Suspension of disbelief WAS: Why should we care if Harry's not really needed

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 182391

Carol earlier:
> <SNIP>
> We do have a reason why Lupin doesn't help Harry in OoP or HBP; he's
spying on the werewolves. In DH, Harry declines his offer to help
them, believing (rightly, IMO) that Lupin's duty to his pregnant wife
and unborn child should come before anything else. McGonagall has her
duties as teacher, head of Gryffindor House, and deputy headmistress.
(Probably DD doesn't want her on the Horcrux hunt, however "sprightly"
she was until those four Stunning Spells forced her to use a walking
stick for awhile, because he needs her where she is. We see her once
dressed as a Muggle, which suggests that she acts as a spy in Muggle
London over the summer.)
> 
> Sirius Black has a very good reason for not helping Harry find the
Horcruxes; he's dead. So is the paranoid ex-Auror Mad-Eye Moody by the
time the Horcrux begins. And so, of course, is Dumbledore (who
nevertheless provides indirect aid via Snape and Snape's spy, portrait
Phineas). Tonks is newly pregnant with a half-werewolf child and in
danger himself from her wacko aunt. And Mrs. Figg is a Squib, for
crying out loud. Mr. Weasley quite reasonably helps Ron plan an alibi
for missing school, allowing him to go with Harry but not imposing his
own company on them. Mrs. Weasley tries, motherlike, to protect them
from danger. Everyone is accounted for in some way, and in no case is
idiocy the excuse.
> 
> <SNIP>
> 
> Alla responded:
> 
> Absolutely, I quite agree that those are good reasons,I would argue
with the degrees of them, but as whole I agree more or less. I would
add some bad reasons to that - like adults of Order not questioning
Dumbledore nearly enough IMO, BUT that is how many people you listed?
> 
> I counted seven, give or take (oh dear my maths ARE bad), and last 
time I checked there are much more people in Wizarding World than that.

Carol:

Of course. But I was talking specifically about Order members with a
connection to Harry and their reasons for not helping Harry on his
quest (setting aside Dumbledore's secrecy, which kept them from
knowing about the Horcruxes). 

So that's Snape, Dumbledore, Lupin, Black, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Mrs.
Figg, Mad-Eye, Tonks, and McGonagall accounted for in my post (ten
Order members or former Order members, not seven). I could have
mentioned Mundungus, but I think it's pretty clear why Harry didn't
want him along on the Horcrux hunt, or the mischievous Twins, who
aren't much older than Harry (and had their own business to run). As
for other Order members, Dedalus Diggle and Hestia Smith are guarding
the Dursleys and Kingsley Shacklebolt is protecting the Muggle Prime
Minister, Emmeline Vance is dead, Elphias Doge is a dotty old man. I'm
not sure what happened to Sturgis Podmore after he was Imperio'd and
arrested, but I doubt that Harry wants or needs his help.

Alla:
> 
> And also last time I checked Voldemort DID threaten WW as whole. 
Where are all those people? <snip>

Carol responds:
Some of the more powerful opponents of Voldemort, including Amanda
Bones, Barty Crouch Sr., and Rufus Scrimgeour, are dead. I agree with
you that the WW should have done more to protect itself (though having
Umbridge and the Imperiused Pius Thicknesse in the MoM made it easy
for DEs like Yaxley to infiltrate the Ministry). 

I'd like to have seen more resistance on the part of the Muggle-borns,
but they would have their own agenda (their lives and the right to
carry a wand) and wouldn't be likely to start hunting for Horcruxes
(which, as I've already established, very few people have heard of).

Alla: 
> And yes, I give WW more credit than you seem to and for the reasons
that Magpie so eloquently described before, I think the possibility of
other people discovering about horcruxes is NOT out of reach at all.
> 
> Regulus' example is a testimony to that IMO.

Carol responds:
But Regulus is a DE who happened to volunteer his House-Elf to LV and
in so doing, accidentally discovered that Voldemort was taking
extraordinary measures to protect a gold locket. (If Regulus hadn't
ordered Kreacher to return home, Kreacher would have died as Voldie
planned and Regulus wouldn't have found out anything.)

