Three shall be the number of the Symposium posts, and the number of the Symposium posts shall be three!
Yes. Well. Let's try this again, shall we?
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All fortified now?
Good. Because now we're going to be delving into those theories that assume unquestionably venal motives underlying Neville's memory charm. Here is where we get into all of those callous cover-ups, spiteful spell-castings, and family failings that are, let's face it, just ever so much more fun than all of those sappy well-intentioned memory charm theories.
Flying Hedgehogs abound once we get into this territory, and the degree of explanation necessary to outline the canonical support goes waaaaaaaay up. So I'm going to be doing a lot of message number citation in this last segment, as many of these theories are not only far too complicated, but also far too beautifully defended elsewhere for me to feel that I can really do justice to them in summary form.
This last part of the symposium deals with the Cover-Up At the Ministry, the DEPRECIATION, and the Memory Charm Most Foul theories. There's quite a bit of overlap between these three, admittedly, but for the purposes of analysis, I have attempted to draw a few bright lines to distinguish them from each other.
Ready? Okay. First up on our list is...
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The "Cover-Up At the Ministry" Theory
(Otherwise Known As: "Longbottomgate," "We Was Framed!," "Rounding Up the Usual Suspects," "Bad Aurors," The "Palace Intrigue" Theory.)
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Neville was placed under a memory charm by someone at the Ministry, in order to cover up the fact that one (or two, or three, or perhaps even all four) of the Pensieve defendents were innocent of the crime for which they were sent to prison. The real culprit(s) are still out there. At large. And many within the Ministry know it. But they just don't care. Not because they're Death Eaters or anything like that, mind—that would be DEPRECIATION—but rather, because they're too busy looking out for their own interests to worry about trifling little matters like the public weal.
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There are quite a number of variants on this theory. Nearly all of them focus on the canonically-derived notion that in the wake of the Longbottom Incident, the Ministry was absolutely desperate to get a conviction in order to appease the mood of the mob and thus to avert a public relations disaster.
The canon here mainly derives from Chapter 30 of GoF, "The Pensieve," in which the extent to which the mood of the crowd defines the judicial process is strongly emphasized, as is the lynch-mob atmosphere presiding over the trial of the Longbottoms' alleged assailants. This alone would probably have sufficed to alert the reader to the possibility that the Ministry had been under a great deal of pressure to get someone, anyone, put away for the attack on the Longbottoms, but just in case we missed the implication, JKR then makes it explicit in Dumbledore's conversation with Harry shortly thereafter:
'The attacks on them came after Voldemort's fall from power, just when everyone thought they were safe. Those attacks caused a wave of fury such as I have never known. The Ministry was under great pressure to catch those who had done it. Unfortunately, the Longbottoms' evidence was -- given their condition -- none too reliable.'
Dumbledore then confesses to Harry that he has "no idea" whether Crouch Jr. had really been involved in the affair at all.
The secondary canon for Cover-Up derives from Sirius' description of Crouch Jr's arrest in Chapter 27, as well as from his description of the status of the young man's co-defendents, generally assumed to be the Lestranges and...er, Fourth Man. Sirius, too, expresses doubts as to young Crouch's guilty verdict: "...he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time..." More to the point, though, Sirius also describes the Lestranges and Fourth Man as "a group of Death Eaters who'd managed to talk their way out of Azkaban," and as "people I'd bet my life were Death Eaters."
So a picture begins to emerge here. We have a Ministry of Magic that is absolutely desperate to get someone convicted of this crime. We have as the only two eye-witnesses the victims themselves, a couple of gibbering wrecks unable to provide any reliable testimony. We have a Department of Magical Law Enforcement still filled with Aurors who, if Sirius is to be believed, have grown accustomed to operating according to somewhat less than stringent standards.
And then we have the Lestranges and Fourth Man, who from the ambiguity in Sirius' description of them would seem to have been people who even at the time were widely believed to have been Death Eaters who only escaped justice in the first place on the basis of some lame legal technicality. If they are the same age as Snape, then they would have been very young at the time as well. Young enough, perhaps, that they lacked much in the way of political power or social clout? That seems likely enough, particularly in the wake of Voldemort's fall, when possible patrons like the Malfoys would presumably have been keeping their heads down.
They do begin to look like appealing suspects, don't they? Very appealing suspects. Particularly for a Department of Magical Law Enforcement that is desperate to get a conviction, and that has been known to ignore due process in the past, when it has suited its purposes.
Did someone in the DMLE decide to go with What Was Easy over What Was Right when it came to closing the file on the Longbottom Incident? Did someone then put a Memory Charm on Neville to cover their tracks?
Eileen objected to this theory on the grounds that it provides insufficient Bang. After all, she wrote, we the readers already know that the Ministry is corrupt, so for this to be the great revelation Neville has to offer would be a total Dud.
Eileen:
If Neville snaps out of the charm and yells, "Corrupt Cover-up," no-one will bat an eye.
True enough. Ah, but the Bang in this theory, you see, isn't really the revelation that the Ministry is corrupt at all. Nor is it the identity of the perpetrator of the Memory Charm itself. It doesn't really matter who in the Ministry might have performed the actual spell.
No, what matters in the context of the Cover-Up At the Ministry is the question of just who the real culprits in the Longbottom Affair were. Who were those secret DE torturers for whom the Lestranges and Fourth Man were willing to take the fall? They must have been pretty important secret DE torturers, right?
So who were they? Someone we know, surely, because otherwise it would be a Dud. So could we be looking at an Ever So Evil Moody here? An Ever So Evil Minerva McGonagall? An Ever So Evil Dumbledore? Oh my, could it be that Neville's own dear Herbology mentor is actually the Ever So Evil Death Eating Sprout? Or could we be overlapping with Memory Charm Most Foul here, to give us an Ever So Evil Granny Longbottom, or an Ever So Evil Bent Uncle Algie?
