Deathly Hallows, Chapter 17: Bathilda's Secret
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, ( Read more... )
And yet it hasn’t been responding to Harry’s Horcrux.
/he lives up to his “dumb hero” reputation by going off alone with this bad-smelling, strangely-acting, nearly mute old woman who knows who he is, despite his being Polyjuiced and her blind. No, Harry, nothing at all suspicious about that situation./
Well, this scene pretty much belongs in a horror film, so why not have Harry act like the typical dumb horror protagonist who enters the haunted house for no reason?
/James dies wandless/
Because he’s an idiot. I still don’t know why JKR had him run at Voldemort without a wand. He’s a pureblood wizard who’s a member of the Order, there’s no reason why he would try to take down Voldemort “like a Muggle.” Why couldn’t JKR just have James duel Voldemort and lose? That would make him look more heroic than this inexplicable brand of idiocy. It would also mean that Voldemort was telling the truth in PS/SS when he told Harry that his father “put up a tremendous fight.”
/And why did she barricade the door with a bunch of junk? Most people could get past that, even without magic./
And isn’t she supposed to be this precociously talented witch who was able to master wandless magic at a young age? You know, like Tom? Why wasn’t she more of a match for him? And like you said, barricading the door? She really thought that that would keep a wizard at bay? Did JKR just forget that James and Lily were wizards when writing this scene?
/he tells her, “This is my last warning--”--and then gives her another warning!/
Instead of, you know, Stunning her. Confunding her. Casting the Imperius Curse on her. Casting the Body-Bind Curse on her. Torturing her. Or any number of hexes and curses that he could have used to get her out of the way. If he didn’t care about granting Snape his wish, why didn’t Voldemort just kill Lily then and there instead of wasting time arguing with her? He has a wand. She doesn’t. He didn’t need to say a single word to get her out of the way.
Again, it’s as if JKR forgot that they were wizards and imagined this scene as a bank robbery, with Lily as the helpless bank teller and Voldemort as the robber with a gun.
/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.
/For that matter, why didn’t Harry notice he was speaking it?/
It was established in CoS that Parselmouths don’t realize that they’re speaking another language. In Harry’s mind, he and the snake are speaking English. He only realizes that he’s been speaking another language when Ron and Hermione tell him.
/She stayed on guard when he stupidly went off alone with an extremely suspicious stranger. (2) She charged to his rescue when the stranger attacked him. (3) She treated his wounds and watched over him for several hours while he was unconscious and helpless. (4) She apologized profusely for breaking his wand and tried to fix it./
And she saved his life! If it weren’t for Hermione, Harry would be dead. Yet he can’t spare five minutes to thank her before brooding over his broken wand? I think that your life is a bit more important than your wand, Harry.
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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.
That his enemies were utter idiots depending on friendship and the possibility of mercy would be what he'd be driven to expect of fools capable of love, don't you think?
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--by the time Tom constructed his created memory, he'd received Severus's assurances that Potter's wife had been of no real importance, there were other women, of better blood.... Sure, back in the dim past Snape had asked his master for Lily's life, but in the event that childish crush hadn't actually mattered. And if not to Snape, not enough to make Lily actually worht preserving as a hostage to control him, then why to Tom?
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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 situation, with Dylan Klebold his depressed sucker accomplice.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the insight it gives into how monsters like Voldy and Harris think. For example, Harris trashed a man's van just because he felt like it. He was given psychological treatment as part of his punishment and was required to write a letter of apology to his victim as part of that treatment. The letter said all the right things: I'm so sorry. I would feel terrible if someone did that to me, and I only now realize how much I must have made you suffer. I feel awful about what I've done to you.
He told the same lies to his therapist. But his diary revealed what he really thought: He felt no guilt or remorse at all. He'd enjoyed trashing the van, and he'd love to do it again. The guy had deserved it because he'd left his property where somebody else could get at it. His therapist was a complete sucker to believe his lies and "remorse." Everybody in the world but him was an asshole/wimp/loser who deserved to be ground under Eric's heel because he was the greatest thing alive, and he had the right to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted, just because he was so wonderful.
That is what real SNPs are like. Like her characters, Rowling did not do her research. Voldy is not nearly fiendish enough to be an SNP.
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As for Lily's own abysmal performance... I suppose one can say that whatever she might have tried in reality was about as effective as barricading the door with junk, even if it was more sensible. Her ineffectual pleading might also have been Voldy seeing a looping, panicked thought she had in the back of her mind even as she was trying to do something more proactive - obviously also ineffectually.
As satisfied as I am with this as an explanation for Harry's behavior, the rest is pure conjecture. We don't know enough about Lily to evaluate what Voldemort might have picked up from her mind, and how that would match up with his memory of events. And of course, if we do allow that V's memories are in part fabricated, then all we can corroborate with outside evidence are those portions found in Harry's dementor visions. However, if V's memory problems began just before or as the Harry!crux was being formed, even those might be suspect. In short, we'd have no idea what really happened. Which rather defeats the usefulness of this exercise beyond excising a truly execrable passage of writing.
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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 (helpless and pathetic) rather than what she actually said, as suggested, maybe not.
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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.
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