deathtocapslock | Excuses for Hagrid’s Brutality (Reply)

Sigh. I just realized we may have to give Hagrid a partial miss for his crimes. It might not be the case that Rita’s simply right about the nature of half-giants, or at least of this half-giant: that they are naturally as brutal as they are stupid.

I’m speaking here of his active crimes of violence, not his repeated crimes of endangering children through incompetence and denial that dangerous creatures, are.

We saw Hagrid engage in acts of violence three times:

In book one, Hagrid got angry because someone insulted Dumbledore, and in retaliation Hagrid tried to turn the insulter’s son into a pig. He succeeded only in giving the (blameless, so far as he knew) child a pig’s tail, which was removed eventually by Muggle surgeons. The victim endured a month of terror and abject humiliation, six months of constant pain, and PTSD that endured to our last canon view of him.

In book four, a visiting dignitary insulted Dumbledore, and Hagrid slammed the wizard up against a tree and tried to choke him. To put this in context, Hagrid is almost twice as tall as an adult male, and three to five times as broad. So the visual image the reader should be creating is best approximated by imagining Vernon Dursley slamming around and choking a slight four- or five-year-old child, such as we imagine Harry to have been.

And in book five, Dolores Umbridge very sensibly decides to sack Hagrid for his gross incompetence on the quiet and with backup. And he responds by violently attacking her and her entourage. (We have Harry’s witness of the incident: Umbridge and her entourage knocked politely and entered quietly, if at a godforsaken hour. After she/they talked to Hagrid for a time, Hagrid started roaring in fury and then banged open the door of the hut. At which point Harry saw “a massive figure roaring and brandishing his fists, surrounded by six people, all of whom, judging by the tiny threads of red light they were casting in his direction, seemed to be attempting to Stun him.”

IOW, Hagrid apparently initiated the violence, and the Ministry flacks are trying to make him go quietly without hurting him.

And then when someone stuns (not hurts or kills) Fang, “Hagrid gave a howl of fury, lifted the culprit bodily from the ground, and threw him. The man flew what looked like ten feet and did not get up again….”

I remind the reader, this is the equivalent of a large, robust man physically assaulting a very small child.

Then McGonagall (who had not witnessed any of the preceding) dashes out, seeing only that Hagrid is fighting physically with Umbridge and several Ministry officials.

She screams, “Leave him alone. Alone, I say! On what grounds are you attacking him? He has done nothing, nothing to warrant such—”

(Jumping to conclusions a bit, Minnie? He attacked them. Though Umbridge had clearly anticipated that he might.)

And Minerva is hit by four stunners. (Not five. Which suggests that Hagrid has by then killed/hurt/incapacitated yet another of the Ministy officials who are trying only to stun him and remove him peaceably from Hogwarts grounds.)

“COWARDS!” bellowed Hagrid. “RUDDY COWARDS! HAVE SOME OF THAT—AN’ THAT---”

And he proceeds to knock cold the two nearest Ministry officials; the third (and final) flinches back and falls over a colleague’s body, and Hagrid takes that opportunity to gather up Fang and run away to join Albus Hood in the Sherwood Forest.

Leaving the almost-dead Minerva to be taken up by those whom she’d attacked and by them tenderly brought to Pomfrey for resuscitation.

Which they did.

Evil, evil Ministry! Saving the life of (and failing to press charges against) someone who’d attacked Ministry officials performing their official duty!

And Hagrid---how well does he conform in these scenes to Skeeter’s worst prognostications regarding giant blood?

Abjectly stupid and given to outbursts of violence, anyone?

*

Only—here’s the thing.

First year, the magical attack against Dudley—if Hagrid had transformed a wizard’s child into a pig, or given a witch’s son a pig’s tail—well, any half-way competent witch or wizard parent could probably have undone the spell hirself. At worst, the parents would have taken the child to St. Mungo’s and, after six hours in the waiting room while the actually WORRISOME magical mishaps were triaged around the unhappy trio, a mediwitch would have set the child to rights in half a minute. Painlessly, scarlessly, with no lasting effects.

The attack against Dudley was significantly hurtful mostly because the parents were helpless to reverse it (and no one else offered to). So Dudley suffered a month of an utterly humiliating deformity, six months of pain after surgery, and a lifetime of an impossible-to-explain intimate (sexually-charged) scar. (In 100 Years of Solitude, a pig’s tail leads to lifelong celibacy and eventual suicide from the protagonist’s attempting to remove it.)

But does anyone care to try to make the case that these consequences were (or could have been) foreseen by someone like Hagrid?

In fact, had Hagrid’s spell actually been fully successful, Dudley would never have suffered even emotionally. He’d have been a pig, caring only about being fed and shitting. It was his dad who would have suffered, watching his cherished son contentedly wallowing at his feet.

So. Hagrid only ever meant to hurt Vernon, not Dudley; he didn’t register that the readily-reversible spell he cast was not, in fact, easily reversed by Muggles; and it’s wildly unlikely that he understood, even after the fact, that he had inflicted lifelong terror and sexual humiliation on a little boy.

Regarding his other crimes of violence, his physical assaults upon much smaller, comparatively helpless humans….

Well. What, exactly, did we speculate was the effect of prolonged exposure to Dementors?

Hagrid spent several months in Azkaban. What HE recognized as his incarceration’s effect was the one that the Ministry hoped to achieve: he wasn’t willing ever again to plan to do anything that he understood to be considered a Ministry-recognized crime, lest he be thrown back to the Dementors.

What did Lupin claim to be the effect of long-term exposure? To be reduced to “something like itself… soulless and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.”

So in justice to Hagrid, I must state: of the three times we see him viciously assault helpless victims, the first time he couldn’t comprehend how truly heinous the assault was (not possessing either the experience or the imagination to realize the attack’s full horror for a Muggle victim). The second and third attacks, came after Hagrid had been subjected to long-term Dementor exposure.

So we don’t know if he’d have reacted with such animalistic brutality before.

Indeed, Minerva’s reaction suggests that she believes he would not have. She’ s known him for forty years or more, and she assumes instantly that if he’s fighting, it’s because the others attacked him.