Voldemort's Resurrection WAS The Spying Game and the Shrieking Shack

[grey_wolf_c]

No: HPFGUIDX 39744

*Voldemort*
-----------

Marina wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at y..., "grey_wolf_c" <greywolf1 at j...> wrote:
> > Marina wrote:
> > > That doesn't make sense to me.  If Dumbledore could engineer it
> > > so that Voldemort had only one resurrection option left, then why
> > > not take that final step and remove the last option, too?  That
> > > would leave Voldemort with no resurrection options at all and
> > > solve everybody's problems.  (Well, except Voldemort's,
> > > obviously.)
> > 
> > See your own #1 condition: Dumbledore couldn't risk having 
> > Voldemort use another resurrection option. We know from PS that 
> > there are many avilable. They must difere in quality, easiness,
> > speed, amount of power restored and a few other variables, but they
> > could all restore a dying man's body. 
> 
> That's my point.  The theory you and Pip are backing has a major
> internal contradiction in it. Either Dumbledore can arrange matters
> to leave Voldemort with only one resurrection option, or he can't. 
> If he can, then there's nothing stopping him from removing that last
> option and leaving Voldemort unresurrected.  If he can't, then his
> whole plan depends on random chance, since he has no way of
> controlling which option Voldemort chooses.  You can't have it both 
> ways.
>
> Dumbledore destroyed the Stone, yes.  But unless the
> stone was the *only* other resurrection method besides the potion,
> Dumbledore is still in the same fix.  And if the Stone *was* the only
> other way, then we're back to my original objection -- why not
> prevent Voldemort from using the potion and leave him disembodied?
> 
> Marina

I feel like if gone through this twice already, but I'm not the one to 
back away from something, so here I go (yet) again:

I believe that there are many options available to recuperate 
Voldemort's body. They come in a variable degree of dificulty, but 
several do exist. Most of them will give back Voldemort enough power to 
start winning again, and some will not, being flawed in one way or 
another. Unicorn blood, for example, is flawed, since he has to drink 
it continually. The PS was NOT flawed, and that was why the Unicorn's 
blood was only interim preparation.

Let's suppose *for the sake of an example* that other perfectly valid 
forms include an enchanted dishwasher and the egg of some odd bird 
(pick one at random form FB, if you want).

Now, Dumbledore and the old gang had a long talk after Voldemort's fall 
and put together as many heads as possible trying to now what his enemy 
would do. They came up with a number of possible solutions to his 
problems, both flawed and not flawed. But they were greatly amazed to 
discover one method that, while indeed flawed, at first glance it did 
not seem to be so: the infamous potion.

A plan was formed: to gently guide Voldemort into using that potion, 
and started to act on it. They took Flamel's stone and put it into a 
security vault. They passed laws against enchanted dishwashers. They 
look up all the strange birds and control them through different 
organizations (if the bird was, for example, a dragon, we know they are 
tightly controled). And they continue to restrict his options so that 
the *easiest* solution to Voldemort's problems is the flawed potion. 

However, it is impossible to reduce all options to zero. It would still 
be possible to enchant a dishwasher, or look for the bird in some 
long-forgotten place, or whatever. The total control implied in 
"arranging matters to leave Voldemort with only one option" is totally 
impossible. There is always the element of chance, too many variables, 
etc. to make this plausible. Dumbledore can eliminate some of the 
options almost completely, but if the option exists, it will always 
exist (Voldemort could re-invent the PS, couldn't he? It's already been 
done once. It's not as if there was the doubt of whether it was 
possbile, would it?)

There is still an element of gambit here, of course: that Voldemort 
decides to use any other form of recuperation spell (for example, 
having Wormtail enchant a dishwasher). And he would have used any other 
of the options if Dumbledore had had Riddle Sr.'s bones hidden. But by 
keeping that option open and easily available, Voldemort was guided 
into using it, before any other. Which was, of course, what Dumbledore 
had planned, so the gambit is not so great after all. There are no 
absolutes in life, Marina. There is always the chance that something 
will go horribly wrong (as Voldemort himself discovered).

Two people already have claimed that this is impossible. However, I've 
seen it used many times in chess (normally against me), and military 
history is full of these tactics, so I can't see that objection. Marina 
claims too that there is internal inconsistency. I see none, not even 
with her pointing at it, and I hoipe this served to clear the waters. 
if not, I'll be around to keep repeating myself over and aover again.


