You mentioned fanon turning barty crouch jr. into an uninteresting character. I don't know much about what the new fanon characterisation has really done with him, but I'm curious for your thoughts on why he's a canonically interesting character. I agree that he is, but it sounds like you might have some interesting thoughts on it that are already fleshed out.
thank you for the ask, @jamesunderwater, and i'm sorry for taking so long to drag myself around to answering this.
as you may have gathered if youâve read my views on jegulus or wolfstar, the common fanon interpretation of marauders-era characters and i donât really get on.
this is not a new development - me and goofy fanon sirius have been beefing for over a decade at this point, i fear - but our enmity has taken on a new form since (roughly) 2020, when the emergence of what we might call the modern marauders subfandom brought with it a whole series of expectations about characters, ships, personalities, and appearances in first war stories which, let me state my position immediately, have absolutely nothing to do with the characters as they are in canon.
i could talk about sirius or regulus or james or snape or lupin until the cows come home - as, iâm sure, could many of us - but i also dislike the expectations the marauders subfandom has around its supporting cast. these characters - who largely fall under the categories of women, slytherins, or both - have names that we might recognise from canon, but they are - to all intents and purposes - original characters.
to do some marauders fan defending, i do understand the rationale behind this. hogwarts is a school, and it needs to be filled with the sort of incidental characters that lightning-era writers can pull from the canon text (shoutout to ernie macmillan, the mvp). if youâre writing about lily, then she needs friends - why not have them be alice, marlene, dorcas, emmeline, pandora etc.?
[well, because dumbledore isnât running a child army. it makes no sense for the entire order of the phoenix to be in the same school year - and the idea that alice is probably around ten years older than lily, that pandora is around the same age as narcissa malfoy and isnât a pureblood, and that marlene, dorcas, and emmeline are hard-nosed ministry bitches in their fifties who can have mad-eye moody quaking with just a look is something which can be prised from my cold, dead hands.]
and if youâre writing about the epic highs and lows of high-school football going to school during a sectarian conflict, then you need some antagonists. which is to say, you need some slytherins.
the issue i have is that the three key slytherins who seem to have been elevated to principal cast in the marauders pantheon - regulus black, barty crouch jr., and evan rosier - get what can only be called the smol bean treatment. that is, that three teenagers who all canonically join a terror organisation are turned into soft and tiny babies who thought lord voldemort was just feeling silly when he said, âmy aim is the eradication of the muggleborn population through violent means.â
and even fics which do acknowledge that the three willingly become terrorists often go out of their way to provide justifications for this which donât contextualise their decision (something which is important - you canât write about snape becoming a death eater without acknowledging the way that poverty, loneliness, and a sense of hopelessness make someone an easy target of radicalisation) but which minimise it. sometimes, their violence is turned into romantic vengeance - iâve seen a fair amount of suggestions that barty goes to torture the longbottoms because frank was the auror who killed evan. sometimes, authors imply - or even outright state - that thereâs no need to see these boys as aspiring villains: voldemort is right; the class system is good and should be maintained; and purebloods (usually james, sirius, regulus, barty, evan and maybe a token woman or two) should stick together while the half-breeds and the mudbloods go hang.
this - like all aristocracy wank in this fandom - annoys me enough with regulus and evan. but itâs particularly grating when it comes to barty crouch jr. because - unlike evan, who is literally just a name in the text, and regulus, who isnât much more - he actually has a canon personality.
and itâs fascinating. indeed, i would even go so far as to say that barty crouch jr. is the greatest villain in the harry potter series.
[my apologies to lord voldemort.]
after all, even though heâs been imprisoned under the imperius curse for over a decade, barty is still so lucid and powerful that he is able to:
produce magic capable of tricking the goblet of fire, which is treated by all the adult characters involved as unprecedented.
pull off a year-long impersonation of a man whom dumbledore evidently knows extremely well without being clocked until his mission has been successful, even though his opportunities to observe the real moody can have been virtually non-existent. he is in character within seconds of his ambush on moodyâs home - after the intruder-alert dustbins are set off - and is able to persuade ministry personnel who can be presumed to have met moody personally (including both amos diggory and arthur weasley, who appear to know him not only personally, but well) that he is the real deal. he maintains his performance even under close scrutiny from the teaching colleagues he has to interact with daily at hogwarts, despite the fact that he presumably canât get a great deal out of the real moody, since heâs having to be kept deliberately weak and docile under the imperius curse.
manipulate multiple people into become accessories to his crimes, without ever being suspected of doing so. with the hindsight of knowing who he is, the first defence against the dark arts lesson in goblet of fire, in which âmoodyâ deliberately distresses neville by using the cruciatus curse directly in front of him, before swooping in to be the person to cheer him up so that he can plant information which will help harry win the triwizard tournament and deliver him to voldemort, is chilling. he just gets unlucky that harry has the biggest martyr complex in human history.
commit murder on hogwartsâ grounds without ever being suspected of wrongdoing.
execute lord voldemortâs plan to kidnap harry and use him in his resurrection ritual flawlessly. the plan itself may be convoluted - but dark lords are allowed to have a flair for the dramatic, as a treat - but, crucially, it works, and barty succeeds in every respect.
but, i concede, weâre talking about the adult barty here. perhaps he was once a sweetheart who went unfortunately off the rails after his father sent him to prison and then - in effect - drugged him for years. that wouldnât be a ridiculous suggestion.
