She liked pictures of kittens. I don’t remember that she ever demonstrated affection for actual living creatures.
I have to admit, he was my first thought for casting Joffrey in Game of Thrones, if he hadn’t been a wee bit too old.
Yeah. Draco is, by a long shot, the littlest of the bads (aside from his own cronies, who are more an appendage to him than characters in their own rights). He’s just there to be an annoyance to Harry at school. Even the least of the true villains - Quirrel, Barty Crouch jr, Peter Pettigrew, Rita Skeeter - are responsible for more serious crimes than being kind of annoying to Harry.
Draco almost becomes a proper villain in book seven, when, apparently in an attempt to make up for the fact that he failed to kill Dumbledore in a surprising fit of morality in book six (thus disappointingly squandering a brief moment of potential character growth), he’s one of the few Hogwarts students to actively attempt to aid Voldemort by trying to thwart Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s attempt to get the diadem (as opposed to most of the other Slytherins simply aiding him through inaction in the Battle of Hogwarts), and even there he’s mostly an incompetent who only manages to get one of his own cronies killed (well, it was mostly Crabbe’s own doing, since he cast the Fiendfyre spell, but the whole misadventure rests on Draco’s head).
Lamia:
I don’t really think you could make such a case. Umbridge was racist, cruel and evil, but Voldemort was all of those things PLUS had no regard for human life, and held nothing higher than his own power. Umbridge, for all of her faults - and there were certainly many - was loyal to the Ministry and the preservation of the existing social order, which, however misguided, is a principle higher than mere selfishness. And she has never, as far as we know, killed anyone.
[QUOTE=Lamia]
I think a case could be made that Miss Umbridge was at least as bad as Voldemort in the moral sense, although she was nowhere near as intelligent or skilled at magic and thus less bad in the sense of how much harm she was capable of doing on her own.
[/QUOTE]
Well, to be fair, she did send a pair of dementors to eat Harry’s soul at the beginning of HP:OOTP. And they didn’t mind a nosh on Dudley’s soul as an appetizer.
That’s not all. By Deathly Hallows she was regularly handing innocent people over to the Dementors. While it’s true that (to the best of my recollection) nothing in the books indicates that Umbridge ever personally killed anyone, it’s likely that many of her victims would have preferred a clean death to a life sentence in Azkaban and/or having their souls sucked out by Dementors.
I never took it as him being more skillful. Draco would know more hexes and techniques simply because he was born into a wizard family and was immersed in it from birth. Harry, growing up in a muggle house, would know nothing and be starting from scratch.
Ranger Jeff:
A fair point, but one definitely gets the impression that in the wizarding world, receiving the dementor’s kiss is considered a less barbaric punishment than death. I don’t know how that would equate with our real-world ideas of life and the soul (after all, if you believe that the soul exists, then death is what happens when the soul departs the body, right?) but in the Harry Potter world, the dementor’s victim is not dead (as they understand death) and this fate is preferable to death (according to the standard value set in the HP wizarding world, though Dumbledore might disagree).
Umbridge was horrible. Voldemort, though, was unquestionably worse.
Maybe you got that impression, but I certainly didn’t and I don’t remember that the books ever said this. I see that the Harry Potter wiki says the Dementor’s Kiss “is considered a fate worse than death”, although they don’t cite a particular quote in the books for that.
The wiki also says that people subjected to the Dementor’s Kiss could not become ghosts when their bodies die (it cites Prisoner of Azkaban, although I don’t remember this being mentioned). That may be why it was considered preferable to simple execution for criminals – not because it’s “less barbaric” but so the executed couldn’t come back as ghosts and make trouble.
I never got the impression that it was anything to do with morality, it is just that killing is a difficult thing when one has to think about it, Draco just became indecisive from giving it too much thought right then.
Was he really working for Voldemort at the time? Had he any clue about the diadem, or about horcruxes in general? I thought he was merely angry at Harry and wanted a proper fight.
Lamia:
The wiki quotes Dumbledore as saying it, which is something I mentioned in my post. Dumbledore seems to have much finer understanding of the value of the “soul” than most of the wizarding world. The impression I got is that the morality governing the wizarding world at large (as expressed through the Ministry of Magic, of which Dumbledore is decidedly NOT a part) is for the most part the same as the morality governing modern Britain, the world which shaped the author, and there hasn’t been a death penalty applied in the United Kingdom since before Rowling was born. As such, I had taken the lack of any mention of a death penalty to mean that it was considered too barbaric to use, but the dementor’s kiss was less ethically troubling to your average wizard in Diagon Alley.
In PoA, Snape tells Sirius Black that he’s being taken back for a Dementor’s kiss and says “it’s said to be almost unbearable to witness, but I’ll do my best”. Doesn’t seem like something “less ethically troubling” than death. Hermoine also treats it as especially horrific.
So I have NO CLUE where any of you are getting the idea that it is nothing really.
Chimera:
I never said it was “nothing really”. All I said was that it was not looked upon in the wizarding world at large as killing, or equivalent to it. Certainly it’s considered to be a horrible punishment - but it’s a horrible punishment that the wizarding world allows to happen with official sanction, whereas there’s no evidence that the wizarding world officially sanctions executions.
