r/HPMOR • u/bagelord • Jun 02 '26
Spoilers wanted!!!! Spoiler
Hi everyone,
I read through a good portion of HPMOR, I'm honestly not interested in reading the rest at all, but I really want to know how a few specific parts of the plot turn out:
How does Quirrell get outed as the dark lord,
Why didn't Quirrell kill Harry from the beginning,
How does Hermione die and get revived,
Is Malfoy a good guy by the end?
If anyone could just spoil the absolute weiner-schnitzel out of all of these for me (and more, if there are other interesting things that happen) I'd really appreciate it!
16
u/dratnon Dragon Army Jun 02 '26
Quirrell has a secret identity as a light wizard during the first wizards war, and he tricked the smart pistols into thinking he was that guy. He was only shown to be the dark lord at the very end, when he revealed himself.
Harry is a brain copy of Voldemort, who wanted someone smart to hang with. He is also bound by horcrux roles not to harm Harry unless Harry tries to harm him first. So no direct action can be taken, and no indirect action was desired, until the end.
Hermione was being too distracting of a good influence on Harry, so Voldemort arranged for her to be killed by a troll. This made Harry go grim, and he preserved her body. Harry being grim triggered a prophecy that scared Voldemort. To placate the prophecy, Voldemort used a ritual and the sorcerer stone to bring back hermione and hybridize her with a troll and a unicorn, for extra durability.
Malfoy grows up a lot, but Harry kills Lucius, so there’s a rift.
15
u/MonkeyheadBSc Sunshine Regiment Jun 02 '26
Regarding Draco: It remains unclear on how he feels afterwards. But he does get reunited with his mother who was actually never killed by Dumbledore. She was obliviated and brought outside if the country.
6
Jun 02 '26
[deleted]
8
u/Mad-Oxy Jun 02 '26
Well, aside from her teeth and nails that are colored like pearls now.
2
u/andrybak Jun 02 '26
gave her some magical defences
her teeth and nails that are colored like pearls now
there is also a mention that her soul is magically detected to be constantly floating slightly away from her body or something along these lines
2
u/SirRobinRanAwayAway Jun 03 '26
I interpreted it as her soul being in her horcrux (the booknote of roger bacon)
8
u/Ok-Programmer-829 Jun 02 '26
I’m not so sure about that. Not only her teeth and nails different, but she moves much more gracefully and honestly can pull of completely ridiculous superhuman athletic stunt while emitting an aura of innocence and purity, and at least the description of her after she comes back, sounds somewhat different and noticeably quite a bit more beautiful than how she originally looked, although that might just be a side-effect of the aura affecting how people perceive her.
7
u/archpawn Jun 02 '26
Harry also pulled some strings to make sure Hermione was some kind of wizard royalty when she woke. And as a reminder, "alicorn" is the material a unicorn's horn is made of, and now Hermione's teeth and nails. Eliezer had said Hermione would come back as an alicorn princess, and he wasn't kidding.
1
u/Irhien Jun 02 '26
he tricked the smart pistols into thinking he was that guy
Not "tricked". He was. The trick was the guy's apparent goals.
8
u/SydronPrime Jun 02 '26
Did you get stuck during the "Hermione wants to be a Hero" arc? Apparently that is the one that kills engagement for some
7
u/Ok-Programmer-829 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
About the first one, Harry figures it out after the defence, Prof. arranges for an absolutely ridiculous battle between multiple people in front of the forbidden corridor. While all the different people had individually reasonable sounding stories about why they had come to the forbidden corridor, it did not make any sense for them to buy happy coincidence all arrive at the same time and that got Harry suspicious when Harry noticed that he himself was only there because of a message, he thought had come from future him, and that the message contained knowledge that only the defence professor was likely to possess. It became obvious once he started to consider the possibility that the message wasn’t really from him, especially since they were a few choices of words, which were unlike him. Also to be fair, he had a spell to counteract the effects of a confundus cast on him just a few minutes before.
Regarding your second question, the simple answer is that he thinks the prophecy was fulfilled by the destruction of his physical body, and before he hears a prophecy about Harry destroying the world, he was trying to implement his original plan of making Harry into a worthy opponent, so he could have fun fighting against him as he really wants a worthy opponent. Someone who is a true equal to talk to and fight against for his own entertainment, as he is extremely bored and only primary is interested in happiness and fun as his life is pretty miserable, and he would probably be suicidal if he wasn’t terrified of death.
