As I see it he wrote the next 7 chapters. He wants to see what we the readers come up with. The cynic in me says he wants to know if we are worthy of being told.
Daydreaming a little I don’t see it myself, but I’m not a writer or y’all would be talking about me.
I finally went to read the submitted stuff. That board is newest at the bottom. So to read the damn comments in order it’s a bunch of bullshit scrolling up and down to get stuff on the page. A stupid stupid system that’s aggrivating me more!
I feel like Harry’s solution was a BIT of a cheat… I certainly considered partial transfiguration, but had we specifically been told that (a) it could be done silently and wandlessly, and at a fairly great distance, and (b) other wizards, even super-smart-and-powerful-ones, couldn’t tell that anything was going on at all?
I mean, fun and satisfying from an action standpoint, but a bit of a letdown from a “Voldemort is a super smart and able foe” standpoint.
Do we know what happened to the Philosopher’s Stone? I don’t remember Harry grabbing it from Voldy’s stuff.
What Bricker said. It might have been an easy detail to miss, because the author is calling it The Stone of Permanency, instead of The Philosopher’s Stone.And now I wonder what effect it WOULD have had…
I’m skipping spoiler tags because honestly who is reading this thread that isn’t reading the story?
Harry just killed 38 death eaters. Wow. Just wow, was Malfoy one? If so what will that do to Draco?
An inert Voldie to be dealt with later.
Can Dumbledore be relased from the mirror? Dumby suggested Harry had the power.
Left a dead Quirrll looking like a hero, good on Harry.
My huge question is Hermione. a) she has been dead a few weeks, what memory does she have? b) a 12 year old girl cannot be expected to respond well waking up on a slab in a graveyard surrounded by dead bodies. b part 2) it’s worse because she has no knowledge of Dumblys theory that Voldy was still alive. This will be another mind blower on top of a blown mind. b part 3) by the way Hermione, you are now as physically invincible as dark magic can make you. Want another piece of chocolate?
I think the way Harry set it up, he wants it to appear to the outside world that Hermione is “The Girl Who Lived”. That is, she has foiled Voldemort more or less due to her innate nature even though he had his snake-y hands around her throat. And we know that she’s pretty mentally tough.
Not saying it will be something she can just laugh off, but having the entire wizarding world doting on her should help.
I have to go with big cheat, in all honesty. I don’t see any reason why Voldemort wouldn’t have thought of the method Harry ends up using, and so far as I can tell that even stopping him is still contingent on Harry guessing what the resonance will do based on evidence that suggests something else should have happened entirely.
And Voldemort letting Harry keep his wand and his pouch, which serves no useful purpose and has the potential for… well, doing what he did. Or not just shooting Harry at any point. Or tricking Harry into revealing what he planned to do without actually having his wand.
At least canon Voldemort had a purpose in his stupidity. Unless there’s some hidden agenda still at play, MoRVoldemort seems to have reason to act other than he does if not for the purposes of a happy ending.
Especially since he’s the one who had just told Harry it was possible to do that without his wand. That stood out to me even at the time as something crucial, and when I got to the author’s exam, I would have bet the farm it was how Harry would get out of his predicament.
If there was a cheat there, it was Harry having such fine control of the transfigured substance. Voldemort was unaware of Harry’s ability to do partial transformations (in this case of the tip of his wand) and he didn’t have enough background in physics to intuit it.
What’s Vinge’s Principle, by the way? Google isn’t turning up much beyond this challenge itself. I wonder if it comes from the work of Vernor Vinge, my old professor.
It was fun and satisfying from an action-scene-catharsis point of view.
But it’s pretty scary from a character balance point of view. Harry, or anyone who learns partial transfiguration, can silently and with no wand just transfigure a pinhead-sized part of anyone’s brain into antimatter anytime he wants to from a distance? That doesn’t seem good as far as a healthy and functioning Wizarding society is concerned.
Transfiguration takes physical contact with the wand, and air cannot be transformed. The author made it pretty clear that even Harry’s partial transformations had to follow that rule. He can’t transfigure things at a distance and he does need his wand in order to perform a transfiguration. He doesn’t, for some reason, need his wand to sustain or dispel the transfiguration.
As far as a functioning Wizarding society, the “Hermione” incident spoke to that. If one wizard can take control of another, erase old memories, and implant new ones, how can anyone be held accountable for their actions? How can they even be sure themselves what they’ve done?
I don’t see it as a cheat. The problem with magic is that power is based on time. The longer you live the more skills you acquire and the more powerful you get. The multiplier of this is intelligence. The truly great wizards learn skills like every other wizard but can conceive of new ways off using it.
Harry is highly intelligent and has the benefit of 2 lines of knowledge, Muggle and Magical. He leveraged it all to rise quickly.
Welp. After the episode of 03/10 the author tells us that the next long chapter will be the finale this Saturday, and to hold off on reading the Thursday and Friday chapters until then if we don’t care for short chapters.
As for me, I decided to read them both today, and let the finale stand on its own. I’m very much looking forward to it, and happy to know that it’s going to post so early. I guess I won’t initiate any discussion of the events that take place in the chapters I read today, beyond saying that I have mixed feelings about the ending of 120, and a good feeling about the ending of 121.
Also, I recently had another look at chapter 1. Is there a NEW epigraph there about the tiny fragment of silver glinting in the moonlight, or was that there at the start a few years ago?
And… its all over. Very satisfying, although I was kind of expecting one last awesome twist at the end or something. Hermione now being a magical superhero with a bazooka should be pretty cool.
Something that seems like it was never wrapped up… at one point earlier, there was a discussion of how new spells are researched, and one of the professors insisted that no one ever answer Harry’s questions about that.
