Dudley Deserved It?

[Eric Oppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 43145

My own take on the Ton-Tongue Toffee Incident is that although the twins may
not have had the absolute right to do what they did, Dudley deserved what
happened to him.

Blaming his parents for Dudley's treatment of Harry only goes so far.  Like
all of us, Dudley is (admittedly, a rather inferior and wretched example of)
a human being, with the same gift of free will that Harry has...and Ron, and
Hermione, and Draco, and everybody else in the Potterverse.  While his
parents no doubt did nothing to _discourage_ Dudley's abuse of his cousin, I
somehow rather doubt that they gave him specific directions ("Now,
Duddiekins, off to school, and make sure to get your gang together and give
your cousin a good sound thrashing!") if only because that would clash with
their own perception of themselves as Normal, Respectable People.  If
anything, I think they refused to believe that Their Dudders (ghods, those
awful dimunitives they use for him!  YUK!) would ever do anything so awful.

Dudley made his own choices in a lot of ways.  While he's a greedy, obese
over-eater ("a pig in a wig") largely because his parents encourage him to
be so, his parents are not around during school, and he could perfectly well
either just more-or-less ignore Harry, or even be civil and nice to him
there.  Instead, he's described as a bully who picks on smaller, weaker
kids, and the leader of a gang of bullies, and as specifically targetting
Harry both by directly attacking (where ARE their teachers, for the gods'
sake?) and by ensuring that his cousin has no friends.  He is a willing
participant in his parents' abuse and mistreatment of Harry.

His youth is, in and of itself, no defense.  At the age he was at in the
beginning of PS/SS, my contemporaries and I were perfectly well able to
differentiate ourselves and our wishes from those of our parents, and to
ignore or even go against our parents' wishes, particularly if the Parental
Units were nowhere nearby.  Many kids I remember from that age were "closet
rebels," deliberately doing all they could to defy their parents just
because they were their parents.

Dudley could easily have rebelled against his parents, if only because they
sound so very suffocating, and made a point of being as nice to Harry as he
could get away with.  Or, if that's too much for The Dud to get his tiny
tiny mind around, just ignoring Harry as much as possible while at school
and otherwise not under his parents' eye would have been just fine with
Harry, from what we read.

While the twins may not have been the _ideal_ person to deliver a bit of the
old retribution to Dudley...they were what was available, and willing.  In
an ideal Potterverse, Harry would have long since turned Dudley into a real
pig and threatened to ship him off to be made into bacon, but that's
forbidden by the law against underage magic use.  The twins were aware of
Dudley's behavior, and the Ton-Tongue Toffee Incident, while it _could_ have
gone badly wrong, was not only a bit of long-overdue punishment, but poetic
justice in its way.  The twins must have known about Dudley's gluttony, and
about his diet.  _All Dudley had to do to avoid the trap was to stick to the
diet that had been set for him._  If he had done so, no harm would have
befallen him.

In a lot of ways, Gred-and-Forge remind me of the main characters in
Kipling's _Stalky & Co_...about the only "school stories" I was at all
familiar with before Harry Potter came along.  While Stalky, M'Turk and
Beetle often do fairly unpleasant things, their sins are pretty mild, and
their targets are portrayed as having provoked the confrontation...and in
one story, "The Moral Reformers," Stalky & Co. go into action on behalf of a
bullying victim, after being made aware of the situation by one of their
friends on the United Service College's faculty.  I think that the Twins and
Stalky & Co. would get along splendidly...and the ghods help their enemies!

Oh, and one last thought---it is often forgotten that "vigilante justice,"
at least in the American West, got started _because_ the official
law-enforcement agencies were either hopelessly ineffective or in the
pockets of the criminal underworld.  We may see a similar situation in the
Potterverse before it's all over, at least until somebody honest and
competent becomes Minister of Magic.