Dragons, Produced and Tickled, and Other Pleasantries

[pippin_999]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "nrenka" <nrenka at y...> wrote:
ith explanations, and we get 
> a "Oh, I tried to be good for a while, but I couldn't stand it" 
> comment, or something where Snape is disparaging of both of his 
> masters--not too hard to realize that this isn't the fanatical 
> Bellatrix, but something rather different and maybe even worse 
> (depends on your criteria). :)

Pippin:
I can't see how that would look different to Harry than Quirrell's
"There is no good and evil, there is  only power, and those
too weak to seek it."  Then we have Voldemort himself telling 
the Death Eaters that Quirrell was naive. 

The story line is presented as a battle between good and evil, with
only the naive  and the unperceptive thinking that in a world where 
Love is reified and dwells behind a door, mere humans have the option 
of neutrality. Love doesn't allow it and Voldemort won't accept it. 
I don't think we're supposed to  see  present day Severus as naive
or unperceptive.

Voldemort accepts that, left to themselves,  most of his servants 
would be OFH. If they weren't they'd have come to look for him or gone to 
Azkaban. But Snape is not "the one who will come back when I make him 
an offer he can't refuse." He's the one who, if he's gone, "has left me forever."


Silmariel:
> 
> > I don't notice the difference between being an ill treated 
> > werewolf, an ill treated house elf, an ill treated muggle, or an 
> > ill treated wizard with an interest in dark arts.

Nora: 
> I'm saying that these different messages of discrimination don't 
> produce quite the same results; Voldie could do specific things with 
> blood as his banner that he couldn't do with other messages.  And 
> this is one case where I want to argue for specificity rather than 
> thinking in generals, because only that will let us account for plot 
> details.  It's like treating fascism, where each instantiation of a 
> fascist state has different factors and your model has to be tweaked.

Pippin:

It's not the pureblood wizards, even  among the Death Eaters, who
are  ready to kill or die for Voldemort.  There's only about thirty
Inner Circle DE's, and even most of them aren't willing to endure
Azkaban for their master. 

Voldemort's armies come from the communities of the downtrodden,
the Giants and the werewolves, and from the dementors, who are
created by suffering and misery, not by racial separatism. 

Voldemort draws on the sense of community and the longing for
one's own, but I think the books show these as only sinister when 
joined to paranoia and the hunger for power. Slytherin's fear of the
Muggleborn is an offshoot of the persecuting society which Muggles
established in the middle ages, when nobody had any idea of
races at all.


But there are real genetic differences between the races of Elves, Goblins,
etc, which probably can't and shouldn't be erased. If Slytherin had
been a Goblin, would it have been wrong to have a Goblin house?


It was when Slytherin began to think that  only purebloods should 
learn magic that strife began. But we learn from 
the Hat that all the founders sought to rule, which implies that they
began to think that power should belong only to the brave, the 
intelligent, or the loyal. Slytherin's paranoia infected everyone and
they all wanted there to be some kind of test. 

What we see in the books is that there is no test. People and beings may act in
concert, but they have to be judged as individuals, just as the hat does,
one at a time. 

> 
> > Nora:
> >> Ummm, so non-aggressive snooping deserves a broken nose?

Silmariel:
> > That comes from the end of OoP train scene, sure, not for snooping.

Pippin:
Also from the end of GoF train scene, where verbal aggression is escalated
to physical aggression by our heroes, who attack from behind five 
against three, stomp on Draco, push him out of the compartment and
leave him to be discovered by his adult guardians, or not.

At any rate characterizing forcible entry, "Harry seized the door
and pushed it open, hard;" as non-aggressive seems rather lenient to me.

Delayed accounting is what karmic retribution is all about. The sins of
the fathers are visited on the children, beginning with Dudley's pig tail,
culminating in Dumbledore's OOP speech "We wizards have mistreated
and abused our fellows for too  long, and we are now reaping our
reward."  Voldemort *is* what the wizarding community
deserves, Snape is what Harry deserves for his father's treatment of Snape,
but there is a power in the Potterverse greater than karmic
retribution, "at once more wonderful and terrible than death, than
human intelligence, than forces of nature." Harry's job is to break the
cycle of offense and retribution, not to give the wheel another spin, IMO.

Pippin