Crucio, Imperio, Avada Kedavra. Lorrie Kim joins the hosts of MuggleNet’s Alohomora podcast for a discussion of the Unforgivable curses. What makes a curse unforgivable? Which characters cast Unforgivables? Who did it best?

Grace: This is Episode 359 of Alohomora for October 22^nd, 2022. (music break) Welcome to another episode of Alohomora, MuggleNet.com’s in-depth exploration of the Harry Potter series. I’m Grace Candido-Beecher.

Aurelia: I’m Aurelia Lieb.

Irvin: And I’m Irvin Khaytman, and I am so excited to introduce, or rather re-introduce, our guest for this episode: my friend, renowned Potter expert, Lorrie Kim. Hi, Lorrie!

Grace: She’s my friend, too, Irvin!

Irvin: Right! I’m sorry, our friend Lorrie Kim.

Lorrie: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Grace: I was so excited that you were going to be on this episode.

Irvin: Right?!

Grace: I know, yeah. So Lorrie, give us the rundown. I know that you’ve done it before, but just in case this is the first episode people are jumping in on.

Irvin: Yeah, they haven’t heard us literally mention your name on any episode we’re on.

Grace: Literally every episode almost that I’ve been on.

Lorrie: Okay, now you have to help me.

Grace: For me, this is easy. Lorrie Kim, the writer of the Snape book that we reference literally all the time, an incredible scholar in the Potter community, and outside of the Potter Community, just in general. I was literally inspired to make my Tom presentation because you jumped in on a question during the conference the year before that.

Lorrie: Yes, I remember that so clearly.

Grace: I remember I ran up to you afterwards. I was so inspired. I was like, “You’re the best person in the world!”

Irvin: Yes, and I was inspired to actually get my Dumbledore book done, because I was at a con where Lorrie’s Snape book was being released and I was like, “I could do that for Dumbledore.” I approached the publisher and was like, “Hey, so like this thing. If I do that for Albus, could it be a book?” So, yeah, Lorrie is an inspiration to us all.

Grace: Yes, for sure.

Aurelia: Aside from inspiring everyone to write books and writing your own book, what’s your Hogwarts House, Lorrie?

Lorrie: I’m such a Ravenclaw.

Grace: Damn it. I was gonna guess Slytherin.

Lorrie: I know. It makes me realize how unpopular Slytherin is that if you’re known for liking a Slytherin character, everyone assumes you can only be Slytherin. Like, no. For good and for bad.

Irvin: Do we have the four houses? Aurelia, you’re a Gryffindor, right?

Aurelia: Yeah, I’m a Gryffindor.

Irvin: We got Grace for Slytherin, me for Hufflepuff, and Lorrie for Ravenclaw. What what?

Grace: What fun! I love it!

Lorrie: I do have my new expanded updated edition of the Snape book out: Snape, The Definitive Analysis of Hogwarts’s Mysterious Potions Master. It is similar to the 2016 version, but it’s been updated with a new chapter all on Cursed Child and with some more thoughts on Unforgivables, coincidentally.

Grace: That sounds magical.

Irvin: I cannot wait to read this updated version.

Grace: Didn’t you say that there’s… I remember talking to you earlier on. This is like ages ago, and you said that there’s so much more content in the new one. I’ve got to get my hands on that. That sounds incredible.

Lorrie: A lot has changed in the world and in Potterverse since 2016.

Grace: Yeah, yeah, it has.

Irvin: That, that is true.

Grace: This is 100% true.

Lorrie: Yeah, and actually it was weeks after my first edition was published that Cursed Child’s script came out, and then the Fantastic Beasts movies came out. Then there was the Trump presidency in the US, and then pandemic. And then the thing that we don’t name, the TERFpocalypse, which meant that I rewrote the section on Prisoner of Azkaban and the Snape Boggart scene.

Grace: Oh God, I’ve got to get my hands on that. I need to hear your voice on that. I have so many notes in your book already.

Irvin: Yes. My copy is just covered in post-its and flags.

Lorrie: Yeah, so I hired a sensitivity reader to help me with that chapter in particular, and I also hired 10 community members to give me their feedback, just on how their feelings have changed toward the series in the past couple years.

Grace: That’s incredible. I cannot wait to hear your thoughts on that chapter. That’s so cool.

Lorrie: And I did not include anybody’s tweets. Tweets have no place in my book. I just didn’t want to give space to that.

Grace: That’s good. Okay. Well, I can’t wait to see it. I really can’t wait to read it.

Lorrie: The publication date was October 18th.

Irvin: Yes, so listeners in our future but in your past, this book is now out and available to read.

Grace: Yeah. This is literally ten days from being out right now as we’re sitting in front of our computers and my pajamas. Everyone’s wearing carbon copies of my pajamas, which is the only correct answer to this.

Aurelia: Since this is not a chapter episode, and you don’t have to read a chapter, you can still close the episode now, buy Lorrie’s book, then come back to us.

Irvin: Yes, yes. This also has required reading.

Grace: I want to see in the comments people telling me they did this, please!

Irvin: But as Aurelia said, this is not a chapter episode, it is a topic episode. And the topic here is the Unforgivable Curses. I’m so excited for this. So this was requested by Emily Therer(?), by Aurelia Lieb — ever heard of her?

Aurelia: Who dis?

Irvin: Nope, not familiar — and also by Lorrie Kim.

Lorrie: Who’s that?

Irvin: Yeah. Mind you, this request, before we got it at Alohomora, it happened on the phone. I think I was chatting with Lorrie, and I mentioned something about Alohomora and she was like, “Oh my God, we should do an episode on Unforgivables. And so we are! Also, fun fact: the three of us host. It’s me, Aurelia, and Grace. We did have episode 319 a while back about the Dark Arts, where we briefly touched on the unforgivables, but we were running very long. Surprise, surprise. I’m sure it won’t happen this time.

Grace: It won’t happen. We’ll be fine.

Irvin: We are just reconvening to flesh it all out.

Lorrie: I’m so excited.

Irvin: So yeah. Actually, listeners, also required reading: go listen to episode 319 as a sort of intro to Dark Arts in general.

Grace: It’s actually very good. I like that one. I have trouble listening to myself sometimes, but I actually like that one.

Irvin: Yeah, that was a good episode.

Grace: But for this episode, funny enough, we have a double sponsor. This doesn’t happen often, guys. This is sponsored by both Oliver Hetherington-Page and Camille Jacques. I don’t know how to say this. If I’ve said your name wrong, feel free to throw tomatoes at me when you see me, I’m so sorry. But both of these members on Patreon, and you can also be a member of our Patreon. Big claps for Oliver Hetherington-Page and Camille Jacques. Thank you, both of you. You’re both wonderful. You can get an ad-free version of Alohomora over on our Patreon and you can get in for as little as $2 a month. It’s an exclusive page where you can get just a ton of crap, like bonus audio, behind-the-scenes glimpses, extra episodes. We’ve got a ton of stuff to find on there. So visit us at patreon.com/Alohomora to find out more.

00:09:04 – 00:10:29 ad break

Aurelia: And now we’re going to the Shout-out Maxima. This is for episode 357, which Irvin and I have been on with Allison which the topic was Hogwarts Class of 1989, which I now know what that means.

Irvin: Oh my God, I honestly feel like we’re still recording that episode. It went on for years.

Grace: Never stopped recording. It just led into this.

Aurelia: I have an excellent comment by AbsentMindedRaven, and they say, “The simplest form of magical facial recognition is to have a portrait on the door and tell it not to let a particular person in. Sadly, that didn’t work out very well for either the fat lady or Sir Cadogan; both recognize Sirius, though. And I think we’ve already chat a bit before. Neither Irvin or I can remember if we ever talk about portraits, but sure. I think it’s a good point AbsentMindedRaven is making.

Grace: I feel like the facial recognition, you’re always going to get into the territory of, “What is this quirky portrait going to be able to recognize? Do they have to wear glasses? How is their eyesight? What are they associating you with? What time period were they painted in?” It could work but maybe not in this situation. Though it is interesting that they both recognized Sirius.

Irvin: Also, I’m just saying, I’m sure Sir Cadogan can recognize every single horse he sees.

Grace: The people, not so much. The horses, though… if there are horses around, he’s got it. Hands down. No questions asked.

Irvin: I love Sir Cadogan. He’s honestly one of the most fun characters to cosplay.

Grace: You knave, you scoundrel!

Irvin: Stand and fight!

Grace: Let’s bring those back, guys. Let’s bring it back. ‘Cause only a knave and a scoundrel would cast all of what we’re talking about today.

Lorrie: Not true.

Irvin: That’s true. Sir Cadogan is going to be very disappointed in every single person who used these spells. But just one more thing before we get to that. Listeners, this is an exciting new bit: you can now listen to us on Amazon Music by heading over to amazon.com/alohomora. Whoa, we have made it onto Amazon!

Grace: We’re the cool kids now. Yay! You know who’s not cool kids, though?

Irvin: Who?

Grace: People who cast these curses.

Irvin: Yeah, shame on them.

Grace: They’re not cool kids. Shame. [Shame in foreign language] as my grandmother would say.

Irvin: Whereas my grandma would say [shame in foreign language].

Grace: Oh, wow. We’re really multicultural in here. Can we get one more?

Aurelia: [shame in foreign language]. There you go.

Grace: Okay, all together in succession. We’ve got [shame in foreign languages].

