Unforgivables - from a different angle

[career advisor]

No: HPFGUIDX 174621

What I don't see anyone mentioning in this debate is the state of the DA when Harry arrives. The curse in the Ravenclaw common room is poetic justice. It gives the female Carrow (whose name I can't spell) a taste of her own medicine. JKR is careful not to mention much about what went on in the school during the 7th year except obliquely and through hints, but it doesn't take much imagination to cringe with horror. It is clear in her mind that she imagined Hogwarts during the 7th year as a bleak vision, a place of screams and terror, an incredibly black and horrid place, were learning was more about survival then anything else, a place filled with torture. 
   
  Lets remember what Neville tells us about the DA's year.
   
  1. Neville in addition to being tortured numerous times has had a knife taken to his face and strips of flesh cut out. His entrie face is puffy and swollen and he is scared for life. He is not the only one this has been done too.    
   
  2. Seamus looks even worse then Neville.
   
  3. Michael Corner was badly , because he tried to save a first year from torture. Let me repeat that. JKR implied that the Carrows tortured ten year olds (in a childrens book).
   
  4. There are more then twenty students in the ROR all of whom have been tortured by the Carrows and/or Slytherins many of them with the cruciatus, including fairly innocent people like Lavender Brown. They're all in that room because they fear for their life. The Carrows would kill them if they knew they were alive. Mostly because they have made the decision to fight with and for Harry (who all the have off is rumors and faith). 
   
   Terry Boot seems to have been the most recent banished, since he wa.s at that nights dinner (though maybe not all DA members are banished, although we know for sure that Neville, Seamus, Lavender, and Michael are, and at least one Hufflepuff because of the draperies).
   
  5. Luna had been kidnapped in front of the DA and for a time until she got the message to Neville they must have thought her dead. And don't tell me Bellatrix didn't torture Luna a bit while she was at the Malfoys, which was about a month, to do so would be out of character. 
   
  6.  It must have been in Harry's mind, despite what Ted Tonks had said, that Ginny must have been punished in the same way as the others, for stealing Gryffindors sword, that she must have been subjected to the cruciatus at some point.
   
  7. And lets not talk about what happened to the muggle borns such as the Creeveys, and Dean and Justin and what did and would have happened to Hermione. If nothing else they would have been running for thier life for the last nine months.     
   
  McGonagall and the other teachers are portrayed as heroes, working the best they can to prevent this. Even Snape...seems to be working to protect them (how the hell did he convince Voldemort to keep on so many of DD allies as teachers?) And the she-carrow has the nerve to spit on McGonagall. What do you think her first curse would have been? 
   
  Harry is a realisitc hero, how can anyone imagine a hero that would'nt do what he would do in that spot. As JKR said, it would take a saint to hold there hand. I mean if this were Luna Lovegood and the Deathly Hollows I could possible see Luna refraining from the Cruciatus, but it was Harry  JKR developed and if she wanted to be consist with his character, he had to do this. Even Harry had to break at one point, and it appears McGonagall just about broke with him. 
   
  If the idea is that she should teach people to be saints, the answer I'll give to that is that the reason most saints end up being martyrs is that they don't fight back. JKR is not trying to teach her readers to be Martyrs, but she is trying to teach them to be courageous and yes sometimes you have to do evil to fight evil and one of the things that makes evil evil is that it makes good people, do lesser evil to combat it. As I have Draco say to Pansy in one of my fanfics: 'To worry about your rights (or the rights of others) when your life is at stake is a philosophy that will leave you dead.'    
   
  This was IMHO opinion one of JKR finest bits of realism, which she totally ruined with the epilogue, but that's an entirely different story (and the epilogue belongs in an entirely different story, LOL!) 
   
  DA Jones

       
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