Harry & Seamus.

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 116190


I (Carol) wrote:
> <snip> What Mrs. Finnegan (who has met Harry only once, and briefly)
> has done is what the WW as a whole has done--take the word of the  
> Daily Prophet on faith. <snip> As for why the knowledge is so      
> limited, it's partly Harry's understandable unwillingness to talk  
 > about events in the graveyard before the end of term in GoF and   
 > partly DD's own very limited and almost distorted version of
events. > Technically, Voldemort didn't murder Cedric. Wormtail did.
But if   > either Harry or DD were to reveal that, who would believe
them? 
> 
> If, instead of flying off the handle in OoP and insulting Seamus's
> mother, who rightly or wrongly was not abusing her child but trying
> to protect him, Harry had confided the truth to Seamus and Dean,   
 > wouldn't Seamus have trusted him? <snip>


> Finwitch responded:
> 
> I think it's simply a misunderstanding between Harry & Seamus.
> 
> And mind you, while Hermione told him that 'papers have discredited 
> him' and that's all Harry knows about it, and it's just as much 
> headlines as Dumbledore's 'Voldemort murdered Cedric Diggory'.
> 
> Also, I'm not saying that Mrs F is like a Dursley, just that I find 
> that Harry subconciously interprets her 'believing nasty lies about 
> Harry' and 'preventing a young wizard from coming to Hogwarts' as 
> very Dursley-like. <snip>
> 
> Actually, it's rather: do you believe that Voldemort's back&killed 
> Diggory or that Harry's a liar&killed Diggory? <snip>

Carol responds:
We seem to be talking at cross-purposes here. You seem to be chiefly
interested in defending Harry (whom I'm not really criticizing) while
I want to get at the reasons for the misunderstanding. Maybe, as
usual, I've obscured my own point with too many details. If so, please
accept my apologies.

Let me try again, and I'm not just talking to Finwitch but to anybody
interested in this thread who wants to respond. The plain fact is that
Voldemort dis not kill Cedric Diggory; he ordered him killed by a
Death Eater whom the WW believes to be dead. Both Harry and Dumbledore
are suppressing this important detail. Now I can understand Dumbledore
not wanting to bring in Wormtail at a Hogwarts banquet when all the
school is in mourning for Cedric, but he could at least have provided
a sentence or two that gave his generalization greater credibility. He
said nothing to explain how Harry could come back with the dead Cedric
and escape from Voldemort himself.

Notice the reaction of the students to his brief remarks. Even the
Slytherins, Draco and all, stand up to honor the memory of Cedric
Diggory. But many of the Slytherins do *not* stand up and drink to
Harry, and many of the other students seem to do so rather
reluctantly. Why? Surely it's because "Voldemort is back. He killed
Cedric and tried to kill Harry, who escaped against great odds"
(paraphrasing here) is not very much information, and it's entirely
unsupported. We on this list know what happens when people are
provided with insufficient information: they speculate. And when that
bit of information is supplemented with misinformation like that
supplied by the Daily Prophet, they leap to wrong conclusions. If
Cedric is dead and Harry isn't, might Harry be somehow responsible for
his death? As someone else on this thread stated, that's the question
Seamus wants answered. Unlike his mother, he knows Harry well enough
not to leap to the conclusion that he's dangerous, but he wants
reassurance, and Harry doesn't give it to him.

That moment, it seems to me, would have been the one in which to get
over his own reluctance to talk about Cedric's murder and provide at
least enough information to enable Seamus to believe his story.
Instead Harry, falls back on self-righteousness, reacting angrily to
the implication that he's a liar, and passing up the opportunity to
give his friends (and I believe that they are his friends,
misunderstanding or no) the information they want and need.

For me, the problem boils down to this: The story, in addition to
being painful for Harry, is too incredible to be believed. What? A guy
who's believed by the whole WW to be dead and who has spent twelve
years as the Weasley boys' rat is now a DE who killed Cedric on the
orders of a helpless, infant-sized snake man? And that same
former-rat-turned-DE threw the infantlike monster into a cauldron,
along with the bone dust of a dead man, a drop of Harry's blood, and
the DE's own hand, then recited an incantation that brought Voldemort
back to his old form, after which Harry dueled with the resurrected
Voldemort and defeated him, with the help of the shadows of dead
people that came out of Voldemort's wand? Even in the WW, this is
surely an incredible story.

Might it be that Harry stubbornly refuses to tell this story not only
to Seamus (and Dean) but later to the DA (and Cho) because deep down
he feels that it (and he) will not be believed? 

Again, I'm not criticiaing Harry. My concern is with the details he
would have to reveal to prove that Voldemort is back and that he,
Harry, is not responsible for Cedric's death.

Carol, who thinks that Harry ought at least to have tried and that
Seamus and Dean would probably have believed him if he had