muggle baiting vs. muggle torture

[Marion Ros]

No: HPFGUIDX 155408

Sydney:
>>>So, what I wonder is, why didn't JKR put them in Slytherin? As I 
see it, either the point is that Slytherin IS the universal house of
vileness and of course no one with a trace of okayness would wind up
there; or, as I think more likely, there's something hinkey with the
house system. As in, it's actually pretty meaningless and only an
artificial source of division.<<<


Marion:

Red Hen did a wonderful essay on the way the Hat decides which House 
a kid is Sorted in, the Houses themselves and probes the possibility 
that the Hat has been tampered with:
http://www.redhen-publications.com/Hufflepuff.html

SisterMagpie:

>>The last funny joke placed on Dudley by a Wizard had to be removed
surgically. I've no idea if the engorgement charm in the candy
would have worn off by itself, but it's still kind of silly to brush
off "a simple engorgement charm" as if that makes it simple to the
Dursleys.<<

Marion:

Word!

I don't think people realize how horrible it must be to be at the 
tender mercy of magical 'pranksters' because magic seems so benign, 
so much fun, so harmless with all those batbogie hexes and whatnot.
Are there mothers or fathers amongst you all with a child with a 
food allergy?  Allergic for, say, peanuts. And some 16 year olds, 
knowing all to well that your child has this allergy, doctor some 
chocolates to look harmless but to contain traces of peanuts. Your 
child eats it, knowing he should be careful with food but hey, it's 
a chocolate, and his throat swells and he has difficulty to breathe. 
He's going into anaphylactic shock. You, his mother or father react
with understandable panic. Luckily, the father of the boys who gave 
your child the rogue choccies (and you've never seen these people 
before but the boys are standing there, watching your suffering and 
suffocating child with grins on their faces, making the whole 
desperate sitiuation feel more nightmarish), luckily the father is a 
medic and knows what to do.

Okay, another example.
One of my best friends is severely asthmathic. She can't walk into a 
room where people have smoked a hour before because that will bring 
on a heavy attack. Now, suppose your child has asthma and the two 
boys purposely blow cigarettesmoke in his face, bringing on a 
debilitating and very frightening asthma attack?

My point being: the 'funny' pranks the twins pull stop being funny 
when you take the novelty of magic away, when you strip it of its 
bizarre-ness.

However, Dudley did not have an anaphylactic shock or an asthma 
attack (although the results were largely the same: a sense of 
suffocation). A part of his body suddenly grotesquely mutated within 
seconds. Think about it: this is the stuff of nightmares, comparable 
with the 'chestburster' scene from 'Alien'.

Now, I know a lot of you will say "hey, it's only a kid's story, 
it's not meant to be taken seriously|", but although the first two 
books might be written for a young audience, the books gradually 
'grow up'. After the third book, where we find out that the WW isn't 
so perfect as Harry thought (Azkaban, people thrown in prison without 
a trial etc) nothing is simple and morally cut 'n dried black and 
white anymore.

So no, I don't think the twins' 'prank' funny.

And I don't *care* why the twins did it (although 'just for the fun 
of it' or 'we were bored' or 'just because he exists' would cover it 
mostly) or if Dudley 'deserved' it or what Dudley did - no-one should 
purpously feed a child with a peanut allergy candy with peanuts and 
watch him go into anaphylactic shock with glee. No-one should blow 
smoke in the face of a kid with asthma, no matter how nasty that kid 
had been to a friend of yours.

Add to all that that muggles are totally helpless against magic and 
that the Dursleys are terrified of magic (with good reason 
apparently).

Now bear with me a little longer. I wonder why the Dursleys are so 
absolutely terrified of magic. At first we thought it was because 
Petunia was jealous of Lily and turned her lack into a virtue: 
Lily's specialness became Lily's freakiness and Petunia's 
ordinariness became Petunia's normalness and thus Petunia's 
superiorness. But although envy might breed contempt, it does not, 
as a rule, breed terror. Then we thought that the Dursleys, silly 
muggles that they are, were simply comic relief. A bit like the 
Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons: violence and stupid behaviour is 
visited on him and we're supposed to laugh. But although this might
look this way in the first few books, the story has become more 
grown-up, more complex, has more issues about right and wrong and 
this explanation simply doesn't cut it anymore. The Dursleys' fear is 
not simply an irrational fear to show how stupid muggles are. This 
would defeat the purpose of the books to show how bad looking down 
on non-magical folks is. Now, why do I get the feeling that Petunia 
and Vernon have encountered 'pranks' like the twins before? Lily's 
sister was engaged and then married to one of the biggest pranksters 
of his time: James Potter. Petunia or Vernon could have said 
something about Lily that James or Sirius found insulting. If you 
consider what James and Sirius at fifteen did to somebody whom they 
thought were insulting to Lily Evans, what would they do to a muggle 
who did the same? Maybe they turned *her* upside down and stripped 
her of her underwear as well. And Vernon would be utterly powerless
against them/him.

Oh, the Dursleys are not pleasant people at all, I would agree with 
you on that, but the Dursleys have the right, as any other muggle, 
not to be magically harrassed by any git with a wand for some real or
imagined insult.