Horse Feathers

[nkafkafi]

No: HPFGUIDX 93688

Kneasy wrote:

We are told that Fawkes has given just two feathers.
Not told where or when mind, that would be telling us too much.

Olivander ends up with both.
He incorporates them into two wands.
Voldy has one, Harry gets the other.
Sheer chance of course.
And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.

It stretches credulity just that little bit too far to accept that 
it's all a coincidence.

<reluctant snip for the list elves>

The odds of the coincidence that we are presented with in PS/SS are
enormous, almost incalculable, even given that Harry has been at the
receiving end of one of the wands before. To think that Voldys attack
would influence Harry's choice ten years later is to argue that wands
can impart 'personality' to persons other than their users. I suppose
that some may say that it's the Voldy part of Harry that is 
influenced.
To do so is to presume that Harry is more Voldy than Harry - now
there's a pleasant thought!

<another reluctant snip>

Time and again it seems that DD knows too much, that he's able to
anticipate events, take corrective measures.
Is this another example?


Neri:
If DD is being a conspirator here, then IMO he is not doing a very 
good job of it. If I had a chance to slip Voldy and Harry tampered 
wands, I'd make sure that Voldy's wand would not function at all 
against Harry's wand. Not just arranging for a draw with that weird 
Priori Incantatum thing. Unless you mean that DD is not on the side 
of Good either, but just having fun playing Harry and Voldy against 
each other? I don't think this goes well the Choise theme.

IMO what you see as puppet-master!DD is actually puppet-master!JKR. 
Things definitely look too prearranged to be pure coincidence, but it 
is the Author who is to blame for this. And since DD is frequently 
used as the Author's voice, there is a tendency to mix the two.

Also IMO as readers we tend to judge DD and the other characters by 
their style rather than by the results of their actions. I pointed 
out in a previous post that Sirius was making correct and reasonable 
choices throughout OotP while DD had several glaring mistakes. But 
Sirius was making his choices with the air of an impulsive teenager, 
while DD, even when he admits to his mistakes, acts like a sage 
Sherlock Holmes to everybody's Watson, so we tend to believe even his 
mistakes were all for a purpose. As Nigellius points out, DD has 
certainly got style, but note that when Nigellius was making this 
obsevation, DD was just driven out of his power base because he'd 
failed making sure that Umbridge won't find out about the DA. Not 
very impressive for the Grand Puppet Master.        

IMHO Harry and Voldy are indeed very similar (as you say, not a 
pleasant thought). I hypothesized in the past that they are 
practically identical in their abilities ("and the Dark Lord will 
mark him as his *equal*"), aside of that power that Voldy knows not. 
It is only their opposing choices that make them so different. And 
wands are apparently objective tools that recognize the *abilities* 
of their masters, not their moral fiber ("terrible, but great"). So 
it is not surprising that the two brother wands chose Harry and Voldy.

Neri