I can't believe I didn't realize this before.

Someone complained elsewhere (I think it was in the other thread) about Harry being the Boy-who-Lived and having a prophecy and having a cold dark side and being super-rational.

From MoR itself:

It's too much coincidence for one girl to be the strongest magically and academically unless there's a single cause.

It's plausible that one of the Muggle-raised students at Hogwarts could be a science nerd. It's not plausible that that student would also be the Boy-who-Lived. There must be a single cause.

I think it's most likely that Harry's dark side is somehow an effect of being AKed. Perhaps he's a horcrux, like in canon. The hat said no, but it's possible that Harry was killed and the only soul left in him is Voldemort's fragment. Or, without positing souls, maybe horcruxing a person overwrites the victim with a copy of yourself.

Harrymort has a warm side because he was raised in a loving household; he doesn't remember being Voldemort because he was stuck in a child's brain, with the plasticity and pruning that entails (or maybe V. wiped Harrymort's memory for some reason?); he didn't survive the attack, but rather his fresh corpse was appropriated as a horcrux.

This also explains his prodigious intellect and indignation at being treated as a child: he's really an adult mind, overwritten onto a child's brain. This is also why the Remembrall reacted the way it did: he's forgotten decades of his former life as Voldemort.

Is it the author's opinion that the creation of house elves was a terribly evil deed? It would seem that to think that after their creation, they would want to do what they have been designed to do and so would be no more evil than creating an intelligence which would want to bowl and fish all day. Even if we accept that creating conscious entities which are forced by means of their preferences to do menial work is wrong, it would seem to be better to create them, than to force those who don't enjoy such work to do it. Is Harry just confused by his intuitions about the evil of slavery, without sufficient reflection?

ETA: While this argument works in the abstract and is useful for countering human biases against "slavery" and applies in the particular for the creation of Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, house elves have addition features I wasn't considering which makes their creation morally evil.

Theory: the 'spell of starlight' is a scrying or remote-viewing effect which Quirrelmort originally developed to keep an eye on the Pioneer horcrux. It's strenuous because of the extreme range, possible at all only because of the strong sympathetic connection involved. Reinforcing the sympathetic connection is important to maintain the possibility of Apparating out there, and sharing the experience helps to establish a sympathetic link between Harry's scar/mysterious dark side and the horcrux, which will eventually make it possible to do something nasty to him from far away.

Just occurred to me: if magic ability is genetic, it should in theory be possible to use gene therapy/retroviruses/etc. (and perhaps some magic) to make all the Muggles into wizards! (Or at least all the ones yet to be conceived or something.) I can just imagine Harry creating a Plague of Magic.

Why do wizards - particularly in MoR, where most people are smarter - carry one wand apiece? This doesn't seem to be an absolute practical limitation wherein only one wand may be mastered at a time. In book seven, Harry is simultaneously the master of the Elder Wand and his own original with Fawkes's feather in it. Why doesn't everyone habitually walk out of Ollivander's with two, so as to have a spare in hazardous situations or in case one should be lost?

Eliezer, is there any chance any speaker at the Singularity Summit might open or close with "Happy happy boom boom swamp swamp swamp!"? For numerous reasons, I think it would be most hilarious if Ray Kurzweil could be persuaded to do so.

Am I the only one who now wants to campaign for gay rights with the slogan "Death Eaters against homophobia!"?

Upon seeing DinosaurusGede's awesome pic, my first thought was that were I able to draw (I cannot), I would draw Dumbledore wailing on an electric guitar and saying "THIS was your father's rock".

Akrasia cure: Self-cast the imperius curse.

Well obviously I'm not going to popularize a method of immortality that requires killing people! That would defeat the entire point!

Actually...

We know from canon that a Horcrux is really just a backup copy, so that on average you probably only about double your lifespan by making one, at best. But it seems to me that based on what Harry has been told, he should believe that a Horcrux makes you immortal and unkillable. Given this belief, in the absence of any better way of achieving immortality, the spell is considerably better than baseline.

Set up a Horcrux clinic. A pair of people come in, fill out some paperwork, flip a coin in the presence of a notary, and the winner of the coin toss kills the loser to make a Horcrux. If nobody ever cast the spell, the loser was going to die eventually anyway, and if you do it when both parties are close to dying of old age (though this would probably be a needlessly reckless strategy, all things considered) then the loser doesn't even lose all that much.

You could save half of the wizarding world from certain death.

Oh, and Harry didn't even ask whether it might be possible to substitute an animal for the human sacrifice, or make a portrait of the caster and use that as a substitute, or Transfigure a rock into a copy of the caster (under heavy precautions, of course). He displays an irrational degree of revulsion at the idea of killing people. One gets the idea that he would let five die in the trolley problem.

