Cindy signed off:
Cindy (wondering how Crouch Jr. is able to kill his father when his father sprung him from Azkaban, which ought to create at least a mini-Life Debt)
Judy wrote:
Yeah, not to mention, Crouch Sr. sprung Crouch Jr. from his loins (You can tell that I've been reading the Bible a lot lately.) You'd think that would create a big life debt.
Hey, I'm sure that it did. After all, just look at what happened to Crouch Jr., will you? His plan was proceeding perfectly, he was all on top of things, everything was going great for him. Then he kills his father, and what happens next? Everything goes all to pieces, that's what! Harry escapes from his original trap, he loses his second opportunity to deliver the kid to Voldemort due to a sudden descent into bwah-hah-hah "Mad, am I?" villain mania, and then he gets himself Stupified, Veritaserum'd, and Dementor-Kissed.
Clearly, violating that life-debt was a biiiiiiig mistake on young Barty's part.
Me, I think that we've been framing this life-debt business in completely the wrong way. It's obviously not a bond that restricts you from taking action against someone. After all, Pettigrew managed just fine in the graveyard — sure, there was a bit of discomfort, a lot of not-meeting-Harry's-gaze going on there, but he pulled it off all right.
No, I think that violating a life-debt is probably a lot more like the classical conception of what happens to someone who assaults a herald, or who desecrates a temple. You do something like that, and the gods just hate you from that moment onward: everything starts to go wrong for you, you become far more prone to madness, and the universe never cuts you the slightest bit of slack ever again.
Boggles, whom I love to death for having a Geek Code in her .sig, wrote:
In both cases, wouldn't the primary life debt be between Crouch Jr. and his mother, not his father? She was the engineer of Jr.'s escape — it was obviously her idea and her will that drove it. And she's the one who screamed in labor for 24 hours straight (or however long it was, with the state of wizarding medicine and all) to give life to him. Crouch Sr.'s part in both cases was necessary but minimal.
I suppose that this all rather depends on whether the metaphysical enforcers of life-debt are more like the Eumenides or more like the Goddess Athena. ;-)
Young Crouch's fate certainly does seem to indicate, though, that having ones mother give her life for you does not, in and of itself, provide one with any particularly powerful magical protection. It didn't seem to bother the dementor much.
So perhaps Crouch Jr. owed the life-debt to his mother - but she's dead now, so he's either free or (more likely, given Snape's reaction to his life-debt to James) in limbo, unable to pay the debt at all. Perhaps that's one reason his mental state seems so, um, rumpled.
Rumpled. Heh. Yes. Well, he's had quite a number of rumpling experiences, hasn't he? Near-death in Azkaban, ten years of Imperius Curse...and I suspect that he was really pretty wrinkly to start out with.
But it's always seemed to me that the parricide was what really pushed him over his last remaining edge. When Harry, Ron and Hermione go to visit Crouch/Moody the morning after the murder, he doesn't seem to be in very good shape at all. He's utterly exhausted, he's even twitchier than usual, and he's swigging down that Polyjuice Potion like there's no tomorrow. It seems possible, in fact, that he might even be in the very first stages of transforming back when they first run into him ("The eyelid of his normal eye was drooping, giving his face an even more lopsided appearance than usual"), which if true would certainly speak to a profound lapse in concentration and care on his part.
Barty sure hated his Dad, all right, but I don't get the impression that parricide really agreed with him very much at all. I think that it added quite a few new creases to his already considerably rumpled mental state.
—Elkins
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