Gay Character - "Food" - Barty Jr - Cruciatis - North American Wizards

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 27225

In my previous post, I forgot to repeat my constant suggestion that 
Bill Weasley being gay would provide some major opportunities for 
humor. Such as Fleur (who has already been seen to be interested 
in him) making some excuse to come to the Burrow while the whole 
family (and Harry) is gathered there in order to chase after him and 
all the other boys are trailing after her with their tongues hanging 
out and the other grown men are gazing at her with dreamy smiles and 
Bill isn't affected at all. 

Such as Molly nagging her oldest son to find a nice witch and get 
married and give her grandchildren, and finally exasperating him to 
the point that he says "I've already found the person with whom I 
want to spend the rest of myself, and it isn't a witch."

Molly jumps to the obvious conclusion and starts yelling at him for 
thinking that she would be unwelcoming to the girl of his choice just 
for being a Muggle. He eventually gets a word in edgewise: "Not a 
Muggle."

Molly, horrified: "A Veela?" Bill: "No, Mum, a very nice wizard."

Beverley Warmaster wrote:

> who now has to review the archives to find
> out what the heck clotted cream and spotted 
> dick are

Actually, those are easier to find than 'what are wine gums?" Besides 
Ask Jeeves and http://www.onelook.com/index.html (One-Look 
Dictionary), there are http://www.effingpot.com/ and 
http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/index.htm

Mindy wrote:

> I think that Barty Sr. did Barty Jr. a
> major disservice by releasing him from
> prison. For the rest of Jr.'s life, he'd
> have to be in hiding in his dad's house
> under a cloak. What kind of life is that?
> It's almost as bad as Azkaban. It's torture.
> It's like being in solitary confinement for life.  

It isn't quite solitary confinement, as he has Winky to bring him 
books and stuff. But it IS, as you point, pretty bad. But it's better 
than being in Azkaban with the Dementors: I think that the only thing 
worse that being constantly surrounded by numerous Dementors would be 
to be permanently under Cruciatis. That raises questions: would 
Cruciatis applied continually for a week or a month or a year kill a 
person who had been young and healthy when it began? Or would the 
heart keep beating, the lungs keep breathing, and the ghost remain 
inside the body as long as the evil wizard who is performing this 
sadistic experiement keeps the body nourished and hydrated by 
intravenous spells? If it doesn't snuff out the life, we know from 
Neville's poor parents that it snuffs out the mind: what happens to 
people who have gone mad from excessive Cruciatis? Do they mercifully 
lose the ability to feel pain? Do they, most horribly, continue to 
feel the pain of Cruciatis for the rest of their lives, even after the 
spell is removed?

Barb wrote:

> In fact, I suspect that the seemingly
> small number of British Isles wizards
> might be directly attributable to the
> siphoning-off of the wizarding population
> to the U.S. in the late nineteenth century.
> (snip)  just like the large variety of 
> religious and ethnic groups who found
> shelter on these shores

QUIDDITCH THROUGH THE AGES says many British wizarding folk emigrated 
to the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in 
hope of evading the persecution in Britain/Europe. Which suggests 
that the history textbook's explanation of why Witch Burning in the 
Middle Ages Was Completely Pointless was one of those lies told by 
textbooks (there may be a Flame-Freezing Charm, but the persecution 
was troubling enough that the wizarding folk emigrated because of it)
I preferred my own Potterverse, in which the wizarding folk's magic 
let them hide from Muggles well enough in the old country, so that 
few wizarding folk emigrated, mostly those who were on the run from 
wizarding law enforcers, leading to North America being a sparsely 
populated kind of Wild West for non-First-Nations wizarding folk, who 
didn't get wizarding schools or Quidditch teams or proper wands or 
the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy until post-WWII. 

> Plus, they would be able to connect with
> wizarding Native Americans...

In *my* Potterverse, in North America the indigenous wizarding folk 
got a good look at how Euro-American Muggles treated Native American 
Muggles and promptly, effectively hid themselves away from 
Euro-American wizarding folk -- I don't know if they also concealed 
themselves from African-American and Asian-American wizarding folk as 
well, lest they spill the beans, or if all wizards of color are in on 
it.

However, in the great empires of South and Central America (e.g. 
Maya, Aztec, Inca), the wizarding folk had well-established schools 
and bureaucracies and powerful/profitable jobs for the Muggle 
governments, and easily adopted the immigrant wizarding folk into 
their societies and easily switched their useful contracts from the 
old defeated Muggle governments to the new victorious Muggle 
governments.