[HPforGrownups] Re: Dark Magic and Snape / Dark Creatures

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 161567

> Betsy Hp:
> If the WW has made the MoM's definitions of dark and light magic
> their ethical crutch I can see them being quite susceptible to that
> sort of  manipulation.  And I can see them concluding that there's
> no good or evil, just power.
>
> Which would suggest that designating light and dark magic *harms*
> rather than helps the fight against evil.

Magpie:
I find in reading that the fact is in the WW there is only power when it 
comes to magic.  Which is not to say that good and evil don't exist, just 
that magic is magic.  There's not much mysterious mysticism attached to it, 
and when there is it's usually more a metaphor for the mystery of something 
else, like love. It's not like they reach for a different kind of magic when 
they make a Dark Spell.  JKR has her kids harm each other in mild ways all 
the time with little discussion about what spells are right or wrong--except 
for the ones designated to be so.  (She also used the word Dark to describe 
some of those things.) And most of those, as a_svirn said, are pretty clear. 
It's not that it's bad to use Crucio because it's demonic in origin and you 
might become possessed, it's bad because you're torturing someone.

This also leads into a tangent, but I've always honestly wondered if fandom 
didn't take the Unforgivable thing more seriously than JKR did legally.  The 
legal system in HP is one of many things that seems tranparently dependent 
on plot, so I find it hard to really take it for granted unless I've seen 
something used before. So whenever I hear about the idea of going to Azkaban 
for using an Unforgivable I have a hard time picturing it because JKR seems 
so totally uninterested in the legal system taking care of anyone.  She may 
end up using that to the situation, but usually they seem to just pass on 
by.

When Harry tried to throw one in OotP I originally thought that was 
important in terms of his using this Dark Curse, but it turns out it really 
wasn't. It was just a teenaged boy looking to throw the pain he felt at 
someone else. It wasn't that he didn't access the demonic power he needed, 
it was that he did what he wanted to do and it wasn't torture someone. Harry 
never thought back on it, nor did anyone else. The next year Draco almost 
throws one in a fight because he was humiliated by being caught crying by 
the boy he'd never want to see him cry and nobody's all that amazed by the 
idea. It's hard to reconcile something that's so bad using it once gets you 
life imprisonment with spells that we see used all over the place, even a 
couple of times by teenaged characters.

-m