Why, the possibilities for Big Loud Bangs are just endless!
Porphyria remained unconvinced:
See, this is fun. But I'm not quite sure what would have gone on.
Well, that all depends on which version of the Cover-Up you favor. The most extreme version of this theory, "Rounding Up the Usual Suspects," proposes that not one of the Pensieve Four was really guilty of the charges against them. Although they were indeed cognizant of a DE conspiracy to restore Voldemort to power and likely involved with the plot in some other capacity, they were not the Longbottoms' torturers.
In this scenario, the fact that Crouch's own son just happened to be hanging out with the Usual Suspects on the night that the Aurors battered down the door is viewed as nothing more than a horrible coincidence, a complication which no one could possibly have foreseen.
Nor, of course, could anyone in the Department possibly have foreseen that after the trial and the conviction and the verdict, the Longbottoms' son would turn out to have seen something, or perhaps heard something -- something that, if anyone ever found out about it, would absolutely require that the verdict be overturned and the search for the Longbottoms' real assailants begin once more. I mean, we're talking total public relations nightmare here. A political disaster. Particularly if Crouch Jr. had already ostensibly died in prison and his father's fall from power begun.
So. Memory Charm. Problem solved.
Porphyria objected to the full frame-up theory on the grounds that Mrs. Lestrange actually confesses her guilt in the Pensieve scene and would seem to be confessing not only on her own behalf, but also on behalf of the entire party. She wrote:
In the Pensieve scene, Mrs. Lestrange admits to the guilt of her party, doesn't she?
Well, she certainly does admit to her own guilt. Who precisely she means to include by her use of the first person plural, though, is something that I've always found fairly ambiguous.
"He will rise again and will come for us, he will reward us beyond any of his other supporters! We alone were faithful! We alone tried to find him!"
Does that "we" really refer to all four of the defendents, do you think? Or is it, perhaps, only meant to refer the three of them who have not been sitting there shrieking hysterial denials and pleas throughout the entire sentencing?
I can read it either way. I can also read it quite comfortably as a use of the marital "we," in which case she means to include only her husband in her boastful confession.
But at any rate, there's no question that she admits her own guilt. She not only admits it, she proclaims it. Proudly. Defiantly. And in a manner that seems designed to strike fear—and perhaps even a slight stirring of reluctant admiration—into the hearts of all those who witness it.
Just like Good Terrorists are supposed to do.
Especially when they're claiming responsibility for an act that they did not in fact commit.
I mean, aren't fanatical members of terrorist organizations notorious for doing that? That's par for the course, isn't it? It's a terrorism trope. It's very nearly a cliche.
Porphyria:
I guess what I'm asking here is, if there were a cover up, if either someone of the four was innocent or someone else was also guilty, what do you think her reaction would be?
Well, as we don't know all that much about her, it's a bit hard to say. But assuming that she is indeed loyal, strong-willed and fanatical, and that while innocent of the attack on the Longbottoms, she nonetheless was cognizant of or involved with a DE conspiracy to seek out Voldemort and restore him to power, then I imagine that her reaction might well have been to do whatever she could over the course of her trial to draw as much attention to herself as humanly possible, in the hopes that she might leave absolutely no doubt in the mind of the tribunal that they had caught the entirety of the conspiracy, thus leaving her unknown but still-at-large colleagues with a much clearer field to seek out their fallen master without having to worry about any Aurors out searching for them.
Anyway, that's probably what I'd do, if I were brave and loyal and slightly mad, and had a fanatic's faith in Voldemort's power.
If I were not only brave and loyal and fanatical, but also rather clever, then it occurs to me that I might also go out of my way to exaggerate all of my defiance and pride and True Warrior Spiritedness -- just to provide a clear example to the convened tribunal of what a Real Death Eater is supposed to look like, and thus to plant seeds of doubt in their minds that hysterical little Barty Crouch could possibly really be one. I can easily imagine Mrs. Lestrange figuring that young Crouch is the only one of the four of them who stands even the slightest chance of getting off the hook and so doing what she can to improve his chances. Not only might this enable him to walk free, which since he is a loyal DE devoted to the cause would be a Very Good Thing, but it might also harm his father's career, which because his father is a loyal Ministry official and an Enemy of the Cause would be an Even Better Thing.
Certainly I do find the Pensieve defendents' reaction—or, rather, their utter lack of reaction—to Crouch's hysteria at the sentencing extremely interesting. They don't respond to him at all. They neither back him up nor try to debunk his claims of innocence. They even resist the temptation to hiss a quick "shut up" in his general direction. All three of them simply ignore him completely. It does serve to bolster the impression that perhaps he really wasn't involved, and I sometimes find myself wondering if that might not have been their very intent.
Porphyria:
Would she be too proud to quibble with the court? Or would she try to expose the real culprit? She has very little to lose.
You think?
See, I'd say that she has nothing to gain, myself. Given the mood of the court, I don't think that anything that she did or said would have kept her from being sentenced to life in prison, and I suspect that she was well aware of that. So she had absolutely nothing to gain by trying to proclaim her innocence, but if she really is as fanatical and devoted a follower as she seems to be, then I'd say that from her own perspective, she had absolutely everything to lose. I mean, Voldemort is coming back, right? One way or another, he's coming back, and when he does, he's going to reward the faithful and punish the faithless. And taking the fall for your colleagues (whom presumably she believed would continue the search for their absent Master, rather than abandoning it) certainly ought to count as loyalty worthy of some great reward.
