Uses for Imperius (was: Motivations for Joining DEs)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 141282

 Mira wrote:
<snip> 
 Imperius turns its victim into a tool. I don't believe that it is possible to perform partial control under the Imperius curse, i.e. to tell your victim: 'be yourself, except for the bad habits', for the simple reason that the person who is possessed does not have a self anymore.
 
Magpie responded: 
I think, based on canon, that you actually can do this because it doesn't seem like people under the spell necessarily become zombies. It seems more  like movie!hypnosis to me with post-hypnotic suggestions making the person ready to take new instructions, as opposed to real life hypnosis which has  no such powers. If you couldn't just be yourself except for certain things  I'd think they'd have been able to sniff out all the people under it in the  first war.

Carol responds to both:
While I agree essentially with Mira's view (in the snipped first paragraph) that the Unforgiveables violate free will  and that a person under the Imperius Curse is essentially a tool, I think Magpie is right that  an Imperioed person can appear to be himself or herself rather than a Zombielike slave. That, in fact, is what makes the Imperius Curse so insidious; it's very difficult to detect. No one in HBP suspected that Madam  Rosmerta had been Imperioed. She behaved quite normally to Harry and Dumbledore when they requested to borrow her brooms. And part of Mr. Crouch's Imperius Curse involved acting as if nothing had happened, as if his own DE son were not posing as Mad Eye Moody in order to place Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire and (ultimately) transport him to Voldemort. In the case of Viktor Krum Crucioing Cedric Diggory in front of everyone watching the Third Task of the TWT, it looks as if he's casting an Unforgiveable Curse under his own volition when in fact Crouch!Moody has forced him to do it using the Imperius Curse.

So the Imperius Curse not only violates a person's free will, it can be used to make him perform evil deeds that seem to be his own doing. And the Imperius Curse, like the Cruciatus Curse, can be sustained , causing lasting damage to those who try to resist it. Granted, it took only a few hours (probably) of excruciating pain to drive the Longbottoms to insanity and more than half a year for Mr. Crouch to reach the same point, but nevertheless, sustained use of the Imperius Curse on Mr. Crouch drove him to madness. Had he not resisted, he would have been a slave but not a (living) Zombie; his actions would have appeared to be his own, and he could have continued to judge the TWT as if nothing were the matter.

Another thing, too--the Imperius Curse makes the unresisting victim feel good, indeed euphoric. It's like a drug that the user do what he would not normally do, including taking physical risks (Neville's gymnastics; Harry jumping over desks, or starting to, which resulted in some serious bruises when he half-resisted the curse).

I think what makes the Imperius Curse Dark is primarily that you must desire to violate and manipulate the will of another in order to cast it. But it is also extremely dangerous, both to the victim and to his potential victims, and very difficult to detect. Mr. Crouch was wrong to use it himself and to authorize its use by Aurors, and his fate, however tragic, is a clear example of poetic justice.

Carol, who is attempting to compose this post using Yahoo's Beta version of HTML and is half afraid to view the results



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