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

[xerox78.livejournal.com]

"Merope chose death in spite of a son who needed her, but do not judge her too harshly, Harry. She was greatly weakened by long suffering and she never had your mother's courage"

Oh yes, Merope chose to die because she was a coward who didn't care about her son. Not because she was starving and therefore malnourished. Not because she was homeless and therefore exposed to the elements. Not because she was already sick as a dog. Not because it was the early 20th century, when even perfectly healthy, happy women routinely died in childbirth. Nope! Merope died out of pure selfishness. I'm sure if she'd had the charmed life Lily had, she would have had the same "courage".

And JKR calls herself a "feminist". *snort*

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to defer to an expert, but even the most normal pregnancy today with medical care can result in maternal death, because of one big factor. Tom Riddle was born around 1926, before the widespread use of penicillin. This means anything could have killed her, she was homeless, malnourished, fevered and you know, possibly hemorrhaging.

And seriously, women today die in childbirth. My sister in law nearly died, my friend nearly died and my grandmother was within inches of her life with my father. Without antibiotics, I doubt any of them would have survived.

It's not just anti-feminist, it's classist.

Middle class Lily was courageous.

Wizard Trailer trash are cowards.

My grandmother, who survived Auschwitz said one thing. "When you're that hungry, you're not you."

Words to think about.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

My SO's best friend died in childbirth last month. Perfectly healthy young woman, in a hospital, with all the standard medical care you'd expect in an industrialized Western nation. It happens. It is tragic, but utterly unsurprising, that Merope - in the situation she was in - died. That JKR and Dumbledore blame her for this is just staggering. It makes me ragey. The misogyny in these books alone is enough to make one want to pitch them into a sewer.

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

For a different perspective, in certain ancient cultures (and possibly some more modern ones) dying in childbirth was considered an act of heroism tantamount to dying in battle. By this standard Merope was probably about as heroic as Lily or James because of the way she sacrificed her life for her child. Yet Rowling decides to use that as the one exception to the "death is totally heroic" rule. The mind boggles.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Amen! I have ALWAYS understood that many cultures considered childbirth a dangerous battle, and even described it as such in a fic of mine. How does Rowling fail to see this? I could never understand why on earth Dumbledore said Merope lacked Lily's courage. Of the two, I would call Merope braver. Misogynist is right, but it's also wildly illogical and incoherent, even from the Watsonian (storyworld) perspective.

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/Oh yes, Merope chose to die because she was a coward who didn't care about her son. Not because she was starving and therefore malnourished. Not because she was homeless and therefore exposed to the elements. Not because she was already sick as a dog. Not because it was the early 20th century, when even perfectly healthy, happy women routinely died in childbirth. Nope! Merope died out of pure selfishness./

That's what made Dumbledore's words so flabbergasting. Putting aside the feminist rage at the moment, it's just mind-boggling. We'd clearly been told Merope's circumstances: she'd been poor and starving and sick and all alone. Anybody would think that death in childbirth would be inevitable or at the very least, extremely likely. Yet Dumbledore turns the scenario on its head and suggests that she *chose* to die? Who on earth would think that a woman *chose* to die in a situation like that?

On a side-note, it reminds me of the similarly baffling and infuriating scene of Padme's death in "Revenge of the Sith." No, you can't just say that she died as a result of Anakin Force-choking her. No, you have to have the medi-droid say that she's "physically fine," thus canceling that excuse, and that the only reason that she's dying is because she "lost the will to live." In other words, she's *choosing* to give up and die. Only in that case, we were supposed to pity her, not scorn her as we're expected to do with Merope.

[sunnyskywalker]

The only way Dumbledore's version even remotely works is if he blames Merope for getting sick and hungry in the first place. As if she ought to just develop survival skills instantly as soon as she needs them (it's not like going back to Little Hangleton would get her any help). And she did sell her prized family heirloom to try to survive for a while, so is Dumbledore blaming her for not having an appraiser's eye for relics with no background for knowing what reasonable prices for those sorts of things are? Or for not being skilled enough to turn a brick into a meal? Then the Trio must have been trying to fail their quest out of cowardice because they didn't turn leaves into a five-course meal. No matter how you look at it, it's just wrong.

Iirc, in an earlier draft of RotS, the med droid said, "We can find no cause for this total systemic failure." This left the interpretation much more open. Maybe she lost the will to live, maybe the intercut shots of her and Vader going in the suit meant he was somehow reaching out through the Force and draining her life to support himself, maybe the droids were just poorly programmed. It's still a bit silly - what Vader did surely could have been sufficient, and Padme apparently got no prenatal care (otherwise she would have known she was carrying twins) and so could have had any number of fatal medical complications - but it's better than what we got.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Twinkletoes blames Merope for not lifting her wand to save her future child. I suppose she should have used summoning spells to steal food from Muggle shops (because who cares anyway). Of course we have on the one hand Lily not lifting her wand to protect Harry, and on the other, the trio on their camping trip, starving until they overhear other refugees summoning salmon. We don't know if Merope attended Hogwarts or received her magical education at home, nor do we know how well she did on her studies, but we know Hermione's abilities. Why was she no better? (And Merope probably needed more than food anyway, being pregnant, alone, and probably not equipped with a tent that doubles as an entire apartment.)

[sunnyskywalker]

Hermione has far, far less excuse. Even Harry and Ron ought to have been able to figure out "Accio rabbit!" or "Accio fish!" And we know they can perform that spell, whereas Merope might have more trouble.