Barty Jr., Consummate Screw-Up

[abigailnus <abigailnus@yahoo.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 52281

Just a small point.  Elkins says, with regards to Barty Jr. joining the DEs:

> Second, assuming that the Death Eaters didn't take minors or 
> schoolboys, he probably accepted the Dark Mark only a matter of 
> months before Voldemort went down.  If that.  (Myself, I always like 
> to imagine that it was only a matter of days, but that's just because 
> I'm seriously Bent.) 

I don't see why we should make that assumption at all.  To me, it 
makes perfect sense that the DEs would be recruiting among 
schoolboys - certainly you can't be suggesting that they would 
have had moral qualms about it?  We know that Snape was a member 
of a group in school who almost all turned out to be DEs - doesn't 
that make it likely that they were recruited in school?  Not to mention 
that Hagrid has lead us to believe that Slytherin house has produced 
many DEs.  

History is on the side of this argument.  In the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 
most of the fighters were in their late (and sometimes even early) 
teens.  They were the only ones fanatic enough to take up a fight that 
they knew they had no chance of winning.  And, to make a thousand, 
thousand distinctions, in my country today we learn on a regular basis 
that evil people can convince teenagers to go as far as blow 
themselves up in the service ofa cause.  Teenagers have a fanatic 
nature, and don't tend to think things through.  They're convinced that 
they're going to live forever.  These are perfect candidates for an evil 
overlord wannabe.  Think of Voldemort's philosophy - "There is no 
good or evil, only power and those too weak to use it." - doesn't that 
strike you as a maxim that would sweep naive and hot-blooded kids 
off their feet?  

No, I think Voldemort got them when they were young.  Maybe they 
didn't graduate into actual DE activities - muggle torture and murders 
- until after they left school, but that strikes me more as a matter of 
convenience.  A schoolboy has to account for his whereabouts in a 
way that a young person out of school doesn't.

I agree that there's something appealing about Barty joining Voldy 
right before the fall, but of course we've seen it happen before.  I 
know Peter had already been in Voldemort's service for a year before 
the Potter's deaths, but his betrayal of them was the first time he 
clearly stated his alleigance - and it brought about Voldemort's 
downfall.  Barty Jr. may be a consummate screw-up, but he's got 
nothing on Peter Pettigrew.

By the way, reading you post, Elkins, the image that kept forming in 
my head was of Barty Jr. as a really stupid girlfriend.  You know, the 
kind that keeps coming back even though her boyfriend treats her 
like dirt.  No matter how much punishment Barty goes through in his 
service of Voldemort, and no matter how many opportunities he gets 
to walk away, he just keeps coming back for more.

Sad.

Abigail 
Who hopes there wasn't too much RL stuff in this post.