death to capslock

Love potions and double standards in Harry Potter and fandom

Sun, 14 Sep 2014 10:11:00 GMT

Posted by: jademoonleader.livejournal.com

It was mentioned on a previous thread that there is a creepy double standard in the series about how love potions are considered to be somehow OK if a witch uses them. For instance, we get Molly whom JKR wants us to love, giggling about brewing a potion that turns people into lust fuelled zombies. Did she actually slip the potion in question to someone? I really do wonder what JKR could have been thinking (if she thought at all).

The author of this fanfiction (link below) clearly adopts JKR's idea that love potions are alright for witches to use. The character Daphne Greengrass (who is only mentioned in the books, but never appears) slips Harry a love potion and then rapes him in order to curry favour with Voldemort, but bizarrely, all the characters, including Harry himself, blame Harry. What is stranger still, is that the author tries to curry sympathy for Daphne even though she had violated Harry for Voldemort. I discovered the fanfiction on the tv tropes double standards webpage.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8499608/1/Fun-with-Potions

The author actually writes in an author's note at the end of chapter 2: "I don't see why people are getting on my case for Daphne raping Harry. If anything it is just repeating how Merope Gaunt conceived Tom Riddle."

Does this series convince many that rape using love potions is not really rape?

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Product of the Department of Mysteries

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 18:49:00 GMT

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

On oneandthetruth's last DH chapter commentary, an interesting thread compared the Mirror of Erised to the Resurrection Stone in its seductive (and potentially deadly) powers of showing something/someone you want.

There's another object somewhat like that: the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. There are voices coming from behind the Veil - voices Luna believes to be those of the dead - and Harry feels tempted to walk through it.

Well, okay, Harry is being trained to have a death wish. But maybe that just means he's more susceptible.

The Department of Mysteries is a research facility. One which we know has produced tangible items now available for (restricted) public use, such as Time-Turners. (Whether they invented them or improved on an existing idea, we don't know.) I seriously doubt they've only produced one artifact ever. So what else might they have made?

They also have the locked room full of either love or Amortensia, depending whom you ask. The Mirror's ability to reflect your heart's desire is suggestively similar to the potion's ability to reflect the scent of what you desire.

A big glass mirror sounds like a relatively recent invention (unless you posit a long history of magical glassmaking, but wizards seem to adapt Muggle technology more often than the other way around). I propose that the Mirror of Erised is a product of the Department of Mysteries, combining attributes of Amortensia and the Veil which the DoM was able to partially replicate/adapt after long study.

Next question: are the Stone and the Veil related? Maybe Mr. Death, whoever he was, created both, and the DoM only got ahold of one of them. Whether this makes the Veil a fourth Hallow, left out of Beedle's version for numerical reasons, is not clear. Possibly it's a super-Hallow, and you can be Master of Death^TM with it alone? Or it's a death-related magical... thing... which shares some properties with the Hallows, but it isn't the same class of artifact and mastery isn't an issue in its case.

Or maybe the Veil is more ancient and the Stone is a portable adaptation created centuries ago by the DoM's first head researcher, Johannus Mors, along with a couple of other powerful items which also escaped the premises and have not been replicated. (And Death took the second lab assistant for his own...)

Thoughts? Fanfic links?

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Truths about Veritaserum?

Wed, 01 May 2013 23:23:00 GMT

Posted by: terri-testing.livejournal.com

What do we really know about the Truth Potion, what can we infer, and what have we just assumed, possibly incorrectly?

*

( Severus )

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Speculation on Liquid Luck

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:18:00 GMT

Posted by: terri-testing.livejournal.com

This idea came up in an exchange with, if I recall, madderbrad, but for those who missed it there, here’s my theory on Felix Felicis.

Horace told his class it was “Desperately tricky to make, and disastrous to get wrong.” (HBP 9)

Old Sluggy is glossing over things a bit here because Dumbledore is so hot against any Dark Arts theory being taught at Hogwarts.

( It’s )

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