening, and it really does fit the description of someone running or flying into a nanowire and being sliced through. You'd scream after the blood, having not felt the cut itself.
  • Confirmed.

Voldemort is a Dark General.

Thus handily explaining Harry's dark side: his Yamiko got awakened and re-fused with him as part of some plan to make him more sympathetic to Voldemort. This also explains why he did something stupid like massacring the only dojo teaching the martial art he wanted to learn: being Yamiko, he has very limited self-control at best and being refused pushed it to its limit.

The difference divergence points and it's consequences

Just wanted to group the general know points where this universe is diferent from Canon, or at least inferred to be different. And speculate how it got this way.

Most witches are Yaoi Fan Girls

Cause: Unknown/Unexplained

• One possibility is that this is caused by Magical Britain being more tolerant of homosexuality than Muggle Britain.

Consequences: Dumbledore has less reasons to keep his crush on Grindewald a secret, but it is possible that it is a recent trend.

• Gellert being a man is no longer a problem. Gellert being Gellert still is.

Narcissa died, Dumbledore claims to be the killer.

Consequences: This might be the reason why Lucius is a more caring father. It is a point agaisnt Harry trusting dumbledore

The reason everyone is so much smarter in this fanfic than they are in canon is that their ancestors were all exposed to the Wold Newton meteorite from Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton family stories

It would handily reduce the points of divergence to one without contradicting anything.

Harry Potter is in fact Doctor Horrible

Doctor Horrible: The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.

Rational!Harry: I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organized.

Close enough, don't you think?

Quirrelmort's consciousness is at the Pioneer probe when he's in zombie-mode.

If horcruxing in this fic lets you transfer your consciousness between the host entities that are horcruxes, Quirrelmort's zombie phases are explainable by his consciousness mostly being elsewhere (either leaving a residual amount moving the body, or handing the body back to whatever vestige of its original mind is left). Quirrelmort seems to very much enjoy the view from the Pioneer probe, so that's arguably where he spends most of his off-hours (explaining the frequent zombie-quirrel periods).

If that was true, why would he let people see him that way? Better do 'zombie out' in private.

• And risk getting caught once then forever being paid attention to? No, it's better this way: It's just what Quirrell does, and it can't be anything implicating or he'd have done it hidden.

• Also, Quirrelmort might not just be going to the Pioneer probe—he could be checking up on all his horcruxes. He's only just shown Harry the stars since that view is the best and to protect the existence of all the other horcruxes.

Quirrelmort encourages Harry's occlumency lessons because it would invalidate testimony from Harry.

Testimony under veritaserum is invalid if the person testifying is an occlumens. It's considerably safer for Quirrelmort to give Harry potentially incriminating information if he knows that Harry would be unable to testify usefully about it.

• This is almost certainly at least one of Quirrel's motives—or at least, a favorable side effect. Harry's musing about Quirrel 'using' him in a way that makes him stronger seems to apply.

Dumbledore wasn't fooled by Harry's false wisdom, but was playing him for his own purposes.

Per the author's notes, nobody in this fic ever holds the idiot ball. Dumbledore has demonstrated that he is skilled at spotting manipulation, skilled at performing manipulation, and capable of holding his own while playing the Game with experienced Slytherins. Therefore, in the discussion with Harry about death and the afterlife, Dumbledore didn't buy Harry's pattern-matched platitude wisdom, but pretended to do so for his own reasons (steering Harry's perception of him, steering the conversation, or some other reason entirely).

• Agreed. Further evidence: After Harry destroys the dementor, he says: "I've just this instant realized that explaining would be an incredibly bad idea until you work some things out on your own." Dumbledore replies, "Is that the truth, Harry? Or are you just pretending to be wise -" before Quirrel interrupts. But what is Dumbledore's motive for this, I wonder?
  • Dumbledore is worried about the True Patronus because he noted its excellent jailbreaking property, and is fishing for more information about it. The confusion is due to Dumbledore's confusion between treating Harry as a student, whom he would certainly attempt to force more information from, or as a fellow powerful wizard due the assumption that they know what information is dangerous to share, as Quirrel is implicitly forcing in this scene.

Lucius Malfoy really was (at least initially) imperiused into joining the Death Eaters.

Lucius is really the sort of person who benefits from a corrupt government, since he knows how to manipulate the levers of power.

Bellatrix Black is a horcrux.

For Harry to undertake the Azkaban trip is understandable: it's already been established that he thinks it's a ridiculously inhumane institution, he's heard an argument from someone he trusts that an innocent (by some definitions) person is imprisoned there, he's had a person he trusts assure him that the rescue mission will very likely succeed, and he's idealistic enough to believe that the whole undertaking is worthwhile.

Quirrell, on the other hand, is neither idealistic nor altruistic. His scheme relied on someone he knew to be erratic (Harry), and he'd have known how badly it could go wrong (probably several ways in which it could do so). Quirrelmort wants to live forever, so taking this kind of risk would require a very strong reason to do so. Quirrell doesn't seem the type to care about Bellatrix's alleged domination, especially if Quirrell is indeed Voldemort (the one who imposed it in the first place). Therefore his motivation is something that hasn't been explicitly mentioned but that's overwhelmingly important to him (important enough to go on this hare-brained trip the instant he had access to someone whose patronus made it feasible, rather than waiting a couple of decades for Harry to gain more self-control).

The risk makes sense if Bellatrix was a Voldemort horcrux. If he still retains a link to her while she's stuck in Azkaban, it explains why Quirrell displays many of the personality traits Harry did when partly-Demented, and why he's especially vulnerable to Dementors (he's already under constant exposure through the quiescent link; direct exposure makes it far worse). As a horcrux, she can't easily be killed (and he likely wouldn't want to, as she'd contain a part of his mind-state even if it was inactive). Rescuing her becomes the preferred, and urgent, option.

• "Bellatrix had once been, the most promising witch of her own generation, before the Dark Lord stole her and broke her, shattered her and reshaped her, binding her to him on a deeper level and with darker arts than any Imperius." -Ch. 52

Binding his soul to the person of the most powerful sorceress of the generation? That seems more secure than putting it in a damn cup.

• Combine this with the 'Horcrux for each element' theory: Bellatrix is Death, Potter is new Life, Ravenclaw is Knowledge, the Basilisk is Destruction. What other elements could characters represent?

• If Bellatrix were a horcrux, wouldn't the dementors have sucked the soul-piece out of her?
  • Only if A) Bellatrix was executed by Kiss and B) dementors really do suck out souls, which we're still not sure of. The fact that Harry is wrong about souls does not mean that everything he does not believe is necessarily true.

Bellatrix will be used in the restoration ritual from Goblet of Fire

Probably why Voldemort wanted her so badly, plus she was his most powerful warrior.

• Cookie for you. This is Dumbledore's theory as well.

Quirrell was Voldemort's "seduction victim"

In Chapter 61, Dumbledore describes three ways Voldemort could return to life:

Dumbledore: Voldemort's final avenue is to seduce a victim and drain the life from them over a long period; in which case Voldemort would be weak compared to his former power.

If Professor Quirrell, before the start of the story, had been "seduced" by Voldemort and is now in the process of having his life drained, that would explain the episodes of zombie-like behavior and perhaps some other facts about his apparent possession by Voldemort. Having only a fraction of his former power would also explain why Quirrellmort wouldn't want to simply reveal himself openly and step back into the role of Dark Lord.

• This isn't a WMG, it's the plot of Philosopher's Stone. The differences in Quirrell's possession are explained as increasing the challenge to deal with MoR Potter's increased abilities. There was an omake entry in one of the early chapters that pointed out how banal the first book would be with a rationalist Harry and a canonical Quirrellmort.

The Pioneer anomaly...

...was caused by the Quirrell's spell.

• The author confirmed that this was his plan before it stopped being an anomoly.

Sybill Trelawney isn't a fraud

• The author has stated that no character is allowed to carry the Idiot Ball, so one or more of the following will happen:
  • Sybill is a true seer who sees the future and remembers her visions. She and Dumbledore use this knowlege to prepare for it.
  • Sybill is prescient rather than a seer: she can only see the future insofar as people have made certain decisions in the present and she can see how those decisions will probably affect the future.
  • Sybill's antics about pretending to predict the future in tea leaves is just a test to see how the students react.
    • Alternately, she genuinely can see the future, but has been driven to the brink of insanity by it and now has great difficulty distinguishing the genuine prophesies from her own paranoid imagination.
    • Alternately, she is capable of actual visions, but believes that they are caused/based on what she taughts, there even might be a possibility that it will be used to show how many people can be decieved by they own "methods" but still find the right answer.
  • The class that she teaches is mostly concerned with the more useful aspects of Divination, i.e. Scrying distant locations in the present or the past.
    • The term Idiot Ball refers to a character's stupidity fueling a story line, especially if that stupidity is out of character or could be cleared up by a single question. A character who is simply incompetent all the time isn't necessarily holding the idiot ball.

Gilderoy Lockhart isn't a fraud

• Since no one is allowed to carry the idiot ball, one or more of the following will be true:
  • He doesn't enter the story at all (boring, but possible).
  • He's competent and popular, but not overly conceited (boring, but possible).
  • He's is still vain and tends to overrate his own abilities, but he does have a few genuine accomplishments to back it up.
    • Alternately, he's just as good as he thinks he is, he's just an Insufferable Genius.
  • He pretends to be an incompetent fop so that his enemies will underestimate him.
  • He has a shrewd eye for public opinion and teaches Harry some valuable lessons on how to use fame to accomplish goals.
    • A character who is always an idiot isn't carrying the idiot ball, he's just an idiot. This would be boring to write, though, so I doubt it will happen in the story.

Gilderoy Lockheart is a fraud...

• ... and within ten minutes of his first class, Harry will have demonstrated this unarguably, trussed him up like a pinata, and started leading the class on the path to killing Dementors.

Harry's Superpowered Evil Side is Voldermort's "Darkness"

Quirrellmort knows that Harry holds a piece of his soul when Harry tells him about his dark side, and he has correctly assumed that it's mostly the part that held the madness from all of his dark rituals and that's what makes Quirrellmort's goals change/take a different approach than Voldemort's.

"Vague Future Speculation for when MoR resumes"

Harry Potter will point out the "obvious reason" (at least to a muggle with sense) to Nymphadora Tonks why she (or any other competent metamorphomagus) can nearly instantly heal (not unlike a troll) just about any wound she receives in combat making her a very dangerous individual. This does not let her violate conservation of mass though... So at some point Tonks will receive grievous injury rendering her into a midget.

• Jossed in the second chapter when Harry has his epic freakout when McGonagall turns into a cat. Both canon! and rational!Harry Potter universes trample all over Conservation of Energy rule, what with Conjuration, Transfiguration, Growth Charms, Vanishing spells, Polyjuice... the list goes on. We even know Metamorphmagi aren't bound by Co E, because Tonks shifts into Susan Bones who would be far shorter than her.

If the marauder's map exists (and is indeed something that students can create), then there is no reason to think that Hogwarts is not equipped with identity verifying aspects to its wards. This means that Quirrelmort has figured out a fairly powerful and comprehensive method for spoofing identity verifying spells and effects; this being almost certainly related to occlumency and the ability to "exist" as anyone Quirrelmort chooses "to be."

Muggle Electronics are not actually sensitive to magic in general; they merely react negatively when exposed to free transfiguration (the same way living creatures do), and this has been generalized in the wizarding world to become a mass prohibition on the use of magic around electronics.

Combining the previous two ideas: Harry will meet or become the first Magical Hacker in the world (only thing better than being a quantum hacker is being able to hack things at the level beyond quantum). Using free transfiguration on electrical components to make them open state or clear their memory; and leaving behind only corrupted sectors would make for a ghost of a hacker the likes of which the muggle world has never even dreamed about.

Voldemort is hiding in Quirell's wand

This explains why Harry's sense of doom decreases when Quirell snakifies (his wand is now merged with him, and no longer in Harry's immediate presence). It also explains why he throws away his wand when the killing curse and patronus interfere.

There are at least two Patroni 2.0

.The normal one is powered by forcing oneself to think about something other than death, and thus holds Death at bay.

Harry's is based on the absolute rejection of death as a part of the natural order, and thus is able to kill Death.

Dumbledore, though, actually thinks of death as a part of nature, and does not fear it. Since he accepts death, and does not force himself to think of anything else, that could itself easily lead to an alternate version that controls Death.

• This troper feels that this is unlikely; the story mentions that the reason why Dumbledore's patronus is so effective is because the patronus is normally powered by ignorance (give death no heed by focusing on happy memory and thus the Dementor is not able to utilize your faculties to achieve the semi-sentience that it does; remember that Harry commands the dementors away in Azkaban because after putting Belatrix down, whose expectations were initially stronger that they would hunt her, has a sufficiently strong expectation that they would leave) and he has been exposed to dementors so many times that the dementation effect has completely eradicated his (what would otherwise be natural) fear of death.

---

Voldemort didn't learn to make Horcruxes from a book.

• Yudkowsky has made a big deal about "The Interdict of Merlin," but we now have two conflicting pieces of information:
  • Harry from chapter 23: "[It] stops anyone from getting knowledge of powerful spells out of books, even if you find and read a powerful wizard's notes they won't make sense to you, it has to go from one living mind to another."
  • Dumbledore from chapter 39: "Voldemort stole the book from which he gleaned his secret; it was not there when I went to look for it."
• So either:
  • Voldemort learned the spell from a living wizard. (Or perchance Slytherin's monster?)
    • ** Yes, the basilisk. This was how Slytherin got around the interdict, and the whole point of the basilisk in the first place.
  • Voldemort didn't create a horcrux (Possible if Quirrel isn't really Voldemort).
• Alternatively: Roger Bacon's diary contains a secret which allows one to learn how to make a horcrux on one's own
  • It was given to Harry by Quirrellmort, admittedly stolen from the private collection of someone who supposedly only used it to impress his friends (noted in this wmg as sarcasm)
  • In chapter 39 Dumbledore specifies "the book from which he *gleaned* this secret"
  • After Harry invents the Patronus 2.0 he is led to believe that with spells powerful enough to deal in The Interdict of Merlin, while their secrets cannot be spoken, one may leave clues towards how to discover them ala his letter to Hermione

Quirrelmort is the only one able to cast the "Star Light" spell

The view from the spell is of space with no major objects impeeding it is. no Sun, no planets. Since the Pioneer probe is a Horcruxe and at the time of the story in remote space with no major objects within range then its logical to assume that the view of the "Star Light" spell is of what the HorcruxePioneer probe can "see". The unfortunate implication would be that Harry will never be able to learn the spell.

• Merging this guess with another one above, maybe Quirrel regularly and consciously moves his mind to the probe when he has to wait for something, using star watching as a time killer. This would be consistent with his fascination for stars, the Horcruxed probe, the zombie mode AND the times when he is zombified (before classes start, for example, which can be boring). The Star Light spell could be just a spell to show other people what is around you. This may be too escapist for his character, though.
  • Maybe, but perhaps he is checking on the location of his Horcrux. It's wouldn't do to put a Horcrux where someone can't get to it just for it to fall into a star (probably as hot as Fiendfyre) or a black hole.

The following Quibbler articles are misinterpreted visions

• The author said that Luna might be a seer. His example is: "Draco malfoy is pregnant" comes from something like "Light will plant a seed in the heart of the darkness"
• "Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew were secretly the same person": The Sirius Black in Azkaban is actually Peter Pettigrew.
  • And the real Sirius Black is running around in Pettigrew's rat-shaped body in Britain.
• "Harry Potter is secretly sixty-five years old.": Voldemort is exactly 65 years old at the time of the article. Either Harry is a Horcrux, or there's an even closer connection between the two of them.
• "Harry is betrothed to Hermione Granger, Bellatrix Black, Luna Lovegood, and Draco Malfoy." It's not actually betrothal (probably), but Harry IS very closely tied to each one of them.
  • As of chapter 81 Hermione swore service to the house of Potter. It is possible that Luna or her father misinterpreted this as betrothal and at some point in the future all four of these characters will have allied themselves to the Most Ancient and Noble House of Potter.
    • One of Harry's imaginary personalities did in fact comment, right before he decided to go through with that, that it was irrational to be willing to get oneself killed eradicating Dementors to keep one girl out of Azkaban and at the same time not being willing to get married to accomplish the exact same thing.

There will be a plot-significant Malfoy-Nott friendship.

Check out the parallels in chapter 67: Daphne duels Neville while planning to start a Romance with him, Hermione duels her best friend Harry, and Nott duels Malfoy. According to Word of Rowling, Malfoy respects Nott as equally noble and slightly cleverer—similar to how he thinks of Potter in Mo R. Nott might be Malfoy's pick to initiate into the Bayesian Conspiracy and start reforming Slytherin House.

The entire wizarding war was just a setup by Voldemort to take over the world in the body of Harry Potter.

Whether or not Quirrel is Voldemort, it seems clear that Quirrel (or maybe Q's wand) and Harry share some "essence". It seems unlikely that Quirrel is a Peggy Sue of future Harry (if so, where does Harry's dark side come from, and what disaster is he going back to avert? Fails Occam's razor). Therefore, the best theory is that both Quirrel and Harry's dark side are (fragments of) Voldemort.

It is clear that Quirrel himself is aware of the "doom" involved in physically or magically touching Harry, and Q hasn't shown any curiosity about that effect, so we can imagine that Quirrel has a (probably correct) theory about the cause.

If Quirrel is Voldemort, he is already extremely powerful and engaged in the real world, and his drooling/pass-out Quirrel periods seem to be a manageable nuisance. So he is probably angling for something more than simple reincarnation.

The wizard war seems to contain many idiot balls. Rather than just excusing these as being grandfathered in from canon, we could wonder if there's a deeper plot. Who benefits? The people who got hero status. Specifically, Harry Potter, or anyone who is believed by the wizarding world to be Harry Potter. (Also Dumbledore, but it seems clear that Dumbledore and Quirrel are enemies.)

So if Voldemort could use the horcrux to move from Quirrel's body to Harry's, that would explain a lot.

Not everything, though. For instance, why does Quirrel apparently care about Harry's education (unless he expects the "Harry" personality to survive as a subordinate, which would create a whole series of problems)? I guess that Voldemort might just want someone to optimize the world, and trust Harry to do a good job - but that also seems very out of character. So there are still problems with this theory, but since I've just found this page, I thought I'd put the out there.

Rescuing Bellatrix will turn out to be a giant mistake

because she's *evil*. Very evil. How she got that way doesn't matter. (Or so Less Wrong believes)

If wizarding society had the ability to make people nonevil by mind magic they would use it instead of Azkaban. It's never actually said that the origins of her psychosis will make it any easier to treat.

Quirell doubtless has a plan to protect himself from her, and likely to protect Harry, but not to protect the general public, because he doesn't value them.

Harry will become an animagius of an immortal creature

Harry will eventually decide to become an animagus but will rationally choose one with specific advantages. The animagus he chooses might be an immortal animal (like the basilisk) or it could be a future evolution of humanity to further increase his intelligence and power. He might have to be careful when explaining his reasoning to others since an evil rationalist wizard could animagus himself into Cthulhu.

• In canon, an animagus does not choose their form, it simply emerges based on their personality traits. So, I think a basilisk seems unlikely... That doesn't mean Harry couldn't be a Phoenix though.

Dumbledore delayed fighting Grindelwald because Grindelwald would have stopped Hitler

What better proof could there be that muggles were unworthy to rule themselves than the election of Adolf Hitler? Fanon usually holds that Hitler was Grindelwald's pawn, but here Dumbledore says Voldemort's atrocities were worse than Grindelwald's, and they certainly aren't on Hitler's scale. Once the allies took out Hitler without Grindelwald, and Grindelwald kept killing, Dumbledore knew he had to stop him.

• [[spoiler:Dumbledore said he waited because Grindelwald's muggle minions had stopped giving him blood offerings, and the offerings were making Grindelwald invincible, Dumbledore couldn't have defeated him before that. But, following the idea that this war paralleled WW2

(i.e. Grindelwald stopping Hitler)than the blood sacrifices could have been the victims of the war or more sinister, the Holocaust victims, either way that would mean that Grindelwald had Nazis as his minions, which invalidates the stopping Hitler Idea.]] Thus the Allies and/or wizards working in secret on their side are ultimately responsible for Grindelwald's defeat, if Dumbledore wasn't lying.

Harry will devise a standard metric unit of magic, for quantitative analysis purposes

We know that magic interferes with electricity - using this, it would be easy to devise a unit of magic defined as "the amount of magic it takes to disrupt a 1-volt circuit at a distance of one-meter". The "Merlin", perhaps.

