Nature vs. Nurture
There's no such thing as a partial soul. Barring the possessed, everyone has exactly one, no more, no less.
Souls are like holograms; given a part of one, it is possible to recover all of the information of the original.
But at a vastly reduced resolution.
A horacrux isn't just a bound piece of soul. If it were, it wouldn't keep the main soul from passing on; and it wouldn't have kept the memories of the past (although the diary might have been a special case, as a magical diary was designed to store memories).
When Tommy sliced his soul into parts, any of those parts could have become a ghost if they could somehow survive on their own. That's what the diary was trying to do, after all. By stealing some of Ginny's life force, and maybe a piece of her soul, he wanted to return to life.
What he would have done about the original piece of Tom is anybody's guess.
It's likely that the seventeen year old Tom would have followed the same general kind of life as his main soul had. At seventeen he had already selected his nom de guere and committed cold-blooded murder. The odds of him becoming a philanthropist were slim.
But one wonders what an obliviated Tom-Ginny-ghost would have done were he treated well.
The debate of 'Nature versus Nurture' had interested me for several reasons. My relatives seem to believe I was born bad, sort of a magical Calvinism. But they also justified their abuse by claiming it was to change me for the better.
It would be easy to claim they were lying to justify themselves, but I believe they were capable of believing both positions without seeing the inherent contradiction.
Some people have said that I had a similar upbringing to Tom; therefore the fact that I turned out different shows that environment isn't the key factor.
But was our upbringing similar? We were both orphans, abandoned by our parents, and abused by bullies where we lived. But Tom's bullies didn't care about him; they bullied several kids, it was somewhat impersonal.
I was my relative's only victim, and they hated me. Had Tom died at the orphanage, no one would have cared; they might even feel sorrow that their toy was broken. My relatives would have gone out to celebrate.
And it soon became apparent that people hated me in the magical world; Tom, the Death Eaters, their spawn, and Snape. No matter whom I really was or what I did, they would always hate me.
I don't see any similarity at all. Perhaps if I had learned from normal bullies that I had to fight my way to the top to be safe, then I might have learned to torture my oppressors; but the lesson I learned at home was that I would always be the despised one, so why scrabble to be number one?
It wasn't until fifth year, and the summers around it that I began to entertain the notion that adult society didn't deserve to be preserved. The magical government, their media, and the Hogwarts' faculty had all betrayed me to various degrees. They wouldn't leave me alone, and they wouldn't treat me fairly. The only way to avoid them taking advantage of me was to attack back.
I had seen enough events to be damaging to the ministry, the Death Eaters, and even the school. They only left me with two choices, complete acquiescence or retaliation. Dumbledore argued for stability, forgiveness, the greater good, and mercy; but under his plan, the attacks on me would never end; with retribution they might.
So was I inherently bad or driven by events when I established a group dedicated to overturning the leaderships of the government, the order, and Tom's fluffers?
I knew I was capable of ending someone's life without remorse, the deaths of Quirrell and Tommy-Ginny-ghost proved that. I'd never intended to kill anyone yet, but I was still very young. I never saw the sanctity in any of the rules or laws, as they were never used to protect me, only constrain me.
If it weren't for my friends and my instinctual kindness for strangers, I could have fairly been called a sociopath. If it weren't for my belief that a fair government could exist, I'd have been an anarchist.
I did have people on my side, people who rewarded good treatment with loyalty instead of abuse. But unlike the pre-Victorian Dumbledore, I didn't need a silly name for my group. Unlike the World War II pulp-fiction reading Tommy, I didn't need a nickname like Voldemort.
So I formed my own group to destroy, or at least damage the established groups. Only once I proved it would be painful to manipulate and oppress me, would people ever give me any consideration.
Hermione was something of a surprise. Throughout the whole S.P.E.W. business, she never once wavered in her support and belief in authority figures. I would never have thought that she would ever waver in her desire to support authority while she was trying to make small changes to improve the world.
But something in her snapped. I think that up until that point whenever she saw an example of corruption in authority, there was always someone else in authority that she could still rely on; therefore it wasn't the fault of the structure, but an isolated example.
