Voldemort's choice of Harry

[Wanda Sherratt]

No: HPFGUIDX 76998

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "severusbook4" 
<severusbook4 at y...> wrote:
> > I don't think DD chose, I think LV chose who he feared most and 
> also who fit the prophecy the best.  Also we don't know that if LV 
> had chosen Neville and attacked him, if Neville would have 
> survived.  What I am saying is that LV knew something that we 
don't 
> know yet, a piece of infomation crucial to his picking the Potters 
> over the Longbottoms.  If LV had killed Neville, would he have 
then 
> seeked out Harry?  And if Harry had not been attacked, would he 
> still be as strong and gifted as he is today?  DD did say that 
> something happened that night and some of LV's powers and traits 
> were passed to Harry.  In LV's attack on the Potters, LV 
> inadvertantly created the only weapon that could be used to destoy 
> him?  I am still not sure if this would hold true if he attacked 
> Neville in the same manner, since Neville even says he is almost a 
> squib.  

I think this is important - we don't yet have a full picture of what 
happened in Godric's Hollow, and why it happened.  Why DID Voldemort 
pick the Potters as the threat to be eliminated?  It wasn't just 
Harry he was trying to get; he was after them for some time before 
his birth, and they had to go into hiding.  I still hold to the time 
travel theory, and I keep seeing little dangling clues that don't 
seem to lead to anything, but might fit together this way.  One of 
them is a mysterious sentence in CoS, when Harry is looking at Tom 
Riddle's diary.  "And while Harry was sure he had never heard the 
name T.M. Riddle before, it still seemed to mean something to him, 
almost as though Riddle was a friend he'd had when he was very 
small, and had half-forgotten.  But this was absurd."  I think that 
Harry and Tom Riddle do meet - in Harry's future and Tom's past.  
This would explain why Voldemort chose Harry and not Neville once he 
heard about the prophecy; it would be the final piece in the puzzle 
for him.  Some 50 years ago, he'd had some sort of encounter with a 
certain Harry Potter, maybe not in person, but he'd have learned his 
name; the name would have meant nothing to him THEN, but whatever 
happened between them must have been important, because years later, 
when he was coming to power, he became very interested when the name 
of "Potter" started cropping up among those who were opposed to 
him.  By the time of his third failed confrontation with them, he 
must have connected them with the "Harry Potter" he remembered, and 
when he finally heard of the prophecy, he knew that THIS was where 
the threat was coming from.  He would act to eliminate it by killing 
Harry, before his birth if possible, but if not, then as soon as he 
could.  This would explain why he didn't care about killing Lily - 
it didn't matter what she might do after, it was only THIS child he 
had to worry about.  

But it turned out not to be so straightforward, because while the 
risks of changing the past to influence the future are obvious, it's 
also risky to change the present if it influences the past.  This is 
tricky, but it draws together a number of disconnected threads.  By 
killing Harry in the PRESENT, Voldemort eliminates the future Harry 
who encounters the past Tom Riddle.  In effect, Voldemort is short-
circuiting history.  He is eliminating a future incident which also 
acted on his past, and in fact led him to become who he is in the 
present.  As he tells Harry in CoS "Voldemort is my past, present, 
and future..."  The scar on Harry's forehead is the moment when 
past, present and future all intersected.  I can well imagine that 
this would cause an enormous disruption; in effect, Voldemort was 
turning all his power upon himself, destroying his own past with the 
curse that was to destroy Harry.  It would explain why the house 
exploded - not a typical result of the killing curse.  And it could 
explain why Harry did not die - because Voldemort was himself 
destroying the curse at the same moment he was delivering it.

I've never been quite convinced that Lily's death saved Harry's life 
at that moment; Dumbledore has always spoken of the lingering 
protection it gave him through the years that followed, after Harry 
went to the Dursleys.  But I just don't think that it could have 
thwarted a killing curse.  For one thing, I can't believe that 
nobody else had ever tried it before; life is full of stories of 
mothers dying for their children, or men giving their lives to save 
others.  If doing so could protect a person from the AK, why would 
it never have happened before?  And love is not some unique thing 
that only Lily possessed - I can't believe that Voldemort had never 
encountered it before, or had no idea how to deal with it.  As an 
explanation, it's also a bit arbitrary.  It doesn't have an 
inevitability about it; it's just something that Rowling could make 
up, like one of Madame Pomfrey's antidotes for a nasty hex.  But to 
have Voldemort himself bringing about his own destruction and also 
saving his enemy would be a very clever and logical way of 
explaining what happened.

Wanda