The Core of the Elder Wand and other new JKR explanations

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 179735

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:

> But Gollum was not. His speech and appearance are childlike:"There
> lay the famished skeleton of some child of Men" if memory serves.

Precisely.  Gollum did elicit pity, and Tolkien did it deliberately. 
But he knew better than to make our hearts break for Sauron, to be
moved by his tormented humanity, and that's what JKR risks doing when
she gives us a LV who is a tortured child.  A child that age lacks the
ability to inflict pain, especially on itself, so the idea that his
state is the result of his choices makes no sense (to me, at least). 
The most evil wizard in a hundred years never grew beyond flayed
babyhood.  He was a child, and so he cannot be judged as an adult.

For me, this has the effect of diminishing the entire storyline. 
Harry never had a worthy opponent at all, and the fact that his enemy
is infantilised reduces him, and means that the series isn't about
coming of age at all.  Harry didn't need to become an adult to defeat
a *baby*.  He just needed the right props.

For this reader, the returned LV in the graveyard was deeply scary,
for the reasons that elkins laid out here ages ago.  He was grown up.
 He was clever.  He was numinous.  He was transgressive.  He was the
worthy opponent of the boy who would save the world.  The last two
books, for me, undermine him to the extent that I really didn't care
much in the Great Hall at the end.  Having your Noble,
Elder-Wand-Equipped Hero fight a skinned baby isn't much of a contest.

Mus, who's about to embark on some more bread making.