Voldemort's Strange Logic

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

I promise I'm still chipping away at Indestructible - I'm just in the middle of a frantic effort to complete my dissertation draft before the end of the semester. I should have another Indestructible piece up over the holidays though. Thanks for being patient!

Until then, I have a little question to toss out for consideration. It's been occupying my mind for a bit.

Question: Why did Voldemort believe that it was necessary to kill to gain the Wand's mastery?

Because he, of all people, should have known that it wasn't. If it were true, Albus Dumbledore would never have had it.

And he did believe, quite firmly, that Albus did.


*

Why did Voldemort believe that it was necessary to kill to gain the Wand's mastery?

He clearly did believe this, since he's willing to sacrifice Severus Snape's life to gain the Wand's mastery even though Severus has been (he thinks) the most useful of his servants and he shows a remarkable-for-him sliver of regret at having to lose the services of this "good and faithful servant."

This is the only time Voldemort shows regret for anything he does toward any of his followers. Severus is clearly exceptional among them in his mind by that point; he is the only one Voldemort ever treats with even minimal respect as well. He quite clearly weighed the loss of Severus' services carefully against the mastery over a period of time, before deciding that the latter was sufficiently important that having to kill his other tool was a worthwhile price to pay.

But why should he have believed that paying it was necessary in the first place? To the point of utterly neglecting to attempt to gain it via disarming first before moving on to the solution that deprives him of another useful tool? Instead, he seems convinced that, however much he would prefer to have Severus alive and useful, he can only gain the Wand by killing him. "It is the only way, Nagini."

Severus, he thought, had taken mastery of the Wand by killing Dumbledore, true.

But he knows firsthand of the existence of a living believed former master of the Wand. Gellert Grindelwald. The wizard Albus Dumbledore supposedly took mastery of the Wand from.

And then left alive, for Voldemort to go interrogate in person, and then kill himself, decades later. As we, and Harry, witness him doing. Here are the relevant bits of Harry's visions of the event (I've bolded what was italicized in the original):

Closing his puffy eyes, he allowed the pain in his scar to overcome him for a moment, wanting to know what Voldemort was doing, whether he knew yet that Harry was caught. . . .
The emaciated figure stirred beneath its thin blanket and rolled over toward him, eyes opening in a skull of a face. . . . The frail man sat up, great sunken eyes fixed upon him, upon Voldemort, and then he smiled. Most of his teeth were gone. . . .
“So, you have come. I thought you would . . .one day. But your journey was pointless. I never had it.”
 “You lie!”
 As Voldemort’s anger throbbed inside him, Harry’s scar threatened to burst with pain, and he wrenched his mind back to his own body [...]

As Harry spoke, his scar burned worse than ever, and for a few seconds he looked down, not upon the wandmaker, but on another man who was just as old, just as thin, but laughing scornfully.
“Kill me, then. Voldemort, I welcome death! But my death will not bring you what you seek. . . . There is so much you do not understand. . .”
He felt Voldemort’s fury, but as Hermione screamed again he shut it out, returning to the cellar and the horror of his own present. [...]

At once, Harry’s scar felt as though it had split open again. His true surroundings vanished: He was Voldemort, and the skeletal wizard before him was laughing toothlessly at him; he was enraged at the summons he felt – he had warned them, he had told them to summon him for nothing less than Potter. If they were mistaken . . .
“Kill me, then!” demanded the old man. “You will not win, you cannot win! That wand will never, ever be yours –“
And Voldemort’s fury broke: A burst of green light filled the prison room and the frail old body was lifted from its hard bed and then fell back, lifeless, and Voldemort returned to the window, his wrath barely controllable. . . . They would suffer his retribution if they had no good reason for calling him back. . . .

The fact that Gellert was still alive long after the duel in which Albus supposedly took mastery of the Wand from him leaves us with two basic options to consider:

1. Gellert spoke the truth. He never had mastery of the Wand - which, remember, he took by theft, not by any force, not even a disarming spell. Thus the entire line of supposed mastery from him onwards is empty.

2. Gellert lied, as Voldemort believed he was doing. He did have mastery of the Wand, and Albus took it from him when he defeated and disarmed Gellert.

If Gellert ever had mastery of the Wand, then killing its previous owner CANNOT be the only way that mastery is gained, since Gellert did not kill the previous owner. And if Albus ever had mastery, the same applies. He did not kill the previous owner either. This would fit with the actual course that we are supposed to believe the Wand's mastery followed: Gellert-->Albus-->Draco-->Harry. Assuming that, of course, anyone other than Death himself ever actually had mastery.

