Hermione and her parents Redux WAS: Re: Wizarding Top Ten

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 188169

Pippin:
> > Imagine that your child is in danger -- is there something that was yours to give that you wouldn't give to save her?
> 
> Ceridwen:
> Convince me that my daughter would be in danger if I did not give this thing. We're not talking clothes or a car, we're talking a lifetime of memories. I wouldn't want my child taken from me, that includes the memories I have of this child. <SNIP>
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> The idea that without such memory charm you are much more likely to break under torture and give out to Death Eaters everything you know about your child's whereabouts is what would have convinced me to agree to it.  See, Kemper called Hermione selfish for doing it upthread, I would have called Hermione's parents pretty selfish if they would not have agreed. It is about their daughter's life too, right?
>
Carol responds:
How is it about Hermione's life? The Grangers can't tell anyone where  Hermione is going, with or without a Memory Charm, because she doesn't know herself. And the simple expedient of asking them to move to Australia (or anywhere out of reach of the Death Eaters) would surely be sufficient to get them (voluntarily) out of harm's way. Just keep their whereabouts secret from their neighbors and their patients and they'll be fine. (hermione could cast a protective spell on the neighbor's houses as an extra precaution.) There's no indication that the DEs have any power or influence outside Britain. Even Voldemort manages only to kill half a dozen people on the European continent. He has no power base there.

As for taking the memories of a child from a parent, nothing could be more cruel. Surely, the Diggorys are better off with their cherished memories of their lost son than with the delusion that they never had him. And the same would be true for the Grangers if they were to lose Hermione. 

I agree with Ceridwen, not that Hermione has gone too far to be forgiven, but that she is thoughtlessly manipulative and unwittingly cruel if, indeed, she wiped their memories without their consent. it's bad enough that they have to sacrifice their home, their possessions, and their dental practice to keep *themselves* (not Hermione) safe from interrogation, torture, and possible murder. But better to lose all that *by choice* and to spend a year worrying about their daughter (much as Molly is spending a year worrying about her son) than to lose the memory of that daughter, which, believe me, no loving parent would ever consent to do. Better to have loved her and lost her than never to have had her at all--or not to remember having had her and loved her. And suppose that Hermione has overestimated her magical abilities? Suppose that she can't put them right even if she finds them? And even if she succeeds, if she didn't tell them what she was doing, how is she going to explain that she sent them to Australia "for their own good"? It's "magic is might" and performing magic "for the Muggles' own good" all over again. She might as well be the young Dumbledore. (I won't go so far as to say the young Grindelwald.)

Carol, still wondering how Hermione could have altered her parents' memories so thoroughly if she'd never performed a memory charm and what kind of spell it actually was