• This troper feels that this is unlikely. If the use of magic on an object interfered with the transmission of electricity in general, then it would result in self-transfiguration or similar body alteration rendering the person paralyzed, comatose, or perhaps just completely numb; if only temporarily. And without some specific reason to distinguish electronic components from everything which magic can effect without compromising its integrity there is no reason to suspect that this will be the case in Mo R. The world of Mo R that is being constructed is using as little fiat and rules inconsistency as possible. It is possible that whatever cosmic machinery governing magic interferes with electrical components, but with no historical precedent (i.e. ancient wizards having electronics and desiring to prevent its spread) you would need a specific law of physics that applied only to electrical components that magic interfered with in order to posit that magic interrupted electricity.
  • Small problem with your self-transfiguration theory. Neural impulses are chemical in nature. It might end up being the same effect, but the difference in origin keeps something that disrupts one process from disrupting the other. Thus, people in this world can use magic without disrupting the workings of their bodies.
    • Neural impulses are electrical in nature. Neurons do communicate with each other using chemical neurotransmitter, but the action potentials that run from dendrite to axon terminal and trigger the release of said neurotransmitters are electrical.
    • Magic stops muggle technology from working when in large quantities, excepting mechanically based technology such as clocks, such as Harry's watch and Minerva's grandfather clock. Whether it is the electricity in muggle tech that makes it vunerable or not, iffy considering the battery and jumper cables that harry used in the first Quirrel battle, though it may have been shielded in the pocket dimension of the moke pouch, Harry will discover what the true reason is and how to prevent it, and or how to cause the inverse, muggle tech that interferes with magic.
    • It's been observed that the quantity of magic does affect the extent of electrical interference (i.e Hogwarts greatly interferes with electricity, yet individual wizards can still use electronics); while the variables might be rather messy, it would still make a good starting point for quantifying magic, assuming the phenomenon is observable in reasonable quantities of magic and electricity. Honestly, I'm surprised Harry hasn't attempted something along these lines yet.
    • After the escape from Askaban, they are working on developing a jinx that will prevent "Opposite reaction" from working around Azkaban. This may imply that there is already many anti-tech jinxs in effect to disrupt various technologies around Hogwarts, and that magic does not innately effect any technology.

The point of divergence from canon is the Words Of Power And Madness being lost.

The Words Of Power And Madness ("Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!") cause the listeners to have a contagious Genre Blind and science/rationality blind affliction. Though the affliction is still quite common in MOR!verse, it's much weaker and effects less people to a lesser extent, because the words themselves cannot be repeated ever again.

Quirrel is a self-made orphan.

"It was long ago, and I resolved my parental issues to my own satisfaction." (Chapter 20)

"Go home, and enjoy your time with your families, or what's left of them, while they still live. My own family is long since dead at the Dark Lord's hand. I shall see you all when classes resume." (Chapter 34)

The button Quirrell threw Hermione does something.

• Instead of playing the voices of the eight girls saying what they'd normally say, it will be a message from Quirrell, or a direct-to-Quirrell communicator, or that's what it would have done if she'd been 'worthy' of his tutelage.
• It's a tracker.
  • Might have signaled the troll where to find her alone.
• It's a pipebomb.
• It's an insidious mind-control device.
• It's a decoy.
  "Look, a decoy!"
• It's a portkey!
  Moody had once seen an addicted Dark Wizard go to ridiculous lengths to get a victim to lay hands on a certain exact portkey, instead of just having someone toss the target a trapped Knut on their next visit to town; (Chapter 63)
• It's support for her cause, it has some spell on it that will trigger when her hero-ing gets her in serious trouble.

Hermione is the enemy Voldemort will use in his resurrection...

See above re: button as portkey. It's not clear that Harry is Quirrellmort's enemy in this continuity, and the plot is making an awfully big point about Hermione being a hero for good in her own right, not merely a sidekick. It would make sense to use her blood for the resurrection, along with Bellatrix's flesh, to get the best possible combination of resurrection ingredients.

• Hermione is not Voldemort's enemy, she is no one's enemy, except the hogwarts bullies, and they may have given up. She will have to do something specifically and drastically against Voldemort himself to qualify.
• It would make little sense for him to use Harry, anyway. What did Harry ever do to him? He was a toddler who happened to be shielded magically. He doesn't hate Voldemort; in fact, he doesn't even believe the guy lives anymore. And he unknowingly chose Voldie to be his mentor. That doesn't exactly scream "enemy". He should use the blood of Dumbledore if he wants his ritual to have any potency.
• It's unclear whose blood is ultimately used in the ritual, or even if the whole ritual is used.

Something really bad will happen to the students at Hogwarts, most likely involving Harry, and possibly involving Quirrel and Trelawny's Prophecy we only heard a part of.

"Everyone knows that nothing really bad ever happens to students in Hogwarts." This phrase or a variation thereof has been uttered by three different characters so far. If that's not Tempting Fate and Foreshadowing then I don't know what is.

Quirrel's willingness to bring Bellatrix into the open, putting innocent bystanders, Aurors and Harry in danger, just for the sake of a political scheme convinces me further of this. (Unless that was a Secret Test of Character for Harry, because it sounded too much like the Idiot Ball for him to actually carry it out after all the difficulties in breaking Bella out of Azkaban, and the possibility that he might use her in the Resurrection Ritual.)

The Dementor's Kiss is just ordinary death.

The Dementor's Kiss is said to destroy a person's soul. Souls are not observable in MoR, and there is no observable afterlife (if there is one, nobody has ever looked into it or received communications from it). Thus, there's no way to tell the difference between somebody's soul being destroyed and the person simply dying. Since a Dementor is just a bit of self-propelled death, it makes sense that the thing that a Dementor does to someone is simply the thing that happens when they die.

• According to the Harry Potter Wiki, a person that suffers the Dementor's Kiss appears to be in a Persistent Vegetative State. So, well, if you discount the whole thing about souls, the Dementor's Kiss would indeed be something very much like ordinary death: the killing of somebody's mind while leaving the rest of the body intact. ("The rest of the body", in this case, would also include the parts of the brain responsible for breathing and other automatic functions.)

• Harry's theory is that both are correct. The Dementor's Kiss is just ordinary death, and it's perfectly ordinary for death to result in Cessation of Existence.

The Marauder's Map malfunctions are due to Time Turners and Voldemort.

• Fred and George believe that the map is actually part of the security system of Hogwarts.
• The Marauder's Map is noted to have two malfunctions by Fred and George in Chapter 25. One is intermittent, the other doesn't change. The intermittent one could be the fact that Harry shows up in multiple places at once when using his Time Turner. However, other Time Turner users would do the same, and we know Dumbledore and Millicent both have one as well.
• The other malfunction could be that Quirrell shows up as both himself and Tom Riddle. Or, since the Map may have been created by Salazar, Voldemort may know some means of confusing or blinding the map.
  • Wasn't the Marauder's Map created by the Marauders? Maybe I missed something in Mo R, but in canon, we certainly know that the drawing is Lupin's work. (I'm with you on Tom Riddle showing up on the map, though.)
  • Perhaps the map never shows a name for Quirrell, if it truly does work with Hogwart's security. Dumbledore stated that he'd identified Quirrell to the Hogwarts wards as simply "the Defense Professor". So that might be how he's labeled on the map. On the other hand, Dumbledore didn't know that Moody wasn't Moody in canon, but the map did....

• Alternatively, the Time Turners wouldn't cause a 'malfunction', since they're a known commoditiy, several people have them. However, The Invisibility Cloak (note important capital letters) could certainly cause a malfunction in that Harry Potter occasionally just drops off the map entirely for no discernable reason.

The lack of Voldemort's face on the back of Quirrel's head is because Voldmemort is always off in space

by himself.

• Quirrel is only balding because the possesion hasn't had a full amount of time to take effect as Voldemort's spirit spends most of its time inside his special Horcrux, and Quirrel's alternating periods of a zombie state and a lucid state are explained by his soul being destroyed by a Dementor's kiss to more fully prepare him as a vessel for Voldemort, whose possesion acts as Quirrel's lucid state.

Sirius is inside of Hogwarts, or has some way of seeing inside it, and is aware of most of what goes on inside it.

This is in accordance with a couple other WMGs. After Peter Pettigrew betrayed the Potters, Sirius Black went after him, and then was framed for the crimes Peter actually committed. However, James had given Sirius the Cloak of Invisibility before he died, and Sirius was able to use this to make a Clever Plan to switch him and Peter's positions; Peter ended up in Azkaban with the Wizengamot being convinced that he's Sirius (hence "I'm not serious...") and Sirius walked somewhat free. He then told Dumbledore everything that had happened, and Dumbledore helped set up Sirius in 12 Grimmauld Place. Later, when Harry started at Hogwarts, Sirius came back and is hiding somewhere in the castle or the grounds, under Dumbledore's protection, probably as the big black dog. Sirius was then able to pass along the Invisibility Cloak to Harry as Santa Claus, and then also gave Harry the card Portkey that takes the user to somewhere in London (according to Quirrel.) Also, James' Rock is some kind of surveillance device that allows Sirius to keep tabs on Harry. As well as this, Sirius is the one who sent Hermione the note in Chapter 72; he overheard Harry and Hermione talking about the bullies because the Rock was with Harry.

• Oh, and for the sake of completeness, he probably has something to do with Mr. Hat And Cloak; perhaps James was known as this because of the Invisibility Cloak, and he is now taking on his name.
• I expect Sirius is at large like the original troper says, but it's not clear he's friends with Dumbledore. As Santa Claus, he tells Harry not to trust Dumbledore with the Cloak. Repeatedly. Honestly, if he's innocent, Sirius has not been exonerated in anyone's mind—he didn't even tell Lupin, his homeboy—and Sirius may suspect Dumbledore's plotting had something to do with James and Lily dying. James' Rock is doubtful to have anything to do with Sirius due to the amount of information he would have on Harry... which doesn't come across in his letters as Santa Claus (he thinks Dumbledore still doesn't know about the Invisibility Cloak). He's also the most likely candidate for the "intermittent" problem with the Marauder's Map due to his occasional trips into Hogwarts as Santa Claus.

Harry can't become an animagus.

His "inner animal" is simply a human being, making the process redundant. He'd wibble a bit and look the same.

• I disagree with that. Patronuses and Animagi are two different things. Patronuses reveal your "inner animal" but a wizard becoming an animagus can assume any form during the preparations. You choose what form you want to transform into, it's just that most if not all of the characters who become animagi have some kind of Meaningful Name thing going on, except for "Meaningful Form." Therefore, if Harry wanted to become a snake he easily could, even though that's not necessarily a reflection of his personality.
  • If Harry can choose what animal to become, he'll be as munchkiny as possible. Does God count as an animal?
  • Patronuses quite don't reveal your inner animal, just whatever animate being has the most meaning for you. At least, in Rowling canon. That's why Tonk's Patronus changed from whatever it was before into Lupin's werewolf form. They can also, at least in Rowling's canon, take on the form of magical creatures. Presumably, though, if Tonks became an animagus, her Animagus form would not be a werewolf and ditto for the historical Wizard whose Patronus was that of a Giant. However, of the two characters in Rowling canon who were able to use both the Patronus and Animagus on "screen", they did match.
    • It seems to me that your Patronus is your father-figure—it comforts and protects you. PATRO-nus for PATER-nal.
    • Nice thought but not exactly. Patronus is a whole different Latin word, literally translated patron or (the reason it's used for this charm) protector/guardian.
• If his inner Animal is a Human Being, then that would either give him powers like Tonk's or make him an enlightened, or perfect human, like how the author of One Piece said would happen if a human ate the Human-Human fruit. Either way he would get some unique power from it.

Dumbledore, Quirrel, Voldemort, Santa Claus, and Mr. Hat and Cloak are all the same person.

I'm already assuming that Quirrel == Voldemort == Mr. Hat and Cloak; those seem reasonably well-supported. Zabini thinks H&C is trying to stir up trouble between Quirrel and Dumbledore, but it seems likely that he IS Quirrel, so that's impossible; Even if H&C isn't Quirrel, Quirrel would never be tricked by H&C's shenanigans with Zabini, so H&C's actions are to trick Harry, not Quirrel. And what better motive for making Harry think Dumbledore and Quirrel are at odds than to hide the fact that Dumbledore and Quirrel are the same person?! Sure, we see them together, but we already know they have a time machine.

• Santa Claus is Dumbledore, Hat and Cloak is Quirrel who is Voldemort, "S" is Snape, but this is still plausible if you want to go into major WMG and suggest that the Mirror thing was somehow feigned, and arguably is supported by Dumbledore's true intentions.

Dementors are the cure to entropy

The Dementors existence and the lack of immortality of the decedents of the late-Atlantis are both necessary evils.

The source-of-magic is always being used and would be used up (law of conservation of energy) except for the dementors who break down and absorb all adjacent magic-matter-and-energy. The collected energy from the magic-matter-and-energy absorbed is returned to the source-of-magic. The reason no Atlantean is immortal is because making someone immortal will break the law governing the artificial source of magic. (The law is probably related to how harry's happy thought destroyed a dementor) Harry will likely find a way around this loophole, and will send the dementors into areas of high entroopy to absorb enough energy for Harry's future reorganization or "godhood" via Harry's wand. In fact, Harry may create more dementors after he realizes this to help him in his attempt to rewrite the rules of the universe/source-of-magic.

Now this makes the hypothesis that magic is diminishing very real if harry continues to kill "death" or rather the "disorganization and absorbtion vehicle" of the source-of-magic. Disorganization is just as chilling as death to an atheist.

Harry will discover the afterlife, conquer it, and establish free travel and trade between it and Earth

It's been established that an afterlife exists in the Harry Potter universe, even though it is very well hidden. Perhaps even intentionally hidden. It would make sense that whatever created the Source of Magic also created the afterlife at the same time. Perhaps Atlantis itself is both the Source of Magic and the afterlife, and it was deliberately "erased" from Time as part of the process that established its function.

Whatever the mechanics, it would be a HUGE deal to mor!Harry for the same reason he was freaking out about parsletongue. The population of the afterlife would be FAR FAR greater than the population of Earth. In his ultimate quest for immortality, it would be a drastically unconventional resolution for him to realize that everyone is already effectively immortal, but trapped in a previously undetected elsewhere.

So Harry's mission becomes the liberation of the afterlife, and devising a way for people to travel both directions, hopefully without destroying a body in the process.

• If there is no afterlife Harry may end up making it.

The Source of Magic / Afterlife 2.0

If there is a physical construct afterlife, I would posit that it only functions for Wizards for the same reasons magic does. Muggles don't get magic, ghosts, souls, resurrection or any metaphysical analog benefits at all. The Source of Magic, already has to somehow have absolute knowledge of all Wizard's mental states in order to activate magic for them, so it's trivial to make a copy at the time of death of a Wizard. Similarly, that constant use of magic strengthens the Wizard's "signal" to the Source, increasing their magical power with practice. When a Wizard dies and there's a magical outpouring, that's only because the Source has decided they're dead and is removing the signalling energies. Horcruxes keep the signal energies bound up in the material world, inverting the direction of information. Prophecies are a self defense mechanism of the Source in order to maintain its own existence.

• A side effect of this is that even if Harry resurrects Hermione in some mundane way, she won't have access to magic anymore, since her signal was extracted. Alternatively, she may have the wait another ten years for the signal to reestablish with her DNA markers.

This story is secretly a Massive Multiplayer Crossover

There are quite a few spells and magical items that are closer to Dungeons & Dragons than regular Harry Potter. The Comed-Tea is probably from Xanth, Mr. Hat and Cloak is a Sidereal, and there are clearly more people from other universes running around.

Rather than stealing fame from the unwilling by magic, Gilderoy Lockheart will steal it from the willing by reputation.

Anyone who carries an Idiot Ball in canon has to have their intelligence upgraded here, and canon Lockheart's living is pretty shaky. So what if instead of relying on memory charms and deception he just relied on people already wanting him to take the credit? Like in canon he makes a point of traveling to meet upstart heroes before word gets out, but he doesn't have to hide it because this is in fact a regular thing he does—many of these interviews end up transcribed in his books without serious alteration. But if he detects that the person would really rather not have their fame, he offers them the chance to get rid of it. A willing hero can easily help him find and obliviate and/or swear to secrecy all loose ends who know the truth (the latter arguably much better since there are canonically spells to make such a promise unbreakable which won't leave behind as much suspicious residue as memory charms, but with obliviate for the truly unwilling), along with themself. I'd expect that after a point he'd also start getting approached by undercover aurors and other people who want it getting out that such and such a thing has been done but can't afford to have their name on it. Either way, everybody wins and noone's been harmed (except the occasional obliviated witness, but he'll claim it's for the greater good). He'd probably have considerably better book knowledge of any magic involved in any of his "exploits", both since he's less of an idiot and because he can properly ask the heroes for help, but he wouldn't be as proficient with Obliviate since he wouldn't be using it as a first resort.

The interesting part is how he reacts to Harry. He wouldn't be stupid enough to dream of inserting himself into a story about canon Harry MOR Harry's exploits, since it just wouldn't fit. If he met canon Harry he'd have one set of interesting interactions since the "encourage him to embrace his fame" thing would have to be reevaluated by the author—but he'll have an entirely different dynamic with MOR Harry who is already exploiting his fame for more mileage than both Lockharts combined. Unfortunately any lesson he could likely give Harry would be about a year too late, and Harry might teach him a thing or two. Ultimately I'd imagine MOR Harry agreeing to keep his secret should it get out.

About the Hermionie tip in chapter six:

As his hand touched the back door’s handle, he heard a last whisper from behind him.
"Hermione Granger."
[...]
There was no answer, and when Harry turned around, Mc Gonagall was gone.

The person who told Harry to look for Hermionie was:

• Dark Lord Harry, travelling back in time.
  • Perhaps to ensure that he made friends with Hermione in order to ensure that he worked out long-distance timetravel, thus creating a consistent timeline? Though that doesn't need him to be Dark.
• Hermionie, travelling back from a Dark Lord Harry timeline.
• Quirelldemort, because he planned things out ahead earlier than we thought
• Mr. Hat and Cloak, because of a Gambit Roulette we don't know about.
• Actually Minerva and the writing was just to confuse us.
  • Actually Minerva, and the writing was intended to be clear without sacrificing the form of dramatic prose.
• Hagrid, because why not.
• Dumbledore, following some prophetic clue that he didn't quite know the meaning of, but understood after Harry befriended Draco first.

The ritual in Chapter 74 completely did work that way.

It actually did permanently sacrifice Yog-Sothoth to briefly summon Harry Potter — or, to be specific, to briefly summon Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. The ritual retroactively turned the canon-verse into the MoR-verse. And the life of a mortal is pretty brief, in the grand scheme of things, even if he does live long enough to do all the things he listed in chapter 39.

• Possible evidence for this theory is a floor in chapter 75, which is tiled in pentagons. While it's true that you can use irregularly shaped pentagons to tile a floor, you need some sort of Alien Geometries to get regular pentagons to tessellate.
• Exactly what chain of events would ever lead Canon!Tracey Davis to ever utter those exact words described in Ch.74? Also, I wouldn't put it past Hogwarts - even Canon!Hogwarts - to have such a pentagonally-tiled corridor.
  • Oh, by the way, I'll just leave this here... Not exactly regular, but close enough, neat and symmetrical pentagons.

Harry's intelligence is the result of accidental, underage magic

It is stated in Harry Potter canon that Muggleborns routinely endure incidents with uncontrolled, accidental magic before they'd receive the Hogwarts enrollment letter — to the point that some Muggle families are relieved to receive it, since it finally explain what has been going on. However, no such history of incidents is mentioned for Harry in The Methods of Rationality at all, to the point that McGonagall has to make a demonstration to the Verres. The explanation for this is, since Harry was raised at as rationalist and that magic is so unscientific, he unconsciously suppressed such instinctive magic manifestations and internalized them. Thus, this increased his intelligence to child genius levels, way beyond that of Canon Harry, and also explain why he inherited some traits of his adoptive father, like the ability to always retrieve the right book he's searching. This had some unknown side effects, though, like his non-24-hours sleeping pattern, and maybe his fractioned personnality too.

How the animagus transformation might work.

Harry freaks out over the animagus transformation violating a lot of things he knows about physics, but ever since reading about the teacher that warmed one side of a metal plate and turned it around, I've been thinking that maybe Harry was making a related sort of mistake. Maybe it doesn't violate Conservation of Mass afterall.

I think a critical piece of evidence here is what does the animagus transformation feel like?

Have you ever woken from a dream in which, at the point of waking, your dream-body is in a very different position than your actual body? It's a very interesting experience, there's no sensation of movement or recalibration of your motor functions; indeed it doesn't feel like anything and your brain doesn't update on the position of your limbs until you actually try to move and get new feedback that overwrites that from your dream.

Would an animagus transformation feel the same way? I think it would, because the only way I can conceive of mass-variable shapeshifting is if all the matter of both states exists simultaneously as a single unchanging structure in 4 spacial dimensions.

Imagine for a moment that our universe expressed only 2 spacial dimensions instead of three. Now imagine that, living in this universe we encounter a three-dimensional object, such as a sphere, intersecting our 2-dimensional universe. If the sphere moved in the 3rd dimension, from our perspective in the 2-dimensional universe what we would perceive as an ordinary circle would appear to change size in violation of Conservation.

(Note: The theoretical 4th dimension I'm referring to here is NOT Time any more than the 3rd dimension is Time in that 2-dimensional universe; I'm conceptualizing purely in the idea-realm of spacial dimensions, here.)

This rather neatly explains the animagus transformation: a 4-dimensional object is merely MOVING so a different CROSS-SECTION happens to intersect our 3-dimensional universe; it's not changing shape or mass at all, and the animagus can go on thinking like a human because the human brain is still there, no less a part of the 4-dimensional physical structure than it is when the human-shaped part of the animagus is intersecting our universe.

