Harry Potter #7: (SPOILERS APLENTY): Now that you've read it...

Cafe Society
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The thing I’m having the hardest time understanding about the portion of the Potterverse we first encounter in HP7 is: what’s in it for the Death Eaters, to be a Death Eater?

I mean, anytime Voldemort gets a a false alarm from you, or even just gets a wild hair, it could be all over for you. Even strong, talented wizards/witches and devoted Voldy acolytes like Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange find themselves on the outs. So I have a hard time seeing how Voldy managed to gather and keep together such a large army as the one he attacked Hogwarts with at the end of HP7.

Over the course of the book, given Voldemort’s treatment of his followers, I’d expect a lot of DEs to consider the severely reduced life expectancy that would go with being in a position that Voldy might notice one’s mistakes, and Apparate to some faraway land. But that clearly wasn’t the case.

Favorite lines:

McGonagall: “We teachers are rather good at magic, you know.”

Percy Weasley, in mid-brawl: “Hello, Minister! Did I mention I’m resigning?”

Ron, to Draco: “And that’s the second time we’ve saved your life tonight, you two-faced bastard!”

Everything Mrs. Weasley said to Bellatrix, of course.

And one bit of dialogue, with a parallel to another fictional Harry:

Harry, to Voldemort: “So it all comes down to this, doesn’t it? Does the wand in your hand know its last master was Disarmed?”

Dirty Harry: “You’ve got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

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He more or less kept them in line with fear. I think once they had the Dark Mark on them, Voldy could track them if he were so inclined. If they stopped obeying his orders (or didn’t show in the graveyard when he made his big comeback), I think he’d have hunted them down and killed them. That’s what they suggest happened to Karkaroff. Also, perhaps some enjoy being evil, and Voldy lets them, perhaps some want to be on the winning side, and perhaps some just like the man’s anti-Muggle policy. I imagine once they were high up enough on the ladder that they were always close to Voldy’s side, it was far too late to back out.

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More like, “carrying a fucking owl cage around the forests of Britain over a period of months in the dead of winter must be really inconvenient to the story line.”

Voldemort has one main weapon, fear and surprise–TWO, two main weapons, fear and surprise, and ruthless efficiency–THREE . . .

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I think it’s pretty clear: most of the first Death Eaters joined up for the same reason Dumbledore was once enamored of the idea of wizards ruling: they saw themselves as superior and wanted to see that reflected in a right of rule. Later wizards joined out of fear, like Wormtail, that they were going to get left behind in the new order.

Some more thoughts:

In retrospect, I’m still not quite liking the treatment of death in the series. Rowling seems to combine a heart-rending separation and stark reality with an all-too-present afterlife. Consider the haunting sequence in which Harry considers his parents moldering bones. I just don’t see how those feelings and thoughts comport with the fact that his parents seem to pop up with some regularity and the afterlife so close and real. Dumbledore in book 4 tries to play this down with all his talk about how the priori incantatem spirits are just sort of “echoes” of the real people, and the same point is made about ghosts and portraits. And yet, the “real” spirits of Harry’s parents in Book 7 are different… how? What’s the point of the distinction when they are all so similar?

Dumbledore is gone… boo hoo hoo and yet at the very end folks are talking to his portrait as if it were him, just the same, no problems, without any of the deep realization that he’s “really” gone and this is just an echo, a slightly more advanced version of the moving pictures in papers. The Dumbledore of King’s cross is no different, walking all over the distinction between life and death that elsewhere in the series is drawn so starkly.

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Bah, having owls around never bothered the plot before. Harry feeds her about once per book. :slight_smile:

They had the means at their disposal to sneak Harry away without anyone the wiser, but they couldn’t. They had to appear to leak the correct information. If the tipoff was obviously wrong, then either “the source we mentioned,” Mundungus Fletcher, would have been on the hot seat, or Snape’s own cover would be ruined.

Besides, the Death Eaters could count. 13 people show up to escort Harry Potter, and only 13 leave — then someone was left behind.

I mean, there are all kinds of ways they could have done it, but the concern was to make Snape’s information appear valuable. If not for that, then they could have had Macgonagall show up in cat form, give Harry a Polyjuice Potion to turn him into Dudley, and he could have slipped out with the Dursleys. He could have just walked out the front door in the Invisibility Cloak. He and his 13 friends could have all taken Polyjuice Potion to look like Fleur and scattered to the four winds — the Death Eaters wouldn’t have known who to follow. (That’s dangerous, though: there’d be a 1 in 14 chance they’d choose Harry anyway. The idea was that Moody was to be the lightning rod.)

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What? :confused: what do you mean hence the terms “Nazi caricatures” etc?

I wasn’t trying to earn “I’m not anti-Semitic” points and don’t appreciate the snark. I had a genuine question–how do you jump automatically to “must be Jewish stereotyping like the Nazi’s did” from goblins being mercenary, cunning and selfish?

I asked for a cite of goblins in fairy tales equating with Jewish stereotypes, because your post implied that the image of goblins in fantasy=stereotype of Jews. If you don’t have one, you don’t have one; I was just asking.

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I didn’t read it this way at all. The Order notes afterward that the DE’s knew the date but not the 7 Harrys plan, which is why they discount Mundungus as the leak.

Dung IS the leak, but Snape is working all alone at this point, and passes on the date but not the 7 Harrys plan so as to protect his cover while giving the Order the best possible chance of success. The Order isn’t helping Snape at all.

ETA: In fact, the whole polyjuice thing may have been Snape’s idea to begin with. I can’t see Dung coming up with that on his own, as someone in the Order says he does.

