How did the wizarding public know Voldemort's powers were broken on Halloween?

[sunnyskywalker]

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?

Comments

[with_rainfall]

I never picked up that the McGonagall incident was the very next day after the attack

[sunnyskywalker]

Pubs sound like a good possibility for spreading the story quickly. There were also a ton of owls flying around during the day on November 1--I wonder if you can crash the Floo network if too many people are trying to talk?

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,

[with_rainfall]

Yeah, that’s a good point too

[sunnyskywalker]

Diggle would be one of the people most inclined to trust Dumbledore and break out the fireworks immediately, too.

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

[chantaldormand]

IMHO what convinced everybody was Albus' status, brainwashing and charisma. It isn't up until COS that people start to doubt his leadership and up until GOF his mental health is questioned by anyone who isn't his political opponent

[sunnyskywalker]

A preemptive letter to the editor does sound like his style. And if McGonagall heard from Hagrid right before he left to pick up Harry and rumors at the Leaky Cauldron very early in the morning on her way to Little Whinging (because the pub got the rumors early enough that people kept coming in to talk and they didn't close), she might have missed the morning paper--so that she hasn't seen Dumbledore's letter and only knows what "they" are saying.

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

[chantaldormand]

/Hm, what really might clinch things for the majority is when all the Death Eaters (who do have evidence that Voldemort is weakened) start turning themselves in claiming to have suddenly been released from the Imperius Curse and gosh they can't believe the things they did. And the real Imperius victims whom the Death Eaters probably released with a strong compulsion to do the same, so there would be a flood of Imperius pleas for the Ministry to sort through and some obviously genuine victims to make the rest look more convincing. That might convince people that okay, if anyone Voldemort cursed is suddenly free, and anyone his Death Eaters cursed has been released, that means Voldemort is truly weakened and the Death Eaters are so sure that he's not coming back that they're trying to cut ties with the whole organization

[sunnyskywalker]

This makes me want to re-read Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore. It's set several years after the the death of the king of a fantasy kingdom--one whose secret magic power was that everything he said was really persuasive, to the point where he basically mind-controlled people. It even worked at second-hand, in weakened form: if someone told you the king was a great guy, because the king told that person he was, you were just a bit more inclined to believe it than you would be on your own. It was terrifying. Bitterblue was about that problem--how do you cope with the aftermath as a society? Do the court advisors etc. keep their jobs, for example? They did horrible things, but not of their own free will. Probably. How can you really be sure who was being mentally coerced and who didn't really need that magic push because they were already on board with what the king wanted

[jana_ch]

"...cry out in terror before being suddenly silenced?"

Quoting Star Trek?

[sunnyskywalker]

Close--Star Wars. Voldemort not-quite-dying is admittedly less dramatic than Alderaan blowing up, but probably still quite a shock considering he's supposed to be unkillable.

[jana_ch]

Yes, that was it. I know them both well (at least the first SW trilogy; I never bothered with the prequels), but all I could think of was Spock responding to the destruction of the crew of the Intrepid.

[sunnyskywalker]

That was a really interesting moment. Iirc we normally hear that Vulcans are touch-telepaths, but if a bunch die at once, they--or at least Spock--can feel it at a distance. And then when Sarek developed Bendii Syndrome, he was projecting his emotions all over the ship. So there's at least some degree of intraspecies telepathy at a distance. Which makes you wonder things like, "Could Vulcans have a literally collective unconscious?"

rebounding curse

[terri_testing]

Regarding your initial plaint, trying to figure out why a rebounding Killing Curse would make Tom's body disappear

Re: rebounding curse

[oryx_leucoryx]

Hi Terri,

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?

Re: rebounding curse

[oryx_leucoryx]

Also, we need to think about what would happen with a 'normal' Horcrux, when the Horcrux-owner is hit by someone else's AK vs Tom's situation, when he was hit by his own AK. Are you saying that 'normally' when a wizard who has a Horcrux is hit by an AK their body disappears, their soul stays around, and to keep being able to carry out actions in the world they need to possess some other body? So the capacity of possession is the main advantage over simply insisting on becoming a ghost? Or is body vanishment unique to Horcrux-owning wizards that are hit by their own AK? I wonder how many of these there have been?

Re: rebounding curse

[sunnyskywalker]

If some of those wizards who made single Horcruxes didn't manage to keep their bodies healthy and spry, maybe it's usual for them to eventually attempt to AK themselves? Or--since we'd want witnesses who could vouch for the body actually vanishing instantaneously--maybe they asked someone to AK them, or tried to commit suicide-by-Auror. (And found that they weren't dead, but even worse off, and then had to possess people until they finally managed to use one to destroy the Horcrux.)

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.