No, Mrs. Lestrange's behavior in the Pensieve scene isn't really all that troublesome for me when it comes to my willingness to run with the full-fledged frame-up theory. I could live quite happily with that. The graveyard scene, on the other hand, is a different story. It is very difficult, IMO, to parse Voldemort's lines in the graveyard in any manner that supports the idea that all four of the Longbottom defendents were sent down the river as a frame-up job.
Fortunately, however, in message #36889, Debbie proposed an even Darker and Dirtier—and also far more blackly humorous—version of the full frame-up job than the rather pedestrian "Usual Suspects" spec, and this one does offer some possible explanation for both Lestrange's confession and Voldemort's praise in the graveyard, as well as providing one possible defense for young Barty Crouch's insistence that his loyalty to Voldemort never wavered, in spite of all of his pathetic squealing at his trial.
Debbie suggested that Aurors not only framed the Pensieve defendents, but that they were themselves the Longbottoms' torturers. And that they were responsible for the Longbottoms' current mind-blitzed states, as well, because what's really wrong with the Longbottoms, you see, isn't that they were tortured at all. It's that they were very badly Memory Charmed!
Ooooooh, those Bad Aurors!
Debbie also dangled the tantalizing suggestion of inter-departmental rivalries within the spook divisions of the MoM before our amazed eyes:
Frank may have had information on people that would shock us. . . .The MOM would have at least as great an interest in this information as the DE's, and if Aurors were in effect secret agents, they would not want to reveal their secrets to the average MOM employee.
She then got herself up to quite a bit of dark mischief by proposing a scenario in which ruthless Aurors, either because they suspected that Frank Longbottom was a DE double-agent or because they worked for a different division and were keen to know what their rivals were up to (and perhaps also driven by a touch of envy over Frank's massive popularity?), were right in the middle of interrogating their colleague by torturing him, and his innocent wife, and even possibly their blameless young son...
<Elkins pauses.>
And even possibly their blameless young son?
<She shakes her head, then reaches down deep into one pocket. She rummages about in there for a few moments. She frowns.>
Boy. You guys really do have nasty little minds, don't you? You know, I've run right out of FEATHERBOAs? That's how vicious and unkind you people are.
Shocking.
So anyway, Debbie suggested that just as the Aurors were right in the middle of perpetrating atrocities on the entire Longbottom family, that was when the Pensieve Four (who in this version are only "innocent" by virtue of having been beaten to the punch by the Bad Aurors) showed up at the exact same location -- and with the exact same plan in mind.
Panicked, the Aurors fired off Memory Charms at the Longbottoms and fled.
Debbie:
The torturers don't want to kill the Longbottoms at this point because he hasn't cracked yet and they think they can return and continue the torture at a later date (believing they can break the charm as Voldemort did to Bertha). But they're in a rush since the...[DEs] are at the door, so they quickly execute an enormous, cover-your-rear Obliviate that would do Lockhart proud, as there's no time for surgical precision. Then they Disapparate. . . .The Longbottoms, now clueless as to (presumably) their own and Neville's identity, may have little more than a vague recollection of Crucio, which allows the Ministry great latitude in sweeping up suspects. The Longbottoms are misdiagnosed based on the sketchy information and sent to St. Mungo's.
And of course, it's easy enough for the Aurors to whip up a compelling case against the Usual Suspects, isn't it? After all, the Usual Suspects really were there that night -- the Aurors saw them there themselves. And they really had been planning to question Longbottom about Voldemort's whereabouts, so all of those "to-do" lists and the like that they left lying around on the dining room table make for pretty good evidence against them.
Well!
You know? I just have to say this. I absolutely love this theory. I am floudering in a sea of hopeless envy over here, wishing that I had come up with it myself. It just has everything, doesn't it? It has wicked Aurors and dirty politics and tragic medical misdiagnoses...and it's even got that lovely bit of farce, with the DEs coming knocking on the door, and the Aurors getting big eyes and whispering, "Uh-oh. Cheese it! Someone's at the door," and then the Usual Suspects walking in to find that their expected victims have, well, already been victimized, which I imagine must have really freaked them out, and...
And, well, yes. Black farce. You know how I feel about black farce, right?
Also, by my careful snipping, I have even obscured one of the best parts of Debbie's theory: namely, that it is completely Schroedingered. It works equally well as a DEPRECIATION theory. All you need to do is to switch the positions of the Usual Suspects and the Bad Aurors, and you've got yourself a workable version of DEPRECIATION, with an option on a Memory Charm Most Foul side-dish of Evil!Gran.
Ah, flexibility! The hallmark of great speculation.
Mainly, though, what impresses me here is the extremely compelling canonical defense that Debbie provided for the notion that what afflicts Neville's parents may not be trauma at all, but a Memory Charm. Having first brought up all of the usual objections to the Longbottom subplot—that the Longbottoms' amnesiac state is simply not in the least bit believable as a normal human response to extended abuse, that it seems even more unlikely that two people should have responded in precisely the same idiosyncratic way to trauma, and so forth—Debbie then wrote:
On the other hand, the description of the Longbottom's condition is completely consistent with a Memory Charm. For support, I compare the description of the Longbottoms (about whom Dumbledore says "They are insane. . . . They do not recognize [Neville]") with Prof. Lockhart (about whom Ron reports "Hasn't got a clue who he is, or where he is, or who we are.") I think the descriptions sound very similar.
Wow, Debbie!
Yeah, so do I. I think that you may just have sold me on this idea. Memory Charm'd Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom really does makes perfect sense to me, and it also provides for quite the opportunity for Banginess later on. Just think of all the dirt that Frank Longbottom might be able to spill, if only he could, well, you know. Stop drooling for just a little while.
