a whole lot of parts of the chapter discussion

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 185319

Carol:
> The Elder Wand does not seem to know that Harry is its master until
he says so. Otherwise, it would not have tried to kill Harry. It would
> have backfired on Voldemort the first time.

Pippin:
It never backfired on Voldemort, not if you mean the way Ron's broken
wand backfired on Lockhart with the magic coming out the wrong end.
The green jet from Voldemort's wand leaped towards Harry, met the jet
of the Expelliarmus spell coming the other way, and then both spells
struck Voldemort, the one killing him and the other sending the Elder
Wand high into the air to be caught by Harry. 

If the Expelliarmus had not been in the way, then the green jet would
have continued towards Harry, just as it did in the forest, with what
effect we cannot say. 

I will certainly concede that if Voldemort got his wandlore from you,
he would never have believed that the Elder Wand would serve him
better than the yew wand!

But Voldemort got his wand lore from Ollivander. 

"He is determined to possess it because he believes it will make him
truly invulnerable."
"And will it?"
"The owner of the Elder Wand must always fear attack," said
Ollivander, "but the idea of the Dark Lord in possession of the
Deathstick is, I must admit...formidable."


We don't know exactly what Ollivander told Voldemort. But Voldemort
was seeking a wand that would make him more powerful than the yew
wand,  he wanted to know everything that Ollivander knew about the
Elder Wand, and nothing he learned from Ollivander dissuaded him from
thinking that the Elder Wand would do the trick.

If Ollivander did not think that the Elder Wand would serve Voldemort
better than the yew wand, or any other dark wizard's wand, he would
not be ashamed of having told what he knew  under pain of torture, 
and he would not have been so especially enthralled with the thought
of what that wand could do in Voldemort's hands. 

That, right there, is enough to convince me that Voldemort's
expectations of additional powers were realistic. And since the Elder
Wand has immense powers, there's no reason to assume it didn't do what
JKR says it did, and recognize its true master in the forest.

I agree there doesn't seem to be any way of predicting whether a wand
left free to act will choose an individual. But a wand that has been
beaten is not  free -- it's been captured. I don't think wands are 
stupid. I think they can tell the difference between practice duels or
playground scuffles, and  an  attempt to capture a wand for keeps.

It makes sense that if you capture one wand, you capture all the wands
that owe that wizard their allegiance -- it explains why they wouldn't
just carry spares.

The wand's failure need not have been apparent to Harry. Voldemort
does not get angry when he thinks fate is against him, or when he
feels that he himself has made a mistake. The Elder Wand was simply a
puzzle to be unlocked, like the Chamber of Secrets, or the protections
around the Stone. It was not a servant who had sworn eternal loyalty
and then failed to deliver.

If JKR had shown the wand failing Voldemort,  it would have
telegraphed his intentions towards Snape to the reader, and maybe to
Snape himself. That is not to make excuses for Rowling. Examining what
would happen to the story if it were changed is one way to understand
why it's constructed the way it is. It seems to me that maybe you
think it would have been a better story if the wand's failure *had*
been telegraphed to Snape. It might have given him a fighting chance.

It doesn't seem, at first glance, that virtue was rewarded and evil
was punished in Snape's case. It doesn't seem fair that he did
everything he was supposed to do, and died for other people's
mistakes, while the chastened but unrepentant Malfoys lived on. 

I didn't want Snape to die myself. I especially didn't want him to die
to show that he was redeemable, like Darth Vader, or repentant, like
Boromir. And thank goodness, he did not.

He died, IMO, to show that what he told Dumbledore in GoF was true: he
was ready. He was prepared. He wasn't only ready to die a traitor's
death if he couldn't manage to swindle Voldemort into accepting his story.

He was prepared to die as Cedric had: a brutal, senseless, pointless
death. That is the kind of death that will find most of us -- maybe
not at the hands of a serial killer, but because of something we
couldn't control.

It's the genius of Rowling's writing that on first reading death seems
to have caught Snape flat-footed -- it's only when you realize how
carefully the memories must have been chosen, and understand what  his
last words meant that you realize he was indeed prepared. Certainly he
had a "well-organized mind"!

And that, I think, gives us the answer to Catlady's question about the
moral. The third brother sought to avoid death, not forever, but until
he was prepared to meet it as an equal. Then he passed the cloak to
his son, and he and death went on together. 

Voldemort *was* right to fear death, but only because he never tried
to prepare for it. He lost his innocence, but never gained wisdom.

The legendary Invisibility Cloak protected its owner until he chose to
give it up. The "real" I-cloak is not so infallible. Its true power,
according to Dumbledore, is in protecting others. 

In the WW as in real life,  few  can honorably choose the hour
or the manner of their deaths. They must therefore find the courage to
live every hour as if they were prepared for death, and what is more,
the courage to help others to survive until they are prepared also.

The Malfoys, being unrepentant, are not prepared to die. The happy
ending for them is being allowed to live, in the hope that when death
finds them they will be better prepared than they are now. But Snape
was prepared, so the happy ending for him was to "go on".


Pippin