[Shame scene from Game of Thrones]

Grace: Oh my God, they sound so good! Alright, let’s all soak in our shame and talk about these word definitions, okay? I took the word basics from this random website that I found about HP language and Unforgivable curses. It’s Language Realm, or something like that, so feel free to take a look at it yourselves, listeners, if you would like to, or if you have anything that you would like to correct or add to, feel free to do that as well. Crucio. We’ll start big with the pain one. Crucio causes intense, torturous pain on the target we all know and love. It happens. In Latin, it comes from “I torture” or “I torment,” and the word stem is ‘cruciatus,’ Latin for cruciate, to torture. And also from the word Crux, as in like a cross in reference to a crucifixion.

Irvin: So excruciating is torturous.

Grace: Yeah. I think that’s what we’re getting at. It’s a little painful, I would say.

Lorrie: So this, in my mind, connects it to the word horcrux because Crucio is supposed to be the worst possible pain. Its only purpose is to torture you. A Horcrux made me think this is when you take the worst pain that you feel, that you can’t endure anymore, you put it in a part of yourself that you then cut off, and keep outside of yourself. Hors, H-O-R-S, is “outside” in French, so that you don’t ever have to feel it again. The kind of pain that might kill you enough to make a horcrux or to kill somebody, that’s the degree of pain that you get with Crucio. My thinking is that since we know Rowling was once an employee of Amnesty International, I’m thinking that she uses Crucio to show her belief that torture as an interrogation tactic doesn’t work. She shows Bellatrix torturing Hermione, and Hermione does not give up information about the sword, but people want to use Crucio because it’s an excuse to let their sadism out. You see that moment in Order of the Phoenix, when Umbridge is all excited to think that she can justify using Crucio on Harry, and she starts hyperventilating.

Irvin: Yeah. At least for me, I always thought Crucio was sort of the most indefensible of the Unforgivables. Because if you cast your mind and your net wide enough, you could think of like, “Is this where you would have to use the other two?” I think we actually find a very necessary use of Imperio in Deathly Hallows, which we’re going to get to, and Avada Kedavra, you could either use it for euthanasia or for the death penalty. Thorny, ethical questions. But like there is a scenario, right, where Avada Kedavra could be considered useful. Crucio, I can’t think of like any defensible scenario where you would use a torture curse.

Lorrie: You can cause pain other ways, but Crucio doesn’t even work unless you really mean it. There’s some kind of cruelty or desire to hurt that is just not safe, it’s not okay.

Grace: Yeah. I mean I feel like this is… I agree with you. I feel like this is probably one of the most indefensible ones. I don’t know why you would need to basically cause nerve endings to feel pain. Is there a medical condition where someone would need that to happen? I don’t know. Maybe the doctors in our listenership can tell me different, but I don’t think that you want the body to start to feel that kind of awful way.

Aurelia: I think, also, the Longbottoms and the way we meet them in “Order” is the primary example of you should just not do Crucio because of what’s happening to them because of being subjected to that curse. That’s just horrible.

Grace: Also that the horcrux comment here really interests me a lot. It’s very interesting.

Irvin: Question: Have we ever seen Crucio used successfully for interrogation? Because I think Ollivander… Yes. Ollivander’s the only one who actually divulges information upon being subjected to the Cruciatus, because the Longbottoms don’t. Hermione doesn’t. I don’t think any of the others do.

Lorrie: It’s shown with Ollivander that part of why I think Crucio was successful on him was that he was completely isolated and cut off. We see that until Luna came, he had nobody and no hope. With the Longbottoms, they had each other. Plus, they also really didn’t have the answer.

Irvin: Yeah, I was gonna say. With the Longbottoms, they couldn’t tell them information.

Lorrie: And Hermione, she could probably hear Ron screaming. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, but it supported her.

Irvin: I also think for Hermione, it was brief. We don’t know what would have happened if Hermione was being tortured for hours, days, years. But at least in the short-term, she had the strength of mind to endure it.

Grace: Yeah. It shows the limitations of this curse and that you can cause severe pain, but severe pain won’t be effective. I feel there are more effective ways of getting the answers and they’re just as evil. It would be threatening the people around them, the people they care about, to destroy the things that they love. That’ll probably get you more results than just causing severe pain. I feel a lot of the Death Eaters just have this in their back pocket as a control mechanism, which is an interesting way to use it.

Irvin: In the magical world, there’s so many ways to try to get at the information someone has in their mind. In the Muggle world, we’re limited in a lot of ways, but they have mind reading, they have truth potions, they have pensieves. They have all these things where you could try to get into someone’s mind, and yes, of course, there are defenses against all of them. But torture should not be your plan A, B, or C for getting information out of that. I think it really says a lot about the people who choose to use it.

Grace: Because it’s not nearly as effective. There’s so many other ways, especially in this universe, to get information. This should be used, I think, as an example. If whoever was using it was trying to make an example of someone, this is the way to do it. It won’t kill them, but it will cause them to have that severe pain, as Lorrie was saying before, where it’s like enough to kill you but it will not kill you. That is so interesting.

Irvin: Also, it wouldn’t be an Alohomora episode if I wasn’t giving our listeners Wizard Rock recommendations, obviously. So there is a fantastic song called Crucio by Bella and Le Strangers, all about how Bellatrix loves using this spell, and it’s so good. “If you want to be able to use this Unforgivable, you’ve got to be believable, Crucio. If you think it over first, you might think death would be the worst, but I prefer the torture curse, Crucio.”

Grace: Oh my God. That’s so good!

Irvin: I’m not singing because I can’t sing, we know this, but like it is so damn catchy. Like, you’re at a concert and you’re like, “Crucio, Crucio, Cruciooooo.”

Lorrie: I’m thinking we see an example of the level of Crucio pain that wasn’t caused by a Crucio, and that’s when Voldemort had no body. He said this was pain beyond pain, but he couldn’t die. But that extremity, it’s a similar feeling. You think it could kill you, but it’s actually worse.

Grace: Woof. Imagine that for 13 years. It’s no wonder he’s pissed off.

Lorrie: Yeah. He’s uncomfortable.

Grace: He’s a little bit peeved. He’s a little upset, I would say. Perturbed, maybe.

Irvin: Sorry. My understanding of it was that was the pain he felt when he was hit with the rebounding killing curse, not what he was feeling for like 14 years.

Lorrie: No, when he’s being revived at the end of Goblet of Fire, when he said, “I don’t even know what I was, and I just made myself exist moment to moment, but I didn’t even know how and I couldn’t die anyway.”

Irvin: Right, but was he still in the pain beyond pain at that point?

Lorrie: I think the whole time, yeah. That’s why he’s so mad at the Death Eaters.

Irvin: He’s mad because he expected, you know, a lifetime of service and loyalty and he did not get that.

Lorrie: Right. He was in pain like that the whole time. Did they come bother to find him? No.

Grace: Because there was nothing to get out of helping him at that point.

Lorrie: They were scared of him.

Grace: They were terrified. Yeah. I could believe that he was in pain. I could believe that the pain would subside when he would jump into a body until the body passed, but I understand that the pain probably was pretty consistent. I could also be proven wrong.

Aurelia: Don’t you need to have a body to feel pain, though? If Crucio actually puts your nerve ends on fire, however you want to put it.

Grace: That’s my assumption as to how it works.

Irvin: They are separate because he says the pain from beyond pain, yada yada yada, when he was ripped from his body, but still he was alive and then he talks about existing and all that. I don’t think he was in pain the whole time.

Grace: I mean, different readings of it. You could definitely believe that it could refer to that. But after we’ve discussed our Wizard Rock, we can also move on to our next spell. Imperio, I have down that it takes control of the target and also makes them feel very calm in the process. There’s a very seductive voice that comes into the person’s brain. Imperio comes from the Latin noun, Imperium, meaning to order or to command. It also could be imperito, which means “I command” and “I am in command”, or impero, which means “I order,” “I give orders,” or “I command,” so all within the same wavelength here. Pretty much the same thing.

Irvin: Yeah. Again, we see it in Latin roots because the imperative and all of that. It’s all about commanding people. What I found interesting magically about the Imperius Curse is that it’s the only one of the three where there seemed to be magical defenses available against it, because we don’t really know of a way to fight off Crucio, and there certainly isn’t a way to fight off Avada Kedavra.

Grace: Ooh, that never occurred to me. This is the only one you can fight.

Irvin: Yeah, because we witness two examples. The magical defenses on the prophecies in the Hall of Prophecy. When you touch one of them, it breaks through the Imperius Curse. That’s what happened to Broderick Bode. He touched the prophecy and it broke the Imperius that was on him. Also, the Thief’s Downfall in Gringotts, when the trio and an Imperiused Travers and Bogrod go through it, the Imperius Curses are wiped away and Harry has to recast them.

Grace: Oh, so it’s almost like a line of code, right? So you can break that line of code if you need to. But the code just runs until it is broken, basically, until it’s met with a certain amount of circumstances, like someone having the will to basically write another bit of code that undoes it or other circumstances outside that break the code. That’s interesting.

Lorrie: Also, like any of the other charms, sometimes it just wears off due to time and it has to be renewed.

Aurelia: I have a question here about the willpower to break Imperio. Do we know or do we just assume that only magical people can do that? Like could a Muggle have the willpower to break Imperio, or would that just not be possible?

Irvin: I’ve honestly never thought about it. My initial instinct would be that Muggles can fight it off but that they would have to have an extra level of willpower because they wouldn’t even know what was happening that they were trying to fight off.

Lorrie: I think it’s not that different between Muggles and wizards.

