Marietta

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 169615

bboyminn:
> 
> But Hagrid is a well-meaning person who made a mistake.
> Marietta, on the other hand, is an ill-meaning person who
> made a mistake. There is no way Marietta can claim she 
> didn't know her actions would be harmful to the people
> involved. She had enough knowledge and evidence to know
> that Umbridge would not be kind to people who broke her
> petty rules.
> 
> Now, I can understand Marietta's action. She we torn
> between conflicting loyalties. We may never know what
> exactly made her tell Umbridge, but we do have enough
> to know that she was torn between at least two 
> conflicting loyalties. But none the less, I still say
> there is no way she could not have known that ratting
> out her friends would be a bad thing for them. 
> 
> I have to wonder when Marietta was weighing her 
> loyalties if she ever asked herself what harm the DA 
> Club was doing? Yes, it was against Umbridge's rules, 
> but she should have been able to see, smart girl that 
> she is, that Umbridge's rules were pretty petty and 
> pointless; as well as restrictive and counterproductive.
> 
> She wasn't acting on a rumor, she had been in the 
> DA classes and knew they weren't about overthrowing
> the government or creating a secret army for 
> Dumbledore. They were simply about training themselves
> to pass their test and learn to properly defend 
> themselves. <snip>
>
> My sympathy for Marietta is limited because, conflicted
> loyalties or not, she really had no underlying 
> justification for her actions against people who were
> trying to help her.
> 
> Steve/bboyminn
>

Carol responds:
Defend themselves against whom or what? If she doesn't believe that
Voldemort is back, it can't be him. And she knows they're opposing
Umbridge, which means they're opposing the Ministry, which, according
to Umbridge (and presumably her ally, Marietta's mother, is trying to
protect the "children" from "lies"). She also knows that they call
themselves Dumbledore's Army and believes either that DD is trying to
take over the Ministry and spreading lies and inducing panic in order
to do so (Fudge's view) or that he's a doddering, deluded old fool
(the official view propagated by the Daily Prophet). So she wouldn't
have seen the club as trying to help her. (She should, however, have
stopped attending. Maybe she was like Lupin, afraid of losing a valued
friendship if she stood up to Cho?)

*We* know that she's wrong. *We* know that Umbridge is evil. But Fudge
is also wrong, and AFAIK, he isn't evil, just deluded--persuaded by
Umbridge, IMO, to take extreme measures against a boy he has come to
believe (because he *want* to believe it) is subject to dangerous
hallucinations. Percy, too, is not evil, just deluded, so far as I can
tell at the moment. Marietta, torn between her friend Cho and her
mother, chooses her mother. And Cho (who might have felt otherwise had
she actually been expelled) understands that and stands by her.

The thing is, when we're wrong, we don't know that we're wrong, unless
we're deliberating propagating a false cause (like half-blood
Voldemort purporting to believe in pureblood superiority to recruit
pureblood DEs). I'm sure that Marietta thought the DA members were
dangerous and *deserved* to be expelled, just as Harry thought
(rightly, in his case, that Draco was up to something dangerous--and
told on him to Dumbledore in defiance of the schoolboy code because of
the extent of the perceived danger. Severus probably thought the same
about the boys who played a "Prank" that nearly cost him his life:
they deserved, in his view (and in mine, in the case of Sirius) to be
expelled.

These kids are, in Marietta's view, dangerous lawbreakers out to help
the renegade Dumbledore take down the legitimate government, which, in
dangerous times, is becoming understandably oppressive (again, her
view). Yes, she betrayed her friends (or, at any rate, her schoolmates
and one friend), but she thought she was doing the right thing, and
the hex would have struck her even if she'd gone to Flitwick instead
of Umbridge.

To answer the question someone asked about why the SNEAK hex didn't
hit Dean, I suspect he told Seamus about the meeting before he signed
the parchment and Seamus, still hurt by Harry's treatment of him,
declined the invitation.

Carol, who thinks it's too bad that Marietta wasn't in her NEWT or OWL
year, in which case she'd have felt as the other Ravenclaws did that
Umbridge's classes need supplementing with real spells