“Is Draco alive? Is he in the castle?” The whisper was barely audible; her lips were an inch from his ear, her head bent so low that her long hair shielded his face from the onlookers. “Yes,” he breathed back. He felt the hand on his chest contract; her nails pierced him. Then it was withdrawn. She had sat up. “He is dead!” Narcissa Malfoy called to the watchers.
In the end, Voldemort’s fate twice came down to the choice of a woman, a mother.
Rock ‘n roll.
Harry Potter as a series repeatedly tells us never to underestimate a mother’s love. Lilly’s love for Harry nearly killed Voldemort the first time, Narcissa’s love for Draco set him up for his real death, and Voldemort’s greatest general was killed by Molly, a mother who loved all of her children and feared losing any more to the magical war.
Bitches. Get. Stuff. Done.
Anyone who thinks Harry Potter as a series isn’t good literature and doesn’t teach important life lessons/points of view about ethics, morality and responsibility, needs to G-O-OUT-DA-DO’.
This had to be the most raw moment in the series because the fact that she was like “My baby is okay that’s all that matters, and I know what will happen if Voldemort wins, so let’s end this.”
I mean, Voldemort lost because he trusted his followers to be implicit in their loyalty, but a lot had changed in the decade since he’d last terrorized the world. Like…the Death Eaters for the most part were calmed down and writing off those dark days as the “wild days of their youth” and shit, so when Voldemort pops back up ready to pick up where he left off, you could see a lot of the doubt in them like “Yo we grew up, son, shit ain’t like it was before.” But they followed out of fear mostly, not loyalty. Bellatrix was just crazy and in love with V so it didn’t matter to her what happened—and it ultimately led to her death.
But Narcissa was raw as fuck because she knew SOMEBODY had to stop him and she knew her husband was too scared to do it himself, so she devised her own on-the-fly plan.
The HP series is way too dope to be written off, and most of the detractors who write it off are just jealous of the hype it gets, but if you really read it, so many themes are covered in the story, chief among them being growing up and the expectations therein.
…am I rambling. I need to stop.
Dang, I didn’t even consider the whole “we’ve grown up” thing, but you’re absolutely right. And to add to that, not only have they grown up, they’ve had children. Being a Death Eater is something that these folks probably thought was hot shit when they were young, but now that they’ve grown up, they’re seeing their children doing the same thing, and suddenly it’s not so cool anymore. They’re deeply unsettled at best, and terrified at worst.
And Voldy literally lacks the ability to see this. He will never understand that love, and love for one’s children, also extends to his cronies. He will never understand that love causes people to take unimaginable risks FOR these children.
He will never understand that love for one’s children is so strong that a woman who’s followed him loyally for years will lie to his face—never mind that he’s THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED LEGILIMENS IN THE WORLD—about his absolute worst enemy. When she was forced to choose between her son and her leader, she chose her son, without even batting an eye.
THAT is powerful.
Exactly. These people have grown up, gotten married, and had children. Voldemort is that dude that was perpetually still trying to be forever young, still going to the same clubs, still doing the same fuckshit, and everybody who used to ride with him is like “For real, tho? We off that, man.”
Harry Potter draws a lot of parallels to the real world despite the story itself. I love it.
I love when Tumblr breaks out into hardcore analysis.
This was one of my very favorite scenes in the book, and I was relieved that it was done well in the film because it was so, so important to me personally. It affected what I wrote after that too — I could never again see Narcissa as a 2-dimensional bad guy.
She was strong where her husband was weak, and had intense courage while Lucius cowered in the shadows. I loved that she was the one who decided to leave the battle in the film adaptation. That scene where the battle is breaking out and she takes Draco by the hand and leads him away, with Lucius limping along behind — it gets me every time. Narcissa had enough of Voldemort and Death Eaters, and she just walked away, not even knowing what the outcome of the battle would be. She didn’t even care if her husband followed or not; she took her son by the hand and walked away from the shit her husband had dragged them into.
I have always imagined that she became a force to be reckoned with after that, and that Lucius basically sat in a chair and drank for the rest of his life while she became a respected member of the new wizarding society.
I have so much love for JKR’s depictions of what lengths mothers will go to for their children. It’s a theme that really resonates with me.
Harry Potter has really good, complicated views of a wide array of mothers and mother figures. It’s seriously one of my #1 favorite things about the series.
Considering JKR started writing it while a single mom struggling to raise her daughter, it makes a lot of sense, but I still appreciate it all the same.
hawberries