Grace: Me, neither. Yeah, I think it’s probably roughly the same. Okay, this is just a thought experiment. What if Muggles were better at it because we’re so pragmatic that the idea of like taking someone else’s advice constantly would be, “No. No. Why would I do this? No. There’s other crap I have to do. Come on.”

Irvin: Are you generalizing that Muggles are more pragmatic than Wizards, just as a lot? Because, listen, I’ve met some Muggles and I would push back on that generalization.

Grace: I would say that there are circumstances that call for Muggles to be more pragmatic because they don’t have the magic to rely on for freaking everything. That’s just my general feedback on that.

Lorrie: With Imperio, as with a lot of Rowling’s symbolic plot devices, I first think about what is it that she’s trying to say. What’s the allegory, and then work backwards from there. I figured that Imperio is the mental aspect of enslavement. It’s what you do when you’re in power and you’re trying to dehumanize somebody else to turn them from a person into property. The more powerfully you can exercise your will over them, the more likely they are to start doing it to themselves. The house elves think that their purpose is to serve their masters and they punish themselves and they can’t stop themselves from doing that. I think that makes this the dirtiest, the filthiest of the Unforgivables because there’s an element of complicity, self-sabotage. And the fact that there is a tiny but real possibility of resistance puts some element of possible self-blame in there. “Oh, but you liked it. What did you do to fight it?” It makes you a dirty person. It makes me think coming out of Imperio must have so much terrible shame. I don’t think everybody would feel it, but that possibility is there because it’s like, “Well, Harry can do it. Why can’t the rest of you do it? What’s wrong with you?”

Grace: Yeah, that sucks. I remember reading that and thinking that. I was like “That is not a way to go. That’s not a way to teach kids.”

Lorrie: But that is realistic because the alternative — of the bliss of not having to think for yourself and of just trusting authority and just doing what other people tell you and you don’t have to condemn yourself to, like, a difficult life, where you’re fighting all the time — that is very seductive. Harry has an advantage over people who have been raised nicely because he doesn’t have any trust left in authority. But Marietta Edgecombe is a great example of, “Oh, no, I’ll trust authority. I’ll trust my mom and her bosses. Surely, that’s easier.” That’s a more comfortable thing than resisting, which is difficult and guaranteed to lose. So to me, Imperio is about doing what’s easy rather than what’s right, which is very seductive. It made me think, for people like Voldemort and Grindelwald who were trying to control a large number of people to their own will, it’s super inconvenient for them that people have their own wills and Imperio is one way to overcome that. It made me think, “Okay, it’s not always enough.” Voldemort uses possession, which I thought, “Oh, I guess possession is a more extreme version of Imperio where you’re really right there to make sure it happens. Because Imperio, you see people cast it and then they wander off and they let it happen on its own. Possession, when he moves into Quirrell’s mind, it’s because he says, “Oh, you need greater supervision than this.” Grindelwald, he got around it by using Inferi: just get rid of the person’s will altogether.

Grace: Yeah.

Irvin: They did?

Grace: The new movie, I think.

Lorrie: No, when Dumbledore tells Harry that that’s why Grindelwald wanted the Resurrection Stone. He wanted an army of Inferi.

Irvin: Yes. But did he ever actually get one?

Lorrie: Well, there is the Qilin, the animal in the latest Secrets of Dumbledore. You’re excused for not remembering that. I know, I know. But it also made me think… You know what? Inferius rhymes with Imperius. It sounds like a lesser version.

Grace: I never made that connection. That’s actually really interesting.

Lorrie: I’m not sure the connection is there. I’m also not sure it’s not.

Grace: Honestly, I think that the psychology of it checks out and that people having wills of their own is inconvenient, especially to individuals who think that their will is the most important one. Also, what we’re talking about right now is so poignant to the time that we are living through. We’re in this weird stage of capitalism where everything is going wrong but people very much want us to follow the old ways of how the economy worked, and it’s failing, and failing miserably. It’s very, very difficult to do anything that was very easy in the past, and following these old mindsets feels comfortable. I’ve even done it myself. Buffeting against it is what is necessary, because we won’t survive this way. I feel this is such a poignant conversation. This is a lot. This is capitalism at its finest.

Lorrie: It’s — Imperio is very tempting.

Grace: But you cannot follow the Imperio commands if you are dead. Avada Kedavra kills your target. This was the most interesting one, and I’ve actually seen this in a lot of crazy, new-agey spaces that I love to hang out in from time to time. It’s reminiscent of Abracadabra, which there are a few different roots that I have found for the word. I’m going to list them all out. See if they resonate with any of you. Greek is, “I create as I speak”; Hebrew is, “I create like the word”; ancient Greek, Abraxas, was a Gnostic or Kabbalistic name for a supreme god and therefore a word of power, and the individual individual letters, were arranged in a pyramid and worn as a protective amulet. Kedavra is similar to cadaver. Rowling, at the Edinburgh Festival in August of 2004, she said that Avada Kedavra is a powerful ancient spell in Aramaic, meaning “let the thing be destroyed” and was used to cure diseases by destroying the illness. She turned the meaning around; she said that this was to make it her own. And I think they all kind of check out in certain ways. I think that the ancient spell that was referenced at the Book Festival, I think it’s a little bit… I hadn’t read that online, but who knows? Maybe that is another Aramaic meaning for it. I just think the interesting part of this is the way that it is worn like a protective amulet, the way that it’s spelled out in a triangle formation. It’s so cool-looking when people do stuff like that. Have any of you seen that?

Aurelia & Irvin: No, no.

Grace: Okay.

Lorrie: Ezra went to the Crimes of Grindelwald premiere with the word Avada Kedavra written over and over again on their palm.

Grace: WHAT?!

Lorrie: I’ll have to find the image.

Grace: I had no idea. What?!?! That’s wild. Then again, they also dressed as Hedwig.

Aurelia: I can remember is Hedwig.

Grace: Yeah, all I can remember is the Hedwig costume.

Irvin: I remember the Hedwig and then the Avada Kedavra pyramid thing on their hand.

Grace: So they did that in the pyramid for… oh my God, I didn’t even know. Okay, let me find the Avada Kedavra pyramid so I can at least show you guys, even though I can’t share with the listeners. I’m so sorry. Y’all gonna have to look that up on your own. I love you all, but I cannot send it to all of you. But I’ll look it up real quick so I can show you guys.

Lorrie: But yeah, if you do a search for “Ezra Miller” “Crimes of Grindelwald” “red carpet,” there’s an image with the Avada Kedavra pyramid on their hand.

Irvin: Well, that was an homage to Abracadabra, right? Because the Abracadabra thing is the one where you were supposed to do the pyramid of abracadabra, and taking away letters until it just gets to A. That’s how it’s worn as a protective amulet. Yeah, yeah, exactly like what Grace showed. I think Ezra Miller did that, but for Avada Kedavra. Excellent. Well done.

Grace: What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t know.

Aurelia: It’s very interesting because if you listen to Stephen Fry’s audiobooks, he also pronounces it like Abracadabra.

Irvin: As opposed to how?

Aurelia: Well it’s been a while… where he elongates it a bit more. He does say “Ava-da Keda-vera.” That’s how he’s pronouncing it.

Irvin: Oh, that is very weird. And I don’t like it.

Aurelia: But it’s closer to the abracadabra.

Grace: So, what do we prefer? Do we like a big wind-up? We like our Avada Kedavra? Or do we like just the flow of the Abracadabra?

Irvin: I will I want a big wind-up. I want a dramatic pause. Avada Kedavra!

Aurelia: Allows people to dodge. People will be like, “Ooh, I know what that person is doing. I’m gonna go dodge.”

Irvin: Excuse me for trying to have some flair while killing people. God, I thought at least Grace would appreciate that.

Grace: I do appreciate it. I also would like a wind-up, but I also think it would not work in any situation unless someone’s holding the person down. Which they might be. It might happen that way.

Irvin: Unless I have really good aim. What if I’m a math magician like Oliver Rivers, and I have my little protractor and I’m like, “PEW PEW PEW!” the numbers are flying and I’m like AVADA KEDAVRA while I’m doing the math.

Grace: You know what? My personal preference for those are like a deadly whisper, but all in the same… no big emphasis on the Avada. Just a deadly whisper. But Abracadabra. That’s my preference. My personal one.

Irvin: Okay. Lorrie, how do you cast the killing curses?

Lorrie: I think it’s so far removed from our associations with the word Abracadabra. I think AK as presented in the Harry Potter Universe has its own, more current meaning in popular culture. I think however that character casting it, however they talk, is the right way for me. I don’t get anything added by having it sound like Abby Cadabby, the Flying Fairy or anything like that.

Grace: That is the new character: Abby Cadabby, the Flying Fairy.

Aurelia: Is that a real thing?

Lorrie: From Sesame Street, there is a four-year-old pink and blue and purple fairy named Abby Cadabby, yes.

Grace: Oh my God. I had no idea!

Irvin: I also had no idea.

Grace: I’m a big fan, new fan of Abby Cadabby. Love the color scheme. Very good.

Lorrie: I love her, and she would never cast an AK.

Grace: Unlike Tom.

Irvin: At least for me as a 90s kid, this immediately put me in mind of Pokemon. So do we think that there is a next-level extra powerful killing curse of Avada Kedavra Alakazam?

Lorrie: No.

Aurelia: You mean, just adding Maxima at the end of the spell and kills everyone in the room?

Irvin: Yes. Maxima, you would add Alakazam.

Aurelia: Okay. Even though we’re the same age, I have nothing to do with Pokemon.

Irvin: Aurelia, what did you do in the nineties?

