^^He's also very very funny.
^Well, it does come out of complete left field. From anyone but you, it'd be a sure sign of a Mary Sue appearing. But in this context my first guess is that Quirell is just lying: Harry's experiments suggest that magical power is a matter of practice and intelligence, and that you don't inherit magical power biologically, only wizardhood.
I've dared read the last chapter while I'm still at "Underwater Battle", but I feel like, while I have missed a lot, it was more-or-less incidental.
Oh, and folks, stop dissing the power of love. It has an integrity mere boredom/hatred/fear lacks. Self-interest is the most reliable, but love is the most powerful.
edited 3rd Sep '11 8:17:32 PM by JesusSaves
An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.
Okay, I think I may give up and change this to "last magical descendant of Ravenclaw" just to avoid the Merlin-brain-frying effect. Unless anyone posts a better idea before 8:40pm Pacific.
You could change it from ravenclaw to slytherin just to mess with people who don't get the ending. They might actually stop and think before commenting.
I'd change it to Hufflepuff, actually, except that I need something that people will recognize as a lie, rather than it causing their brains to stumble.
...I wonder if anything could be ridiculous enough. "You, Hermione, are the last magical descendent of Cthulhu."
"You, Hermione, are the last magical descendent of Naruto."
"You alone can fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness."
"Only you can prevent forest fires."
Maybe I should just have it be an unspecified "I will tell you of your destiny..."?
edited 3rd Sep '11 8:39:42 PM by EliezerYudkowsky
Shadowed Philosopher
I'm suddenly getting the strangest urge to write an Mo R/Naruto crossover. I have no idea what would happen, but I'm getting the sense that it needs to.
Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)
1931 FurikoMaru3rd Sep 2011 08:44:14 PM from The Arrogant Wasteland
, Relationship Status: He makes me feel like I have a heart
Reverse the Curse
^^ Well, it depends. Do you intend for this latest attempt to be the succesful one? Or is it meant to show by its very ridiculousness that whoever-it-is is basically playing darts in the dark by this point, and they've yet to run through all their ideas because they're half-making them up on the spot? What I mean is, do you want utterly bizarre but believable, or 'sure! why not! I've already spent two hours on this, I might as well make a night of it!' bizarre?
Hell, this is gonna bug me now; I haven't guessed who it is, and until I do I won't be able to think of the best line for the situation. I suspect it isn't one of the adults, what with that hissy-fit, but Draco would have just fed her a variation on the 'adopted' line.
(Also, thanks for the staircase. It'll make things much more convenient.)
edited 3rd Sep '11 9:11:18 PM by FurikoMaru
Indeed, if the line is supposed to clear it up going way out there might be the best approach.
"And I need you to save Harry Potter from dragons." Springs to mind as rather silly.
I get the impression that this figure isn't so great at figuring out how Hermione works... That's actually the main reason that comes to mind against it being Quirrell. Maybe throw in something about princesses? "Little girls like princesses, right?"
I've been Bluelinked
Well, if the way the memory charm was described was less like a general purpose "passing through a magical barrier" description, then I might have figured out what was going on.
Australia
The country with a 2 party system
But all the power with independents
The country with a 2 party system
But all the power with independents
Plausible Deniability, Eliezer. You have none. You have pulled such outrageous stuff and made Canon your bitch to such an extent, people could actually believe you pulled off Hermione actually being what the Strange Pond Woman said, and making it awesome. You could even make it a lie invented on the spot as far as Mr. Game&Watch knows, and make it turn out to be true later on. Readers expect you to make the stupid smart and to use reason so rigurosly it becomes unresonable.
Also, Quintuple Agent WTF. I'll need to reread those chapters. Was the plan to get an actual stalemate? I mean, it felt a lot like a Xanatos Roulette, especially since nobody could have expected chaos to be so good at submarine fighting. Nobody who didn't read muggle fic... DUMBLEDORE
An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.
Pat. St. of Archive Binge
Sometimes I forget that the person writing this is human.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
What? Why? Seldom seen such an emotional writer, myself. He pours a lot of his soul into this, I can tell. It feels very sincere.
An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.
Pat. St. of Archive Binge
I meant "Human" as in "shares the same flaws as the rest of the human race,doesn't have all the answers, and hasn't planned every detail of the story he's writing". That kind of human.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Oh, I think it's pretty clear he's moslty built the hugest parts of the plot, and then started Writing by the Seat of Your Pants, and then, well, planned the mini-arcs as they came, and had good ideas while writing those, and reused them to come up with the next mini-arcs. Like the armies. He uses them as a plot device, to do his little Ender's Game, and because getting Hermione and Draco closer. But the events surrounding and during the battles have provided chances to do more than that, achieve secondary goals that the author could run with. Nothing inhuman here.
Of course, his vast sf&f culture means he has a bigger luggage of material than usual, his rational/cognitive-science training means he's got a more sophisticated toolbox, his remarkable raw intelligence is like having more powerful, fast and precise muscles: he can handle bigger pieces, more pieces, harder better faster stronger. His massive ability to navigate idea-space allows him to design cooler, novel, more interesting construts. His extreme emotionalness gives him the drive to do all this, to output.