except for the fact that - canonically - the teen barty was just as clever, sly, manipulative, and - above all - ardent in his support for voldemort as his adult self.
at his trial in the early 1980s, young barty gives the performance of a lifetime. he screams, he shakes, he looks terrified of the dementors, he is pale and weak and harmless-looking, he begs his mother to help him, he pleads with his father for mercy, he maintains his innocence as he is dragged off to his cell. he gives off the impression of simply having been in the wrong place at the wrong time so well that harry potter is almost certain that his conviction is illegitimate. so too, it is implied, is albus dumbledore.
indeed, barty plays the part of the wrongfully imprisoned so well that - as canon tells us - he not only influences public opinion to be broadly in favour of his probable innocence (or, at least, his diminished culpability - sirius suggests that the widespread view was that he was probably there, but that he only ended up involved in what was clearly bellatrixâs idea because of his fatherâs failure to relate to him properly), but also changes public opinion against the governmentâs anti-death-eater strategy entirely. following his imprisonment, his father - a man who never met an extrajudicial punishment he didnât like, and whose ruthless approach to dealing with the death eaters in the first war (such as his use of internment for suspected terrorists, his order to aurors to shoot to kill) was, we are told, enormously popular with the wizarding public - is forced to resign in disgrace from his role as head of the department of magical law enforcement. crouch sr. is quietly shuffled off into a boring bureaucratic position, his ambitions to be minister in tatters, and his only way forward to free his son from the prison cell where he is languishing for the crime he very literally did.
[as an aside, i do think that we are supposed to read that bellatrix is the ringleader of the torture of the longbottoms. but, all too often, that gets reduced to her doing everything while rodolphus, rabastan, and barty just stand there gormlessly. they were clearly performing the curses too!]
now, bartyâs unusual cunning can - of course - be explained by narrative reasons. the text needs to conceal that heâs the villain (since, as with philosopherâs stone, it wants to imply that the dark lordâs faithful servant at hogwarts is severus snape) until the very end - and this naturally requires dumbledore to not think too hard about whether his good judy alastor is behaving even more strangely than usual.
the text also needs to suggest that he is innocent in order to properly stick the landing on the narrative role of his father - barty crouch sr. as with dolores umbridge in order of the phoenix, crouch sr. exists to show harry (and the reader) that the rot in the wizarding world was not caused by - and will not stop with the defeat of - voldemort. his ruthlessness and inflexibility, his lack of respect for due process, his astonishingly cruel treatment of winky (brutal beyond even the standard way in which wizards abuse their enslaved elves) all serve to teach harry that the anti-voldemort cause can become just as easily corrupted as the disillusioned young men in voldemortâs orbit. the suggestion that crouch sent his own son to azkaban without good reason, simply because he would not deviate from his beliefs, is an important lesson to harry about what âjusticeâ actually means.
but, despite this, barty is also able to pull off his deception because heâs spectacularly talented. itâs not all just narrative.
and his talents are caused by characteristics which arenât good or bad in and of themselves. heâs clearly very intelligent (he got twelve owls, the seriesâ benchmark for genius). heâs hyper-observant, creative, adaptable, good under pressure, and possessed of nerves of steel. he shares these traits with other villains in the series - voldemort above all - but he also shares them with plenty of the heroes. harry, for one.
which is to say that all of his personality traits could be put to non-criminal uses. but - as with harry, who is capable of being quite sinister when he wants to be (for example, when he manipulates slughorn into giving up the horcrux memory) - they would give a non-criminal barty an edge. and this doesnât seem to be present in his standard fanon persona - as sweet and goofy as all marauders-era men - to any great extent.
finally, there is another aspect of bartyâs character which is absent from his fanon version - that he clearly has some sort of childhood trauma, but that this does not excuse any of what he does.
even though crouch sr. is right to send him to azkaban, he was clearly also a cold and distant father, who had absolutely no idea how to relate to his son.
[as another aside, this emotional negligence is bad enough without it needing to be written as having been accompanied by extreme physical and/or sexual abuse. there seems to be a real tendency in fan-fiction - not only in marauders-era stuff, although the exaggeration of orion and walburga black into despotic villains is one example of this - to make childhood misery âworseâ, in order to justify a characterâs later actions.]
voldemort demonstrably uses bartyâs terrible relationship with crouch sr. (and his absolutely flagrant daddy kink) to groom him into taking the dark mark (not least because thereâs otherwise no explanation for why he cheerfully informs him that he too is named after his dad), which he may very well end up taking when heâs still at school. my reading is that heâs recruited to inform on his father - since voldemort would undoubtedly wish to keep the head of the department of magical law enforcement under constant surveillance - and that this is why the dark lord pays him the attention he is so obviously lacking.
but, as with snape and regulus and draco malfoy and all the other young death eaters, barty also colludes in his own radicalisation. voldemort is a master at ensnaring recruits, sure, but heâs also a busy man. he only bothers to make the effort because the clever, creative, cunning, manipulative young man - who wishes to avenge himself on the father who never paid him attention (sound familiar?) - he finds before him is very much determined to become a spectacular part of his terrorist organisation. and stories which feature him owe it to him to give him that dark complexity of character
show the seriesâ best villain some respect.
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