Aurelia: I read books. I grew up without TV. I didn’t have Pokemon cards because my mom, being very pragmatic, was like, “That seems like a waste of money.”

Irvin: Well, of course it was. It was so much fun.

Aurelia: So yeah, there’s that. I feel like I’ve just broken down Irvin’s worldview.

Irvin: I can’t conceive of a 90s kid who had nothing to do with Pokemon, because it was completely ubiquitous.

Grace: Okay, the siren is finally done. I was muted because the firehouse was going off again. Safety. Why do we have to be safe? No, I’m kidding. Why can’t we all be at Hogwarts and unsafe? Alakazam, for sure, would be like AK Maxima, which I am a big fan of. Can we then say that like in the Pokemon Universe are the psychic Pokemons, the ones that are the best at casting these three spells then? Because those are psychic, right?

Irvin: Yes, there are a trio of Pokemon that are psychic.

Grace: I can back you up on this. Don’t worry. I got you. At least for the first game. That’s the only one I know. Pokemon Blue or Red is the only one I played.

Irvin: Well, Grace, did you watch the show? Do you remember Sabrina and her Kadabra?

Grace: Oh my God. Oh my God. Was this in the creepy town?

Irvin: Yes, it was so terrifying.

Grace: With literally the best song in the game? Yes. I know what you’re talking about. Sabrina was hot. She had the bang.

Irvin: She was hot, but she was also terrifying. It was very confusing,

Grace: Which is what you really want in… She’s really wife material, is what I’m saying. At the time, I was a child. Okay. I was a child.

Irvin: Yeah. Pokemon really changed a lot after the first season. Aurelia and Lorrie, for context, the Sabrina Arc is she was one of the gym leaders, but she was psychic and terrifying. She turned people into dolls. The protagonist had to flee her, and to defeat her and her epic psychic powers they went to the ghost town where Ash died for five minutes so he could befriend the ghost Pokemon and take them back to rescue all the people Sabrina had turned into dolls. Gym Battles had very high stakes in the first season.

Grace: How did you remember this? All I remember…

Irvin: It was traumatizing, how do you not remember this?

Grace: It was very good. All I know is that the Ghost Pokemon literally are the best Pokemon. I won’t go further on with this tangent, but this tangent wins. It’s fabulous. I love it so much. The Ghost Pokémon are best and the psychic Pokémon can probably cast these three curses the best if they wanted to. Which they probably don’t.

Aurelia: I feel like you all just spoke in your own language. I’ve got maybe 30% of what you were saying.

Grace: This is like other people listening to us talk about Harry Potter, is what that is.

Aurelia: Lorrie, you and I need to pay attention to what these two are talking about. 

Irvin: Okay, go off. We’ll wait. I’ll be here, sipping my tea.

Aurelia: I wanted to add, going back to Avada Kedavra. Obviously, there’s no counter curse, but you can use blocking spells like we see Dumbledore doing when he makes the statue walk in the way, essentially, of the curse to block it. You can obviously dodge it, or if you have a drama queen of a phoenix, you can have the phoenix die for you. I’m not sure if I would recommend that.

Irvin: I don’t know, I think it’s an excellent get-out-of-jail-free card.

Lorrie: It is,if the Phoenix cares about you enough to do it for you. You can’t get the phoenix to do it…

Irvin: I wonder what a phoenix’s recharge time on that is. Do they gotta wait a couple months until they’re sexy again so they can swallow killing curses, or could like baby Fawkes just swallow another one and be like, “I guess this was a short life.”

Lorrie: I think they can regenerate constantly, but they can’t fly or anything. So they have to be fledged enough…

Irvin:  So Dumbledore would have to throw it in front of–

Grace: Like a little dodgeball, basically.

Lorrie: Like what they call a shuttlecock in badminton.

Grace: Just punting it around.

Irvin: Yeah. He’s winding up like a baseball pitcher, tossing it, and you hear, “SQUAAAAAK!” 

Aurelia: That feels like animal abuse.

Irvin: No, because the animal would be totally fine afterwards.

Lorrie: Fawkes would do it for Dumbledore.

Grace: Fawkes is gonna be real upset about this and will be salty for a while and I don’t blame Fawkes for that. That’s all on Albus.

Aurelia: There’s a difference of doing it out of your free will. “Okay, I’m going to die for this person. I’m going to be thrown to death.”

Irvin: No, Dumbledore would talk it over with Fawkes first and get informed consent, obviously.

Grace: In writing.

Irvin: I want to talk more about the physicality of the spell, while we’re on the topic of throwing birds at it. Avada Kedavra is very different to the other Unforgivables and also, I think, to most other spells in that it’s a very physical presence in the world. First of all, whenever it’s cast, there’s a jet of green light. It’s not like, “Oh, there was a light, there were sparks.” No, it is a BAM! type of spell, and it impacts the world around it, even when it doesn’t like hit targets. I’m pretty sure if an Imperius Curse bounced off a statue, it’d be like meh. But whatever Avada Kedavra hits, desks go up in flames, houses in Godric’s Hollow just explode. Avada Kedavra destroys pretty much anything. Also, it’s a weird dichotomy because it completely, violently destroys physical objects it hits, yet it kills people it hits without any damage. So, curious.

Grace: Two points to that. My first point is, have we seen Crucio hit anything else other than the people that it’s intended for? I feel like Crucio might have a physical presence, but I can’t remember anytime it might have hit something.

Irvin: Indirectly, yes. Because in the Battle of the Tower, Amicus is casting Cruciatuses at Ginny, and she keeps dodging them, which means the Crucio was hitting something. But we don’t hear of craters in the walls from that or anything.

Grace:  My second point is… my thought process is maybe it is not physically or mentally more demanding to cast Avada Kedavra. Because if it is difficult to cast a good Crucio, would it then be even more difficult to cast a good AK?

Irvin: Yes.

Aurelia: Sorry. Can I just go back to your first point, Grace?

Grace: Sure, absolutely.

Aurelia: Going back to thinking Crucio attacks your nerves. Wouldn’t that just mean as long as you don’t have a nervous system or nerves? It can’t do anything to you?

Irvin: Yes.

Grace: If that’s true, though, because I literally am only getting that from my own headcanon. So that’s not canon. That’s just me saying a thing that I think might be correlated to it, how I think of it. But I also don’t know for sure if that’s the case in the book.

Aurelia: it would work with the spider because insects don’t have brains, but they have a nerve system. So, it definitely tracks from the one example we see that’s not a human being.

Irvin: Wait, bugs don’t have brains?

Aurelia: No, they only have a nerve system.

Irvin: I learned something today

Grace: Isn’t their brain throughout their body, basically? Kind of like a jellyfish?

Aurelia: Yeah, but it’s not a proper brain. It’s literally just a nerve system. That’s all they have.

Irvin: Wait. So you’re saying that the iconic film, A Bug’s Life, isn’t true to life?

Aurelia: I do not know the iconic film, A Bug’s Life. You can just presume of another Network.

Irvin: Where were you in the 90s?

00:47:37 – 00:48:38 A Bug’s Life Scene

Grace: A Bug’s Life is full of lies, is what you’ve just told me. How dare you! I’m leaving!

Irvin: But that was the first movie I saw in theaters. It’s a foundational part of my knowledge of the world.

Aurelia: I’m very sorry to shatter your whole life view.

Grace: Irvin has to go rethink everything.

Irvin: I need a minute. Y’all go on.

Aurelia: If we go back to Avada Kedavra translating to something like, “I create as I speak” and you speak essentially cadaver, maybe things, objects, can still technically die, stop existing as in they go up in flames, they get destroyed. But because they don’t have nerves, they can’t feel pain because how would they feel pain? Unless, obviously, we track the whole Desk Pig situation. Then I’m just gonna slowly leave, because I’ve got too confused with them.

Irvin: Desk Pig! Desk Pig!

Aurelia: That’s, at least, how I could explain why we see objects being affected by one of the curses and not by the other two.

Grace: Yeah.

Irvin: I really like that.

Grace: That’s really interesting. I like that. What was my second– oh, is AK harder? What do y’all think?

Irvin: Yes.

Aurelia: Yeah, I think so.

Grace:  It seems as though it is more difficult.

Lorrie: It depends on different motivations. With Crucio, you have to have some cruelty or vindictiveness. With AK, one of the things, in fact, is that the person you’re killing doesn’t feel any pain. You just want their life to end.

Grace: I always found that so interesting.

Irvin: It’s also very different because AK is permanent. You can understand the hairy impulse for Crucio; you want to lash out at somebody, you want to hurt them. But wanting someone dead is a very different impulse that I think a lot of people would struggle with.

Lorrie: What I think of is Voldemort when he’s just tired of Harry and says, “You’ve escaped me long enough. You’re such a thorn in my side.”

Irvin: “You have irked me far too often.”

Lorrie: Yeah. And he’s not angry. He’s just tired.

Irvin: Oh, no, he’s furious.

Lorrie: Yeah. But it’s not the same as times when he’s chasing Harry and screaming Avada Kedavra. It’s just yuck, squish.

Irvin: See, my interpretation of that scene is that Voldemort didn’t have an audience. Because Voldemort is a performer and a propagandist and he’s excellent at it. Whenever he has an audience, he’s like, “Ah, let me now put on a full-on musical. I take my foot, do do, do do.” But at that moment, he doesn’t have any Death Eaters to watch and he’s like, “Agh! My plans have been ruined. You are so annoying, and no one is even here to watch me kill you. So let’s get this done!”

Lorrie: There is that.