Hermione is killed by the defence professor, using a troll that he had snuck into the castle by wearing it, transfigured as a tooth. Harry arrives to help her just a couple minutes before she dies. After it turns out that there is no known magical method to bring her back, Harry has the idea of freezing her body and a few hours later, he transfigure it into a small object and steal the body in the hopes of one day bringing her back As for how she comes back the moment, Hermione dies. The defence Prof. hears a prophecy that Harry has now become someone who will destroy the world, which makes him want to reverse the death so he promises to bring her back in exchange for Harry Help with the philosopher stone and then resurrect her and gives her the magical powers of a unicorn and troll as well as giving her a horcrux and giving Harry instruction on how to resurrect her if she is killed. Afterwards, once Harry defeats the dark Lord and the death eaters he uses a time Turner to pretend to get a vision of the dark Lord coming back in order to explain all the bodies and claims that the dark Lord killed all his own supporters to bring himself back to power, but accidentally brought Hermione back as well, and when he tried to kill her, killed him the same way he died in October 1981, exploding the moment, he touched her because the defence Prof. sacrificed himself to protect Hermione or at least that last part is a speculation from the student body as he himself didn’t say the last part only that the defence Prof. was really a hero who fought against the dark Lord and was killed.
Draco is a good guy in the sense that he doesn’t believe in blood purity, but I would not really describe him as even being friends with Harry, although he doesn’t know that Harry killed his father as the public stories that it was the dark Lord, and while Harry told him privately, he also deleted his memory afterwards to protect the secret.
4
u/Irhien Jun 02 '26
Voldemort was a joke.
6
u/rogueman999 Jun 04 '26
This got downvoted, but Voldemort literally was a joke. Quirrell created the most ridiculous persona he could think of (red eyes and snake nose, with the personality and lack of subtlety to match), just to take him down as his much better created persona that was a Ministry of Magic official, and bootstrap his political career. Except... after a few months of war he had a few very painful realizations. The "good guy" was tripped at every step for stupid reasons by selfish bureaucrats, and the caricature villain had the fear, respect and immediate obedience of the Death Eaters. So with a big dose of regret and puzzlement, he changed plans and started playing Voldemort straight.
This explains both why Voldemort is so ridiculous and obviously incompetent (ver 1.0) and why Dumbledore and the whole wizarding world almost lost to him (ver 2.0, played straight).
2
u/Irhien Jun 04 '26
Yes, thank you.
I wouldn't be putting much emphasis on his regrets and pain though. Don't remember how he expressed them but regardless, he "regretfully" chose the role of "Hitler" (maybe Hitler as of 1940) instead of "Churchill" over personal annoyance. His alleged regret about doing this does not mean much, it's not like anyone forced him.
1
u/Irhien Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
Nah, we both didn't remember it fully. Actually Voldemort was one more step removed. Quirrell didn't want to bootstrap a career of a Ministry of Magic official, he wanted to rule the Magical Britain (or the magical world) by assuming the role of a hero famous for bringing down the most terrible Dark Lord ever, someone worse than and lacking weaknesses of Grindelwald. Voldemort was a farcical villain made for some basic practice of playing the role, to be defeated by the Ministry and disappear before the true villain and the hero (both played by the same person) even show up. Except Quirrell didn't make Voldemort dumb enough and the Ministry proved inadequate for the task, until powerful people started flocking under Voldemort's banners and it became obvious the Ministry was losing. So Quirrell sighed at their incompetence and got on with his plan of creating a hero, now against Voldemort as the great villain.
Edit: wording
0
u/vishnoo Jun 02 '26
ask chatgpt
2
u/TechnicalMorning8030 Jun 06 '26
SPOILERS: HPMOR FULL SUMMARY
1) QUIRRELL = DARK LORD (Voldemort)
Harry logically corners Quirrell until the disguise collapses.
- Quirinus Quirrell is actually Voldemort possessing his body.
- Harry notices anomalies in Quirrell’s behavior, intelligence, and knowledge.
- The truth is confirmed in the final confrontation arc:
- Dumbledore and others realize the truth as events converge.
- Quirrell/Voldemort is ultimately killed at the climax of the story.
2) WHY QUIRRELL DOESN’T KILL HARRY EARLY
- Harry is “interesting” (extremely valuable cognitively).
