OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Judy wrote:

By the way, I re-read the description of Karkaroff, and he is described if ways that could be thought of as stereotypically gay—"fruity" voice, weak chin hidden by a goatee, etc.

I saw Karkaroff as falling very firmly within a (now, thankfully, rather archaic) British literary tradition. He's a variation on a stock that was more popular in the first half of the twentieth century, the Oily and Disreputable Eastern European, given a slightly (but only very slightly) more modern edge by all of the Cold War/Biased Olympics Official stuff.

You see a lot of these guys in Golden Age Whodunnits. Agatha Christie was partial to the type for a while: in her hands, he was often a Jew (up until around 1939, that is, when a dinner conversation with a member of a Foreign Political Party Which Must Not Be Named shocked Christie so badly that she apruptly abandoned much of her earlier anti-semitism).

Anyway, in the tradition of this Type, the effeminacy isn't really a signifier of homosexuality at all. It's a signifier of unwholesome and predatory sexuality. This stock character is often a hostile seducer ("ruiner") of well-born young women; sometimes he's a con man with fraudulent aristocratic credentials, hoping to marry wealth. I've also seen him written as a bigamist.

So, um...yeah. My suspicions about Karkaroff and Krum (::big smile and appreciative wave to Tabouli for K.I.S.S.T.H.I.S.D.U.C.K.::) probably were largely influenced by his effeminacy, but I think that I was reading that far more as a sign of "predatory" than of "gay."

While we're on this topic, I'd just like to add that JKR really knows her classic detective fiction tropes. The Karkaroff character in 1930s Whodunnits is the Designated Red Herring—the one that even the readers are meant to recognize as such. He's the character that nobody trusts, but while he usually does turn out to be No Good in one way or another—he's a jewel thief, or a forger, or a bigamist, or an espionage agent, or a gold-digger, or on the lam for crimes committed elsewhere—he's never the real culprit. He is not the murderer. He usually disappears half-way through Act Three; at the denoument, the detective then reveals his secret and explains that he fled out of fear of exposure, or fear of repercussions deriving from his exposure.

Sound a little familiar?

I don't think that I've ever seen this stock character's probable eventual fate painted quite so darkly as poor Karkaroff's, though. In mysteries, he just slips back into the dubious shadowlands whence he sprung—presumably to resurface at someone else's house party a few months later...

Judy again:

Ugh. I found the thought of Karkaroff being attracted to Krum pretty nauseating; the thought of him wanting Snape is even worse.

Aw. Poor Igor. What's so nauseating about him? At least his standards of personal hygiene seem up to par.

You know, I'm beginning to agree with Cindy? Karkaroff gets nothing around here but disdain.

So that does it. I'm inviting Igor out for a few drinks and to pick up his S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S. membership packet. We'll go far over our limits, and sing old songs loudly and off-key, and then get all weepy and bathetic and sentimental before staggering home at dawn.

I'd invite Cindy to join us, but... Well, I fear that the weepy bathetic stuff might prove too much for her. I wouldn't want her to snap and...well, you know. Kill us.

—Elkins, who can become weirdly obsessive about Agatha Christie and who has the Christies on her bookshelf filed in order of original publication date.

Porphyria, in response to my "Where are the Weaklings and Patsies?" query, wrote:

That's a good question, but I guess my reply would be, where do you draw the line between weak and unwilling?

That's an excellent question! There's certainly a continuum there, even in the real world. And as someone (Judy, I think it was?) pointed out some time ago, the entire question of personal volition is even more complicated for wizards in the Potterverse, where there are things like Imperius and Fidelius and the mental side-effects of Transfiguration to contend with.

And then there are also...well, genre conventions. In real life, for example, revealing secrets under torture is essentially a blameless act. Torture subverts personal volition—that's its purpose—so people can't really be held responsible for their behavior under its influence. Even members of certain branches of the military, who receive special training in resisting interrogation, are not really expected to hold up to it very well at all; those who do show a native facility with resistance (and yes, there are such people) are generally not considered so much "heroic" as they are seen to be possessed of an unusual and somewhat freakish talent.

In most types of genre fiction, on the other hand, virtuous people resist interrogation. They just do. It's a convention of the genre: Good Guys Don't Crack. So the question of personal volition is complicated even further in the world of HP by the extent to which the world might operate under the laws of genre convention, rather than those of real life.

This is an issue that touches directly on my question of a week or so ago, as to why Pettigrew might have chosen to go for that muggle-blasting-fake-my-own-death-and-frame-Sirius stunt, rather than simply claiming that the DEs had somehow figured out that he was the Potters' Secret Keeper and then wrested the secret from him by means of magical or physical coercion.

I argued that the latter plan seemed far more sensible to me, and it would have had the added bonus of placing him under Dumbldeore's protection in case the other DEs came after him for betraying Voldemort to his doom.

In response, Marina wrote:

Did he know that Volemort was down for the count? At the time, everyone pretty much thought that V was invincible, so Peter probably thought that the disappearance was just a temporary setback, and that V would be back any moment, kicking more butt. In which case worming his was back into the good guys' graces would've been a really bad move.

But...but...but...But he was a spy in the first place, wasn't he? He was a mole: he'd been passing on information from the inside. So surely 'in the good guys' graces' would be precisely where Voldemort would expect for him to be? I mean, that was a very important part of his job.

Really, worming his way back into the good guys' graces would seem like a no-lose strategy to me. If Voldie never returns, he gets pity and protection from the good guys, and if Voldie does return...well, he's just been carrying on doing his job like a loyal little DE. Win-win.

But (and this is the big "but") it's a strategy that only makes sense if one makes certain assumptions about how the Fidelius Charm works—and specifically, about what is meant by the phrase "chooses to divulge it." (It all depends on what "chooses" means.) What degree of volition is required for the SK's information to count as "freely" divulged? Could it be divulged under torture? Under Imperius? Under Veritaserum? How does the Fidelius Charm itself answer the question of at what point personal volition is negated by coercion?

This is a question that puzzles me because on the one hand, the only reason I can imagine for Pettigrew not utilizing the "they found out and came after me, and I just couldn't keep it from them" strategy would be that the information hidden by the Fidelius Charm can't be wrested from the secret keeper by force. If this is the case, then the fact that the others consider Pettigrew to be both magically weak and physically delicate is irrelevant: he still wouldn't be able to get away with claiming magical or physical coercion as a defense.

But on the other hand, if this is the case then I confess myself puzzled by the decision to try to bluff the enemy by switching secret-keepers in the first place. "They'd never suspect we'd use a weakling like Peter" would seem to imply that the Fidelius Charm is no proof against extreme forms of coercion, that the Secret Keeper can indeed be forced to reveal his secret through torture or Imperio or Veritaserum or whatever forms of magical mind-reading might exist.

In which case I'm left once more wondering why Pettigrew didn't choose the far wiser strategy of claiming that this was what had happened to him.

Cindy wrote:

I can only think of two reasons why Peter wouldn't try this. First, it could simply be that he is dedicated to the Dark Lord, as Sirius suggests in the Shrieking Shack. Peter was just biding his time, waiting for a chance to help his master, so being a rat for 12 years would probably provide a better vantage point than Azkaban.

But if the Fidelius Charm can be broken by torture or Imperius or Veritaserum or magical mind-reading or whatever else, then why on earth would he wind up in Azkaban? On what charges? Being Overpowered By a Bunch of DE Thugs? He could share a cell with the Longbottoms, perhaps?

Nope. That explanation just doesn't cut it. If Pettigrew had claimed coercion, then he would have been perceived as a victim (always a role he enjoys), not as a criminal, and he would have wound up far better positioned to wait for a chance to help his master than he did as a pet rat.

Once again, I'm left with the conclusion that the only reason that Pettigrew could possibly have chosen the strategy he did was that he knew full well that Sirius Black's "nasty temper"—or maniacally homicidal tendencies, depending on how you look at it—would have caused him to be blasted to smithereens on the street in spite of the fact that this would have been a monstrously unjust and indeed psychopathic response on Sirius' part.

So there.

<Elkins nods with supreme satisfaction, takes a long drag on her cigarette, and then blinks, frowning>

Although actually...

::long sigh::

Yeah, okay. Okay, Cindy. Fine. Never mind. I just realized. Sirius really would have been perfectly justified in blasting Pettigrew into a faint red mist had he tried out my strategy after the Potters' deaths, and you want to know why?

No, not because Pettigrew's a coward and a weakling, nor because Sirius would have thought that he ought to have been able to stand up to any degree of coercion, nor because the Secret Keeper's resolve can't be broken by magic or force. None of that.

No. No, Sirius would have been utterly justified in blasting Pettigrew on the street for the simple reason that Pettigrew is a terrible liar.

And no, I don't mean 'terrible' as in 'incorrigible.' I mean 'terrible' as in 'he's just no damn good at it.'

He never would have been able to pull off my strategy successfully because the man can't lie his way out of a paper bag. It would have been pathetically obvious that he was making it all up, and Sirius would have blasted him.

::exasperated sigh::

You know, I really do have very little patience with pathological liars who aren't even any good at it? God, I hate that. That just annoys the hell out of me. What's wrong with Peter, anyway?

It's just depressing. I really do find myself wanting to believe that Pettigrew was once a competent liar, and that maybe it was just all those years spent in rat form that dulled his edge or something, because otherwise I really do find myself wondering about Sirius and the Potters. They went an entire year without realizing who the spy really was? When it was Pettigrew? The worst liar in the entire Potterverse? The man whose tells are visible from a hundred yards away?

I mean, it just kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Back to Porphyria:

Peter sure seems to me to act more on fear than conviction; he seems really disgusted with what he's doing and living in constant fear that he'll be axed once his usefulness is over. Do we know the dark mark on his arm indicates that he's truly a willing DE, or is that just another thing he got browbeaten into?

"But they would have killed me if I hadn't agreed to enter into a binding magical compact with Voldemort and swear my undying loyalty to him! I was browbeaten into it! I didn't really want to!"

No. To my mind, that's willing. Weak, yes, to be sure, and if the browbeating was severe then rather sad as well, but come on! There are lines beyond which you just cannot venture while still claiming to be "unwilling." Once you're bearing the magically-binding token of your oath of eternal loyalty to the age's Great Dark Wizard, then I'd say that Checkpoint Charlie isn't even in your range of sight anymore: you've already gone miles past that line.

Then, much of this depends on how one interprets the status of the DEs and the nature of their compact with Voldemort. I don't really believe that there can be truly "unwilling" Death Eaters.

