Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality/Characters

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Students

Ravenclaw

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres/The Boy-Who-Lived/General Chaos

• Badass Boast: What kills darklords, terrifies Dementors and owes you sixty thousand galleons?
• Badass Bookworm: as befits a wizard.
• The Chessmaster: he tries, with the best intentions, but he's an overambitious, dangerous amateur. This is pointed out by many characters, including himself.
• Child Prodigy: to the nth degree.
• Confusion Fu: Harry isn't just gratuitously unpredictable, he is also very efficient about it.
• Crazy Awesome: Harry has a very strong tendency to explicitly look for flaws to exploit, thinking outside the box, taking the perspective no-one ever tried. His plans are outrageously shameless as a result.
• Deadpan Snarker: Harry is not very patient with what he perceives as stupidity, and will violently mock it, especially if it gets people hurt.
• Determinator: Heroic responsibility means you have to get the job done no matter what.
• Did You Just Kill A Dementor?
• Ditzy Genius: Deconstructed. He doesn't understand normal people very well, and has almost zero common sense. He tries to compensate for it with intelligence, but it doesn't always cut it. When you are a hero with ambitious plans to change the world, this is a huge liability.
• Encyclopaedic Knowledge: His (foster) father was an Oxford professor, his house is full of books, he is intensely curious and has the intelligence to assimilate the knowledge. Do the math.
• For Science!: Actually, for Humanity and/or for Truth, but Harry thinks Science is essential to serve the first and find the second.
• Genre Savvy: When Harry hears "Ssalutations from Sslytherin to Sslytherin: if you would sseek my ssecretss, sspeak to my ssnake." when the Sorting Hat calls out Slytherin, Harry is Genre Savvy enough to know to tell McGonagall about it.
• Guile Hero/Magnificent Bastard: The goals of a guile hero, the tactics of a magnificent bastard.
• Grin of Audacity: he's usually represented with these in fanart. You can feel it in the text too, but they get much rarer after The Incident: Harry's gone grim.
• Happily Adopted: Mostly.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Towards Quirell. He wises up.
• The Hero
• Immortality Seeker: not just for him, but for everyone, "otherwise what would be the point?"
• Innocence Lost: Harry becomes much harder, grim and cynical after the Azkaban episode.
  • And Harry just looked at the Defense Professor with cool eyes that would never flinch from anything; not even death, now. He was no longer in Azkaban, no longer fearful of the part of himself that was fearless; and the solid gemstone that was Harry had rotated to meet the stress, turning smoothly from one facet to another, from light to darkness, warm to cold.
• Insufferable Genius: "I'm smarter and I know it. (*wiggles*)"
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Is terrified of this.
• Large Ham: At age twelve, he talks like a book. And that's when he's being low key. When he tries to be a ham, it's spectacular.
• The Leader: He leads the Chaos Legion primarily as a type 1 with a bit of type 4.
• Mad Scientist: Harry — yer a wizard. Who knows Muggle science, and ain't afraid to use it. We are doomed.
• Memetic Badass:

And from that day onward, no matter what Hermione tried to tell anyone, it would be an accepted legend of Hogwarts that Harry Potter could make absolutely anything happen by snapping his fingers.

• One Man Industrial Revolution: One of his many ambitions is to accomplish this by bringing tech to wizards and magic to Muggles.
• Overly Long Name
• Patrick Stewart Speech: Uses them, most notably, as a prelude to invoke his Patronus. He's good at those.
• Nerd-Cultured Badass
• Sore Loser: First thing he thinks of after being shown up by Snape? How to destroy the potions professor.
• Spoiled Brat: More like homeschooled, but yeah, his parents were very doting.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Harry tries to achieve this, but Magic in the Potterverse acts according to narrativium and Rule of Funny, which makes no logical sense. He won't let that get him down, though.
• Too Clever By Half: A quintessential example.
• Young Conqueror: Tries to be. Quirrell is trying to groom him into the darker sort.

Hermione Jane Granger

• Action Girl
• Badass Bookworm
• Beware of the Nice Ones: During chapter 78, she led a vendetta against Draco during the recurring war game. Full of rage, she managed to overpower his magic, defeating him in the result.
• Child Prodigy
• Friendly Rival: She and Harry have a bit of competition going on about who can earn more House Points and do better in class (hint: she tends to win), and this escalates even more when they're both generals of their student armies.
• Foe Yay: With Harry.
• The Leader: Type 2.
• Overshadowed By Awesome

Antony Goldstein

• Jewish and Nerdy: Like the author.

