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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3210 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

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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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