For one thing, the DEs would seem to be Voldemort's elite followers, not fellow-travellers. Whenever people talk about the dark days of V's original reign, the impression given is that he had a lot of supporters—people didn't know who to trust, they were fearful of talking to strange wizards, anyone could turn out to be the enemy, and so forth. But there are only thirty some-odd DEs in the graveyard scene. Even allowing for attrition due to imprisonment and death (not to mention cowardice and treachery), that number is just too small to represent all of Voldemort's original supporters. I'd say the DEs are an elite group.

Also, the Dark Mark would seem to represent a rather serious relationship: it's not exactly like bearing the Nike Swoosh on your ankle. It's not just a tattoo; it's a form of magical binding. It is intrinsically connected to Voldemort's state of being (it grows more visible as he approaches recorporation). It's linked to all of the other Dark Marks (Voldemort can use Peter's to activate all of them, and Snape claims that part of its original function was to serve as a means of identification and recognition between Death Eaters). Through it, Voldemort can summon his DEs to his side over great distance without giving them any explicit directions to his location. And when he's accusing them of infidelity in the graveyard, he reminds them that they once "swore eternal loyalty" to him.

That all sounds like serious ritual magic to me. While canon never actually makes it explicit, I think it's pretty strongly implied that the Dark Mark represents a compact, one that is both personal and binding, and one that really could not be entered into "involuntarily."

Also, Avery seems like a coward—maybe he's really evil but just hyper.

Oh, Porphyria! Surely you meant to say "he's not really evil, but just hyper," didn't you? I certainly hope so, because otherwise we may need to have words. You know how I feel about Avery. ;-)

So far it seems like only Lucius and Mrs. Lestrange stick with Voldemort because they feel they have a stake in what he's doing.

And I'm not altogether certain about Lucius. Yes, I'm sure that he and Voldemort do share certain agenda. But still. Lucius doesn't seem at all happy to see the Dark Lord back in action, and IMO there's more to that then simple fear of punishment. I definitely get the impression that there's a reason so few of the DEs went out looking for Voldemort the way the Lestranges did. I think that by the end there, he'd grown so completely mad and erratic and bwah-hah-hah villainish that all but the very nuttiest of his followers (Crouch, Lestranges...) were more than a little relieved to see him go.

Does anyone but me wonder if Rita Skeeter will wind up delivering information to Voldemort—wittingly or unwittingly? She's be a good candidate for some Imperius duty.

You think she really needs Imperius? Rita's on the make. I would think that she'd be so easy to manipulate by the usual means that there'd be no real need for mind-control.

Did JKR ever say something in an interview about trying to paint some characters in shades of gray, or depict degress of evil, or words to that effect?

Not that I recall. There was an interview in which she responded to the suggestion that GoF might have been a tad too dark for her audience with the response that she saw no point in writing about Evil unless one were willing to portray it as truly bad, which is where that "JKR has said that she wants to show Evil as bad" line that gets cited so often around here comes from. But I'm damned if I can remember the source—probably someone else will know.

I do remember that in its original context, it came across as a considerably less trite statement than it usually does when cited here. ("No! You mean to say that evil is...is bad? But surely you can't really mean that! Say it isn't SO!")

::rolls eyes::

"Evil is bad."

::snort::

Sheesh.

—Elkins

Marina wrote:

(snipping musings on why Peter didn't throw himself on Sirius' mercy after the Potters were killed)

I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the possibility that Peter just didn't think of it, just as Sirius, freshly out of Azkaban, didn't think of owling Dumbledore to tell him what really happened.

Neither do I, actually. It does seem a little odd to me, though, because it strikes me as the sort of strategy that would leap immediately to the mind of the Peter we see these days—a Peter who seems to consider the manipulative possibilities of tears and deceit first (they're his default response), and only seems to move on to consider other options after rejecting Tears-and-Deceit as unworkable.

Although...hmmm. Actually, perhaps that's just not true. Now that I think about it, perhaps flight is really his default response. It's how he tries to deal with Sirius Black in PoA. (For that matter, it's how he eventually succeeds in dealing with Sirius Black in PoA.) And all through the Shrieking Shack scene, he keeps glancing around, looking to the boarded-up windows and the door... He goes for the Tears-and-Deceit only because he can't just cut and run, but that's what he really wants to be doing, and that's what his first instinct is to look for a way to do.

And Voldemort accuses him of planning to scarper at the very beginning of GoF, doesn't he? Astute of him, really.

So...yeah. Okay then. Never mind.

So it's possible that if someone said to Pete, "hey, why didn't you just tell Sirius you were tortured into revealing the Potters' location," it's possible he would've slapped himself on the forehead and exclaimed, "D'oh! Can't believe I didn't think of that! Boy, is my face red!"

Oh, I'm sure he thought of it eventually. I'm sure he thought a lot about it during all those years he spent as Scabbers. No wonder he was such a depressed-seeming rat. ("...eat chocolate...take nap...eat more chocolate...take nap...")

Also, even if Peter did think that Sirius would summarily blast him no matter what excuse he gave, that doesn't mean Peter was right.

Well, I don't really think that Sirius would have, unless Peter had really botched his tale-telling. But Cindy thought that he would have, and she wholeheartedly approves of such irrational and bloody-minded behavior (I understand that she likes ambushes too), so I was teasing her.

The combination of extreme terror he must've been feeling and knowledge of his own guilt may have made it impossible for him to believe that any of James' friends might show him mercy or compassion.

That wouldn't surprise me either. Also, I suspect that he'd been expending quite a bit of mental energy up to that point in time convincing himself that they were really hateful people, monstrous people, people who had never treated him well, people who had in fact treated him very very badly, people who had injured him, people who richly deserved to be betrayed...

It would be rather difficult, I think, to go from there to: "This situation can be salvaged. I'll just tell them it was forced from me. They'll believe me, and since they can't really hold something like that against me, I'll be just fine."

—Elkins

Tabouli wrote:

Ahaaaaa, now this brings back my other (more outlandish subversive, Elkins?) but nonetheless thought-provoking) shipping theory... FLIRTIAC (Filch's Lover Is Regretting Transformation Into A Cat).

Outlandish? Subversive? Nonsense! FLIRTIAC is overwhelmingly implied by canon. Indeed, were I ever to abandon the liminal pleasures of the shoreline for the absolutism of the wide-open sea, FLIRTIAC would be my vessel of choice. It is the only ship on which I have ever so much as considered booking passage.

For now, though, I am content to sit here on my rock at the tideline, singing merrily to myself and luring only the occasional sailor to his doom.

And speaking of people who love cats, Catlady wrote:

It is to be hoped that Malcolm is from an old Slytherin family, so he understands (from parents or older siblings telling him) that Gryffindors and Slytherins hate each other, so being booed by the Gryffindors is only typical Gryffindor nasty behavior...

It is to be hoped, indeed! (And how I love you, Catlady, for using that construction!)

JKR surely intended "Malcolm Baddock" (MAL... BAD...) to be a Slytherin name.

::laughs:: Oh, I'm sure you're right. Ah, yes, poor little Mal Bad, son of Perfidius Baddock and his second wife, the lovely (if cold-hearted) Nefaria, not a drop of muggle blood in those veins, nursed on unicorn blood and virgin's milk cocktails, cut his first tooth on a disobedient House Elf, cast his first hex at the tender age of five....

<brightly>

Hey, but don't worry about Malcolm Baddock. He can make choices just like the rest of us. Right?

::snort::

Ah, what's in a name? What's in a name indeed?

---------

Olly provided definitive proof that although Gred-and-Forge, like Tom ("I Am Lord Voldemort") Riddle, have been known to play word games with their own names, they are nonetheless not destined to become Evil Overlords:

A friend and I went through a whole heap of the character names to see if any more of them could do it and the best we came up with for Gred and Forge was...

Seedy Elf War and Eyesore Waggle. :) I dont think either of them would be a huge problem.

Nooooo...no, I think that you must be right. "Eyesore Waggle" lacks that special Evil Overlord cache. The world is definitely safe from the twins.

Thanks, Olly. I'll rest much easier at night now.

But you know, I was thinking about Riddle and his pretentions, and I found myself wondering: just who were those teenaged "intimates" of his who had actually agreed to call him "Lord Voldemort," anyway?

Can you really imagine a fifteen-year-old Slytherin being willing to call even a very charismatic and talented peer "Lord Voldemort?" I mean, without sniggering?

My theory is that all of Riddle's close friends had come up with similarly ridiculous and pretentious anagrams for their names, and that they used them as nicknames within their little clique. There was actually a "Prince Nephridior" as well, you know, and a "Regulus Vindex," and an "Eat Me, Calliope." (Old Eat Me always was kind of an odd duck.)

Of course, upon their leaving Hogwarts, Riddle simply had to hunt them all down and kill them. There was just no way around it. But that was okay with him, really, because you see, unlike Severus Snape, Tom Riddle really never had liked any of the members of his Old Slytherin Gang. ;-)

------------

Catlady, again:

I want to believe that Draco is an intelligent child, altho' he (alas does not act intelligent while feuding with Harry.

No, he doesn't generally, does he? It's disappointing, that—much in the same way that his subtle-as-a-brick-in-your-face father Lucius is disappointing. I think that I'd like it much better, really, if Harry had a brighter rival in Draco.

I did think, though, that Draco's choice of the 'Densaugeo' curse in his impromptu duel with Harry in GoF was quite witty. It surprises me that no one ever seems to bring that one up when they've just gone scouring canon for proof (some proof! any proof! please!) of Draco's intellect.

------------

Eric wrote:

Of course, ol' Voldie's sort of a standing warning against most of the Seven Deadlies, except for Gluttony and Lust.

Ah, but surely he has Nagini to represent his Gluttony!

And as for Lust...hey, I know! How about we modify "Even EEWWWWWWer" just a bit? If we claim that in addition to wanting a male heir of his very own sprung from Lily Potter's magical loins, Voldemort also just plain wanted Lily Potter's magical loins (for the, er, usual reasons), then we could ascribe to him all of the Deadly Seven.

We could call this new theory "So EEEEWWWWWWWer it's in the SEEEEEWWWWWWer," perhaps.

Me:

I find myself wondering when Hermione's going to have to stare down envy.

Eric:

Either when one of her two pals starts dating seriously, and she is no longer the Girl in their lives ("What? You told her that...and not me?") or when she's faced for the first time in her life with real, serious competition in the academic line.

Ooooooh! I hope it's the latter. Seriously, I'd love to see that plotline.

—Elkins, thinking she might just hear some human voices out there, and so hastily assembling the scuba gear...

Mahoney wrote:

On another subject, has anyone speculated that as for Black having suspected Lupin as being the spy, there might have been some reason related to, I dunno, Lupin's personality that suggested it? I.e., something other than, say, general distrust of werewolves?

::raises hand::

I have.

