The Core of the Elder Wand and other new JKR explanations

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 179710

"meann ortiz" wrote:
>
>  J.K. Rowling updated her website and posted some interesting
tidbits about *Deathly Hallows*.
> 
> - The core of the Elder Wand is the tail hair of a thestral, a
substance that can be mastered only by someone capable of facing death.
<snip>

Carol responds:

Does anyone besides me find this information less than helpful, even
possibly annoying? It isn'e in the books (we don't even know that the
wand *has* a core), and it seems to me that a number of people became
the master of the Elder Wand by seizing it or killing the previous
master without necessarily being capable of facing death. (That's what
"master of death" seems to be about, as well.) How could Draco, who
seems to be afraid (like most people) of dying have been the
(unwitting) master of the wand, and why did it work perfectly for
Voldemort (who killed loads of his own DEs with it and used it to
create Nagini's bubble) when he was more afraid of death than anyone
in the WW? I found his statement to Snape that it wasn't performing
exceptional magic for him bewildering, in any case.  If you want
someone dead and they die, isn't that sufficient? How do you perform
an exceptional AK? And what, exactly, was inadequate about Nagini's
bubble?

Carol, who prefers to believe that the Elder Wand was coreless and
that mastery of it has nothing to do with overcoming the fear of death
(if that were the case, it should have gone to Snape!)