Harry Potter and the Death Cult

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

So recently I was reading this (actually really excellent) Pokemon fanfic, which appears to have been an attempt to iron out a rather confusing Pokedex entry. Basically, the fanfic revolves around the idea that a certain species of Pokemon has a custom that all young male members of the community must kill their own mothers as a rite of passage. Anyone who can’t do it is disgraced and treated as vermin for the rest of his life- failure to kill your own mother is considered a sign of despicable cowardice. The more I thought about this fic, the more I realized that there’s a similar parallel in Harry Potter- except that instead of the message being, “If you’re truly a real man and worthy of belonging, you’ll kill your own family on instruction,” it’s “If you’re truly brave, a true Gryffindor, you’ll kill yourself on instruction.”
 
In Harry Potter we see characters committing ritual suicide on just about any pretext. We see people kill themselves to protect their family (Lily and James), to escape a bad boss (Regulus), as a strategic ploy (Dumbledore), and even to vanquish their enemies (Harry). Granted, it’s quite possible that these people were better off dead than otherwise, given the circumstances; but still, it does seem to be a pattern.
 
Consider the fate of Lily Potter nee Evans. She dies to protect her son, and in doing so, grants him special love protection. Now, it’s stressed again and again that Lily’s sacrifice was so noble and granted Harry the protection specifically because Voldemort offered her a choice about whether or not to live. And it was noble of her to die for her child- but it also established a pattern that the books’ attitudes towards death reinforce: if you’re in big enough trouble, trouble you can’t escape from any other way, die. Preferably as prettily and dramatically as you can manage.
 
Then there’s Regulus. There was another essay on here in which someone, I think it was Terri Testing, puts it out there that Regulus’s search for Slytherin’s locket was not to have the locket destroyed, but to, effectively, commit ritual suicide rather than serve Voldemort any longer. And for this the heroes emphatically reward him.
 
Now consider Peter Pettigrew. Peter Pettigrew is easily one of the most confusing characters Harry Potter ever gave us. He’s pretty much the only Gryffindor who’s never presented in a remotely positive light (at least not once his identity becomes known). The main reason given for this (both by the author and her fans) is that he’s a coward who betrayed Lily and James rather than be killed by Voldemort (granted, we don’t actually know how much of this is true, since the evidence of his cowardice is rather conflicting and since we never get his side of the story- just the main characters’ assumptions). Tellingly, when Sirius confronts him, he specifically goes out of his ways to say that, had Sirius been in his situation, he would have willingly died rather than betray his friends (the fact that Peter easily would have been better off dead than with Voldemort is largely beside the point here, since it’s only DE’s, and never anyone who could be counted among the “good guys” who serve Voldemort out of fear).
 
And then there’s Phineas Nigellus, who makes the statement about Slytherins choosing to save their own necks. This in and of itself is taken as reason to regard Slytherins as contemptible cravens- they won’t kill themselves for any greater good they can come up with (and you could argue that one of the downsides of “ambition” is that you’re motivated to stay around and wait for things to turn in your favor, rather than the Gryffindorish “bravery” of permanently ending your problems through death).
 
To return to the fanfic I read earlier, like most pieces of media dealing with death cults from the inside, the fanfic mostly just illustrates how things are done- it doesn’t take a stance on the morality of the characters’ actions, and the narrator is genuinely conflicted about killing someone he loves so much- but not enough to stop himself from doing it. What makes Harry Potter’s death cult so freaky is that it really does seem as though suicide is treated, not merely as a cornerstone of wizarding culture but *objectively good and righteous.* Throughout the series we meet literally no suicide bombers among the villains (despite the fact that the DE’s are terrorists, and terrorists in the modern world are notorious for suicide bombing). No, the only suicide bomber we meet (so to speak) is Harry Potter- who’s supposed to be the hero we’re meant to admire!
 
So, yeah.

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

Given her upbringing, just finding out that Muggles even had places to care for orphans where she could go must have taken some doing. She was in a strange city, in a strange culture, and due to her appearance, poverty, and condition might not gotten unfriendly receptions from many people she asked for help, but she persisted until she found somewhere Tom could be safe and cared for.

