Marietta and Pettigrew/Who was Pettigrew anyway

[julie]

No: HPFGUIDX 176898


> 
> Alla:
> 
> Then so be it a gross misjudgment on my part ( and JKR's). I am 
> ready to agree to disagree but wanted to address this point. For me 
> Peter's betrayal **started** a year before he sold Potters to 
> Voldemort- namely when he started giving Information to Voldemort 
or 
> whoever approached him. I can totally see that starting same way or 
> close to what Marietta did. After all, he was supposedly eighteen 
> when he started doing it, wasn't it?
> 
> Let me repeat to me that is what started his betrayal. I do not see 
> him giving info as anything less than such. Only for a year he was 
> betraying whole Order IMO not just his best friends.
> 

Julie:
I do see your point, I just don't agree. We see that Marietta
tells on the DA for very specific reasons, because she let 
herself be talked into doing something she didn't want to do,
and then became uncomfortable and conflicted by her loyalty to
her mother when she realized the scope of the DA's intentions
to subvert the Ministry. Peter wasn't uncomfortable with the
Order's intentions or caught between conflicting loyalties
(unless he really did like something about Voldemort's plans),
but elected to work on a long-term basis for a clearly evil
regime simply to save his own skin, AFAWK. I don't see any
evidence that Marietta has the same core weakness or ability 
(and perhaps desire) to slide into pure evil as Peter did.

I do admit we are hampered by the fact that Peter is hands-down
the worst realized character in the books (IMO). We know almost
nothing about his background, his childhood, his talents or
ambitions separate from the Marauders (who were really made up
of James and Sirius and two tagalongs). At one point Peter 
whimpers that he betrayed the Potters because he feared for
his life, but why did he start giving information to Voldemort
in the first place? 

Fear as his single motivation seems a bit strange to me (and
I won't even go into how Peter possibly could have been sorted
into Gryffindor when he possesses not even a single supposed
Gryffindor trait--not in any overriding sense, as even Draco
displayed courage in rare instances like trying to save Crabbe
and Doyle from the Fiendfyre). 

Even if he was fearful, he made a lot of choices that weren't
motivated only by fear. He could have refused the Secret-Keeper
role and thus kept his friends James and Lily, and their child,
safe. He didn't have to resurrect Voldemort, as he could have
ensured his safety almost as well by leaving the country and
living in France, Bulgaria, Australia or anywhere in the world
as a rat while leaving Voldemort to potentially never find a
way to regain a body. Still a risk maybe, but a small one, if
Peter has any shred of decency or Gryffindor courage at all.

Reasonably Peter needed other motivations, but the author 
never bothered to reveal them. Money, perhaps, or power, or
revenge against his Marauder friends and other Order members
who didn't really respect him but just patted him on the back
occasionally like some stray dog they couldn't get rid of.

Whether we entirely liked those resolutions or not, at least 
most of the other pivotal characters in the story finally 
got their due revelations in DH. But Peter Pettigrew remains
a fuzzy spot on the tapestry, an enigma, the most un-Gryffindor
like character ever to be sorted into Gryffindor.

Julie