[HPforGrownups] Re: Dementors kiss

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 59056

On Sat, 31 May 2003, Grace Saalsaa wrote:

> It could be that a person kissed by a Dementor is more dangerous.  We don't
> know what happens to them after the kiss, do we?  I would think a person
> without a soul has nothing to lose and therefore cares about little.
> Sociopathic; the axe murderer, serial killer... without a soul and without a
> heart.  That sounds pretty scary to me.

It seems unlikely to me that the MoM would use the Dementor's Kiss as a
punishment for DEs, as they intended to do for Sirius Black, if the kiss
was going to make the DE *more* dangerous.  My impression was that
imprisonment with the Dementors was the first line of punishment, and when
Black showed he could not be reliably kept in prison the MoM turned to the
Kiss to "defang" him and render him harmless to the wizarding world.  
Leaving him with all his brains and powers but removing his conscience
would hardly seem to fit the bill.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"