A follow- up question to the discussion on the Malfoys:

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

From 2007 onwards, we have, via DH (that disastrous book) and interviews, discovered the following things:

1. The Death Eaters were right. According to Rowling, there are no "Muggleborns". Every Witch or Wizard born to normal parents is a throwback to a magical ancestor. Yes, she really said that!

2. All Wizards seem to feel themselves superior to normal people. Even good-hearted types like Arthur Weasely show themselves extremely prejudiced toward non-magical human beings, as well as extremely ignorant. But-

3. I am no expert on magical history - like Harry, I missed any hints of a coherent backstory that might have been in the books. But I do get the impression that, in addition to being prejudiced, magical people might fear ordinary human beings. Perhaps the persecutions shown as laughable in Harry's textbook were actually quite serious?

4. Young Tom Riddle was fearful of being locked up in an asylum.

5. Young Gellert Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore aspired to rule over Muggles and Muggleborns.

6. Young Regulus believed Voldemort's agenda was to overthrow the stature of secrecy and have wizards take their rightful place as the lords of creation.

7. And then there's the way Dumbledore chose to raise Harry.

Where I'm going with all this? It's seemed to me for awhile now that the Death Eaters might have a point. What if every Dark Lord in the Wizarding World was either a Muggleborn or a Muggle-raised half-blood? What if Dumbledore was actually trying to create a new Dark Lord?

Think about it. Given what we see of Tommy's, Sev's, and Harry's experiences, magical children have a very hard time in the normal world. In self defense, they may well come up with grandiose theories about their specialness. And, like all magical children, they will lash out with magic at times of high stress. The future Dark Lords among them will control magic early, cling hard to their specialness, and learn contempt, as well as fear, for the normal people who don't and cant' understand them and cant' do magic, either. By the time such a child is 11, he may well be quite powerful magically and morally and emotionally quite messed up.

Thoughts?

Comments

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I don't have the background to comment on psychopaths, but I do believe a lot of what Tommy endured was also because he had no effective limits. My then two year sweet tempered niece once bit me because she was frustrated and cranky and had no way to express it. And then I, being an adult was able to put her in time out, and help her learn that biting won't work.

But in this case, the biting worked. The bad things happened and no consequences happened. So he kept doing it.

That's frighteningly bad for development.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Yes! This is exactly what I'm getting at, and it's oddly difficult to explain it to people. Children may be naturally good - I believe they are - but they do not naturally recognize limits. They have to be taught. A wizarding child in Tommy's situation could not be taught. The child had all the power, and the adults none. The result would naturally be a disturbed child.

Thank you.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

My pleasure. Kids are happiest with fair limits.

Tommy has no adult authority figures who can give him limits.
Tommy has no one who he can trust with his terrible secret, and is aware that he will likely be ridiculed, or severely punished if he does tell the truth.
Tommy has enormous frustrations because of the above and can take them out on people around him and do terrible things.

Maybe at first, he was scared, but being so isolated and alone, he just warped into a monster.

This makes me wonder how Harry turned out so uber-normal, given that he had a worse situation than Tommy (who wasn't actively abused) and yet, lashed out less.

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Basically, wizards and witches raised solely by muggles are likely to be less powerful versions of Anthony from It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby. If a significant number of magical psychopaths were being produced due to an inability to discipline them as children, it might have contributed to magic users becoming so hated and feared in general that witch hunts gained wide-spread support (beyond the more obvious religious and political considerations). What other defense did muggles have at that time? Likewise, it could explain why the witch hysteria died down after Seclusion was implemented. The magical community at large finally had a strong incentive to crack down on the worst predators, even if it was only to protect the Statute of Secrecy.

As for Harry... canon at least implies (or can be construed to) that the Horcrux affects his mental state, even disregarding Rowling's interviews. If we assume this is true, particularly for his emotional state, then the fact that Horcrux was dormant for most of childhood might have led to a general dulling of Harry's emotional responses. Thus, the root cause of his unnaturally detached affect can also be attributed to the Horcrux fragment, just like every other one of his flaws in-series /sarcasm.

[sunnyskywalker]

I think I've mentioned this before, but there's a chapter in Lyndal Roper's book Witch Craze about the "godless children" of Augsburg - that is, by the 1740s, after Seclusion would have removed trained adult witches and wizards from Muggle society, the focus there had shifted from old female witches to child witches. Some of them were accused by their parents after being utterly uncontrollable and (ostensibly) trying to kill their parents, etc. The authorities seem to have concluded that most of them were just disturbed children (after noticing that the kids were just sitting in a room when they claimed to be flying to Sabbaths), and eventually set many home. Possibly in the Potterverse the kids talked about Sabbaths because that's what they understood witches were supposed to do, and that must be what they were, so shouldn't they be going?

There were children accused before this point, too, but the shift in focus is highly suggestive in a Potterverse context. Now Muggleborn magical children had no chance of a magical relative in town teaching them what they were and how to stay in control. Instead of a lot of old ladies and some men and children occasionally getting out of control because they could (or because their Muggle neighbors thought they had when something went wrong), the children shouldered more of the blame. Because they were the only ones left to catch.