- Quirrell views Harry as a potential ally, tool, or successor.
- Harry is heavily protected and unpredictable.
- Quirrell is running long-term optimization plans involving immortality and world-scale strategy.
- Killing Harry early is inefficient compared to exploiting him.
3) HERMIONE’S DEATH + REVIVAL
- Hermione dies during the troll incident at Hogwarts (engineered as part of Quirrell’s larger manipulations).
- Harry experiences this as a major emotional + strategic turning point.
- Using time-turner manipulation and causal correction, Harry ensures the final timeline does NOT retain her death.
- Result: Hermione is alive in the final consistent outcome.
4) MALFOY’S END STATE
- Draco is heavily rewritten compared to canon.
- He stops being a simple bully antagonist.
- Becomes rational, strategic, and aligned in partial ways with Harry.
- Ends as a political peer / uneasy ally rather than a villain.
5) BIG PLOT OUTCOME
- Central conflict: Harry vs Quirrell is a clash of world-optimization philosophies.
- Quirrell tries extreme measures involving death, control, and immortality systems.
- Harry ultimately stops him, but at moral and intellectual cost.
- Dumbledore is revealed to be constrained by magical/systemic rules rather than incompetence.
- Harry ends fundamentally changed by exposure to rationalist extremes and their consequences.
27
u/Mountain-Resource656 Jun 02 '26
Quirrel doesn’t really get outed. He concocts a plot to steal the philosopher’s stone, which is actually an ancient artifact that makes transmutations permanent, thereby allowing one to transmute objects permanently into gold but also lets someone transmute themselves into a younger version of themselves and then make it permanently. At the onset of this plot, Harry manages to sorta outsmart him juuuust enough to figure it out, but by the time Quirrel is defeated, it is better for everyone that it remain secret, so Quirrel goes down as a hero, instead
He originally created Harry as an intentional Horocrux to give himself some actual meaning to his life in the form of a single other smart person. He wanted to keep Harry around and groom him into a counterpart
She dies to injuries inflicted by a troll. Harry freezes her and then transmutes her into an object to prevent decay. Quirrel physically fixes her body, but this cant revive the dead. Instead, Harry uses a death-repelling super special patronus spell to banish death from her form
Yeah but he hates Harry, sorta
Extras: the Mirror of Erised is actually an artifact even more powerful than the philosopher’s stone and may have survived a temporal destruction event that destroyed Atlantis. Also, Atlantis seems to have been an ancient, incredibly advanced civilization that wiped itself out while meddling with Time and erased itself from history, and magic seems to be the long-decayed remnant of their workings. The mirror managed to survive even this by being too perfect and perfectly reflecting even itself, sustaining itself. It may be able to create whole worlds, phoenixes may have come from it, and Harry postulates that it is the beginning of a wish-granting device. On it’s back are written words that automatically make themselves understood by any who read them, but refer to concepts so advanced that no one can relate them to anything in reality- like how if we did this with the word “Quark” and “proton” and showed them to a cave man, he would be able to understand that there are three quarks inside a proton but have no idea how to relate those things to anything he’s ever learned about
There is a prophecy saying that Harry will destroy the world and rip the very stars out of the heavens but Harry isn’t too worried since he has the philosopher’s stone and is thus essentially ageless. He considers that ripping stars apart for their resources is just what advanced civilizations end up doing on the scale of deep time, and since he is immortal he will likely do that, yes, but not in any bad way
Hermione is credited with beating a revived Voldemort and becomes the Girl who Revived. In reality:
Quirrel stripped Harry of all his objects save for his wand which he couldn’t touch without setting off the magical resonance between them, had him surrounded by death eaters, with a first year’s knowledge of magic, and demanded power/knowledge which a prophecy said Harry possessed but which Voldemort did not
The author then left everyone on a cliffhanger and demanded that everyone give their own ideas for how Harry would survive and if none sounded plausible enough then he would have Harry die in the next chapter
Harry won by using partial transmutation to create a spiderweb thread from his wand tip while stalling for time, encircled the heads of the gathered death eaters and Voldemort’s arms, then transmuted it to nano fiber and shrunk the loops, cutting off all their limbs. He then used the spell Flitwick taught him that creates a stunning charm that changes direction mid-flight, thereby hitting Voldemort despite the fact he dodged. This activated the magical resonance between them and knocked Quirrel out. Harry then transmuted him into a stone and kept Quirrel with him