'They call it the Dementor's Kiss,' said Lupin, with a slightly twisted smile.

Ooooh, yes. There's definitely a dark streak to Lupin's character. He's got Edge, which is one of the reasons that I like him so much. (Without his Edge, he'd be a bit sappy, if you ask me. Far too nice. Too...well, too ewww to be trewww, shall we say.) I don't think that Lupin's werewolf status was the only reason that he was suspected at all. Not by a long shot.

But then, I think that it may be hard to separate Lupin's dark side from his lycanthropy when we talk about the reasons his friends may have had for coming to suspect him—or for that matter, even when we talk about our own feelings about him. That notion of "the wolf is always there, even when you can't see it" is far too central to even our own werewolf mythos, let alone that of the Potterverse.

Mahoney:

I Was thinking...the 'Jekyll & Hyde' type is one way of looking at Lupin; but what if he's less split down the middle? What if he's actually a bit...wolfy? He acts mild-mannered and nice, because he is generally mild-mannered and nice; but even the mild-mannered nice people can have dark emotions and urges.

Yes. I think that if we didn't know that Lupin were a werewolf that Edge of his would still be an evident aspect of his character, but the fact that we do know—as did the Marauders—makes it all that much harder to ignore.

Still Mahoney:

And if he had a bit of a wicked streak, which he only let his close friends see, it would make more sense for Black to think that Lupin was the type to maybe be amenable to Voldemort's ways and thus become a spy.

Well, I think that we get to see quite a few signs of Lupin's "wicked streak" in PoA, and that they do make it easier to imagine how Black could have come to suspect nice, mild-mannered, intellectual Remus as the spy in their midst. After all, we suspected him, didn't we? ;-)

Leaving aside the question of his capabilities (Lupin is certainly both clever enough and sufficiently emotionally-controlled to have been an effective spy), and of his social vulnerability (aside from the lycanthropy itself, the fact that Lupin's condition renders him effectively chronically-ill and terminally-nemployed would have made him far more vulnerable than any of the others to temptation by offers of financial security or enhanced social standing), and focusing instead purely on questions of character, I see a number of things which might have made him seem suspect.

For starters, he's apparently chosen to specialize in the Dark Arts... errrr...Defense Against Dark Arts, that is). It's not clear whether he was drawn to this field because of being a werewolf or in spite of it, but either way it's a little suspicious, and would surely have seemed far more so during the days of Voldemort's reign.

Then there's his sense of humor. It's dry, but it can also be a little bit black:

Professor Lupin had come back. He paused as he entered, looked around, and said, with a small smile, 'I haven't poisoned that chocolate, you know...'

Of course he's joking, and the humor there is primarily self-deprecating: Lupin knows full well that to the students he must appear somewhat disreputable. It's a joke designed to release tension and put the kids more at ease with him, and it works beautifully. But it is a little dark.

His demeanor when practicing magic is casual in a way that could be read as indicative of darkness as well. On more than one occasion in PoA, JKR uses the word "lazy" or "lazily" to refer to aspects of Lupin's wand work. This speaks to his competence, of course, but it's also a trifle unsettling, because "lazily" is a loaded word in the Potter books. It's how Snape speaks when he is being deliberately cruel; it's the adverb consistently applied to the Malfoy drawl. And in GoF, Voldemort gets an awful lot of "lazily" as well. "Lazily" is how the Potterverse's sadistic characters behave. In JKR's idiom, it's really not a neutral word at all.

Then there's also Lupin's tendency to speak of dark matters in a cool, light, or even breezy fashion. The angrier or more upset he is—or the more potentially emotionally upsetting the subject under discussion—the lighter and milder his tone becomes. We see that whenever he has to deal with Snape's unpleasantness, we see it in Shrieking Shack when he responds to Hermione's outing him as a werewolf, and we see a lot of it whenever he talks to Harry about the dementors.

When Harry asks him why the dementors came to the Quiddich match, for example:

'They're getting hungry,' said Lupin coolly, shutting his briefcase with a snap.

That "coolly" sort of chills the blood, doesn't it? And he gets even worse when he tells Harry about the Dementor's Kiss. There's the "slightly twisted smile," of course, but even beyond that, Lupin's entire tone as he describes the Kiss is light, casual, breezy; it's very nearly bemused.

There is, of course, nothing in the least bit "wicked" about using this technique to disconnect from upsetting matters; it's a form of emotional self-protection. But it's a habit that is horribly prone to being misinterpreted by others. It can all too easily be misread as callousness or inhumanity, or even as cruelty.

(I've had a lot of personal experience with this one, as I share Lupin's tendency to take on a facetious tone when angry or upset, or when discussing distressing subjects. There have been many times when I've discovered—much to my dismay—that somebody I'd thought I was getting along with quite well had actually come away from a conversation absolutely convinced that I must be a truly horrible and cruel and uncaring person. It's always a bit of a shocker, when that happens.)

Of course, you'd think that Sirius and the Potters would have known Lupin well enough not to be dismayed by that sort of thing, but...you never know. Horrible things were happening. I can easily imagine how Lupin's breezy and off-hand manner when discussing, say, somebody that the group actually knew having been tortured or murdered might have given even his friends pause, particularly if they were already becoming suspicious of him for other reasons.

Even Lupin's compassion could, viewed in a certain light, make him seem a little suspicious, because it's a compassion born of sensitivity and insight, of the ability to "read" others, to deduce other people's personal vulnerabilities and motives. Lupin's very good at that; it's what makes him a good teacher. But that form of sensitivity can also be a rather unnerving trait, particularly in a paranoid situation, one in which there are secrets that must be kept hidden. On a certain level, an emotionally astute individual is a spy—he knows your secrets...or at least he makes you feel as if he does—and I don't think that it did much for the others' sense of security around Lupin. I think that his very sensitivity probably made him seem suspect.

When we're talking about Darkness, also, I think that Lupin's sensitivity to others is one of his most suspect character traits because while wisely used that sort of sensitivity can lead to compassion, used with ill-intent it turns to sadism. If you can tell where somebody's vulnerabilities lie, then you may know how to help them, but you also really know how to hurt them. And while Lupin rarely uses his sensitivity cruelly, he certainly does know how to do it. His rebuke to Harry at the end of Chapter 14—"Your parents gave their lives to keep you alive..."—is devestatingly effective. It's also slightly...

Well, intent is everything here. Lupin truly believes that murderous Black is trying to hunt Harry down, and the kid really isn't taking the threat as seriously as he ought to be. But if Lupin's comment hadn't been delivered with such undeniably good intent, if the context had been different, then one might even be tempted to call it "vicious." Lupin really does know how to target the jugular, and there are times when I get the definite sense that he's got a bit of a taste for it as well. He's not a sadist...but he could be, and if he ever did go bad, I think that's exactly how he'd do it. It does come across as a "dark streak" to his personality, IMO, and I can easily imagine how that aspect of his character could have made him seem highly suspect.

Of course, where I think that Lupin's capacity for sadism comes across the most clearly is in Shrieking Shack. Others, I know, have disagreed with my reading of Lupin's lines there—we had a thread on this a little while back, and it reached an impasse pretty quickly—but I still maintain that in Shrieking Shack, Lupin's anger has pushed him to the brink of sadism.

Everyone gets bestial at the end of PoA, of course—that's the entire point—but Lupin's particular mode of beast-ness does, IMO, come across as considerably more "Dark" than either Sirius or Pettigrew's respective forms of beastliness.

So...um, yeah. I do think that there are a lot of things about Lupin's character other than his lycanthropy that might have tempted Black and the Potters to suspect him as the spy. There's a streak of Darkness there, to be sure.

Good thing, too, 'cause otherwise he wouldn't be nearly so interesting. Or nearly so sexy.

—Elkins, to whom never even occurred that others might find anyone but Lupin the sexpot character of the older generation, and who was shocked—just shocked!—to learn otherwise. ("'Sirius Is Dead Sexy?'" she read to herself, and then blinked in confusion. "Sirius?" she repeated blankly. 'Sirius? Is that...that's a joke, right?" Then she remembered the flying motorcycle, and nodded to herself. 'Ah,' she thought. 'Okay. I guess some people do like that sort of thing.')

(We won't even get into her response when she discovered the Snape-Is-Sexy people.)

I have a stunning and revolutionary new Avery theory to share with you all!

But first, some ambushes.

Much Ado About Ambushes

Cindy wrote:

Oh, you want me to speak as a List Elf instead of a Spinner Of Wobbly Theories?

::corner of mouth twitching suspiciously::

No, not really. I just wanted to see what you'd look like in an oven mitt.

I was also rather hoping for some Jar-Jar Binks-style dialogue, but now I suppose that I'll just have to die disappointed.

Oh, my. This is just making me feel all squishy inside. Finally, someone else (besides George, who I still don't fully trust) buys on to the Ambush idea. ::dabs at eyes::

Good lord, woman. Suck it up, won't you? Think of your reputation!

I wouldn't trust that George guy as far as I could throw him, by the way. Every time I see him, he's changed his clothing, or his hair style, or his glasses have new frames... You ask me, he's still trying to find himself. I wouldn't commit myself to anything until he's grown up a bit, if I were you.

Elkins, can I offer you a few cheap trinkets that probably won't give you a bad skin rash if you remember to take them off at night?

Welllll...I don't know. You're selling those things from off of the deck of that <supreme distaste> ship these days, aren't you?

I'm not getting on board that thing. You bring those trinkets of yours down here onto the beach, then maybe we can talk about it.

Actually, Dolohov is in my ambush as well, and I'm willing to let Frank Longbottom have a bit of the glory. I will note for the record, however, that I think there were three Death Eaters in the ambush (Dolohov, Rosier and Wilkes). That makes my ambush bigger.

<eyes Cindy reproachfully>

Well, really now, Cindy. Was there ever any doubt that yours was bigger?

Dolohov, eh? I suppose that makes sense, given Crouch's exchange with Karkaroff in the Pensieve scene. Any chance I could convince you to off Wilkes in an entirely separate scenario?

See, (where's the canon, where's the...) Wilkes was probably in a different cell, right? Because otherwise Karkaroff would have named him at the Pensieve hearing, along with Rosier and Dolohov. The fact that he didn't name him leads me to believe that either Wilkes was already dead by the time of Karkaroff's arrest or that Wilkes and Karkaroff were in different "cells" of the DE organization, and so didn't really know each other.

Either way, you need a separate scenario to account for Wilkes' demise.

And besides, big ambushes make me nervous.

But look on the bright side. This way, you can have two ambushes! Smaller ones, yes, and perhaps a tad less Great-And-Bloody than you like—but two of them! Or, if you prefer, you can take one Small-But-Bloody-Ambush and one...oh, I don't know, Entrapment Scenario Gone Terribly Wrong, say. or perhaps a Hit Wizard Sniping. You can take your pick.