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That makes some sense, but if he’s almost as likely to kill you if you stay as if you run, you might as well run - the company’s better, and your odds improve if others follow your example and run too.

Yeah, but all that’s negated by the high mortality rate of Voldy’s followers, completely aside from the risks of being killed by members of the Order of the Phoenix and their allies.

Too dangerous to stay, too dangerous to run…sucks to be a Death Eater.

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As Regulus Black found out, to his, and ultimately Voldemort’s, sorrow.
I love that little Teddy Tonks had turquoise hair at birth!

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It was Snape’s idea. When Harry views his last memories, this is one of them:

Now Snape was head to head with Mundungus in an unfamiliar tavern, Mundungus’s face looking curiously blank, Snape frowning in concentration.
“You will suggest to the Order of the Phoenix,” Snape murmured, “that they use decoys. Polyjuice Potion. Identical Potters. It’s the only thing that might work. You will forget that I have suggested this. You will present it as your own idea. You understand?”
“I understand,” murmured Mundungus, his eyes unfocused…

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In one of Snape’s pensieve memories, we see that Dumbledore’s portrait came up with the plan and instructs Snape to make it look like Mundungus Fletcher came up with the idea. Snape puts a Confundus charm on Mundungus and feeds him the information.

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Am I to understand that the Order of the Phoenix knew that Snape was still working for them?

Sorry I just can’t get my mind around that.

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Exactly-it seems like anymore you can’t make a character greedy and money-grubbing without being accused of a stereotype. It’s like JarJar-everyone assumes these characters are “racist”, somehow.

If you ask me, that says a LOT more about the person making the insinuation. That somehow, if THAT’s what crops up when you see these things-why does that automatically come to mind?

Not, mind you, that I’m saying Sampiro is like that.

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Wasn’t it Dumbledore’s (portrait’s) idea? IIRC, He tells Snape to confund Mundungus and plant the idea on him.

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I was really hoping that Snape would live, and that Harry would have to find a way to trust him, if not forgive him completely. I thought that would’ve fit very well with the theme of the books. Still, I can see where it would be difficult to make the story work that way.

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I’m not saying that, though. I am quite confused by his reaction to my post (in response to his claim that the goblins seem to be Nazi caricateurs of Jews)–either he meant it or he didn’t. I’ve asked for clarification.

Roger Ebert once said thank God for the Nazis, otherwise there wouldn’t be any PC villians (human) anymore. I think we may have gotten to that point…
The more I delve into HP7, (rereading it), the more confused I am getting–funny, when I stayed up all night to read on July 20-21, it all seemed to fit and I was mostly satisfied. Now I am either missing lots (could be–am trying to work two jobs, pack the kids and go out of town this weekend, plus clean carpets of cat pee), or it’s more a muddle than I thought. When did Harry lose a tooth? It’s restored by Tonk’s parents (?).

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When he is in the sidecar with Hagrid being chased by the Death Eaters in the escape from the Dursley’s house at the beginning. Someone shoots a spell at him and he ducks out of the way and bangs his mouth on the metal rim of the sidecar, knocking out a tooth.

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Right, I forgot about that part. Still, I love the idea that Snape was working all alone for so long–you wouldn’t think it would be possible for him to get any lonelier, but I guess there’s always another lower level of lonely. I also found it terribly poignant that he was willing to die posing as a faithful Death Eater–I wonder if he died thinking he had finally repaid his debt to Lily?

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What debt? Her friendship? Or his passing on the prophecy?

Any one else think that James Potter was a real jerk? I still don’t know how Lily ended up falling in love with him. It actually crossed my mind a couple of times that he used a love potion on her. I llike Lupin, and came to like Sirius, but really, James and Sirius seemed, when they were young and in school, like the kind of asshats who would drive by a book release party and use a megaphone to yell out spoilers for the book to the unsuspecting crowd.

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Sometimes people are jerks to some people and great to others. James and Lily Potter were only 21 when they died; they had Harry very young, and for all we know would have been at each other’s throats four years later if they hadn’t been murdered. James Potter was never really given a chance to become a full-fledged man. They were practically kids themselves when they died, which just makes it all the more horrible.

You’re right though in that James and Sirius are bullies at times, and it’s to Rowling’s credit that she makes some of Harry’s inspirations flawed people. I always got the vibe from Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Sirius Black that he saw that in the character too; I can’t put a thumb on it, but he seems to play Black like a guy who loves Harry but can be a dick at other times.

But, as they say, that’s just life, isn’t it? Harry’s father was kind of a dick, but he would have loved Harry a lot more than the Dursleys did. Some people died who didn’t deserve to, and some lived who deserved to die. Draco Malfoy is still a cock at the series’s end, he’s just an ineffectual cock who becomes irrelevant because he was a useless soldier on the wrong side of a war. His father deserved to die, but ended up a loser, too. On the other hand, good and decent people got killed. Lupin and Tonks fall in love, have a kid, and die. Snape spends almost his whole life loving a girl who doesn’t love him, and helps get her killed, and then works for years to avenge her and assuage his overwhelming guilt and then he dies before the job is done, and all he can do is just try to make sure someone knows he was on the right side before he dies. Isn’t that just terribly sad? That just plain blows, but don’t think Rowling doesn’t know it.

Rowling is honest enough with her readers to say “Sometimes life is just the shits. Bad things happen to good people and sometimes in unbearable quantities. You do the best you can do, and I believe you’ll usually win and the right will prevail, but sometimes it doesn’t.”