I was trying to think of a reason for a rebounding Killing Curse to make Voldemort’s body disappear (no luck so far) when I thought of an entirely different question: with no body and no witnesses (other than Harry, who probably didn’t know more than a few words), why was the wizarding public so quick to believe Voldemort had been defeated?(
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Though some of those owls might have been later reactions to exciting but less urgent, party-provoking news: "OMG did you hear Sirius Black killed his friend and was laughing his head off when they arrested him?"
Yeah, everyone is awfully quick to believe Dumbledore. At least until 1995. It's just such a big claim, over something that had supposedly been terrifying everyone, that it's hard to believe even wizards would immediately go, "Whew, that's settled! Pop the cork on the bubbly!" And I can't see Crouch being happy about smiling and nodding and letting Dumbledore take even third-hand credit for winning the war without doing a very thorough investigation of his own. Because it would look terrible if the Ministry went along with the celebrations and then it turned out Voldemort was fine, if nothing else. Hm, ( ... )
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I think people not believing that Voldemort has returned is a slightly different situation, since someone bodily coming back from the (mostly) dead is supposed to be just as impossible for wizards as for us. And there isn't any evidence available to them other than Harry's eyewitness account, and he spends most of the year not giving it. Whereas they do have proof that an escaped Death Eater was in the school impersonating Moody, and know that there are spells which can make people (like Harry) believe things that aren't true. So not believing Harry and pinning all the blame on Barty Junior is pretty reasonable and doesn't require unusual trust in authority figures or more than a normal amount of wishful thinking ( ... )
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Maybe only the most, um, trusting and unreflective wizards, like Diggle, are actually celebrating that first day. Vernon also sees clusters of strangely-dressed people just out and talking, so maybe they're running around going, "OMG did you see the paper? Do you think it's true? Hey guys, did you see the extra edition that just came out with the story about Black?"
Sirius apparently killing Peter to shut him up and not getting rescued by Death Eater moles in the Ministry makes people wonder...maybe it really is true ( ... )
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Quoting Star Trek?
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I still think that until Harry's tale about the Chamber and Tom's diary and its capabilities Albus believed Harry was Tom's only Horcrux, created accidentally by an amateur Dark Wizard, not half as clever as Albus himself. And that by the time he talked to Severus and pressured him into helping the protection of Harry he knew that Harry was the Horcrux and that Lily's action was key to Harry's survival. Could he have figured out both of these without visiting the minimally disturbed scene?
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And there' some sort of...I don't know, Killing Curse momentum, that means it has to push something into Death's country, and if the soul's stuck here, that leaves the body.
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