And I still have no idea why Dumbledore thinks she chose to die. Mrs. Cole surely would have mentioned if Merope died for no apparent reason, so it probably looked like a normal fatal childbirth. Could your average witch on the street stop herself from hemorrhaging while, you know, hemorrhaging and starving and not being good at doing magic under pressure in the first place? That has nothing to do with courage. In the "didn't try to save herself" contest, Lily seems more culpable to me; you'd think having emergency Portkeys to different places all around the house just in case would be a gimme, and she had the time, talent, and energy to set that up, but was there a Portkey in the nursery, or in a pouch around her neck?

I wonder if this is some weird unconscious reaction to her own mother's death. I'm sure if you asked her, she knows that her mother couldn't have helped dying of a fatal condition, but feeling abandoned anyway is a common human reaction. I don't know what Dumbledore's excuse is, though. Unless he's deliberately picking the interpretation he thinks Harry should hear for some reason.

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Don't forget, poor widdle Alby wost his mummy, too. Kendra selfishly allowed herself to be killed by her nutty daughter, so poor Alby was stuck caring for his younger siblings, instead of going off and having the Brilliant Career he was obviously fated for before that.

Come to think of it, there are a lot of instances in the Potterverse of parents dying for or because of their children. The rate is much higher than in the normal, modern-day population of a developed country. I wonder if JKR feels some weird, subconscious guilt about her mother's death?

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

Maybe Albus still has issues with losing his own mother and so he transfers them onto other mothers (save for Harry's since he wants to curry favor with him anyway). It would fit in perfectly with his character, since he seems to want to warp everything to his own view of the world.

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

That's what I like about this site: so many great minds running on the same track. ;-)

[karentheunicorn.livejournal.com]

Okay so for me the HP series is a love/hate relationship. I like the character of Snape but am sadly disappointed that JKR couldn't find something better to do at the end of the series than kill off a good thing or at least the only thing that made the series worth a damn to me.

I don't think everyone here loves/likes Snape. It just seems like this group is more the thinking group that doesn't automatically fall on they're knees and drool over everything the author does, says or writes.

and I think like the character of Snape we're mostly thinking WTF, who cares about Harry Potter and why do I have to put up with this shit and did it have to end so miserably.

[sunnyskywalker]

Right... If Mother had just kept Ariana under control, none of this would have happened! It's all her fault!

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

What Dumbledore's really trying to say about Merope is that since she's affiliated with Voldemort everything she does is wrong no matter what it is. It's like that one essay I linked to all that time ago, "Evil is Evil, and Good is Good. If someone is designated evil then no matter what they do it will be evil; if someone is designated good then no matter what they do it will be good."

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I didn't think of that. She's ugly, odd, destitute and has a bastard in her belly. She'd be spat at wherever she went, and yet she persisted. Wow, Merope really did everything to give her son a chance. And is vilified for it.

And seriously, she had no prenatal care. Womens bodies can be hurt during pregnancy, the calcium leached from her bones. Being abused, she may have been afraid to go for help. Being the 30s, she may have been ashamed or have no to help her. And then she likely is hemorrhaging and may have tried to turn her wand on herself, but have no strength to do it.

[sunnyskywalker]

She could have had prenatal diabetes, preeclampsia, all kinds of dangerous things. And I really doubt the spell to stabilize blood sugar is one everyone knows (or maybe it's an expensive potion), even assuming she could self-diagnose that in the first place.

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

And this is what happens when we're instructed to infer things about the characters without proof and never get their side of the story.

That's why when I write my fanfiction I try to give psychology to every important character- including ones I really do think are evil and horrible (e.g., in my fic about a villain I actually try to explain why his horrible parents abuse him from their point of view, just so that their behavior doesn't come across as totally random).

[detritius.livejournal.com]

For all we know, she could have done some kind of healing spell that actually made the complications worse, either because she botched the spell or just because the human body is so complicated. We don't have enough information to know what she may have tried, just that giving birth to Tom Jr. resulted in her death. Given this and everything mentioned above, it's ridiculous for Dumbledore to say she died because she didn't have enough courage rather than, say, adequate nutrition, a decent support system, and prenatal care.