Or do you only like ambushes?

Cindy's ambush theory

This is shades of Eric, in a way, but maybe not.

Eric? Is he a friend of George's? I...Oh! ERIC! That Eric! Yes, yes, all right. Do go on.

[Moody's attempts to talk Rosier down go horribly awry, whereupon Frank Longbottom single-handedly takes down three DEs, thus not only ensuring his popularity, but also establishing beyond a shadow of a doubt his Toughness credentials]

Mmmmmm. I rather like that. It has the advantage of maintaining the Alastor-Moody-Was-the-Most-Civilized-of-the-Aurors thing, while still allowing Longbottom to be—if slightly more trigger-happy and reckless than Moody—still most decidedly not one of those Judge-Dredd-On-Acid types. Dolohov was taken alive, right? So there you have it. Judge Dredd would have wasted the guy.

You still need to replace Wilkes with somebody else, though. Perhaps, uh... ::sound of flipping pages:: Travers? How 'bout Travers?

Of course, if it's Travers, then your ambush is a tad less Bloody, as Travers would seem to have been taken alive. But that would make Longbottom all the more impressive, wouldn't it? (If somewhat less dripping with DE blood.)

Much as I like Longbottom-takes-down-three-DEs-single-handed, though, I'm still going to keep on plumping for Rosier-dead-at-Moody's-hands, because I like what it does to Snape's interactions with Crouch/Moody all through GoF. Although, really, I suppose that if you gave Moody Wilkes, you could get much the same effect. You just wouldn't have quite as much canonical suggestion to back it up.

Longbottom, like Moody, is quite Tough.

<quiet satisfaction>

Was.

<sudden horrified look>

Oh my God. I didn't really just say that out loud, did I?

Ahem. Yes, well. Sorry 'bout that. But somebody recently levelled accusations of "the Longbottoms had it coming"-itis against me—at least, I think they were levelled against me, although they might have been levelled against Eric—it was sort of hard to tell—and you know how suggestible I am to that sort of thing.

Take Avery, for example...

Much Ado About Avery

Yes, Avery is a difficult case to sort out. Still such a blank slate, and only three books to go.

Right now I imagine he's hanging out in the Green Room, preening himself and bouncing excitedly in his chair and lording it over all of the other guys who spend their time down there—you know, Mundungus Fletcher and Arabella Figg and the Longbottom family and that lot, all of whom are beginning to finger their wands and squint speculatively at him—but he hasn't even noticed that yet, not our Avery, nope, he's still far too wound up, he's all smug and gloating and babbling uncontrollably: "I had an appearance. I had a line of dialogue! Seven whole words! And Harry was watching me—not even in a dream sequence or anything like that, no, in real life! And the Dark Lord even spoke to me, he addressed me by name, he said, 'Avery,' he said, he...well, er, actually what happened there was that he, er, sort of, well, you know. Tortured me. A bit. Which wasn't really all that enjoyable, now that you mention it, I really can't say that I was all that terribly keen on that part, to tell you the truth, and...well, I do rather wish that I had been able to take that wretched mask off. I mean, it's all rather awkward, isn't it, not even knowing what you look like? And I still don't have a, well, a, you know. A first name. Not, at any rate, yet. Not as such. But! Still! I've had an appearance! And a line of dialogue!"

<Elkins pauses for a moment to contemplate the notion of young Severus Snape forced to share living quarters for an entire seven years with that version of Avery, shudders, then shakes her head and moves on>

Unlike Hagrid, I can't write Avery off as insufficiently Tough, though.

<tonelessly>

You think that Avery's Tough.

<shakes head very slowly>

Oh, sure, he doesn't have the good sense to keep his head down when Voldemort is looking for an opportunity to polish his Crucio skills. Yes, he writhes and shrieks, but who wouldn't?

Cedric Diggory, that's who. Diggory just yells. And gets right back up on his feet afterwards, too. Ah, the resilience of youth!

Then, I don't suppose that Imperio'd Krum's Cruciatus was really all that powerful.

What Avery needs is a compelling backstory.

Well, I'm sure that JKR has one all worked out for him. He is a terribly important character, after all. I myself won't be at all surprised if Book Five proves to be all about Avery!

Cindy's Avery Theory

No, Avery is and has been head of DMC since the Potters were killed.

He was head of a Ministry Department by the time he was twenty-one years old?

I mean, we all know that Avery's a misunderstood genius and everything, but don't you thknk that might be a little...much?

[Cindy then goes on to attribute Avery with all manner of marvellous things: recovering Voldemort's wand from Godric's Hollow, tampering with the evidence to ensure the success of Pettigrew's framing of Sirius Black, and so forth]

Wow. Well, that theory would clear up a number of contentious plot points, wouldn't it?

It has the drawback, though, that it drifts quite far away from my original premise that Avery Is Not All That Bad A Fellow, Really. I mean, you've just made him a...well, a fairly seriously committed Death Eater, actually. That just won't do at all.

Besides, I think that if Avery were heading the DMC, then he wouldn't occupy nearly so low a rank in Sirius' evaluation of threat to Harry, do you? The head of a Ministry Department is obviously Dangerous, even if he is Not Tough.

Now that things have settled down, Avery is leading a quiet life as a middle-aged bureaucrat...

::shriek::

Middle-aged? MIDDLE-AGED?

Cindy, if we assume that Avery is Snape's age, which I think is quite strongly suggested by the text, then he is only around 35 years old!

And 35 is not middle-aged! It is not! THIRTY-FIVE IS NOT MIDDLE-AGE! THIRTY-FIVE IS THE PRIME OF LIFE!

<Elkins takes a few deep breaths, trying not to contemplate her own mortality>

Besides, it's especially not middle-aged for wizards. They, uh, live a long time.

Yes, why does Avery become unhinged in the graveyard? After all, Avery did nothing more or less than Lucius did....But maybe Avery's behavior can be explained another way.

What, you didn't like my "Avery Has Recanted Deep Down Inside and Has Been Leading a Virtuous and Muggle-Loving Life" theory?

That's okay. I've got a new one, and this one doesn't even require that you accept Avery as virtuous or at all good. This is a theory that allows him to be utter scum, although it also allows for a Virtuous Avery variant. Okay? Ready?

But first, a few words of explanation as to why it is clear that Avery really is an important character, and not merely my own personal cause.

(You there in the back! Stop sniggering! This is serious!)

Why Avery Is Very Important, Really

Okay. It's quite clear to me that JKR wants us to notice Avery. She's obviously setting him up for some secondary villain duty in future books. He alone of the named DEs in the graveyard scene is neither someone we have met before nor (as far as we know) the father of a student at Hogwarts. Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle, Nott, MacNair...all these names at least ring bells. We know Lucius; we've met MacNair; we know Crabbe and Goyle's kids; and we've at least heard the name 'Nott' in a Sorting Ceremony, and so know that he has a child in Harry's year at school. Avery stands out as the notable exception.

Furthermore, JKR went out of her way to prime our curiosity about him before we even got to graveyard. In "Padfoot Returns" she gave us the intriguing notion of Snape's Old Gang, and then she went on, both in Padfoot and in Pensieve, to let us know what happened to Rosier, and to Wilkes, and to the Lestranges. Avery, however, is strikingly omitted. Furthermore, we are told that he is still 'at large.' This is a set-up. It's laying the groundwork so that when Voldemort addresses Avery by name in the graveyard sequence, we will prick up our proverbial ears. We're meant to reach that line and say to ourselves: "Ah-hah! Avery!"

And finally, she tortures him. Torture's always an attention-grabber, and it's often a sympathy engine as well.

So. JKR wants us to notice Avery. She wants him to be rooted in our minds. And yet—and this is an important point, so you there in the back: pay attention!—she never actually shows us his face. He is masked in the graveyard scene, and no hint is even given as to his overall body type. We—or, more to the point, Harry—would be able to walk right past him on the street and not recognize him.

She also partially obscures his voice. While he does have one line of dialogue, it is a histrionic plea for forgiveness screamed out in what appears to be a state of near-panic. Thereafter, of course, all he can do is shriek and gasp. Would Harry even recognize him from his normal speaking voice? Quite likely not. Unlike Nott, for example, who is given at least one hint of physical appearance ("stooped") and whose voice is heard, Avery remains utterly camoflaged.

So I therefore predict, with the cheerful confidence of one who has no actual money riding on any of this, that Avery will appear in some future volume—very likely in Book Five—and that it will be an important plot point that Harry Not Recognize Him. Either he will be masquerading as someone else, or Harry will encounter him in whatever social roll Avery normally fills and be horrified when he first hears his name.

That's my prediction.

(I also predict, by the way, that Ali Bashir's illegally-imported magical flying carpets will play some small but vital role in the plot of Book Five, and that a switcheroo with one of the twins' trick wands will save one of our Protagonists—probably Harry—from a sticky end at the hands of a Very Bad Wizard at some point in the story.)

(But I digress.)

Now...

The New Avery Theory

So. Having established beyond an question of doubt that Avery really is a Very Important Character, and not merely my own strange little joke (I said stop that sniggering back there! Do I have to ask you all to put your heads down on your desks?) I will go on to elaborate my most recent Avery theory. I hope you were paying attention before, because some of this builds on earlier stuff.

Okay. So we have Avery, whose most notable quality so far is his peculiar blend of seeming-irrelevancy and authorial emphasis. We know his name, we've even heard his voice (albeit only screaming), but we don't actually know anything about him. He hasn't actually done anything—he's never even had a child mentioned at Hogwarts. It's really all very odd, don't you think?

So where in Goblet of Fire do we find Avery's counterpart? Where is his opposite number in the text? What we are looking for here is a character who is of some importance or relevance, who has done something of some interest to the reader (and to Harry), and whose face we have seen—but who nonetheless suffers from a mysterious and seemingly inexplicable anonymity.

No, seriously. Think about this for a minute. Who have we seen who fits this description? Who is it who has both a face and a role—but no name? Who is Avery's double? Who is Avery's other half?

Are you with me here?

Yes! That's right! Avery was actually...

::dramatic chord::

...the Mysterious Fourth Man In The Pensieve Scene!

This was in fact the "trouble" that Avery "wormed his way out of" by claiming to have been acting under the Imperius Curse: his life-sentence in Azkaban alongside his old friends the Lestranges and young Barty Crouch. Yes, we've all been assuming that Avery never actually did any time - but there's no reason that this must be so. Sirius does not, after all, say when Avery wormed his way out of trouble - only that he did so. And life in Azkaban certainly counts as "trouble," while wrangling a pardon after only a year or two served would still qualify as worming ones way out of it. This would also explain why Sirius mentions Avery's name right after the Lestranges': they are linked in his mind by virtue of their common crime, just as Rosier and Wilkes are linked by virtue of their common fate.

