I enjoyed reading your Barty headcanons. He's one of my favourites. Just wondering if you any others about Bellatrix?
Honestly, I don’t have many headcanons about Bellatrix, because I think her lore has always been fairly clear. What I do think is that she’s usually portrayed as “mad” from the outset, when I believe that, in her youth, she was simply a woman with an enormous amount of force of character, a vicious temper, and the absolute conviction that no one had the right—or the power—to put her in her place.
The ideas of her family were not enough for her; they felt limiting. And she saw in Voldemort a way to channel her anger and her frustration. I think the Blacks were non-violent supremacists who favoured non-intervention, whereas Bellatrix had a far more bellicose drive, a need to externalise what was boiling inside her. Voldemort actively encouraged action, and that was probably what attracted her to him in the first place. That, and the fact that I firmly believe Voldemort allowed his followers to stop repressing their basest impulses, which meant that those already inclined towards violence completely came undone.
But I’m also convinced that Bellatrix was perfectly aware of everything she did, and that her mental health only truly deteriorated after years in Azkaban. Before that, she was lucid. Her worldview doesn’t stem from sadism for its own sake, but from the fact that, even if she wasn’t the heir to the Black family, she was the firstborn of the last generation of cousins in one of the richest and most aristocratic families in her society.
In her own mind, she was unstoppable. No one was allowed to talk back to her, because she believed she had a right to everything—because that is precisely how rich aristocrats are raised. Her behaviour is simply that of any aristocrat who has been given free rein to treat those she considers beneath her as animals. She isn’t mad; she is a very, very healthy product of classism.