Grace: It’s an interesting way to feel about it, because it’s literally Tom’s go-to spell for basically closing out a situation. To me, it proves that he is a performer. I will give that to you, Irvin. But I also think that he just wants to get things done. He wants things to be done successfully and effectively. I don’t know if he takes a ton of joy from elongating out something.

Irvin: I’m just saying he spent a year trying to get Harry and other people to take the prophecy instead of just popping in one night and grabbing it himself.

Grace: There’s a huge risk in that, though, because he’s still in hiding. That’s a very difficult thing to do for someone who’s trying to stay out of the spotlight.

Irvin: A year. A full year.

Grace: Yeah. Sometimes a year’s effective. Remember, he waited 13 to get back. He didn’t want to, but he had to. If he’s gonna screw it up, just waiting one year to try to get a prophecy, that would completely screw up all of his plans.

Irvin: That’s fair. My impression of him was never that efficiency is the goal.

Grace: I think that efficiency is the goal. Think about when he went to kill the Potters. He could have actually made an even huger spectacle of it if he wanted to. He could make a crater out of that town. He really just wanted to kill the Potters. He wanted to go in and make sure that their lives ended. He could’ve tortured them for hours, he could’ve torn them apart bit by bit and made them watch. He just wanted them dead, so he made sure that they were dead.

Irvin: But that’s because he was nervous about them. This child was foretold to be his doom and all that, and he spent years trying to get the Potters who thrice defied him. I think he wasn’t as secure in that one.

Grace: Are you sure, because he certainly did spare one random kid that said “nice costume” to him. I think that that it was unnecessary–

Irvin: Because he had no one to perform for.

Grace: I would actually put it because there was no… It’s not that he didn’t have anyone to perform for. It’s that it was unnecessary. That effort is unnecessary. He’s not gonna put that out to do that if he doesn’t have to.

00:54:20 – 00:55:16 Ad break

Lorrie: I think he has more than one reason for using Avada Kedavra. Sometimes it’s a checklist. Get rid of the Potters and that annoying baby, checklist. But there are times when he uses the theater to amplify the myth of himself, because that’s also part of his checklist: Impress everybody.

Aurelia: Yeah. I think especially in Goblet of Fire, when he is just back and the Death Eaters are returning, not all of them but most. I think that’s why he just needs to show off that he’s still in charge and they should still very much fear him. 

Grace: Gotta maintain his own mythos.

Lorrie: I agree with Grace that it’s his default spell. Just like when Harry uses Sectumsempra, he doesn’t even know what it is. It’s the thing that was on his mind, so he says it. I think that happens to Voldemort like, “Oops, Avada Kedavra again. Oh, well.”

Aurelia: Like Harry constantly using Expelliarmus. It’s his go-to.

Lorrie: And that’s the last thing that they say to each other.

Grace: It suits the both of them.

Lorrie: Yeah. And when you have the big fight of your life, you use your signature magic.

Aurelia: Yeah.

Grace: It’s weird, because for this big bad that we’re talking about, it’s a spell that doesn’t cause pain, which amazes me in a certain sense. You’d think that the spell that causes immense pain would be the go-to, but honestly it shows how much Tom just wants results. He just wants to be secure in his place of absolute power, and in that security he has control. He feels like he cannot be touched. Everything he does supports that.

Irvin: Yes. I think it makes perfect sense that he doesn’t default to Crucio. For him, the most important thing is immortality, and on the way to that, mudblood genocides and all these things.

Grace: All that is secondary, honestly. The immortality, even, is secondary. The immortality is in support of him wanting power and control, both of these things. He has none of these things when he is young, so he seeks them so much when he is older.

Lorrie: He wants to be safe.

Grace: Yeah. Safety is the number one concern, and that safety serves as the search for immortality and power.

Irvin: And one of Harry’s actually very good insights into Voldemort comes early on in Order of the Phoenix, when they’re discussing the weapon and Ron is like, “Maybe it’s a super painful way of killing people,” and Harry’s like, “He has the Cruciatus for pain. He doesn’t need anything more than that.” And the fact that even that early on, before Voldy Studies 101 in Half-Blood Prince and everything, Harry’s like, “No, Voldemort kills people when he is intending to kill people, and torturing them is a completely separate thing.” Voldemort doesn’t care if the deaths are painful. He just cares if they get done.

Aurelia: Yeah, I think for me is Voldemort is almost removed from other people. H doesn’t care enough to bother with torturing someone if it’s just a waste of time.

Grace: There’s no point of “playing with your food.” Yeah.

Lorrie: I wanted to go back to the thing about the killing curse where you can just dodge it, which I love because it’s so low-tech.

Grace: Dodge and roll.

Lorrie: It’s such an extreme curse, but if the person misses, then they just miss. There’s also the extremely dumb fate that happens when you die from friendly fire because somebody’s just shooting off killing curses and they get you by mistake.

Irvin: Rowle.

Aurelia: Sorry, Lorrie. Can I just jump in there with aiming and dodging? Do we assume, as long as it hits you anywhere on your body, you’re dead? You’re dodging, and it just about hits your arm or something.

Irvin: No. I think if it hits you, then you’re dead.

Aurelia: Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Irvin: Like instant poison almost. Anywhere on your body, it’s there.

Lorrie: So it makes me think that this is part of Rowling showing us her stance on guns and disarmament. We know, because she has emphasis on Expelliarmus and Defense Against the Dark Arts, that her agenda is to promote disarmament and non-aggression. In Prisoner of Azkaban, when Sirius Black is on the loose, guns are described as a kind of metal wand that Muggles use to kill each other. The difference in power between somebody who’s armed with a gun and someone who isn’t reminded me of what makes Avada Kedavra such an unforgivable way to kill somebody when there are so many different ways to kill people. The impossibility of defending yourself at that kind of power difference, especially at close range. And especially, if you think about people who might say that they want guns for hunting or self-defense, but then they get those kinds of weapons that are military grade designed to kill lots and lots of people.

Grace: Horrendously powerful.

Lorrie: It’s not anything that anybody would use for hunting or for scaring off a burglar.

Grace: What kind of deer are you going after that you need this?

Irvin: If you need that kind of a gun to kill a deer, you need to spend more time at the shooting range practicing.

Lorrie: And that, I think, is why there’s so many different spells that wizards can use to kill each other. But the extremity is different when it’s Avada Kedavra. This is not the kind of thing that people do when they’re having conflicts and they’re angry. This is something more severe.

Grace: This is your Executioner spell situation.

Lorrie: Yeah, but more.

Irvin: Actually, this just came to my head when Grace said Executioner: Do we think it’s curious that the Ministry, when they are coming to execute a magical creature, they bring someone with an ax as opposed to someone with a wand that casts killing curses?

Aurelia: Is that not because you split yourself when you use the killing curse? Well, I guess you could use something else.

Irvin: No, because Dumbledore’s line is that killing rips the soul apart. Not the curse itself, but the act of it.

Aurelia: Okay. So it would happen even with an axe. Fun job. I mean, it was a fun job before…

Irvin: It was for Macnair.

Grace: I guess they get to choose whatever is their favorite method.

Irvin: Oh, that’s so gross.

Aurelia: Maybe Macnair.

Grace: There’s a lot about Macnair.

Lorrie: This is also part of the Wizarding World’s dichotomy between what they considered human or Wizard and what they consider beasts, and killing with an axe is okay if you’re going to do it to a Beast. Especially for somebody like Macnair, who wants to have a really big dichotomy. Then you’re trying to categorize other human-like creatures as beasts as well, like elves or Goblins, so that you have an excuse to treat them the same way. Or, you know, Hagrid. So, the difference is really the degree of sadism.

Irvin: This is so gross.

Grace: It’s weird because honestly, there’s so many… Humans are fragile, we’re fragile creatures. There’s so many ways for a human to die. It’s just crazy that this is one of the ones that is ‘lights out, no pain’. In a sense, this method as Unforgivable as it is, is a lot more chill than a lot of other methods that people can go.

Lorrie: It’s cold.

Grace: It’s cold, but it’s not brutal, which is a weird thing to say about this curse, right? There are other much more brutal ways to kill someone.

Irvin: Not to mention messy ways. You behead a beast, there’s heads rolling, there’s blood gushing.

Grace: You’re lucky if it’s one stroke. That’s the horrible thing about Nearly Headless Nick. Right. What a way to go!

Irvin: how many strokes was it for Nick?

Lorrie: Too many, not enough.

Grace: Any more than one is too many.

Lorrie: Well Aurelia, we can go off on our tangent here with Fantastic Beasts movies, because this ties into the U.S. capital punishment theme of the first Fantastic Beasts movie. They allegedly have this merciful way of purging you of your memories. “Oh, no, it’s going to be pleasant, it’ll be fine. Doesn’t that look good?”

Grace: It’ll be great!

Lorrie: And is that more merciful? It’s just kind of dystopian and sick. The lack of pain involved in an Avada Kedavra is uncanny. It’s eerie when they find the bodies of the Riddles, and they say, “There’s nothing wrong with them except that they’re dead.”

Aurelia: The thing we see in Fantastic Beasts is almost if you were to Imperio someone and then make them walk off a cliff or something. You would still kill the person, but they wouldn’t feel unhappy about it, almost.

Lorrie: Which brings us to Dumbledore reminding Harry, “I’m really sorry at how much emotional pain you’re feeling, but it proves you’re human.” Okay, I’m done with my point.

Grace: I’m letting that sink in. That’s a very interesting topic to take, with the way that the different societies think about capital punishment, basically. I have a point later on that that jumps into this.

