[HPforGrownups] Re: Choice and Essentialism/Understanding Snape)

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 153994

Gerry

But Voldemort could help it. He is unable to love, but he does know
right from wrong. He hoodwinked almost the entire school when he was a
boy. He could have gone on doing that and have had a brilliant career
at the MoM. He would have been hugely popular, could have married a
trophy wife and had a couple of children en nobody would have known
that inside he was an egocentric cold fish, only caring about himself.
He had these possibilities, yet he choose differently.

Magpie:
But that gets back to the personality again.  I could have chosen lots of 
different things and perhaps been a neurosurgeon by now and have a lot more 
money.  I didn't choose them because, among other things, I have no desire 
to be a neurosurgeon.  That choice really wasn't open to me the way it was 
other people who do become surgeons because I was naturally only going to be 
attracted to things I liked by nature.

That's why it's hard to compare characters choices without comparing their 
natures and situations.  The things you're saying are incentives for 
Voldemort to choose differently (he'd be popular and nobody would know he 
was an egocentric cold fish) aren't any more incentives to him than it would 
be an incentive to Hermione to do badly at school so people wouldn't know 
she cared so much about grades.

I don't know if it completely comes down to blood--it seems more like a 
combination of things.  But whatever the combination, Voldemort seems to 
really have no incentive to go by the rules of society.  Ironically this is 
something encouraged plenty of times in the books.  Lots of characters 
decide that their needs outweigh what might be considered "right" by others 
in a situation, or have different ideas of right and wrong than someone 
else.  It's just that in my experience in canon every time someone holds up 
two characters and says they're the same but chose differently (so proving 
the one could have been the other) it always seems like given the characters 
involved we're talking about two totally different sets of choices.

-m