Blessed explores this premise, as well as An Old and New World, which also explores the premise of a surviving Diary!Riddle.

 

Why would Voldemort be able to control Harry? Harry has his own soul, and it's that soul that is in the driving seat of his body. Voldemort's horcruxes being subservient to him does not logically lead to him being able to control other people's souls. The fragment of Voldemort in Harry has no control over the body or Harry.

On top of that, remember that Harry isn't a horcrux. We refer to him as a horcrux for convenience, but he's actually a quasi-horcrux. For a start, he wasn't a prepared receptacle. Secondly, the soul fragment in his scar displays none of the properties of horcruxes (ability to communicate, ability to influence people around it) other than tethering Voldemort to life. But most importantly, Harry simply doesn't fit the definition of a horcrux as Hermione described in DH. Harry is a soul with a body. A horcrux is a body with a soul.

 

This assumes Nagini doesn't have a soul. Is there anything in HP that points to animals not having a soul? They do have ghosts iirc.

If Nagini does have a soul, then Nagini the snake was in control of its body rather than the Horcrux and yet Voldemort had more control over it than is normal. The same logic would then apply to Nagini.

 

There comes a point, I think, where if you want to poke holes in a theory that's pretty backed up by multiple consistent parts of canon, you have to do more than posit "what ifs?".

"What if animals had souls, then you would be wrong" is so speculative that it seems to me to lack credibility as a counter-argument. I think, given that the weight of evidence points towards horcruxes being subservient to the master soul, the onus is on you to show that canon demonstrates that animals do have souls and therefore my theory breaks down. Especially as animals are not traditionally thought of as having souls (bad news kids: there's no doggie heaven).

 

Your argument is based on the idea that animals don't have souls. Mine is based on the exact opposite. I come to my idea based on a canon fact that animals do have ghosts, and I can't think of any canon fact that points otherwise. You base it on the traditional assumption in the real world, and have provided no canon argument to back it.

CoS:

My argument is not 'What if animals had souls', but that 'Canon likely points to animals having souls'.

Besides, your main evidence towards Horcruxes being subservient to the master is Nagini, who being a snake is already subservient which the horcrux might only have amplified. If you have any other argument that independently points to horcrux subservience, I'll concede my argument.

 

I don't have any "main" evidence. My evidence is a combination Nagini + Dumbledore's explanation + Diary!Riddle's own statement as to his identity + JKR's use of the phrase "master soul".

1. Ghosts aren't souls. Sir Nick tells us in OotP that ghosts are "imprints" of people, not the people themselves.

2. Even if ghosts were souls, the horses wouldn't mean much. Ghosts have clothes but that doesn't mean a shirt has a soul. The horses seem to be accessories to the riders, part of the same entity.

Regardless, I reject the suggestion that both arguments make equal assumptions. I don't need to assume animals don't have souls, because I'm simply pointing out multiple consistent canon events which all point to horcruxes not being agents independent of the master soul.

The issue of animal souls only becomes relevant once you bring up your specific speculative counter-argument, which runs against Dumbledore's statement, that Voldemort's control over Nagini was not because Nagini was a horcrux but because Nagini was a snake.

 

Well depend on when he have his body again i think. If he regain it inside CoS harry would still kill him and traumatised by the fact that he kill some one. Just a thought really.

 

Here you go, Taure.

During our discussion on this in the Yet Another Horcrux Thread, during my research I actually found a quote by JKR from PotterCast's JK Rowling Interview that implicitly supports your theory.

Quote:
[T]he pain he feels whenever Voldemort's particularly active is this piece of soul seeking to rejoin the master soul. When his scar is hurting him so much, that's not scar tissue hurting him. That's this piece of soul really wanting to get back out the way it entered. It really wants to ’ it entered this boy's body through a wound, and it wants to rejoin the master. So when Voldemort's near him, when he's particularly active, this connection [¦]was always there. That's what I always imagined this pain was.

So from this quote we can take that each soul shard will try to re-join with the Master!Soul, explaining why each soul shard attempts to attach itself to the person currently in possession of the Horcrux containing that soul shard (as seen in CoS and DH) as it wants to be whole again.

 

While I appreciate the intent, I don't think that helps my theory for the same reasons as explained above -- Harry is not a horcrux and the soul fragment in his scar does not behave like one. This is just another example of how Harry is not a horcrux. We know for a fact that horcruxes do not try to merge with the master soul, because that only happens when the master soul feels remorse.

 

Harry is definitely a horcrux. It says so in the books.

"You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make."

Albus Dumbledore - Deathly Hallows - Page 709

 

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2...-part-1-of-pottercast-s-jk-rowling-interview/

 

You had me convinced at "master soul".

That said, I don't like JKR saying that Dumbledore's explanation was one of convenience. Dumbledore is the one authority for obscure HP Magic in canon.

 

Dumbledore was trying to get Harry to sacrifice himself. I don't think going into the minutiae of obscure magic theory was the point he was trying to make. It was the final huzzah. And I think Dumbledore would know that Harry would want to know what to do to end the war, even if it isn't exactly right, rather than an exact definition of a quasi-horcrux.

 

My headcanon was always centered around there being no Master!Soul I always assumed that the reason the Horcruxes didn't act like Voldemort as he was in Albania etc; was because they were contained within the objects. Properly prepared to house the souls for eternity.

So that you could use the horcruxes to bring Voldemort 'back' as it were in place of merely rendering him unkillable due to the inability to completely destroy his soul.

The actual Rowling statement answers some of the things I always found odd around the Horcruxes.

 

No. Harry had already sacrificed himself by that point.

In any case, that wasn't what I meant. For most of the obscure magic in canon, we take Dumbledore's explanations at face value which is a problem if there's a possibility that they're inaccurate.

 

Not inaccurate so much as imprecise. Magic is complicated, you can't expect a full explanation of everything, it would take up too many pages, break the flow of the story, and be boring.

 

It is inaccurate though. If JKR defines a Horcrux as something that can't be made intentionally and Dumbledore calls Harry an unintentional Horcrux, it is not imprecise, it is inaccurate.

There was no need for a full explanation, or any kind of explanation at all. There was simply no need to call Harry a Horcrux. Dumbledore, however, clearly calls Harry a Horcrux:

"‘You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make."

In any case, I think this is getting off topic, so I'll stop here.