a whole lot of parts of the chapter discussion

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 185303

Catlady wrote:
> I don't understand all of Harry's logic here. <snip> Harry *knows*
that the master of the Elder Wand doesn't have to be using it nor even
be in possession of it to lose mastery by being defeated, because
Draco wasn't using it and didn't possess it at the time that Harry
took its mastery from him.
> 
> So if Harry were defeated in any kind of duel, even a sporting
competition rather than a battle, the winner would be become master of
> the Elder Wand. 

Carol responds:

I don't think that sporting competitions count or anyone who's
Disarmed at any point in the story, starting with Lockhart by Snape in
CoS, would have lost mastery of his or her wand. And incidents in
which one wizard disarms the disarmer of another and assumes mastery
of a wand neither has touched must be rare indeed. (I think that only
happened because Harry was able to tell the wielder of the wand what
happened, and that wand, being fickle, had to choose between the Dark
Wizard holding it and the boy claiming to be its master. It chose to
betray Voldemort and accept Harry. How often has an AK backfired on
its caster? Only twice that we know of, and both times to a certain
Dark Wizard who doesn't learn from his mistakes.)

At any rate, in most sporting competetions, starting with the Duelling
Club in CoS, the wand is returned to the Disarmed wizard without any
indication that its loyalty has temporarily gone over to the Disarmer.
Given, however, the fickleness of the Elder Wand, it would be utterly
stupid for Harry to use it in a duel. But I don't think it would know
that he had been Disarmed in a duel with someone else, or even in a
real fight with a Dark Wizard. Even if he didn't get his own wand back
and the Dark Wizard claimed it (not likely since Harry would always
have backup and he's finally learned to do nonverbal spells), unless
the Elder Wand knew about it, it wouldn't make any difference. (I'm
sure it thought that its master was Draco until it was told otherwise.
It can read its casters mind and it can understand human speech, but,
so far as we know, it doesn't have long-distance ESP!) In any case, I
don't think other Wizards would know that defeating Harry could,
theoretically, make them the master of the Elder Wand. Any DEs who
heard that speech are either dead or in Azkaban.

Catlady:
And the next person to defeat the new master would become the newer
master, and so on. And none of these people know that they're the
master, so they don't know to go looking for it, but there is some
strong magic involved and eventually it will wind up in the hand of
its current master. <snip>

Carol:
Then why didn't it somehow end up in Draco's hands? it stayed buried
with Dumbledore until Voldemort blew up the tomb and stole it. No one
else knew it was there, and they wouldn't know its new hiding place,
either, which means, IMO, that it would remain undisturbed until
Harry's death even without a Fidelius Charm.

> 
> jkoney said it better in
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185268>:
> 
> << But if Harry became master of the elder wand by taking Draco's
> regular wand, then wouldn't anyone who beat Harry's holly wand
become master of the elder wand? <snip>

Carol responds:

Because there's more to wandlore than Disarming spells. You and jkoney
are disregarding the bond that forms between most wands and their
masters. The holly wand would, IMO, never take a Dark Wizard as its
master. It has a will and it can choose. We see Harry's fondness for
his *own* wand. Wands being sentient and able to learn with their
masters, I see no reason why it isn't equally fond of him.

Carol earlier:
> 
> << Too many unanswered questions, especially what DD wanted Snape to
do with the wand and how DD defeated Grindelwald, the master of the
wand. >>

Catlady: 
> I think DD must have defeated Grindelwald by trickery, or perhaps
cheating. I want to believe that there was the mighty duel claimed by
Elphias, but it must have been kind of a draw. Maybe DD was injured or
pretended to be injured, and GG called time out and came over to check
if DD were dead and ask him "old friend, wouldn't you rather join my
side than fight me?" and DD Stunned him by surprise while he was
kneeling over him... <snip>

Carol responds:
I don't think that it was won by trickery--unless you count banter of
the kind we hear between Harry and LV, Harry and Snape, Bellatrix and
Sirius, or DD and LV distracting him for a moment. I think it's more
likely that DD cast a simple spell that GG wasn't expecting--an
Expelliarmus. But if the trickery had involved deceit or cheating, I
don't think he could have tamed the Elder Wand. It might have
controlled him (as it seems to have controlled GG and LV, imposing its
evil will on Wizards predisposed to evil and the will to power in the
first place). I picture a mental struggle rather like Aragorn's
mastering the Seeing Stone in LOTR, only not so obvious and much more
prolonged. The temptation to use the wand to kill would be like the
temptation to put on the ring (again, I can't help thinking of LOTR),
only the lure of the Resurrection Stone would be much stronger for DD
than the lure of the wand (so strong that he doesn't even bother to
de-Horcrux it, much less remove any curses that might be on it, before
he puts it on his finger).


