(Discussion split from 'How Manipulative is Dumbledore Really?'

To discuss: is it possible to imprison Voldemort instead of needing to kill him outright? If it is, how would you go about it?)

Then obliviate the fuck out of him, feed him to a dementor, soak him in draught of living death, before letting a basilisk stare at him through a mirror. And then lock him up in a fidelius protected cell and obliviate the secret from the secret keeper.

It's not like magic doesn't provide enough solutions.

Harry dying doesn't help anything, as Voldemort is every bit as hard to defeat with or without Horcruxes.

 

What part of "he's not going to stand there waiting for you" don't you get?

Not to mention your point on Harry is bordering on dumb. Voldemort is hard to kill even without his Horcruxes, but it's actually doable. On the other hand, your chances of ending him while Harry is alive are exactly zero. And no, postponing the problem for future generations to deal with is not a solution.

 

It's a little bit headcanon, a little bit vaguely remembered implication, but I've always thought that one of the main reasons Grindelwald stayed locked up was remorse for his actions (at least in so far as they hurt Dumbledore).

 

What part is there to get? It's going to be damn hard to hit Voldemort, but you need to hit him to defeat him, horcruxes or not. When you do hit him, it doesn't matter if you hit him with a killing curse or a first year petrificus totalus, because he'll be down and out of fight with one hit in either case. Magic just is that OP.

When you have him contained (you know, with magic), you only need to wait for Harry to die a natural death and you can finally cut his head off. No need to kill Harry. Meanwhile you can fix the real problem, and weed out the Death Eaters.

 

It's quite charming that you think a wizard of Voldemort's calibre could be contained so easily. Where exactly could they put him that would be secure enough to hold him? Azkaban? He commands the dementors. The Ministry? He has supporters there. Nurmengard? There's a possibility, but we're discussing a man who made the most feared prison in the world act like there was a revolving door on it. I wouldn't trust anything to keep him under lock and key.

 

Azkaban is a laughably terrible prison security-wise (as far as we know). Even if the dementors were to remain loyal to the Ministry, they're blind, deaf and dumb. It doesn't take a genius to fool them, and that's if you want to go for the subtle route and not the "charge in shooting off Patronuses and Reductos" route.

Like, Azkaban's whole defense as a prison is that normally no-one is crazy enough to break in, not out. Given motive (free your master!) and appropriate recklessness (who cares if people know there's been a breakout, you're wanted anyway) any semi-powerful wizard or competent group of wizards could break out half of Azkaban by themselves. Hell, End of PoA time-confident Harry could do it, or any three or four members of the DA.

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Erm... what? I have no clue where you got all of that from.

Actually, we know that Azkaban is a fairly secure prison, seeing that there were only two people who successfully escaped, and both of them were special cases (Sirius with a secret Animagus ability and Barty Crouch Jr due to high level corruption). The only reason Azkaban had the breakouts was because Fudge, being the fool he was, ignored Dumbledore's advice to replace dementors. If he had listened, none of the death eaters would have been able to break out.

Actually, canon shows us that Dementors are quite sentient. They're intelligent enough to make decisions that benefit them (like by siding with the Ministry while they fed them with prisoners, and then switching sides with Voldemort). We know that they can communicate, since they told ministry officials what Sirius was saying in his sleep in PoA.

Again, I'm not sure where you got this from. As stated above, Sirius was a special case in that no one knew he was an animagus, and the only reason Death Eaters were able to escape was because Fudge was an idiot.

No. I think you're forgetting that prisoners don't have their wands when they're in Azkaban. In such a case, how would they even be able to get out of their prison cells, much less escape Azkaban altogether?

 

Don't forget that as of the last few weeks, Word of God is that wandless magic is a thing. Rare, but possible. So simply saying the prisoners don't have wands isn't enough anymore.

 

Not a problem, because:

 

As I said earlier, force feed him Draught of Living Death (from the first year potions textbook) and you can keep him safely contained in a closet. Or you could amputate his arms and legs and use him as a garden decoration. Or you might try the Lestrange-Longbottom method and hit him with the Cruciatus until he's nothing more than a vegetable.