This doesn't explain TRANSFIGURATION, in this specific case of the creation of the 4-dimensional object in the first place, or in general, but it may explain mass-changing shapeshifting like animagi (or the Wolves in Luminosity for that matter).

• I was thinking of animagi in terms of Alan Moore!Miracleman, specially when it was mentioned that when Bella was imprisoned "her animagus form was destroyed".

Azkaban Island is the last remaining chunk of Atlantis

Dumbledore implies that a temporal-engineering disaster destroyed Atlantis. Azkaban is a time-travel anomaly. It would be neat.Would be Jossed if that property of Azkaban was created by modern wizards as a part of constructing the prison.(I also don't have much confidence in it because I think I recall Eliezer saying he added the Atlantis reference to make an unrelated point. But he's not above retconning.)

• (Yes, he is.) Iceland would be another protruding part of Atlantis. That's why it's called the Saga Island.
• It seems likely that the anti-magic features of Azkaban Island are put on it by Aurors and weren't actually there to begin with. The reason the island makes a good place for a Dementor-guarded prison is that it is a lone island, and Dementors aren't likely to get tempted to hunt people right outside the prison walls, nor would they affect anyone but the prisoners.

The Timeturner limit of six hours is enforced by a time police

They force anyone who would cause a paradox to Trick out Time, and thus prevent their own paradox, and the limit is enforced to make the job of policing time easier. Thus Harry's Worries about time being consistent despite time travel is explained as being and artificial condition created using multiple worlds theory and branching time lines, anytime time you use a time turner you create another timeline, this time police keep every not internally consistent, Tricked out Time timeline from interacting with the alpha timeline, It is possible that this is done by atlanteans, Their civilization was removed from time either by these police for mass time crime, or they removed themselves from the timeline when they created time travel and not they treat it as their responsibilty to police time, as they exposed it to tampering.

This version of the Potterverse it's actually the Stargate Verse

We have several mentions of Atlantis, which would be THE City-ship of Atlantis, Also Harry discovered that a wizard is some one with a specific Gene, IE. the ATA Gene. Magic would be thus some Advanced Technology left by the Ancients in Earth OR After They ascended they played with the laws of physics so humans could some day beat Entropy.in the end when harry starts contacting the Scientific community to get help on Magic research he will be contacted by Stargate Command wich would make the connection of the ATA Gene.

Voldemort was Raised By Albert Einstein

If Harry had a happy family life, and was raised by nice Muggles, then the concept of Harry and Voldemort being foils for each other no longer works. In order to maintain the concept of Harry and Voldemort having a similar starting point, but ending up at completely different points, Voldemort must then have been adopted by a good Muggle or good Muggle family (or else been in an orphanage where he wasn't mistreated). This could also work as a nice Start of Darkness, since Quirrell's horror at the muggle invention of use of nuclear weapons it very much like Einstein's own.

• Mark Oliphant might be a better match, since it would have to be a scientist who lived in Britain.

James Potter killed Voldemort with the Potter Family Rock

Accio meteorite!

Lucius Malfoy will learn about Draco's Patronus when Draco uses it in an emergency to summon Lucius to save Draco and Harry.

Draco doesn't want Lucius to know he can cast a Patronus, but sometimes, ET just has to phone home.

• Most likely he found out when he gave Draco veritaserum after the attempted murder.

Harry will become a phoenix animagus

From chapter 42, when asked what his patronus will be: "Peregrine falcon," Harry said without hesitation. "It can dive faster than three hundred kilometers per hour, it's the fastest living creature there is." The peregrine falcon had been Harry's favorite animal since forever. Harry was determined to become an Animagus someday, just to get that as his form, and fly by the strength of his own wings, and see the land below with sharper eyes...

The phoenix is faster (instant teleport!), immortal (resurrection?), and important emotionally to Harry (Fawkes). It can fly, and even seems somewhat sentient. Anthony Goldstein got the peregrine falcon first, and there appears to be an unexplained limit of one character per animal, so it's likely Harry can't have it. Rethinking his choice will lead to the only logical conclusion consistent with his desires in a spirit animal. Phoenix!

• Problem: Dumbledore already has a pheonix patronus.
  • That's not a problem. One's patronus don't necessarily have anything to do with animagus form.

The prophecy Dumbledore told Snape was ENTIRELY made up.

Why wouldn't it be? Dumbledore and Minerva heard a real prophecy, which made it clear that Harry and Voldemort would be enemies for life, the dark lord would mark Harry as an equal and Harry would discover "a magic of which he knows not". A sufficiently cautious dark lord would recognize that the trope coming and avoid that kid like the plague, sending a minion to do it and preparing for his failure. But since Dumbledore was leaking this prophecy anyways, might as well hedge his bets and give him a prophecy that clearly implies that striking Harry while young will work. And he'd HAVE to do this for the same plan to work had it mentioned Harry by name, since otherwise Snape would never have just handed over the prophecy. For that matter, have we heard the full prophecy in MOR-verse?

Mr. Hat and Cloak is a time traveller.

My first WMG, and I post this only out of sheer, stupid, blind confidence in it. When asked, "Just what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it, anyway?" Mr. Hat and Cloak responds, "Time -" [The voice seemed to catch itself] "Time enough for that later." Sounds like he was stumbling over the word time travel, huh? It would explain a lot. And it opens up a whole range of possibilities of who it could be. And it explains why Hermione recognized him. And . . . wow. This one's exciting.

Mr. Hat and Cloak is Ms. Hat and Cloak.

It's strongly implied that M Ha C is a time traveller (see WMG directly above). Also, Millicent said that she was feeding Millicent hints. Also, the confrontation with Hermione takes place on a witches-only staircase. It's a pretty damn strong case.

Ms. Hat and Cloak is Hermione from the future. The only reason Hat and Cloak took so long to convince Hermione is that she eventually recovered her own memory of the whole incident and did things the same way to avoid a paradox.

Ms. Hat and Cloak is Voldemort, who has resurrected himself in the body of a woman, because he used bone of the mother instead of bone of the father in the resurrection potion, because his father's bones were contaminated by Snape and Moody. She travels back in time.

• It seems more likely that Millicent got her gossip from her sister, who has a spimster wicket.

Harry is going to become the next Dark Lord.

If Quirell is Voldermort, then Harry is going to be terribly conflicted durring their battle, since he was his true mentor. But Harry is likely only going to be conflicted for about a fraction of a second. By then it's likely that Harry would have heard the prophecy, and knowing that he could never stand by Voldermort's side since they were destined to kill eachother, Harry will be forced to kill Voldermort.Plus, Voldermort killed his true parents. But Voldermort's ideals of immortallity will live on in Harry, who will replace him as the Next Dark Lord, beleiving himself to be a Light Lord.

"I'm sorry it had to end this way, Tom. You were absolutely right. But you killed my parents, and for that you'll have to die."

Voldemort is a Ravenclaw

Voldemort is smarter than Harry. Harry is far more ambitious than Voldemort. (Harry is trying to become God. Voldemort is trying not to die.) Harry is a Ravenclaw. Voldemort can't possibly be a Slytherin.

• Better yet, Voldemort is a Hufflepuff. It matches the Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalry and Voldemort was a Muggle orphan, meaning that he had to work very very hard to become as skilled as he did (Harry and Hermione were both raised by caring parents who were also very intelligent and so they had an advantage in Hogwarts that Voldemort never did).
• Problem with this theory is that Harry wasn't sorted into Ravenclaw; he was put in Slytherin and Dumbledore interfered (probably). Still, this would be an interesting development if true (I doubt it's true though, the hat's gotta be a bit smarter than that if it's worth the fabric it's made out of. Canon Riddle was already pretty Slytherin by the time Dumbledore found him).

Bellatrix Black is actually Narcissa Malfoy

As a corollary,the person burned to death in Narcissa's bedroom was the real Bellatrix.

• Possibly the "new" Bella was made from Narcissa after Voldemort lost the original services.

Fawkes killed Narcissa(or whoever that was)

Phoenix=Fire.

The story is rock-solid hard SF

The story, rather than taking place in the recent past the way the canonical stories do, actually takes place several decades into the future. Like The Matrix, it takes place inside a computer simulation. Unlike The Matrix, the characters aren't flesh and blood humans plugged in to the computer simulation, they're all A.I.s. Different A.I.s in the story were deliberately designed with significantly different levels of sophistication and/or constraints on their behavior, which explains Harry's observations about PCs and NPCs and heroic supervision in chapter 75. The purpose of the simulation is an experiment to determine whether Harry is Friendly (i.e. whether he is safe to release from the simulation into the real world.)

• Yeah, but the problem with working out hard solutions to "computer simulation universe" is memory. You'd need a ridiculously large amount of writable memory to manage the everything in the universe that complies with the laws of physics, since you'd be covering all objects and all physical laws.
  • Unless the real world has more than four dimensions.

H+C in ch 76 is Bellatrix

Evidence: he/she seems to be sure that Harry, once fully powerful, will crush Hermione. Inside knowledge of death-eaters - Snape and Lucius. High giggle. Though the encounter is not on the witch's staircase, she is obviously aware of the witch's staircase, which favors his/her witchiness - and I doubt that staircase would be a happy memory for Bellatrix. Bellatrix certainly has the power and ruthlessness for such an attack, which pretty much guarantees that Hermione will have at least some PTSD symptoms later. Motive is unclear, but if Bellatrix is loose and able to get into Hogwarts despite Dumbledore and the Marauder's Map, then Quirrel certainly has something to do with it.

Also, "recognition sent a jolt of terrified adrenaline bursting through her." Even Quirrel or Snape wouldn't trigger reflex terror before there was time to understand the implications. But Hermione has unquestionably seen pictures of Bellatrix, and who could be more terrifying?

Harry is going to end up screaming at Dumbledore and mugging Nicholas Flamel for the Stone when he finds out about it.

Rational!Harry isn't going to take NF keeping the Stone to himself lying down, and Dumbledore arguing that the Stone is a curse will only make him angrier. He'll probably find out about the Stone in Flamel's presence, attack DD and NF from behind, take the Stone, make tons of Elixir and magically pour it into the sea, possibly with Quirrel's help... then Quirrelmort regains full form, but can't kill anyone and rule Britain/the world until he destroys the Elixir, making Harry completely turn against Quirrel.

Wizards' lengthened lifespan is the result of diluted Elixir of Life

There's only one Philosopher's Stone (or at least very few), and they simply can't make enough Elixir of Life to make more than a few people actually immortal. However, they do have enough to make "everyone" (meaning Wizards) age more slowly, which they accomplish by putting what they do make into the water supply. This is probably the only way I can see Harry learning about the Philosopher's Stone (that it exists, and that someone is using it) and NOT immediately going into an Unstoppable Rage.

• This theory actually makes a lot of sense—as I understand the stone only ever gave immortality of the "never aging or getting sick" kind, not the "stabbed through the chest" kind, and anyways the books canonically state that Flammel was still able to die when he chose to and I think state that he needs to constantly drink more of the potion to remain alive. So a diluted version making you age slower and get sick less certainly makes sense. And the "potions just redirect magic" thing plays into it well; making something like that would be hard, at the very least either requiring the sacrifice of something immortal or a scary number of non-immortal things (remember, it has already kept him going for a few centuries). And since we now know potions obey a conservation law, if the stone was designed to keep one or several people alive forever it can't keep everybody alive.

Greg Weisman is either a wizard or just knows about the wizarding world

Basically, the shout out to Gargoyles isn't just a shout out. Greg Weisman created the series based on the opera, since no one in the Muggle world had ever seen it (and the few that have can't really call him out on it, lest their local ministry "detain" them), and the wizard's don't know/don't care since the magic in the series doesn't work the same way as real magic does.

Harry's dark side and Quirrel's non-catatonic side are both part of something or things far older than Tom Riddle

This thing has something to do with Atlantis. For instance, it could be a human Atlantean who managed to self-improve their intelligence and was on the way to godhood when somehow they were thwarted (by the magic-causing AI? In a titanic struggle which resulted in deleting Atlantis from time?), and ever "since" has been trying to fully resurrect themselves and resume the path to godhood. Whatever-it-is is obviously not very human anymore; perhaps it never was, perhaps it was originally an AI, although that would make it harder to explain why immortality is such a struggle for it.

Voldemort was a failed attempt, perhaps thwarted by Riddle's irrationality (that is to say, Voldemort had a separate "dark side" like Harry's, but unlike Harry his human side also happened to extremely evil). Bacon's diary could be a horcrux of this whatever-it-is, and perhaps Bacon himself was a previous vehicle. (If only "by Francis Bacon's mysterious dark side!" scanned a little better, it would be a pretty awesome oath.)

The fundamental nature of prophecy might have to do with this entity's struggle with the force that thwarts it - since the force that thwarts it almost certainly has godlike power, including power over time, but is probably usually less than self-aware, somewhat like the hat.

One bit of evidence against this theory is that there were no such hints from the Sorting Hat, which by its own word would have been able to notice such things. But since the hat itself (unlike the author) has nothing to gain by honestly dropping such hints, that is not conclusive.

People are reading too much into the shout-outs

Yes, the author has in some cases been careful to explain his shout-outs – for instance, the somewhat-implausible reference to Harry having seen the Army of Darkness "preview", even though his parents had managed to keep the naughtier Tom Lehrer lyrics from him, and it's not as if he saw it on youtube when his parents weren't around. But there are other shout-outs to things which already existed at the time which aren't explained, and the answer is not some crazy theory, just the author having fun. For instance, "squeamish ossifrage" had already been encoded, but not decoded, at the time; yet I doubt Dumbledore had used legilimens on the relevant cryptographers. So this is not some massive crossover story, they're just shout-outs.

Two wizards can have a squib child because of quantum mechanics

This isn't so much a real WMG as post-hoc technobabble, but I leave it here in case any other readers (or perhaps even the author) want to embrace it. The idea is that the Source of Magic has to constantly check people's DNA to see if magical things should be happening around them. This extra "attention" is an observer in a quantum mechanical sense, and so affects the observed. That is to say, just as constantly shining x-rays on that DNA locus would tend to lead to it mutating into a nonmagical version, the same happens with whatever means the Source of Magic uses to check. Thus, magical genes mutating into nonmagical genes is a particularly common mutation. Since the Source of Magic (magically) goes straight to the correct locus, other genes are not affected. When this mutation happens in living wizards, it affects only certain cell lineages, so they retain their magic talent; but if by chance it affects their gametes, then their offspring can be squibs. However, once the gene is in a squib (including later-generation squibs who don't know any more than Muggles) it is no longer the subject of so much attention from the Source of Magic, so the extra mutations cease.

Of course, other squibs could simply be the result of illicit liaisons with Muggles. But if all squibs were such, then someone would have noticed.

If you want to stretch this idea a bit, you can explain the mystery of the (canon) frequency of half-blood wizards. Since recessive wizard genes are not common in the Muggle genepool, why aren't half-blood wizards vanishingly rare? Well, inside the mother, the Source of Magic still considers the fetus as part of the mother, and so it's checking for magical genes. The precise locus where the muggle allele differs from the magic allele is therefore subject to extra "magical radiation", and sometimes this leads to a reverse mutation, causing a cell lineage in the fetus which has two copies of the magic gene instead of just one. The baby, once born, then has mostly non-magic cells, but the few magic-lineage cells are enough for the Source of Magic to class him or her as a wizard. (In this theory, the Source of Magic decides magic-or-no on a binary basis, and relative magical strength comes from other factors.)

So if both parts of this theory were correct, you'd expect that

(halfblood wizards with wizardly mother)/(all halfbloods with wizardly mothers) = ((fullblood squibs) * (fudgeably age factor) / (all fullbloods)) + sqrt((mudblood wizards) / (all muggleborn))

, while

((halfblood wizards with muggle mother)/(all halfbloods with muggle mother)) = sqrt((mudblood wizards) / (all muggleborn)).

That is still a somewhat lower-than-canon fraction of halfblood wizards, but plausible. (And testable! Not that I expect Harry and Draco to actually try to test it, but ... let's just say I would if I were Harry. Too bad that fanfics don't have large "begat" sections, or I could attempt to test it myself from outside the fanfic. That is NOT a hint to the author; I'd have fun testing it, but it's not worth the WT Fs from other readers.)

Oh, another testable prediction: the chances of a squib child (legitimately) coming from two wizard parents would be about proportional to the total age of the two parents (or perhaps to the total number of spells they've cast, which should be approximately the same thing).

• Simpler explanation: magic doesn't exist in genes at all. It's passed by heredity, but it finds its own way, independent of any long chains of mere matter.
• Alternate simpler explanation: There is a rare genetic disorder that disables a person's capacity to use magic.
  • Canon!Neville describes himself as "almost a Squib", implying that he has a mild form of this disorder. Doesn't even have to be genetic, could be of psychological or other origin.

Narcissa is only dead to Lucius some of the time. When he does to sleep at night, he's in another world where Draco died and Narcissa lives.

Actor Allusion.

Magic is actually sufficiently advanced technology

It's a supercomputer system with holographic/replicator capabilities a la Star Trek.

When it predicts the future during a Divination function call, it actually calculates all the particles that are currently within its system and all their interactions frame by frame (in other words, the universe is a deterministic system). However, it loses accuracy the further into the future it tries to calculate (perhaps due to the system being open—-read: doesn't cover the whole universe—-and thus susceptible to outside influences), and so it could predict a showdown between Harry and Voldemort but could not predict the final victor since it would be years before the actual outcome comes to pass.

On the other hand, as long as it's within a few hours, the predictions can be accurate enough to support the Time Turner. That's right, Divination is the basis of the Time Turner. How, you ask? Well, Magic isn't actually capable of manipulating time/changing the past: It simply predicts a future version of you that will use the Time Turner and then copies that version into the current time frame. And when the current version of you uses the Time Turner, the current version is simply erased from existence, leaving behind a future version that's so accurate in composition and behavior that nobody in the world can tell the difference. That's right, Harry has already cloned/killed himself hundreds—-perhaps thousands—-of times without even being aware of it.

By the way, since Harry couldn't prove P=NP using the Time Turner, that means:

• Magic can't take too many recursions at once (hence why you shouldn't talk to your future self)
• Magic runs in polynomial time
• The future can be calculated in polynomial time
• Magic has a sense of humor (rather than saying "Fatal Error: Out of Memory", it said, "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME")

- This is frighteningly plausible

Quirrel's plan is to frame Harry as Voldemort

Quirrel has made several public statements hinting that he thinks Harry should be/will be the next Dark Lord. Lucius Malfoy (may) believe Harry is Voldemort, and Bellatrix Black definitely believes that Harry is Voldemort, and Quirrel is literally tutoring Harry to become more like him.

Quirrel lied about why Voldie killed the dojo.

Quirrel is Voldemort, so why would he reveal his Fatal Flaw to everyone? He didn't—he created a fake flaw in order to (1) create yet another tenative Harry/Voldemort connection (see above), and if that plan doesn't work to (2) make sure everyone's misinformed about his weaknesses.

He probably did kill the dojo, however; as Quirrel says, you don't leave the source of your power lying around...

Salazar's Basilisk was behind everything.

Because Salazar Slytherin wasn't stupid enough not to have planned for the "heir of Slytherin" deciding to Avada Kadavra the basilisk once it's outlived its usefulness. Obviously, everything that's happened since Tom Riddle found the basilisk has been one giant Gambit Roulette. ;)

Professor Quirrell is actually Peter Pettigrew

Crazy, I know, but stay with me. In canon, Quirrell speaks with a stutter to make himself seem weak, right? He can speak normally, he just doesn't. This means that in order for that to be a valid plan, nobody at Hogwarts must have met Quirrell before he got seduced by Voldemort. This applies to Mo R as well. Nobody at Hogwarts knows who Quirrell is, he's a complete mystery. He could be anyone.

There are two ways the Pettigrew/Black debacle can be resolved in Mo Rverse: either Black is really guilty and Pettigrew is dead, which REALLY conflicts with canon, or Pettigrew is guilty and escaped like in canon, he's just not hiding with the Weasley family. It could go either way, but think about this: canon!Quirrell had Voldemort as a separate entity than himself, which isn't the case in Mo R. In Mo R, Voldemort and Quirrell are fused together. This means that Quirrell's completely accepted Voldemort's personality and fused it with his own. I can only think of two people who would be willing to do this: Bellatrix and Pettigrew.

If Pettigrew is guilty, he wouldn't be wasting time in hiding like in canon, he'd have found Voldemort by now. I'm pretty sure this is the case, there've been a lot of hints toward it. Voldemort needed a body, and Pettigrew would be readily available. Pay attention to the descriptions of Quirrell. A man in his late thirties, short and balding. That could EASILY be Pettigrew. Everybody thinks he's dead, and it's been 10 years since he was last seen, so most people aren't going to recognize him.

Lupin knows who he is of course, but he's protecting him because he believes Sirius was guilty, and if Pettigrew was found alive then it would cause too much trouble for his friend.

Snape also knows it's Pettigrew, they were Death Eaters together and Snape knows that Pettigrew is alive and working for Voldemort. Read the scene with them in the woods again, that scene confused me at first. Why would Snape have to pretend he's not working for Dumbledore for Quirrell? Because he believes that Snape's still working for Voldemort as a spy.

There're other hints as well. Quirrell tries to teach Harry humility, and the ability to 'lose'. Pettigrew's always been humble, and he 'lost' when he fought Sirius. In Azkaban, look at how Quirrell acts around Harry. He's acting like Pettigrew, the humble servant. It makes perfect sense that small, timid Pettigrew would learn martial arts, the story with the dojo was true.

