Moody and his Potion (wa: The canon or The Canon or JKR post-Potter assignment)

[blpurdom]

No: HPFGUIDX 32290

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Margaret Dean <margdean at e...> wrote:
> My wild guess:  JKR originally meant for Crouch Jr. (or whoever)
> to have killed Moody and taken his place, but in the course of
> writing him she decided the character of Moody was Just Too Cool
> and that she wanted to use him (Real!Moody) later.   

Crouch needed Moody's hair to continually add to the Polyjuice Potion 
so that he could maintain his appearance.  I suppose it's possible 
that he could have just cut off all of Moody's hair and killed him, 
but that leaves two undesirable possibilities for Crouch to cope with:

a) It is possible that Polyjuice Potion only works properly with a 
person that is alive.  There could be a magical connection between 
the hair and the owner of the hair such that the way the person looks 
at the moment the hair is placed in the potion is the way the person 
will look who takes the potion.  If the person who was the source is 
dead, you might wind up looking like or even being a corpse.  Not a 
good idea.

b) Even if the way the potion works is that the person taking it 
looks like the person from whom the hair came AT THE MOMENT THE HAIR 
WAS TAKEN FROM THAT PERSON, rather than at the moment the hair is 
placed in the potion, eventually, Crouch probably would have run out 
of Moody's hair and he would no longer be able to impersonate him.  
Crouch had no idea how long he would need to pretend to be Moody, I 
think, and as long as Moody was still alive, he was still growing new 
hair for Crouch to use.  This second way for the potion to work seems 
more likely, since Moody's appearance did change while he was in his 
own trunk, stunned for months on end (and oddly, not starving to 
death, but that's another discussion) and yet Crouch did not look 
like a wasting-away half-bald Moody, but the same man whom Crouch 
ambushed in August.

We also know from CoS that it takes a long time to prepare Polyjuice 
Potion (the trio was brewing it in Myrtle's bathroom for what, a 
month or more?) so Crouch must have been working on this for quite a 
while before he ambushed Moody at his home and took his place.  We 
also know that what he was doing in Snape's office at the castle was 
stealing boomslang skin to continue making the potion.  The one 
question that is never answered in GoF (okay, there ARE others, but 
this is one of them) is where did Crouch brew his Polyjuice Potion?  
In his bedroom?  In a secret chamber somewhere?  (Perhaps 
Dumbledore's chamber pot chamber?)  You'd think someone would have 
discovered it.  (Of course, no one discovered the trio's brew, but no 
one wanted to go into Myrtle's bathroom, either.)

I do like the idea that we will meet the real Moody later.  It was 
actually rather disappointing to find out that Moody wasn't Moody at 
the end of GoF.  He's one of JKR's best character creations, IMO.

--Barb

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