Deathly Hallows, Chapter 17: Bathilda's Secret

[oneandthetruth]

Unfortunately for the Hs and us, things don’t stay so peaceful. As they leave the churchyard, Hermione is sure someone’s shadowing them. Harry tries to dismiss it as an animal, but he doesn’t really believe it; he’s just trying to reassure her. In fact, he’s right, but not in the way he means, as we find out later.

As they wander through the town,

Comments

[aikaterini]

/The Horcrux locket wakes up and responds to--something

[terri_testing]

I have to remind you, one way to make sense (Watsonianly) of Tom's memory of James and Lily is to suppose it isn't accurate. My grandmother, in her dementia, was given to confabulation, and it was clear that she believed every plausible false memory she presented when an interlocuter demanded an explanation of something. (She managed to hide her memory loss for years, we discovered belatedly, with my grandfather's collusion. Even after his death, we only discovered the extent of her problem when she broke her leg, and couldn't stick to a consistent story of how she came to fall.) The human mind needs to make sense of things, and when my grandmother couldn't remember what actually had happened, she made something up that made sense to her and explained whatever needed to be explained. And believed wholeheartedly her own fabrication (so long as she remembered it

[oneandthetruth]

Discorporating oneself inadvertantly must be deeply traumatic, and the restored (somewhat) Tom could not be blamed if his memories of the events immediately preceding that trauma had been erased. At the same time, he's got to have tried to remember, tried to picture how it all happened.

So there's at least a chance that this whole scene is Tom's elaborately-imagined recreation of how it must have been, rather than a true memory.

Which would explain the lack of thought for Snape--

It's highly likely that's what did happen. Given that Voldy died, exploded, dissolved right after these events, his memory of the events never would have had time to travel from his short term to his long term memory, so he probably remembered nothing that occurred right before his death. We know that happens to people who suffer head injuries.

However, it still is completely unrealistic for a sadistic narcissistic psychopath to act this way. A while back I read Columbine, David Cullen's account the school massacre. Eric Harris was the SNP in that

[oryx_leucoryx]

Still, at least part of the sound-track matches Harry's dementor-induced memory of the scene, so Tom can't be completely off.

[annoni_no]

Part of my own head!canon on this is that at the time of the attack, V was legilimizing Lily for some reason, perhaps to see if she'd have any use beyond as a hostage for Snape, and ended up incorporating some of hermemories and thoughts in the reconstruction of events. This is why Harry in particular seems so sociopathically unresponsive to his mother's distress: it was Lily's memory of another time when she really was just playing with Harry. Voldy might also have incorporated some her perceptions of the people involved. She might have thought James was reckless enough to charge V without a wand, and, if the fight downstairs was decided quickly enough (from her perspective) might have assumed that was what he'd done

[sunnyskywalker]

Can we trust Harry's Dementor visions? The Dementors might be affecting the Horcrux in his forehead too, since it is a piece of a soul. And surely the worst memories of that soul-piece would be the events surrounding it being ripped away from the main soul and shoved willy-nilly into some random kid.

If the soul-bit's memories are accurate, then it makes little difference whether the audio comes from it or Harry, except that the memory of that soul-trauma might explain why Harry is especially susceptible to Dementors. It isn't his memories that are so much worse than everyone else's.

But if the soul-bit's memories are a hash of some of its own, some of Lily's, and maybe a vestige of Harry's (he remembered the motorcycle, so we can't discount it), then it's possible that Harry's memories and Voldemort's align because the respective Voldie-bits reconstructed the events the same way from the same memory soup.

Which still means that most of the audio could well be roughly accurate. But if instead Lily's words are based on how she felt

[sunnyskywalker]

Sorry, messed up the threading - that was a response to Oryx. But I think the idea that the memories are based on what the participants at the time felt about what they were saying and doing is intriguing!

[oneandthetruth]

/James dies wandless/

Because he’s an idiot. I still don’t know why JKR had him run at Voldemort without a wand.

The only halfway reasonable explanation I've seen for James and Lily's passivity is that it was symbolic. That is, they went to their deaths not fighting, the same way Harry went to his, so their deaths had the same noble, selfless, protective factors that Harry's did. (And Snape's, although nobody mentions his.) That theory was proposed by a JKR apologist--except for the Snape angle, of course.

/It says, “...it seemed more prudent to finish them all....”/

And nowhere in that narration does Voldemort mention Snape. Nowhere does Voldemort think about Snape pleading with him to spare Lily. And I thought that “The Prince’s Tale” was already random and out of place.

No doubt that was because it would have ruined the "big reveal" about SS/LE.

[hwyla]

One surprise I had was that James didn't even at least attempt to change into a stag and gore Voldy. I know we don't have canon for James being able to change into his animagus form wandlessly and Peter in canon DOES need his wand. But it IS canon that Sirius can change wandlessly - otherwise he wouldn't have been able to do it in Azkaban. Was he unable to do so pre-Azkaban and only managed to do it wandlessly because he had to do so to avoid the dementors? Or were James and Sirius both able to change without their wands and James just 'forgot' or didn't think?

[oryx_leucoryx]

It is canon Peter grabbed a wand before transforming, but I'm not sure it is canon he needed it in order to transform. Having a wand with him when he transforms back is a good enough reason to act like he did. Peter did not let go of Remus' wand willingly, it was taken from his hands by Harry's Expeliarmus while he was still in human form. My reading is that he transformed wandlessly after that. If he had cast the transformation spell with the wand he was holding before Harry's disarming spell the wand wouldn't have flown away, it would have become part of the rat form, just like Peter's clothes.