Voldemort's synthesized himself with Pettigrew and learned humbleness and caution as a result. Pettigrew's animagus changed from a rat to a snake because of Voldemort's influence. It all fits, it explains the changes in Voldemort's behaviour as well as what happened to Pettigrew, and ties up those weird scenes with Snape and Lupin.

Nobody's ever heard of Quirrell because Quirrell doesn't exist, he's an invention of Voldemort and Pettigrew.

I'm not saying this is definitely true, but it would be a great twist, and the evidence seems to support it. It's exactly the kind of thing both Yudkowsky and Rowling would do.

• But in canon, plenty of people have met Quirrell before. He even used to teach at Hogwarts, though presumably not Defense. They comment on how much his trip abroad changed him, making him afraid of everything.

• In Mo R, Quirrell doesn't even make an effort to seem like the real Quirrell, although there are times that make it clear Quirrell was a real person. He's depending on everyone being desperate enough for a competent defense teacher that they won't fire him even though he's obviously not Quirrell.

Peter Pettigrew isn't serious...

After their violent confrontation, Sirius realized how bad things would look for him. So he arranged for Pettigrew to be thrown in Azkaban without trial, while thinking it was him. I would guess the method included the initial use of Polyjuice, followed by selective False Memory Charms to make the right people "remember" that Sirius looked liked Pettigrew really does looks. This would rely on there being only a few people who ever see Pettigrew who should otherwise be able to identify him from before.

Dumbledore was tricked into identifying a secret antagonist to Hogwarts as a Professor

When being interrogated Quirrell says that Dumbledore identified him to Hogwarts by drawing a circle around him and using that as the reference for "Defense Professor". There's no saying who ELSE was in that circle. They could have been invisible (time travelling Harry?), tiny (animagus), possessing (Voldemort's soul), or just really high up.

Harry will generalize potions theory, rediscovering a lost form of magic

After deducing the theory behind all potions in chapter 78—that the ingredients store magical power which can be reforged into a desired outcome by ritualized spells—Harry applies the concept to other 'ingredients', such as the surrounding landscape.

The founders knew this theory and exploited the hell out of it when they created Hogwarts, its location in Scotland being no mere coincidence. Scotland is historically geologically active, and the millions of years of tectonic activity in that region would provide ample power for both the construction of the castle and the creation and maintenance of its many wards and enchantments.

The logical conclusion of all this—neatly packing away all the WMG for Harry's reaction to learning about the Philosopher's Stone—is that it is made of humans.

Alternatively, as the work-in-work-out potionmaking principle is about capturing the work through something which has been changed by the work, an ingredient would have to be altered by something else's immortality. For example, someone killed by an idea that just won't die.

• It seems like if you're willing to accept the sacrifice of ideas as the source of the Philosopher's Stone, Merlin's Interdict is the logical thing that allows the Stone to be made. Perhaps in order to make enough for all humanity, Harry would have to extend the Interdict to Science.

• Narcissa was killed by Fawkes to provide an ingredient for the Stone.

Merope never stopped dosing Tom Riddle Sr.

(A consequence of the no Idiot Ball rule).Which means he didn't abandon her,and Voldemort wasn't raised in an orphanage...sinceby the time Merope died (even if it was still shortly after his birth),Senior wouldn't have beenable to dump junior in an orphanage without wrecking his own social standing.

• In the STPE arc, there is mention of the Dark Lord growing up in a Muggle orphanage.

Harry is an escaped Atlantean.

That's what he's forgotten.The real Harry Potter, of course, was simply killed by Voldemort.There was a guess to this effect here, but it seems to have mysteriously vanished.

Oh wow, there's actually forshadowing for this: "Harry considered the question. Was he really Harry Potter? "I only know what other people have told me," Harry said. "It's not like I remember being born." His hand brushed his forehead. "I've had this scar as long as I remember, and I've been told my name was Harry Potter as long as I remember. But..."

• What he forgot was that he shouldn't misuse his Time Turner.

Harry will create a potion or ritual to give immortality by using a Dementor.

A potion reshapes the magic to create an effect. The Dementors are immortal. In a potion they could give the drinker immortality. If Harry can make more Dementors then he can give everyone immortality. With a ritual if you sacrifice Death, logically, you should be able to get immunity from Death.

• Potions don't reshape any magic, but just the energies (which, apparently unbeknownst to anyone but harry, don't have to be magical) invoked in the creation of its ingredients. The nature of dementors doesn't matter, just the method to create one. Presumably, the ritual to summon death mentioned by Quirrel is this method, meaning all you get is the effort expended in the creation of a rope used to hang a woman and a sword used to kill a man. Nothing really death-defying in there.

Anyone Harry tells the truth about Dementors to will Obliviate themselves if they can't cast the True Patronus so he won't use it to threaten people.

This is the logical thing to do if that happens. The writer is not stupid and so by extension Harry is not stupid and will realize that this is a stupid idea. Plus they'd probably charge him with some crime and Quirrell at least would realize that that would happen.

The plan was never to kill Draco.

Harry assumes that the plan was to kill Draco and to make Lucius too burdened with rage and loss to think clearly, but things don't really add up that way. Assuming ourselves that Harry was correct and Voldermort was behind the plan, then it makes far more sense to have Draco be found badly injured/dying (and of course Draco was found by Quirrell). If Draco was dead there would be no one to actively accuse Hermione and for the plan to work at all she would have needed to become so burdened by guilt she turned herself in, something that there was no sign of happening before she was arrested. But with Draco still alive, his father finds out about how he'd been getting influenced by Harry, who will keep a closer eye on him and try to steer him towards being a proper Blood Purist/Death Eater once again to insure the blood purists have the financial backing of House Malfoy to rally around for another generation. Meanwhile Hermione would be shipped off to Azkaban which would so enrage Harry that he would be willing to tear down the obviously corrupt Wizard Society by becoming the next Dark Lord thus insuring Voldermort gains a powerful ally/enemy against Dumbledor/ someone to follow in his footsteps.

• Given how Hermione acted afterwards, she was most definitely being burdened by that much guilt. The only thing that I could even imagine getting her past the 48 hour mark before she confessed would be the knowledge that she'd face a Kangaroo Court, and even that might not work. And anyways, with the death of the scion and only heir to such a Noble House they'd probably bring in a legilimens to help investigate, and she'd be radiating guilt like a beacon.
• Agree with other commenter that the evidence given is faulty, even if the conclusion could well happen to be correct. Draco shows up dead; who are the suspects? Maybe that girl who was acting really angry at him the day before, and whom he had a good reason to challenge to a duel? Let's give her a drop of veritaserum and ask her the simplest possible yes/no question... or even just ask her without serum...

McGonagall is Hermione's maternal relative (grandmother or grand-aunt).

• This accounts for her repeated visits to Hermione before school started,rather than any attempt at intimidation(as Roberta thinks).

Harry's animagus form will be that of a phoenix but he will not get any of their abilities

The form of a phoenix would very much fit his personality, while not getting any of a phoenix's magical abilities would be an extremely interesting twist on a tired Harry Potter fanfic cliche. Harry would, of course, still find ways to use it to his advantage such as using tricks to make people think that he has a phoenix's abilities.

Harry will have two animagus forms

If one's animagus form is a reflection of your inner self, then it would make sense for Harry to have two forms, one for his normal self and one for his dark side since as it has been hinted at multiple times, the dark side is Voldemort's Horcrux. His dark side's animagus form would likely be a snake as a result.

Only Harry's dark side will be able to cast the Killing Curse

When Quirrel teaches the curse to students (he earned the right in his bet with Dumbledore about students casting the Patronus Charm), Harry's ideology, which allows him to destroy Dementors, will prevent him from casting the curse. Only Harry's dark side will be able to cast it, driving a wedge between Harry and his darkness. Light-side Harry will then develop a new version of the Killing Curse, possibly to heal or resurrect.

• Or perhaps to surgically excise the body from around the soul and mind, rather than rip the soul and mind from the body, creating a new type of ghost which is functionally identical to a human who has Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence... Which would be interesting in light of the quite silly fear several people seem to have had early on (and other people still do have, or have now) that Harry was going to use the killing curse on everyone to keep them from dying.
  • As a corollary wild guess: the spell (functionally, the opposite of the Killing Curse) will be triggered by the words... Avra Kedavra. This is because, in Aramaic, Avada Kedavra means "I destroy as I speak", while Avra Kedavra means "I create as I speak".
    • Actually plausible: Avra Kedavra sounds much more like Abracadabra (mentioned back in Chapter 13 to introduce Harry to the Killing Curse in the first place) than Avada Kedavra does, making the mention of Abracadabra possible foreshadowing for this. If Eliezer turns out to have been actually planning that that far back...

The Interdict Of Merlin is the point of divergence

In this world Merlin laid down his own life to create the Interdict. In the canon world, he didn't and used it to continue his work instead. As a result spells can be learned from books no matter how powerful they are, unethical use of spells is relatively rare, and magical nobility have lost all their legal privileges, even if they retain a lot of economic and political power.

Voldemort's behind it all!

Blaise is right, Quirrell isn't Hat & Cloak

Quirrell is smart, and someone else framed Hermoine, or has a bigger plan that's interfering with Quirrell's. It could be one of the good guys, like Dumbledore, but despite being insane, he's not likely to harm a student. Snape, perhaps?

Gilderoy Lockhart is a front for Alastor Moody.

Moody undoubtably prefers that Dark Wizards not know he exists at all, but he still needs some sort of contactperson/face for dealing with people. Lockhart is that face(or one of them), playing the Inspector Gadget (high profile,high reputation distraction) to Moody's Penny (low profile,high effectiveness).

Gilderoy Lockhart is famous for his skill with memory charms.

Lockhart runs a professional memory modification business, obliviating people like Mr. Bester or removing painful memories for people who can't bear them. Under the table, he handle some shady jobs, like memory charming Rita Skeeter. However, his job also gives him access to a lot of secret/private information, so he also acts as information broker.

Nobody knows TMR's middle name

This is just a simple consequence of the no-idiot-ball rule. "I wanted it to be an anagram of my name, but that would only have worked if I'd conveniently been given the middle name of 'Marvolo', and then it would have been a stretch. Our actual middle name is Morfin, if you're curious. But I digress."

The Hero who QQ is suspected of being is not TMR

TMR is the obvious suspect, but the birthdays don't match, nor does the grandmother. So, there was a Most Ancient scion who was a classmate to TMR. Possibilities then include:

1. Hero and TMR/Voldemort were in cahoots, playing both sides of a con
2. TMR/Voldemort took over hero when he was in Albania and either puppeted or polyjuiced him from there on.
3. Hero was actually fighting TMR/Voldemort, but then got fed up and took over the Voldemort role (by killing Voldemort).

If this is true, then Harry's dark side is probably still Voldemort.

Quirrel's catatonic rest is not just a symptom of being dead, but is when his soul is running some other body

There's almost no question that the author would allow a single intelligence to split into two clones, but it's plausible that he wouldn't allow them to re-merge after that. Quirrel has lots of plots, so he goes and does those other things while catatonic. The supposed "increased frequency" is because he's has to deal with Bellatrix somehow. Note that the prohibition on re-merging intelligences would mean that his ultimate plot with Harry could not be to re-merge with Harry's dark side.

Roger Bacon damaged the Source of Magic.

No one was as good as Merlin, and supposedly afterward no one was as good as the Founders-but all5 of those wizards are British, and that trivia comes from a British wizard,so should be regarded with skepticism.There may well have been other notable powerful (comparable to the founders) foreign wizards in between.This is the reason this story's Hogwarts founders are from the late 12th/early 13th century-to move the date of the founding to just before Bacon broke magic.

Harry is the next Dark Lord. Draco is the one in the prophesy.

Harry is teaching Draco his methods, thus marking him as his equal. Draco is gradually treating people better and thinking for himself, while Harry does Dark Things and ignores warnings about turning into a Dark Lord.

Voldemort never died. Not even a little bit.

A charred body was found next to baby Harry, and suddenly Voldemort wasn't doing stuff anymore. Everyone assumes this is because Voldemort is dead, but he may simply have faked his death and gone into hiding. Voldemort seemed to be winning the war, but the prophesy was out there, and the Order of the Phoenix was getting closer to being able to attack him directly, not to mention having spies like Snape in the Death Eaters. Voldemort's number one priority is not to die, regardless of his other plans. He attacked Godric's Hollow in order to make Harry into a Horcrux (which he did deliberately) and make it look like he had died, to take the heat off him. "Quirinus Quirrell" is simply Tom Riddle, as Amelia Bones suspects.

1. It IS known, that Tom Riddle=Voldemort in this universe, Dumbledore mentions him as such. Amelia directly mentions that her-guess-on-Quirrel was Voldemort's enemy. Which means that her-guess-on-Quirrel is NOT Tom Riddle. In addition, author commented in discussion thread that this hypothesis is false and specifically changed QQ's birthyear to not match with Riddle's.

Time-Turners ARE Turing computable

As "Two wizards can have a squib child because of quantum mechanics" this is more like theory about how world in Mo R runs, but I beleive it belongs to here.

In chapter 14 Harry says that magic could be explained if the Universe is a computer model, but for not being Turing computable, Time-Turners are breaking even this theory. But under certain conditions they actually are computable.Fisrt, let's define a Very Simple Time-Turner Problem:

• Entire Universe is simulated in the computer's memory.
• Memory is potentially infinite, but discrete.
• World is fully determinictic, computation from given state of memory always results in same steps.
• To simplify reasoning let's assume that the basis of simulation isn't particles, wave functions or something, but actors representing humans and objects from environment. It's an object in memory which has it's internal memory, representing all data about it's current state (memories in his brain, position in the space, current heart rate and so on), which is transformed on each step by simulating computer according to universal rules. One of possible transformation is interaction between actors.
• Amount of one actor's memory is finite and known to simulator (such is real life: at least your memory can't be larger than required for memorizing positions of all particles in your body).
• A certain actor, let's call him Harry, can travel in time using Time-Turner.
• Travel is instant, we can imagine that there's a certain bit in Harry's memory which is checked by simulator on each step, and when it appears to be "1", in the next step Harry will be in past with Time-Turner-Bit switched to "0".
• For some reason we just know that on certain moment t1 Harry will come from moment t2 in future. So, on t1 we'll have two copies of Harry: original h1 and came from future h2.
• State of h1 is known because defined by previous steps of simulation. And we know that in the moment t2 actor h1 will have "1" in Time-Turner-Bit.
• We don't know contents of h2 (Harry which came form future), we must calculate it so the Universe will be consistent. How?

If we know that h2 is actually h1 came from t2, we can write equitation: h2(t1) = h1(t2) - Time-Turner-Bit.Now we can pause main world simulation and perform some brute-force search in a sandbox (as long as our memory is infinite, we have a place to do it). We will just iterate over all possible states of Harry's memory (let's call them h2n), assign h2(t1) = h2n and then propagate all steps to moment t2 and then check if their interaction results in h1(t2) = h2n + Time-Turner-Bit.Now we can assign h2(t1) to the first found suitable h2n, and it will result in stable time loop. Case solved! If we can't find suitable h2n, then our presumption of h2 coming from the t2 to t1 is just wrong, there's no any time loop which cat lead us to it. This also explains why every single time traveler fulfills time loop instead of checking what happens if he doesn't (assume he has a suicidal and apocalyptic intent): if he hasn't a strong intent to fulfill it, he just couldn't come up with idea of time traveling, according to the mechanics of the Universe.Of course, we can speed up these calculations by assuming that the entire state of h1 could not be changed so dramatically from t1 to t2. So we can start brute-forcing not from memory state 000...000 and to 111...111, but start with assuming h2(t1) = h1(t1) and then iterating over states with increasing Levenshtein distance. But nonetheless, it's brute-force problem.

Now let's try to bound this solution the real Mo R world.Both this solution and sentence about your inability of changing time in Mo R explicitly stay that there's no any randomness, at least in the past light cone from point h1(t2) to the moment t1 (let's call it L1). What should we do with true quantum randomness? We can simulate it. For our space-time in simulation is discrete and L1 is finite, there's only finite amount of random events and their possible outcomes which could be theoretically observed by both h1 and h2 within time from t1 to t2 under any conditions. So we can just write up all required random outcomes in a certain vector r1 and then calculate plausible values of r1 and h2 together, the same way. Which obviously will slow down computations, but at last we need to cancel randomness not to the entire Universe, only to space-time lying in L1.

But the real problem is defining t1 and t2. Well, almost t1, because as it is defined, we can just propagate steps forward and check, if we will come up with h2(t1) = h1(t2) for t2 = t1 + {1h, 2h, 3h, 4h, 5h, 6h}. I see no way to define it but assuming on every single step that h2 will come here, and only if all calculations mentioned above won't result in stable time loop, we would think that there's no time travelers arriving to this particular moment. But not sure about about this moment + 5.4e-44 seconds, so we must perform this test for it too.Um. Well. Well, it is still computable. It's unimaginable difficult to compute, incomparably harder than factorizing a factorial of the Ackermann function, but it is computable. I can think about certain optimizations such as if person doesn't have Time-Turner, using light cones we can check if he can get one in next 6 hours (so, do we need to perform all brute-forcing for him or not), or if a person with Time-Turner didn't use it, we can estimate how long does it take to the Universe to be changed enough to result in other solution through some stochastic processes.

The only thing that still unclear is a concept "you can't change things about which you knew in the first place". The Universe doesn't run on concept of awareness, it runs on causality. Anything lying in the past light cone of a certain event is it's cause. I may not be aware of what reader of this text did 21 milliseconds earlier than I wrote it, but elementary particles in my brain certainly are. Even if you're sitting in Cheyenne Mountain bunker, neutrinos and gravity fields still can connect us. The only solution I see is that this constraint is only visible consequence of the fundamental fact of impossibility of changing of entire time line. Wizards think that they being sent to past they still acting by their own will, while actually their actions and thoughts were entirely predefined.

Popular things in Muggle culture is remade for Wizards

Like The Tragedy of Light, which is actually Death Note. People are capable of getting away with blatant plagiarism because: 1) Most wizards don't know anything about the Muggle world and truly believe that it was created for wizards, 2) Muggle wizards get to watch the real deal, so they don't really care, and 3) Who would beleive that you're being plagiarized by wizards?

• Alternately, things in wizard culture is being edited for muggles and sold for easy currency by wizards who realized it's easier to buy certain things in the muggle world but also know better than to mess with Gringott's.

There will be a version of Dumbledore's Army in MOR-verse

But it will be led by Dumbledore, Harry and/or McGonagall after Quirrell leaves. And Harry, Hermione and Draco will become a Power Trio of some sort and utterly steamroll Voldemort, which is why Quirrell wanted to turn them against each other.

Taboo Tradeoffs went all according to plan

It is obviously a plot by Voldemort to weaken Harry by splitting up his band of trusty companions. The one-level play is that the goal was to kill Draco and frame Hermione. This would deprive Harry of Draco, neutralize Hermione, and make Lucius wreck his own game for vengeance. The two-level play is that Quirrell saves Draco. This does the same except instead of killing Draco, Draco is whisked to safety by Lucius. However, Harry gives up his fortune and swears Hermione to his service to save her from Lucius. The three-level play is that Draco is still removed from the picture, Hermione's reputation is still dirt, Harry has no warchest, and Hermione is sworn to Harry in a light mirror to how Bellatrix served Voldemort. Quirrelmort totally won this one.

• This seems unlikely just because Less Wrong disapproves of convoluted plans, and there wasn't really any way to accurately predict all of that happening.
  • Not so. For one thing it's only Lucius Malfoy who says you should stick to simple plots (which is sensible if you're already on top and have all the privilege and advantage you need without needing to outwit everyone else to get what you want). For another, according to both Dumbledore and Snape Voldemort 'really is that twisty'.

Harry will sacrifice himself and use his love for Mankind as fuel to cast a MASSIVE version of the Sacrificial Protection spell for EVERYONE ON EARTH, saving EVERYONE from death

Or at least Sacrifice his dark side, the Horcrux. And I don't doubt that he would be able to find a way to do so. The crux (hee hee) is that Harry will have to willfully accept death, but that doesn't seem TOO out there as a plot point. Or, if he actually dies, he can just undergo cryonics. It's not like that was never NOT an option. Hell, you have to be legally dead to undergo it now, right?

If Dumbledore knew about the Pioneer Plate, he would just use the Elder Wand to summon it towards him

Because the Elder Wand has monumental power, and Quirrelmort's power is as far away from it as a Googolplex is from infinity. Well... ish. ALSO, the only specific requirement for the Summoning Charm is that you have to have the object clearly in your mind, and that range doesn't matter. Harry could just... show him a picture, right? He has BOOKS. HOWEVER, there are spells that prevent summoning. But then AGAIN, it's the friggin' Elder Wand.

• In MOR-Verse, Magic=Power+Knowledge. Dumbledore may have more power in the form of the elder wand, but Voldemort had knowledge of spells which had been lost for hundreds of years. It's unlikely that Slytherin didn't tell his snake about at least one ward which, cast at close range, can't be dispelled at a range of billions of kilometers even by a "more powerful" caster. Hell, with those odds even "known" magic might do it.

