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That... was a far more profoundly uncomfortable and awkward experience than I expected it to be.
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I still don't get it. I've read the chapter, but there are a few scenes that might be considered awkward, but I don't follow why they were super-awkward.
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I'm not sure how much fun I should be having with this. The scene involves a new bit character in Dragon army.
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I haven't read it yet, but I'll venture a guess: Have you by any chance managed to get a cameo?
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King of Men wins. Got it for this piece. I can't tell if my name sticks out worse than other cameo names that are decidedly un-Hogwarts-like, but it feels really weird to me.
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I don't recall thinking any of them were outlandish. I suppose I take it for granted there will be Wizarding names, and Muggle names in the story and don't bat an eye at either.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: I can't tell if my name sticks out worse than other cameo names that are decidedly un-Hogwarts-like, but it feels really weird to me.
Having read the chapter, I didn't notice it until you pointed it out.
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I, on the other hand, did notice it. But only because I recognised your name and concluded that it was a promised cameo. Wouldn't have noticed it otherwise, though, other than as a name I didn't remember from canon. It fits well enough into the story.
Very well deserved cameo. I really like your artwork. Epic in every sense of the word.
I liked the new chapter. No noticable drop in quality and it will be nice to get updates at regular intervalls for a time.
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Chapter 79 wasn't bad per se, but I could feel it straining as several different plotlines collapsed into each other.
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I thought it was fun, but I felt the same strain in the story you did, Raymond. It actually reminded me of a scene earlier in the story, when Snape and Dumbledore work together with graphs and charts and diagrams and protectors and compasses and orrerries to try and figure out who could've been involved in the Azkaban jailbreak (which, incidentally, seems to have dropped off in the world in terms of importance) when they realize two Time-Turners may be involved. There's just too much here. I think, though, that since Dumbledore is one of the mysterious hidden advisors, hopefully things will become more clear with only Hermione's remaining.
Really curious to see how Draco shakes out. Many possibilities.
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posted
I just saw this on Thinkgeek and thought it was really cool, it is a Ravenclaw house symbol shirt for women. It seems men are not welcome in the smart kid house of Hogwarts.
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Errr...I guess that's what that shirt means? (Can't get a read on whether you're funnin' or not.)
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Well, goddamn, that's a hell of a cliffhanger!
I didn't expect to have my opinion that Harry was right, Wizarding Britain needs a massive and if needs be violent upturning badly, but I hadn't expected the story to validate that idea so thoroughly.
Anybody got any guesses? My guess is that much of this is Quirrell...mort?...for some reasons of his own. He has often expressed a desire to see much of Harry's thinking on politics and on people radically changed, and having to stand by while one of, if not the, his best friends-and also most virtuous and least deserving-is sentenced to be, in about the worst way imaginable, brutally tortured to death. If that's not a 'to hell with this aiming for nice ends' moment, I don't know what is.
I wonder how voluntary Draco's participation in this business is? He didn't get to speak except under mind-control, and even then he stammered. I wonder if the kind of thinking he's learned from Harry is up to the challenge of seeing through the incongruities of his own near death, and (apparently) with the shame and disgust his father feels for some of his new ideas?
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I have a thought regarding what Harry is about to do. There's a dementor in the Wizengamot chamber, which is right now being held in check by a few patronuses. It was pretty clearly set up way back when Harry first cast his patronus that if he tells anyone else the secret behind them (that dementors are death, and that animal patronuses only work because they don't understand death) that person would no longer be able to cast a patronus. Which is to say he can permanently disable everyone else's ability to defend themselves against dementors whenever he chooses.
Breaking the ability of wizards to defend against dementors would be a fantastic way to make them go renegade (why stay in Azkaban when nobody can stop them from rampaging across the country and kissing everyone they see) and have the entire wizarding world get behind their elimination real quick. It would also let Harry blackmail them into dropping all charges against Hermione.
There's also the point that Harry is reasonably sure that Hermione could learn to cast a human form patronus fairly easily. Which would make her probably the only other person alive still that could defend herself or anyone else against a dementor. That seems like a reasonably powerful get out of jail free card, especially considering that a vote of the Wizengamot apparently overrides everything else, and they'd all be terrified.
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quote:Originally posted by xtownaga: I have a thought regarding what Harry is about to do. There's a dementor in the Wizengamot chamber, which is right now being held in check by a few patronuses. It was pretty clearly set up way back when Harry first cast his patronus that if he tells anyone else the secret behind them (that dementors are death, and that animal patronuses only work because they don't understand death) that person would no longer be able to cast a patronus. Which is to say he can permanently disable everyone else's ability to defend themselves against dementors whenever he chooses.