More to the point, though, this theory (which I hereby dub "The Fourth Man Theory") serves to explain why that mysterious fourth co-defendent goes so suspiciously unnamed throughout all of GoF. It is a set-up, you see, for the Great Shock Moment of Book Five, when it will be revealed that not only is newly-introduced Character X (who will have always struck Harry as vaguely familiar, but he will never quite be able to figure out why...) actually Death Eater Avery from the graveyard scene of the last book, but that he is also one of those mad fiends who tortured the poor Longbottoms. O, horribile dictu!

But how (I hear you all cry), how, how, how, how could any of those four prisoners ever have wrangled a pardon after that trial, with its hissing mob, and Crouch's stirring denunciation, and all the rest of it? How could the public mood ever have allowed for such a thing?

Well, you have to remember that not long after that trial, the public mood began to change. According to Sirius, Crouch's popularity went into a sharp decline not long after his son's trial and subsequent death: people were beginning to think poorly of his excesses and those of his Aurors in the last years of the war. And Crouch himself, as we know, got shunted off into the Department of International Magical Cooperation—thus leaving his position open for a successor, who would likely have been eager to distance himself from Crouch's legacy.

So let us say that a year or two after the trial, the Wizarding World's Bleeding Hearts (HA!) all began to crawl out from the woodwork, calling for the reexamination of some of Crouch's more dubious old cases, the ones in which justice might not really have been served. Crouch has by now been shunted off into the Department of International Magical Cooperation, and the person who has replaced him sees in this an excellent opportunity to ensure his own political reputation by taking a second look at some of Crouch's more notoriously shaky old cases. So...

Eh? What's that? Oh. Why didn't Sirius Black's case ever get reexamined, you ask? Well...um...

::thinks hard::

Because Bleeding Hearts don't like Sirius Black, that's why. They all think he's a brute; he reminds far too many of them of those popular kids who used to pick on them in school. And besides, Dumbledore himself had never expressed any doubts about Black's guilt—and as everybody knows, Albus Dumbledore Is Never Wrong About Anything. ::snort::

Dumbledore did, however, seem to have held some doubts as to the actual guilt of Avery and young Crouch (who unlike the Lestranges didn't shoot their mouths off at their trial, but instead continued to insist upon their innocence), and this fact emboldens the Bleeding Hearts. They pressure Crouch's successor to allow for a retrial. It's too late for young Crouch by that time—he's already "died" in prison ::snicker::—but Avery is still there, spending his days rocking back and forth, moaning, banging his head hard against the walls, screaming in his sleep, and all of that sort of thing. He cuts a truly pitiful figure at his trial, which sways the court's sympathy, and this time he manages to pull off the Imperius defense—his claim, let us say, is that the Dead Sexy Mrs. Lestrange was controlling his mind. He is granted an official pardon and allowed to walk free.

Traumatized, twitchy, and Having Had Quite Enough Of That, Thank You Very Much, Avery then goes home to live in his mother's basement, where he takes up coin-collecting. He never pursues a visible or prestigious career, stays as far away from the public eye as he can manage, and whenever he gets an owl from one of his old DE comrades, scrawls "Return To Sender" hastily onto the outside of the envelope and owls it right back unopened.

More to the point, he never makes the slightest effort to seek out Voldemort. Like I said, Avery Has Had Enough.

And this is the reason that Avery is in such a nervous state when he gets to the graveyard. Not only because his stint in Azkaban has left him pretty twitchy to begin with, but also because he knows that his degree of infidelity is not really analogous to Lucius Malfoy's, or to that of any of the other acquitted DEs. All those other guys just wanted to be on the winning side, and the Big V can understand that—he was in House Slytherin himself, after all; he knows how that works—and besides, they can all defend themselves by claiming that they just didn't know how to go about looking for Voldemort: they had no leads, they had no clues, they had no ideas, "had there been any sign of you, any whisper of your whereabouts...," and all of that.

Avery, on the other hand, was in with the Lestranges. He did have some leads, and he could have continued to try to pursue them on his own, just as young Crouch did before Daddy Imperio'ed him. But he chose not to, and for no better reason than Not Being Able To Take His Licks Like A Man.

Voldemort just hates that. Like Cindy, he values Toughness.

Also, Avery begged off on the claim that he was Imperio'ed by a peer. Not by the Great Dark Wizard of the Ages, not even by a much older and more experienced wizard, but by a peer. And even worse, by a girl peer.

And Voldemort hates that sort of thing even more. He doesn't really have very much respect for women—which is why there are so few female Death Eaters—so to his way of thinking, that is just plain despicable.

So that's my Fourth Man theory. It explains Avery's hysteria in the graveyard. It explains the otherwise inexlicable anonymity of that mysterious fourth co-defendent. And it also explains Voldemort's utter lack of mention of the Fourth Man during the graveyard scene.

He's overflowing with praise for Crouch, and for the Lestranges, and yet he never even mentions the fourth guy? Even if the fourth man had died in Azkaban, wouldn't you think that V would have mentioned him by name? "And so-and-so, who was loyal, who died a martyr's death in my service, blah-blah-blah..."

Well, Fourth Man explains why Voldemort says nothing of the sort. It's because the Fourth Man is Avery, who is right there grovelling at his feet already, and because Voldemort has already made it perfectly clear what he thinks of him: namely, that his performance was shoddy beyond any hope of forgiveness, and that he now owes thirteen years of faithful service to make up for it.

Fourth Man also offers the possibility of a ::shudder:: SHIP, for those who like that sort of thing. One can, for example, contemplate the possibility that Avery was hopelessly in love with the Dead Sexy Mrs. Lestrange, and that he remained devoted to her even after she threw him over for his classmate and romantic rival. Tragic, hankie-worthy speculation possibilities abound.

Really, the only problem that I can see with Fourth Man is that it does absolutely nothing to support the notion that Avery Is Not All That Bad A Fellow, Really.

In fact, it kind of makes him even more loathsome than he was back when he was just a grovelling toady, doesn't it?

::long silence::

Oops.

Wait...wait...I can do this.

::even longer silence::

Okay. How's this? Avery really was under Imperius. He's a hopelessly weak-willed but Not All That Bad Really a fellow, who...uh...who only really became a DE in the first place out of his desire to impress the Dead Sexy Future Mrs. Lestrange. Alas, once within the ranks, he found that murder and torture made him sick. All of the other guys made fun of him, and there seemed a good chance that the Dark Lord might simply have him killed. So...uh, the Dead Sexy Mrs. Lestrange took, uh, pity on her oh-so-pathetic admirer and placed him under the Imperius to help guide him safely through the ickier aspects of the lifestyle he had so unwisely chosen for himself.

::short pause::

No. No, all right. I'm not buying the Dead Sexy Mrs. Lestrange as the pitying type either. Well, okay then. She just found him amusing. It entertained her to keep him around as a pet, and she particularly enjoyed forcing him to commit terrible atrocities that she knew he found horrifying and distressing. That seems rather more in character for her, really.

There. Now we have an alternate version of Fourth Man that maintains the whole "Avery Is Weak But Not Really Evil To the Core" theory. We call this one "Redeemable Fourth Man."

You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

Cindy wrote:

Really, all Avery needed in the graveyard was a good . . . lawyer. Someone to say, Avery, don't answer that question, and whatever you do, don't admit guilt.

Unfortunately, it was impossible for him to bring his advocate along with him to the graveyard. And while he had indeed been advised against the admission of guilt back at the office, without the support and comfort of that smooth-tongued fellow constantly leaning over to whisper in his ear, he just couldn't handle the pressure.

Uh, would it be a fair assumption that S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S. members are not Tough?

Er...not as a general rule, no. But some are. In fact, a few of our members have even been known to do things like sever their own body parts, although they are generally only able to manage such feats of Toughness when the plot demands it.

As I've said before, though, there really is a great deal of diversity within our ranks. We are, after all, an umbrella organization of sorts for those members of the fictive world who are what we like to call, er..."reader sympathy challenged." So while it is indeed true that our Abject Neurotics are, almost without exception, Not Tough, quite a number of our Yes-Men are very Tough Indeed. Young Crabbe and Goyle, for example, currently show every sign of growing up to be Reasonably Tough Yes-Men.

It is a sad truth, however, that our Toughest members are also often our very least articulate. As a result, they do often find themselves shockingly marginalized, even within the ranks of our own organization. We hope to address this problem in the future.

Do they watch a great deal of daytime television and read a lot of self-help books while they eat pint after pint of high-fat ice cream? :-)

Well, many of our members currently hold 24/7 positions as Minions to various Evil Overlords, which doesn't leave them very much time at all for daytime television and the like. Really, you know, it's very hard work being a SYCOPHANT. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of mental and physical energy...it can be draining, you know, it really can be... and all too often it leaves you with nothing left over for such frivolities as self-help books and the like.

No, at the end of the day, most of our members really just want nothing more than to go home and take their anti-anxiety medications, and their sedatives, and their anti-depressants, and their antacids, and their many many pain-relievers, and then go to bed, secure in the comforting knowledge that Tomorrow Is Another Day -- And Quite Likely To Be Your Last.

And as for the ice cream...well, minions rarely get very much of that. Evil Overlords are notorious for bogarting the high-fat ice cream.

Damn them.

—Elkins

Just a quickie, on the Unforgivables.

Tex asked:

Why would a dark(i.e. one who is already on the sheet for using an UC, so it doesn't matter if he uses more) wizard cast any other spell than AK? Is it more difficult? What spells would one use in a serious duel, other than the UC's?

Crouch/Moody claimed that AK was difficult, and I see no reason to suspect his word on that issue, at any rate.

More to the point, though, I think, is the fact that AK targets only one person. It is unblockable, which is good, and it does kill instantly, which is also good, but in a combat situation, I can easily imagine why you might want to use something with a wider effect, even at the expense of a little bit of "BANG -- You're Dead!"-dom.

AK might also require careful aim, which would make it a far less appealling option if visibility were limited, or if your enemy had cover.

Something like whatever Pettigrew used to blast all those muggles might be a more tempting alternative, if you got yourself into a situation that wasn't one-on-one combat, or if you didn't have a clear line of sight to your target.

About Imperius, Gray Wolf wrote:

We're discovering recently that the Imperio has big disadvantages (like people throwing it off at will, and it always looked implausible to me that the wizard who made the curse could have the imprisioned one do ANYTHING while under the curse...