Whoever manipulated Hermione into trying to kill Draco wanted to make a Horcrux

Dumbledore: "There is a murder, committed in coldest blood". Hermione hit Draco with a Blood-Chilling Charm. Significant?

The prophesy will be solved by Quirrel leaving Earth.

The prophesy states the two spirits of Harry and Voldemort can't exist in the same world, Quirrel is Voldemort and Quirrel has stated he wouldn't be on Earth if he knew of anywhere better.

QQ is jeremy wibble (the guy that spoke out against voldie and his family was killed for it and he was flayed).

the "nurse" waiting for them after azkaban called him jeremy, the detective person interrogating him thought he was jeremy, and it would explain why he is so peeved about no one standing up against voldie and why he wants to help harry "optimize" the world. i was super shocked to see no one had guessed this.

• It's Yermy Wibble, not Jeremy. Though apparently Quirrell's alter ego vanished, whereas Wibble was found killed in a horrible way.

I figure the difference between yermy / Jeremy is an accent or pronunciation thing. He was found flayed, no body, just skin. Sounds to me like they shed it like a snake would.

• QQ could be yermy and voldemort, they aren't mutually exclusive. how many people IS he anyway?

QQ is not really Voldy and Eliezer is just jerking us around.

The above actually seems quite likely, especially since nothing has really happened in the story to make us assume QQ is Voldy apart from freeing Bellatrix, and even than she could easily be innocent of whatever she was imprisoned for since this is AU. QQ iis harsh in his teaching methods, yes, and sometimes even acts slightly cruel. But he always meant well. I really think he is trying to train Harry, Draco, and Hermione to fight Voldy, and he isn't really Voldy himself. Yes Eliezer has said that he is Voldemort, but really he could just be trying to lead us down another path, Red Herring style.

• EY has stated that he doesn't do stuff like that. Even so, the clues are pretty conclusive: frees Bellatrix, insane magical power, knows minute details of Voldemort's life...

Quirrelmort is setting Harry up as the next Dark Lord

And the students in the armies have the skills to overthrow him, leaving Voldemort unopposed.

Lesath Lestrange is actually Lesath Riddle.

That is to say that Lesath is actually Voldemort's son.

Lesath Lestrange's begging was an act,or at least prompted by Quirrelmort.

He was actually put up to it by Quirrelmort (aka Daddy-see above), and wasacting in concert with Quirrelmort to get Bellatrix out of prison.

The rock is Dumbledore's Horcrux.

Because,seriously, Dumbles is insane.

• And he made it by killing some Dark Wizard. Alternatively, it's Grindlewald's Horcrux.
• Alternatively, the rock is James Potter's Horcrux. Because it is "his" rock.

The Incident with the Pet Rock...

Harry's accidental magic animated the rock,and it injured/killed one or more of his childhood friends.This is the trauma that caused him to become dissociative.Whatever he actually remembers about it is a false memory.

• Actually, it turns out Dumbledore did it. All part of an elaborate scheme to prevent Harry from destroying the people in the world when he's foretold to "tear apart the very stars in heaven"
  • Not really a scheme. Dumbledore had no idea why he needed to destroy it, other than prophesy said it must be so.

Lucius [spoiler below]'d Draco to keep him from being able to rescind the debt Harry owes to House Malfoy.

If Draco hadn't been transferred out of Hogwarts, Harry (or, now, Hermione) could have saved his life and had Draco formally renounce the debt of sixty thousand galleons. If Draco isn't just being kept in the dark about the details, it could perhaps even be done without the lifesaving.

Harry's Next Year

Word of God says that Methods of Rationality is the account of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres' first year at Hogwarts and will resolve at least as much as the seven canon Harry Potter novels. This means that he will destroy all of the Horcruxes and kill Quirrellmort. The first 85 chapters of Mo R have a greater word count than the entire first four canon HP books. So, what's Harry going to do after Mo R? My hypothesese: he'll find and root the Atlantean Magic Server and kill Death. Thoughts?

The pet rock incident was Harry having a nervous breakdown because he took "treat it like a living creature" too far.

It wasn't eating its food, it wasn't drinking its water... It wouldn't even move when he was near it... When he took it out of its box to roam around, it just did nothing. What was wrong with it? What did Harry do wrong? Remember, the part of a person that "knows" things and the part of the same person that "feels" things don't quite work in tandem. Harry pretended too well, and set off his infamous pessimism at full force before he had the mental shields set up to handle it.

• Jossed, turns out Dumbledore did it!

Dumbledore knows about the Pet Rock incident.

That's why he gave Harry what was said to be his father's rock. Either he didn't understand the situation and wants to "heal" Harry or he did it because it seemed funny to him. Fortunately, Harry didn't get the "joke".

• He does know, but because he killed it.

Dementors' cloaks are provided by the ministry to reduce their visibility and make it obvious that they're dementors.

When Harry kills the dementor after the patronus-casting class, its cloak is left behind. Perhaps only ministry-affiliated or captured dementors such as the ones that work at Azkaban have cloaks, and if a wizard met a dementor in the wild, they would see it for the unknowable Eldritch Abomination that it is instead of the unpleasant corpse-like creature their minds expect it to be, which would be very, very dangerous.

• Dementors are given cloaks because they are painful to look upon. Also, naked corpses floating around would be distracting.

The diary isn't actually Bacon's

Think about it; how would Quirrellmort get his hands on the Diary of Sir Francis Roger Bacon? Highly improbable. He would, however, have a good idea of where Riddle's Diary was because, well, he is Tom Riddle; meaning that, if Harry wasn't procrastinating on learning Latin, we would all be very, very screwed.

• Point of order, it's just Roger Bacon. Francis Bacon is a different guy who lived centuries later.

"Blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word"

Harry hangs Quirrelmort after winning his battle against him, kills Bellatrix with a sword, and uses them to summon Death, whom he then kills.

• No, it's pretty much already been stated that Dementors are Death. That ritual most likely summons a Dementor. It's very unlikely that there's a whole other kind of Death who'll appear.
• If Dementors are Death, it does look like Harry now knows the counterspell to dismiss Death.
• As it turns out, those opening lines are foreshadowing of the way Harry defeats Voldemort and all the Death Eaters. The "tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line" refers to a thread of carbon nanofiber Harry transfigures and wraps around the necks of the Death Eaters and Voldemort's wrists. The falling black robes are the robes of the Death Eaters. The Blood is their blood as they are decapitated simultaneously, and Voldemort's as his hands are cut off. The word is Flitwick's swerving stunner, "STUPORFY!" which Harry uses to incapacitate Voldemort, who he didn't bother killing thanks to his hundreds of horcruxes.

The person muttering "I'm not serious/Sirius" in Azkaban is Peter Pettigrew."

In Methods, to make a double ruse, Pettigrew and Sirius Polyjuiced as each other and Pettigrew-disguised-as-Sirius went undercover. When PDAS betrayed Lily and James, he framed Sirius, and when the two met Sirius-as-Pettigrew Disapparated just as Pettigrew-as-Sirius, trying to further implicate Sirius, cast a Blasting Curse at a gas mains. Pettigrew-as-Sirius, since he doesn't get a trial, is thrown into Azkaban before the Polyjuice wears off. Pettigrew's worst memory is betraying his friends and being taken to Azkaban, hence he mourns not actually being the real Sirius.

• Confirmed, except he's a metamorphmagus instead of an animagus as in canon.

Dumbledore, when Hermione (temporarily) loses the hundred points for fighting bullying, is under influence of a potion of stupidity.

Think about it: official!Dumbledore isn't stupid enough to do such a thing, and while he's eccentric, this totally isn't his style. Maybe HPMOR!Dumbledore is simply different... or maybe potions of stupidity are not merely a rant against the Goblet of Fire plot, but also a Chekhov's Gun.

• Or, alternately, he's doing it for the reasons he stated, the situation was getting out of control and this would appease those who might otherwise have harmed Hermione far more than losing 100 points and some time in detention would've.

The timeline of HPMOR is the product of the actions of Canon!Harry

More specifically: something happened to Canon!Harry, after the "19 years later" epilogue (possibly, when he was alrady an old man) that caused him to travel back in time to before he was born. In the past, he used a spell which, as a side effect, caused many characters to have a dramatic IQ increase, which led them to make many different choices in life. The effect was hereditary. Thus, Old!Canon!Harry caused Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres to exist.

Also, note that HJPEV discovers that the universe is not Turing-computable and can make use of information that have not yet happened.

This is why, upon meeting Quirrell, Harry had the feeling he had already met him. This is why, in the words of McGonagall, Harry sometimes acts like someone who spent his first eleven years locked in a basement. This is why the Remembrall lit up like a sun when Harry caught it. Because HJPEV did forget a lifetime of memories... his entire life as Canon!Harry!

• Universe with time-turners is Turing-computable ~~~~
  • Nope. See Word of God (sortof) at http://lesswrong.com/lw/fok/causal_universes/

Animagi do *not* violate Conservation of Energy

There are forms of magic (like the mokeskin pouch, Harry's luggage) that work by folding space and connecting the outside of a container, that exists in normal space, to an "inside" which exists outside of it. Animagi are just one more instance of it, and whatever mass they need to gain or lose, they just take it or deposit it into one such extra-spatial locale.

• As a corollary: no form of magic violates Conservation of Energy. It all comes down to transferring mass or energy to extra dimensions. The Frigideiro charm? Moves heat away from this dimension and into another. The disappearing Comed-Tea? It does not actually disappear, it just leaves our dimension. Wingardium Leviosa? Moment by moment, it transfers just enough kinetic energy from another dimension to the target to counter gravity.
  • But that would ruin the whole "it's just magic" thing.
    • If you dislike Sufficiently Analyzed Magic (and you consequently give the verb "to ruin" any other meaning than "to make more awesome"), you shouldn't be reading a story titled "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" in the first place.
  • Point of fact, one does not counter gravity on an object by imparting it with kinetic energy. An object is held in place when its potential energy is no longer transformed into kinetic energy. The net energy is not affected by such a process; no additional energy is theoretically necessary to prevent a fall. This is why rocks do not require a power-source to avoid falling through the earth, for example. Levitation does not violate conservation of energy. No, instead it violates Newton's third law of motion.

Neither the universe nor anything in it runs time travel.

It's run by a higher-order being (or a conglomerate of such beings, or if reality is just a game or a war multiple opposing beings, hereafter referred to as "you") using the following simple rules: Someone can arbitrarily appear in the past, generally following a condition involving a reasonably high probability of a time machine passing into or already existing in the person's life. You have six hours to make their past self conform to that of their time-traveling self, including the capability and the decision to go back in time. If you succeed, all affected memories are edited for consistency. If you fail, the time traveler's universe is destroyed. The reason nobody ever succeeds in breaking time travel is not because it's impossible, it's because of a form of quantum immortality: In any universe that exists, time travel has never been broken, because any universe in which time travel has been broken no longer exists.

The author lied: this is going to be an HPDM bottom!Draco mpreg fic

It's all been building towards this.

Quirrel is Nicholas Flamel.

No one in this world is holding the idiot ball. Nicholas Flamel is the only wizard of record that has an actual immortality device neatly wrapped up. It is fairly obvious that Flamel’s Philosopher’s Stone is at Hogwarts. If a wizard is both not holding the idiot ball and owns the Philosopher’s Stone, then why would you let it leave your own protection? What other wizard has had enough life to learn how to literally sneeze at powerful spells to dispel them? Quirrel claimed his family was killed by the Dark Lord. Of course Voldemort would try to do everything in his power to gain the Stone, including kill Flamel’s likely extended family. It also explains why Quirrel hasn't hunted down Flamel as Harry Potter states would happen. Being six centuries old would also explain why the Dementors, under the influence of normal people, are actively seeking to hunt Quirrel down.

To stay alive as long as he has, Flamel would have had to have the cunning displayed by Quirrel at the very least. It might also explaine zombie mode, as he is off his Elixer of Life for the year. He is also mentioned several times as looking older and older as the year continues. Flamel is acclaimed to be six centuries old, old enough to have attended school during the tenure of the "quote, unquote undying Baba Yaga" which is directly referenced by Quirrel in his opening speech. He has also mentioned his personal history being largely absent from any media, and we saw the prejudice with which he treated those who investigate his personal history with Rita Skeeter. Nicholas Flamel, aka "Crozier", would certainly have enough money to pay for everything Quirrel has paid for.

Someone has claimed Word of God says that Quirrel is Voldemort. I haven’t seen the Word, so I am not going to destroy my theory until I see the evidence myself. Even if it were true, who is to say that Voldemort wasn't just another mask of Nicholas Flamel? It certainly seems like Nicholas Flamel has been receiving more name-checks as the story continues.

The world ends because of the jinx to stop "opposite reaction" from working around Azkaban.

In real life, things don't always happen for big important reasons. Removing "opposite reaction" would undermine such a fundamental law of physics that it might be impossible to predict what would happen to any particles in the jinx's area of effect. Perhaps it will cause all the matter in Azkaban's vicinity to disintegrate at a subatomic level, thus becoming the world's biggest-ever nuclear detonation. A bright light, cities and people on fire, and maybe in Trelawney's Sunday prophecy, the word that started with an 'S' was "substance."

As long as the phrase, "He is coming," need not be interpreted literally. In prophecy-speak, "coming" could easily refer to a person growing into "the one who will tear apart the very substance". Then again, if the prophecy doesn't give Harry credit for that, maybe Arthur Weasley or someone else in the Ministry "is coming" to cast the jinx.

Considering that prophecies are usually announced only to those closely linked, and this prophecy tried to spill itself before the entire Hogwarts population, it may well involve the end of the world entire.

• Possible, but remember how broomsticks work on Aristotlean physics because the people who first created them didn't understand Newtonian physics? Magic is quite clearly at least partly guided by intent, and it's unlikely that the people who develop the anti-"opposite reaction" jinx would research it in such detail that they would understand the possible outcomes, and if they did it's very unlikely that they'd go through with its creation.

Quirrell's battle magic class is an allegory for the Cold War.

The Chaos Legion is the United States (individualist), Dragon Army is the Soviet Union (conformist), and the Sunshine Regiment is China (the third, underestimated power). Alternatively, the Sunshine Regiment is the United States (democratic) and the Chaos Legion is Maoist China (the leader orchestrates a state of perpetual revolution while maintaining de facto absolute power for himself).

Hermione has Asperger's syndrome

She loves to read, she is unusually interested in the things she finds interesting, she is socially awkward and finds it easier to interact with books than people, she basks in praise, she is extremely sensitive… It is practically canon. (Fanon-canon)

Quirrell is Quirrell

But he is possessed by Voldemort. Voldemort is pretending to be David Monroe pretending to be Quirinus Quirrell.

Quirrell can cast a Patronus

He has figured out the secret, just like Godric and Rowena before him and Harry after him. He just doesn't want anyone to find out.

The burning of the chicken is related to the burning of Narcissa Malfoy

Perhaps Dumbledore did not actually burn Narcissa alive, but rather something transfigured and contained etc etc (the same explanation McGonagall gave Harry for the chicken). Doing so was an attempt to hint to Harry that he shouldn't take that story too seriously. Alternatively, one can imagine that Dumbles is a crazy pyromaniac, and McGonagall's explanation is why clever good people have not so far jumped him.

Quirrel, Harry's dark side, Mr. Hat and Cloak, and Santa are all separate and incomplete copies of Voldermort.

Much like how the canon!diary was a copy of younger Voldermort. They are not all aware of each other, and some are working towards separate and mutually exclusive goals.

Harry's Sense of Doom is in fact…

• The feeling a horcrux gets when it detects another piece of Voldemort in its presence.

• The knowledge that the universe will explode if he gets too close to Professor Quirrell.

• Just plain old intuition telling him that Quirrell is a bad guy, one which Hermione has in spades.

Lucius Malfoy knows that science works, and plans to use it.

We know that Lucius knows everything Draco knows. Draco believed that Harry was planning to use Muggle science and magic to take over the world. Lucius might realize that the things Harry said seem to hang together logically, and decide to investigate. If Lucius does believe that Muggle science is as powerful as Harry claims, he might decide to use it himself, in secret. It wouldn't even occur to other wizards to use Muggle ideas, because that idea is just too alien to them. Lucius's next steps will be to go into the Muggle world, strip a good library to the bare shelves, walk out with all the scientific, engineering, and technological knowledge Harry said Draco wasn't ready for yet. It's true that in chapter 80 Lucius says that Harry lied to Draco (presumably about Muggle science and the blood purity test), but this is just to make Harry think that Lucius had rejected his ideas.

Lily somehow tricked Voldemort into accidentally making an Unbreakable Vow

As we saw, the confrontation between Lily Potter and Voldemort didn't go down quite the way that it did in canon. but Voldemort did, indeed, say "I accept your bargain" after Lily offered her life for her son's. And when you break an Unbreakable Vow, you die. It's possible that, instead of saving Harry with The Power of Love, Voldemort ended up sticking himself with a Magically-Binding Contract of some sort when he (dishonestly) agreed not to kill Harry; when he went on to ignore this, the contract went off and killed him. Lily knew darn well that Voldemort wasn't going to keep his word, so she set up a ritual (arranging for her own life to be the sacrifice) which would ensure Harry's safety.

• I agree, and I suspect that Eliezer added the bargain in order to explain why nobody else's self-sacrifice killed Voldie earlier on (and never killed any of his Death Eaters either). It's interesting that the source material explains that Lily's sacrifice gave Harry magical protection, then disregards all the counter-evidence that no-one else's loving self-sacrifice yielded similar results, and the human brain, by default, ignores the very possibility of negative evidence due to the existence of positive evidence.

• It makes sense that they at least made a deal ( "Very well. I accept the bargain.") and Voldie didn't notice at the time, being too distracted by his assumptions that, "here is a helpless, stupid Gryffindor, and there's the baby I have come to murder, this is gonna be easy." Lily did the first thing she could think of that was guaranteed to make him break his end of the bargain, thus ensuring her son's survival.
  • That sounds too much like him holding the idiot ball at the time, though, thus unlikely in Mo R-verse. [Edit, same troper] Equally, Harry's reaction to Unbreakable Vows would make wonderful foreshadowing for this (when he suggests dying wizards should seal them for money on their death beds). The explanation given to him then, though, seems to imply that 3 separate people are needed for the vow, so Lily shouldn't be able to do two roles...
    • Unless someone (possibly a not quite dead, or even time travelling, James) was under the invisibility cloak, acting as the binder.

Quirrell attacked Draco and Hermione because Harry revealed way too much information in chapters 65 and 66.

Harry revealed two important facts. First, Dumbledore believes Voldemort to be still alive. Second, Harry's ability to stay in Hogwarts for six years is contingent on his friendships ("If necesssary - sstay at sschool ssix yearss and sstudy. Hogwartss sseemss fine place to dwell. Bookss, friendss, sstrange but tassty food.").If Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix are active, Quirrellmort needs to accelerate his plans. He decides to give up on the Philosopher's Stone, and instead conduct the resurrection ritual as soon as possible. He cannot forcibly remove Harry from Hogwarts, so he must convince Harry to leave. Quirrell primes Harry for impatience and wanderlust, telling him that they are alike in their inability to tolerate confinement. Once Harry refuses to leave Hogwarts, the boy makes the mistake of pointing out to Quirrell that his friendships will help him to endure. He literally pointed out his greatest vulnerability to the man in whom he'd just lost faith, the man who was already blatantly trying to convince him to leave. Quirrell spins a plan to destroy Harry's alliance with Draco and to remove Hermione from Hogwarts, and potentially driving Harry to immediately run to Azkaban to save her, and maybe even ask Quirrell to provide the necessary portkeys, et cetera. Whether all the details come together or not, the core plan is solid: Damage Harry's friendships. Plan of action: Reduce Harry's army and thus disband Dramione's Sungon Argiment. Whenever either Draco or Hermione outperforms the other, point this out to both of them. Give Hermione a forged S.P.H.E.W Badge, which you've enchanted to allow yourself to track her. Find her when she's all alone and use Obliviation to instill a sourceless paranoia against Draco. Wait until Draco and Hermione clash. Realize your incredible stroke of luck when they clash climactically in full view of the school, and when later that very same night your tracking spell reveals Hermione sneaking out after curfew. In the quiet of night, strike.

• This actually makes a surprising amount of sense. Although I'm not so sure about Voldemort planning for his resurrection. He could easily have kidnapped Harry at any time to do that, such as straight after the Azkaban break-out when he had everything he'd need. Assuming that the ritual is the same as in canon.
  • Dumbledore drops hints that the ritual is expected to require the same ingredients as in canon: Bones of the father, blood of the enemy, and flesh of the servant. As for allowing Harry to return to Hogwarts, Quirrellmort seems to have expected less from Dumbledore. Note his surprise and chagrin when Harry reveals that Dumbledore believes Voldemort to be still alive. If Dumbledore's guard is down, even a little, Quirrellmort could very well find himself an opportunity to secure the ultimate prize, the Philosopher's Stone. Once he finds out that Dumbledore's guard is very much not down, he decides to take Harry Potter and the Resurrection Ritual off the backburner.
    • What if Dumbledore is so insane that he agreed to keep the Philosopher Stone in Hogwarts in order to distract Voldemort from cheaper alternatives, thus guarding Harry's life in a way Harry will never guess?

