Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality/Fridge

• Fridge Brilliance: Quirrell seems to be taking his teaching duties seriously, marking boring homework assignments and advising Hermione to leave Hogwarts for her own safety (though there might be other motives for that). This seems at odds with his cynical, unconcerned attitude, until you realise there was a time in canon that Voldemort wanted to be a Defence Professor.
• Moody thinks rather than using a trapped Triwizard Trophy to teleport a victim (with a completely pointless return charm on it), an intelligent dark wizard would have someone simply toss the target a trapped Knut on their next visit to town. Quirrel used this exact method to take Harry to Diagon Alley (albeit consensually) earlier in the story, making this a call back (and reminder of Methods!Quirrels genre-saviness compared to cannon Voldemort).
• Fridge Horror: If horcruxes work the same way as in canon, then someone has been horribly murdered while in the presence of the Pioneer plaque and the deed has been covered up afterwards.
  • All of the crazy stuff Harry pulls off is done in his FIRST YEAR. What could he be capable of in his second year? The third? The fifth?
    • How is this Fridge Horror? If he's this awesome in his first year think how exponentially awesome he will become as he grows up.
  • Chapter 28, where Harry finds a loophole in the laws of transmutation to change part of an eraser to metal without changing the entire thing due to a branch of what boils down to multiverse physics. Even if it checks out on the magic side of the equation, there is no way to know what would happen once the spell wears off naturally since it works with an probability based science turned constant on an infinitely improbable situation, and the realm of consequence for messing with what could have been over time stretches from nothing major, to radiation poisoning, turning Hogwarts into a flaming crater, or tearing the universe atwain.
  • When Draco is briefly forced to consider siding with Dumbledore, he decides he'd rather be burned alive. And then when you read it again with the knowledge that Draco believes Dumbledore killed his mother by burning her alive while she slept, that comparison becomes rather horrifying.
    • And very similar to the decision that Potters took - dying rather than letting Voldemort kill Harry.
  • In Chapter 26 Quirrel decides to take Harry to Gringotts and suggests "And we might even make it a little outing, if you like. I've just had a pleasant thought." and begins humming to himself as Harry goes. The horror comes when you reread the previous chapter and note that the last time he hummed was after resolving to "crush" Rita Skeeter. So his "pleasant thought" was actually...