The Protection of the Prophecy Plot

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, Catherine Coleman 
<catorman at y...> wrote:

> Catharine:
>
> I can only think of two reasons - one, that Voldemort wasted 
> almost a whole year trying to get hold of the prophecy, and so 
> bought Dumbledore some time, and two, that he was trying to lure 
> Voldemort into revealing himself at the Ministry, which he 
> presumably expected only to work if Voldemort failed to lure Harry 
> there first, hence the importance of occlumency.  

Both of those reasons have legs, as Voldemort alludes to both issues 
in his obligatory "So, you want to know why I'm here..." speech at 
the end.  Voldie was very happy to be nicely ensconced in hiding; he 
gets to work at finding out the end of the novel after 15-something 
years, and his main enemy looks like an idjit for saying "The sky is 
falling! Voldemort is here!".  So Dumbledore has problems: on the one 
hand, there are strong pluses to keeping Voldemort from going 
active.  Voldemort in hiding is far more careful and discriminate 
about doing things like killing people, which is generally nice for 
the white hats, and Harry gets some more time and mad skillz under 
his belt.  On the other hand, the Ministry and the general populace 
are sitting ducks, and Voldemort can accomplish certain goals because 
no one is really believing the threat.

So don't break the desired shiny object, but guard it; use it as a 
lure and eventually Voldemort himself will have to come into a public 
place and be told that he is indeed live on Candid Camera.

Of course, it goes a little egg-shaped and they end up losing one of 
the Order members most prized by the person who they're all depending 
on.  Oops.  Which leads to my $64,000 question, which I hope is 
answered, being "What the hell was up with Occlumency lessons?  Good 
teacher, bad teacher**?  Ended them as personal prerogative or with 
knowledge of his boss?  Because I don't know."

Oh, waiting.

**(I have a personal conceptual model for Occlumency and why Harry 
couldn't learn it that I would be happy to share.  Not for those 
deeply allergic to comparisons with RL practices.  No idea if it has 
legs or not, but it makes sense to me.)

-Nora longs for another hour of sleep