However, when the headmaster smiled while saying that he knew I was abused as I grew up, but it all turned out alright in the end, at least for him, the man she revered most had fallen from his pedestal. And combined with the abuse of Snape and the hypocrisy of McGonagall telling us to submit to Umbridge's will; her image of the faculty was forever tarnished.
The only people in the ministry we ever saw in positions of influence were Fudge, Umbridge, Percy, and Barty Crouch Sr. (who forced a child into a deadly situation and never investigated how it arose). The only aurors we ever saw were either in Fudge's pocket or Dumbledore's, and therefore at least somewhat corrupt. The Prophet reporters were obviously corrupt, willing to make up lies to boost sales. And I needn't mention the leadership of the Death eaters.
Suddenly there wasn't anyone she could point to that was both praiseworthy and in authority. And we, her friends, soon realized that there was no one as fanatical as a convert. I seriously shudder to think what might have happened had she not had our friendship . Imagine her as a dark lord dedicated to wiping out purebloods; she's way too smart to make all of the mistakes that Voldy makes. No one would even know she was up to something until she'd blown up the Wizengamot.
Luckily she was our friend, and therefore not likely to start another race war.
If Hermione was our Ravenclaw in Gryffindor clothing, slightly braver than she was smart, then Neville was our Hufflepuff. Once we earned his loyalty, nothing would shake it. He wouldn't follow us blindly, he wouldn't follow anyone blindly ever again, but he was clearly strongly on our side.
Ron grew up also. Once he got over his "Gryffindor are best" attitude, which arose out of his "I must be right/best" stubbornness, he developed an introspective nature that still surprises all of us. Now he tends to overanalyze things to avoid looking the prat. Getting him to voice an unfounded opinion grew to be like pulling teeth. And although he was years behind us when it came to empathy through observing others, he was catching up. Sometimes he'd miss something obvious to everyone else, but with greater frequency he started to notice things before we did.
And while he still tended towards the idea that something must be either true or a lie, he was increasingly analyzing everything adults said to see if it were true or not.
While Ron learned to control his anger, his sister, Ginny, suppressed it. When something made her angry she became quiet, attentive. If it stopped in time, then all was fine, but when it became too much, she'd explode; magical curses, invectives, accidental magic and at the same time a detailed description of everything wrong with what made her angry. It was as if she became hyper-logical working out her argument, and then when it was time to deliver it, she added all the fury she'd stored.
And while she didn't hold a grudge when someone apologized, she wouldn't forget it until then. She could pick up a conversation a few days later and be just as angry as she was when she had left.
Since she was analyzing it before she exploded, she was invariably either correct in her anger, or understandably misunderstanding something, so her blowups rarely had any serious repercussions from the powers that be.
Luna was the oddball genius, completely unconcerned with the veracity of information and delighted in how the pieces fit together. False predicates lead her to bizarre conspiracy theories and beliefs in imaginary creatures. On the other hand, using more information than we could check, and with the majority of it being a matter of historical record, she 'proved' that the last piece of society that acted as a check to prevent society's slide into corruption, unfortunately changed sometime in November 1923; maybe October or December, but she was pretty sure it was November. It was her opinion that the whole thing needed to be swept away and rebuilt, and we were several generations behind schedule.
Luna once asked Hermione why Hermione cared whether or not Luna believed her wild fantasies. After all, if a person has a belief, then their argument was more likely to be tainted by feeling and opinion; it was the person arguing something they don't believe that is most likely to be the most accurate and logical. She then went on to prove that if the Easter Bunny did exist, Santa Clause couldn't possibly exist.
Then there was me. I went through a crisis of faith wondering who I really was. The obvious root of the problem was that everyone had expectations for me to live up to. In addition, I had Voldemort trying to influence my thoughts. Eventually my friends came through for me, first convincing themselves and then convincing me, that I was, and would always hopefully be "Harry".
We talked about the mental invasion, and found a way to reduce the effect of Tom to the level of a correspondent. As he was no longer able to send me visions, but still able to send me messages, we decided that his connection had been reduced to the same status as owl-post. Getting a letter from Tom "influences" me but doesn't "change" me.
