Wandless!Harry - A Fatal Flaw?/Fawkes' Tail Feather in H+V's wands

[grey_wolf_c]

No: HPFGUIDX 43082

Phyllis wrote:
> I think I've found a fatal flaw in this 
> premise, which is that Harry was wandless when he was tied to the 
> gravestone and he didn't do any magic at all, powerful or not, while 
> he was tied up. The instances we've seen of Harry doing wandless 
> magic - the Aunt Marge inflation incident and the vanishing glass at 
> the zoo, for example - haven't involved him using his arms to make 
> the magic happen, so this suggests to me that he only needs his brain 
> (and perhaps those gorgeous green Lily eyes??) to make the wandless 
> magic happen.  So, this suggests to me that Harry could have 
> performed wandless magic while he was tied up.
> 
> So I think if Voldemort truly thought that Harry was more powerful 
> without a wand, he would have killed him immediately upon his arrival 
> in the graveyard (probably by slitting his throat so he could get 
> Harry's blood for the regeneration potion by force - oh, perish the 
> thought!).
> 
> ~Phyllis

I don't really see where the fatal flaw is. He didn't kill Harry as 
soons as he got to the graveyard because I'd imagine that he needs the 
person alive for the potion to work, but that's not really the point. 
The fact is that voldemort is scared of Harry. He is nowhere sure he 
can kill the boy. He is going to try, of course, but his plan B assures 
him that even in the probable case Harry manages to escape again, 
something good comes out of it.

Harry, after all, is taken to the graveyard because Voldemort believes, 
IMO, that he can get to share Harry's magical protection against the 
AKs by using his blood in the potion (this is a conjeture, though, 
Voldemort never actually tells Harry the reason he was chosen. If you 
fdon't like it, read: "for reasons of his own that precised Harry and 
not any other wizartd or witch of WW). Once the potion has worked, 
he'll obviously need to see if this is really the case (which explains 
why he touches the boy), so Harry has to be alive until after the 
potion. Why keep him alive afterward? Well, there are two main reasons. 
One, that he's feeding him false information to take back to 
Dumbledore, by giving a very garbled account of what has been going on. 
And two, because he half-expects (and hal-wishes) Harry to escape while 
he's with his back turned.

If Harry had escaped during Voldemort's speech, well, everything would 
be like what happened sans the priori incantatem, and with a little 
less info thrown in. Of course, Voldemort isn't sure that Harry is 
going to escape, but he still has to have him believe that he has 
forgotten about him, in his drive to restore his dominion over the DE. 
After a while, however, Voldemort runs out of false info to feed Harry, 
and he has to get with the show.

At this point, Voldemort is running a big risk. As many have pointed 
out, unfocused magic happens both when a wizzard is scared and when 
he's enraged, and in the enraged cases, the unfocused magic tends to be 
offensive in nature (which only stands to reason, really). Voldemort 
doesn't want *any* unfocused magic happening now. He knows Harry is 
powerful, and that his unfocused magic could probably hurt him more 
than a petty focused magic spell he might now (since he probably knows 
what spells Harry is capable of thanks to Crouch). 

Voldemort, after all, is an evil person who does not need to show his 
superiority by beating someone in fair ground, especially when that 
person is nowhere up to the level of Voldemort except for some magical 
shield of unknown properties. And herein lies the nucleus of the 
problem: Voldemort doesn't know what are the unfocused capabilities of 
Harry, but he probably believes that this capabilities are somehow 
related to what nearly killed the first and second times. After all, a 
one year old baby *doesn't* have conscious thought, but it has a 
protection instinct. Last time, he got blasted because of that 
unconscious magic, just as it happened when Harry was a baby. He's not 
falling for the same trick a third time: he's going to give him a wand, 
and have him focus in the situation, to rationalize, and to use his 
conscient thought. And hopefully, Voldemort must think, this will be 
enough to get through the damned boy's defenses. And he got it right, 
too. After all, GoF!Harry with a wand is nowhere near powerful enough 
to beat Voldemort, and I think we all agree with that. It will take him 
another few years, and book7!Harry will beat Vodemort consciously, but 
until then he hasn't a chance (I still would like to know how 
Dumbledore plans to prepare Harry by book seven, though. I dislike 
metathinking and "Harry is going to beat Voldemort in book seven" is 
putre, unabridged, unadultered metathinking in all it's glory).

What's the situation, then? Voldemort has given Harry time to escape, 
hoping that he won't have to face him this soon. After all, he cannot 
simply liberate him with all the "valuable" information he has 
overheard, or Dumbledore wouldn't believe a word of it. And since he's 
already there, he'll definetely try to kill him, but Voldemort probably 
knows that he's going to need quite a bit of his strenght to kill 
Harry. So maybe, he was resting up after being reborn. Getting used to 
his new body, and that. And of course, feeding him false information 
just in caser he escapes *once again* (after all, Harry has faced twice 
Voldemort now, when he was younger and less powerful, and he managed to 
escape both times. Why should this one be any different?).

Voldemort can hope he'll kill the brat, but he's not going to suffer if 
he escapes again. It doesn't loom to big. After all, his real eney is 
Dumbledore, and last time, it was easy to beat him. If Harry grows to 
be another Dumbledore, it still won't be enough to stop him from taking 
over the WW once again.