If killing the previous owner IS required, then neither Albus Dumbledore nor then Severus Snape could ever have had it. Nor Gellert himself.

Both of these things are quite basic and obvious inferences from the established fact that Gellert lived after the duel in which he supposedly lost mastery to Albus. A fact we KNOW Voldemort was entirely aware of.

(The possibility that killing is required, and Gellert had it - if Voldemort did not know how Gellert acquired it - but thus that Albus did not, would have been proven false to Voldemort when he himself killed Gellert and did not gain mastery.)

So how do we explain the curious fact that, after much searching and speculation and rumination upon the subject of the Wand's mastery, Voldemort quite clearly believed two obviously contradictory things: namely, that 1) killing a previous owner is "the only way" to gain mastery, and 2) that Albus Dumbledore took mastery of the Wand and left Gellert alive afterward?

Voldemort clearly believed that Gellert had mastery, and that mastery passed to Albus after their duel. This is the route that led him to believe Severus had it in the first place.

He also clearly believed that the owner's death specifically was what would pass the mastery on. He did not attempt to find out who disarmed Albus first, and did not speak to Severus of the latter's having 'defeated' or 'disarmed' Albus, or other such vague wording, but strictly of Severus' having killed him as the key fact. And he showed reluctance to kill Severus, overcome only by his having convinced himself after much thought that killing him was the sole way to gain mastery. Convinced himself so thoroughly of this, in fact, that he did not even pause to try disarming Severus before killing him, despite his reluctance at losing a useful servant.

(Had he showed no reluctance, had we not seen him talking himself into that conclusion and then demanding in a petulant rage that Severus confirm for him the necessity of his own death before Voldemort can bring himself to kill him, the entire problem would disappear. Severus' execution would simply be a slight, ah, overkill in the course of dealing with the matter in the simplest and most decisive manner. But that is decidedly not the situation as Voldemort sees it, given what we see.)

So how and why did he become convinced of this? He had recently been confronted directly with a living counter-example that utterly disproved either one or the other of the two central theses of his understanding of the mastery (depending on whether Gellert was lying or telling the truth). It doesn't matter which one was actually the one disproved; Voldemort's logic in thinking he must kill Severus Snape to gain the Wand depended utterly on both being true.

Impossibly.

And Voldemort, for all his flaws, is not actually stupid. Nor prone to under-thinking things. Quite the opposite. And he knows a great deal, supposedly, about the workings of dark magic.

So why, having clearly followed a trail that explicitly led him to believe that Albus gained mastery without killing Gellert, did he decide that the Wand's mastery from there could only be accomplished via killing?

What piece are we missing, here?

(Speaking Watsonianly, of course. Doylistically I think we can just attribute this to Rowling's lazy plotting and the utter lack of a competent editing job for DH. But I like at least attempting to explain what characters' reasons for things are...)

Comments

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

I fear there’s no way around this one. It’s just plain botched plotting.

The whole business about wand mastery would have made more sense if it had required something dramatic and permanent, like death, for wand mastery to change. But JKR couldn’t let her hero kill because that would tear his soul—though torture is perfectly all right. Downright gallant, in fact.

JKR needed an editor with status as co-author. If she’d had one, we wouldn’t still be sporking her decades later. Analyzing, yes; sporking, no.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Doyleistically I agree, yeah. But we've had some extreme theories here before, so I thought it might be fun to try this one... Maybe Harry's luck caused Voldemort to think an incredibly stupid thing that ultimately helped Harry? Anything?

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

Maybe Harry's luck caused Voldemort to think an incredibly stupid thing that ultimately helped Harry?

Hee. :-)

I think the within-universe reason must simply be that Riddle was a stupid idiotic villain. Which *is* supported by the text, after all. I have to disagree with ondwiramurs ('And Voldemort, for all his flaws, is not actually stupid') on that score.

[oryx_leucoryx]

I think the reason is that Voldemort feared that an Elder-Wand-enhanced Severus would be too much for him to handle, even if Severus wasn't holding the Elder Wand. If stealing a wizard's wand gives the thief control over all of the wizard's wands, perhaps all of a wizard's wands might share the power of their strongest wand? And I think Voldemort may have become aware of the first part through Lucius' experience if he didn't know that already.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

If stealing a wizard's wand gives the thief control over all of the wizard's wands, perhaps all of a wizard's wands might share the power of their strongest wand?

Interesting! Sharing power between wands is quite different from keeping track of a wizard's superiority/defeat tally :-) but it's still a lesser leap than Rowling's hand-waving the latter into existence from thin air in the first place. Nice.

But it still doesn't explain why Riddle didn't just 'defeat', rather than kill, Snape, does it? Once Snape lost his 'undefeated' status he would no longer be 'Elder-Wand-enhanced', right?