Aurelia: Yeah, I’m excited to talk about that later, Grace. 

Grace: That’s a really good one. I had a weird question in my brain, and I just wanted to share it with you guys. I’m just going to say a statement and it’s going to be horrendous, and then we’re going to speak about it. If I were going to be killed by any of the Death Eaters, I would prefer it be Tom, and not just for private reasons. I’m going to explain this. Now, if you go to Bella, you’re going to get tortured and it’s going to last forever. If you go to Fenrir, you’re probably going to get assaulted in many ways that I do not want. If it’s Tom, he’s going to be like, “I don’t even need to be in front of you right now. Goodbye. Goodbye. It’s done.”

Irvin: There’s going to be a lot of monologuing first.

Grace: I’m okay with that. He can monologue if he wants.

Aurelia: There’s only going to be a lot of monologuing if you’re important enough to him, though. If you’re a random person, he will not tell you his plans because he’ll just be like, “Eh, whatever.”

Grace:  I’m basically a bug. He’s just going to be like, “Goodbye. I’m leaving. Goodbye. Actually you’re leaving.” What are your thoughts? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to, but I was like, “That would probably be the best way to go out of all of these.”

Irvin: I think I would actually go for Dolohov, because I feel he would kill me with some fabulous, bright purple flames. Again, I want the drama.

Grace: That would hurt.

Irvin: It won’t be my problem after that.

Grace: Okay, Irvin will feel pain for the drama.

Irvin: Listen, I went out dancing in heels yesterday. Of course, I will.

Lorrie: I think if Irvin had a no-drama death, he would feel pain more.

Irvin: YES! EXACTLY! Lorrie, you know me so well.

Grace: I love that you’re willing to have this conversation with me, Irvin. Thank you. The weird things I think about.

Irvin: Okay, so now that we’ve gone through the curses one by one… I thought this was interesting. We’ve talked about how each one is terrible in its own way. But in the books, there seems to be a clear ranking in terms of badness of these curses, which goes Imperio, Crucio, Avada Kedavra; that’s the order they’re introduced to us in, they ramp up. That is the order that Harry successfully casts them in in Deathly Hallows, where first he does Imperio, then Crucio, and he never gets to Avada Kedavra. Imperio is the only one that fake Moody is allowed to cast on students for educational purposes. For me, reading the books, it always seemed clear that that was the order we went in. Thoughts? Disagreements?

Aurelia: Can I also just say unforgivable, unless it’s awkward, and then bend the rules and then it’s educational. Sure.

Grace: It’s so insane. I agree with you, though. I feel there’s terms of badness in this. You can bounce back from either of the first two.

Aurelia: Yes, but it also goes back to, I think, our popular view of mental issues aren’t as bad as body issues. Bodily harm trumps mental illness, essentially, which I think a lot of people have the opinion of. You can’t generalize that for some people. Their mental issues probably trump other body harm issues. I don’t know. I’m talking myself into a corner here.

Irvin: Yeah. Because depending on how you Imperius someone and what you do to them, that could be worse than Crucio. I’m sure Crouch Jr. would much rather be tortured a little bit than spend 15 years under his father’s control.

Grace: If someone Imperio’d me to go and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I would love it. I think that was great. But if it was anything else, I think I’d be very upset about it.

Irvin: Yeah. If someone Imperio’d me to stay at home and never go out and never talk to anyone? Again, so much rather the pain.

Aurelia: Yeah, I guess for what we see people using Imperio, I would say Crucio is worse. You Imperius someone, you could make them do a lot of terrible things.

Grace: It’s like what we were talking about before with AK and that it’s a painless situation, but there’s no bouncing back from it. I always get tripped up about that, because Crucio, you literally can torture someone into insanity and there’s no bouncing back from it. I’m almost at the same level in my mind on Crucio and AK, but it depends on how much you’re using that and AK. One time, and you’re done. It’s a one-and-done baby. That’s all it is.

Lorrie: it’s also different, though, if you look at it from the point of view: are they Unforgivable? With Imperio, there’s so many different reasons you could use it and for different durations and to cause different degrees of harm. Imperio is a case-by-case kind of Unforgivable curse. If someone casts Crucio on you, how much are you going to forgive them? Not. It’s not your job. If somebody cast Imperio on you, sometimes it can be so impersonal that it’s like, “Well, I don’t forgive them, but I don’t hate them. I just never want to see them again.” And with Avada Kedavra, of course, there’s no forgiving; the person’s dead.

Grace: There’s an interesting case to be made. What if beforehand, in a medical sense, you needed someone to control you for any way? There is a certain situation where you need someone to take the reins for you, and you agree beforehand, “You may use this curse on me.” Does it become forgivable then?

Lorrie: No, because that would not be Imperio, then. Imperio is doing something to replace a person’s will with your own will, and if there was an agreement, then it wouldn’t be Imperio. It would just be like an immobilizing curse or something.

Irvin: Yeah, I agree with that because Imperio, you are making someone do something with their body.

Lorrie: Consent cancels out Imperio.

Irvin: Actually, on the topic of forgiveness. Do you think Madame Rosmerta would ever speak to Draco Malfoy again?

Lorrie: I read a fanfic once in which he feels so terrible, he goes and tries to apologize and he says, “You can do anything to me.” So she casts Imperio on him and the command is, “Think about what you did,” and then she just leaves. That brings me to my thinking… This is where I’m going to say what I think Unforgivables are. It’s not that some things are so terrible that they can’t be forgiven, because there are things considered forgivable curses, things other than these three, that are that bad. To me, an Unforgivable is something where getting forgiveness from your victim doesn’t actually help you because you’ve hurt your soul. You’ve damaged yourself by doing this thing, and they can forgive you if they want, but it’s their business. And the only way that you can repair your soul after that is to feel remorse and to understand what you really did and let yourself feel it, which is so uncomfortable that you might die.

Grace: I never thought of it that way.

Lorrie: Because you see this when Snape, as a teenager, when he calls Lily a Mudblood, that’s the fourth Unforgivable. Rowling doesn’t use the word unforgivable for anything except these three curses, plus him calling her Mudblood. Because even if she forgave him, that wouldn’t repair things. It’s not her job. He comes and he tries to apologize, and she just looks at him, like, “What, do you want me to forgive you for this? That’s so far beyond what we’re talking about here.” And if he wants to make himself whole again before he dies, he has to make up for what he did with the rest of his life.

Irvin: I think that’s a really, really cool reading of the series. It is obviously 110% completely different from my reading of the series, because that is how you and I roll. My understanding of it was that Unforgivable is a strictly legal definition, but I also take a much more pragmatic view of all things Wizarding. I don’t think it’s a question of who’s forgiving who, who can’t forgive, or what can be forgiven. I just think that legally, they are unforgivable.

Lorrie: But legally also, when the Death Eaters are in control or when it’s during times of war, that legal enforcement is completely absent. But we still have the issue of what they do to your soul.

Irvin: I don’t think we know that Imperio or Crucio do anything to your soul, necessarily. I don’t think Harry’s soul is particularly impacted by using Imperio on Travers and Bogrod.

Lorrie: Ooh, I disagree.

Irvin: I would expect nothing less from you.

Lorrie: I know. We agree on nothing.

Irvin: Not a damn thing.

Grace: I think that is a really interesting reading, to think that all three of these will impact your soul in some way. Also, to consider saying ‘Mudblood’ as part of that or being racist in some way as part of that, it’s… In that way, if we were going to carry that line of thinking, it would mean that every person who has done a regrettable task in this series would need to spend the emotional time to solve, to heal that in order to become complete again. I don’t know if I agree with it as a reading of canon. I agree with it as a reading just in general of reading these characters, that they have had a point in their lives where they need to correct a line of thinking. I don’t know if it affects their soul in the series, but I think that as a character, their soul is affected. As a reader, I see them as affected, so they need a character arc to go back and complete this, or the character arc is incomplete.

Lorrie: The problem with what Voldemort has done is that he’s committed so many crimes that he can’t do that. Even something like Snape committing the Potters to be killed was such a bad crime that he spent his whole life not sure if he could let himself feel remorse for it or if he could just keep denying it. But when you’ve done as many bad things as Voldemort, that’s what it means to make your soul unstable. No, he can’t even open his mind to that. That would be unbearable. Grindelwald, he does survive it, but it’s not fun for him.

Grace: This is where I disagree with you. I think that Tom has done so many crimes that he should do this. This is a far more satisfying way of Tom’s arc coming to completion than what actually happened.

Lorrie: That’s what Harry thought, too.

Grace: As it is right now, he doesn’t realize anything that he’s done wrong. I think even in the afterlife, he still blames Harry. He still blames everyone else but him(self) for what has happened.

Lorrie: I think that last scene where Harry says, “Try it this way. You’re going to die anyway, but try remorse first.” I think he has a sense that, “Oh, God, Harry’s on to something. I don’t want to think about it. Avada Kedavra.” I think that’s the difference between… that’s why people try to say, “How can you split your soul even more than once? Once is bad enough.” But when you’ve gone that far, you’ve really made it hard for you to die a human being.

Grace: I think that if Harry had wanted Tom to reconsider and try to feel remorse, it should have started ages ago. I feel like in that moment, it becomes a useless sentiment. You might as well be speaking another language. Tom isn’t going to understand what you’re saying at all. He thinks that this is just gobbledygook. Not actual Goblin speak. I think that that’s a useless sentiment.