Had Tom's spirit merged with Ginny then Ginny would have ceased to be Ginny, and someone new would be there. But as I was unchanged for the last decade and a half, I was who I grew up as, "Harry."
Furthermore it was pointless to wonder how I would have grown up if my parents lived. The person I would have been wasn't "Harry." I wasn't a construct because of the bizarre path my life had taken; the "Harry" who could trace his life back to infancy was the "True Harry." My friends were friends with the "True Harry" and didn't have any emotional attachments to whomever I might have been, or to what people thought I was.
It sounds simple to say, "I am he whom I am." But until I relearned that fact, I was conjuring up problems all over the place. I wanted to act, for example, the way I would have if Dumbledore hadn't manipulated me all those years, never realizing that that was not me. I thought that was how I should have been, but my friends showed me that I needed to act like myself, instead.
Because I grew up with it, Parsletongue was a part of "Harry" even though Tom gave it to me accidentally when I was a baby. From the moment I was old enough to become self-aware, it was part of me. It wasn't something foreign to be rejected; I could love it or hate it but regardless it was a part of me. And if I wanted to cut off my own nose, I could, but not under the excuse that it wasn't really my nose.
I had a radically different upbringing from Tom, yet I still formed an organization dedicated to looking into ways to reform or sweep away the status quo of the wizarding world; with the understanding that we'd try it if it weren't morally objectionable. Seeing as how Tom sees no moral objection to killing muggleborn, I'd have to say he did the same thing.
Yet Luna "proved," and even Hermione couldn't disprove, that the ministry was a lost cause even a generation before Tom. According to Luna, anyone who possessed a social conscience and was aware of the problem would have invariably formed such a group. She suspects the "Order of the Phoenix" was the first such group, but that they concentrated on building a framework first for an uncorrupt society, and then through connection to the existing government absorbed their rot.
Most of my group are willing to kill, but only those people oppressing others. Unlike Fudge and Voldemort, we can't condone killing the "occasional" victims that the other groups permit; and unlike Dumbledore we can't condone the level of forgiveness he seems to require. Ironically it was Dumbledore's organization, and its failures which allowed us to accept killing as possibly necessary.
We'd prefer a peaceful solution, but there are a few people that will continue to screw everything up as long as they live, and none of us have a difficulty with ending that. Voldemort, Bellatrix, Lucius Malfoy, Peter Pettigrew, Fudge, and Umbridge have all proven that if left alone they'll keep doing harm again and again.
Dumbledore fits that description as well, but he can be reasoned with, and he's due to die of natural causes soon, so it's neither ethical nor necessary to put him on the must-die list. We're pretty sure that there are more members of the Wizengamot that deserve to be on the list, but we're still investigating which ones are completely corrupt.
I'm sorry I go on and on comparing myself to Voldemort, but the prophesy said I am in some way his equal. And while I would never divide up my soul, I do acknowledge that he has a soul, however one-dimensional he's made it. We'll eventually fight and resolve the prophesy after releasing all of his other horacruxes.
Meanwhile we do have a connection through my scar, created when he tried to kill me as a baby. As they are my friends, I have allowed Luna and Hermione to study my link with Tom in greater detail than anyone else, and they have come to some startling conclusions. There would have been no way a killing curse could create a bond and transfer an ability, if he had not been trying to use my death to make his last horacrux.
We don't know what went wrong, whether it was his mistake or some protection on me. We think he was trying to imbue some Gryffindor artifact, using my soul to sheer off a piece of his soul for storage. Instead, his soul was completely expelled from his body and the piece of his soul he sheared off merged with mine.
I've been "Harry" since I was fifteen months old. I have a soul that is more complex than the average, and my parents include Voldemort, although to a much lesser extent than my biological parents; he gave me about one seventh of his original soul.
Did I turn out the way I did because of my nature or my environment? I've no idea. You decide.
.oOo.
Part of my intention was to start this arguing from the idea that Harry's upbringing was similar to Tom's, yet he turned out differently and end it with the idea that Harry's upbringing was different from Tom's yet he wound up similarly,
There's no such thing as a partial soul. Barring the possessed, everyone has exactly one, no more, no less.
