Dark Magic

[prep0strus]

No: HPFGUIDX 176723


> > prep0strus wrote:
> > > so far.  A repentant murderer is all well and good, but it's not
> > > exactly the same as a *NEVER* murderer.
 
> > Bart:
> > Actually, in most branches of Christianity, it is.


>   Rowena:
>   There are even those who argue a truly repentent sinner is morally 
> superior to one who has neither sinned nor been tempted.
>

Prep0strus:
It gets us into areas of personal morality, as well as religious, with
absolution and the like.  No one can really say if someone else has
been tempted or not, but by that logic, to reach a true moral high
ground you should go out and do something horrible to someone... and
then feel really really bad about it.

I don't believe someone who kills can ever be the same as someone who
has not killed.  The baron's afterlife is made more miserable by the
chains he puts on himself, and repentance is very good.  But I don't
think that was what JKR was trying to show us, really.  We didn't get
a Baron-arc in the story.  What we got was another symbol of Slytherin
that did something terrible and then tries to make up for it through a
fairly miserable existence. I think it would be almost more meaningful
to have someone who repents and gets to live a full life, but that
doesn't happen (perhaps closest with Dumbledore, whose sin is arguably
smaller, and his life still not full).  In any case, it's not the Fat
Friar who stabbed somebody with a carving knife.  It is again
Slytherin.  The founder placed a monster to kill people.  The ghost is
a former murderer.  The head of house is a nasty, angry man working
through his own repentance.  Its most famous graduate is a monster
himself, as well as an attempted genocide.  Its graduates that we have
met are participants in this movement.  Its current students are
bullies and DE neophytes.

Perhaps there is a symbolic idea of repentance for Slytherin house,
but then it seems that no one else needs repentance, just Slytherins.
   The Baron might be repentant, and therefore in some theological
views in moral equivalence with non-murderers, but from a story point
of view, JKR made the Slytherin ghost a murderer, finding another
opportunity to show us that Slytherins, from old to new, are worse
than everyone else.

~Adam (Prep0strus)