"Bad Aurors" also fixes many of the holes that "Rounding Up the Usual Suspects" falls headlong into. It explains why the Pensieve defendents seem so utterly convinced of their loyalty in being the "only ones" who were loyal enough to go looking for Voldemort: because in fact, they were. No additional conspirators are necessary, as they are in Usual Suspects. It also explains why Voldemort himself seems so convinced of their loyalty. After all, who knows that those Bad Aurors beat them to the punch anyway? No one. Except for those Bad Aurors themselves, that is -- but they're not talking.
The problem that I can see with this, though, is that it leaves the Bang potential just a little bit Duddy. If there were no DE conspiracy, then what could the great shocker revelation when Neville or his parents are finally freed from their memory charms be? That the Ministry is corrupt? That some Aurors (whom we don't know and don't care about) are Evil, Evil, Evil?
To give this one a good Bang, I think that you either have to return to the DE conspiracy (in which case you're left with the problems of the graveyard scene) or to assume that an Ever So Evil Alastor Moody was one of those Bad Bad Aurors.
Not, of course, that I ever have a problem with Evil!Moody.
The full frame-up varieties of the Cover-Up At the Ministry are certainly a good deal of fun, but the less extreme versions are far more easily defended. The idea that young Crouch was actually innocent, for example, has ample enough canonical support that many readers have found it an instinctive reading. If we assume that Crouch Jr. was innocent, then it is very tempting to suspect that his implication might have been engineered as a political attack on his father.
This, the "Palace Intrigue" Theory, was the possibility that I was hoping to suggest when, in response to Finwitch's suggestion that young Crouch might have been innocent after all, I wrote:
So tell me something here. Am I the only person so deeply and profoundly mistrustful of the Ministry that my immediate thought upon reading Finwitch's above suggestion was that if a memory charm had indeed been placed on Neville to suppress this particular piece of knowledge, then the culprit probably wasn't a Death Eater at all?
No sooner had those words passed through my proverbial lips than Dicentra immediately leapt forward, blurting in a state of great excitement:
I'm not ready to claim that Fudge tortured the Longbottoms, but I'll always vote for him covering up something evil.
Heh. Why, yes! I thought that Dicentra might like this idea, for some wacky reason.
::Dicentra displays her FIDEDIGNO badge, which when pressed flashes FISHFINGERS in green, and when pressed again shows FIE in orange, and when pressed again shows FIEONGOODNESS in blue.::
<Elkins, entranced by all of those bright colors and pretty flashing lights, is alarmed to find herself reaching out as if to accept a badge of her own. She tightens her lips and shakes her head firmly, snatching her hand back down to her side. She reminds herself crossly of just how fond she is of her own Fudge badge, the one that bears upon it but a single sad little acronym: O.S.T.R.I.C.H.>
<Elkins' OSTRICH badge is not, it is true, nearly as attractive as Dicentra's. It is not very shiny. It has no flash. And it really is a very drab color. It is, in fact, precisely the same dull matte black of a cannon. It really doesn't go with the rest of Elkins' wardrobe at all. But she's had it with her for such a long time now, and she's grown accustomed to it, and it's...well, it's comfortable. And besides, it does sort of match her SYCOPHANTS badge. So she guesses that she'll just stick with it. For now.>
::sigh::
Yeah. You know, I try, I really do try, to resist the seductive lure of Ever So Evil Fudge. I fight against it with all of my might. See, I'm just way too fond of reading Fudge and Crouch as literary doubles in GoF, and that reading goes all to pieces once you start wagging your finger at Fudge and crying "FIE!" It really does. It throws everything hopelessly out of balance.
But all that said, I have to admit that poor old Cornelius really does make by far the most appealing culprit for this particular version of the Ministry Cover-Up Theory. As Debbie wrote:
Interesting possibilities here: if the MOM was responsible, could Fudge (now presumably and up-and-comer in the Ministry after his role in the Sirius/Pettigrew affair) have somehow had something to do with getting Crouch Jr. framed to perhaps clear Crouch Sr. out of the path to the Minister of Magic Position?
He certainly is the most likely candidate, isn't he? He was working within the Ministry and therefore might well have had just enough insight into Crouch's character to guess that if Crouch's son were implicated in the affair, Crouch would behave precisely the way that he did. He also was working for the Department of Magical Catastrophes at the time. The DMC might well have been the division that was first called in to deal with the mess that the Longbottoms' assailants had left behind. If Fudge were first on the scene, as he was in the Sirius Black affair, then that would have placed him in an ideal position to take stock of the situation, realize that Neville was the only person present in any condition to reveal the truth of what had transpired, and then to take the appropriate action to ensure the boy's silence. And of course, most damning of all, Fudge is the one who benefitted the most from Crouch's political fall.
<Elkins casts one last wistful look at Dicentra's pretty badge, then shakes her head sadly and looks back down to her notes in preparation for moving on to the next of her Memory Charm theories. As she flips through her pages, her attention is caught by a blur of motion just at the corners of her vision. Something is moving out there. Something entrancing. Something...Dark.>
<She turns to look, then simply stares. It is Debbie, reiterating her idea that the Longbottoms might not have been reduced to their amnesiac state by the Cruciatus at all, but rather, from a botched attempt to Obliviate them. This time, though, she has combined it with Tabouli's Tortured Toddler to form a new and wondrous version of Cover-Up, one that does not really need to involve any Death Eaters at all.>
Debbie:
....it's possible that the real problem with the Longbottoms is that either (a) the Memory Charm was botched, Lockhart-style, so they lost their entire memories, or (b) the MOM attempted to break their Memory Charms so they could testify but in doing so damaged their minds beyond repair, as happened to Bertha Jorkins. And so the MOM claimed that the Cruciatus Curse caused their insanity, to cover their own tracks. This would make their evidence seem quite unreliable.
Oh, my!
Okay. So what if we propose that this is in fact the memory which the Ministry was so very keen to remove from Neville's mind -- not the memory of vile DEs tormenting his parents but rather, the memory of his parents' relatively coherent behavior after the original attack, but before they were then broken completely by the Ministry's ham-handed attempts to smash through those memory charms?