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. If he wanted to keep Severus' services as long as possible, and thought disarming might work, he should have tried it.

If he was just making certain and didn't care about the cost, he wouldn't have had a fit about it in front of Severus beforehand.

[oryx_leucoryx]

The way I see it, he wanted to do it without using a wand, because he believed the circumstances made Severus the better wand-user. And he wasn't going to poison him either, at least not in the conventional manner. Which left Nagini, and she doesn't do halfway jobs.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

That would help explain why he feels killing Severus would be worth it, but not his failure to try disarming him first, nor his apparently entirely sincere belief that the killing itself is what is needed to pass the wand on. Nor does it explain his emotional chaos over the idea of killing Severus in the first place.

Voldemort was deeply upset that he had to (so he thought) kill Severus for the Wand. He talked himself into thinking it "the only way;" dithered and delayed asking Severus pointless questions that Severus couldn't answer and that Voldemort already knew the answers to; got angry at Severus for being unable to explain back to him the situation that caused Voldemort to have to choose between Severus and Wand (i.e. his "trusted advisor" and "faithful servant" could not justify the necessity of his own murder to him, not knowing of the situation, but Voldemort kept demanding such an explanation of him even though he clearly knew far more than Severus - that's an emotional need, not an informational one, there); and then, despite his rage and reluctance, did not even try disarming Severus first but went straight for death.

Via PROXY - the only time he ever used a proxy to kill when he could have done it himself directly.

And then, the moment Severus was bleeding - not even DEAD yet - went icy cold and calm and walked right out, confident in his mastery. Once the deed was done. But he had to work himself up to doing it, first.

Contrast this with his treatment of Lucius when he took Lucius' wand earlier the same book, to correct the same deep-seated need to have a wand he's certain will beat Potter. Very different. And his easy cold-blooded ability to kill Charity, James, Lily, and others with the AK, and equally easy ability to kill his followers in a rage, also with AK. And the way he humiliates all his followers, even Bellatrix in the midst of her adoring devotion, except Severus.

Nowhere else does Voldemort compliment a follower un-mockingly, express even minimal or faux regret at doing something to them, use a proxy to kill them when he's capable of doing it himself, have to literally talk himself into killing one of them, or demand that they independently confirm the situation and justify their own harm to him before he does it. Only with the one single follower who anyone, even hyperbolically, ever speaks of as his "trusted advisor" and who alone he later speaks to with basic civility lacking any mocking or threats.

Some of this is going to come up in my Sev and Voldemort essay that's in the works, but essentially I do think that Severus was by DH emotionally a different ballgame for Voldemort (subconsciously) than anyone else, due to Severus having being in the position of teacher over him when he taught him how to fly. That's the only way that that Shack scene makes ANY sense to me at all.

It's the only thing that explains the bizarre reluctance to kill that Voldemort displays here and nowhere else.

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

I don’t see Voldemort having special respect for the much-younger Severus as his ‘teacher’. Any empathy is more likely to come from seeing Snape as a younger version of himself: a poor half-blood trying to make his way among the snooty purebloods. I think Voldie actually hates purebloods worse than he hates muggles, and takes great joy in exploiting the hell out of them, and making them grovel all-unknowing to a half-blood. I can imagine him seeing a lot of himself in Severus—almost like the son he doesn’t have, and doesn’t need because he’s immortal. But the desire for offspring is irrational, and if Voldemort were to imagine himself having a successor, who would be more natural than the Half-Blood Prince?

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

My only suggestion for Voldy using Naigini as his proxy is that perhaps he believed that since she was his horcrux and had a piece of himself in her, that he believed that made it the same as killing Snape himself.

Otherwise he is risking having to next kill his own horcrux to get control of the wand from her. Or even having the wand lose its power if it cannot be owned by a snake,

This is in direct contrast however with Voldy telling Naigini to 'hold' Harry because he must kill him himself.

So killing by Naigini makes even less sense.

All because she didn't bother to write a convincing scene where Harry would trust Snape enough to listen when told he must let Voldy kill him. Or possibly because she didn't want to reveal Snape's attachment to Lily until the very last moment. When she COULD have had Harry discovering bits of Sev all along the book - through Petunia or Remus or Hagrid or someONE!

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

It's like jana_ch said - 'plain botched plotting' on Rowling's part. On a scale which has us still counting the errors close to a decade later.

I've always thought one of Rowling's most horrible examples of her lazy writing, her tunnel vision ... her just not caring any more ... was in *how* Riddle killed Snape. Okay, say he believes that Snape must be killed rather than disarmed (which you are questioning here, but let's go with Riddle absolutely believing that). Riddle must kill Snape.

