Headscratchers / Harry Potter and the Natural 20

• Why did the attempt to use the ritual to switch Milo with Bellatrix not work? I can't see any significant difference between what works in chapter 62 [1] and what fails in chapter 26 [2].
  • In chapter 26, the initial ritual didn't summon Milo, it summoned his rat, Mordy; Milo just came along. Because he didn't have the rat with him, the ritual could not be reversed. In chapter 62, Milo wasn't being summoned at all. He just used the familiar soul bond thing to piggyback a ride across dimensions on the otherwise perfectly normal Gilderoy for Bellatrix ritual.
  • How did you know that the rat wasn't there in chapter 26?

• Why didn't Milo just have his mother die and then get Resurrected? They can do that in the D&D world.
  • It would probably negate the protection.
  • You see, the thing is, it would have been optimal. Just as it would be optimal for Lily Potter to let her son die to protect herself. And in the past, before he gazed upon his reflection in the Mirror of Erised, before he started interacting with Hannah not because of bonuses but just to interact with her, before he changed his alignment to good rather than neutral, in the past before all of those and more happened he would have taken the optimal choice. Because it would have been optimal. But after all of those, he could no longer see it as an "optimal choice" versus "non-optimal choice". No, he tried to see it that way, that is evident in his train of thoughts, that is what the whole "it wasn't as if [he] was sacrificing something" thing was about. But he failed to see it in such a way, after all that happened even though she did not exist she was not a plot device anymore but his mother now, and now he had a choice between "sacrifice my mother to live" versus "sacrifice myself to save my mother", the same choices Lily Potter had with Harry. And they chose the same.
    • So would that mean that if Voldemort somehow met Milo's mother, she'd be protected from him?
    • Maybe, maybe not. Most likely not as with Lily and Harry there was the factor of Voldemort giving her a chance (an important thing with that blood protection) whereas with Milo Tom was unaware of the choice Milo was making, not to mention that Milo isn't exactly a wizard of the same sort that Lily was a witch of (which likely is a requirement for the protection), and even if those did not stop it there's also Milo not exactly being dead anymore. But the point is that they made the same choice, the consequences of said choice don't really have to be identical.
  • It's simple: The fact that he doesn't do this, demonstrates the Character Development Milo has gone through. Milo from the beginning of the story would definitely have tried to exploit the system in that way, because he was a munchkin who only cared about min-maxing, geining as many pluses and bonuses as possible, and finding the most "efficient" way to become more powerful. He didn't care about people at all; to him other people didn't matter because they didn't really "exist." They were NPCs, whose only real purpose was to provide Milo with challenges or aid or rewards. That Milo would have gone: "Cool, a way of exploiting the system and gain a protection without having to sacrifice anything! I like it!" But after so much time and Character Development, not to mention being freaked out at what he saw in the Mirror of Erised, Milo's priorities have changed in that he's started viewing other people as people. He's begun caring about other things than power and rules-lawyering. And so he doesn't want his mother to die. No matter that she could be rescurrected, he doesn't want to put her through that awful and traumatic experience, even if it means he himself doesn't have the optimal protections; her well-being is more important to him than "cheating the system." It signifies that he has become a better person.