> Carol wrote in
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185241>:
> 
> << LV who, I think, has lost the capacity for sexual desire along with
> the capacity to love) >>
> 
> I think Tom Riddle was born without the capacity for love, but
probably had a little bit of sexual desire when he was an adolescent
and young man. I think he completely lost sexual desire *and* sexual
organs when he completed his transformation into a snake-man. 

Carol again:
I'm not sure about his capacity for sexual desire as an adolescent (we
see no evidence of it), but I agree that the loss of his sexual organs
(shriveling of the testicles?) is part of the dehumanization resulting
from the Horcruxes, along with the snakelike features. But he may
never have felt any sexual He's twice symbolically depicted as a baby,
indicating that certain aspects of him never matured. Sexual maturity
could be one of them. And I could argue that Voldemort feels a kind of
infantile attachment to Nagini, the surrogate mother whose venom was
an ingredient in the potion that gave him that infantile form and also
served as mother's milk (it's no coincidence, IMO, that Wormtail
"milked" her--yes, I know, that's the term used for obtaining the
venom of a snake, but I think JKR was well aware of its connotations).
At any rate, I agree that he never had the capacity for love (except
in that perverted form for his "dear Nagini") and that *if* he ever
had the capacity for sexual arousal and performance, which depends at
least in part on finding a fellow human being attractive and
desirable, he lost it long before.

BTW, did anyone else notice that "Tom Riddle's" dead body is feeble
and frail? Was it only magic that protected that conjured copy of his
already dehumanized form from old age? He'd have been what, seventy,
when he died? Not all that old for a Wizard. Had he not been hit by
his own AK in Harry's infancy, would he have been subject to old age
despite his Horcruxes, tied to life like Tithonus but without eternal
youth? (Destroy my Horcruxes, somebody, please!)
> 
Carol earlier:
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185248>:
> 
> << A second AK fired at the moment Narcissa revealed that Harry
wasn't dead would have finished Harry off, the shared blood having
ceased to protect him once the soul bit was destroyed and the
connection between them was severed. >>

Catlady: 
> It is not clear to me that the drop of Harry's blood inside
Voldemort ceased to protect Harry when the bit of Voldemort's soul
inside Harry was destroyed. Surely the blood protection is not related
to the sort-of-Horcrux, but rather to the blood protection spell that
DD cast on baby Harry. Somehow, leaving out the word 'dwells' and the
expiry date on his 17th birthday, Harry is protected while he is in
the presence of a person with Lily's blood in his/her veins, and
Harry's blood is Lily's blood, so he is protected in the presence of
LV who has a drop of Harry's blood in his veins. <snip>

Carol responds:

But as you say yourself, that old blood protection expired on his
seventeenth birthday, and he lost his protection from Voldemort's
touch when Voldemort's new body incorporating Harry's blood was
created when Harry was still fourteen. ("See, I can touch you now," he
says, touching Harry's scar and causing excruciating pain--hope I'm
not bringing in movie contamination here!) That was the whole point of
having Harry's blood in Voldemort's body (that, and he somehow thought
he'd share in the protection from Harry's mother's love evn though
he's just demonstrated that it no longer works!) Also, both Harry and
Voldemort state that it's no longer love that's protecting Harry.
(Possibly, as Pippin says, his self-sacrifice only protects other
people, not himself.) At any rate, the connection between Harry and LV
is severed when the soul bit is destroyed. There's nothing left to
kill besides Harry himself if he's hit by another AK. The only
remaining function of the drop of blood is (as JKR says
offpage--almost said offlist!) to give Voldemort the capacity to feel
remorse and save himself from self-imposed eternal torment if he so chose.

I could be wrong. It's possible that he'd be tied to Voldemort and
couldn't die if he were hit by yet another AK, but he doesn't have any
Horcruxes of his own to hold him to life. Voldemort now has only one,
Nagini. Suppose that Nagini prevents Harry from dying when the AK
hits. Would he become disembodied like Voldemort, hoist with his own
petard at Godric's Hollow? Or would he return to King's Cross, this
time to "go on" to whatever the afterlife offers? Better to go there
than to be a soul torn from its body like LV. And Harry's own love
magic, created by his self-sacrifice, doesn't seem to protect *him.*

In the end, it's not the drop of shared blood that protects him, or it
would protect Voldemort, too, even after the destruction of his last
Horcrux, and neither could kill the other. It's the Elder Wand
choosing to betray Voldemort rather than kill its master.

Carol, tired of wand posts and wanting to get back to Snape!