Whose prophecy? (was Re: Why Harry?)

[David Burgess]

No: HPFGUIDX 54660

Greicy wrote:
>
> Nick wrote:
>> Lilly, leave or kill...
>
>> Look at it from Voldemort's point of view... Even if the Potter
>> parents are his targets, it's easier to kill them while he's gt
>> them than to try and spare them and have them walking around with
>> thier minds bent on vengeance. He probbaly just did was what easier.
>> (These conversations go by too fast to keep up with!!)
>
>
> Voldemort was more than likely going to kill Lily after Harry if she
> had for some stupid reason taken into consideration to move aside.
> His focal point was Harry and he wanted to obviously get rid of
> Harry, possibly asap.  If he could just kill Harry without having
> any obstacles in the way was perfect.  Having Lily pleading to take
> her was just as others have suggested an annoyance.  Basically, it
> could have been "Step aside girl."  Lily didn't.
> So now it's kind  of like, "Fine if you're not going to make this
> easy for me, I'll  kill you now rather than later."
>

Something just occurred to me on this:

I used to play D&D a long time ago, and we had something called
"alignments".  One of the things about alignments was that the characters
has certain things that their alignments indicated they should do.  Think
of it as 'the right thing to do for someone as sick as you'.

So, if we assume that everything Voldemort says is self-serving and only
truthful to the extent that Voldemorts wants the truth to extend, what
would this order possibly mean.  Later (as pointed out to me earlier),
Voldemort tells Harry that "your mother didn't have to die."  We know this
to be true because we trust Voldemort.

Huh?

The rest of the line would have been "All she had to do was run away when
I came or hand you over to me so that I didn't have to go through all this
stuff for the past 10 years."  I'm certain that the entire exchange is
designed to undermine Harry's resolve.  If he had faltered for more than a
second, I'd have been standing on my chair screaming at the book "NO YOU
IDIOT, IT'S A TRICK!"  Of course, my wife have been there with the digital
camera, and since you haven't seen that picture yet....

Another literary example: "Luke, I am your Father."  It moves the story
along, and is (technically) true.  I think we are working from a similar
position in this story.  We know (from the description of the interactions
between the dementors and Harry) what was said and can imagine the scene,
but we have to remember that Voldemort was at the top of his game.  He had
been in hiding for a couple of years, and came out to kill Harry and James
(plus everyone else that died in the flurry of homicide that is hinted at
several places in canon)*.

The question that is still the nexus of the entire line of thought is
"What precipitated this action?"  Everyone (in HP and RL) reacts to
stimuli of various kinds.  Most people, especially people with as much to
lose as Voldemort had to lose, don't just sit up one day and think "Hmmm,
I'm gonna go find that kid from the school and kill his whole family." 
Voldemort and the senior Potters weren't in the same class, so they had to
come to his attention some other way.

Some people think is was a prophecy of some kind - I don't see anything in
canon that supports that, with the possible exception the cleverly vague
"That's two" for Trelawny.  I think it was something mundane.  No idea
what yet, but it was definitively something much more like a response to
an immediate threat to Voldemort's powerbase.

*Footnote:
In PoA, I think, we hear the Voldemort had been in hiding for 2 more years
than Harry has been an orphan.  Most people ascribe this to bad math on
JKR's point.  I think he was hiding from the MoM and the Aurors.

-- 
Dave Burgess