It's magic, you know.

 

And how did they break out? People on the outside.

You'll notice I said nothing about their sentience. They're canonically blind, although if they were the ones to inform the Ministry of Sirius' sleep-talking deaf and dumb may be off the menu. As far as we know their senses are limited to emotions and souls.

It's like you didn't even read my comment. You know, the one where I go on and on about Azkaban being secure because people are not crazy enough to break IN.

 

Voldemort is one of the most powerful wizards of all time, and he commands fear amongst the populace on a massive scale. You really think nobody has a vested interest in breaking him out of Azkaban?

People like the Malfoys went back to their old ways and forsook Voldemort because they thought him dead. Can you imagine how much more 'loyal' they'd be if they knew he could return from any death? Even if he was imprisoned in a horrific place, the sheer potential reward from freeing him would tempt even those with more self-aligned interests, to say nothing of the sort of things the likes of Bellatrix would do. Don't forget that the Lestranges tortured the Longbottoms to get information on Voldemort's whereabouts, there's plenty of avenues for ensuring his escape if they actually knew where he was.

Voldemort had practically won both of the wars he started, and in each case he was defeated moments away from victory by the rarest of events, not exactly something to count on in the long term.

Edit: Sorry, got mixed up, you weren't arguing to hold Voldemort in Azkaban. My bad.

 

Yeah, my point is that it takes only two or three competent people on the outside to break him out, barring the nonsense that Dark witches/wizards can't cast Patronuses (if fucking Umbridge can do it I'm pretty sure even the devil can). Take a Calming Draught, get someone to hit you with a Cheering Charm, hold on to your chocolate, and you're off to the races.

And people breaking out Voldemort aren't going to be very concerned with subtlety or sneaking, since the whole of Britain will probably know by morning anyway. Someone like Bellatrix would probably just reduce the entire row of cells to rubble to get him out.

Of course, in the canon universe Kingsley sort of sacked them when he was appointed Minister. But then you're back to square one with any alternative guards most likely not being powerful enough to contain someone of Voldemort's power, especially if he isn't being drained of his will/magic by Dementors.

You could always wait for Harry to die a natural death I suppose, but that's an incredible risky gamble. For one thing, we don't know how Horcruxes affect living containers, and I highly doubt Voldemort would have made Nagini a Horcrux if she was just going to naturally die in ten to twenty years. For another, we don't know how a Horcrux would handle a non-violent death that did not destroy its vessel. You run the risk of Harry's soul moving on and leaving Voldemort's soul fragment in a functioning if aged human body.

...wait, did Harry give up immortality to defeat Voldemort?

 

Again, the break out wouldn't have happened if Fudge wasn't an idiot and actually listened to Dumbledore's advice. The problem wasn't security, it was incompetence.

You said "it doesn't take a genius to fool them." Seeing that Dementors canonically can communicate and sense their surroundings very efficiently, the implication goes to their intelligence.

They were.

No human guards are ever mentioned to be stationed at Azkaban, so we know these are the Dementors.

Why would they need additional senses, when they are able to use emotion well enough to find people even under invisibility cloaks? In the DH, the Death Eaters use Dementors to try to find the trio under the invisibility cloak.

I admit that I read that part wrong. Apologies for my mistake. However, I think you're underestimating the Dementors. They actually are very efficient guards (except that they do not have lasting loyalty). As we know from PoA, just being near one Dementor can cause all happiness to drain, which would make producing Patronuses very difficult. Even the trio struggled with producing Patronuses in their presence in DH. Now multiply these effects by hundreds, and that's how much resistance you'll get while trying to break in.

 

And Dumbledore's warning was that the Dementors would defect. That is, like, the very definition of a security hole, using creatures that are naturally Dark minions as security.

