a whole lot of parts of the chapter discussion

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 185323

Carol:
> You seem to be saying that it made no difference in the end that
Harry was the master of the Elder Wand. It was only Harry's
Expelliarmus that prevented the spell from striking him.

Pippin:
Of course it made a difference, I just don't think it was the sole
deciding factor. You might as well say (as Voldemort did) that Harry
owed all his victories solely to the help of greater men and women.
Did that play a part? Of course, and maybe Harry wouldn't have won
without their help, but that's not to say that his own abilities and
character had nothing to do with it. 

Carol:
> So, unless the wand chose not to kill Harry by striking the
> Expelliarmus instead of its master, Harry's being the wand's master
> makes no difference.

Pippin:

So why didn't the crucio work? It threw Harry into the air three
times, but didn't hurt him.  I don't think he's impervious to pain, or
he wouldn't have known when Narcissa's nails pierced him. 

I take your point that the AK in the forest seemed to work. But I
think what you've ignored there is that  when the Elder Wand struck
him the first time, Harry *wanted* to die. The Elder Wand, like Snape,
obeyed its master and tried to carry out an order that would
ordinarily have been impossibly repugnant. 
 
> Carol:
> Ollivander himself was a bit obsessed with the Elder Wand, which he
> had read about but never seen (rather like DD and the Hallows). He
had read and was fascinated by its history. <snip> Only when
> Ollivander started talking about the Elder Wand did he start caring
> about its (supposed) immense powers.

Pippin:
Voldemort had already heard of it.
"When You-Know-Who realized my wand had done something strange, he
came back and asked about that other wand, didn't he?" Ollivander's
reactions show that Harry is right in his guess. Voldemort had already
heard about the Elder Wand, but Ollivander had told him that he only
needed to borrow another wizard's wand to overcome the connection with
Harry's. 

Voldemort was not angry when Harry's wand did something strange -- he
just went back and asked Ollivander for more information.  Voldemort
then decided that the Elder Wand would make him invincible. That
indeed was folly, but it doesn't mean that the documented powers of
the Elder Wand that Ollivander knew of weren't real. 

Voldemort had never concerned himself with the Elder Wand before
because he didn't attribute his earlier failures to wand problems.
Obviously his wand had worked  at Godric's Hollow, and it was only
Lily's "foolish sacrifice" that had deflected Voldemort's magic back
at him. 

Instead of trying to understand why Harry had such power against him,
Voldemort resolved to seek more power himself, and this, Dumbledore
says, was his undoing.

You seem to be saying that JKR has nothing to say about super weapons,
and only introduced one as  a way to get rid of Snape. But I see it
differently. I think she is saying something about relying on powerful
weapons instead of the things that truly make a wizard great:
friendship and bravery.

Compare the Elder Wand to atomic weapons. They can be effective
deterrents and devastating in attack but they don't make their
possessors unbeatable. Some people exaggerate their powers and that
can be a factor, both in deterrence and in relying on them too greatly
-- but their powers are by no means purely imaginary, and they have
been decisive in war.

Pippin
hoping that Carol will forgive her for trying to clarify a few more things