Padma Patil

• Action Girl/Dark Action Girl: She's played up as Malfoy's most important lieutenant, and later joins SPHEW.
• Bastard Understudy: Possible Guile Hero understudy to Harry.
• The Dragon: By the end of the first term, she's replaced Crabbe and Goyle as this for Malfoy (in the Armies at least).
• Ship Tease: With Draco.
• Twin Switch

Slytherin

Draco Malfoy

• A Father to His Men: Strange as it may seem he actually manages to become this.
• Anti-Villain
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: All the time.
• Daddy's Little Villain
• Deadpan Snarker
• Evil Chancellor: His family's dynasty basically revolves around this.
• Friendly Rival
• Heel Face Turn: When Draco learns that wizards are not losing their powers because of interbreeding with muggles, he starts to come around to Harry's view even having a Rage Against the Mentor moment followed by a Heroic BSOD.
• The Leader: Type 4, he really knows how to play his dignity as a noble for leadership.
• Only Sane Man: Often serves as a foil to the Slytherin's prejudice or to Harry's Crazy Awesome -ness.
• The Starscream: At least, in his own mind.

Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle

• Badass
  • Magic Knight
• Large Ham
• Those Two Guys/Those Two Bad Guys

Daphne Greengrass

• Only Sane Girl. At least she thinks of herself that way.
  • Only up to a point:

"Well," Daphne whispered, keeping her voice as low as she could, "at least now I don't feel like the only sane person in Hogwarts any more." "Because now you've got the rest of us as friends?" whispered Lavender Brown, who was tiptoeing along at her left side. "I don't think that's what she means," General Granger murmured from Lavender's own left.

• Foe Yay: with Neville.

Blaise Zabini

• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: quintuple, even. In a battle between only three armies.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: To remove the knowledge that he is a quintuple agent bringing him down to quadruple.
• Magnificent Bastard
• Wild Card

Tracey Davis

• Cloudcuckoolander: 'The girl went on stalking through the corridor, like she had dramatic music accompanying her that only she could hear.' This may or may not be connected to her previous association in the Chaos Legion.
• Dark Magical Girl: After sacrificing her soul to Harry Potter.
• True Companions: One of the reasons why Harry promised her his protection.

Hufflepuff

Neville Longbottom

• Beware the Nice Ones
• Calling Your Attacks: Justified as his attacks require his allies to buff him.
• Confusion Fu
• Crazy Awesome
• The Dragon: To Harry, in battle magic.
• Large Ham
• Screaming Warrior

Susan Bones

• Masquerade: Suspected by the rest of SPHEW to be a "double witch", which is the magical world's version of someone who attends a super secret magic school.
• Only Sane Girl: Probably the only one out of SPHEW, because she actually takes steps to prevent DOOM.
• Doom Magnet: What Susan believes SPHEW to be.

Gryffindor

Ronald Weasley

• Butt Monkey: Harry refuses to take him seriously.
• Demoted to Extra: He is one of the generals of Hermione's army and has a battle with Neville but is ultimately a minor character in this series.
• Ron the Death Eater: Inverted. He's treated completely in character... in a series where everyone else is OOC.
• Your Approval Fills Me With Shame: When Hermione is framed for the attempted murder of Draco, Ron sends his condolences and approval, but not because he thinks Hermione is innocent.

Fred and George Weasley

• Crazy Awesome: Manage to royally screw over Rita Skeeter by forging a betrothal contract between Harry and Ginny, manufacturing a lot of evidence that should have been impossible to forge, and did it all in a time frame of less than twelve hours and on a budget of forty galleons.
• Noodle Incident: ...And then Obliviated themselves so that if they got caught, they wouldn't be able to divulge the details. It's implied that this is a fairly common procedure for the twins whenever they achieve some kind of grand-scale prank.
• Overshadowed By Awesome: After Snape's apology speech...

At the Gryffindor table, where a cake waited with fifty-one unlit candles, Fred whispered, "I think we may be out of our league here, George."

• Trickster Twins

Teachers

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

• Cloudcuckoolander
• The Ditz
• Obfuscating Insanity: Maybe.
• Shell Shocked Senior
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Used to believe this.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?

Minerva McGonagall

• Animorphism
• Reasonable Authority Figure
• Shape Shifter Baggage

Severus Snape

• Double Agent
• Evil Teacher
• Heel Face Turn
• Jerkass Woobie
• I Have This Friend/And That Boy Was Me

Quirinus Quirrell/Tom Marvolo Riddle/Lord Voldemort/Jeremy Jaffe

• Affably Evil
• Animorphism
  • Scaled Up
• Badass: Second best Warlock alive. Black belt, sixth dan.
  • Badass Abnormal
  • Magic Knight
• Byronic Hero
• Deadpan Snarker
• Genre Savvy
  • Dangerously Genre Savvy
• Evil Is Cool
• Evil Mentor: Rather than try to kill Harry, he instead tries to bring him around to his point of view.
• Evil Sorcerer
• Fallen Hero: Claims to be one to Hermione and Amelia Bones has identified him as one. It's not clear how this squares with him being Quirrelmort.
• I Have Many Names
• Immortality Immorality
• Immortality Seeker
• It Was His Sled: Quirrelmort.
• Nineties Anti Hero: What little we know of his "hero" days indicate that he was this type of hero.
• The Obi-Wan:
• Retired Badass
• Retired Monster
• Self Made Orphan
• Weapon of Choice:Avada Kedavra!
• You Are Too Late:Harry, my horcrux is in space!
  • Crazy Prepared: The steps taken by Quirrel to protect his plans led to the Space-Time Continuum telling Dumbledore that he was Too Late.