That's pretty dire, all right. Mainly, though, I like it because it offers the possibility that once Neville finally figures out what's up, he will respond by becoming—
Yes! You guessed it! An iconoclast, that's what. An enemy of the status quo. A revolutionary. He will lead protests against the MoM. He will distribute pamphlets and fliers and badges. He will agitate for reform. He will join an anarcho-syndicalist commune and dye his hair strange colors. He will jaywalk for the fun of it and stay up far too late at night.
<p;Elkins looks around the room hopefully. People are shuffling in their seats and leafing through their programs. No one seems willing to meet her eyes. There is a single cough.>
Aw, come on, guys. Let me have my dreams, won't you?
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DEPRECIATION
("Death Eaters Provoked a Really Evil Charm-Induced Amnesia to Incapacitate Our Neville")
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Neville was given his memory charm by a Wicked Death Eater, in order to prevent him from giving testimony or in some other way exposing the culprit's true identity. The reason that Neville's memory is in such bad shape is because the perp used a truly massive Memory Charm on him...just to be on the safe side. After all, Real Death Eaters Aren't Compassionate.
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Ah, Depreciation! Such a classic Memory Charm approach, with so many dire and paranoid and vicious variations! Where to begin?
Well, first off there's the Classic version of Depreciation. This one proposes that Neville was a witness to the assault on his parents, and that he therefore was given his memory charm by one of the perps, to prevent him from being able to finger them to the ministry.
It's got the weight of tradition behind it, this one does. But as with that other fine old classic, the Well-Intended Memory Charm, it has come under a great deal of attack. Really, everyone raises pretty much the same objections to this theory, as it has some obvious continuity problems. If the DEs had known that Neville was there, then wouldn't they have subjected him to the same treatment as his mother in their efforts to persuade Frank to talk? If so, then wouldn't he be in the same catatonic state as his parents? And even if for some reason he weren't (perhaps due to the resiliency of youth?), then why on earth wouldn't the DEs simply have killed him, if they were so worried about the possibility that he might give them away?
All very good questions (although they do also beg that troubling and even IMO somewhat FLINTy question of why the DEs didn't kill the Longbottoms themselves, once they had finished with them).
Tabouli wrote:
What happened to Dead Men Don't Tell Tales? Come on, these Death Eaters were trained by Lord "Kill the Spare" Voldemort! If Neville was watching and they thought his toddler testimony would be a threat, why not use the one spell you have time for to AK him? Why bother with a Memory Charm (unless you go for the AK is too exhausting theory)? For that matter, given the fact that they left the Longbottoms alive convicted them in the end (through the action of none too reliable information, given their condition), why didn't they just kill them off when they found them of no use, to safeguard themselves?
Agreed in full. Classic Depreciation has never made very much sense to me, either. Even Debbie's marvellous "Oh, no! Someone's knocking on the door! Let's Memory Charm them for now, and then finish the job later on" speculation works far less well for me in its DEPRECIATION version than in its Ministry Cover-Up manifestation. I can easily believe that Bad Aurors might have thought they'd get a chance to continue with their interrogation later on and so might have smacked the Longbottoms with a couple of killer Memory Charms. But I can't even begin to imagine how a group of Death Eaters could have thought that they'd get such a second chance.
No, the notion that Neville's Memory Charm was cast on him to prevent him from fingering the Pensieve Four to the Ministry just doesn't work for me at all. Far more workable, I think, are the variants that assume that Neville's Memory Charm was intended to prevent him from revealing the identity of some Death Eater not among the Pensieve Four -- someone who possibly didn't even realize that Neville had witnessed something important until quite some time after the fact.
But who could this person have been?
Ah. Well, that's where it starts to get interesting.
Cindy suggested that the culprit might have been none other than Real!Moody himself, whom Neville saw tampering with a bit of evidence at the scene of the crime in order to help to cover up for the Longbottoms' assailants.
Cindy:
Neville saw Moody do something the night Neville's parents were tortured. Something that would blow Moody's cover if it came to light. It might not necessarily be Big. Maybe just some evidence destruction or some such. . . .But whatever Neville sees Moody do, Moody has a Big problem now. He can't kill Neville, because it would be too weird for the perpetrators to kill the toddler and leave the parents alive. Also, Moody is worried that killing Neville will cause MoM to do an investigation, and Moody would hate for Neville's shadow to come crawling out of Moody's wand. So Moody does a ::gulp:: Memory Charm. And a big one, too, much bigger than is really needed. Moody isn't taking any chances.
Mmmmmm. It definitely has possibilities. It explains, for example, why Neville should have seemed so very frightened of Crouch/Moody in GoF. It also allows one to assume that Neville never witnessed his parents being tortured, thus averting all of those pesky little problems with the Second Task Egg's mermaid song, and the Dementor on the train, and so forth. And yet, it still has quite a bit of Bang potential, particularly as JKR has already promised us in interview that Real!Moody will be a character in his own right in later volumes.
Yes indeed.
It does, however, take quite a bit of juggling to reconcile with the fact that neither Crouch Jr. nor Wormtail nor Voldemort himself seem to have the slightest idea that Real!Moody is in fact a Death Eater.
Fortunately, Cindy's already taken care of this problem. For her full canonical defense of Secret Death Eater Moody, see message #36829. In brief summary, she there suggests that Real!Moody was actually one of Rookwood's people, and that therefore although he was indeed an ally of Voldemort's, Voldemort himself was unaware of this fact, as were the vast majority of his Death Eaters. The irony abounds, naturally, once Crouch and Wormtail and Voldemort are all overpowering their devoted ally Moody and shoving him into a trunk.