Souls are like holograms; given a part of one, it is possible to recover all of the information of the original.
But at a vastly reduced resolution.
A horacrux isn't just a bound piece of soul. If it were, it wouldn't keep the main soul from passing on; and it wouldn't have kept the memories of the past (although the diary might have been a special case, as a magical diary was designed to store memories).
When Tommy sliced his soul into parts, any of those parts could have become a ghost if they could somehow survive on their own. That's what the diary was trying to do, after all. By stealing some of Ginny's life force, and maybe a piece of her soul, he wanted to return to life.
What he would have done about the original piece of Tom is anybody's guess.
It's likely that the seventeen year old Tom would have followed the same general kind of life as his main soul had. At seventeen he had already selected his nom de guere and committed cold-blooded murder. The odds of him becoming a philanthropist were slim.
But one wonders what an obliviated Tom-Ginny-ghost would have done were he treated well.
The debate of 'Nature versus Nurture' had interested me for several reasons. My relatives seem to believe I was born bad, sort of a magical Calvinism. But they also justified their abuse by claiming it was to change me for the better.
It would be easy to claim they were lying to justify themselves, but I believe they were capable of believing both positions without seeing the inherent contradiction.
Some people have said that I had a similar upbringing to Tom; therefore the fact that I turned out different shows that environment isn't the key factor.
But was our upbringing similar? We were both orphans, abandoned by our parents, and abused by bullies where we lived. But Tom's bullies didn't care about him; they bullied several kids, it was somewhat impersonal.
I was my relative's only victim, and they hated me. Had Tom died at the orphanage, no one would have cared; they might even feel sorrow that their toy was broken. My relatives would have gone out to celebrate.
And it soon became apparent that people hated me in the magical world; Tom, the Death Eaters, their spawn, and Snape. No matter whom I really was or what I did, they would always hate me.
I don't see any similarity at all. Perhaps if I had learned from normal bullies that I had to fight my way to the top to be safe, then I might have learned to torture my oppressors; but the lesson I learned at home was that I would always be the despised one, so why scrabble to be number one?
It wasn't until fifth year, and the summers around it that I began to entertain the notion that adult society didn't deserve to be preserved. The magical government, their media, and the Hogwarts' faculty had all betrayed me to various degrees. They wouldn't leave me alone, and they wouldn't treat me fairly. The only way to avoid them taking advantage of me was to attack back.
I had seen enough events to be damaging to the ministry, the Death Eaters, and even the school. They only left me with two choices, complete acquiescence or retaliation. Dumbledore argued for stability, forgiveness, the greater good, and mercy; but under his plan, the attacks on me would never end; with retribution they might.
So was I inherently bad or driven by events when I established a group dedicated to overturning the leaderships of the government, the order, and Tom's fluffers?
I knew I was capable of ending someone's life without remorse, the deaths of Quirrell and Tommy-Ginny-ghost proved that. I'd never intended to kill anyone yet, but I was still very young. I never saw the sanctity in any of the rules or laws, as they were never used to protect me, only constrain me.
If it weren't for my friends and my instinctual kindness for strangers, I could have fairly been called a sociopath. If it weren't for my belief that a fair government could exist, I'd have been an anarchist.
I did have people on my side, people who rewarded good treatment with loyalty instead of abuse. But unlike the pre-Victorian Dumbledore, I didn't need a silly name for my group. Unlike the World War II pulp-fiction reading Tommy, I didn't need a nickname like Voldemort.
So I formed my own group to destroy, or at least damage the established groups. Only once I proved it would be painful to manipulate and oppress me, would people ever give me any consideration.
Hermione was something of a surprise. Throughout the whole S.P.E.W. business, she never once wavered in her support and belief in authority figures. I would never have thought that she would ever waver in her desire to support authority while she was trying to make small changes to improve the world.
But something in her snapped. I think that up until that point whenever she saw an example of corruption in authority, there was always someone else in authority that she could still rely on; therefore it wasn't the fault of the structure, but an isolated example.
