The Cabinet Plan...again (was:Re: The UV (was ESE, DDM, OFH, or Grey?)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 162774

> a_svirn:

> That's the thing that bothers me about the bathroom scene, for 
> instance. We are told quite unequivocally that Harry was oblivious 
> to the danger of using an unknown jinx labelled "for enemies", 
> which, of course, makes his case so very different from Draco's. But 
> I just can't swallow it. After all he'd been through he *should* 
> have known better than that. Quite suddenly from being "on the brink 
> of manhood" he reverted to a silly little boy mode, and he hadn't 
> been all that silly, even when he'd been little. 

Pippin:
No? Isn't he the guy who took off for Hogsmeade on a lark when
he knew there was a murderer on the loose who especially had
it in for him? And it wasn't fear of the consequences that made
him realize it was dumb, it was Lupin's disappointment with
him. 

Don't you know anyone who did some incredibly stupid and
reckless things as a teenager that they wouldn't have done 
as a child and wouldn't do now as an adult? 

Teenagers just aren't good at weighing present rewards 
against future dangers. It's not that Harry and Draco don't
know things could go wrong, it's that their brains haven't
an adult's capacity to turn that knowledge into fear. 
Meanwhile, they've lost the child's fear of adult disapproval
in general. It's a dangerous time.

> > Magpie:
> > So it certainly makes Draco potentially responsible for worse 
> > things, but he's not intentionally moving beyond his mission to 
> get  students attacked. He's written as conflicted--trying hard but 
> also  hampered by internal conflict. <snip>
> 
> a_svirn:
> I agree, but I don't see how his internal conflict made him blind to 
> the blatantly obvious. On the contrary, I think that if Draco had 
> been so confident about his fellow death eaters' good behaviour or 
> if he hadn't realised in how many ways his own attempts could 
> miscarry his internal conflict could have been less intense.

Pippin:
The necklace and the poison illustrate Draco's subconscious
conflict. They  didn't require Draco's personal
involvement, and carried only a small chance of actually hurting 
anyone. While you can say that Katie and Ron were lucky, you 
could also say that they were unlucky to have suffered at all. 
If Katie's friend had gone to an adult as she had been 
instructed to do instead of trying to wrest the necklace away, 
and if Filch had been doing his job properly instead of giving 
Mme Rosmerta's bottles a pass, both the necklace and the
poison might have been discovered without any harm.

That's one reason I don't think the cabinet plan was entirely
Draco's idea. I don't think he would have been so proud of it
and  worked so doggedly at fixing it if he had conceived of it 
as a way to do murder. His internal conflict would have 
gotten in the way and he would have failed. But Draco
didn't know he was conflicted, just as Harry didn't know he
was conflicted about killing Sirius until he stood over him.

OTOH, Draco certainly expected there would be mayhem
when the DE's entered the castle. He just didn't think that
his friends might be the targets. He understood that
Voldemort might kill his family as a punishment but not
that "he shows just as little mercy to his followers as to his 
enemies." Draco's comment to Snape about his friends not
needing to study DADA shows how naive he was.

Pippin