Doing it for Lily? was Re: Snape and Harry and expulsion LONG

[lealess]

No: HPFGUIDX 188966



--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
Doing it for Lily? was Re: Snape and Harry and expulsion LONG

> Lealess:
> > If it appeared that Snape killed him, then Snape would have been a sitting duck for a Voldemort determined to find a wand to head off the wand trouble he was having with Potter. Having observed Snape through six books, I think Snape would have taken steps to address that situation, had he known about it, to place himself out of danger so he could fulfill his mission to tell Potter of the embedded soul piece.

> Pippin:

> Voldemort's notion of killing the wand's previous owner to make himself its master was irrational and contradicted by facts known to Voldemort. Therefore it's difficult to see how Snape could have anticipated it no matter how much he knew.

> It's canon that Voldemort acted to conceal his theft.

> "It would not do for Snape, or indeed anyone else, to see where he was going. But there were no lights in the castle windows, and he could conceal himself...and in a second he had cast upon himself a Disillusionment Charm that hid him even from his own eyes." -DH ch 24.

> If Snape or Portrait!Dumbledore had known that the wand had been taken, they might have acted to protect Snape. But JKR tells us here that they didn't. There's no canon that Snape ever saw Voldemort with his new wand until those last moments in the Shrieking Shack, so he had no opportunity to recognize it either.

It is also canon that Voldemort took Lucius Malfoy's wand at the very beginning of DH because Voldemort's wand was ineffective against Potter, and when Malfoy's wand failed to defeat Potter, he took Selwyn's.  It is also canon that Voldemort had taken the wandmaker Ollivander prisoner to extract information from him.  I think Snape was aware of all this, and moreover, reported it to Dumbledore, along with Voldemort's request to be let into Hogwarts.  It is also canon that Dumbledore expected Voldemort to go after the Elder Wand.  It's also canon that Voldemort enjoys killing, and has no compunction about murdering his followers.  It's also canon that Voldemort acts irrationally, for example, giving Potter chances to duel when he should have just killed him and been done with it.  Adding all these factors together just says "Wand! Wand! Wand! Kill Snape!" to me.  Yet, I agree that Snape had no idea that Dumbledore's wand was something special or was in Voldemort's possession until he saw it in the Shack.

> Lealess:
> > As for the Prophecy, see above. No matter what Dumbledore said, he put his faith wholly in Prophecy Boy Potter to carry out his plans, making no contingency plans.

> Pippin:
> Dumbledore's portrait presumably had all the knowledge Dumbledore had and all the memories that he collected are, AFAWK, still in his office. If Snape failed to transmit Dumbledore's message to Harry, or if Harry and his friends failed, the portrait could find others to carry out those tasks.

Maybe, maybe not.  The portrait might also have been sealed, never to be heard from again, or the office sealed.  As for Dumbledore's memories, how do we know the memories are still there, and were not hidden away or destroyed once Potter saw them?  It seems an ever-curious Snape might have looked at those memories if they were readily available, and yet, Snape doesn't seem to know something so basic as why Potter needs the Sword of Gryffindor.  We know the Horcrux books have been Accio'd away by Granger.  All Potter noticed in the Headmaster's office was empty portraits and a basin.

In other words, imaginative speculation can be used to prove any point.  We can speculate about what might have happened had the heroes failed, but the fact is that we do not see Dumbledore make a contingency plan for the end game.  What he did was give instructions regarding Potter to Snape, and give the mission of destroying the Horcruxes to Potter and company.  He put a lot of faith in very few people, and kept information from all of them.

> Lealess:
> > He also put people in danger to protect the secrets of the Prophecy and cried over Harry's prescribed role at the end of OOTP. Were these the actions of a rational leader who discounted prophecy?

> Pippin:
> Dumbledore put people in danger to guard the prophecy so that if Voldemort showed up to try to steal it, there would be proof that he had returned. Once it became clear that Voldemort's plan was to entice Harry to steal the prophecy, the guards would no longer be necessary and it appears they were removed. As DD tells Harry, there was never any need to protect the prophecy, and if he had been honest with Harry he would have told him so.

> Certainly he wept over Harry's role, but what has that got to do with the prophecy prescribing it?

> It may not seem rational that Dumbledore would think that anyone acting alone or with a few helpers, would be capable of destroying Voldemort without the prophecy to suggest it. But Dumbledore comes from a tradition of duels and single combat, and he himself defeated Grindelwald in just that way.

You're probably right about the guarding of the Prophecy.

Dumbledore's weeping over Harry's role shows to me that he accepts the Prophecy as determinative.  If the Prophecy was bunkum, he could have laughed it off and encouraged Potter to do the same.  Instead, he communicated that Potter must put himself in mortal danger because of the Prophecy; in other words, he lent credence to its words and helped to put them in action.

Just because someone comes from a tradition of duelling doesn't mean he will only ever bet on one champion, unless he has reason to believe there is only one champion.  That belief came from the Prophecy, before Dumbledore even knew Potter as a person.  Who else was Dumbledore protecting -- the Longbottoms?

> Lealess:
> > If he was stressing choice in HBP, he may have been allowing Potter to believe he had a choice, at the same time he demanded absolute obedience from Potter.

> Pippin:
> There's a difference between being coerced into obedience and voluntarily agreeing to obey.

This is true. There is also a difference between conditioned behavior and voluntary agreement.  Potter was an orphaned boy who'd been abused and isolated.  Then, the greatest wizard of all time took a personal interest in him and even told him he loved him, praised him for his bravery, said he was better than anyone else, and promised to take him on an unparalled learning adventure.  He also said Fawkes followed Potter only because Potter was loyal to Dumbledore, and seemed flattered over the Dumbledore's Army name.  All this would encourage love for Dumbledore.  And to cement this, Dumbledore took support away from a no-doubt attachment-anxious Potter.  He isolated Potter after Diggory's death in GOF.  He withdrew Potter's access to him in OOTP, wouldn't even look at him.  He brushed off Potter's concerns about Malfoy in HBP, and grew unreasonably angry with Potter's failures to obtain Slughorn's memory.  At the end of HBP, he basically had Potter saying "Anything!" in order to go on a Horcrux hunt.  Throughout this, Potter identified himself as "Dumbledore's man," until in DH, we have a Potter so obsessed with knowing what Dumbledore wanted him to do, he scarcely thought about anything else.

In the end, Potter may have had a choice, but there is evidence for me to believe it was a highly-conditioned one.

lealess