Voldemort/Harry Showdown

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 175509

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "va32h" <va32h at ...> wrote:
>
> In another thread entirely, Ceridwen said:
> 
> I was more noticing the whole world stopping just to listen to Harry 
> playing Dumbledore to LV's Harry, and getting an earful of LOLLIPOPS 
> for their patience.
> 
> va32h here:
> This sent me off on another tangent. I agree that it seems odd for 
> Harry to monologue at this moment, and to bring up such a variety of 
> topics. 
> 

...


> 
> And yet, for Voldemort to die publicly, by Harry's hand, requires all 
> the witnesses to back off. Is that believable? Would the readership 
> accept and ending in which Voldemort is ganged up on by dozens of 
> people, or are we conditioned to expect a one-on-one, and does the 
> story require it?
> 
> I have to admit, I'm stunned that Harry glossed over the whole "you 
> thought I was dead but I'm not" issue to talk about Snape, but I 
> suppose that we needed to know that Voldemort knew Snape wasn't his? 
> For Snape's sake? So that Snape's memory could be exonerated, as 
> Sirius' had been?
> 
> Personally I would have liked Snape to be the one to reveal that 
> tidbit, even if he did die for it. But that's another topic. 
> 
> While I dislike the cliche of the hero-villain duelling monologues, I 
> am not sure an alternative would have worked. 
> 
> Your thoughts?
> 
> va32h
>

Ken:

I think that too many of these confrontations in the series have been
overly Hollywoodized, or maybe it is overly pulp fictionalized. I've
never been in a deadly confrontation but I suspect they more often are
like poor Cedric's last moment: "kill the spare", and that's that.
Personally I would have preferred to see dozens to hundreds of people
hitting Tom and Bellatrix at once with so many spells that their
combined effect was lethal. That would be more satisfying to me in the
same way that having each horcrux destroyed by someone else was more
satisfying than watching Harry get them all. Having the whole great
hall participate at once would drive home the point that together we
can take care of this evil, as we or our parents should have done long
ago. In a way having the two chief villains die in personal combat
gives their deaths a nobility they would have lacked in other
circumstances. Crushing them like cockroaches under the combined
weight of hundreds of boots would have been more appropriate ends for
them. Riddle would have been just as publicly, irrevocably dead.

The Harry/Tom ending does give Harry the chance to play Dumbledore for
the reader. As far as the elder wand goes, Harry could have told us
about that later on in the discussion with Dumbledore's portrait. The
revelations about Snape were really only important at that point to
allow Harry to mess with Tom's mind so that he could better
guess/control when Tom was going to pounce. If it hadn't been single
combat that would not have mattered. If it hadn't been said then I
think that the WW for once would be willing to believe Harry when he
told them about Snape later on. Two nice touches do come out of that
final discussion though. One is Harry's suggestion to Tom that he try
to heal his soul through remorse. The story would have been much the
poorer without that and it would have been impossible if Riddle had
gone down in a hail of wand fire during an intense battle. The other
is of course the Dirty Harry Potter moment: It all comes down to this,
do you feel lucky Riddle? Do you? I'll take the cliched good guy/bad
guy taunting in order to get that! I guess it is a cliche in itself
but one I still like.

It does seem a little odd that no one is all that surprised that Harry
is alive. I guess nothing that Harry could have done or survived would
have surprised the WW at that point. I don't accept that Tom and Harry
were both literally present in the King's Cross scene but Tom must
have had a near death experience of his own during those moments. He
must have had an inkling that Harry could have survived if he did. So
Harry reasonably would have known that he did not have to explain that
to Tom. On a tangent of my own, why Tom chose Narcissa to check
Harry's apparent corpse for signs of life is beyond me. That she
either lied to him or was fooled by Harry must not have been much of a
shock to him. Of course the greatest Legilimens the world has ever
known can't mentally probe a body and determine whether it is alive or
not??? Oh well, some things you just have to ignore in order to enjoy
the ride.

Ken