Yes. I suspect (on the basis, admittedly, of no very strong canonical evidence) that Imperius victim's chances of throwing off the curse start to rise exponentially once he is being asked to perform acts to which he is deeply and fundamentally opposed.

I think that canon does suggest this in places. His fury at seeing Lucius Malfoy (and the rest of the ex-DEs) all smug and happy and successful at the QWC would seem to have acted as the catalyst for Crouch Jr's ability to overthrow his Imperius: being called upon to sit there silently and watch the game, rather than to act on his sense of fury and outrage, would seem to have been the straw that broke that particular camel's back. And I feel certain that Crouch Sr.'s ability to throw off the curse was greatly aided by the fact that (whatever one thinks of his methods) he was a fanatical opponent of Dark Wizardry—and so probably not the best candidate for forcing to aid with a plot to restore Voldemort.

That said, though...

The latest developments in Canon seem to point out at "Imperioed" people need constant supervision...

I don't think that I agree. Crouch Sr. isn't under supervision during his appearance at Hogwarts for the selection of the Triwizard Champions, and while he does seem to be trying to fight it off (I assume that this is why Harry keeps noticing him looking sicker and sicker throughout the meeting in the antechamber off of the Great Hall), he doesn't succeed. Unsupervised Crouch is still unable to disobey his (rather complicated) orders, even though the original caster of the Imperius is miles away at the time. He can't even manage to accept Dumbledore's invitation to tea, although I'm sure he would have liked to.

(I do think that one of the major reasons that Moody/Crouch stomped in on that meeting was to be on hand in case Daddy did succeed in throwing off the Imperius. What he planned to do about it if that had happened, though, I have no idea.)

So constant supervision does not seem to be necessary to maintain the Imperius. It would also seem that Imperio'ed people are capable of following rather complex commands—even ones that rely on a certain degree of thought and volition. What were Crouch's "orders?" I get the impression they were something along the lines of: "Act like your normal self, don't tell anyone what's really going on, fulfill your function as an official for this event, and then come straight home, Barty -- no stopping for drinks."

—Elkins

I'd like to jump into this thread [said Porphyria who will probably prove to be more un-subversive than will amuse Elkins ;-)]

Oh, I shouldn't worry about that, Porphyria. I'm easily amused. ;-)

For starters, I'm interested in summing up a few areas of potential reader unrest in the HP series to see if anyone else would like to discuss them.

Cool! Let's see, now.

3. Frustrations of being an adult reading a series which is designed to be suitable for a child or young adult audience (i.e. certain issues like teen pregnancy or drugs seemingly will never be addressed; sex gets glossed over)

Hmmm. I can't say that this one has bothered me much (not yet, at any rate). I was fairly impressed, in fact, with the way that in the last book, JKR managed to suggest some rather adult nastiness without actually straying from the PG path. The harrassment of Mrs. Roberts at the Quiddich World Cup, for example, certainly suggests muggle-rape as a popular DE pasttime to adult readers; to a child I expect it would have had far stronger associations with the playground obsession with seeing people's underwear. (Not, of course, that the two phenomena are completely unrelated, which is part of what made it such a very clever gloss, IMO.)

5. Inconsistencies of genre: the series combines elements of fantasy/fairy tale (in which one typically finds archtypical roles with distinct functions) with that of the mystery (where characters are often not what they seem and break type), plus other genres as well: boarding school, coming-of-age, and certainly satire. Do these genres combine in a satisfactory way or are they often at cross-purposes?

Now this is a really interesting one, because I think that my answer would have to be: "Both." The 'genre-soup' aspect of the books is certainly one of the things that I find most appealing about them, and I doubt that I'm alone in that: I suspect that it may well be one of the things that accounts for the series' enormous popularity. At the same time, though, the genres that JKR is combining do often work at cross-purposes, and I think that this can definitely be...anxiety-provoking.

Take that infamous Gleam In Dumbledore's Eye, for example. That gleam does seem to have caused some people a great deal of consternation, and I think that the genre-medley is largely to blame for that. If this were merely a fantasy/fairy tale, then the Gleam would be far less of an issue: a gleam in the twinkling blue eyes of the Old Wise Wizarding Mentor can mean nothing but good news in such a story. In a series which owes so much to the mystery genre, on the other hand—a genre in which People Are Not Always What They Seem—the Gleam really seemed to frighten some readers. Could Dumbledore Be Up To No Good? What if the gleam is there because Dumbledore has just realized that Harry's death might now serve to banish Voldemort permanently—and he's just thrilled about it? Could Dumbledore actually be a Machiavellian manipulator, driving poor Harry relentlessly onward to his doom with all of the consideration and compassion of a farmer whipping on a reluctant ox?

Heh. Anxiety, yes. And in this particular case, a type of anxiety that I am almost certain was not at all what the author had intended to inspire, one that I don't really know if I think is terribly beneficial, overall.

In some cases, though, I think that the anxiety provoked by the genre-mixing is tremendously beneficial to the books. PoA, for example, was such an engaging read in part, I thought, because it had all of these tremendously powerful mytho-poetic archetypes running all the way through it, and yet at the same time was so firmly rooted in the mundane details of the boarding school story, and also at the same time had strong aspects of an Agatha Christie-like mystery novel...it was a page-turner in part because you just couldn't be certain how all of these genres were going to interact. It wasn't just a matter of wondering what would happen next, or what was really going on in the plot; there was also a kind of metatextual mystery in play—"Which genre conventions will take precedence here?"—that really made the book (for me, at any rate) impossible to put down.

Anxiety there, too, certainly. But a really really good kind of anxiety.

Does anyone have any issues with the writing style?

::wince::

Er...do I get lynched around here if I say that I do sometimes have some problems with the writing style?

What can I say? I think that Rowling's an excellent story-teller. Her prose style, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. All IMO, of course. Obviously I read the books with enjoyment, so it can't be all that big a problem for me.

Where it does become a problem for me, though, are the few places where I find myself running into a conflict between how the writing itself led me to visualize a scene while reading, and how I feel almost certain the author meant for me to visualize the scene.

Rowling's fondness for the verb "to shriek" is a good example of this one. My God, does she love that verb! She uses it every chance she gets. Whenever people raise their voices in the Potterverse, they are almost always "shrieking." (The Shrieking Shack has always amused me for this very reason. Of course it would be called "the Shrieking Shack!")

Now, to my mind a "shriek" is a very specific type of high-pitched raised voice. The verb has an entire body of implications and associations connected to it as a matter of connotation, and JKR's "shrieks" don't always seem to quite match up with these. (And no, I don't think that this is a matter of British vs American English. I read many English books, and I have never run into this difficulty with anybody else.) Sometimes it's almost as if I have to remind myself while reading: "Now, remember, Elkins: this is one of Rowling's 'shrieks.' So you mustn't necessarily assume that it's really a shriek."

And that can be...jarring, yes. Jarring and potentially problematic. I say "potentially," of course, because I've actually consciously noticed the Shriek Problem, and so it doesn't have quite as much power to lead me astray as it might otherwise have done (my insistence on reading Avery as a pathological hysteric rather than as a grovelling toady aside...)

But what about JKR's idiosyncracies that I haven't consciously noticed yet? Are they leading me into erroneous assumptions as a reader?

"Being Driven Right To The Brink of Sanity Draco" is another example of this. I have a strangely divided mind when it comes to those scenes which illustrate The Very Worst Of Draco Malfoy. The two that leap to mind are these:

The very end of Chapter Eight, CoS:

Then someone shouted through the quiet.

'Enemies of the heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudbloods!'

It was Draco Malfoy. He had pushed to the front of the crowd, his cold eyes alive, his unusally bloodless face flushed, as he grinned at the sight of the hanging, immobile cat.

(It's rather amazing, actually, that she didn't have him 'shrieking' there. Draco often shrieks.)

And then this, towards the end of Chapter Thirty-seven, GoF:

'So,' said Malfoy slowly, advancing slightly into the compartment and looking slowly around at them, a smirk quivering on his lips.

[Draco's horrific "I tried to warn you" speech follows shortly thereafter]

Now, I'm almost certain that I'm supposed to read both of these scenes as a Just Plain Mean kid being spectacularly horrid. And yet, my instinctive reading of Draco as he is described in both of those scenes is "stressed." In the CoS passage he looks half-crazed to me and not (as I suspect was the intended impression) with sadistic enjoyment, either. He looks febrile, like someone who is being pushed to the very limits of his own sanity. And similarly, in the GoF passage, that single word, "quivering," acts to undermine completely for me the impression that I suspect JKR was actually trying to convey.

And this is a problem. It's a problem because it creates a strange layering effect in my mind: there is the scene as I originally visualized it based on JKR's own writing, and then there is the "revised edition" based on what I believe to have been the true authorial intent. But the first impression can never be banished utterly: it remains, as a kind of ghostly shadow-image superimposed over my entire reading of the books—almost like that reflection of myself that is always faintly visible when I look out of the window here in dark-and-cloudy Portland, Oregon—so that, for example, I can never completely banish my mental image of Draco Malfoy as a deeply-divided character...even though I do not for a moment believe that he is supposed to be read as one.

And while to some extent this may be a matter of my own idiosyncratic reading practice, it is also a writing problem. Did JKR really stick the word "quivering" in that sentence to leave us with the impression that Draco is under emotional stress -- and thus to cast some doubt in our minds that he really means what he is saying? That's certainly the effect that it has, but was that its intended effect? And if she didn't want to convey that impression, then why in God's name did she put that word "quivering" there in the first place? Didn't she know the effect that would have on the reader?

Does the writer know what she's doing, or doesn't she?

If JKR were a better craftsman overall, then I would feel more confident in accepting my first readings as intent. Because I don't quite trust her technical abilities, however, I often find myself revising—"Shrieked" there doesn't really mean shrieked, it just means that he raised his voice," "No, that isn't really stress, that's sadistic pleasure; it just looks feverish because JKR got a little overexcited with her depiction," "That the smirk is 'quivering' probably doesn't really mean anything at all," etc)—and that is an anxiety-provoker -- and one that can lead quickly into subversion.

I'm interested in your assertion that all speculation (and fanfic) is inherently subversive.... If I understand you correctly, this subversion is independent of the content of the individual reader's content; one does not necessarily have to offer a controversial reading in order to effect this type of subversion.

Well, there are levels of subversion. ;-)

I do think that it is inherently subversive in that it is a kind of usurpation of authorial power. To speculate about future plot events, for example, is to assume, if only temporarily, the role of the Author. It is not necessarily a statement of authorial "superiority"—one can speculate without ever implying, for example, that one could do a better job of writing the story than the original author could—but it can very readily pave the way to that line of thinking.