The real reason magic is "getting weaker" is to do with the training methods, not magic itself.

Before the founding of Hogwarts or wizarding schools in general, people with magical ability were trained as apprentices to experienced witches and wizards. As with Muggles, mainstreaming education ends up turning everyone average; instead of having them invest all their energy in learning things they'd actually be good at and have passion for instead of practicing a set of standard spells and being primarily motivated by grades. This works with the next WMG.

• In Cannon, both OW Ls and NEWTS can lock people out of certain classes, so if you mess up your potions OWL (like Harry did) you could end up not being allowed to take the next year's course (although it seems to be up to the teacher, as Slugthorn had a slightly lower standard than Snape.) So it seems that while 1st year students have the same curriculum, they get more and more specialized as they progress. Whether this is still the case in HPMOR cannon though (it was a pretty minor detail in a late book that the author has admitted to not reading) remains to be seen.

The Muggle witch trials persecuted Muggleborns.

Of course, Muggles in Medieval times burned lots of other Muggles as witches; however, many of them may easily have been untrained Muggleborns.

Lily had figured out what the prophecy meant.

Either that or she was just really good at thinking on her feet.

Quirrell took the DADA teacher position specifically in order to be above criticism.

After all, Mc Gonnagall would personally kill anyone who tried. To find out who has power over you, find out who you are not allowed to criticise (~Voltaire), and Quirrell is effectively the most powerful person in Hogwarts. Even Dumbledore can't question him, and Mc Gonnagall refuses to do so. Quirrell can conduct his investigations in relative peace.

The Deathly Hallows are made from a cloak of a dementor.

the cloak has been shown to be black in the HPMOR-verse, and this allows the 'three brothers actually met death' theory and the 'the three brothers made the Hallows themselves' theory to be simultaneously true. The hallows are not made by a quasi-deity and they can thus be defeated, e.g. Moody's eye in ch 86.

• I feel that it would be more than just the cloak, but the only thing I can think of that doesn't leave bits of the dementor behind (unless dementors nowadays are what's left of what the first dementor was, and that's why their cloaks degrade now but the invisibility cloak doesn't) is super-symbolic and doesn't work well in the very literal HPMOR universe: They eldest brother took its bones and fashioned a weapon from them, the middle brother took its skull to look within Death's memories, and the youngest brother took the cloak which makes Death invisible to all living things.

When Quirrell does that in-the-stars thing

• … He is really making contact with his pioneer plaque horcrux.
• He could also be just creating an illusion.

Sirius is a villain…

And did a body-swap, exchanging bodies with Peter, albeit without Peter's consent.

The one telling Millicent about the S.P.H.E.W. battles…

• Was Rianne Felthorne – but then, why would Severus have left notes under Hermione's pillow?
• Was Margaret Bulstrode, her sister in fourth year. It would explain why Millicent was so reluctant to tell Hermione and Daphne who her informant was. It is also obvious that Millicent doesn't have a Time Turner, but that her sister does. It is even made clear in the text.
• Was Millicent Bulstrode, who heard about it as future-gossip via her elder sister Margaret Bulstrode. HOWEVER, Snape and Rianne Felthorne ensured that someone would inform S.P.H.E.W. about the battles by also giving notes to Hermione, which set up the Stable Time Loop including the Bulstrodes' actions in the first place.

Harry's comparison of Lucius Malfoy to Darth Vader will be significant.

Hermione is still alive.

• Someone polyjuiced as Hermoine was attacked by the troll.
• Tonks morphed into Hermoine and fought the troll.
  • After the conversation in chapter 87, it makes sense that Hermoine would ask an older girl for relationship advice.
  • Hermoine was under her invisibility cloak on the roof which is why the patronus brought Harry there.
• IF Dumbledore staged the troll attack, Hermione is not dead. Think about who confirmed Hermione's death, that 'her soul has departed' - Dumbledore. Notice the similarity to Narcissa's supposed fiery death: there seems to be no proof but Dumbledore's words. What conflicts with this theory is that Harry perceives the outpouring of "Hermione-ness" while she dies, which seems rather hard to fake, especially since Harry is an occlumens (never mind that big D arrives only after she dies, he could have easily used a time turner and disillusionment).

Hermione is dead

• However, she will be preserved in liquid nitrogen and revived at some later point.

Harry's two-minute goodbye to Hermione was more like a six-hour goodbye. And she was awake.

• He guarded the door for well over six hours before starting, and he had no reason not to transfigure her body temporarily into a living form since her basic form was already damaged beyond feasible repair. It would give her an opportunity to convey any important last words and advice. It's just a pity that nobody else would be able to share in this sort of goodbye due to the ick factor. It might have been horrifying for her, but it would have been a sort of reprieve from what she'd already experienced.
• Maybe he took stem cells.

The body in the storage room is a death doll

Quirrell is David Monroe is Tom Riddle is not Lord Voldemort

• Before David Monroe went to Albania, he found and was eaten by the diary horcrux. The horcrux, for its own reasons, decided that taking out Voldemort was a good idea, and so kept up the David Monroe persona.
  • Seconded - this is essentially what happened in A Black Comedy, where the David Monroe character is from.
    • OP here, that's what I was going off of, yeah.
    • Different troper here: I've never read A Black Comedy (but it's queued up in my fanfiction archive), and I came to the same conclusion- that Defense-Professor-mort took over Monroe before Voldemort had a chance to die; a "copy-protection failure", as someone once referred to in a different HPMOR context of peoples' backups potentially being resurrected before they die (people being returned from the afterlife within the Atlantean machine, not horcruxes). Having come up with the idea in parallel, without completely different sources of inspiration (including non-HP, non-HPMOR sources) supports your guess.

Voldemort was David Monroe's lackey

David Monroe orchestrated Voldemort's rise to power and funded his terrorism in an attempt to commit a false flag takeover of Magical Britain. Think the Star Wars prequels with David Monroe as Palpatine and Voldemort as Count Dooku, Magical Britain as the Republic and the Death Eaters as the Separatists. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the whole plan when he realized that instead of rallying behind a strong leader (himself) the population was instead content to cower and do nothing while he dealt with the problem virtually alone. Realizing this, he went into seclusion to formulate a new plan that didn't rely on people being rational and left Voldemort to do what he would, only occasionally assisting to maintain the balance of the war.

• This nicely explains the discrepancy Harry perceives between everyone's opinion of Voldemort's intelligence and his inability to instantly win the war. The intelligence was always David Monroe's and was only ever applied towards achieving his own goals, which were never "Voldemort wins the war".
• Alternatively, David Monroe and Voldemort were always physically the same person (not mental clones or anything), although this would require explaining their two different childhoods.

the real Hermione will be revived

• With the Elixir of Life, made from the Philosopher's Stone.
• By being given a blood transfusion.
• By the necromancy Prof. Evans-Verres quipped about in chapter 92.

Harry's father's rock now contains Hermione's brain.

While Harry was paying his respects to Hermione's body, he used his Time-Turner and the Invisibility Cloak to go back to the fight with the troll, extract Hermione's brain while she was dying, hollow out the rock and place the brain inside it, along with a Cooling Charm and some insulating material. He then keeps the entire rock and brain transfigured into a gem, which nobody questions because he's always done it. While transfigured, Hermione's brain only degrades very slowly, and so this is Harry's best chance of preserving it for long enough to bring her back to life. There are clues in the fight scene - Harry transfigures part of the troll's brain into sulphuric acid, and Hermione's death scream sounds a lot like she's having her entire mental state extracted magically.Makes more sense than the above guess, anyway.

Hermione's body is the ring itself

Hermione's body is missing because she's alive

Harry already succeeded in resurrecting her, or thinks he did. He's keeping it secret to keep her safe. However, he still needs to keep looking for a way to bring her back, because...

Harry is maintaining a transfiguration of dead Hermione to living Hermione

Inanimate object to living creature transfiguration can be done with charms. So it stands to reason Harry can figure out a way to do inanimate to living free transfiguration, and sees no theoretical problem as to why it can't be used to heal someone. However, he needs to maintain the transfiguration, which is harder than with the rock, and needs to keep her someplace where he can control the environment, in case there's any issues when the transfiguration reverts. In the meantime, he's looking for a permanent solution.

Everyone gets patroni 2.0

And are thus shielded from Dementors and therefore Death.

Voldemort is the Heir of Slytherin in truth, not just in name, because he's using Slytherin's ring.

First, think back to after the lake battle in December. Blaise Zabini comments to Mr. Hat and Cloak that 'nothing really bad ever happens to students in Hogwarts'; to which H&C replies, "With the murder of one student five decades ago being the exception that proves the rule, since Salazar Slytherin would have keyed his monster into the ancient wards at a higher level than the Headmaster himself." (Chapter 35, Aftermath: Blaise Zabini.) Dumbledore never felt the troll enter, and wasn't able to tell where it was (unlike with Harry's potential phoenix). The troll, like the last creature to have killed a student within Hogwarts, outranked the Headmaster as far as the wards were concerned.

So far, so obvious. Now for the WMG bit. Less Wrong has clearly read nonjon's A Black Comedy, as shown by the appearance of David Monroe. Towards the end of that fic, Harry is recognised by Slytherin's ring (no longer a horcrux) as Lord Slytherin, and finds himself able to do things like apparate within the grounds, open the main doors, and turn all of Hogwarts green. Back with MoR and thinking about who might be motivated to go after that particular object there (although it may or may not be a horcrux), the reason Voldemort was able to attack using the troll was because he 1) has Slytherin's ring and 2) is genuinely the Heir of Slytherin, or possibly Lord Slytherin.

A further guess - the attempt on Draco's life was not Voldemort. If it were, the slow-acting blood-cooling charm to bypass the wards would have been unnecessary; Voldemort could have simply killed Draco himself at a higher Hogwarts User Level than the Headmaster, which would have been a more certain method (not foiled by a random teacher or prefect out for a stroll) and only a potential giveaway if someone were to know about the ring and that Voldemort is the Heir, in which case all they know is that he has some mysterious ability to murder Hogwarts students even behind the wards: perfect for creating the terror he wants. So, I think some other culprit is framing Voldemort, without the knowledge that he's the Heir.

The attempt on Draco's life was not an attempt on Draco's life.

Pertaining to the above guess. As has been said, Voldemort can hack the wards. If he wanted to kill Draco, he would simply have done so; the whole affair was probably just to frame Hermione. The most likely culprit is of course Quirrell.

Harry will use partial transmutation to make large amounts of money.

By mass producing abundant but difficult to refine materials. The process goes like this: starting with a raw material (e.g. titanium dioxide) he selectively transmutes only the oxygen atoms into a nonreactive element (e.g. helium), the covalent bonds break and the elements separate, then when he reverts the transmutation all that's left is pure titanium which he can then process further or sell. Even though it breaks one of McGonagall's cardinal rules of transmutation since both the subject and target are harmless gasses, and he would undoubtedly test the process with her and Dumbledore's supervision, it would be permissible.

• Except that, while helium is no reactive, oxygen is not, and as soon as he stopped, focusing, the helium would convert into oxygen, which would cause a huge reaction when they all started bonding to each other to form O2.
  • It's a simple enough matter to flush the transfigured element from the system, the point is that he's using partial transfiguration to perform a task more efficiently than he could otherwise.

If Dumbledore was responsible for the troll, then a third party knew about the plot and sabotaged it.

Chapter 97 has the characters consider (and begin acting off of) the possibility that Dumbledore was behind both murder attempts and both were meant to be foiled. The chain of logic holds up as far as they took it... but even if you account for sabotaging Hermione's emergency items by saying he wanted to play into the narrative of Harry rescuing her, nothing accounts for the map being taken from the twins. Dumbledore knew they had it, and if they had been able to use it that day Harry could have found her in a very short span of time and saved her easily. It wouldn't even look odd that the perpetrator to overlooked it, since Harry would just assume the guy was watching him and Hermione. So Dumbledore would have no reason to sabotage the map, but would have reason to expect Harry to find her in time if the twins had the map. But it would make perfect sense if a third party who actually wanted her dead (possibly Quirrel), somehow having learned about the plot in advance, performed all the necessary acts of sabotage to get her killed. The only question is how someone could possibly see this coming since he would have told noone. The map almost certainly was taken very shortly before the incident since the longer they spent without it the likelier they were to notice and go to the teachers.

• Equally, we actually see Dumbledore taking the map earlier in the text and never see him give it back. The twins can have been obliviated or legilimised to forget it. If anything, that supports the idea of Dumbledore being behind the troll, odd as it seems.

• The reasons he gives about why he didn't realise something was wrong with Hermione are also highly suspicious and overly specific. He specifically chose to cast magic-only detection on her and prevent anyone else from casting any charm to check on her, when last time there was an issue precisely because of a loophole. Furthermore, if a teacher causes grievous harm to a student, that surely should still ring some alarms, but Dubmledore insists that that's the reason the wards didn't alert him until her death (Ch. 94).

Quirrell brought the troll into Hogwarts. The wards are speaking the truth.

Everything speaks for Quirrell doing it. He notices stuff, like Margaret Bulstrode having a Time Turner. He would have noticed that the Weasley twins somehow knew when to hide and where to go – maybe already when helping them with Skeeter, which he most likely did – and he would have found out how. And memory charmed them again, since they obviously didn't remember that it was a map they had. He must have been hoping that Harry would shed his restraints when Hermione was dead.

• Plus there was that bit of foreshadowing where Quirrell threatened Hermione on a balcony. (ch. 84)

Quirrel is a troll animagus.

We see his body become a snake for the same reason he can speak Parseltongue; he's one person's soul in another person's everything. Voldemort's soul-fragment is a snake animagus. Not his host, whose few irreproducable talents (such as his personal animagus form) allow him to be used as a tool and perhaps aimed at a vulnerable student. Quirrelmort clearly has a thing about trolls- or hey, maybe the Battle Magic professor who cursed the DADA position fifty years ago is a troll animagus, and his host is the snake animagus. It would certainly jive with what we've seen of Voldemort's personality that he'd cover up being a troll animagus (covering up being a half-blood, because half-bloods and trolls are stupid) and/or hype trolls after discovering that he is a troll animagus (the way he insisted that being a descendent of Slytherin meant you were inherently awesome despite all evidence to the contrary, simply because he was a descendent of Slytherin). Maybe Voldemort chose Quirrel in this continuity not because he was the former Muggle Studies professor and was trusted by Hogwarts (as in canon), or because he was a convenient nearby person, but because it would let him turn into a snake.
Regardless of which of them is the snake and which is the troll, we don't actually hear about the disposal or disappearance of the corpse of a certain suspicious troll after it got acid in the face or rather, the brain; all we know is that acid retards or prevents their healing, and that acid and fire are the only things that can kill a troll, not that acid actually did kill it in this particular case. It would certainly give Harry means to re-evaluate the possibility of wizardly souls existing independent of the brain.

• The problem with this theory is that it involves Quirrel putting himself directly in the line of fire in a position where Harry and potentially any or all professors will legitimately try to kill him and he can't fight back with magic and has to appear to be beaten. Him taking such a risk would be absolutely ludicrous. Also, just because Harry didn't see the body taken away doesn't mean noone would look for it.

Lily doomed the World.

A Centaur made a very clear prophecy to her. If she used Magic to make her sister pretty, the world would end. Because then Harry would meet Michael Verres and thus become who he is today. It's in the first Chapter!

Prophecy is Malicious.

Who the hell are the Fates? What if they don't want immortality? They want Epic campaigns of Heroics, not boring Utopias where nobody needs them. They Sniped Atlantis off the maps and when Merlin brought a new Golden Age they told him the World would end until he killed himself and banned Epic Spellbooks.

What Dumbledore signed from the terrace, and to whom he signed it

Given that it happened immediately after Harry told him about the Transfiguration rule he broke, it was most likely some kind of secret warning sign to Minerva.

• No, he was just making the troll corpse that'd been kicked off the terrace safe to go near.

It is also possible that it was the wizard equivalent of crossing oneself, to ward off the consequences of breaking a rule of Transfiguration or defying McGonnagal's orders.

The list Harry gave the Weasley twins contains…

• At least one semi-automatic firearm.
• Enriched uranium.
• Actual rocket fuel.
• A rocket.
• An EKG-machine.

Renaming it Battle Magic is enough to lift the Curse.

The curse was cast on the position of Defense Professor. Quirrell is holding the position of Professor in Battle Magic.

• This is entirely plausible. Quirrel knows exactly how the Curse works. He cast it. Kudoes.

The ending of the fic will be determined by TV Tropes.

Eliezer already mentioned in discussions about chapter 98 that he included the student council based on a WMG. Since the focus of the story is creativity almost as much as rationality, and it is possible we'll be required to do something to get a True Ending, his unspoken plan is to use the most creative and workable solutions produced here to finish the book more easily. It is therefore in our best interests to come up with as many ways for Harry to save Hermione as we can, possibly even thinking about it for 5 minutes beforehand.

• The other side of that Guess is that we will never know how it was really going to end, and therefore we should be careful with what we Guess. But really, I think Yudkowsky would only take the awesome WMGs and incorporate them into the original story that he already has in his head.

The Verres family is somehow related to the Verres family from El Goonish Shive.

Harry and Tedd are both named Verres, and they both try to categorize magic in a scientific context. Since they most probably don't exist in the same universe, we have to assume that they're both personifications of attempts to introduce order into chaos. Or something like that.

Quirrell is lying about not speaking Parseltongue

He knew it would seem too suspicious if he could speak it, too. Harry would have figured him out in no time. Probably snake Animagi can't even speak that unless they know it as humans.

Hermione is now released from her Oath and servitude to House Potter

She swore servitude "until the day I die". Specifically April 16 1992, nine days after taking the oath. There was nothing in there about resuming if she ever got revived.

Lucius thought Hermione might be Narcissa reincarnate

When he thought Harry was Voldemort, he referred to her bloodlust and power. You'd think he meant she might be Bellatrix, but Bellatrix is still alive. Maybe he was inadvertently confessing that his wife wasn't such an innocent person after all.

Nah, he thought she was Bellatrix

He would perhaps have been friendlier to Narcissa reincarnated. Still doesn't explain why he thought she would kill his son/her nephew though.

There will be a sequel in which adult Harry fights intergalactic Voldemort and his assembled army of Aliens.

Duh.

How Harry Brings Hermione Back To Life

This guess is based on two pieces of information about how magic works in-universe that we are given.

First, ghosts are not sentient in as much as they are aware that they are aware. Instead they act as mind-uploads that are impressed upon the environment when a wizard suffers a sudden and violent death. Given the manner in which she died and the huge outpouring of magical energy at the time, it seems likely that Harry will encounter a Hermione ghost in Hogwarts in the near future.

Second, the Killing Curse acts as the magically manifest desire of the caster to see the target cease to exist. The caster must want them dead "as an terminal goal of their utility function." Going off of a WMG above, Harry will eventually learn the polar opposite of the Killing Curse, which will use his desire to see Life prevail in much the same way as his patronus does. Harry's utility function has this as an terminal goal already.

Combining these two premises, Harry will cast Raise Dead on Hermione's body, which is mostly likely transfigured into his ring to prevent decay. Besides the body he will also use the Hermione-ghost as a restore point for her mental state. From Hermione's point of view she will have been attacked by the troll, blacked out from her wounds, and then will wake up healthy and whole.

• There won't be a Ghost of Hermione: "For a moment it seemed like the outpouring of magic might hold, take root in the castle's stone; but then the outpouring ended and the magic faded [...]."

In the end, Harry will kill Death via a magical ritual

The ritual will probably involve Summoning Death (via the ritual Quirrel mentioned, that has a forgotten Banish-Death counterpart). Then, using all three Deathly Hallows, Harry will cast the True Patronus to Heal Death. After that, it's anyone's guess what happens, but I'm going for "retroactively create an afterlife (which, to prevent paradoxes, is only detectable insofar as it does not change the past of the physical world)."

Anyone else know an acceptable (non-tragic) ending?

• Harry will summon Hermione's soul with the Reurrection Stone and ritually restore her to life. He will use the Philosopher's Stone to heal her legs, or give her silver prosthetics (or bronze for symbolism, or gold for even more symbolism). He will get rid of Quirrell and all the horcruxes with her help after she figures out Dementors for herself and can cast the True Patronus charm.

The remembrall lit up because it got confused by Harry's time turner.

Harry would have been in existence as two copies at the same time, but the other copy had memories further into the time line, so the rememballs magic could have been "confused".

• What he forgot was probably to be discrete about his Spimster Wicket.

Harry will discover that he can transfigure matter into antimatter.

Magic can create a big boom, but evidently not one that can compare to WWII-era nuclear weapons. Total conversion would make even the most efficient nuke look like a firecracker in comparison, pound for pound. Of course, the problem with an antimatter bomb is designing a mechanism to propel the matter and antimatter together in such a way as to create one large explosion.

...Unless, of course, you can just use partial transfiguration to ask every other proton to please become an antiproton^*Also neutrons/antineutrons and electrons/positrons, if it makes you happy.. This is what Quirrell fears will happen to the Earth, or perhaps the Sun. Can a few antiparticles unmake a horcrux? He doesn't know.

Professor Sinistra will be legilimised

It's practically been foreshadowed twice.

The Elder Wand can fight off old age, and maybe even reverse death.