However, when the headmaster smiled while saying that he knew I was abused as I grew up, but it all turned out alright in the end, at least for him, the man she revered most had fallen from his pedestal. And combined with the abuse of Snape and the hypocrisy of McGonagall telling us to submit to Umbridge's will; her image of the faculty was forever tarnished.
The only people in the ministry we ever saw in positions of influence were Fudge, Umbridge, Percy, and Barty Crouch Sr. (who forced a child into a deadly situation and never investigated how it arose). The only aurors we ever saw were either in Fudge's pocket or Dumbledore's, and therefore at least somewhat corrupt. The Prophet reporters were obviously corrupt, willing to make up lies to boost sales. And I needn't mention the leadership of the Death eaters.
Suddenly there wasn't anyone she could point to that was both praiseworthy and in authority. And we, her friends, soon realized that there was no one as fanatical as a convert. I seriously shudder to think what might have happened had she not had our friendship . Imagine her as a dark lord dedicated to wiping out purebloods; she's way too smart to make all of the mistakes that Voldy makes. No one would even know she was up to something until she'd blown up the Wizengamot.
Luckily she was our friend, and therefore not likely to start another race war.
If Hermione was our Ravenclaw in Gryffindor clothing, slightly braver than she was smart, then Neville was our Hufflepuff. Once we earned his loyalty, nothing would shake it. He wouldn't follow us blindly, he wouldn't follow anyone blindly ever again, but he was clearly strongly on our side.
Ron grew up also. Once he got over his "Gryffindor are best" attitude, which arose out of his "I must be right/best" stubbornness, he developed an introspective nature that still surprises all of us. Now he tends to overanalyze things to avoid looking the prat. Getting him to voice an unfounded opinion grew to be like pulling teeth. And although he was years behind us when it came to empathy through observing others, he was catching up. Sometimes he'd miss something obvious to everyone else, but with greater frequency he started to notice things before we did.
And while he still tended towards the idea that something must be either true or a lie, he was increasingly analyzing everything adults said to see if it were true or not.
While Ron learned to control his anger, his sister, Ginny, suppressed it. When something made her angry she became quiet, attentive. If it stopped in time, then all was fine, but when it became too much, she'd explode; magical curses, invectives, accidental magic and at the same time a detailed description of everything wrong with what made her angry. It was as if she became hyper-logical working out her argument, and then when it was time to deliver it, she added all the fury she'd stored.
And while she didn't hold a grudge when someone apologized, she wouldn't forget it until then. She could pick up a conversation a few days later and be just as angry as she was when she had left.
Since she was analyzing it before she exploded, she was invariably either correct in her anger, or understandably misunderstanding something, so her blowups rarely had any serious repercussions from the powers that be.
Luna was the oddball genius, completely unconcerned with the veracity of information and delighted in how the pieces fit together. False predicates lead her to bizarre conspiracy theories and beliefs in imaginary creatures. On the other hand, using more information than we could check, and with the majority of it being a matter of historical record, she 'proved' that the last piece of society that acted as a check to prevent society's slide into corruption, unfortunately changed sometime in November 1923; maybe October or December, but she was pretty sure it was November. It was her opinion that the whole thing needed to be swept away and rebuilt, and we were several generations behind schedule.
Luna once asked Hermione why Hermione cared whether or not Luna believed her wild fantasies. After all, if a person has a belief, then their argument was more likely to be tainted by feeling and opinion; it was the person arguing something they don't believe that is most likely to be the most accurate and logical. She then went on to prove that if the Easter Bunny did exist, Santa Clause couldn't possibly exist.
Then there was me. I went through a crisis of faith wondering who I really was. The obvious root of the problem was that everyone had expectations for me to live up to. In addition, I had Voldemort trying to influence my thoughts. Eventually my friends came through for me, first convincing themselves and then convincing me, that I was, and would always hopefully be "Harry".
We talked about the mental invasion, and found a way to reduce the effect of Tom to the level of a correspondent. As he was no longer able to send me visions, but still able to send me messages, we decided that his connection had been reduced to the same status as owl-post. Getting a letter from Tom "influences" me but doesn't "change" me.