Breaking the ability of wizards to defend against dementors would be a fantastic way to make them go renegade (why stay in Azkaban when nobody can stop them from rampaging across the country and kissing everyone they see) and have the entire wizarding world get behind their elimination real quick. It would also let Harry blackmail them into dropping all charges against Hermione.
A pretty decent idea. The biggest issue is that it's never been confirmed that the truth would disable a normal Patronus. Harry worried it might, but that was never tested. Still, Harry is really low on options, and an uncertain ploy beats not having one at this point.
Also, I have to give a slight nod of respect to Lucius. Yeah, he was totally dispicable here, but staring down what he thought was Voldemort for the sake of his son is still commendable. Doesn't even come close to making up for everything else, of course.
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I wonder if he actually believes that, though, or if he has convinced himself it's true. It gives him a handy reason to counter the influence of this little punk who's perverting his son's mind, after all.
Quite aside from the cronyism and nepotism practiced by Malfoy's faction, there is also the gleeful, virulent racism practiced right out there in the open of Wizarding Britain's most central tradition.
Perhaps he will trade Bellatrix Lestrange for Hermione? Not sure how he could do that or even if he would, but that's one of the other big secrets he's got. Another being knowledge, or supposed knowledge, of Voldemort's return. And then of course there's the dangling plotline of Quirrel's interrogation.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I wonder if he actually believes that, though, or if he has convinced himself it's true. It gives him a handy reason to counter the influence of this little punk who's perverting his son's mind, after all.
I think he does. At least, his dialog definitely seemed to show more fear and weight than Malfoy would give to such a young child, even a really famous one like Potter.
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But is that fear because he's Voldemort, or fear because he thinks he is quite capable of murdering Draco?
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Possible ploy: if Harry figures out that Lucius thinks he's Voldemort (and assuming Lucius does), he could remind everywhere that Bellatrix Black DID escape Azkaban, without directly threatening anything, but pointedly giving Lucius a specific WAY in which Harry-mort could threaten the Malfoy family in the immediately future. Imply that he can point Bellatrix at Lucius or Draco.
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Harry has demonstrated an ability to get people out of Azkaban without much help from Quirrell. Now that he, presumably, no longer cares about detection, how about recruiting Quirrell, the Sunshine and Chaos armies, and perhaps Dumbledore, and doing a mass jailbreak involving heavy use of the True Patronus?
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That's where I figure this is going sooner or later, but I think he'd be trying to prevent Hermione from having to go there in the first place.
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Yes, Azkaban and the system that created it seem pretty clearly to me one of, if not the, big bads of the story.
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Harry has to do something here, but destroying Azkaban right now isn't good storytelling. No. I expect something else. Also, his time with Lucious is done.
What I expect is something bigger.
I think he will free the Dementor from its Patronus captivity and allow it to roam the Wizengot chambers. In exchange for stopping the Dementor he will ask for time to prove Hermione's innocents.
There are a lot of chapters left in this story so nothing can be finalized yet.
Or he will memory charm the entire Wizengot. Either way works for me.
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Well, I don't think anyone meant to say Harry would proceed swiftly to destroy Azkaban now. It's not even clear he could do so as he is without killing himself.
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I don't know how Harry could free the Dementor from its Patronus-induced captivity. His human (humanist?) Patronus has been shown to have the power to cow and destroy Dementors, and to confuse Patronuses, but not so far as I remember thwart other Patronuses while leaving the Dementor intact.
Hmm. I'll make a prediction. I think it's a long shot, but Harry will offer himself as the one to suffer the prison term, perhaps calling on the debt Draco owes him, somehow, and using other means as well. If there is no way he can discover to overthrow this sentence (the convinction seems completely lost in terms of beating), then there's only one person we know of who can, without a Patronus, withstand any length of time in a Dementor's presence: Harry Potter, himself.
So that's my bet, that's what Harry will work toward if/when the sentence cannot be altered. And then while others are doing work to bring doubt into the matter, he will try and endure in Azkaban, hopefully intact when he's freed. But I don't have much confidence in it, since there are so many other possible angles.
