For one, it would mean he could never talk about his work “as himself”, e.g. on Facebook or Reddit, unless he wanted to set up and constantly use dummy accounts, which is both time-consuming and sometimes in violation of site T&Cs.
Velorien
Karma: 2,168
But then, Dumbledore seemed to think, after listening to all the prophecies, that the end of the world was inevitable, and that the optimal goal was not about preventing it.
It’s also the only explanation we have for Voldemort’s assertion in 108 (I think) that he has further use for “her, or rather a certain part of her”.
A part surely overwhelmed by the legacy he left behind as Voldemort, which includes lots of orphans and lots of people whose own positive legacies he cut short by killing them.
If you’re going to count legacy as part of one’s self, then anyone who kills people for any reason is going to end up in the karmic negative very very quickly, because they are taking away other people’s legacies, and their potential children’s, and their potential children’s, etc.
Voldemort knows that Harry understands game theory, and has no incentive to drop his wand if he ends up dead and cannot save everyone anyway. If he orders Harry to drop his wand, Harry might refuse, and then he has to kill him before being able to extract information out of him.
There are two possible answers to this argument.
1) If Harry is refusing to give up his wand, this suggests that Harry thinks that with the wand he has a non-0% chance of escape. In that event, getting the wand off him takes priority over questioning.
2) Expelliarmus. One of Voldemort’s 36 followers must know it, and if not, frankly Voldemort could probably teach them on the spot.
Voldemort knows Harry has knowledge he has not, but this doesn’t necessarily mean Harry knows spells or has the magical power required to cast strong enough spells to harm him.
“Power he knows not” strongly implies the ability to do or achieve something, rather than abstract knowledge with no immediate applications.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a plausible excuse for the wand thing except “Voldemort was careless”, and carelessness under such conditions simply hasn’t been part of his character at any point until now.
Word of God says that the plot of HPMOR was set in stone since the beginning. If there was some better reason for Harry to face the Final Exam with a wand in his hand, Eliezer would have known about it from the start, and could have seeded all the necessary foreshadowing for it way in advance.
Last time we heard, Voldemort had sent her to “a safe place to recover her strength”. We do not know whether this is before or after he removed her arm, or whether she survived the process. Presumably, without her arm she no longer bore a Dark Mark, and hence wasn’t summoned to the graveyard.
I guess I misread your tone. The way you put “sometimes that involves people dying” immediately after “you rejoice” made it seem like the former was an afterthought.
You’re right, “sociopathic” was perhaps a poor choice of words. “Cheerfully unempathic” would have been a better way of saying what I was thinking.
I think it’s the tone and the context that does it for me. It seems less “worthwhile tradeoffs where part of the cost is someone’s death exist” and more “I don’t care if people die as long as I get enough out of it”.
I’m not convinced. I agree that worthwhile tradeoffs where part of the cost is someone’s death exist, but the way that’s framed in the comment suggests that people dying is irrelevant to whether one rejoices over a worthwhile tradeoff or not. This contrasts heavily with, say, Harry’s view, which is that a necessary death is still a tragedy.
But that isn’t relevant. It doesn’t matter what Voldemort’s assessment of Harry’s abilities is. He knows three things:
1) Harry has unknown powerful secrets
2) Prophecy says Harry has power Voldemort knows not
3) Any failure on Voldemort’s part to stop Harry could be all it takes to end the world
When you know for a fact that you are missing information, and you know for a fact that you can’t afford the consequences of failure, you take every step you can think of to ensure success. Voldemort has already shown that he knows this with his plan of how to kill Harry.
The step of disarming Harry is both obvious and carries no costs to Voldemort, so it should be one of the first steps he takes.
Re-reading the story, I see a lot of evidence that Dumbledore didn’t know that Quirrell was Voldemort. For example, Chapter 62:
You are no longer taking lunches in Diagon Alley, even with Professor Quirrell to watch you. Your blood is the second requisite Voldemort needs to rise as strong as before.
He refers to the same issue when talking to Bones. It would make no sense for him to do so if he believed that Voldemort had constant access to Harry and countless opportunities to “accidentally” obtain his blood (as indeed happened with the newspaper).
You can’t have it both ways. Either Harry is dangerous enough to justify the full suite of precautions, or he’s an idiot, in which case what you need isn’t “the full suite of precautions minus disarming”.
To follow up on this, the sad ending wouldn’t be the sad ending because Harry had to sacrifice himself to win. It would be the sad ending because Harry failed, as a result of not being able to think of a clever enough way to stop Voldemort (reflecting our own failure to do so in the exam).
That’s fair for Muggle schools. But Hogwarts went through a huge wave of orphanings a mere ten years ago during the Wizarding War, at which time McGonagall was already a Hogwarts teacher (likely in the same position). She should have as much experience dealing with such things as any educator can.
Sure you can. Life is full of trade offs. When the tradeoff is sufficiently in your favor, you rejoice. Sometimes that involves people dying.
That’s… more than a little sociopathic. You seem to be saying that the only value of people’s lives to you is instrumental: if you benefit from someone’s death overall, then their death is a good thing.
I fail to see how your proposal constitutes justice. Neville gets bullied by Slytherins. Lesath gets bullied by Gryffindors. These two facts do not cancel each other out; they just make the world a worse place twice over.
In story, there was only a few minute or so between the making of the unbreakable vow (which did require Harry to have his wand) and Harry using it to kill the Death Eaters. Voldemort makes the “You have 1 minute to tell me your secrets or you die” offer immediately after the vow, after all.
Not so. At T-20 seconds, Harry starts verbally stalling while he keeps working on the transfiguration.
It also would have shown weakness in front of the Death Eaters.
After he’s already given them lengthy and detailed instructions about all the many different kinds of spell they must be ready to cast at this naked 11-year old boy at the first sign of trouble?
And Voldemort probably couldn’t imagine anything Harry could have done. He’s way too young for any really dangerous magic, despite his skill. Voldemort doesn’t know about nano-wires and all that stuff. It’s probably unimaginable for him that so little magic could have such a big effect.
He knows that the Harry is a walking extinction event waiting to happen, and that Harry knows secrets powerful enough to be worth learning (potentially even powerful enough to end him—cf. “power he knows not”). Indeed, these are the two facts motivating his actions immediately prior to his defeat.
If he had demanded that Harry drop his wand, and Harry had refused, he would have been forced to kill him without learning any of his secrets.
Why? Surely at least one of his Death Eaters knows Expelliarmus.
By that point, the story will have propagated far enough that people probably won’t believe her even if she denies it, and it’ll just make her look crazy.
Plus trying to reveal that Harry was lying will damage his reputation and sabotage his efforts to cure death etc. just as they’re gearing up.