If you don't care for Ever So Evil Moody, though, then how about Ever So Evil Frank Longbottom?
Caroline risked a yellow flag violation by suggesting that the Longbottoms were never tortured at all, but instead are under the influence of Insanity Curses, with only Neville having been given a memory charm. But why was he given a memory charm? Merely to prevent him from blabbing about the identity of the Lestranges et al?
Not precisely. You see, in Caroline's DEPRECIATION theory, Frank Longbottom Was Ever So Evil! (Message #36825)
Caroline:
How about—Frank L. is really a bad guy. Evil as they come. Knows exactly where Voldemort is floating around. But his sweet innocent wife has no idea about all this, until she overhears Frank & the gang of 4 plotting. She goes all hysterical and someone slaps an insanity curse on her. Someone (Dead Sexy Mrs. Lestrange, anyone?) decides that Frank is now a liability and can't be trusted. He gets an insanity curse, Neville gets a memory charm, the gang gets the heck out of there. (This can come with an added bonus of an innocent-of-torture-Crouch Jr if you'd like!)
I'm always happy to accept an innocent-of-torture-Crouch-Jr option.
The nice thing about this one, to my mind, is that it implies that deep down in their heart of hearts, the DEs have Neville mentally filed away as a future ally. (It can therefore be nicely reconciled with TOADKEEPER II, if you are so inclined.) It also provides acceptable answers to all of the usual questions raised by DEPRECIATION theories.
Why don't the DEs want to kill Neville? Well, because he's Longbottom's heir, of course, and while Frank did unfortunately turn out to be just a wee bit unreliable when it came to his wife, he was on the whole a good and loyal Death Eater, and the others would like for his son to follow right in his footsteps (only without that pesky reliability problem) when the time comes.
So why wipe Neville's memory of the event at all? Well, really! The lad is hardly old enough to appreciate the sad necessities of Evil Overlordship at the age of two, is he? Children can get a little bit funny about their parents being cursed sometimes. If he could remember what really went down, it might just turn him against the Cause. So best just to keep the truth from him for now. The full story can be explained to him later, when he is old enough to understand such things and ready to take up his father's mantle of Devoted Death Eating.
(We might want to call this one the "Human psychology? Oops! I forgot!" approach to long-term DE planning.)
I'm sure that there are many other revisionist DEPRECIATION variations out there somewhere, just waiting to be proposed.
Anyone? Anyone?
Finally, although I've such huge problems with classic DEPRECIATION, Amanda did come up with a spin on it that I love so dearly that I am unwilling to reject it out of hand. I'm therefore hoping that I might be able to snatch it right out of the Classic DEPRECIATION context in which Amanda first suggested it and instead stick it into a different theory altogether.
Amanda wrote:
Has anyone suggested (as I am), that Crouch/Moody was the perpetrator of the crime against the Longbottoms, that he saw Neville's reaction to his class, and held Neville back to reinforce the memory charm that he himself cast, years ago? Neville is loopy in the hall because he's just had a memory charm cast on him.
Ooooooooh, Amanda!
I really like this, although I can't see how Crouch could have done so in the classroom. I don't think that he would have had time, for one thing—Neville's already standing in the hallway when the Trio emerge from the room—and for another, Neville seems if anything more in touch with his memories in the hallway than he does later on, when Harry runs into him again in their dormitory. Neville is indeed acting loopy and Mr. Robertsish in the hallway, but he is also quite evidently distressed, and he seems to be absolutely terrified of Crouch/Moody. I'm therefore more inclined to view his loopiness there as a symptom of his latent memory charm having activated in response to his own attempts to fight his way through it.
But what if this happened during Crouch/Moody and Neville's little tea party?
That tea party goes on for an awfully long time, doesn't it? Neville seems to have missed out on lunch altogether. And when Harry runs into him in the dormitory afterwards, there is a strange incongruity in how Harry perceives him. On the one hand, Harry thinks that Neville "looked a good deal calmer than at the end of Moody's lesson." Harry also notes the touch of pride in Neville's tone as he relates what Crouch/Moody told him about Sprout's praise for his work in Herbology class and deduces from it that Crouch/Moody has "cheered Neville up." On the other hand, Neville still doesn't look entirely "normal" to Harry, and his eyes are red—he has obviously been crying—and although Harry doesn't notice it, he lies awake for much of that night.
So how does this sound? Let us suppose, for the moment, that Crouch was not in fact the original caster of Neville's Memory Charm. Someone else was. Who it was is up to you -- you could go for a Ministry Cover-Up, or a Spontaneous Magic approach, or even a classic well-intended Memory Charm. It really doesn't matter, so long as you maintain two assumptions: that Neville did indeed witness his parents' torture, and that Crouch Jr. was one of the perps.
Let us also assume that Crouch knows that Neville has a Memory Charm. He learned about it, let us say, at some point during all of those years he spent hanging around in Daddy's kitchen under the Imperius Curse. Crouch knows that Neville has a Memory Charm, which as far as he's concerned is a Good Thing, because even though he's polyjuiced and one heck of an actor, the possibility that the kid might recognize him still makes him a little bit nervous.
As well it should. Because in DADA class, his demonstration of the Cruciatus Curse doesn't just upset Neville. (Upsetting him would be fine; Crouch likes that sort of thing.) It also seems to...trigger something. The kid isn't just acting upset. He's acting like someone whose memory charm might just be degrading. Crouch was a terrific student in his day, and so he knows his charms. He recognizes all the signs: Neville's remembering something, and he's also giving Crouch/Moody all of these terrified looks...could he possibly be onto Crouch somehow? Could he possibly have recognized him even through the polyjuice disguise? Was there, perhaps, something horribly familiar about that look of relish in Crouch's eyes while he was practicing his Cruciatus on that spider? Something that triggered a memory?