Had Tom's spirit merged with Ginny then Ginny would have ceased to be Ginny, and someone new would be there. But as I was unchanged for the last decade and a half, I was who I grew up as, "Harry."
Furthermore it was pointless to wonder how I would have grown up if my parents lived. The person I would have been wasn't "Harry." I wasn't a construct because of the bizarre path my life had taken; the "Harry" who could trace his life back to infancy was the "True Harry." My friends were friends with the "True Harry" and didn't have any emotional attachments to whomever I might have been, or to what people thought I was.
It sounds simple to say, "I am he whom I am." But until I relearned that fact, I was conjuring up problems all over the place. I wanted to act, for example, the way I would have if Dumbledore hadn't manipulated me all those years, never realizing that that was not me. I thought that was how I should have been, but my friends showed me that I needed to act like myself, instead.
Because I grew up with it, Parsletongue was a part of "Harry" even though Tom gave it to me accidentally when I was a baby. From the moment I was old enough to become self-aware, it was part of me. It wasn't something foreign to be rejected; I could love it or hate it but regardless it was a part of me. And if I wanted to cut off my own nose, I could, but not under the excuse that it wasn't really my nose.
I had a radically different upbringing from Tom, yet I still formed an organization dedicated to looking into ways to reform or sweep away the status quo of the wizarding world; with the understanding that we'd try it if it weren't morally objectionable. Seeing as how Tom sees no moral objection to killing muggleborn, I'd have to say he did the same thing.
Yet Luna "proved," and even Hermione couldn't disprove, that the ministry was a lost cause even a generation before Tom. According to Luna, anyone who possessed a social conscience and was aware of the problem would have invariably formed such a group. She suspects the "Order of the Phoenix" was the first such group, but that they concentrated on building a framework first for an uncorrupt society, and then through connection to the existing government absorbed their rot.
Most of my group are willing to kill, but only those people oppressing others. Unlike Fudge and Voldemort, we can't condone killing the "occasional" victims that the other groups permit; and unlike Dumbledore we can't condone the level of forgiveness he seems to require. Ironically it was Dumbledore's organization, and its failures which allowed us to accept killing as possibly necessary.
We'd prefer a peaceful solution, but there are a few people that will continue to screw everything up as long as they live, and none of us have a difficulty with ending that. Voldemort, Bellatrix, Lucius Malfoy, Peter Pettigrew, Fudge, and Umbridge have all proven that if left alone they'll keep doing harm again and again.
Dumbledore fits that description as well, but he can be reasoned with, and he's due to die of natural causes soon, so it's neither ethical nor necessary to put him on the must-die list. We're pretty sure that there are more members of the Wizengamot that deserve to be on the list, but we're still investigating which ones are completely corrupt.
I'm sorry I go on and on comparing myself to Voldemort, but the prophesy said I am in some way his equal. And while I would never divide up my soul, I do acknowledge that he has a soul, however one-dimensional he's made it. We'll eventually fight and resolve the prophesy after releasing all of his other horacruxes.
Meanwhile we do have a connection through my scar, created when he tried to kill me as a baby. As they are my friends, I have allowed Luna and Hermione to study my link with Tom in greater detail than anyone else, and they have come to some startling conclusions. There would have been no way a killing curse could create a bond and transfer an ability, if he had not been trying to use my death to make his last horacrux.
We don't know what went wrong, whether it was his mistake or some protection on me. We think he was trying to imbue some Gryffindor artifact, using my soul to sheer off a piece of his soul for storage. Instead, his soul was completely expelled from his body and the piece of his soul he sheared off merged with mine.
I've been "Harry" since I was fifteen months old. I have a soul that is more complex than the average, and my parents include Voldemort, although to a much lesser extent than my biological parents; he gave me about one seventh of his original soul.
Did I turn out the way I did because of my nature or my environment? I've no idea. You decide.
.oOo.
Part of my intention was to start this arguing from the idea that Harry's upbringing was similar to Tom's, yet he turned out differently and end it with the idea that Harry's upbringing was different from Tom's yet he wound up similarly,
