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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2786 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

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So what are you reading?

Working on my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom and staring the Stormlight Archive.

HPMOR. I'm just past the troll fight.

I have never planned to do this (since I haven't read the original books), but somehow, I ended up on its webpage and decided to give it a try.

It's... not what I expected. I kinda expected a "Harry Potter pokes holes in or abuses the laws of magic while being an insufferable little shit about it" and there were chapters like that, but that's not what the book is about. It's not "sequences for the fans of HP", even though there are chapters like that. The quality is kinda uneven, too. The whole SPHEW arc felt like filler, for example, especially after the Azkaban arc that preceded it.

What's surprising is how much of a capital P progressive EY is, up there with Paine, Marx, Pinker, etc in his conviction. It's not this surprising when you think about it, it's the Motte that has been warped by its interest in the culture war too much.

What's funny is that back when the chapters were being released live, people used to complain when it got far afield of "Harry Potter pokes holes in or abuses the laws of magic", as many seemed to genuinely expect that the series would end with Harry discovering the source of all magic and using that to become God or somesuch.

Also, the reveal of Quirrell's true identity caught a lot of people off guard.

There's maybe a fair critique there, the series starts to get REALLY BIG in the scope of its ideas when you're past the midpoint, and brings in a lot of characters and implies a LOT going on... then as it comes in for a landing the plot has a laser focus on the few main characters. And then the somewhat unfortunate message, which is all but outright stated in the last couple chapters is: "Only about a dozen people in the WHOLE WORLD are capable of making any real difference in the grand scheme of things."

So people who came in hoping for Harry to break everything were let down... and yet there's literally no doubt at the end of the book that Harry is the most important person in history™. Which isn't a knock against the plot, but looking back its pretty on-the-nose as to how EY and perhaps other rationalists view themselves.

Also, the reveal of Quirrell's true identity caught a lot of people off guard.

Seriously? I haven't even read the original books, but wasn't that, like, the plot twist of the first volume?

It was! Which may have been why people expected him to subvert it.

Yudkowsky said he thought it was blatantly obvious as soon as we found out that, e.g. Quirrell and Voldemort (by Quirrel's own admission!) were trained in the same martial arts dojo by the same teacher.

But I think many people (myself included, I guess) were expecting some kind of clever double-twist to be revealed later.

I think using power word: kill on the jailer and explaining it away as expecting him to dodge it was the stage when it became obvious who the BBEG was, especially given EY's strong views on harm.

Didn't he explain that in parseltongue, which is the language that allegedly prevents the speaker from lying.

Of course, the reflexive reliance on the killing curse is indicative enough on its own.

Oh, I also remember that my other theory was that Harry himself had been specifically confunded to be unable to make any direct observations about Quirrel's true nature, which is why he was seemingly unable to make basic reasoning/connections about the guy even as evidence mounted.

And then there's a moment in Chapter 104, right before the finale pops off for real:

"Wait!" Harry blurted.

The Potions Master's hand hovered about his robes. "Why?" said the Potions Master.

"I... I just think you probably shouldn't call them..."

In a blur, the Potions Master's wand was in his hand. "Nullus confundio!" A black jet darted out and hit Harry, striking in the direction Harry had already started to evade. There followed four other spells, containing words like Polyfluis and Metamorphus; and for those Harry politely stood still.

Snape literally hit him with a spell for dispelling confusion caused by another spell, and then SHORTLY THEREAFTER (mere minutes later) Harry puts together the entire puzzle of Quirrel's role in everything.

Just really interesting timing, that.

I think EY intended Harry's issue seeing Quirrel for evil as an example of a massive failure mode for rationalists (I really don't want this thing to be true so I will purposefully avoid accepting information that would make me update that way). But it also makes sense that Quirrelmort might take the extra precaution of screwing up Harry's thought processes just enough to avoid catching on too quickly.

But Quirrell can't cast spells on Harry. That's the whole narrative reason why the resonance mechanic exists; if Quirrell can just confound Harry or erase his memories, the plot becomes unsolvable.

Not quiiiiite true.

The actual solution to the final exam involved Harry casting a spell directly on Quirrell, for example. If the spell effect were small enough I'd guess its something that he could actually do without triggering a major problem, OR he could have someone else do it for him, which is his MO for almost all the other stuff he pulls outside of the Azkaban rescue.

And Quirrell's initial motivation was to create a worthy opponent to play with so he wouldn't be bored in eternal immortality. And that only changed once he learned of a Prophesy that would DIRECTLY threaten that immortality, with Harry being the trigger.

Adjusting Harry's thinking so that he wouldn't discover Quirrell's secret before Quirrell had won him over is well within bounds of that motivation.

Yudkowsky wrote a whole author's note about how obvious he thought it was and how he didn't know how to make it any clearer:

Since many reviewers are still asking if Quirrell is Voldemort, I tried putting in a final sentence from "Professor Quirrell's" point-of-view and got such reader outrage at the unsubtlety that I gave up and removed it. I am now seriously asking for help and suggestions on what I can do to make it clear to all readers that Professor Quirrell is Voldemort. So far we have the following facts:

  1. canon!Tom Riddle applied to teach Defense at Hogwarts and put a curse on the position when he didn't get it.
  2. canon!Quirrell is possessed by Voldemort.
  3. It has been repeated within the fic that the Dark Lord has lost his last body but is somehow still alive.
  4. The author has summarized the First Law of Fanfiction as "Frodo gets lightsaber, Sauron gets Death Star".
  5. The Defense Professor at Hogwarts is
    5a) A drooling zombie
    5b) Who occasionally undergoes a drastic shift of personality and
    5c) Becomes a genius who
    5d) Loves the spell Avada Kedavra and
    5e) Is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Battle Magic and
    5f) Talks about how he always wanted to teach Defense at Hogwarts and
    5g) Wanted to be a Dark Lord when he was a young Slytherin and made a list of all the mistakes he would never make and
    5h) Talks about "pretending to lose", which he learned through a horribly humiliating experience in a martial arts monastery which was wiped out by Lord Voldemort shortly thereafter, except for one student who was a friend of his and
    5i) Doesn't seem to understand why Harry wouldn't want to become a Dark Lord and
    5j) Talks about how much he hates this flawed world and
    5k) Has manipulated Harry into disliking Dumbledore and
    5l) Thinks that when Harry knows him a little better, Harry will deduce that he would want to cast a spell on the Pioneer 11 plaque which will "make it last a lot longer"

The reader is supposed to know at this point that PQ is LV. How can I make it clearer without it being disruptive? If you have ideas, please share them.

I think the only way to make it 'clearer' was to not make the whole fanfic explicitly about disrupting the canon set up by Rowling in every way possible.

That is, its still pretty possible that there was an incompetent Lord Voldemort who got destroyed by the combined might of the good wizards...

AND there's a vastly more competent dark wizard who isn't blatantly evil but is definitely running machinations in the background that are far and beyond what Voldemort could achieve, whilst having nothing to do with voldemort.

I guess the one factor I didn't see right away is the why, as to why a supergenius wizard with demigod-level powers would want to adopt that persona for long periods of time. That came out later.

But yeah, he practically bashed people over the head with clues.

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