The once thing I really don't believe is that Voldemort needs to 
dmonstrate anything in the graveyard to his DE. They already know he's 
not infalible: they know he won't face Dumbledore. And no-one believes 
that Harry is as powerful as Dumbledore. Killing the boy would be a 
great treat at the end of a succesful evening, but if he survives, it 
still furthers thir plan: an information war is fought (and won) by 
missinforming the enemy at the same time you learn what they really are 
thinking, and Voldemort knows this. After all, he managed to put the 
entire WW on it's knees last time. Harry, as I've said before, is an 
important chess piece, but he's not the king, and if he's killed 
Dumbledore's side would be debilitated, but not destroyed. Infact, one 
of Harry's great victories is already in place: the flawed potion that 
has made Voldemort mortal again. While Harry can still be used (ther's 
still that life-debt in place, and his amazing rough powers), 
Dumbledore ould and probably would work around his death. Please note 
that that doesn't mean the he wants Harry dead (as one liestee 
understood last time I mentioned this theory), only that Harry's 
well-being isn't the angular stone of his strategy.

> And why would Fawkes only donate two tail feathers to the wand making 
> cause?  

I want to point out that when they speak of "Phoenix feathers", they're 
probably not speaking of your everyday, wing's feather, but of a long, 
beautiful feather that phoenix generally have in their tail. This are 
traditionally non-regenerative. Thus, if a phoenix looses one of them, 
they do not grow it back. Those where the most powerful part of the 
phoenix body, too, although right now I cannot tell you what porperties 
those feathers were supposed to have (pheonix legends are not my 
strenght). I seem to recall that phenix normally have three, but I'm 
nowhere sure about it, and fawkes could simply be a rarity.

> I think this is part of Dumbledore's master plan to vanquish 
> Voldemort, and is why he needs Harry. I think Dumbledore was 
> planning on a final Harry-Voldemort showdown when Harry comes of age 
> in which their wands wouldn't be able to work properly against one 
> another because of the priori incantetem effect. Then Harry would be 
> able to use his then-fully developed wandless magic (going back to 
> that JKR interview - perhaps through his eyes?) to finish Voldemort 
> off (IMO, Harry's internal powers have *not* yet been developed to 
> the point where he can channel and use them in a controlled way 
> without a wand. But he's getting there!).
> 
> But due to the graveyard duel, Voldemort now knows that his wand 
> isn't effective against Harry's wand (Dumbledore and Ollivander were 
> the only ones who knew this previously). So will Voldemort now get a 
> different wand? Since the wand that chooses you is the one that you 
> can use the most effectively, will his substitute wand not work as 
> well?  Or has Dumbledore's master plan been completely thrown off 
> course?
> 
> ~Phyllis
> waiting for Grey Wolf to pick this apart

Me? Pick it appart? You do realize, Phyllis, that this is in accordance 
of Safe House tennets and strictly compatible with MAGIC DISHWASHER, do 
you? You've used the key phrases, to quote: "part of Dumbledore's 
master plan to vanquish Voldemort" and "Dumbledore and Ollivander were 
the only ones who knew this previously". Once you start understanding 
that Dumbledore and Voldemort are carefully making plans and keeping 
information from each other, you're fully in MAGIC DISHWASHER gear.

In fact, I love the idea. One of the main points of MAGIC DISHWASHER is 
that they both have "B" plans, since they realise that their "A" plans 
will sooner or later have a bad encounter with reality and fail. Snape 
was knocked out. Priori incantatem happened. etc. Now you're sugesting 
that the priori incantatem effect was one of the cards up Dumbledore's 
sleeve for the final conflict, and I find it a great idea, although I 
do have a suggestion: it was just a further protection for Harry, a 
one-use save-life for him: the first time Harry and Voldemort dueled, 
Harry would be saved by it. However, I do accept that Dumbledore didn't 
expect it to happen until further on, or else he would have told Harry 
what to expect (Dumbledore *did not* expect the Portkey!Cup twist).

I doubt, however, that Dumbledore relies on *anything* exclusively. He 
won't be thwarted by having to have used the priori incantatum so soon. 
No-one wins *all* the battles, and I'd imagine that Harry's survival of 
the graveyard is a good silver lining in the black cloud of having lost 
that particular card. That was the reason it was there, after all. At 
any rate it cannot be the *main* plan, because Dumbledore must have 
devised the main plan long before Harry got hold of his wand.

Where does that take us? I'd say that Voldemort would have to change 
wands now, but it could be that he informs himself about the priori 
incantatum, and decide that it's worth the risk, since he should 
believe that his will is strong enough to force Harry's wand into 
spewing old spells' images next time. If he doesn't believe it, he'll 
just have to use another wand, which would certainly debilitate him, 
since (even if, like in my case, you don't believe in choosy wands, but 
only in wands suited and unsuited) it wouldn't be tuned to his powers 
and capabilities as the old one. At any rate, even though it's not as 
good as Voldemort finding himself wandless in the final showdown, it's 
a good situation nonetheless.

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf, who will add Phyllis' idea to MAGIC DISHWASHER, and would 
like to know if she wants to join, since she's already substantially 
added to it.