The Lost Boys: Sirius, Percy, and BCJ
I was thinking about Sirius and BCJ being the OG Azkaban escape artists, and it occurred to me that their lives are actually parallels in several ways. Sirius grows up with an overbearing parent in a family with Voldemort sympathizing beliefs. He, however, goes in the complete opposite direction of his family, befriends a bunch of blood traitors, and runs away from home. His mother disowns him (allegedly?) and blasts him off the tapestry. BCJ, does the same, but on the other side of things. He grows up with an overbearing parent in a family with strict law abiding beliefs. He goes completely against his family and joins a pureblood supremacist gang. When he is arrested for his crimes, his father has him hauled off to prison.
And like, sure, sure, sure, the House of Black is fucked up, that is Known, but what on Earth was happening in the Crouch household? I mean, just the absolute insanity of Crouch Sr. agreeing with his wife’s plan to break BCJ out of Azkaban…when she was sitting there crying through his whole trial and likely begging her husband not to throw him in jail in the first place Crouch Sr was like “nah, fuck ‘em, off to the dementors he goes”. But then she’s on her death bed the very next year and asks him to put her in Azkaban in BCJ’s place, Crouch is like “yeah, sure.” What?!
(My interpretation of his change of heart: partially motivated by his wife’s last wishes, yes, but I think if his wife had been on her death bed when BCJ stood trial, he wouldn’t have cared if she asked him to release their son. First, Crouch was in a very different position at the time of his son’s trial. He was rising in power and had supporters, and he felt compelled to make an example of his son to mitigate the embarrassment of having a DE son in the first place. A year later, he had less to lose. Second, the trial was public and breaking BCJ out of Azkaban was secret. My read on Crouch is that he was the type of person to typically behave the same in private as he did in public, but if he was going to put his family above the law he was only going to do it in secret. Which is sad. Whack priorities, man, whack priorities.)
Crouch is such an interesting example of both extreme rigidity and obvious moral relativism. The man is so in love with the law he might as well have married it (because he had no business having an actual human family). And yet, he is comfortable bending the law when it suits him. He authorizes the use of the Unforgivables, so long as they’re used on the “wrong sort”, he sent people to Azkaban without a trial, and he breaks his son out of prison and harbors him as a fugitive with the aid of an Unforgivable for years. Not to mention poor Bertha. He’s rigid enough to send BCJ to Azkaban without an apparent lick of regret or sorrow, flexible enough to Imperius BCJ in captivity.
Another parallel, another example of rigid parenting leading to the excommunication of a child is, of course, Percy. He completes the unholy trinity, because there are really three sides in this war: the Ministry, the pureblood supremacists, and the Order. BCJ goes from Ministry origins to the pureblood supremacists, Sirius from pureblood supremacist origins to the Order, and Percy from Order origins to the Ministry. The circle is complete. All three are considered dead to at least one of their parents (Sirius, unfortunately, is probably considered dead to both his parents, but Percy and BCJ both have sorrowful mothers who still love their children). All of these parents have whack priorities, imo. They only want children who agree with their politics. If you love your principals more than you love your children, then you probably shouldn’t have children, and I don’t care what those principals are tbh.
And it’s interesting to note that Crouch Sr. is pretty significantly involved in all three of these stories. BCJ is obvious, but he also is responsible for sending Sirius to Azkaban and robbing him of the opportunity to defend himself, and he is Percy’s first mentor in the Ministry. It is Crouch, I think, rather than Fudge or Scrimgeour, who represents the “power gets to your head” theme in the Ministry faction best (a theme we see in Voldemort for the pureblood supremacists and Dumbledore for the Order). He foreshadows the idea that the Ministry is not and will not be the “good guys”. And he’s one of the first illustrations that, while there’s obviously a bad side, there’s bad in every side.
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