So what does he do?

Does he cast a Killing Curse? That's almost the only spell he's used up to this point in the book. He meets the housekeeper - a flash of green light. He meets Grindlewald - a flash of green light. Charity Burbage - a flash of green light. Gets mad at a goblin - a flash of green light.

But now, when he absolutely *has* to make sure that *he* *kills* someone - Snape - he doesn't make with the tried and true green light.

Instead he gives Snape a long and lingering death. AND then walks away while Snape is still alive. Classic six-year-old melodramatic bad writing. All so Snape is conveniently alive and can conveniently grant Harry the convenient memories that not only conveniently tell we readers what's happening - trying to support everything that went on in the last six books - but also conveniently tell Harry what he needs to know to do his 'job'.

Such horrible writing. Such LAZY writing. Pathetic.

But Riddle doesn't even kill Snape *by his own hand*. Something that would be *mandatory* to ensure that *he*, Riddle, gained mastery of the wand. No, he commands Nagini to do it. What's the wand lore rule on transference of mastery when a second agent, a proxy, does the deed? Don't ask Rowling, she wouldn't know. She didn't even bother to think about it. Laziness and tunnel vision.

But yes, all of that is assuming that Riddle had to kill Snape in the first place. Which you've now shown to be a flat-out error as well. Excellent.

What a horrible, horrible book. So sad that Rowling wasn't denounced as a hack author who couldn't properly finish what she'd started.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the fact that he uses a proxy - in my desperate attempts to make some watsonian sense of the MESS Rowling's laziness leaves us with - is one of the things that got me thinking about the scene.

It is hack writing, from the doyle standpoint. Very lazy, and inconsistent with the rest of the book's supposed logic.

I do think Voldemort did honestly BELIEVE he had to kill Severus. I just don't see any explanation WHATSOEVER for WHY he believed it.

There's NOTHING that suggests it. He has direct evidence that contradicts it. And he doesn't want to do it.

But he does it anyway??

[sunnyskywalker]

It might have worked better if he had set Nagini on Severus only to weaken him to ensure that Voldemort could disarm him afterward. Then JKR could still have given him a lingering death so he had enough time to pass on the memories, without the problem of whether killing by proxy can grant wand mastery.

Which leaves other problems, of course, but at least one fewer...

[sharaz-jek.livejournal.com]

Is it really proxy, though? I mean, we're told absolutely nothing of how wands recognise whoever's beaten up their last owner their True Masters, but it feels like the soul should have something to do with it.

Mind you, given this is Potter they probably have flesh memory or something crap like that.

[traverse.livejournal.com]

Surely Riddle cannot use the trusted AK precisely because he believes Snape to be the master of the Elder Wand against whom the wand may well refuse to work, thus defeating the object and making him look ridiculous to boot? He cannot simply strangle Snape or bash his head in either, because that would just be too Muggle. Hence the snake.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

That would be a nice theory/reason; it's a pity there's nothing in the text at all that suggests that Voldemort refrained from directly attacking Snape on those grounds.

Plus, if he *was* conscious that there was grave risk in attacking the master of the Elder Wand with that wand ... why did he do *exactly that* when he attacked Harry in the farcical ending? When Harry had *told him* "I am the master of the wand, you'd better be careful and think it out, dude"?

Voldemort's deliberate attack against a person calling himself the master of the wand shows that (a) that was *not* the reason that he'd refrained from killing Snape using the wand, and (b) he was stupid. :-)

[sunnyskywalker]

Oh, this is a puzzle. Um. Well, I'm usually game for extreme theorizing...

What exactly was Gellert Grindlewald infamous for? His war killed people, sure, but that doesn't seem to be enough by itself to get you remembered as a terrifying dark wizard. So probably he was known to be performing magic both dark (in the technical sense) and extremely dangerous and harmful (dark in the colloquial sense of "really bad"). He was expelled from Durmstrang for unspecified terrible "experiments;" presumably he wouldn't give such hobbies up.

The average wizard on the street might not have known exactly what all of Grindlewald's dark spells were. But Grindlewald's interest in immortality may have been known as a general thing.

Maybe Voldemort made a logical wrong turn and concluded that naturally, Gellert had made a Horcrux, and Albus had killed him--but since he used AK, it didn't destroy Gellert's body, and so Gellert could pop right back up again to surrender now that he'd become mortal AND lost his unbeatable wand.

So, assuming Voldemort doesn't know how Gellert acquired the wand, he makes the following connections: Albus kills Gellert and gains the mastery (but Gellert doesn't stay dead), then Severus kills Albus and gains the mastery. Clear line of succession with murder as the only method. Right?

