ACID POPS and Teenager Draco - Motivation?/Re: CHAPDISC:HBP19,Elf Tails

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 157603

Alla wrote:
> >
> > Where? Where are the places that it should have been? And who gets
to decide that? For all we know it occurred behind the scenes and we
may never get the confirmation that it really occurred.
> 
> Magpie:
> It should be in some of the following places: Spinner's End, the
bathroom scene with Myrtle, the Tower scene and the scene between
Draco and Snape. These are the places where "what is the situation?"
is presented.  To put it more broadly, the places it should have been
are all somewhere between the first page and the last page of the book.

Carol responds:
I know that you're adamant about your position being canonical, but so
are the arguments Steve presented about Draco discovering the
connection between Hogwarts and Borgin and Burke's via the vanishing
Cabinet and his expressed desire for revenge after his father is
arrested near the end of OoP.

The Vanishing Cabinet can't be brought up in the scenes you mention
for the simple reason that what Draco is up to is one of the mysteries
of this book (along with the identity of the HBP). Snape doesn't
mentin it because he doesn't know about it. Neither, apparently, does
Narcissa because Draco sneaks off to B and B's without her. (Bellatrix
may know about it; she's teaching Draco Occlumency and he seems to
have DE accomplices, including Fenrir Greyback, whose job is
apparently to threaten Burke into submission, but we're not privy to
her pov.) Draco refuses to tell Draco about the Vanishing Cabinet plan
in "the Unbreakable Vow"; he's certainly not going to tell *Harry*
about it in "Sectumsempra." (He hasn't told Crabbe and Goyle or
Moaning Myrtle, either.)

As for the tower scene, it's clear that the Vanishing Cabinet plan is
Draco's and that he's proud of it, but there's no reason for him to
tell us whether he went to LV with his plan (as I think is possible)
or whether he came up with it after Voldemort gave him the "job" of
killing Dumbledore. The Vanishing Cabinet is the primary plan from at
least "Draco's Detour" onward, and there's no indication that *Draco*,
unlike his mother, feels that he's destined to fail. In fact, he's in
typical Braggart!Draco mode in that chapter and on the Hogwarts
Express. Even in the scene with Snape, where he's starting to get a
bit desperate and he talks about his plan taking longer than he
thought, there's no indication yet that he's receiving death threats.

We really don't know which came first, Draco's "plan" for getting the
DEs into Hogwarts (a perfect means of revenge against Dumbledore and
Harry for the arrest of his father) or the "job" of killing
Dumbledore, which you think results solely from Lucius Malfoy's
failure to retrieve the Prophecy. It makes just as much sense, if not
more, for Draco to present his plan to LV and for LV to seize the
opportunity. Which is more important--revenge on Lucius Malfoy, who's
already in Azkaban and was probably Crucio'd for the Diary foul-up or
an opportunity to invade Hogwarts and just possibly kill "the only one
he ever feared"? For Voldemort, it's a win-win situation--if Draco
fails, Lucius Malfoy suffers. If Draco succeeds (or one of the back-up
DEs does the job), Voldemort's greatest antagonist is dead. And
whether LV knew about the UV or not, having Snape kill Dumbledore must
seem like the icing on the cake.

I really don't think that we need to accept revenge against Lucius
Malfoy as the only explanation or even the primary one for draco's
assignment. After all, JKR--and Dumbledore and Snape and Hermione and
others--have been giving us partial explanations and sometimes
plausible theories that turn out to be wrong for six books now.

At any rate, having Draco approach LV with the Vanishing Cabinet idea
in no way diminishes his danger and it adds to the irony by having his
whole predicament result from his own action. Maybe you want to see
him as a pathetic victim, but he is also, at least at the beginning of
the book, an arrogant sixteen-year-old who threatens Borgin and brags
about his mysterious assignment and who has already stated to Harry
that he's bent on revenge for his father's imprisonment.

Maybe, as Alla says, we'll never get an explanation. Maybe we'll never
find out how those coins worked or who Imperio'd Rosmerta, either. It
may be one of those details that JKR doesn't think is important. Or
maybe we'll find out the answers in Book 7. Either way, I wouldn't
dismiss the possibility that Draco went to Voldemort with his
brilliant idea just because characters who don't know about the plan
don't talk about it.

Carol, who agrees with Magpie about Draco's reasons for not confiding
in Snape and feels a bit sad because no one responded to her post on
that topic