Lorrie: I don’t agree with you, because I think by that time, Harry knows that if Tom was really not interested in what Harry had to say, he would have stopped this chase a long time ago, one way or another. When he says “try for remorse” in that last scene, it actually reaches Voldemort. He’s stopped and he’s shocked, and he says, “What nonsense is this?!” It gets to him.

Grace: It’s an interesting way of looking at it.

Lorrie: Nothing else has gotten to him. The only person that Tom will listen to in the world is Harry Potter. He will kill or ignore or chase down every other person. Say, “No, no, I’m obsessed with this boy. None of you has anything to say to me except this boy.” And then Harry says, “Okay, I have an answer for you,” and he’s like, “What, you think you have an answer that I haven’t thought of?” “Yeah, I do.” He’s like, “What?”

Grace: I like this reading a lot. I do like reconsidering it a little bit. I will say, though, there is another individual that seemed to have an effect on him, and this is for all the Voldy-Bella shippers out there. The only one he seems to be upset about dying is when Bella dies.

Lorrie: He’s mad. But is he upset because he misses her, or is it the same way that Lucius is mad at Harry for losing him Dobby?

Grace: Who knows? That’s the thing. He reacts in a way that evokes emotion, is what I can say.

Lorrie: That’s true. It’s like, “You stole my best thing.”

Grace: “It’s a good thing I had. Damn!”

Irvin: If you go by the movies, both of them try to follow that up with the killing curse.

Aurelia: That annoys me every time.

Lorrie: I don’t go by the movies. What movies?!

Aurelia: The movie came out at a point where we knew the Unforgivables, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, sure. Let’s have Lucius say Avada Kedavra. That makes sense. Let him try to kill Harry now. That’s good.”

Grace: I’m thinking back on Harry saying “try for some remorse”, though. What an interesting way of reading it. I think that it’s a cool way of looking into it. I had always seen it as Harry reiterating things that he had gleaned from Dumbledore. Basically, his ending monologue is just, “I’m Dumbledore’s boy. Secure all the things! I love Dumbledore! He’s the best. You’re the worst, so man up. Man up, Tom. This isn’t definitely a weird gendered statement for me to throw down in the middle of our very cool conversation. Man up! Feel some remorse!” It’s like, “Okay, I’m not listening to you at this point. This is like the emptiest comment in the world. I don’t know what’s going on here.”

Lorrie: Yeah. It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be Harry saw the last bit of soul that Tom had remaining. And by that time, he knows this is an Unforgivable. You can’t help somebody who’s hurt you. Harry thinks, “I should pick it up, but I totally don’t want to and I know I shouldn’t.” Dumbledore… it feels almost cold. Dumbledore’s looking at this suffering baby that can’t even breathe and saying, “Don’t pick it up. There’s nothing you can do for it.”

Grace: Oh, it is cold. I thought it was cold, for sure.

Lorrie: That is so disturbing, but it also means you can’t help. Because if you pick up the soul, the little baby soul of the person who tried many times to kill you and has killed so many other people, the only thing that can happen is that they can keep trying to make you into their manipulated object of obsession, like Tom’s been doing to Harry all this time. No, the only help for that soul, because he’s going to die, he’s just mortal. But is he going to die whole again with some healing, which is possible if he takes Harry’s offer up and tries to feel some remorse and try to feel emotion? Or is he going to die and be forever this baby that can’t breathe. And that’s what Harry has seen.

Grace: Wait a second. Okay, wait. Okay, interesting pivot. Let’s suppose that your theory of him saying ‘try for some remorse’ is actually Harry seeing that last bit of living soul. Wouldn’t that then connect to the fact that he should pick up that baby? Because he feels for that baby, he wants to save that baby.

Lorrie: No. It’s the same thing that happens when Snape says to Dumbledore, “What about my soul? You want me to kill you?” and Dumbledore says, “You, alone, know if you have what it takes to put your soul back together after you kill somebody.” And that’s what Harry’s saying, too, is, “You, Tom Riddle, keep chasing me for answers. I’m just a kid. I have no answers for you. Can you feel remorse? If you do, something more healing and whole can happen for you. I don’t even owe you this explanation. I’ve just giving it to you for free.”

Grace: That’s an interesting topic, because technically Tom, if we’re thinking of empathic psychology where he is psychopathic, remorse isn’t something that is natural to him. So if Harry, his connection… Okay, this is a complete other topic. Let’s go back to the main topic.

Irvin: Aurelia and I are just over here with the popcorn being like, “Mmhmm.”

Aurelia: Yeah.

Lorrie: My point being that whether forgivables and unforgivables are a legal issue or not, the reason that they’re a theme in the book is because hurting other people has implications for your soul, and that normal human life involves hurting other people. Sometimes a huge amount, and sometimes by accident but irreversibly. How do you come back from that and what does it cost you if it feels so awful that you spend your life running away from the truth of how you hurt yourself or just keep doing it more and more and more. That has nothing to do with whether you go to Azkaban or not. When something is unforgivable, in my opinion, is not a matter of legal issues but a matter of when you have hurt somebody so much, that their forgiveness is not going to help you. Your only thing is between you and yourself.

Grace: I think from a literary standpoint, that is very poignant and I love that idea, I think, in terms of how they’ve turned it in this book, it may be something about their society and how they value people. I think that it’s more reflection on their society, though I love from a story standpoint how that plays out because then that means that every character has cast an unforgivable and every character needs to go through an arc in which they reclaim parts of their soul. I think that’s pretty damn cool.

Lorrie: Well, in normal ebb and flow of life, that happens but it’s not unforgivable. Normally, you hurt somebody, you can go to apologize to them and have a reconciliation or an acknowledgement of some sort. But at what point do you, the victim, no longer owe the criminal the time of day? If you’re the subject of racist genocide, like what Mudblood implicates, then no, you don’t owe the person who called you a Mudblood forgiveness. And if you are the orphan that some maniac has tried to kill over and over and over again, you don’t owe him to pick up his baby soul. But if you want to, you can tell them the only advice you have.

Grace: That being said, do we want to maybe jump forward a little bit and discuss the comparison with these different systems of government and how they consider unforgivable crimes to be? Because I know I keep teasing at it, but we never actually talk about it. I know it’s later on in our notes, but we can always jump forward and then jump back again.

Irvin: Sure, let’s do it. I will move it right on up in the doc.

Grace: I just scroll down. I’ll go through these very quickly because I think it says something about society. I know, Irvin, you had something to say about Unforgivables and how you think that they’re classified. So if we’re thinking of a life sentence discussion and what the American system would consider to be unforgivable, there was a study released by the criminal justice system back in 2015. The most common offense type for which life imprisonment sentence was imposed in the fiscal year of 2013 was drug trafficking, which was 64 cases. Most common offenses for life imprisonment were also firearm offenses. That was 27 cases. Murder, which was 19 cases; and extortion and racketeering offenses, which was 16 cases. If we’re going to boil all this down, too long, didn’t read, life imprisonment is basically boiled down to drug trafficking, firearms, murder, extortion, and racketeering. The trend that I am seeing in all of this is that the drug trafficking, firearms, murder… Murder is part of this. The Extortion/Racketeering crimes shows us that money crimes are very high on the scale of things that will get you a life sentence. Drug trafficking is a huge thing, I assume, because of how much it is connected to a ton of other extremely horrible things that can be done. I think firearms is another situation where you’re providing firearms to people who should not have them. Not to say that anyone should really have crazy firearms. I would say, how does this compare to wizarding society, though? Because we don’t see a ton. Like, murder’s reflected, for sure. I don’t know who wrote this note down here about drugs or potions / ingredients. Was that you, Aurelia?

Aurelia: Yeah, I was trying to come up with comparisons between those. Drugs could be a comparison that we can see in the wizarding world. I think to a degree it works with potions of specific ingredients, because we know Polyjuice isn’t exactly legal to just buy and take. I think there’s some sort of restriction on Polyjuice. I don’t think death sentence is the restriction on it if you’re getting caught doing Polyjuice, but I don’t think we have an example of what happens if you take those potions without the right permissions.

Grace: Weirdly enough, your note about the firearms and the question mark is what interests me most, because technically, aren’t they all just carrying around a firearm all the time? You can’t restrict this because everyone’s holding a wand of immense power in their possession at all times. Oh, Lord.

Aurelia: The only way it’s obviously restricted is they’re not allowed to use it outside of school as long as they’re under 17.

Grace: Yeah. So, if we’re reflecting this on society, it means that their society deems to protect everyone the most from immense pain, death, and being controlled. These are three, I would say, very good things to make your ultimate crime. Make an example out of these people. I would say that completely leaves out the fiscal responsibilities. If anybody wanted extortion and racketeering, that’s apparently on the table.

Aurelia: Can I proposition something that would probably be similar to the extortion/racketeering. Because it’s a secret society, isn’t anything where you risk breaking the secrecy act: wouldn’t that also, depending on how big that thing is?

Irvin: Yes. I think that makes more sense, because the thing is wizards, because they have magic, are much less impacted by a lack of money. I think one of the reasons that financial crimes have such a huge penalty in our society is that if someone gets screwed out of money, their life really, really sucks. For wizards, still sucks in a lot of ways because food, Gamp’s Law, yada yada yada. But they can do a lot more basic human necessities through magic that they don’t need money for, like a place to live. A home that is comfortable, that you can afford, and all of that can be done with magic. Yeah, so I think money and messing with people’s money wouldn’t have as huge an impact for wizards as it does for Muggles, so the sentence for financial crimes would be comparatively lesser.

Grace: Hmm, I never thought of it that way. I think the Gamp’s Law thing does plan to allot that, because if you’re starving, then that’s a huge issue, so you’re going to need some kind of money.

