death eaters and patronii
today i’m thinking about the claim (by jkr iirc) that death eaters can’t produce patronuses/patronii (i prefer that second term; sounds cooler) because they’re ‘dark wizards’ or some such nonsense. snape was an exception to the rule, she said, because his love for lily was enough to declare him ‘good’.
i vehemently reject that notion (as well as the several related points on it) on principle.
suspending the fact that death eaters were allied with dementors and ‘had no need’ for a patronus, why wouldn’t they be able to create one for the heck of it? jkr said that it’s ‘complex magic’ but harry as well as the rest of his class managed to do it while they were still in hogwarts. you’re telling me people like wormtail, 1/4 of a group that created an enchanted interactive map when they were teenagers and an unregistered animagus, wouldn’t be able to? skill requirement claim = flawed.
there’s also the argument that they are ‘dark wizards’, but what does this mean? wasn’t it implied durmstrang was a school for ‘dark wizards’ and yet hogwarts was allied with them? is it someone then who is well-versed in the dark arts and is therefore a ‘bad’ person? dumbledore himself was a pro at the dark arts, was also besties with grindelwald, the proto-tom riddle, and yet he could clearly produce one. snape too was a dark wizard, quite obviously, and was not a nice person, yet his doe was an integral part in winning the war. this also excludes people like, say, the black family, who were ‘dark’ wizards, yet tonks was able to produce a patronus, and i sincerely doubt that they themselves were saints. so moral requirement claim = also flawed.
it also doesn’t make sense because ‘light’ wizards are able to cast Unforgivables with seeming ease, as long as they have the full intention to do them. harry himself was able to cast one. it’s bs because it implies then that using these spells for torture or killing by the ‘right’ people is ok, but ‘light’ spells can’t even be cast by ‘dark’ wizards? what harmful things can they actually do with a patronus apart from probably sending lewd messages to each other? (and they would pls i can imagine a doe and a peacock flitting back and forth just to throw obscenities at their recipient’s faces). it’s such a glaring double standard.
with regard to happy memories too, like...i’m sure they’d have them? even if the ‘requirement’ was that they should be ‘pure’ memories, i’m sure even people like lucius would have some, of his wife, or draco, at the very least. (raises the question too of what if your happy memory was causing someone else pain? *cough*sirius*cough* what if it was that, jkr, huh?)
i know it’s fiction but it’s annoying that this type of thinking automatically polarizes certain things and places people in categories of either being fundamentally bad or inherently good with nothing in between, when the truth of it is humans are complex rational beings who are capable of change and whose behaviors are dependent on several factors at a time. i’m not saying the DEs were actually great people, but they were human, and they definitely should have been able to produce a patronus if they had needed to.
(example of when they could have used a patronus: not all death eaters were killing machines, or had started as such; some were forced into the fold, like draco, so likely wouldn’t have had the same confidence with dementors. they would have needed that spell if only to keep themselves safe, and that’s not a bad thing??)
