Off the top of my head I remember the University of Michigan riding a team of 5 freshman all the way to within one timeout of the NCAA basketball championship back in the early 90s. So yes with a couple phenom players this is not hard to believe.
I don’t recall Harry’s blood status being an issue, although it’s possible I’ve just forgotten. And while I’m sure there are Slytherins and Death Eaters who are contemptuous of halfbloods, I don’t recall them being specifically persecuted under the Voldemort regime. I don’t think Voldy would have taken kindly to claims that halfbloods are inferior or less powerful.
I think fach is differentiating between halfblood and mudblood. Someone like Voldemort or Harry is a halfblood with a mixture of magical and nonmagical ancestors, while Hermione is a mudblood since she has no magical relatives. While technically, the death eaters should focus on halfbloods as well as mudbloods, the sheer number of them in the wizarding world makes such a stance politically untenable.
Pretty much the only allusion to it is Dumbledore noting that of the two candidates for the Prophecy’s subject, Voldemort decided to do away with the one with a muggleborn mother.
Yabbut, Voldemort isn’t going to get racial purity for himself; half of his chromosomes come from a Muggle. Accepting an axiom that halfbloods are wielders of an inferior grade of magic forces him to accept that HE is the wielder of an inferior grade of magic.
And fachverwirrt’s point, if I’m reading him correctly, is that during the purges of the Thicknesse administration, the interrogators only required their defendants to prove the magical status of ONE birth parent.
I’ll poke around at some of the other stuff. Just got burned looking for the pod casts. picked up some annoying malware that took some time to get rid off.
Voldemort was a half-blood, remember? As was Snape and Harry.
Oh, I’m not completely through HPMOR. I’m only up to chapter 16 or so. The Harry in HPMOR reminds me a lot of Sheldon Cooper; A lot of memorized book knowledge, an inability to conceive of the idea that he could be wrong, a belief that he’s smarter and therefore superior to everyone he meets, and grossly lacking in social skills. And so far, I haven’t seen much of a Moral Compass in him.
Oh, and the other major change I see, so far, is that Harry is in Ravenclaw, not Gryffindoor.
Not QUITE complete. Arabella Figg was there to monitor the situation. It’s completely unclear what she would have been prepared/instructed to do if Harry had never been permitted to interact with the outside world, but she WAS there, all the same.
Heh. In the thread on the subject, somebody called it Ender Wiggin Goes to Hogwarts, which is pretty funny. And funnier if you have any basic familiarity with Ender’s Game.
Eh, sorry, my question was rhetorical. I’ve read both. The similarities are almost…superficial, in that the world is similar, but the characters that are in the limelight, their experiences leading up to and then their interactions in Hogwarts are massively, massively different. The changes are all pervasive. Huge spoiler ahead about the nature of one of the characters in HPMOR.
Are you aware that Voldemort is Harry’s most trusted mentor at Hogwarts? Yup. Quirrel is Voldemort.
Heh. I suspect that even Yudkowsky would probably agree with that assessment. Later on, some of the parallels are so close that I think it’s fan fiction for both novels.
Heh. Thanks for linking this. I read a couple of chapters and will probably read all of it now. A couple questions. How long is it? Is it finished? Do you know if it’s available on mobi? I couldn’t find a mobi version.
But she was useless. “Monitoring the situation” means “intervening if the kid is locked in a 2"x3"x3” closet filled with spiders, forced to either hold his bladder for 16 hours a day and living off canned soup he can steal" or “intervening if Uncle Vernon is in Harry’s face to the point where Harry can see Vernon’s nostril hairs and Vernon is yanking Harry around by one arm” or “Seeing that Harry is malnourished, abused, ill-treated and given no human contact or affection.”
Apparently her only mission was “Watch out for Harry…call me if Voldemort shows up…don’t sweat anything else” which isn’t really a good standard of care.
Yes, exactly. In fact, having Figg there makes the whole situation LESS believable to me, not more. It’s one thing if we can think that Dumbledore was in the dark to some extent and maybe we can excuse him for being busy and trusting to human nature being good. It’s another thing when it looks like the attitude of many wizards surrounding the situation was “So it’s a little child abuse. No biggie.”
It was apparent from the letters that they were aware of the situation and as he grew older they threatened the Dursley’s outright if they mistreated him.
It’s possible Dumbledore and company didn’t realize how bad the situation was with Harry. Remember, they weren’t aware that he didn’t know that he didn’t know about Hogwarts, and that it took him forever to get his letter? They probably thought he was okay. It wasn’t until later that they found out he was being abused.
Uh, this is open-spoilers, and that is not even a big one.
[spoiler]Quirrel was never one of Harry’s mentor’s, let alone a trusted one. You’re probably thinking of Mad-Eye, and he didn’t turn out to be Voldemort, but Barty Crouch Jr. Besides, of all of his DADA teachers, Harry was closest to Lupin.
(An amusing fact: the twins at one point bewitched snowballs to hit Quirrel in the back of his turban. They were actually hitting Voldemort in the face!)
Rowling made Voldemort a half-blood on purpose – it was to show his insecurity and his hatred of his father for leaving his mother. It’s almost as if by ridding the world of Muggle-borns he was ridding himself of his paternal roots.[/spoiler]
Uh, different book being spoilered there. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Please do me a favour and request a mod to alter your post? There are people in this thread who have expressed a desire to read HPMOR.