Perhaps.
At any rate, Crouch is taking no chances. He drags Neville (who looks as if he thinks he's being led off to his execution -- as indeed, perhaps he really does) off to his office, and he gives him a Memory Charm. But memory charms only work properly for discrete events, so Crouch has to make a judgment call here. Is he going to try to reinforce the original charm? No, that's far too complicated: ince he wasn't the one who cast it in the first place, he doesn't know precisely what it was initially designed to suppress. And besides, his immediate problem isn't really that Neville might remember something about the attack on his parents. His problem is that in spite of his polyjuice disguise, Neville seems to have been struck by the suspicion that he isn't really who he claims to be.
Crouch figures that the spider is probably what gave him away, so he casts a memory charm designed to blitz that half of his DADA lesson right out of Neville's mind. He casts it, and then he spends the rest of the afternoon chatting up Neville about his heroic Auror father, and about his Herbology lessons, and about whatever else he can think of that might reinforce the notion that he is Moody, and that he's really a very nice fellow underneath that gruff exterior.
So Neville is indeed cheered when Harry sees him again in the dormitory, because he is no longer haunted by the notion that there is something horribly familiar—and something very very bad—about the new DADA Professor, and because he's just been chatted up by an old buddy of his Father's, and because he's just been stroked about his herbology talent. But he's also disturbed, because his memories of the entire afternoon are fuzzy, and because since his original memory charm really is degrading, these sort of fugue states are already becoming more and more frequent occurrences for him, but not usually this bad, I mean, he's lost like the entire afternoon this time, and oh God it's just getting worse, isn't it, and how is he ever going to pass all of his classes if this sort of thing keeps up anyway?
And on top of all of that, he's just hit puberty, and he thinks that Hermione is cute.
I mean, I'd lie awake at night too, if I had to deal with all of that.
And of course, the reason that his eyes are red is because the instant that Crouch/Moody got Neville alone in his office, the poor kid went all to pieces. He probably snivelled and pleaded and begged and all sorts of embarrassing things, but that's okay: he can't remember a bit of it now, so he's feeling absolutely no shame. And boy, did Crouch enjoy it, while it lasted! So you see, that part of the afternoon was really win-win for everyone.
<Elkins nods with satisfaction>
There. How's that? Does that work for everyone?
What's that? You think that it's a little bit...what? Twisted? Sick?
Oh, please. You don't know from sick. You want to hear sick, then we're going to have to move on to...
************************************
Memory Charm Most Foul
(Otherwise known as: "A Family Affair," "Something Rotten In the State of Denmark," "Amnesia Begins At Home," The Skeletons In the Closet Theory, and "Ever So Evil Granny Longbottom")
************************************
So what is this hidden knowledge anyway, this secret so very dire that Neville cannot, will not, or must not look upon it?
Well, that's obvious, isn't it? Someone in Neville's family circle must be culpable. Very culpable. No other explanation will suffice.
-----------------------
For purposes of classification, I have adopted "Memory Charm Most Foul" as the umbrella designation for all of those theories which propose that whatever afflicts Neville's memory must be chalked down to something ugly festering away at the heart of the Longbottom family dynamic itself.
Porphyria made a strong case for viewing this approach as not merely canonically supported, but indeed as thematically inevitable.
Porphyria:
And I'd have to answer that the deadly problem within the immediate family is a theme that keeps coming up over and over, isn't it? . . . .Maybe my problem is that I'm too steeped in Freudian thought, but it seems to me that the overall trajectory of the HP series is of finding out scandalous crap about your parents, your family and by extension, yourself.
She cited her reasons for believing that Harry himself is on a collision course with discovering some quite unsavory things about his own family, and then concluded:
I'm not saying that Harry's parents are bad, by any means, but I am saying that the theme of the books seems to be ugly secrets that revolve somewhere around the general vicinity of where your parents are.
And so, if we read Neville as some form of literary double to Harry (as indeed I think that we must), then whatever afflicts Neville's memory must have something to do with some ugly secret involving his own family, yes?
Yes.
Of course, one might well argue that all of these theories already incorporate this thematic thrust perfectly adequately, dealing as they do with the sorry fate of Neville's parents. But mere victimization is just not ugly enough for the Memory Charm Most Foul adherents. Nope. Not ugly enough by half. Memory Charm Most Foul people insist that it must be worse than that. Much worse.
Memory Charm Most Foul theories, much like their benevolent counterparts, the Classic Well-Intended Memory Charm theories, focus overwhelmingly on Neville's grandmother as the culprit. In these theories, however, her motives are not good. They are not good at all.
I was startled—startled and a little bit bemused—to realize that I was in fact the person who started people off on this train of thought, with all of my nattering on about the significance of the Snape boggart dressed in Gran's clothing. I mean, my goodness! I was just thinking about the cultural demands of the wizarding world! But Porphyria came to a somewhat different conclusion.
Porphyria:
Hmmm. Maybe I'm way misinterpreting you here, but are you suggesting that one might not have to go so far from the Longbottom home to find an accessory to his parents torture?
And then Eileen waxed positively Shakespearean on this subject:
Porphyria has an even worse theory about murder, murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural...
The murderous DE grandmother: a little more than kin and less than kind.
Ever So Evil Gran. What else can one say?
Of course, dear old Gran does not necessarily have to be a DE in a Memory Charm Most Foul Spec. As Eileen wrote:
Even if Gran did not torture the Longbottoms, did someone trade exact rectitude for a beter result, under the illusion that there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so?
And indeed, in Porphyria's own Memory Charm Most Foul, dear old Gran isn't at all a Death Eater. She's just, well, a little bit venal, that's all. A little bit greedy. A little bit selfish. And a whole lot culpable.