The Umbridge-vs-Voldemort things reminds me of a debate that used to happen a lot back during the height of the Iraq war, when things like Abu Ghraib would come to life, and someone would complain about the actions of the Americans there, and someone else would say “hey, why are you complaining about that, that’s not nearly as bad as suicide bombers blowing up cafes”.
It’s much more of a betrayal when someone who should know better, who should be approximately on the side of good, does something bad. Of course Voldemort is evil, that’s the premise of the books. But a random school administrator working for the ministry should NOT be evil. Of course Al Qaeda is evil. We already knew that, it’s not shocking. But American soldiers in Iraq should NOT be evil.
MaxTheVool:
But she’s not random. She’s a Ministry/Fudge loyalist who sincerely believes that Dumbledore is lying (and using the students, especially Harry, as proxies) to destabilize Fudge’s regime and take over the Ministry for his own personal power gain. Until Fudge witnesses Voldemort for himself toward the end of Book 5, he (and those who follow him) sincerely believe that they are doing the wizarding world a favor by suppessing Dumbledore’s scare-tactic lies, by whatever means necessary.
It’s pretty clear by the third HP book, and definitely by the fifth one, that the wizard government tends to be at best ineffective and at worst bigoted, cowardly, and corrupt. (There are decent, honest government officials, but they seem more the exception than the rule.) The justice system is especially bad – innocent people are convicted, guilty but powerful people walk free, and convicts are psychologically tortured by the Dementor guards. Most are eventually driven mad. I don’t really know anything about JK Rowling’s political views so perhaps she does think the British government is basically the same way, but I would not assume that she intended the wizard government to be particularly admirable.
With regard to Miss Umbridge, she doesn’t even stick to the questionable protocols of the Ministry of Magic as it exists for most of the series. When she sends the Dementors after Harry in the fifth book, she is acting outside the law. In the seventh book, when she’s tossing people suspected of being Muggle-born to the Dementors, her behavior is apparently legal but only because the Ministry has already fallen to the Death Eaters.
That’s the most positive light in which you can possibly paint her. As written, she certain seems to revel in petty and vindictive cruelty, and she also apparently sent dementors after Harry (although I’ve totally forgotten how that happened… can someone clear that up?) which is certainly damn close to attempted murder.
In a grown up version of HP, it would have been interesting if she was a decent person stuck in a tough situation where her loyalties to her superiors forced her into a situation where she had to do unpleasant things or something like that, but there’s no such subtlety actually present in the books at all, at least that I can recall.
(Side rant: of all the silly things about the HP books, perhaps the most frustrating is that the entire conflict in book 5 concerns Harry telling the world one thing and people claiming he was lying. But the Wizard world has various ways (including veritas serum) that don’t exist in the muggle world which ought to be at least discussed as ways for Harry’s story to be confirmed. Heck, the moment he showed back up and related his story, just send 100 aurors with time turners to the graveyard where he reported seeing the death eaters, and boom, problem solved. It just doesn’t fit into what we know of the magical world that a case of “he says something and no one believes him” could linger for so long about an issue of such prominence.)
It’s not revealed until near the end of the book that Miss Umbridge was the one who sent the Dementors after Harry in the first chapter, but at Harry’s hearing for violation of the underage magic law Dumbledore makes it pretty clear that he thinks someone from the Ministry was behind it. Fudge is very eager to throw the book at Harry, accuses him of lying about having been attacked by Dementors, and handles the proceedings in an irregular and possibly illegal manner, but Harry is eventually found to have acted in self defense and the charges are dropped.
Both Fudge and Umbridge wanted to silence or discredit Harry since he wouldn’t stop saying that Voldemort had returned, but IIRC Fudge did not actually know that Umbridge had sicced the Dementors on Harry. I think he was just happy to take advantage of the situation once it had occurred, although I’m not certain about that.
I did think it was interesting that Umbridge was a clear villain who, at that point at least, wasn’t actually in league with Voldemort. So that was less black-and-white than the earlier books, where the villainous characters all had some connection to Voldemort.
The way time turners were handled was always kind of problematic, but I don’t think the veritas serum, mind reading, etc., were supposed to be any good against someone who really believed what he was saying. If Harry was delusional, the victim of a hoax, or had been brainwashed or had his memories tampered with by Dumbledore, none of the magical polygraphs would reveal that. A sufficiently talented wizard was also supposed to be able to resist their effects even if he was deliberately lying.
Beyond that, the issue wasn’t so much that Fudge suspected that Harry was lying as it was that Fudge wanted Harry to be lying. He refused to believe that Voldemort was back and wasn’t going to go looking for evidence to the contrary when he could just stick his head in the sand about it.
I agree. This was simply fucking with the HP Gang of Three.
Sure, but Umbridge is not accusing him of having been misled or misremembering what he saw, she’s accusing him of LYING, specifically.
But there are other people in the magical community than just Fudge and Dumbledore and Harry Potter. If you were a wizard living in the wizarding community, and Harry Potter (who, it’s worth noting, was incredibly famous and heroic in his own right) says one thing, and Dumbledore, a very powerful and respected wizard, says he believes him; but the minister of magic says he’s lying, wouldn’t you want to know the truth? Wouldn’t you be interested in one or both sides presenting some evidence? My point is that the entire common-in-the-muggle-world scenario of he-said-she-said ought to play out differently in the Wizard world due to the magic that they have, but which they conveniently forget about whenever it doesn’t serve the plot for them to use it.