Wand Lore / Luna / Alchemy

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 181707

 
> a_svirn:
> You may believe it but this is all guesswork. And even if you are 
> right there were still alternatives. The easiest was for Dumbledore 
> to give it to Harry even before he died. After all he was dying 
> already, Harry needed to overcome the twin connection as much as 
> Voldemort did, and it wouldn't put Harry in anymore danger than he 
> already was.

Pippin:
Aren't your theories guesswork also? <g> But I don't understand how
this one works.

Giving Harry the wand would not make him master of it. As has been
pointed out, had Dumbledore  still been master of the wand and 
died of either the ring curse or the poison, the new  master of the 
wand would have been Voldemort. 

Magpie:
 I was not talking about freak accidents, I was talking about
things much more obviously violent. 
<snip>
Dumbledore's plans often fail to
take into account all the crazy things that could happen, even though
he himself witnessed the accidental killing of his sister, and the
destruction of the Potters.

Pippin:
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Crazy things can't be planned
for by definition, nor can Dumbledore expect them to prevent them
by not planning to do anything "crazy", ie unconventional,  himself 
-- that kind of magical thinking doesn't work, even in the Potterverse.

 Dumbledore knew Harry, knew he would be tempted by the Hallows 
and by the desire for vengeance,  but he also trusted that Harry would 
grow out of those desires, and that is exactly what happened. 

Was it risky? Of course. Even Dumbledore couldn''t make an omelet without
breaking eggs. There was no safe way to get rid of Voldemort, and who
would want to read about it if there was? 

At least Dumbledore's plan did not entail a full scale wizarding war as
a public hunt for the horcruxes or the hallows might have.  And
while part of the readership may feel cheated I don't think the people
of the wizarding world would share that opinion.

Likewise, I don't think the people of the WW feel cheated that their
saviors did not turn out to be persons of heroic sanctity. JKR is
not trying to inspire people to become saints, IMO. She is trying
to inspire us to resist evil, and telling us we don't have to be 
preternaturally virtuous to do it. All that's needed is a drop of courage 
and a modicum of love. 

> 
> a_svirn: Here would be Snape, a man 
> he hated as much as Voldemort, and whom he believed to be steeped in 
> villainy, and he would have the very thing Harry would believe he'd 
> need to vanquish Voldemort. Well, really, what would you expect him 
> to do under such circumstances? 

Pippin:
I wouldn't expect him to murder in cold blood, and I wouldn't expect 
him to be able to beat Snape in a duel. Under those circumstances 
Snape would have  time to convince Harry that he'd got things wrong. If Harry
was too angry to listen, he would  also be too angry to fight effectively.
This isn't Star Wars, where anger gives you the power of the dark side.
All anger does, in Potterverse magic, is make you lose control of yourself
and your powers.  

If I were Snape I would have been much more worried about Moody,
or even Hagrid, than Harry. Lucky  for Snape that Moody
got killed so soon, and that Hagrid wouldn't believe Snape was guilty.


Magpie:
Obviously there's more reason to symbolically kill the previous owner
of the Elder Wand than to kill all of his followers at once as soon
as he returned. If I wasn't surprised at all that Voldemort killed
Snape it doesn't seem like Dumbledore should have been.

Pippin:
How could we be surprised? If Snape was going to die, it would be
either at Voldemort's hands or at Harry's -- nothing else would be
dramatic enough. But Dumbledore doesn't know his universe is 
biased towards drama.


Canon recognizes the danger that Voldemort would see 
Dumbledore's killer as competition. Narcissa realizes in Spinner's
End that it must not look as if Snape is doing something that 
Voldemort himself dared not do. Both Snape and Dumbledore
took steps to forestall it. Snape made  sure everyone knew
that Dumbledore was not the wizard he once was, while Dumbledore
 flaunted his damaged hand, and played up his weakness 
on the tower for all it was worth,  making sure that his killer
looked like a traitor and a coward rather than a mighty duellist.

And it worked. 

 Voldemort didn't treat Snape's murder as a symbolic death. 
He didn't linger to watch Snape die, or  desecrate the body, 
or arrange in some way to let his followers 
know of his triumph, or take a trophy of the death. 

Snape's death was not a fetish death -- it was incidental,
the product of a random error in Voldemort's
thought process,  something that might have happened for
any number of reasons unrelated to Dumbledore's plans.


Pippin