Because yes, they're not very [humanoid] intelligent on account of being first of all blind and second of all pretty much only concerned with feeding off emotions. It doesn't take a genius to fool them because blindingly obvious tricks get past them on account of them being, well, blind. Even the most incompetent of first years with a pair of eyes in their head would have noticed things like the big black dog lounging around in Sirius Black's cell, or that the body they were burying was not in fact Barty Crouch Junior. I mean, when you can't even recognize/properly identify your own prisoners...

See above about how poor their emotional sense actually is. It's only "good enough" because they're amoral creatures; they don't care what they find, as long as it's got emotions and/or a soul. They can't tell the difference between a dog and a deteriorated human mind. They can't tell the difference between one diminished human mind and another. They apparently can't recognize genders.

...which was immediately followed by Seamus, Ernie and Luna driving them off, so I'm not sure what your point is (except maybe that the trio isn't as good at Patronus-casting as they think?). And that attack involved hundreds of dementors, so unless you're saying there are tens of thousands of dementors at Azkaban I'm not sure what "multiply these effects by hundreds" is supposed to mean.

 

Taken to PM to prevent further thread derailment.

 

Come back!

Feel free to PM me in future if you notice a thread is getting off-rails. I'm happy to make new threads.

 

The PM that I've sent:

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The point is that Azkaban is generally a secure prison, with only two known cases of successful escape before the war happened. Voldemort is an exception, since the Dementors by their nature would side with him, hence Dumbledore's warning. But other than that, we never hear about there being any breaking in or out of Azkaban. Sirius was known to be the "first" successful case of escaping Azkaban (although it was actually Barty) over the hundreds of years Azkaban was used. From this, we can know that Azkaban is generally a safe place.

Intelligent enough to communicate and detect invaders is literally all they need. I don't see why any more is needed. Again, they're not blind - they're in tune enough to find people under the invisibility cloak. As stated earlier, Sirius and Crouch were special cases. Sirius had a rare ability that no one knew about (Animagus) and the only reason Barty got out was because of high level corruption.

When they are guards, and their only objective is to keep prisoners in, and invaders out, greater sentience isn't needed. They don't need to recognize genders because it's irrelevant - If there is an invader, they administer the kiss. Simple.

First, I was referring to the effect of one dementor, which is then magnified hundreds of times in Azkaban. Second, there weren't "hundreds" of Dementors in that attack.

First, "hundred" not "hundreds." Also, the "hundred" here obviously isn't literally 100. Harry obviously didn't count every single one of them. Rather, it's an expression used to mean "a large number," which is also probably exaggerated because Harry at this point is not a very reliable narrator with descriptions, seeing that he's under the effects of the Dementors.

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Chaosattractor has responded to this PM, but I won't upload that since I respect her privacy. If she wants to post her response, it's up to her. But since this argument is going nowhere and we're going in circles, I'll just stop posting after this and let her have the last word (if she wants to).

 

There's no real evidence to support either of those arguments about living Horcruxes. A natural death would result in the death of the physical body, and there's definitely no evidence that the Horcrux could somehow reanimate it. If the Horcrux stuck around after the body's death, it would be easily dealt with via cremation. There's no evidence of how the Horcrux would have affected Harry's longevity, but there's no a priori reason to suppose that it would somehow grant his physical body immortality. Even if it somehow did, it could be handled by Harry swearing an Unbreakable Vow not to live past some arbitrary age, say 200.

I think you're overstating the risk of keeping Voldemort around as well. Keeping him incapacitated using the methods discussed, under a Fidelius with a randomly selected Secret Keeper (if possible a muggle who is then Obliviated) would make him next to impossible to find. Even if he were recovered, a Dark Lord isn't very intimidating if he's spending his days practicing his autographs with Gilderoy Lockhart.

 

Of course it's possible to imprison Voldemort. Ingredients:

1 dimension hopping Harry Potter

1 Neville Longbottom

1 horcrux

1 prison device (built with the best dwarven crystal)

a bunch of jellyfish

20 years

Or am I the only one treating ABC as 8th book headcanon?