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

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

You know, to me it seems like the same kind of heroism/stupidity that WWII era British people would have shown if, knowing that Germany was probably going to bomb them at some point, they had thrown themselves onto their kids to protect them, rather than, y'know, building a bomb shelter in the back yard. Heroic, I guess, but mostly just dumb and unnecessary.

Hope that isn't a really weird example...

[pearlette.livejournal.com]

Bomb shelters during WWII did not always guarantee survival:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter

Not every British family would have been able to afford one either.

Re: James and Lily's last stand, I was surprised and disappointed that JKR didn't write a more convincing faceoff between them and Voldemort, given that they're supposed to be such experienced Order fighters. James seems very unprepared and, frankly, clueless.

It seems a contradiction in the canon too because Voldemort tells Harry that 'your father fought bravely'. This is supposed to be a taunt. It would have been a more effective taunt, surely, if Voldemort had sneered at Harry about how young and inexperienced James was ... ouch!

[oryx_leucoryx]

Re: Bomb shelters: In Romania they had communal bomb shelters for each neighborhood. But my grandmother decided she couldn't spend so much time cooped up away from friends and relatives that lived in the next neighborhood over, so when the siren sounded she took her two kids - my mother in her arms and my uncle (who was 2 years older than my mother) running along - across a bridge and who knows how many streets to the other bomb shelter. And if a plane showed up while they were still on their way she told my uncle to jump into the craters left by previous bombs because no 2 bombs would fall into the exact same place. (To my grandmother's defense, she was forced to quit secondary education so she never learned probability and Bayes' theorem.)

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected, though at least the article said that poor families were provided with shelters or communal options.

I guess my point is that it was silly for Lily and James to be unprepared when they had plenty of time to be and knew that he would eventually come for them. I just didn't make that point very well.