I would not dream of attempting to summarize Porphyria's Memory Charm Most Foul theory here. Suffice it to say that it involves a frustrated and dispossessed Granny Longbottom, desperate to get her hands on a piece of the Longbottom estate which, to her great dismay, was left entire to Frank. It involves a SHIP between Gran and Lucius Malfoy. It involves an explanation of how slippery old Lucius managed to get his hands on all of Tom Riddle's old school things in the first place. And it makes Gran directly responsible for the fate of her son and his wife.
It is message #36840.
And I solemnly swear never to call Porphyria "canonically pure" again.
Some people, though, just weren't content with Venal!Gran. No. No, they wanted Gran to be a full-fledged Death Eater. People like Debbie, for instance, who not only made a case for Gran-as-DE, but also insisted on a DEPRECIATION scenario in which Gran herself was one of the Longbottoms' torturers.
Debbie:
Assuming [Neville] was no more than 2 or 3 at the time of the events, he wouldn't be able to identify the participants (e.g., "Barty Crouch was there") and I don't think he would fare much better identifying the perpetrators by sight. That is, of course, unless he already knew that person. Unless that person he knew did unspeakably horrible things to his parents.
Mmmmmmm. Yeah, okay. Actually, I can buy this. In fact, this may well be the only version of Classic DEPRECIATION that I find believable. I am not willing to accept that Crouch, or the Lestranges, or Fourth Man (regardless of how Remorseful he might later have become), or any other group of random Death Eaters would have cast a memory charm on Eyewitness Toddler Neville, rather than just killing him outright to prevent him from squealing.
But if one of the DEs was his own grandmother?
Yeah. Yeah, actually, you know, I really can buy that one. After all, they may be Very Bad People, but they're still human, right? I can accept the notion that even an Evil!Gran evil enough to torture her own son into a state of raving lunacy might nonetheless have prevailed on the rest of her party to spare her grandchild's life and use a Memory Charm instead to ensure his silence.
Because you know how people can get about their grandkids.
Debbie's Evil!Gran gets herself up to quite a lot of mischief, actually. She is the one responsible for keeping her son and his wife in their state of incurable amnesia:
But a powerful Auror such as Frank Longbottom would eventually have been able to throw off the Memory Charm, you say. That's true, but Gran may be forestalling that eventuality by refreshing it every time she takes Neville to see his parents.
She's the one responsible for Neville's constant state of befuddled forgetfulness:
If so, she's probably refreshing Neville's as well.
And she's also the one who has for years been coldly and deliberately subverting his self-esteem:
She's got to find cover for Neville's charm-induced forgetfulness and other ill effects. And she needs to keep Neville from figuring out that he's powerful enough to shake the Memory Charm. So she begins to tell the relatives after she gets custody of Neville that she's worried he's a Squib, and she makes sure Neville hears it, too, so he thinks he's incapable of magic.
Ah, yes. There's just nothing quite like family, is there?
Evil!Gran, whether she is a full Death Eater or merely an accomplice, certainly is a promising notion. She is thematically consistent with the rest of the series. She explains Neville's nervousness at the prospect of having his boggart turn into her. She is easily reconciled with TOADKEEPER II. She is Big, and she is Bangy, and as Porphyria pointed out, she wears a stuffed vulture on her hat, for crying out loud! How can one resist?
And of course, she also fits in wonderfully with the Spontaneous Magic Theory. What motivated Neville to wipe his own memory? Merely the trauma of seeing two of the people he loved the most tortured? Nonsense! It was the trauma of realizing that two of the people he loved the most were tortured into a state of insanity because of one of the other people that he loved the most!
Small wonder he doesn't want to remember anything. Or to accept the vengeance-driven warrior ethos of his own culture. Or to grow up to become a big powerful wizard.
Porphyria:
And herein lies the problem. This is the real reason he's keeping himself back. He knows all about his parents. He visits them every holiday. He knows all about their torturers because it's a matter of public record. But why would he be so afraid of finding his power when he really doesn't have to wreak vengeance on behalf of his parents -- all the culprits are already in jail! No, his memory is self-damaged because the person he'd go ballistic upon is the person he loves more than anything in the world.
Yup. There you have it. Neville. He's effectively an orphan, his memory is shot, he's got a crazy Great-Uncle who tries to kill him all the time, he's not good at sport, he's not good at schoolwork, his social skills are minimal, he's scared of just about everything, he has to visit his drooling catatonic parents in the hospital over all of his holidays, he dresses funny and he's pudgy and no one really wants to go to the Ball with him and he gets no respect from either his peers or his teachers and he has an unfashionable pet who may even be an Evil!Spy...
But hey, that's okay! Because sooner or later Neville's going to kick that Memory Charm of his. And when that happens, Things Are Going To Change, all right. When that happens, we're going to see some serious worm-turning action. Because when that happens...
Well, when that happens, then Neville will discover that his one and only responsible caregiver, whom he loves more than anyone else in the world, is actually an Ever So Evil Death Eater who helped to torture his parents half to death and has in fact been deliberately keeping him in a state of helpless amnesia for all of his life!
So don't worry.
Be happy.
><(("> ><(("> ><(("> ><(("> ><(("> ><(("> ><(("> ><(("> ><((">
Well. That about wraps it up, I think.
Except, of course, for all of those new Memory Charm theories that have hit the Bay of late. Double Memory Charm. Memory Charm meets Fourth Man. Not to mention, of course, the Ever So Memorably acronymed T.N.R.A.M.C.N.T.S.H.P.B.T.A.F.A.S.E.T.U.D.W.O.I.T.
Somebody else can deal with those. I'm going to bed.
—Elkins, toddling away from her lectern and hoping that somebody else will take care of the clean up, because otherwise there is just no way that the Museum is ever going to give her that deposit back.
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