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From chapter 46, after Dumbledore asks Harry to explain how he'd just destroyed the Dementor:
quote:Harry opened his mouth, and then, as realization hit him, rapidly snapped his mouth shut again. Godric hadn't told anyone, nor had Rowena if she'd known; there might have been any number of wizards who'd figured it out and kept their mouths shut. You couldn't forget if you knew that was what you were trying to do; once you realized how it worked, the animal form of the Patronus Charm would never work for you again - and most wizards didn't have the right upbringing to turn on Dementors and destroy them
Presumably this means that if he tells everyone there what he figured out about how the patronus works, the wizards maintaining the patronuses guarding the dementor would lose the ability to use the charm, thus freeing the dementor from captivity.
If he wants to engineer a situation in which he goes to Azkaban instead of Hermione, he could just confess to orchestrating the whole thing and using Hermione as a pawn. His ability to lie under veritaserum due to being an Occlumens would make it reasonably easy to convince the Wizengamot of his guilt. I suppose there's a problem there in that Draco knows he's an Occlumens, which means Lucius may well know, but it would at least buy some time. I still think that Harry setting a dementor on the Wizengamot is a more likely outcome, especially considering he's diving deep into his dark side to come up with a plan.
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Huh. After this chapter, I'm quite a lot more willing to believe that Dumbledore may have tortured Draco's mother to death by burning her alive than I was before, when I considered it a possibility but not a very serious one. In this chapter, he was willing to risk or even actually accept the very slow, most horrible death by torture the Wizarding World can apparently imagine for an eleven year old child-that he knows to be innocent, not that it matters-for the sake of the greater game, so Harry won't be indebted (in unknown ways) to the wrong people.
Someone who would do that, permit or permit being risked, that...I could see how at the height of the last war, when neutral and friendly families were seeing their loved ones tortured to death themselves regularly when they weren't killed...I could see the Dumbledore of this chapter eventually reaching a breaking point and going straight to the most powerful Death Eater's wife and administering some merciless, poetic justice.
I'm more curious than ever to see how Draco, Hermione, and Harry will handle this as a group, too. I suspect that was a part of whoever brainwashed Hermione plan too-the three of them were shaping up to be a real juggernaut of power and insight in the Wizarding world for the next couple of centuries, but I think it would take a series of miracles to for them to work together in a genuine way now.
I also wonder if Draco will be mentally strong enough and ethical enough to be repelled by what Lucious tried today. I suppose much of it starts with whether he can accept Hermione's innocence.
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I am really impressed with the number of things that were absolutely ridiculous that happened in this chapter, without being completely silly. I'm on the fence about whether I think it was genuinely good.
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I thought of that too as I was reading it, actually. I wonder how much of the last few paragraphs, dealing with how many and how strongly most members of the Wizengamot believe in, what was the term, 'story-reason'? I mean, that's their sandbox, and things that seem completely silly are so often par for the course when you start treating 'once upon a time...' as having that sort of weight.
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That last chapter is an April's fools, in case anyone was fooled. I'm saying this since s April 1st has already passed, and I think it unfair for anyone to get fooled beyond that day.
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Not really liking Harry in the latest chapter, though I guess I can kinda see where he's coming from.
I guess some of that was deserved, if Dumbledore actually did kill her like that, but Harry definitely didn't come across well in this chapter. No one did, really.
At least, I guess, he called himself out for some of it by the end of the chapter.
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I thought the express *point* was that Harry finally realized what a jerk he's been being to Dumbledore all along.
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Well...sure, Harry has been a jerk (to quite a lot of people) for quite some time, it's true. But, y'know, it's not as though Dumbledore has really earned much consideration from him, either.
Anyway, I thought the explanation about Narcissa would probably be something like this. And, y'know, in that scenario, she wasn't an innocent bystander. You can't BE neutral and also married (and allied) to a guy who's helping in the kidnap and brutal torture of innocents.
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So, turns out I am friends with the author's father. Last night he brought the book version into the pub where we sing to show it to us. I told him that I had read some of it and knew a lot of folks who are big fans. Just as well that I didn't mention that I stopped reading because I found Harry to be a dull, annoying, snot because, according to Dad, Harry is very much patterned after the author.
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I should have made the connection but I never really paid attention to the author's last name. Or his dad's for that matter.
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(By this point I've met the author, and, well, yes. People I know who know him better than I have commented that Quirrel is *way* better at understanding social interaction than Eliezer Yudkowsky is)
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What would you say if you really, *really* wanted to make parents invest in cryonics for their children?
Assume you have the same goal as Yudkowsky in so convincing parents. Is there a more effective *and* more socially acceptable method of convincing parents towards the same goal?
This is an honest question, because if anything I'm probably even worse at social interaction than Yudkowsky is.
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I don't actually think his statement is that bad in its original context. (Though subsequent statements in the comment section of that article are pretty bad)
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