There have been several instances of Dumbledore's age appearing to change in tandem with changes in his mood. It may well be that Harry is incorrect in Chapter 97 in supposing that the Elder Wand can't fight old age. Perhaps it only takes the right mood, and Dumbledore, being a Deathist, fails to harness the Elder Wand's full power.

And if the Elder Wand truly can reverse aging, perhaps the right sort of mind can drive it to reverse other processes as well, such as death itself.

Next will be a dragon.

As per Quirrell's List of Most Dangerous Creatures Alive, backwards. Harry has already fought and won against the Top 3 in descending order.

The next will be a basilisk.

Which is kind of a dragon and not in any way less dangerous.

• No idea why it didn't make the short list.
  • A basilisk is plausible, considering that Harry wants to resurrect Hermione and an exchange of lines between Moody and Snape in chapter 63: Moody:"Basilisk venom." Snape:' "What? Snake venom is a positive component of the resurrection potion! Not to mention that it would dissolve the bone and all the other substances! And where would we even get-"

The Prophecies didn't speak of Harry at all.

The first, canonical one may have been about Snape, who was marked by Voldemort not long after hearing it prophesised that "the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal". You might say the Dark Mark is in fact the mark of a subordinate… until you remember that Voldemort has it too.In the case of the newer, fanonical prophecy, it could have been about Quirrell or his alter ego. Or his tertiary ego.

Harry's mysterious dark side is a fragment of Voldemort's soul that is capable of independent thought.

He was not detected by the Sorting Hat because he was an Occlumens.

Dementors originated on Atlantis.

That's why it sank. They forgot to turn off their Dementor-producing volcano in the panic and rush of getting off the sinking island, though, and now another one pops up every once in a while, presumably from below the sea.

• Alternatively, new Dementors are produced by people believing in death. Or every time you cheat Death, a new Dementor materialises.
  • Quirrell already explains this when he tells Harry about a ritual to summon death, which he says he would not dream of trying since the spell to dismiss death was lost (i.e. Patronus 2.0).
    • No, he doesn't. What you just wrote has nothing to do with the WMG.
    • Quirrell in Chapter 74: "...a ritual which promised to summon Death itself - though what is truly meant by that I do not know and do not care to discover, since it was also said that the counterspell to dismiss Death had been lost." Harry already identified the Dementors as manifestations of Death, and he himself most likely (quietly!) decided that the ritual Quirrell told him about was the source of Dementors.

A shot of liquid fire is what you should get after getting bitten by an inferius.

Turning Harry into a horcrux was not an accident.

On October 31, 1981, Voldemort entered the Potter residence with a plan. He had no use for James Potter, so he just killed him. Lily Potter assumed that he wanted to kill little Harry, so she begged him to take her instead. But Harry's death had no part in Voldemort's plan. Voldemort wanted one more piece on the chessboard to manipulate, so he started the ritual for the creation of a horcrux. For that, he killed Lily and implanted a shred of his own soul into Harry, whose scar was a side effect of the procedure. Then, he used a death doll to make a duplicate of his own body, set it on fire and Apparated away.

The goal of this was to create the legend of the Boy-Who-Lived. Authorities would discover James's and Lily's corpses, as well as charred remains they would assume to be Voldemort's. They would add two and two together... and get five, coming to the wrong conclusion that Voldemort was killed by his own Killing Curse, which rebounded against Harry. This would make sure that Harry would grow up to be Voldemort's nemesis. But as long as Voldemort's enemies protect Harry, he (Voldemort) would not die, because of Harry's nature as a horcrux.

But Voldemort's plan went further than that. He knew that, less than ten years later, Harry would receive a letter from Hogwarts, so (some time between 1981 and 1991) he kidnapped the real David Monroe and Polyjuiced himself into a lookalike, periodically plucking one of his hair from his skull to keep up the deception. As David Monroe, Voldemort created the identity of Quirinus Quirrell and applied for a Defense teaching post at Hogwarts, which he got. The goal of this was to persuade Harry to join his side. This would make Voldemort capable of controlling not only his associates, but his enemies too, thereby assuring that every outcome in the subsequent war would lead to his victory.

Quirrell isn't polyjuiced.

He is transfigured.

Elizier is going to take a 100-year break from writing Methods of Rationality...

...in order to encourage readers to sign up for cryonics so they can eventually see where the story goes. Every reader who signs up is another life potentially saved. When faced with a choice between conventional story completion and a life-saving cliffhanger, what would a rational humanist do?

• You idiot! Don't give him ideas!
  • We have a responsibility to bring this to his attention just as much as he has a responsibility to carry it out.
• Or we the readers could commit ourselves to sign up for cryonics as soon as we can afford it, thus decreasing the potential benefits of a cliffhanger.

Harry's Dad being a biochemist is a hint about the nature of Magic.

"I read somewhere that if you string out all the veins in one human body, you can wrap it around the Earth a few times."

• That's a lot of friction.

Next will be an army of inferi.

More specifically the one Lavender mentions in chapter 70.

The centaur is now brain dead.

That was an Avada Kedavra and Quirrell just temporarily reanimated the corpse.

• The two other greenflashes killed two other magical creatures. The centaurs are going to go to war – that's the "Mars is bright" line.

Atlantis was a highly advanced technological society.

Narcissa lives.

She is kept in a state of coma with the Draught of the Living Dead.

• She can only be woken with a kiss, possibly it has to be of True Love.
  • This leaves three possibilities: her husband, her son or her sister. Depending on whose love is truest.

Harry will try to piece together Voldemort's soul.

He has a friend in Quirrell, a mentor. He wouldn't want to let that go.

Quirrell is David Monroe, and is not Voldemort, yet.

You-Know-Who turned Monroe into a Horcrux. That is why Monroe quit being a hero, he realized he couldn't win. That is also why he can connect to Harry (end of chap 89). And either the Pioneer Probe is Monroe's Horcrux, or it is Voldemort's and he can connect to it to. The reason he goes into zombie mode is that You-Know-Who is trying to take over his body, and he doesn't have Harry's protection. That is also why he became the teacher and is so desperate to make the students improve, and unite Britain under Harry, he is preparing the forces to defeat him once he is turned.

The Animagus potion flask contained the potion Quirrell used to become a snake Animagus.

To keep up appearances. It would have been too suspicious if he just happened to speak Parseltongue too.

Eliezer only made the respective amounts of Galleons "100 000" and "40 000" to confuse us about whether a Galleon is worth twenty pounds or fifty.

Harry keeps referring to the amount as "two million pounds sterling".

"Abracadabra" will be the reversal-spell to Avada Kedavra.

• Or "Adra Kedavra" which is the dubious etymology of "abracadabra". "Adra Kedavra" means "I create as I speak" or "I create as the word" (or "I create as the Word" if you want to get powerfully biblical about it.) In contrast "Avada Kedavra" means "I destroy as I speak" or "I destroy as the word". Oddly, J K Rowlings seems to be a little fuzzy on this, as she seemed to get the two mixed up in an interview, convoluting the intended canon etymology.

The pyramids were conjured, not built.

Like Hogwarts.

• Would explain a lot.

There will be at least one gratuitous House elf scene.

In a shout-out to Pet Project. At least one.

• The thing with Hermione thinking she lives in a romance novel is a possible shout-out to Pet Project.
• Not so, but the Grangers did become the Noble House of Granger, with Hermione as it's only magical member.

The entire story is the novelization of a role-playing session.

Specifically, a session of a Harry Potter role-playing game (Wizards and Wands?) where Eliezer Yudkowsky's player character is Harry Potter. The existence of in-universe items with statistics ("Knives +3! Forks +2! Spoons with a +4 bonus!") is a clue. All references Harry Potter makes about player characters or non-player characters are just Eliezer Yudkowsky meta-gaming. Besides, a comment Eliezer Yudkowsky made about midichlorians and why he is allegedly against them, could be rewritten to be about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. He wrote: "So trying to explain the Force with little mindochondria is futile" and "In the world where midichlorians are needed to explain the Force, the Force simply doesn't exist in the first place.", which could be rewritten as "So trying to explain magic with a genetic marker is futile" and "In the world where a genetic marker is needed to explain magic, magic simply doesn't exist in the first place." Since magic exists in the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, then Harry will eventually discover that a genetic marker is not needed for it to work, and the reason why magic exists in the first place is that Harry himself, and all that surrounds him, is fictional.

Trolls are remote-controlled biological drones.

Let's start from the assumption that everything "magical" in this story is controlled by the Source of Magic, an Atlantean artificial intelligence equipped with molecular nanotechnology. Then an apparently absurd property of trolls starts making sense. If they can regenerate because "they continuously transform into themselves", wouldn't that mean that they cannot have a functional brain? After all, whenever a brain acquires any information, its neural connections change, and any such change would be impossible in a being that "transforms into itself".

The answer is that they don't have a brain, they only have sensory and motor organs. Every information processing is not done inside their bodies, it's done remotely by the Source of Magic. They are possibly made out of nanobots, or by organic material held together by nanobots, and whenever a troll gets damaged, its nanobots just reorganize themselves, synthesizing the missing material (or even missing nanobots) by manipulating whatever substances they come in contact with at a timeless physics level.

The answer to the further question of why they are vulnerable to fire and acid, is that those are intentional vulnerabilities implemented as safeguards by the creators of the Source of Magic.

Voldemort already took Harry's blood by force, for use in the Resurrection Ritual.

From Chapter 26: "Give me that," said Professor Quirrell, and the newspaper leaped out of Harry's hand so fast that he got a paper cut. ... Harry watched, gaping in open awe.... It was like the man had cast off a pretense of mortality.

While it's extremely unlikely that Harry bled much onto the paper, we don't know how much blood the ritual requires. While it's extremely unlikely that the blood could be taken far in advance of the ritual, we don't know how long the ritual is allowed to last. Months? Years? Decades? Could Voldemort have already moved his father's bones long ago? It could work as long as "during the ritual" is as arbitrary as it sounds.

Other people have cast Patronus 2.0

There's a semi-canon historical figure named Andros the Invincible who could cast a Patronus "of giant size", commonly interpreted to be an actual giant. Which is just a big human, for all visual purposes. His name "Andros" is a form of the Greek Andras, meaning "man". Also, being able to destroy death is a pretty good requisite for being considered "Invincible".

Harry won't create the canon universe

But will be tempted to as a way of returning Hermione from the dead. He'll figure out some limited type of time travel that exceeds time turners, and be given the choice to negate his own reality in favor of the canon one where Hermione lives. This is the END OF THE WORLD, in Trelawney's latest prophecy, since it would be the unraveling of their own reality. Contrary to expectation, he won't choose this, since he is rational and will realize how much vaster the potential for him to do good is in this reality.

The Interdict of Merlin isn't a rule of magic.

It has to do with powerful magic being hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it for himself. People have just attributed this effect to Merlin, and Slytherin himself believed it enough to create an immortal monster to contain his knowledge (or he didn't).

At the end of the story, Hermione really will come back as an alicorn princess.

Because of word of God. Eliezer wants us to hope that he lied, so that in the end, when that is actually what happens, his trolling will have been much more effective.

• But… then she'll be a horse.
  • Precisely. That's how he'll troll everyone who hopes that statement not to be true.
    • Maybe she was Rarity? Or Twilight Sparkle?
    • If Hermione's going to be anyone, it's definitely Twilight Sparkle.
    • Hermione will, in fact, become Celestia in the far future, when people have figured out the whole omnipotence business and decide to create a cuddly pony utopia just for fun. Immortal and fantastically powerful unicorn, check. Has a phoenix companion (heavily foreshadowed in the epilogue), check. And Harry Potter? He's Star Swirl the Bearded, obviously. Celestia's mysterious old wizard, and father of either the amniomorphic spell or the omniomorphic spell, which sounds surprisingly apt for Harry's game-breaking Partial Transfiguration invention). And Twilight Sparkle? Celestia takes her on as a personal student because she reminds Celestia of her younger self.
    • Also, remember that theory of Discord being Star Swirl, and how Discord is a) personified chaos and b) likes to make weird things happen by snapping his fingers?
• Well, he wasn't lying.
  • At the moment, she's just a unicorn retainer. It's in the right ballpark, but still has some way to go.

The secret to Transfiguration is that you have to know the material.

Maybe not the exact molecular structure, but you have to know what it's made of. This, Hermione could Transfigure buckytubes, but not an Alzheimer cure. It has nothing to do with whether or not it already exists.

Souls have no molecular structure.

They are just a bunch of quarks, held together by something like a point of gravity.

• This may or may not have any bearing on their Transfigurability.

Harry's going to start a galactic civilization that harvests stars for energy, or he'll harvest them instantaneously by magical accident.

From chapter 21: '"If someone's going to tear apart the Sun we're really in trouble!"

'That seemed rather unlikely to Harry, unless the world contained scary things which had heard of David Criswell's ideas about star lifting.'

Harry qualifies as a scary thing which has heard of star lifting.

Quirrell is lying about how horcruxes works.

In Chapter 102, Quirrell says that horcruxes work in such a way that they are useless. However, the Chapter 20 Author's Note implies very heavily that Quirrell is Voldemort, and that he has made the Pioneer Plaque his horcrux. Furthermore, the horcrux described by Quirrell would require the horcrux to be present for resurrection, something not seen in the canon series and something that would make the Pioneer Plaque horcrux pointless.

Nicholas Flamell is Merlin.

And so not six hundred years old after all.

Voldemort never used the killing curse on Harry

The core question of rationality is: "What do we know, and how do we know we know it?" So, let's apply this to the evening of Voldemort's "death". We know of most of those events because we saw them in Harry's memory (though given the unreliable nature of memory, especially in this setting, and the fact that it was recalled in a way that's probably not been tested for accuracy, even that is weak evidence). However, those memories end before Voldemort casts the killing spell on Harry himself. The only evidence given for that is Voldemort's corpse being found next to Harry crib, which other characters surmise happened because the killing curse somehow rebounded. However, as we see during the raid on Azkaban, there is a spell known to Voldemort that allows you to create a fake corpse. Hence, there is no reliable evidence to support the 'rebound spell killing Voldemort' hypothesis.

Rather than use the killing curse, Voldemort gave Harry his dark side

Based on the premise of the above. If Voldemort never used the killing curse on Harry, the question becomes why he didn't do so. Based on a few hints in the text, we can establish another possibility. Point one: Harry's dark side implicitly trusts Quirrel. Indeed, when Harry falls under the influence of the Dementor, Quirrel is the only person who Harry doesn't see as insignificant/annoying. Point two: Harry trusts Quirrel way, way more than he logically should. Whether it is breaking into his home at night, arguing for the implementation of a fascist regime or getting an insane murderer out of prison, Harry keeps trusting the guy even when all logic says he should be far, far more wary of Quirrel. Point three: Harry seems to keep getting manipulated into situations where losing himself in the dark side would be a logical outcome. There's the time the defence class beat him up, there's the time he was exposed to a dementor, there was the time Quirrel took him to Azkaban, there's the time Hermione was framed for murder and there was the time that Hermione was killed. Of these traumatic situations, Quirrel was directly responsible for setting three of them up, and is a suspect in the matter of the other two.The first two points suggest the possibility that Quirrelmort has placed Harry under some kind of spell to make him more controllable. Voldemort possessed the opportunity and ability to implement such control during his attack on the Potter Home, as the flashback ended with him looking Harry straight in the eyes, and Voldemort is capable of manipulating minds through legilimency. The first and third point together suggest the possibility that Quirrelmort is trying to permanently place Harry in a state where he'd be willing to kill anyone except Quirrelmort. Incidentally, having Harry placed in such a state would probably count as 'destroying all but a remnant' of him, fulfilling the prophecy.

How the troll got into Hogwarts without notice.

It must have been transfigured. Not sure how it didn't set off the wards when it got untransfigured, but Occam's razor says the Q is lying. If it's already there when it becomes itself, it won't register as "strange creature".

The Fat Friar is Roger Bacon.

Magical power is zero-sum game

The reason it seems like it is fading is because there's a limited quantity of total magical energies available at any given time. As time passes, the number of magic users is increasing, distributing the total wider. Also, any magical energy that is bound up in a magic item is removed from the total until that item is destroyed. Raising Hogwarts probably consumed a signficant portion of the total, as did the other works of historical Wizards, such as the Interdict of Merlin. This is why it always seems like power fades greatly after these figure's lives. They're the cause.

• Assuming that magic is caused by an artificial intelligence, this makes sense. The more processes exist in a system, the less resources each of those has available.

Magic isn't fading at all.

It's just that present-day wizards are comparing themselves to legends. Fine, Hogwarts is a piece of evidence, but when did anyone test whether a team of four powerful present-day wizards could do something equivalent? Additionally, they are drawing comparisons to the most powerful wizards of hyperbolic legend, not to averages.

• Considering the existence of the Interdict of Merlin, this is doubtful at best. It's more probable that knowledge of magic is fading, due to the limitations implemented by Merlin.
  • The Interdict of Merlin could be bullshit. It surprised me that Harry was more sceptical to souls than to that, even with souls being more easily testable.

Wizards are losing power over the generations because magic distribution is a zero-sum game.

The amount of total magic is consistent, but the available ambient magic fluctuates. The examples of Merlin and the founders of Hogwarts being superior to anyone that came after seem telling. If there's only so much magic in the world to go around at any given time, you'd see the existence of impressive works followed by a sharp decline. Specifically because all of the magic has been permanently bound up in artifacts they created. Hogwarts itself is hoarding an enormous amount of the world's magical potential, all being used to power moving staircases and power magical rooms. Additionally, population growth will spread the remaining magic around more thinly, assuming that Wizarding populations have followed Muggle trends.

• How come it seems to become weaker, then, instead of just running out at some point with no such forewarning?
  • The wider distribution I mentioned? Although, I take your meaning if you're looking at it like a tank full of magic, dispensing it on one end and retrieving it on the other, but with no real reason to restrict the actual total flow. I was thinking of it more as having magical "pressure" which increased when more was available and made it easier to draw forth greater quantities, which is like the tank metaphor if you account for head pressure.

The original Voldemort was a reptile mutant, and possibly a ninja.

Minerva remembers him as looking reptilian during the first war, the one that ended when Voldie died of nearly unrelated causes. When he returns he knows martial arts, which he probably didn't learn in his host body.

• So while he was at Hogwarts, he would have been...

Felix Felicis works on the same principle as Comed-Tea.

Comed-Tea is described as having a deep probabilistic effect on the universe: Whenever you drink it, a Spit Take is guaranteed to occur. However, Harry quickly realizes that it actually works via time travel, creating an urge to buy or drink it when something funny or surprising will happen in the immediate future.

In canon, Felix Felicis is describes as having an even greater effect of the same kind - making the drinker as lucky as possible. When Harry drinks it, he does indeed seem to be the king of Contrived Coincidences, but nothing too out of the ordinary occurs.

From this, it makes sense that the potion would create a modified version of the same effect - making you drink it just before a whole lot of things go really right for you.

• It may be the same principle with one difference: The Comed-Tea effect is plausible because "something surprising happens" is a fairly probable event on its own. The kind of lucky streak following Felix Felicis is much less probable. However, instead of just causing you to drink it, the potion may have an on-going effect that causes you to act optimally without knowing why. In the canon example, all the lucky events are indeed driven by Harry's actions: Being in the right places and saying the right things, as if with foreknowledge.

Voldemort was always a cover.

I dunno if this even counts as wild mass guessing so much as "is extremely heavily alluded to in the story", but I figured this out the first time I read the story, and it was only confirmed later on.

Basically, Voldemort was never doing it For The Evuls; Voldemort was setting himself up to be the ruler of all of Britain. The anti-Muggle faction were easily manipulated fools with a lot of power. All he had to do was tell them what they wanted to hear and set himself up as their hero... while simultaneously setting himself up as the hero of the rest of Magical Britain himself under the guise of the last survivor of a Most Noble House. He thought he could get everyone on the side of the "good guys" to give themselves the Mark of Britain, and then he could lead the heroes against the villains, defeat Voldemort and the pure-bloods (who comprised many of the Most Noble Houses who would stand in opposition to him, or be clever enough to see what he was up to), and thus rule Britain unopposed.

Unfortunately for him, the good guys were never really willing to band together as strongly behind him as he wanted, and eventually he decided that he didn't want to be in charge of the good guys after all and "killed himself off", his alter-ego disappearing while he tried to figure out what to do now. Eventually the prophecy came, he went after Harry, and... something happened. Either he deliberately turned Harry into a horcrux, or he DID try and kill him with his magic and it backfired on him.

Many years later, after recovering, he realized the truth - he didn't actually care about any of this anymore, and he ended up truly deciding to pursue the idea of being a teacher, meaning that what he said towards the beginning of the story was, in fact, his true motivation at that point. He had despaired about being a leader of men because it was pointless and they just weren't interesting enough to push around the board because they were too predictable and the game was too easy for him, and he was slowly dying due to making the Pioneer Plaque his Horcrux, not realizing that by separating it out so far away from the rest of his body, the speed of light would become an issue and eventually incapacitate him.

He more or less confirms this after the prison break when talking to Harry, saying that people like him don't have any real identity, it is merely whatever is convenient for them.

The Moody we neet in ch 86 is alrady a polyjuiced impostor.

Possibly Grindelwald himself. Possibly just Barty Crouch Jr.

Snape already suspects that Harry is a horcrux.

