...I don’t think it does. I think what we’re supposed to take from those passages, plus every other time Harry has made a promise, is that he doesn’t make promises with the intent to break them.
The latter, yes. The former, no. I think he’s basically honest, and as such the statement made in Parselmouth is not a lie, but he’s not going to feel himself bound by that promise in extremis.
(Unless Parseltongue is magically binding.) But yeah, of course I agree that Harry doesn’t consider keeping his word to be the be-all end-all. For instance, in the course of TSPE there were several times that Harry considered breaking that specific promise and confessing all, and I don’t think the fact that he promised not to was ever even brought up in his internal narration- the decisive factor was always the consequences to Quirrell if he did.
But I still disagree quite strongly with
Harry explicitly says earlier that he’d say he could be trusted with a secret, even if he couldn’t be, because it was never helpful to be ignorant of it. I think his statement there is actually a known lie
...I don’t think it does. I think what we’re supposed to take from those passages, plus every other time Harry has made a promise, is that he doesn’t make promises with the intent to break them.
The latter, yes. The former, no. I think he’s basically honest, and as such the statement made in Parselmouth is not a lie, but he’s not going to feel himself bound by that promise in extremis.
(Unless Parseltongue is magically binding.) But yeah, of course I agree that Harry doesn’t consider keeping his word to be the be-all end-all. For instance, in the course of TSPE there were several times that Harry considered breaking that specific promise and confessing all, and I don’t think the fact that he promised not to was ever even brought up in his internal narration- the decisive factor was always the consequences to Quirrell if he did.
But I still disagree quite strongly with