Cabinet FIRST! One last time. (Long--sorry!)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 157841

 
> > Pippin:
> > The trouble is, if Voldemort just told Draco to kill Dumbledore in some
> > way and left the means up to him, then Draco would have come up with
> > some half-baked plan like the necklace and gotten himself caught (and
> > killed, as Voldemort would expect) immediately.
> 
> Magpie:
> Why would Draco have done that? 

Pippin:
Because that's what he does, in canon, when the cabinet plan doesn't
work. The plans he comes up with are to kill Dumbledore, not to
get backup in some other way. That suggests to me that the need for 
backup didn't originate with Draco. 

Nor do I think he would  have made panicky feints like the necklace
and the mead if he'd been cooly planning to do away with his 
Headmaster since the beginning of the summer. To me, he acts
like he expected he wouldn't have to think about killing 
Dumbledore till he'd fixed the cabinets, so he wasn't troubled about 
it. 

Then he chose methods that would let him kill at a distance, so he
wouldn't have to trouble about it. He didn't have to think about what 
it would really mean to kill until he was face to face with Dumbledore 
on the Tower. Then everything he'd been through caught up to him. 

The way I see it, Voldemort gave him the task of killing DD, supposedly
as a way to recoup the family's honor, but actually to punish him, just
as all the characters at Spinner's End agree. The fact that they're 
unanimous says to me that we don't need to go looking for other 
reasons. 


Magpie:
<snip> The Cabinets are something Draco realized were a secret way into 
> the castle when Montague told the story, so why doesn't it follow that he 
> thought to use that in his plan to kill DD?  That's the way I thought he 
> presented it in the Tower.

Pippin:
 I agree with you that it was Draco, all by himself, who
realized that the cabinets were a secret way into the school. But I
think it was Voldemort who decided that Draco should be set to
fixing the cabinet as a gateway for the DE's.  IMO, Voldemort never 
expected the cabinets would actually work. Draco was told he needed 
backup to keep him from trying to do what he eventually did -- 
make an actual attempt on DD's life.

Voldemort expected that if Draco did that, he would be discovered and
killed and the game would be over. Of course Voldemort intended that
to happen eventually, but he wanted it to be on his timetable, not
Draco's. Voldemort is doing all this to amuse himself -- just
crucio-ing Draco to insanity, for example, wouldn't be nearly so much fun.

You could write a book where the villain was a psychopath who knew
what he was and tried to outwit his psychosis, I suppose, but Voldemort
is not that guy. Like Sauron, the only measure that he knows is desire.
He desires to punish the Malfoys and therefore that is a project just 
as worthy of his attention as taking over the wizarding world.


 
> Pippin:
> > Fixing the cabinets is ideal for Voldemort's purposes, assuming that
> > he thinks it can't be done. Draco will struggle forever, which means
> > Voldemort can keep the game going as long as he likes, or end it
> > whenever he chooses. It isn't in Draco's hands at all.
> 
> Magpie:
> Which gets back to the main point of the Cabinet First theory, which is to 
> always take as much out of Draco's hands as possible and make 
Voldemort's  strategic planning dominate events. 

Pippin:
Erm, Voldemort is the villain. His strategic planning is *supposed* to 
dominate events.  Voldemort  didn't and wouldn't, IMO, mean to leave 
anything in Draco's hands. But the plot of the book is  
IMO about Draco discovering that being a Death Eater is not
the path to the attention and glory that he craves, 
that he is he is not as worthless and incapable as Voldemort thinks,
that there is such a thing as mercy in the world, and that he does not
want to be a killer.

IMO, Draco  conceived the plan to fix the cabinets and carried it through, 
despite what I see as his growing realization that Voldemort never 
expected him to do it. For that, he won Dumbledore's praise.

Pippin