Will there be an ESE!character in Book 7?

[Renee]

No: HPFGUIDX 147573

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "mmmwintersteiger"
<mmmwintersteiger at ...> wrote:
>
> >Renee:
> >For Voldemort is a riddle. You say he is without humanity. As he's 
> not iterally the devil and was definitely born human, the question 
> is why he lost this humanity. 

Michelle:
> Maybe I am mis-reading but I didn't interpret the pensieve "visits" 
> as showing LV's "humanity". 

Renee:
By humanity I meant nothing more than: belonging to the human race.
He's not some demon in human shape, or some evil deity, or whatever.
He's a human being. That is, he was born as such; what he has become
after all this soul-splitting is a different question. 

Michelle:   
> I am agreed on the fact that more backstory on why 
> LV lost all his humanity (if he ever had any) is needed, and 
> hopefully provided in book 7, however even in the scene at the 
> orphanage we see that early on LV was cruel and almost (forgive me 
> for saying it but) inhumane.  He seems to kill animals and traumatize 
> younger children for revenge and his own pleasure.  JKR also alludes 
> (IMO) to a large amount of in-breeding in the Slytherin line which 
> may have caused all the worst characteristics of generations to be 
> manifested in LV.  Tom Riddle Sr doesn't seem to have the best genes 
> either-he seems cruel and arrogant in the brief moments we are privy 
> to.  I hate to believe that any child would come out "bad" but I 
> haven't really read anything in the series to convince me that at one 
> time LV was a "good" child with a loving, kind heart.

Renee:
No, but that is precisely my problem. Are we to believe he was born
evil, due to bad genes? Did he turn bad because he never experienced
any love, not even as a baby? Either option would beg the question
whether he can be held fully responsible for his deeds, or whether
he's not sane. And if he's not sane, does that mean he should be
killed like a rabid dog?

HBP leaves me more than a little unsatisfied on these points. 
Voldemort's evil remains a riddle. If JKR's answer to the question why
some people turn bad would ultimately turn out to be bad genes and
lack of love, I'd be less than happy, because it runs counter to human
experience: not everyone who turns bad started out like Voldemort did. 

It also runs counter to the stress JKR puts on choices. If our choices
show who we are, instead of making us who we are, they're hardly
choices at all, merely dictates of our own nature. The really
interesting question would be, how we've become who we are, and
whether there's anything we could have done to influence the outcome.
I don't expect the last book to present a fully-fledged philosophy
about the origins of evil, but I hope it will contain a little more of
it than I've seen so far. 

I keep running against the same problem over and over again: that JKR
is telling us a symbolic story about love and death, good and evil
using a degree of (psychological) realism that is not always
compatible with the symbolism.     

Michelle:  
> (I'm going to start some serious speculating here, mostly just to 
> play around and to have an adventure in my most wild tangents) What 
> if LV was so evil that just carrying the child and giving birth to 
> him was enough to drain Merope of all her energy?  Maybe she would 
> have had more resistance to the child if she didn't have a broken 
> heart? What if it wasn't her lack of will or caring that caused her 
> not to use magic to save herself but her absolute inability to use 
> magic at all because all her power had been drained of her by the 
> child she was carrying?
> 

Renee:
Well, if this would turn out to be the case, I must say I'd have to
stop taking JKR seriously. But I really hope this sort of biology
isn't acceptable even in the Wizarding World. 

Renee