A few reviewers are speculating that Lucius thinks Harry is Voldemort. Any thoughts on that? I'm not sure yet, but rereading their conversation with that in mind is pretty interesting.

(41)

So, traitors. Were there any? Did they play any part in the fight at all or was it just the principle of the thing? The whole point of the Draco+Hermione vs Harry war was on the subject of unity. I was kind of hoping for some object lessons on just how much Harry's advantage of being able to trust his soldiers helped him while Draco and Hermione had to put in place extra precautions to protect themselves from sleeper agents. Or, well, even an offhand mention of "Chaos got 3 extra fighters" to acknowledge the issue.

I just had a thought WRT Harry's controversial apology to Hermione in Chapter 42. This is the Harry that lectured McGonagall on the Planning Fallacy, while demonstrating that he really does assume a worst-case scenario (insisting on purchasing a magical first aid kit just in case one of his fellow students ended up maimed and dying in front of him). I think it's entirely plausible that he could have spent the whole time Hermione was falling imagining that maybe he'd forgotten to stir the ground hen's teeth (or whatever) into the Feather Fall potion six times, or that it wasn't quite a three-quarters Moon when he started, or that a sudden gust of wind might impale her on the spikes of a wrought-iron balcony fence, or blow her into the Forbidden Forest or whatever other horrific Murphy's Law scenarios his all-too-imaginative mind could concoct, right up until her feet touched the ground.

Also, from the descriptions it looks like he was fighting this battle in ColdDarkLordHarry mode, so in addition to the above, he might even have been worrying that his Dark Side had subconsciously arranged things (such as a Potions failure, or just the situation of random danger with the Feather Fall potion as a false guarantor of safety) in a way that would bring his Intent To Kill to bear. It might even be revealed later that, for just a moment, his Dark Side produced a desire that she actually die, and that's what's making him feel so guilty.

Then, he would have spent the time until she came to meet him imagining that she would have been imagining the same things as an expression of his Planning Fallacy-based ur-pessimism combined with his tendency to try to model other people's minds, i.e., in this case, in the most pessimistic way possible. So, by the time he sees her, he's got himself expecting her to hate, hate, HATE him, and since he cares about her he really doesn't want that. And for her part, she's got him apologizing and willing to let her avenge herself on him, so why stop him now?

Some of the comments here have pointed out Hermione's strong sense of Justice and Fairness as an objection to her behavior in this scene. Maybe we're seeing some Unintended Consequences to Harry's "get Hermione and Draco to work together" plot. For Draco to reflexively try to catch Hermione is (I think) a major change in his character. This is a boy who casually expressed his intention to rape Luna Lovegood to someone he'd just met, assuming that boy's stated "intention" to murder her was equally casual, and equally serious. Major, major misogyny here.

So, for Draco to try to save Hermione, and have difficulty letting her go even as what's left of his Pureblood conditioning is railing at him, and Hermione herself is begging him to drop her so he can beat Harry, is a huge change in his character. If we grant that so much of Hermione's[1] sensibilities have rubbed off on Draco during their collaboration, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that some osmosis has gone the other way. Hermione's spent the last few months of warfare learning the art of Devious Plotting, and since her alliance with Draco, would be getting lessons from a master. So, if we accept the changes to Draco's character, it's not too implausible IMO that Hermione might have become less of a "goody-goody" by now, and be willing to let Harry grovel, and even enjoy it a bit.

1. I'm assuming it would be Hermione's values rubbing off on Draco and not Harry's, since in the portrayed encounters Harry has been concealing his Enlightenment sentiments from Draco to keep him in the Bayesian Conspiracy. "Slytherin! Just Kidding! Ravenclaw!"

The most compelling evidence for an afterlife in canon was Harry's "near-death experience" in Deathly Hallows. While "dead", Harry talks to Dumbledore one last time, and Harry learns things that only Dumbledore would have known.

Of course, MoR!Harry doesn't have this evidence.

[I]f we lived in the sort of universe where horrible things were only allowed to happen for good reasons, they just wouldn't happen in the first place.

I love this line and am probably going to be quoting it frequently.

Edit: ...and Harry was pretty magnificent in that scene, in general. "Wrong! I want the secret of the Dark Lord's immortality in order to use it for everyone!" was one of my favourite moments, even if Harry was mistaken about the feasibility of that particular plan.

Chp 39 (the Dementor)

I think that Dumbledore and Harry were too quick to conclude that the Dementor could just be used as a distraction. It was Harry's first idea (once he turned cold), and Dumbledore stopped him there. Cold!Harry didn't even spend 5 minutes on the problem - compare with Harry's instructions to Fred & George in the Hold Off on Proposing Solutions MOR chapter. If there's a plot, that seems much too obvious for Quirrell.