The whole thing with Merope really makes me wonder what HBP would have been like if we got Voldemort's backstory through a series of more objective flashbacks (Lost-style, if you will) rather than having it all come through the Dumbeldore filter. Of course, that's assuming JK has any ability to be objective about her characters in the first place, which probably would have made for an entirely different series anyway.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. Even a trained doctor can't operate on themselves, and even a simple malady is complicated by pregnancy. It's not clear she had magical training, I noticed that none of the wizards have speciality training in treating illness. I doubt Harry could do much injured, could he?

So why would Merope know what the heck what to do?

I'd have loved to seen Tom being an ordinary, happy little boy, much like Harry and Harry marveling on how easily Tom could have been a force for good, instead of some pint sized sociopath that no one seemed to monitor.

[oryx_leucoryx]

I once read a fanfic (written before HBP) where Tom was abused by the other kids in the orphanage and the Ministry forbade him to defend himself magically because of Secrecy issues. That's a believable scenario for a neurologically sound person to become an anti-Muggle arch-terrorist. Haven't seen a happy Tom scenario.

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/I'd have loved to seen Tom being an ordinary, happy little boy, much like Harry and Harry marveling on how easily Tom could have been a force for good, instead of some pint sized sociopath that no one seemed to monitor./

That's why I felt that all of those parallels between Tom and Harry went nowhere. There were so many times where Harry thought about the similarities: Hogwarts was their only home, they were orphans, they were Parselmouths (before we found out about the Harrycrux, of course), etc. and for what? What was the purpose of those parallels if the only conclusion to be drawn at the end was that Harry was good because he was Sorted into Gryffindor and his parents loved him, and Tom was evil because he was descended from Salazar Slytherin and his parents didn't love each other? If Tom was literally born evil and Harry wasn't, then why bother? There was no danger that Harry might become like Tom because anything wrong that Harry did was excused away (it was the Horcrux, he was stressed-out, etc.) and didn't lead to anything, while everything that Tom did was dismissed as "Oh, yeah, he was just a sociopath."

[sunnyskywalker]

There was that one doctor who operated on herself because she was at the South Pole and there just wasn't anyone else to do it... but that was an extraordinary and abnormal occurrence, not something any doctor could do, let alone the average person with no training while in labor. Blaming someone for not being one-in-a-million extraordinary and having advanced training is just ridiculous.

Yeah, Tom being an ordinary kid at a grim but not horrific orphanage would have made his eventual transformation that much scarier. Although it would also have made the Hogwarts staff and the wizarding world look that much more culpable, since he wasn't a murderous megalomaniac before he was in their care... Now, I think that would be an interesting story, but knowing what she had set up for Dumbledore in DH, Rowling probably wanted to let Dumbledore off the hook for Tom's evil nature - at least in her view, since she probably meant it to look like Dumbledore really tried to give Tom a second chance in a "better" environment and only realized how wrong it went once it was too late. It's just that I don't buy that version.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Yeah but as you said, that was a highly educated woman who was extraordinary, one in a billion who had the fortune to have the training and the luck to survive it. Merope had the odds more than stacked against her, she had a permanent kick me sign on her forehead.

What would have been really creepy cool is if Tom would have appeared deadly normal, and we never knew what made him go bad. Giving evil a reason often is making the emperor seen as being naked.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

I rather like Jodel's theory that in order to get someone in power to give them more souls to eat, the Dementors haunted Tom as an infant, causing both his profound fear of death (they rather resemble Muggle depictions of the Grim Reaper) and his psychopathy (since he would have been emotionally stunted AND his carers would not have lingered around him to give him contact).

[sunnyskywalker]

I like that one too. (It even inspired a drabble.) Wizarding world wants to make a deal with soul-sucking demons? Um, that usually has consequences... Voldemort as the consequences of their collective bad decision in dealing with the Dementors just makes so much sense. And it goes along with other things in the books, like the Hogwarts culture which lets kids get away with murder. Ignoring bad stuff > extra bad stuff. It totally would have worked, thematically, if she hadn't wanted to let the wizarding world off the hook for everything.