And in all fairness to Voldemort, he might not have been too far wrong? Maybe Gellert did make a Horcrux. It would certainly fit his research interests. And maybe Voldemort even had evidence that he did. Come to think of it, maybe Albus really did AK him!

[oryx_leucoryx]

But Voldemort knew how Gellert got the wand. He viewed the entire scene by Legilimency from Gregorovitch. So he knew Gregorovitch survived the loss of the wand by many decades. He knew Gellert simply stole the wand from him.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Then he had even LESS reason to suppose he needed to kill Severus. TWO counter-examples.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Voldemort thinking Gellert had taken his own approach to conquering death...

That actually sort of works.

I don't think Gellert's interest in immortality was general knowledge - or Voldie would have learned much sooner what the symbol on his ring was, and Krum would have mentioned it - but if he came on a reference to Gellert having had that interest during his hunt for the Wand's trail, that would be enough.

I think you're on to something. ;)

Disarm versus Defeat

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Gellert wasn't just disarmed. He lost his war, his crusade, his followers (to death or disillusionment), and his freedom. All permanently. Able was I ere I saw Elba... there was no possibility of a comeback for him, and he knew it. Being disarmed by his first convert/first deserter was only the final blow. (Or, maybe the wand deserted him for Albus BECAUSE Gellert was already defeated--his cause lost, he himself utterly discredited. I wrote that happening to Dumbles in my fiction "Spirit of Vengeance.")

And stealing his most prized possession from a shopkeeper with no means or hope of ever getting it back IS a defeat.

But Severus? He's like Miles Vorkosigan, he doesn't know HOW to surrender. We saw that in SWM. Set on him four to one, does he give in like a sane person? He fights. Disarm him so he can't? He starts cussing you out verbally. Waterboard him so he can't do that either? He still struggles, and then he manages to get his wand back and hexes you in the face. While it's still four to one odds!

What could you possibly do to him that he'd ACCEPT as a defeat instead of as a temporary setback? Worse, he's learned since he was a teen to be patient and cunning, to bide his time before taking his revenge. Disarm him, and he wouldn't be all emasculated like Lucius. He'd bow his head properly and defer to his lord, and wait for the right opportunity to seize it back. If he could communicate with the Deathstick, he'd tell it to pretend to be Tom's until the right moment--the moment when its failure would be most fatal to Tom's plans....

No, sorry, the only safe thing to do if you're going to try to defeat Severus is to kill him. And even that didn't do it, as we all saw! Severus didn't let his own death (if he died) prevent him from prevailing over Tom, in the end. But Tom couldn't have appreciated that someone could have a goal larger than hir own survival, so he thought that death at least would be a surefire ultimate defeat.

Re: Disarm versus Defeat

[oryx_leucoryx]

So did Draco totally defeat Albus? Albus had no chance of retrieving the wand, but he still believed in his fight overall.

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

Another thought - why didn't Voldy think that perhaps the wand HAD lost its power simply because Gellert stole it, rather than killing for it.

After all, Gellert did not prove to be unbeatable. Albus DID 'defeat' him. But also Voldy dueled Albus in bk5 and was holding his own pretty well against that wand. Albus wasn't performing any better than he was assumed to perform before the wand. We were told in canon that he could do marvelous things with a wand during NEWT testing.

Of course Albus probably didn't want Voldy to know that he owned a supercharged wand, but just why does Voldy believe the wand will perform miracles for him? After all, if HE had the wand and was dueling Albus, HE certainly wouldn't hold back, so I doubt he would expect that Albus was doing so. And yet the wand didn't make Albus 'better' than Voldy during that duel. In fact in retrospect, I'm forced to consider that Voldy WAS actually a better dueler than Albus, considering how 'equal' they appeared in that duel.

[muisjelief.livejournal.com]

I imagine that even if the basic process for gaining wand mastery only revolves defeating someone, Voldemort would naturally translate this to killing that person. A related question is why he uses Nagini to kill Snape other than personally taking care of it. Maybe that's the same thing because of the soul-sharing, but what if the Nagini-fragment took ownership instead? How could he take that risk?

And why does Olivander create wands that operate according to this ownership principle anyhow. Doesn't he know better? After all a wand seems to consist of something like a phoenix feather, it doesn't have any intelligence, just magic resonance. For these wand mechanics to exist they need to be built into the wand or what?

Inconceivable?

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Am I imagining things? I thought you'd posted something new, opened it with glad cries, read enough to decide it was brilliant, got distracted & went to look at something else--and now I can't find it! Where is it??? I want, I want!!