*Snape*
-------

> The idea that Snape must've provided the resurrection spell because
> it's a potion is specious.  Snape is neither the only nor the first
> potions expert in the WW.  Voldemort is half a century older than
> Snape, was the most brilliant student at Hogwarts in his day, and has
> devoted his life to the study of immortality and resurrection.  He
> doesn't need some 35-year-old pipsqueak to teach him potions, no
> matter how competent that pipsqueak might be.  And for Snape to
> provide the spell we would have to assume that sometime during PoA
> Wormtail resumed his human form, approached Snape and got the spell
> from him -- a huge assumption with not a shred of canonical backing
> to support it.

I don't know what "specious" means, and I'm getting tired of being 
accussed of uncanonity, but I think I get the idea. Anyway, there is no 
need, Snape could've told Voldemort about the potion much earlier than 
that: during his reign of Terror, when he was still a loyal DE. I don't 
think Voldemort listened to closely, though, since it's a potion that, 
at the time, didn't interest him, since it does not grant inmortality, 
just mortality (which he already had).

We don't know if Snape is the foremost expert in the field, but it is 
besides the point. It's the expert Voldemort had. Just because he's old 
it doesn't mean that he knows about everything. My grandfather was one 
of the most knowledged men I've known. He developed, without any use of 
a computer, one of the fundmental equations of chaos theory that is 
still used in weather-pattern prediction today. Yet I am hardly 20 and 
know more than he ever did about computers, and he accepted my help 
whenever he needed someone to explain him what the strange symbols that 
popped up in the old computer he used. Snape may be young, but he knows 
a lot of potions that could've helped Voldemort.

It's entirely possible that Snape learnt most of them when he became a 
DE under the express orders of Voldemort himself, but we're talking of 
Severus "Knows more curses at eleven than a seventh year" Snape, so I 
assume that he had lots of time in school to learn about them from the 
forbidden section (which I imagine he could get access to through his 
own head-of-house). I do believe that Snape told Voldemort but, as I've 
said, it's besides the point. If Voldemort is as intelligent as you put 
him, he must have surely heard of the potion. 

What's important is that Voldemort didn't know the potion well enough 
to know it's flaw, and I think that, *if* we agree that there is a 
major flaw, Voldemort is unaware of it (and stand to reason, since he 
was not an expert in potions, but in being inmortal, and as I've said, 
the potion does not confer inmortality, just mortality, the exact 
opposite of what he was looking for).


*Harry*
-------

> Oh, so all that "Boy Who Lived" crap we've been getting for four
> books is just a smokescreen?  Harry is really no more important to
> the great scheme of things than Dennis Creevey?  In that case, what
> was the deal with the ending of PS/SS?  Harry (and we) have been led
> to believe that Dumbledore allowed events to happen as they did in
> order to prepare Harry to fight against Voldemort.  But under your
> version, the whole thing becomes just a pointless exercise in sadism
> on Dumbledore's part, since there's no need for Harry to fight
> Voldemort at all -- Dumbledore already has a method of defeating
> Voldemort, a method to which Harry is utterly irrelevant.  In fact,
> there's no need to bother with Harry at all -- no need to guide his
> choices, to protect him, to train him, to spend any time on him at
> all.  Harry's just another spare, no different from Cedric, and no
> one wasted any time teaching Cedric how to stand up to Voldemort, did
> they?

If you've got an A plan, and a B plan, and a C plan, and... , you try 
to have the A plan work, since normally the rest of the plans are 
nowhere as easy or sure. Harry is part of D's A plan, so to speak, but 
I hope that Dumbledore is not stupid enough to lay all the future of 
countless of beings on the hands of an eleven year old. The easiest way 
to defeat Voldemort passes through Harry, but there must be other ways. 
The main one is already shacky, I'd hate to see the rest of the options 
(which we will never see, since we all know that D' A plan is going to 
work, but that doesn't mean that they do not exist).

Going back to the old resource of examples, let's say you've got a fly 
in your house that you want to kill. You can use several methods to get 
rid of it: open windows in the hope it leaves, use a spray can, use a 
fly-swatter, blow your house into smitherins, whatever. You start out 
using the one you think will work best with the minimun of colateral 
damage, and if that one fails, you continue with the rest of the ideas 
you get, which probably are nowhere as good, even if they do get 
results.

Harry *is* important. He's a great weapon against Voldemort (even 
though we don't yet know why), and Dumbledore is educating him so he 
can destroy Voldemort. But if the unexpected occours, and Harry's 
suddenly teleported into an old graveyard where a handful of DEs are 
waiting and Harry is blasted into little bits, I hope Dumbledore has a 
B plan ready isntead of simply accepting defeat. *We* know that Harry 
is not going to die before the end of book seven, but that's 
metathinking, and Dumbledore cannot do it. In real life, there is no 
such opportunity. In a war, generals learn to accept their loses, but 
still train their men so that they have the greatest probablity of 
surviving.

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf