Crouch, the duel, and the Imperius (WAS: Percy Traitor...)

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 43009


Melody wrote:

> Crouch Jr. is a facinating character to me because he enjoyed his 
> time in Hogwarts so much. 

Yes!  Yes, yes, yes!

Ahem.  Erm, well.  Sorry about the...enthusiasm there.  It's just that Crouch Jr. really is one of my all-time favorite characters, and the major reason for that is the sheer amount of *fun* that he has, all the way through _GoF_.  I find it curiously refreshing.  Endearing, even.  It somehow just resonates with me.  I love the malicious glee with which he conducts his entire masquerade: all of those double-edged statements, all of that *payback.*  And I love scenes like the Yule Ball, too, places where he's having a (relatively) innocent good time doing things like gallumphing around the dance floor with Professor Sinistra.  He's an arrested adolescent who has been enslaved for over a decade, and now he's finally getting to act out in a big, big way -- and he is just having a *blast* with it.  And really, now.  I mean, how can you *not* love a character like that?

And besides, he was a good teacher.

On which topic...


Richelle asked:

> Plus Moody/Crouch and the Imperius. Which still blows my mind why 
> Voldemort's most faithful servant would want to teach Harry to 
> resist an Imperius curse.

Do you really think that Crouch was Voldemort's most faithful servant?  He didn't put up a very good showing at his sentencing.  

Really, the only way that I can see for Crouch to stake a *legitimate* claim on "most faithful servant" would be under a variant of JOdel's theory in which he willingly accepted the role of sacrificial lamb in order to help the DEs to destroy his father's political career.  Even then, though, I'd say that his co-conspirators, the Couple Assumed To Be The Lestranges, ought to be awarded just as many faithfulness points, if not even more, for the part that they played in the entire charade.  

But I digress.  The question here is: why would Crouch want to teach Harry to resist the Imperius?  

Well, for one thing, it was his job.  He needed to be impersonating Moody, and Dumbledore asked "Moody" to teach the Unforgiveables to the fourth year students.  Crouch couldn't very well have refused, could he?  What possible reason could he have given for doing so?

And besides, it must have been quite a kick for him, don't you think?  To have been actually *sanctioned* to cast Unforgivable Curses on a bunch of schoolchildren -- and sanctioned to do so by *Dumbledore,* no less?

Melody wrote of Crouch that:

> [he] loves casting dark curses on students with Dumbledore's 
> permission especially on the one wizard that causes he precious 
> Dark Lord Father to become the evilbabyVoldemort he is today.

Sure.  It must have been absolutely irresistable, I'd say.  Quite the
perverse thrill.  He did have quite the sense of irony, after all.

But I agree with Richelle that Crouch really does seem to have gone above and beyond the call of duty when it came to training Harry to fight off the Imperius.

She wrote:

> Why on earth? Of course he didn't know Harry would instinctively 
> resist it, but once he found out he didn't stop until Harry could 
> resist it completely. 

Nope.  He didn't.

Over the years, people have suggested a number of reasons why this might be the case.  I personally believe all of the below to be true.


1) Crouch was a method actor.

Crouch's masquerade must have been very good indeed to have fooled Dumbledore for nearly an entire year.  He was rather deeply in character.  To say the least. The real Alastor Moody would presumably have been thrilled to death to see a student prove so adept at fighting off the Imperius Curse, and would have gone out of his way to encourage that student and help him to develop his talent.
Crouch-as-Moody therefore did the same.


2) Crouch hated the Imperius Curse.

He spent over a decade underneath the Imperius Curse himself, remember.  I'd say that Crouch just plain *hated* the Imperius and that it gave him a deep sense of satisfaction to see anyone, even an enemy, prove so adept at fighting it off.  

I also think that in many ways, Crouch found it very easy to identify with his adolescent students.  He was himself very young at the time of his arrest, after all, and from his behavior in the Pensieve, he would seem to have been rather emotionally immature as well.  Thereafter, he was first in Azkaban and then under the Imperius Curse, neither of which are states conducive to any real emotional development or growth.  In his Veritaserum confession, both his assumption that his father never really loved him and his desperation to view Voldemort as a surrogate father figure always come across to me as strikingly childish, really pathetically so.  Crouch was himself trapped in an arrested state of adolescence, and I think that this may have led him to on some level *identify* with Harry in 
those DADA classes.  He was reading Harry's success in throwing off the Imperius Curse as his *own* success in throwing off the Imperius Curse -- and he was reacting accordingly.


3) Crouch's plan depended on Harry winning the Triwizard Tournament.

The Ever So Clever Eloise suggested this explanation back in February, and the more I think about it, the more compelling I find it to be.  

In order for Crouch's scheme to work as planned, Harry *must* win the Triwizard Tournament, a contest in which we are told that "cheating" is traditional.  One of Harry's major opponents in this competition is Victor Krum, who has been trained at Durmstrang (where it is rumored that students are taught the Dark Arts), and who is also the pet pupil of Igor Karkaroff, an ex Death Eater who clearly wants 
Durmstrang's champion to win the competition *very* badly.

Crouch may well have feared that Krum (or Karkaroff himself) would at some point place Harry under the Imperius Curse in order to prevent him from winning the Tournament.  After all, later on Crouch himself will use *just* this technique to weaken the chances of both Krum and Diggory.  People do tend to ascribe to others the same sorts of plans, motives, and tactics that they themseles are the most prone 
to utilize.

Once Crouch discovered that Harry stood a chance of being able to resist the Curse on his own, then he would have had a strong vested interest in helping Harry to develop this talent.  It would have been one less thing for Crouch himself to worry about when it came time for him to be scurrying around behind the scenes, working to ensure 
Harry's victory. 

4) Crouch was a born teacher.

Melody wrote:

> [he] had that teacher facination and giddiness when a lesson goes 
> well and a student helps prove a point.

Yup.  Crouch was a very good student himself in his day, and I think that if his life had gone differently, he would have made an excellent professor.  Harry's class is by no means the only one raving about "Moody's" DADA lessons.  The entire school is excited by them.  Sadistic nutcase though Crouch may be, he's also a very good teacher, and I do tend to read that as a reflection of Crouch's own character, rather than merely as a reflection of Moody's.  

I always get the impression that teaching Moody's DADA class was just about Crouch's favorite part of his entire masquerade.  I think that he was born to teach, and that like all good teachers, he took a genuine and instinctive pleasure in helping students succeed at difficult tasks.



So that's why *I* think that Crouch was so dedicated to teaching Harry to throw off the Imperius Curse.  But of course, if you don't like my own preferred "all of the above" answer, you can always mix and match to suit your own tastes. ;-)



Melody wrote:

> I also assume he told evilbabyVoldemort about it and Voldemort 
> wanted to try.

Hmmmm.

You know, I used to reject this notion that Crouch reported Harry's talent at resisting the Imperius Curse back to Voldemort.  I always figured that had Voldemort really known about Harry's talent in this arena, then he would *never* have risked losing face in front of all of his Death Eaters by giving Harry the opportunity to resist him during that "duel" in the graveyard.

Now, however, I'm beginning to change my mind.  Looking back over the graveyard scene, one of the things that I find rather striking about the failed Imperius is how utterly unsurprised by it Voldemort seems to be.  His Death Eaters are taken aback, but he himself is not.  He is not described as looking in the least bit startled, nor alarmed nor astonished, nor dismayed, nor even particularly angered.  We see him be all of those things later on in the scene, when he is thwarted by the Priori Incantatem, but when Harry resists his Imperius Curse, his response (said "quietly") reveals no particular surprise.

Of course, he could just have been putting up a good front.  But I don't think so.  Voldemort has not, elsewhere in canon, shown himself to be in the least bit skilled at putting up a good front when he finds himself (as he constantly does!) thwarted by unforeseen events.  He just doesn't take that sort of thing well.  He doesn't usually
respond to it "quietly."  Instead, he generally screams and rants and raves and otherwise make an appalling spectacle out of himself.  Voldemort isn't exactly one of those "roll with the punches" sorts of Evil Overlords.

So I'm beginning to come around to believing that Crouch really did give him advance warning, and that just as Melody suggests, Voldemort cast that Imperius Curse mainly to gratify his own curiosity about the real extent of Harry's ability to resist.  After all, Barty Crouch was shipped off to prison at the age of nineteen and then spent the rest of his life as a mind-controlled zombie with an invisibility cloak thrown over his head.  His testimony that Harry had this amazing Imperius resistance might therefore have been something that Voldemort felt disinclined to take at face value.  I suspect that he wanted to see for himself.



-- Elkins