That's why he asks if Voldemort "did" anything to her before killing her. It's the mysterious extra thing one must do that Rowling can't make up her mind whether or not to publish. Harry thinks he just means torture.

Magic did evolve naturally, but not as spells.

During one of the earlier chapters, Harry carefully thinks about where magic comes from, and concludes that it's likely an artificial construct, since spells aren't built for self-propagation. However, by this point, Harry is largely unaware of magical creatures, except in the vaguest possible descriptions, and he doesn't re-assess his knowledge once he meets them. There's two creatures in particular that are significant in this regard. First, phoenixes. Creatures of flame, capable of great feats of healing, inspiring hope and going anywhere they want. Second, mountain trolls. Existing in a constant state of self-transfiguration, they are near-immortal, and nature's greatest killing machines.

Both of these beings are obviously magical in nature, but they use magic that seems to be beyond the capabilities of wizards. Even when keeping in mind the interdict of merlin, they seem impossible. Constant self-transfiguration without needing to ever renew the spell? If that was ever possible for wizards to do, you'd think there'd be immortal, nigh-unkillable wizards hanging around somewhere still. Or at least, more than one kind of creature with the capability. And phoenix teleportation? If wizards were capable of it, you'd think they'd left some colonies (or at least ruins of colonies) on the moon, especially given how advanced Atlantis would have needed to be to create magic out of scratch.

Even looking at less impossible magical creatures, many don't seem particularly engineered. Unicorn blood has unmatched healing ability, but will flee from sexually mature humans, and their blood only works if you retrieve it in a wasteful and inconvenient way. Dementors are floating death, only killable by a mindset that would make their creation impossible. What kind of design parameters would lead to the creation of beings like that?

So, if there exist magical beings that are not engineered, the logical conclusion of that is they developed naturally, and thus that magic can develop naturally. Given the mendelian inheritance of the capability, humans simply don't have enough genetic information to code for something as complicated as magic, so it didn't develop naturally for them. The logical conclusion then is that human magic was developed from the magic of magical creatures. Which would explain a lot of things about magic. If eternal constant transfiguration and limitless teleportation have always been beyond the capability of wizards, it means that whoever allowed humans to become beings of magic never figured the full base principles of magic, or at least how to exploit those. Spells then are based on a limited understanding of magic, which would explain some of the odd limitations. Avada Kedavra requires hate or apathy because its based on some creature or plant that naturally possessed a similar ability, but no one ever figured out how to make it work without the limitations.

The Potion of Eagle's Splendour induces permanent transfiguration.

Petunia has been Transfigured into a super hot model (albeit not necessarily one who actually exists or has existed).Key phrase: "You will become sick and maybe die."

• This could possibly be another resurrection opportunity for Quirrell, although it might not be dramatic enough for his tastes.

The Interdict of Merlin does not exist.

Rather the reason people can't comprehend what they read is that they lack background knowledge. Same as when you can't learn Calculus without understanding algebra first.After all, who'd get to decide what spells qualify as "powerful"?

The creation of a horcrux involves star lifting.

Obviously, not the whole substance that makes up a star, but a tiny part of it. However, making every sapient creature in the universe immortal by means of horcruxes would, in fact, lead to a catastrophic destruction of stars. This is the meaning of "the one who will tear apart the very stars in heaven".

• As a corollary: one of the steps for the creation of a horcrux is marking the subject with a rune that means "sun". The mark creates a permanent scar when used on sapient beings, and it is, in fact, the rune called "Sowilo". It means "sun" and it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Runic_letter_sowilo_variant.svg

"Lord Voldemort" was a failed Horcrux of someone else

Assume Quirrell's description of Horcruxes is accurate. Now, suppose some Dark Wizard, say, Well-Intentioned Extremist Grindlewald, decides to test the process on teenage Tom Riddle, already a fairly powerful wizard in his own right and sociopath to boot. The Tom Riddle/Someone Else hybrid ends up as a Card-Carrying Villain that promptly decides to go throw morality out the window, re-learn as much Dark Magic as possible, and become an Evil Overlord. This wasn't what the original Dark Wizard was hoping for, so when "Voldemort" ran into trouble, he decided to try again, except this time, he'd create a pure copy by imprinting a baby with no substantial memories of its own...

Tracey will discover her ambition.

Through the Mirror of Erised.

Voldy is Voldy's bane.

Harry will give someone else the diary. When that person touhes it, they will absorb the soulpiece and become a Voldemort themselves. Unknownmort and Quirrellmort will fight to the death.

Draco is the real hero.

He has twice been compared to Luke Skywalker, in ch. 7 and ch. 97.

Quirrell's animagus form is a human

Quirrell was originally born a snake. After a parselmouth gave him sentience, he became smart enough to learn how to transform into a human.

The chicken actually was Fawkes.

Fawkes was going to go to a costume party for phoenixes but Dumbledore took offense at his costume and set it on fire.

Either Slytherin or Ravenclaw will win the House Cup, not both

Quirrell has a loophole: he only said that he'd fulfill three wishes. However, given that there are four wishes in play, he can get rid of the snitch, teach Battle Magic next year, and give one of the houses the House Cup.

Snape is well aware that Quirrell is Voldemort.

He just can't say anything. The Dark Mark or some Vow he took keeps him from it. He can and does hint at it.

The Quirrell's latest attempt at fulfilling the prophecy.

By giving Harry the same marks in Defense as he himself got, he has marked him as his equal.

At some point, it will occur to Draco that even though Harry couldn't have faked all that evidence for the moonlanding, Muggles could have.

Harry will eventually use his Patronus to heal the Longbottoms.

McGonagall could see no effects of dementation on him after he had been demented. Presumably ordinary patroni can't do that, or she would have figured Dumbledore probably used his patronus to heal the boy of his depression or PTSD-like symptoms that are apparently quite common.

Dumbledore and Voldemort are on the same side

By this point (chapter 104), Voldemort's suspected modus operandi has been confirmed; he played both sides of the Wizarding War conflict, serving as both the leader of the death eaters, and as a rising influence in the resistance against him. He is also likely to have lived with muggles for a while, given his familiarity with both martial arts and firearms. However, on the night of october 31st, 1981, he vanished.

Now, in canon, Voldemort's disappearance would be attributable to his killing curse rebounding when used in Harry Potter. In this universe however, it seems increasingly unlikely that the events of that night went down the same. Most obviously, Harry Potter is only marked as his equal in chapter 103, more than 10 years after the night in question. Since Voldemort's death that night seems increasingly unlikely, we are left with the question why Voldemort chose to vanish. After all, there doesn't seem to be any reason for him to do so.

However, let's look at who rose after Voldemort's fall: Dumbledore. As Draco mentions, Dumbledore has assembled a ridiculous amount of power as a result of the Wizarding War. A rise to power that started when Voldemort supposedly killed Monroe. We know now that Voldemort and Monroe were in fact one and the same person, so what reason would Voldemort have had to retire that persona? As Lord Malfoy has said: 'to figure out a strange plot, look at what happens, then ask who benefits'. The only person who benefited from the seeming deaths of both Monroe and Voldemort was Dumbledore, which makes him rather suspect.

Now look at what Dumbledore does in the fic. He hires Quirrel in a way that gives him a plausible excuse to stay out of any investigation against him. He gives Harry Potter a weapon to kill a troll, which he had no way of knowing Quirrel would deploy unless Quirrel told him. He constantly tries to get students to investigate the corridor on the third floor, even teaching Harry Potter the spell to get past the door, which we know Quirrel wants him to do. He has convenient security holes that allow for the death of Hermione and the near-death of Draco, under conditions which don't fit with Hogwarts' supposedly near-perfect survival rate (non-magical lethal injury and slow magical death not being detected should account for a fairly significant fatality portion).

It also explains why Dumbledore killed Narcissa: to enforce binary polarity. This is actually foreshadowed in the quidditch game Harry watches in chapter 104. When Harry tries to get the Snitch banned, there are a couple of reasonable alternatives that pop up, which could split the vote of reasonable people. He quickly realizes that the solution for this would have been for Draco to directly oppose him from the start, creating two clear-cut factions from the beginning. By killing Narcissa, Dumblemort has essentially done the same, as it ensured that Lord Malfoy would oppose Dumbledore under every cirumstance. This ensured that there were only two factions, both of which he could control.

Harry can defeat a handgun, if given sufficient time holding his wand.

By combining partial transfiguration and his knowledge that he can transfigure hard carbon nano-fibers, Harry has the potential to transform his robes into crude-but-effective body armor, without moving his arm. He can only hope that Quirrell hasn't figured any of this out after the wall-cutting in Azkaban, and that Quirrell desperately needs Harry to keep a wand as part of this plot. (On a side note, ever since I saw that McGonagall could nigh effortlessly transfigure her chair without her wand, I always imagined that adult Harry would at least be capable of transfiguring random spots on the terrain into various guns and potentially other traps. Say, maybe a spike pit?)

Harry will destroy Voldemort by having his Patronus give the Dark Lord a hug.

Probably not really, since the Patronus would likely be cancelled by the pain of the experience, and Voldemort seems able to stop the reaction through an Animagus transformation. Could still function as a tactic to disable the Dark Lord in battle.

Harry will retcon souls into existence

Harry will break time, travel back to the dawn of human sentience, or perhaps to the big bang itself, and lay down a great spell that records the mind states of all sentients, forming perfect replicas of those minds in another realm. Harry will create heaven. Harry will become God.

Magic will turn out to be based on Quantum Mechanics.

Yudkowsky is just doing this for a laugh.

Harry is going to need the Resurrection Stone to bring back Hermione

Although Harry doesn't believe in souls, this world seems to function in the same way that Rowling's did, so souls are almost certainly a thing. Harry will retrieve the Philosopher's Stone from the Mirror of Erised and fix everything physical wrong with Hermione's body, but he can't put her every neuron back into place: she will function like someone who has been Kissed. Harry will then discover that his father's rock is the Resurrection Stone, bring back Hermione's soul, and transfer her back to her body, since it is no longer damaged. He might have to utilize Patronus 2.0 and/or the other Deathly Hallows to make the transfer work, as he is basically flipping off Death.

Harry won't have to leave the solar system to retrieve the Pioneer horcrux, he just has to use the Resurrection Stone on it

It seems plausible that the Resurrection Stone could summon all the parts of a torn soul. Which would be bad news for Quirrelmort if you can cast an Avada Kedavra on the fragments once they were together again. And the scene of all the fragments together would look something like the Seven Potters from canon, only with spirity Tom Riddles—although the Pioneer Riddle will be late because it has to rend the stars in heaven to get back to Earth.

Patronus 2.0 is the Power that the Dark Lord Knows Not

Voldemort is emotionally incapable of understanding the faith in humanity that the True Patronus requires.

Voldemort transfigured the troll well in advance

When Dumbledore identified him to the wards he had the troll, transfigured into a small form, on his person, so that it was also identified as the defense professor. As we know from chapter 102, a transfigured magical creature won't trigger the wards meant to detect them.

The Killing Curse destroys energy.

Avada Kedavra basically means "annihilate", and when hit by it the soul (which we are assuming exists in this universe) ceases to exist.

Flamel knows that Sirius Black was innocent

Flamel used the Stone of Transfiguration to permanently transform Peter Pettigrew into a duplicate of Sirius Black and swapped the two before he was sent to Azkaban.

Quirrelmort used his status as Heir of Slytherin to kill Hermione

One of the things the basilisk teaches is how to get root access to Hogwarts' wards. Quirrell turned off the alert system for injuries, and likely also the alert system for dangerous creatures on the grounds. And if there any system in place keeping track of Imperius Curses, he turned that off too to put Sprout under his control later on.

Harry will have to call on his adoptive parents' Power of Love before the end of the story

They tell him to use it in Chapter 93, and if this universe is anything like Rowling's, it'll help.

Quirrelmort anticipates getting a new body (or at least a new blood supply) soon

He's been free with his use of fiendfyre lately, even though he earlier warned that it wasn't a spell to cast lightly, since it means that he's permanently losing a drop of blood with every casting. He just no longer cares about this limitation since it won't be a problem much longer.

Perenelle is secretly enrolled as a student at Hogwarts.

Think about it. Why would she leave the Stone unguarded and with Dumbledore?Since it would have to be someone new of the year, my Guess is the Durmstranger that got detention with Filch along with Draco and Tracey.

How to deal with Voldemort without killing him.

So, how to get rid of Voldemort?

1) Memory magic works on Voldemorts soul, even if he inhabits another body.

2) The stone makes transfiguration permanent.

It wouldn´t surprise me, if rewiring the neural network to make up new memories counts as transfiguration for the purpose of making them permanent with the stone.

From there we have a lot of similar but in detail different solutions, that mostly boil down to;Transfigure Voldemort (Polyjuice, Transfiguration, make him go snake- Animagi himself) and make it permanent.Then maybe cast a bunch of memory charms if that counts for the stone.If you feel nice, give him the body of a child (limited magic power?). If not, make him an unassuming object like a stone and give him false memories so his soul doesn´t try to abandon the stone ("Oh. I was always a stone? How strange. But for some reason I really find it fun to sit around doing nothing all day." Yes, that is basically "murder" in all but the actual killing sense, but Harry already decided he wouldn´t play Batman if he doesn´t find another way and people die - which the centaur at least did)Then use the stone and make it permanent.You now have an immortal Voldemort that doesn´t know he is Voldemort and doesn´t want to be Voldemort and sits around doing nothing bad for the rest of eternity.

Of course that would leave the "partial transfiguration" - gun unfired.

So the other possibility is to first partially transfigure Quirrelmort into a harmless mess (harry can partially transfigure parts of the brain. Good luck moving your hands/mouth/think about spells with your brain not working properly), then take your time deciding whatever form you want him to have for the rest of eternity.And we have seen Harry do that one in a matter of seconds with the troll, so we know he can do it on his own.

Voldie's gun is unloaded and Transfigured from air.

After all, when Harry was picking the "low-hanging fruit" of unresolved magical impossibilities, Voldemort already had a sixty-year headstart on him. Firing a Transfigured gun would count as burning it because of the heat. That's why he hasn't shot a bullet just to prove that he would fire it.

Voldemort still can't kill Harry

In chapter 112, Voldemort states that the restriction on killing alternate versions of himself was lifted when Harry tried to end his true life. However, looking back at chapter 111, Harry started drawing the gun when he thought that Voldemort was still immortal, just in the hopes of inconveniencing him for a while. He actually tried to stop himself after hearing it would end Voldie's life (though probably not because of that, as much as the general feeling he was making a mistake). At no point did he attack Voldemort with intent to end his immortality, meaning he's still covered under the 'Tom Riddle Mutual Protection Curse".

Hermione is immune to the Killing Curse.

She is saturated with Patronus 2.0. She can probably cast it now, too, because it is what fuels her.

Tom Riddle Prime is expecting Voldemort to lose.

The situation as of the chapter 113 cliffhanger is almost exactly the plan he detailed to make Harry leader of Britain after the Azkaban raid (in parseltongue). The Voldemort character is killed off, Harry reforms the corrupt wizarding world, and Riddle comes back in a new guise to do something that he finds more enjoyable with his immortality.

• Nope, turns out he was serious.

Hermione's horcrux is different

Because Hermione's soul wasn't broken her horcrux will have a different/additional functionality compared to Voldemort's horcruxes, such as a magic amplifying resonance compared to the uncontrollable resonance Voldemort has with Harry.

• I imagine she will feel remorse at once, thus unhorcruxing her soul. She won't even have to be told she has to feel remorse to do that.
  • Except that in MOR horcruxes work totally differently.

Mr. Grim is the real Sirius Black.

Of course, that depends on the Guess about the imprisoned Sirius Black being Pettigrew being right. He did know Harry's parents.

Oblivated!Tom Riddle will be Dudley

Harry can't very well tranfigure Voldemort back into his original body; since all his memories are gone, it'll probably be better to turn him into a child. Harry will use a memory charm to make his parents believe that he's always had a younger brother who is a year younger than him. Harry has to think of a name to call him, but decides Tom would be tempting fate, so chooses the name Dudley out of thin air.

• Except that in the early chapters it's mentioned that the last straw for Petunia marrying Vernon was that he wanted to call their son Dudley Dursley...

Hermione will be transferred to Gryffindor.

As foreshadowed by Voldemort. She will become a real daredevil now that she can't get permanently hurt, and reform the school's bullying system. All before her third year.

Mr. White was Lucius.

He was "delinquent" in that he failed to keep the Death Eaters together. He was extremely useful during the original establishment of the DE, because, as he said to Neville, the Dark Lord needed the cooperation of House Malfoy to get people to join his cause. And he has lost much, including his wife.

• Confirmed.

Hermione is Voldemort now

Going off the 'Roger Bacon diary is Tom Riddle's journal' theory. Killing Quirrell was just for show (and to get rid of a loose end). Giving Hermione the journal was really just to allow the Voldemort save state to copy itself.

Voldemort is still alive. She has a nigh-indestructable, superhuman body that radiates an aura of pureness, and once again has Harry's trust to the point that Harry is sending her on missions.

• Jossed by word of god. He confirm it was just an ordinary diary by Roger Bacon and even if it was Tom Riddle's diary, she still would had to touch it to be overwritten.

Harry's new office is not where it appears to be

Specifically, it's not "high enough in Hogwarts that nobody looking from the outside would see a piece of castle corresponding to where Harry now sat". Instead, it is underground, in a room that is only connected to the castle by an invisible portal. The office proper is surrounded by another room, where all walls, as well as the floor and ceiling, are enchanted to project a 3D image of the lands surrounding Hogwarts, as they would look like from somewhere high above the castle.

• As a corollary: Harry will figure this out in 1998, after trying to edit an Unreal level. The Unreal engine can handle this very effect: to implement it, it is enough to use two WarpZones to connect two locations, add a SkyZoneInfo high above the main part of the level, and check the Fake Backdrop and Unlit tags on every surface that must project the image of the skybox.
  • As a further corollary: this realization will make Harry wonder for a little while whether Cliff Bleszinski was a wizard, then he will dismiss it as an amusing coincindence.
• Or, as an alternative: Harry's new office really is up high in the internal structure of Hogwarts. It's just that the entire internal structure of Hogwarts is underground, while the castle only contains (magical equivalents of) WarpZones, to make it look like a normal castle. The advantage of building Hogwarts like this was that its builders were not constrained by its outer physical shape and they could make any sort of arrangement to the inside without altering the external shape of the castle. As a nice side effect, it also makes the inside of Hogwarts almost invulnerable to external attacks.

Why Dumbledore smashed Harry's pet rock

The reason Harry had a pet rock in the first place was a sort of dare after an argument with his parents. He wanted to have a pet, but Michael and Petunia, understandably, didn't believe he could take good care of a pet. The argument got louder and louder and eventually they yelled that Harry couldn't even take care of a rock if he tried. Harry, being Harry, tried, and got his parents to swear to give him a pet if after a given period of time, his pet rock was still unharmed. Dumbledore had to smash it so that Harry would lose his bet and never get any pet, because a prophecy that Harry would get killed by his pet dog or something.

• Harry being killed without interference ín any prophecy wouldn't be likely, because that would mean the rest of the prophecies wouldn't apply, which would likely mean that they wouldn't have been told prior to said interference, which contradicts Dumbledore's stated series of events. The implied reason seems to be that it was to prevent harry from bringing any pets to Hogwarts (like canon!Harry brought Hedwig). The exact series of events in universes where Harry brought a pet is difficult to predict, but it would have apparently been a Butterfly of Doom that led to humanity going extincpt.

Voldemort wasn't an animagus

Voldemort wasn't an animagus once he inhabited his new body, he no longer had the broomstick enchantment or the dark mark.

• Voldemort could definitely fly both as Quirrel and in his resurrected body. Chapter 113 and 114 describe numerous times how he is hovering, floating, or moving through the air to dodge spells. Presumably his resurrection copied the broomstick enchantments that were on his original bones, since the scene makes it implausible for him to have cast them again.
• The rest is ambiguous. After resurrection, Voldemort does not transform into an animagus, and he uses Bellatrix's arm to summon his servants. In his original body. he would almost certainly have had a way to summon his servants without a servant already present, so that might be weak evidence he did not get his Dark Mark back.

Canon Luna is a double witch

Yeah, this isn't a WMG for HPMOR exactly, but the idea stems from it. Luna can see magical animals that even witches can't see. She talks about things that can't be understood by regular magicals. She is as weird to witches as witches are to muggles.

Cruciatus alters perception of time exponentially

The Cruciatus curse permanently destroys its victim's mind if used for "more than a few minutes" (Chapter 19), yet seemingly has no permanent effects before then. When Voldemort tortures his Death Eaters for several seconds or "what seemed like a full minute" (Chapter 113), it leaves them only slightly shaken.Voldemort also threatens that Harry's friend and family will "ssuffer for what will sseem to them like eternitiess" (Chapter 113). (The fact this is in Parselmouth may be taken to mean he means it quite literally.)

A possible explanation is that the curse extends the victims subjective perception of time, and it does so exponentially rather than linearly. For example, if each minute of the spell passes ten times more slowly than the one before, then a minute or two would still be a relatively short time, while six minutes would last years, and ten minutes many millennia. This would explain how the spell can go from "harmless" to "guaranteed fatal" in the span of minutes, with no regard to individual differences in pain tolerance or mental fortitude.