Whether Regulus's parents, unlike the majority of Wizards, had books
on Horcruxes in their home or whether Regulus consulted Borgin and
Burke, or however he found out about Horcruxes despite DD's taking the
books out of the Hogwarts library some thirty-six years earlier (ca.
1944; Reggie died in 1980), Regulus had a particular reason (LV's
treatment of Kreacher) for finding out what was so special about that
locket. (You don't need to agree with me that LV must have used the
word "Horcrux" to agree that it was a highly unusual situation.) And
note that even though he stole a Horcrux, knowing what it was, he
couldn't destroy it, and neither could Kreacher. 

The only other Wizards who came in contact with a Horcrux before Harry
destroyed the diary, Bellatrix and Lucius, didn't know what the
objects were and would have been more careful with them if they had.
And even if they had known what a Horcrux was and wanted to destroy
the Horcrux entrusted to them (highly unlikely in Bellatrix's case, at
least) they wouldn't know how, any more than Regulus did.

As I've said, only advanced DADA students might have encountered the
topic of Horcruxes in their reading before DD removed the books from
the library and no one younger than Voldemort could have read them
there at all. Sure, old books written by now-dead wizards might exist
somewhere in the WW (though Bathilda Bagshot obviously didn't mention
them in "A History of Magic" or DD would have banned that book), but
who besides Dark wizards would have such books in their home
libraries? Nor do we see any circulating libraries in the WW. Such
books won't be available from Flourish and Blotts, either. It's
possible that Borgin and Burkes or some other Knockturn Alley merchant
sells them, yet not even the older DEs knew about the Horcruxes. How
is anyone on the good side supposed to figure it out? (Possibly the
Unspeakables did Horcrux research, but, if so, they kept their
findings to themselves.)

Unless Dumbledore, who was 115 years old when he died and had
certainly read books that few other Wizards (except, perhaps,
Grindelwald) had read, informed the Order members (the only people
besides the Aurors and Barty Crouch Sr. as head of the Department of
Magical Law Enforcement who actively opposed Voldemort at any point)
about the Horcruxes, I don't see how even the most intelligent Wizard
could have figured it out. I'm quite sure that Snape would have if the
books had been available to him, but Dumbledore didn't want to put too
much information in a basket that often dangled on the arm of Lord
Voldemort. But suppose that DD, Snape, and a few trusted Order members
had found the ring, the locket, the tiara, and the cup (without
alerting Voldemort to the theft of the cup) and somehow destroyed them
without Harry's ever entering the Chamber of Secrets. (Hogwarts would
still have a Basilisk in the basement, but, oh, well.) And suppose
that they could find some other Basilisk or that Fiend-Fyre is
controllable. (I don't think so; the point of Fiend-Fyre is that it
isn't controllable, and Basilisks are only controllable by
Parselmouths, but never mind.) Suppose that Dumbledore found a way to
destroy them all and resisted the temptation to put on the ring. (Good
thing Frodo didn't offer him the One Ring!) Suppose that Snape, DDM!
despite there being no Godric's Hollow murders and no Prophecy, found
a way to kill Nagini. There's still the diary, which would not have
been at Hogwarts at all had LV not been vaporized and no one except
Harry could have destroyed. And, of course, if Harry has a soul bit in
his head, that, too, has to be destroyed, and only Harry's
self-sacrifice (or his actual death, had he fought back rather than
accepting death) can accomplish that.

If Harry hadn't, by a chain of circumstances and unintended
consequences of actions by various people, become "the one with the
power to defeat Voldemort," the discovery and destruction of the
Horcruxes would have been much more difficult, and the destruction of
the diary perhaps impossible.

Carol, who would have liked to see the Order members and the WW in
general doing a bit more than wireless broadcasts in DH but thinks
that their not figuring out that LV had created even one Horcrux makes
perfect sense under the circumstances