I had seen that on HP Lexicon's switching spell guide, but the distinction I was making wasn't between living and nonliving, but between animate and inanimate in the Aristotelian sense. I haven't really thought about the nature of HP magic in depth (like say Taure has), but it has always seemed to me that the HP world behaves according to classical categories more then it does modern scientific ones.

So in this case, while we know that plants are living and have DNA, from magic's point of view a cactus has more in common with a block of wood (both lacking the source of their own movement) then it does with a animal.

I don't remember any examples, with the possible exception of Mandrakes, of why this sort of solution wouldn't be perfectly consistent with the books. Although I would gladly be corrected if I'm wrong.

 

Maybe you could add some sort of intermediate step to make it more noteworthy. You could keep the same general "switched body parts retain connection to original animals" theme, but change things up slightly. For example, examine what would happen if the switched body part were transfigured, with the original body remaining the same. Make Harry transfigure the pillow-monster + appendages into a cat or something. Here, varying "sources" are integrated into one consolidated creature, but there is still some link to what one of the switched body parts was originally connected to. Harry can prove this link's existence somehow.

Someone please tell me if this made any sense... :\

 

It's rather remarkable how much discussion this story generates. Hopefully you're pleased with that, Santi, because considerable parts of the discussion are interesting.

As far as Harry's discovery goes? Yeah, it does seem a bit flimsy. But it still works to some degree because it does manage to exceed canon's scope on this sort of cross-discipline magic. And as Sesc mentioned, it doesn't use any Muggle voodoo or the like to accomplish that. But since some people are offering suggestions on how to make it better, maybe I'll offer one of my own:

Harry has an idea to play with switching spells and transfiguration, but hasn't yet come up with an idea that would guarantee a Master rank. Start with Harry switching the pillow-rabbit's teeth with the snake fangs. It does not cause a personality change in the rabbit.

On the spur of the moment, he decides to see what happens if he transfigures ten pillows into rabbits, and switches the fangs to the first rabbit, then from the first to the second, and so forth, all the way down the line. He wants to see if the switched object "degrades" from being switched so many times in a row like that (he later finds out that this experiment has been documented in the literature - the answer is 'no, it does not degrade the switched object').

But by the time he's done his full series of switching spells, the rabbit has begun to pick up the snake's personality, as written in the story already. It turns out that each switch transfers a little bit more of the original animal's essence to the end point of the switching spell chain - the effect is cumulative for some bizarre (read: magical) reason.

Nobody before Harry has discovered this because Harry's original hypothesis about switching degradation has already been disproved - therefore, that sort of experiment hasn't been run all that often. And there was never any evidence to indicate that you could transfer a living creature's essence to a transfigured creature, so nobody bothered performing such a monotonous permutation of the experiment. So ultimately, the property was discovered by a smart, determined, yet inexperienced little wizardling.

 

Even though it didn't happen in canon, there's a pretty legitimate point for Viktor to say "I'm a budding quidditch superstar, so I think I'm gonna pass on the deadly tournament where I'll gain at best a fraction of my monetary and celebrity potential."

 

I am hoping that's it Harry that enters the tournament and GOF should be different then canon, more difficult. The champions shouldn't be able to get through a task with luck alone.

 

Also with the help of a death eater. I'm not sure that Harry should be in the GoF. The only reason he was in it in Canon was because Crouch Jr. put his name in and confounded the goblet. Seeing as how Santi's Harry is not the Boy Who Lived, there is no reason to let him in since he is not of age and would make having Nathan touch the trophy cup at the end much more difficult.

Of course he could easily get in the tournament if the goblet's enchantment isn't about age but academic year levels since Harry skipped way ahead.

 

On the subject of Harry's dicovery, I think one good analogy could be Klein's Erlangen program, in which he implied (maybe not so explicitly in the context of all modern geometries) that one could, instead of looking at objects, look at the transformations that preserved certain properties.

Harry then could (maybe a bit unkowingly) be changing the way the switching spell works, altering the outcome in unexpected (but interesting) ways.

 

Except that this time Karkarof will not agree to the age limit. Harry is the most talented student he has.

 

This isn't science with all of its careful testing. The wizarding world in cannon has always been focussed on creating new spells rather than how to best use existing ones.
This is being approached as if it is in the modern twenty-first century science rather than in a rather backward archaic community.
The project is fine everyone says that this should have already been discovered but it had to be discovered at some point why not by Harry.

 

When the fuck is this covered in the books?

 

You're reading way too much crap fiction my friend. Let me invite you to our library

 

The mostly-Victorian, myth and legend-obsessed, wizarding world...is forward-thinking when it comes to magic?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

 

Well....Dumbledore and Voldemort apparently came up with shit-tons of new magic, we know Snape did as well, and there are multiple mentions of spellbooks having more than just one edition. We have the Weasley twins creating new magical items and consumables consistently, and Snape, again, chilling in Potions editing the recipes to be better. Sure, the society is backwards in some ways, but there's plenty of room even in canon for magical discovery.

I mean, the wizarding government has an entire department just for experimental charms. Within a larger department dedicated to the acquisition of newly discovered, lost, or obscure bits of magical knowledge.

 

Only thing is we don't know how much of that is inventing whole new spells and how much is through dedicated modification of previous spells.

Personally, I think believing that only one of the methods is occurring is ridiculous.

There are those who explore the unknown and others who tinker with the known and both make major contributions to the wizarding world's body of knowledge.

 

It probably is a mixture of both new magical theory and tweaks on old principles, but the point is that they are indeed very forward-thinking when it comes to magic. Sure, the general populace is relatively slow, but what general populace isn't?

It seems the general wizarding public depends mostly upon a few mega-scholars to carry their tradition forward, but it does appear that there is at least one wizard in each generation who is actually capable of doing that. This Harry will probably be doing some as yet unseen wandwork himself by the time he's 17, just like Dumbledore was.

 

I figure the age line would take care of it for everyone. It's probably a rule in the Triwizard tournament (maybe for safety), although I don't remember if it was ever mentioned as such exactly.

 

There are so many ways to subvert it it's not even worth wondering how Santi is going to do it here. No ageline, no ageline for the other schools, an ageline somebody else subverts to get Harry in, an ageline Harry himself gets around, an ageline that everyone ignores on the basis it exists simply as a 'if you can't get past this, GTFO."

I think we take it as an article of faith that assuming the tournament happens, then Harry is going to be a participant, and any so-called 'protections' are worth less than the sentence or two of the story they take up. If there's a twist and suddenly there's a full year of nothing but Harry supposedly doing nothing but watching someone else compete, then it becomes an issue of discussion. But not a minute before.

 

Or Karkaroff could just go, "fuck this age line, give me your slip, Harry," and put it in himself.