Sybil Trelawny

• Fainting Seer
• Fortune Teller

Other adults

Bellatrix Black

• Dark Action Girl
• More Than Mind Control

Amelia Bones

• Badass
  • Badass Grandma
• Da Chief
• Good Is Not Nice
• Hero Antagonist: in the Azkaban Arc.
• Iron Lady
• Lady of War
• A Mother To Her Men
• Parental Substitute: To Susan Bones, her niece.
• The Zenigata

Lucius Malfoy

• Badass: Hinted at by Harry's description of his appearance, has yet to be actually demonstrated.
• Big Bad: Dumbledore considers him to be this, with Voldemort as the Bigger Bad
  • Big Bad Wannabe: Quirrel considers him to be this.
• Crusading Widower
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones
• Evil Chancellor: To Fudge, somewhat subverted as by most measures that actually matter, Lucius is more powerful than Fudge in his own right.
• Fantastic Racism
• Hoist By His Own Petard: Harry uses his (probably false) claim that he was placed under the imperius curse by Voldemort to insist on a blood debt from House Malfoy in return for killing Voldemort and "freeing" him.
• Kick the Dog: Oh yeah.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Connections
• Would Hurt a Child

Posthumous Characters

Godric Gryffindor

• Author Avatar

Armies

Dragon Army

• Authority Equals Asskicking: Mildly deconstructed as Draco points out the disadvantages of being both the commander and the most powerful wizard: he needs to exhaust himself casting the powerful spells and risk himself in combat when he should be focusing on command.
• Badass Army: Draco tries to invoke this. He's still working on it.
  • Chapter 78: His army finally achieved a victory against Chaos and Sunshine, even managing to disabling Chaos's trump card against them. However, for Draco, being defeated by Hermione during the battle spoils everything.
• Enemy Mine:With Sunshine
• Five-Bad Band:
  • The Big Bad: Draco
  • The Dragon: Padma Patil
  • The Brute: Crabbe and Goyle, though they aren't stupid or unskilled in this fic.
  • The Evil Genius and The Sixth Ranger: Dean Thomas.
• Shout Out: To Enders Game (see title).
• You Are in Command Now: Padma Patil has twice taken command of Dragon when Draco was taken down.

The Chaos Legion

• Break the Game Breaker: Quirrel forces Harry to downsize chaos after he curbstomps both other armies in the fourth battle. It works, they lose the next battle to Dragon.
• Catch Phrase: Seamus claims that Harry frequently says "I find your lack of skepticism disturbing" while doing the Vader-choke gesture.
• Chewing the Scenery: Are encouraged to do so.
• Confusion Fu
• Cloudcuckoolander: Some members (especially Harry) are guilty of this.
• Crazy Awesome
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Their theme song consists of nothing but the word Doom repeated over and over again to the tune of the Imperial Death March from Star Wars.
• Five-Bad Band:
  • The Big Bad: Harry/ General Chaos
  • The Dragon: Neville of Chaos
  • The Brute: Theodore Nott
  • The Evil Genius: Harry himself, as well as Blaise Zabini to a lesser degree.
  • The Dark Chick: Tracy Davis
• Game Breaker: In the Battles after christmas break Harry starts using new or unexpected forms of magic in each battle to give himself an edge over the other armies.
• Handicapped Badass: Harry is forced to split up his army. However, he manages to do a good job at fighting with his remaining forces, and may have possibly won if the Dragon Army hadn't copied their trick.
• Mildly Military: Harry doesn't even attempt to impose any kind of military discipline.
• Obviously Evil: Rigorously enforced by General Chaos, just for Lulz.
• Only Sane Man: Seamus says that when you first join the chaos legion it seems like everyone in it is insane, then after a while you realize everyone else is insane.
• Shout Out: Mainly to Warhammer, H.P. Lovecraft, Ender's Game, Starwars, and Monty Python.

The Sunshine Regiment

• Beware of the Nice Ones
• Enemy Mine: With Dragon
• The Hero: Hermione Granger.
• Lethal Joke Character
• The Strategist: Ron Weasley
• Tastes Like Diabetes