death to capslock

A lot of fanon assumes that because Lucius, Severus, and Bellatrix are very important during the second war, they must have been so during the first. Lucius was especially trusted and valued because Voldemort gave him the diary and told him so much about it. Similarly, Bellatrix was exceptionally trusted and important because he told her all about the Horcrux he gave her to guard. Severus was important because he got assigned a special mission at Hogwarts. But does any of that that hold up? ( Not very well, in my opinion. )

One bit in the memory of Voldemort's job interview that has always bothered me is Dumbledore's statement that he knows which Death Eaters are waiting at the Hog's Head because he's friendly with the local barman. Voldemort has just returned to Britain, no doubt planning terrible things...and Dumbledore immediately outs his brother as a spy? WTF? And then Voldemort continues to let his followers gather in the spy's pub?

I'm sure you could make a good story out of a Cold War-esque game where Voldemort is sending his followers in with false information to mislead Dumbledore while Dumbledore tries to filter out the misinformation to get at the real information they inadvertently reveal, and they both know the other knows... But it seems odd for Dumbledore to choose that option instead of trying to maintain his spy's cover first.

There's another possibility: maybe Aberforth wasn't the barman yet. Maybe the proprietor at the time was a Voldemort sympathizer, or at least a potential one, and Dumbledore wanted to oust them so he could put his own agent in place. Either he tricked or coerced them into telling him about the Death Eaters, or they wasn't involved and it was Willy Widdershins or his predecessor hiding under a veil who really reported to Dumbledore.

Voldemort shouldn't be so easy to manipulate that he immediately believed the proprietor was Dumbledore's agent. But the suspicion might have grown over time, no doubt nurtured by other "clues" Dumbledore helpfully planted, until Voldemort decided it was time the proprietor found a new job. (Possibly that job was "inferius.")

And he should have been deeply suspicious when Aberforth Dumbledore took over the pub, no matter how public the brothers' estrangement was. Aberforth couldn't just indignantly protest his hatred of Albus and all his works and give the Death Eaters a load of intelligence to prove his loyalties--that would be too much, too soon. But letting a few things slip over time, and griping about his brother just often enough to sound natural (well, it was--he just secretly hated Voldemort even more), and Dumbledore deliberately not acting on information Voldemort deliberately leaked via Hog's Head patrons to make it look like he never got the intel, might eventually convince them that he was on their side, not his brother's. Or at least that he was genuinely neutral.

A third possibility is that Aberforth was already the barman, but not yet Dumbledore's spy--again, it would really have been Willy Widdershins reporting on the gathering. Instead, this was Dumbledore's overly-complicated scheme to force Aberforth into becoming his spy. ("If I get Voldemort to suspect him, the means Voldemort will use to try to get the truth will convince Aberforth that Voldemort is dangerous and must be opposed. He's smart enough to realize that the best way to do this is to convince Voldemort that he doesn't trust me or report to me, then turn around and report to me. I'm a genius!") But that's even more convoluted and risky than most of Dumbledore's usual plans. I think it works more smoothly if Aberforth wasn't the barman yet, and this was Step 1 in Operation: Trench Coat Goat.

No wonder Aberforth is so cynical about how many people his brother is willing to sacrifice.

...and when he knew it.

I was reading through the comments to one of Terri’s old fics, and got sucked back into the probably-irresolvable tangle of questions about what Lucius was really planning during Chamber of Secrets. Piecing together some of the comments and one or two of my old speculations, we might at least be able to come up with a mostly-coherent hypothesis for one of those questions: what exactly did Lucius think the Diary was, and what did he think it would do?
( Read more... )

Kreacher tells us that Regulus joined the Death Eaters when he was sixteen. Which at first sounds unimportant. After all, Draco too (if we accept Harry’s prejudiced jump to that conclusion—but let’s do so for the sake of argument) took the Dark Mark at that age. And Voldemort seems to recruit most of his followers young, when they’re easier to manipulate.

Except… Draco wasn’t exactly a typical case, was he?( And he wasn't special in a good way. )

Another question occurred to me while pondering whether and when Tom had access to the Vanishing Cabinets connecting Hogwarts and Borgin & Burkes: did Tom know about all the school’s secret tunnels? ( Safest place in Britain, my foot. )

Trelawney probably made her prophecy sometime between the fall of 1979 and early spring 1980. Harry and Neville were born in July 1980. So why did it take Voldemort until October 1981 to even try to kill one of them? Was he waiting for a significant date? Were the Potters and the Longbottoms just that well-hidden?

Or maybe we aren’t giving Voldemort enough credit.

We readers are introduced to the prophecy in its entirety, years after Dumbledore and Voldemort have decided who the subject is. So it seems obvious that Voldemort should have targeted babies as soon as they were born at the end of July. But was it obvious then?

Dumbledore is the one who says—in 1996, with the benefit of hindsight—that there were only ever two possible prophecy-boys, and that Voldemort “chose” Harry as the greater threat rather than just, say, going after whichever baby he got access to first.( Does anyone here believe Dumbledore's every word without question? I didn't think so. )

After working out the reasons I think the Dark Mark can’t be visible on Death Eaters’ arms at all times (otherwise wizards would all be so incompetent that their society should have collapsed ages ago), I decided that exploring other aspects of the Mark’s functioning that might be interesting, or at least useful for fic writers.( Read more... )

We know that Tom’s appearance deteriorated during the same time period he was making Horcruxes. Dumbledore and Harry seem to believe this is cause and effect: you split your soul, and your face gets melty-looking.

Are they correct, though?( Read more... )

I was just looking back through PS/SS Chapter 1, thanks to all this fantastic discussion and the beginning of the new read-through for the book, and lo and behold, Secrecy pops right up:

"A fine thing it would be if, on the very day You-Know-Who seems to have disappeared at last, the Muggles found out about us all."

As I suspect most of us did, I had always read that as an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" comment. Wouldn't it be terrible to trade one problem for another?

But perhaps she was implying a connection. More like, "Wouldn't it be terrible if the guy who had been trying to destroy Secrecy finally disappeared, and then we managed to destroy it ourselves by celebrating his vanquishment? Oh, the irony!"

Book 1, chapter 1. The possibility was right there from the beginning.