So it boils down to this: he's perfectly human, he's just better trained, with better tools, more raw talent, and more motivation. We suck. But, hey, at least this guy openly encourages you to break Rule 1 of power dynamics: "Never outshine the master"
An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.
You probably don't actually want to do this, but if you want to get a very vivid impression of the value of the Hufflepuff virtue of "practice", you could google "Barney vs. the Federation" to get a picture of what kind of fanfiction I was writing at age thirteen. I've got no idea what that story is about, since it's too far back to remember directly, and I can't read past the first sentence or look at it on the screen for longer than three seconds.
Seventeen years of practice can fix a lot of suck.
Has Harry informed Hermione that the inheritance of magical ability works on the same math as blue eyes? She probably rejects the notion that purebloods have stronger magic because she's living counterevidence of that...
but that doesn't mean that she came up with a better model of how it ought to work or even investigated the matter further. The human brain is capable of considerable incuriousity and compartmentalization after all.
So really, Mister Incredibly Suspicious Person should be trying to convince her of what Malfoy is trying to convince Slytherin he actually believes; that she's actually an adopted pure blood from some incredibly potent blood line (I like Merlin to be honest, but whatever floats your boat). In the absence of a better model of how the heritability of magical power works in Hermione's mind the idea that she's so good because she's actually some long-lost representative of the magical master race will actually cause less cognitive dissonance than the idea that she just happens to be that good. In addition, trying to drive a wedge between Hermione and her parents, when they obviously love each other so much, has an especially delectable evil taste that I relish!
^^More to the point, we could just go to the first chapters of the fic. They didn't suck outright, but when recommending it to other people I have all the trouble in the world getting them to read up to chapter 5. Once that is done though...
^Bayes 101: One in a million coincidences happen thousands of times every day, but the theory that makes what happened more probable will have an advantage.
edited 4th Sep '11 7:04:47 PM by JesusSaves
An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.
That story was at once a) completely ludicrous and b) much better than any fanfiction I ever wrote when I was thirteen.
1944 storyyeller4th Sep 2011 07:32:10 PM from Appleloosa
, Relationship Status: RelationshipOutOfBoundsException: 1
More like giant cherries
By the way, does anyone know A) Why Millicent got a time turner, and B) How Harry figured it out so quickly?
Shadowed Philosopher
Presumably for the same reason as Hermione in canon (just wanting to take more classes than possible, or wanting to take two classes that conflicted), and either Harry or Quirrel (I got the impression it was Quirrel) noticed that she was, for instance, reporting bits of juicy gossip before they actually happened. (This was foreshadowed right after the Humanism arc; the Slytherin girls are charging back to the common room to share what happened, they are the people who realistically could have gotten back first, and the people in the room say that Millicent already told them.)
Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)
Re: Millicent Bulstrode: See Ch. 62. Maybe I should spell out explicitly that Margaret Bulstrode is Millicent's sister, the problem is that Harry has no reason to think this. Or maybe I need to give her a more dissimilar name, though I was trying to hew to fanon.
Oh, BTW, congratulations on this chapter for finally and definitely convincing me that Dumbledore is 100% a good guy. I'm more and more convinced his "father's rock&chicken" routine was his own way of punishing Harry for misusing the time turner. I also have no idea where the insanity accusations come from: he seems like a social contrarian on many points, an outlier (and less so than Harry Potter, at that!). Such a thing is common among the smartest. But, besides the KFC (doubly hilarious because he used muggle prestidigitation, which I'm sure would throw lots of wizards for a loop), I haven't seen him show any signs of actual disorders or conditions (mentally disturbed) or disconnection from reality (delusion, I mean above and beyond normal people).
![[down]](http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]")
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited. Thank you for pointing this out: fixed.
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited. Thank you for pointing this out: fixed.
edited 4th Sep '11 8:25:37 PM by JesusSaves
An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.
tilkau
![[up]](http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
An outliner? Perhaps you meant an outlier?
'Harry, on the other hand, has a lot of potential for being a bad guy. He's being set up as Too Clever by Half, with little protection against his own cleverness (Hermy, on the other hand, has some very healthy self-inhibitions, though they can get in the way of doing what's right), and seems way too willing to compromise his ethics, make exceptions, for the sake of immediate results. He also seems way too willing to reactively escalate conflicts by being frontally confrontational rather than developing slower but safer, long term approaches to problem-solving.
The bullies here are remarkably one-dimensional, though. I never met anyone like that IRL.
An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.
1950 FurikoMaru4th Sep 2011 10:53:40 PM from The Arrogant Wasteland
, Relationship Status: He makes me feel like I have a heart
Reverse the Curse
I did. Two of them, actually. I won't go into detail because one story sounds like bragging and the other sounds like I'm fishing for sympathy, but suffice it to say, there really are some people that noxiously stupid in the world.
Not sure if it's believable to have so many of them around, though, even in the wizarding world.
