Sirius, Sirus, and more Sirius/ Blood protection/ Dumbledore and Harry

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 158519

Tonks:
It is the loving sacrifice of Lily that makes the blood protection
strong. It is not the blood in and of itself. And it is not Love by
itself. It is both. I think that we are supposed to look at the
whole Love-Sacrifice-Blood as one thing. The books stress the fact
of Love over *Purity* of blood. Lily was a Muggle born and it was
her sacrifice that makes the difference. It is not the sacrifice of
a pure blood. So if Lily and Petunia were pure blood, yes, I might
agree. But they are of a Muggle family. There is the difference. A
Love Sacrifice from a Mud-blood beats a pure blood line. And who
knows, maybe it somehow saves all Muggles in the end. Another way of
looking at it is that the blood of a Muggle or Muggle born is the
lowest thing to many in the WW. So to have that blood be protective
because of the Love/Sacrifice is a major idea.


Magpie:
But I can still easily see people seeing the contradiction because 
while it's not following the Pureblood Superiority idea it's 
replacing one way of using blood with another.  The Purebloods are 
Purebloods because they are all family too.  Blood does matter. And 
if it matters on a deep, magical level one way it could matter in 
others.

As to whether DD is being cold-blooded, I don't think we can avoid 
an element of that given the home he's putting Harry into.  Of 
course he's not putting him there because the Dursleys will be cruel 
to them; his reasons are about protecting Harry.  But he seems to 
admit that only later do personal warm feelings of affection for 
Harry begin to alter his choices. Given what we know about child-
rearing today, if we're thinking realistically, Dumbledore was 
taking a big risk by not taking the Dursleys' treatment of Harry 
into account.  The author happened to know that this was a fairy 
tale and Harry would magically be okay, but in the real world I 
don't think an abusive environment usually leads to being a stronger 
person--it leads to quite the opposite. A loving environment, even 
if it's flawed, seems far more likely to produce a strong person. If 
his magical blood protection from a dead mother is stronger than an 
upbringing that might otherwise have led to rage, violence and a 
lack of connection to people and so a lack of empathy, that could 
chalk another one up in the "blood matters" column.  

-m