To speculate about a future plot development in a serial, for example, involves first contemplating the possible options, and then choosing one over all of the others for reasons of plausibility, enjoyability, complexity, consistency, and so forth. Should the next installment of the serial reveal that the work's true author chose one of the options that the fan had already considered but rejected, then that can certainly lead to feelings of authorial superiority ("My idea was so much better. Why aren't I the one writing these things?"). It can also lead to a more generalized sense of disappointment and unrest, a loss of trust in the author. ("Of all the possible directions she could have taken that plotline, why did she choose that option? I mean, of all the stupid and simplistic ways to go with that...")

Even when speculation does not lead to these sorts of disappointments, though, I think that it is still inherently subversive in that it encourages a different relationship with the text than the usual one which exists between a reader and a completed work. It produces a dynamic in which the reader is empowered to make statements as the author ("I favor this theory because it is the one most in keeping with JKR's work to date..."), statements which even if they are not in the least bit controversial, may well prove to be false. Speculation sets up a kind of competition between Author and Reader which texts which do not encourage speculation do not foster in quite the same way.

Furthermore, I'd like to ask if all speculation and fanfic must be predicated on frustrations with the text. Is there such a case where a fan simply becomes so enamored with the fictional world here the 'Potterverse') or with some of its characters that they simply wish to become more of an active participant?

One good example of this type of active participation, I think, is self-insertion. Fan readings tend to be characterized by a high degree of self-insertion: the "fannish" reader likes to imagine herself entering the fictive world as neither reader nor as author, nor even precisely as character, but instead as reader-as-character. Fans enjoy perceiving the fictional world as one that has an independent existence outside of the text; imagining oneself actually entering this world is the next logical step.

Leaving aside the issue of how this often manifests itself in fanfic (because this isn't a fanfic board, and so I'd rather not get caught up in a discussion of Marysueism here), you see a lot of self-insertion in speculative discussions too, as well as in plain old HP fan chatter. ("What House do you think you'd be sorted into?" "If you could go to Hogwarts for one hour, where would you go?" "What sort of magic would you be best at, do you think?" "Who would you hate more as a teacher: Hagrid, or Snape?" "Which characters would you actually like as people in real life?")

This is active participation that is not really based on frustration at all. It's based in a desire to immerse oneself even more deeply in the fictive world. It can often lead to frustration, though, because in order to imagine oneself actually in the world, one needs information about its details that the author has not provided. I think that a lot of the speculation and discussion we see here about the logistical details of the Potterverse, or about aspects of the world that fall outside of the scope of the books themselves, is characterized by a bit of frustration, even if frustration with the text was not the original impetus for wondering about these things in the first place. If that makes sense.

"Can devout students even really attend Hogwarts?" might be a good example of this one—or, for that matter, "Where are all the Bleeding Hearts of the Wizarding World?" ;-) The questions, and the speculation they encourage, are symptomatic of a certain degree of frustration with the text. But in many cases they derive from self-insertion—"How would I myself (as a devoutly religious person, or as a political leftist, or as a lawyer by profession, or as a lesbian, or as a superb student who would want to go on to higher education) fit into this world? Where would my place be? What would my social role be? How would I have to adapt myself, if this were the world that I inhabited?" Self-insertion is the sign of an enamored reader, not a frustrated one. But self-insertion quickly leads to frustration with the text.

Uh...so in short, being enamored can lead quickly to frustration.

Riiiiight. Like we didn't already know that.

Or does all emotional involvement require some sort of frustration? If not then authorial envy (wanting to write it yourself) and anxiety with the text (and its consequent tendency to produce readings against the grain) would be two separate forms of subversion.

I think that in practice, the one almost invariably leads into the other.

Here I'd like to add that the HP series itself actively and consciously encourages speculation due to the way that it's written.

I think that this is an excellent point! And JKR seems to take quite a bit of pleasure in teasing her fans about this aspect of the work as well, in interviews and such. She may not have known she was doing this when she first started writing the series, but she's certainly doing it quite consciously now.

Snapestuff to follow.

—Elkins

Yay! Droves flock to the Fourth Man banner!

Well, er...two do, at any rate. Can two people be called a "drove?"

------

Eileen wrote:

Elkins, I think you've hit gold here. Now, if you could tell me who the third murderer is in Macbeth.... :-)

Mmmmmm...the third murderer in Macbeth. Let's see...

Nope, can't help you there. But I can offer some very compelling evidence to prove that it was actually Caroline Shepherd who murdered Roger Ackroyd. Will that do?

I must admit that I brushed over the fourth man the first seven times I read the book...

LOL! What, you mean there was somebody who didn't view the Mystery of the Fourth Man as the central enigma of the entire novel?

It is very strange that the fourth man is given no attention by anyone, including Voldemort when he praises the Lestranges and Crouch Jr.

Yes! It's bothered me for...well, for over a year now, that has. It was keeping me awake at night. I would toss and I would turn...

I'll also note that the description of the fourth man "thinner and more nervous-looking", eyes "darting around the room" fit perfectly with the nervous wreck we meet in the graveyard.

I favor Thin Nervous Eye-Darty Man as Avery myself. But the Fourth Man theory is also willing to accomodate those who favor Thin Nervous Eye-Darty Man as Lestrange, and Thick-set Blank-Stare Man as (an already bordering on catatonic? or merely in a state of despair?) Avery.

Fourth Man is very inclusive that way.

Now, the fourth man gets up "quietly"... It's probably Barty Crouch Jr. who leaves our bleeding hearts thinking, and I can't say I blame them.

Yeah, it really was a good thing for Avery that little Barty carried on like that, wasn't it?

Even I sometimes wonder how far Crouch Jr. was in the business, though we know he's not as innocent as he made out to be.

Hey, young Crouch could have been innocent -- of torturing the Longbottoms, at any rate. No way to know for sure, is there? He sure seems like a sadist in GoF, but I imagine that ten years spent under the Imperius Curse could do a lot of funny things to your mind.

Fourth Man takes no strong stand on the issue of young Crouch's complicity in the Longbottom Affair.

Crouch Sr. must have been sick at heart when the bleeding hearts reopened Crouch's and Avery's cases. Perhaps, if Crouch Jr. was still around to be released, they wouldn't have released Avery? Instead, Avery walks free and it's Crouch son who's locked up in the kitchen. Must have made him furious.

And just imagine how Crouch Jr. himself must have felt about it! You know how very cranky he could get on the subject of DEs walking free.

Sort of makes you wonder what kind of things he might have told Voldemort about Avery, doesn't it?

As mentioned before, the convincing part of all this is that Avery really does act as if he needs forgiveness for something big. And Voldemort, even if he doesn't give it, gives a semblance of it.

Yes. The Dark Lord was really very generous there, all things considered, don't you think?

Honestly, Avery ought to have thanked him. Had he been a genuine Toady, rather than merely a Nerveless Hysteric, he would have...

<Elkins blinks down at the S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S badge which seems to have made its way out of her pocket and onto her bathrobe somehow, shakes her head crossly, and puts it away>

Finally, an answer for those who ask, "But how can Snape get back into the DE circle?" If Avery can, Snape can too, though I'm sure Voldemort has similar plans re: Cruciatus.

I think that if that's what Snape's gotta do, then he'll manage just fine. He's got tons of great excuses he can draw on, and unlike Avery, he isn't a Nerveless Hysteric. It woudn't surprise me, in fact, if he managed to pull it off without having to endure even a single Cruciatus -- although unlike Cindy, I find this notion more relieving than disappointing.

But, having picked up GOF and looked up the scenes, I am feeling VERY surprised, and somewhat elated. Something new, and something real. LOLLIPOPS I fervently believe in, but it's somewhere in the past in the murky realms of motivation, this is right there under our eyes.

Aw, gee whiz, Eileen. You're making me blush here. But you also bring up one very strong objection to Fourth Man, so let's see if we can manage to resolve it.

--------

Here is the great big threatening cannon that, as Eileen points out, is indeed aimed straight at Fourth Man's poor palpitating little heart:

"Avery-Nott-Crabbe-Goyle-"

"You are merely repeating the names of those who were cleared of being Death Eaters thirteen years ago," said Fudge angrily. "You could have found those names in old reports of the trials!"

<Elkins nods grimly>

Eeeeee-yup. That's canon, all right. And since I can think of no reason why Fudge would be lying there, we've just got to accept it.

Okay. So Avery did stand trial shortly after the Fall of Voldemort (presumably in late autumn or winter of 1981/1982), and he was cleared of the charges against him.

This, then, was presumably when Avery used the Imperius Defense to which Sirius refers in "Padfoot Returns." It does seem to have been an especially popular defense in the days directly following Voldemort's disappearance -- presumably because at least a couple of people really truly had been kept under Imperius, only to break free once Voldemort was discorporated.

"People who was on his side came back ter ours. Some of 'em came outta kinda trances. Don' reckon they could've done if he was comin' back."
—Hagrid, in PS.

I somehow suspect, though, that three or four years after Voldemort's fall, Imperius was no longer seeming like a very convincing defense. So let us say then that Avery's Imperius Defense was how he squirmed out trouble the first time around, back in 1981/1982.

This is all still perfectly consistent with Fourth Man. Sirius says that Crouch's son was "caught with a group of Death Eaters who'd managed to talk their way out of Azkaban." Avery, tried but aquitted, would certainly qualify.

The problem, of course, is this:

So, Avery was acquitted thirteen years ago, as Fudge tells Harry. But then, he gets "caught up" in the Longbottom fiasco, and it's off to Azkaban. Later, the bleeding hearts get him out. So, why tell Harry he was acquitted thirteen years ago, when he was more notoriously acquitted at the most eleven years ago, probably shorter?

Oooooh, a touch! A touch, a touch, I do confess! Can Fourth Man be saved?

Hmmmm. Well first, let's see if we can establish a time-line here.

Dumbledore says that the attacks on the Longbottoms came "just when everyone thought they were safe." Given that the Ministry took some time to round up the last of the DEs—that went on for about a year, I'm thinking—and given how obviously traumatized the entire society was by Voldemort's reign of terror, and given that it must have taken some time for everyone (fireworks and parties on the night of his disappearance notwithstanding) to really and truly and honestly believe that he was Gone For Good, "just when everyone thought they were safe" could mean as late as 1983.

(Yeah, I know that most people date the Longbottom Fiasco much earlier than that, but I like it better my way. Admittedly, this is largely because I'm also partial to Neville-With-A-Memory-Charm, which works much better IMO if Neville was well past the babe-in-arms stage by the time of the incident...but even aside from all that, I still think that a later date for the Longbottom Fiasco makes more sense.)

So let's say, oh, late 1982 or early 1983 for the Longbottom Incident and Avery's second arrest and trial, which would make the death of Crouch's wife and the supposed death of his son the winter of 1983/1984. Winter's good, because (a) sickly people tend to die in the wintertime, and (b) the weather in the Potterverse is often driven on the principle of pathetic fallacy, and so there really ought to have been a cold hard driving rain when Sirius watched the dementors burying Crouch through the bars of his cell.

Okay. So 1984 would be the year that Crouch's popularity goes into sharp decline. There's a Bleeding Heart backlash, Crouch gets shunted off into IMC, Fudge rides the wave to become Minister of Magic, and Crouch's successor comes into office at MLE and starts looking into old cases. Avery stands retrial in 1984, or possibly early in '85.

The second time around, I don't think that he would have gone for Imperius again. He'd already used that excuse once, and it would seem awfully fishy for him to claim to have been under the Imperius Curse twice. (Once is merely unlucky. Twice is...careless.) And besides, the times had changed: by the time of his pardon, it would have been the mid-'80s. The Imperius Defense was probably 'way out of vogue by then.

So a slight modification to the Fourth Man theory here. Avery doesn't claim Imperius at all at his retrial. He claims pure and simple innocence. He wasn't there, he didn't do it, he knew nothing about it, he was nowhere near the Longbottoms that night, and the only reason that he was arrested in the first place was because he happened to be over at the Lestranges' playing a rousing hand of Exploding Snap with them and young Crouch on the night that the Aurors came a'knocking on their door. It was guilt by association, pure and simple. Of course he had no idea that the Lestranges were involved in any of that sort of thing. If he had, then he would hardly have been hanging out in their kitchen playing cards with them, would he? I mean, not after what Voldemort had done to him, back in the late '70s and early '80s? Not after the Imperius Curse and all?

And since there was probably never any real hard evidence against any of them anyway, and since unlike Mrs. Lestrange he had never once confessed his guilt, and since he cut a truly pathetic figure in the dock, and since public sentiment had turned against Crouch, and since everyone was feeling sorta guilty over young Barty Crouch's death, Avery got his pardon and walked away free.

Okay. So why would Fudge have brought up the thirteen-year-old acquittal, rather than the ten-year-old pardon, when Harry mentioned Avery's name? That does seem a little strange doesn't it?

<Elkins pauses, bites her lip, shifts in her chair, and then suddenly sits bolt upright, smiling triumphantly -- if also just a touch madly>

NO! It does NOT!

Because what you have to understand about Fudge is that he was swept into office on precisely the same wave of public sentiment that led to Avery's pardon -- a Bleeding Heart backlash that did not last.

The backlash was very short-lived -- which is the reason that we see no Bleeding Hearts in canon. Avery's pardon represented the break of that particular wave; no sooner had he walked free than the backlash receded quickly, leaving people feeling decidedly...ambivalent about the entire affair. No other cases were in fact reexamined; the Avery/Crouch/Lestrange case was the only one that ever made it to retrial.

(And this is yet another reason that Sirius Black's case was never reexamined. Not only did it lack the pathos of young Barty Jr.'s trial [thus not appealing quite so much to the Bleeding Hearts], and not only did Albus Dumbledore show no sign of support for the notion that Black might be innocent, and not only is Sirius far too Tough to be willing to take the advice of his legal counsel and try begging off on Imperius at retrial, but also even if Black's case was ever on someone's agenda, it was far enough down near the bottom of the list that by the time it would have been reopened, public enthusiasm for the entire idea of reexamining Crouch's old cases had vanished away entirely.)

So as things turned out, Avery's pardon did not prove to be at all the great political coup that Crouch's successor had hoped for. Far from it: it was a bit of an embarrassment for everyone, and particularly for those politicians who had pushed most avidly for it -- people like Crouch's successor...and Fudge himself.

Fortunately for them, the cultural insistence on Not Talking Or Even Thinking About Those Dark Days Or Anything Related To Them that we see in effect in the HP books was now coming to dominate the wizarding zeitgeist. Nobody now wanted to think about any of that stuff at all, which made it a simple enough matter for politicians who might otherwise have been embarrassed by the affair to simply sweep it under the carpet where (to their minds) it rightfully belonged.

So this is the reason that Fudge mentions Avery's original acquittal but not his more recent (and more notorious) pardon. To mention the latter would touch far too closely on the subject of his own rather dubious claims to the position as Minister of Magic, as well as reminding everyone present of one of his own failed attempts to manipulate public sentiment for political advantage -- and that's a can of worms he most decidedly does not want opened right now. Not with these allegations of Voldemort's return and all. His position could be getting unstable enough as it is in the very near future, without dragging in all of that old business.

Okay. So, uh, where's the canon?

::thinks::

"Padfoot Returns." The canonical suggestion for all of this is in "Padfoot Returns," when Sirius first says of younger Crouch that he was "caught with a group of Death Eaters who'd managed to talk their way out of Azkaban," and then that he "was definitely caught in the company of people I'd bet my life were Death Eaters -- but he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Well, that's an interesting ambiguity, isn't it? First he says that the people Crouch was caught with were Death Eaters, next only that they were people he would "bet his life" were Death Eaters. Well, come on, Sirius. Which is it?

The deep ambivalence that Sirius reveals there is perfectly consistent with a scenario in which the people he's referring to include both those he is certain are guilty (Lestranges), and those about whose guilt he is undecided (Avery). This undecidedness is consistent with the overall cultural attitude toward the Avery Affair -- Sirius, you will remember, has come by the majority of his information on this subject after his escape from Azkaban ("This is mostly stuff I've found out since I got out"); it was evidently not an incident that was much gibbered about by the imprisoned DEs. And Sirius' suggestion that Crouch might just "have been in the wrong place at the wrong time" is telling as well -- wherever would he have come by this idea? Why, from Avery's own defense, of course!

::pantpantpant::

There. Does that work? If anyone has a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it.

----------

Now, on to the question of whether Avery (who, as we all know, is by far the MOST important character in all of canon!) was ever a Ministry official, or if he was, whether he still is now.

Cindy wants Avery to have been the head of the Department of Magical Catastrophies (even at the tender age of twenty-one), so that she can have him responsible for tampering with evidence in the Sirius Black case and for recovering Voldemort's wand from the rubble at Godric's Hollow. She also wants him to have been given this position back after his release from Azkaban and sees no problem with the notion that Sirius would have failed to mention this, or that he would continue to perceive Avery as no particular threat to Harry, or that he would list his name last when he rattles off the names of Snape's old classmates. She writes:

Ah, but look at who else Sirius mentions. He mentions Rosier (dangerous and crazy enough to take on Moody)...

And dead.

...Wilkes (dangerous and crazy enough to take on Voldemort)...

And dead.

...and the Lestranges (just plain dangerous and crazy).

And in Azkaban.

Wouldn't you mention Avery last out of that group, even if he were responsible for a department that has responsibilities for little things like deflating Aunt Marge?

Er...no. I wouldn't. Not unless there were some reason for believing him to be really really non-threatening, which I hardly think that I would have if he had managed to become the head of a Ministry Department.

Nor, if he were the head of a Ministry Department, would I refer to him merely as 'still at large.' Being the head of a Ministry Department isn't being 'at large,' it's being 'in power.'

And besides, the DMC isn't a lame department at all. Working for the DMC must involve a good deal of interaction with many different departments, as well as with the Muggle authorities: it's not all Aunt-deflating and street-sweeping, you know. Remember, it was Fudge's department, right before he made Minister of Magic. (Now you in the back there, stop that snickering. Yes, Fudge is lame. But he's also the Minister of Magic, so he must have something on the ball.) If someone like Fudge can vault himself straight from DMC to Buck Stops Here, then I really doubt that the DMC has at all the Lame Duck reputation that you suggest.

But since you've been so nice about swallowing down my Fourth Man theory, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do for you here: I'll give you Avery in the DMC. Okay? Avery was in the DMC. He wasn't the Department Head, mind, but he was a junior minister in the department, just like Fudge. He was the chief investigator assigned to the muggle-blasting site, where he confiscated Sirius Black's wand (so that it couldn't be Priori Incantatem'd) and tampered with a bit of the evidence to make Sirius' guilt seem all that much more incontrovertible.

He was particularly motivated to do this, you see, because Sirius had once played a rather nasty prank on him back in their school days, and...

Well, okay. So that part's optional. You don't have to accept that part, if you don't want to.

There, Cindy. You can have Avery-Helped-To-Snooker-Sirius-Black. But I'm not willing to give you Avery-Retrieved-Voldemort's-Wand-From-Godric's-Hollow as well, because that would run completely counter to the entire "Avery has avoided the other DEs like the plague ever since his release from Azkaban" aspect of the Fourth Man theory, which is central.

Pettigrew can have Voldemort's wand all to himself. ::snerk::

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So what did Avery do after his release from prison? He certainly didn't go looking for Voldemort (his failure to do so is absolutely essential to the Fourth Man theory). I suggested that he moved into his mother's basement and took up coin collecting. But Cindy insisted:

His mother's basement? No, probably not. I think Avery gets out of Azkaban, and Fudge has been promoted to Minister of Magic....So Avery asks for his old job back. Fudge knows and likes Avery, and Fudge (being prone to denying the obvious) never really believed Avery was guilty. Who knows? Maybe Fudge pardoned Avery singlehandedly. The DMC is now very short of people who know how to puncture Aunts, so Fudge gives Avery his old job, with back pay to compensate for Avery's wrongful imprisonment.

Mmmmmm. Yeah, okay. I'm willing to run with this, if only because it offers yet more reason for Fudge to have wanted to avoid the issue of Avery's second acquittal altogether. Probably even Fudge has come to suspect, way down deep in his very heart of hearts, that Avery really was guilty all along.

But I still can't buy Avery as Department Head. The Fourth Man theory is far too dependent on the notion that Avery Has Had Enough, and Had-Enough Avery wouldn't seek a position of such prestige or power. Too dangerous.

No, if Avery's in DMC, then he's still a lowly (but NOT yet middle-aged!) desk drone, mistrusted and ill-respected by his co-workers, who occasionally gather around the water cooler to mutter darkly among themselves while shooting him suspicious glances. (He takes far too many sick days, too, and occasionally goes on extended personal leaves of absence for "reasons of emotional health.")

Avery does, however, resist all contact from Death Eaters like Lucius who would like to go on a Voldemort hunt.

You think Lucius ever wanted to go on a Voldemort hunt? I doubt it.

But yes. Avery resists all contact from former DE colleagues. In fact, he may well have children. If he does, then the reason we've never heard of them is that he sent them off to Beauxbatons or someplace. He wouldn't want them at Hogwarts, where they would