Irvin: Yeah, which is why I’m sure there still are penalties for financial malfeasance in the wizarding world.

Aurelia: They also have… at least Britain has a bank system that’s governed by a whole other species.

Grace: I would also say that this show of like not actually having that as much of an extreme reaction to a financial crime shows that families like the Malfoys, and people who have had a lot of money for a long time, can probably get away with it for a lot longer, because there’s a lot less people who would be concerned about taking them to task. My assumption from this was that the people in power wanted to keep it basically more lenient when it comes to financial offenses because of that. That was basically my thought process behind why they might not care as much.

Irvin: Yeah. I’m also wondering, because the government is by far the biggest employer in the wizarding world, so I wonder if that impacts how society campaigns for like you know financial reforms and laws protecting money and all of that. If your employer and the person in charge of like what can and can’t happen with money is one and the same, you might be a lot more hesitant to fight the power and demand change.

Grace: Irvin, what was your theory as to why the Unforgivables were unforgivable?

Irvin: So the Unforgivables were deemed unforgivable in 1717, when it was decided that casting any of these spells lands you a life sentence in Azkaban. My thought for why they’re unforgivable is that there’s no good use for any of the Unforgivables. My go-to example for them is you can use Diffindo, the severing charm, to either cut a rope for whatever you need or to cut a neck, which is the same as Avada Kedavra. But Avada Kedavra can only be used for killing, so that’s why Avada Kedavra is an automatic unforgivable legally; whereas Diffindo, they’re like, “Well, if you cut a rope, go about your day. If you killed a person, we’ll see you in Azkaban, you’re going on trial,” but it’s not an automatic thing.

Grace: Even if the intention was to kill the person by cutting their neck, that wouldn’t be an Unforgivable? I don’t know. I feel like that’s a really rough–

Irvin: No. It’s the spell itself. The classification is the spell. If you kill someone, I assume you still get a life sentence in Azkaban. That is still a very big No-No. But you can’t classify Diffindo as an Unforgivable spell because it is very forgivable in some situations. In terms of the Unforgivable curses, a curse that is not forgivable in any context is only Imperio, Crucio, and Avara Kedavra. The example that came to my mind is we were talking about how about Avada Kedavra is like guns. Diffindo is like knives. Knives can be very, very lethal. You stab someone, and it is pretty much the same exact thing: they die, and you are then in a lot of trouble. But you can’t outlaw knives themselves, because they are used to prepare delicious food. Whereas guns can and, some might say, should be outlawed and be made illegal because there is no non-lethal use for a gun.

Lorrie: It’s not that other crimes don’t get a life sentence. It’s the word automatic.

Irvin: Yeah. That’s the huge distinguishing things here.

Grace: So circling back: in terms of automatic life sentences, I can see, Aurelia, you have like a ton of notes on the British counterpart for what’ll earn you a life sentence.

Aurelia: Yes. I was like, I’ll be interested to see what Britain has to say about all of this. Considering this is based in Britain, I’m sure that a lot of what is probably taken for granted as a British citizen maybe has influenced Rowling’s writing. First point I found, and I think the year for this data was 2016. It says in 2016, there was 8,554 people in prison in the UK serving a life sentence. That’s more than France, Germany, and Italy combined, which are obviously the next big three countries in Europe, so that was a bit of a shock. But I found the data and I was like, “Where am I living again? Right.” And then I found percentage data to compare it with the US. So in the UK, the life sentence prisoners make up more than 10% of the total sentence prison population, and that’s even higher than in the US where it’s at 9.5%. Again, assuming that’s the data from 2016. I don’t know figures of this year, which is, again, something that was like, “Okay, interesting.” The death penalty has been abolished in the UK in 1965;1973 if you wait for Northern Ireland. Life imprisonment became a mandatory sentence for murder in the UK, and that is actually not the case for most European countries. It’s not a mandatory sentence in other European countries because murder is very widely defined in the UK. A person can be convicted of murder despite having no intention to kill in a lot of other countries. At least I know that’s the case in Germany; the intention to kill is very much crucial to getting a life sentence. You’re not getting a life sentence because it could be accidental. So yeah, I thought that was really interesting to know that life imprisonment in various traditions of the UK is imposed for a wider range of offenses than in any other European country, because I foolishly assumed it was probably about the same across Europe. I was doing a lot of very quick learning about the country I’m living in. I was like, “Okay, I foolishly thought this is the same as in Germany. It’s really not. And then lastly, the minimum term life sentence prisoners have to serve in the UK before their release is considered really long and apparently even longer now. It used to be 12.5 years back into 2003, but then they extended it and it’s now, as of 2016, which is again where found the data, is almost 21.3 years. So they went up from 12.5 to 21.3.

Grace: Wow. That’s shocking. You know what? We didn’t even talk about death penalty, because we don’t even hear about that. That’s not mentioned anywhere in the books.

Irvin: Well, because if it’s not a thing in Europe at all. I remember I was at some kind of museum. Oh, I think I was at a Torture Museum, because I weirdly like those in Europe.

Grace: Same. It’s weird. I know

Irvin: Right? And they’re all over Europe. So I was at a Torture Museum in, I don’t know, maybe Belgium. At the end of the museum, there was an exhibit on the death penalty, and they’re like, “Yeah, so this is also a horrible thing humans did to each other. It’s a death penalty. Obviously, it’s been outlawed in like all the civilized countries here,” and there was a list of all the countries that still have the death penalty. It was these tiny countries in Africa or whatever, and then The United States. I’m like, “Wow! We really are exceptional here.”

Grace: Good ol’ United States!

Lorrie: Yeah, the whole Fantastic Beasts first movie is about that, like, “No. In this country, they have the death penalty. This is America.”

Aurelia: Which is interesting, though, because during that time, as I just literally said the numbers 1965 for the UK. During the time of Fantastic Beasts, death penalty still existed in UK as well, because, I think, most countries in Europe stopped doing it after WWII without having any data to back this up. But that’s a feeling more than it’s a fact.

Irvin: We know Jo is strong, thinks about this a lot, and is very opposed to the death penalty because it’s a very big plot point in Lethal White, the fourth of her Cormoran Strike books. One of the things is that gallows were made illegal in the UK as a torture instrument that there is no good use for, and a big plot point is that there’s a government minister who’s making gallows and all of that in Lethal White. So yes, it is very likely front of mind for Jo, and I’m so excited because I have someone on the podcast who’s actually read these books other than me.

Aurelia: We do see a form of a death penalty, I guess, with Buckbeak. But I guess we can ask…

Grace: That’s for just a filthy beast. Disgusting! Get it away.

Lorrie: That’s the issue again, going back to the Fantastic Beasts movies. Which I like even more than I like the Cormoran Strike novels. Is an obscurial a beast or human? Does it get the death penalty or not?

Grace: Never thought of it that way.

Irvin: The key question of the franchise: What is fantastic, and what is a beast?

Grace: What a way to word it. I assumed human, but I…

Aurelia: I think I would actually really like to learn more about the difference in long-term imprisonment, because we see the UK at least, and during the Harry Potter books at least, they use Dementors. It’s not really the same as life sentence imprisonment in the Muggle World because you’re not getting constantly sucked out your happy memories.

Grace: Just that the idea of having Dementors as guards; what an interesting turn. Really, a life sentence is probably worse than the death sentence if you’re doing that.

Aurelia: I was going to say, isn’t that torture in a way itself?

Lorrie: That’s the wizarding world equivalent of the death sentence, is to have the Dementors’ Kiss.

Irvin: Because that’s what they sentenced Sirius to in Prisoner of Azkaban.

Lorrie: And that’s the debate that Voldemort’s always having with Dumbledore: Is there something worse than death?

Aurelia: Yeah. In that instant being whatever you choose how to kill someone, wouldn’t then death be preferable to Dementors’ Kiss?

Lorrie: Which brings me back to Unforgivables being about the effect on your soul.

Aurelia: So I think one of the questions I have is how… It feels to me about– We made these illegal in 1717, but what is actually happening? How do you keep track of it? And I guess one way that I know already answered it is saying, “Well, if you’re caught, then that’s that.” In this world, if you’re caught, then you’re caught. But in The Wizarding World, couldn’t you add a tracking system, and isn’t that something you can add to similar to the Unforgivables?

Irvin: Yes. Kinda, sorta.

Grace: Tom managed to track Voldemort, the name, so there must be some kind of tracking that can be done. But the thing is if someone’s just mentioning Imperio but not actually casting it, then you’re running into some trouble because you can’t arrest someone for just mentioning a spell.

Irvin: You could swoop in and be like, “Hey! So uh, so what are you talking about here?”

Grace: Can you imagine every time someone was talking about a spell, that 10 Ministry officials just appear out of nowhere?

Aurelia: If that were the case, you would know about it and you would know not to do it. Unless, obviously, it’s at Hogwarts and it’s a teaching thing and you need to learn that it exists. And that’s the whole case about it.

Irvin: Also, the spells have names, so you would put the taboo on Imperio, not Imperius, and then just hope people enunciate it.

Aurelia: True.

Grace: But you can say the Imperius curse without casting the Imperius curse.

Irvin: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. That you would put the taboo on the incantation, not the name of the curse.

Grace: Yeah. But you can still say that without casting it, though.

Aurelia: No, no, no. The cast is Imperio, and you would say Imperius curse. Those are different words.

Grace: Okay, I’m sorry, because you can say a spell without casting a spell in the series.

Irvin: Yes, you can. But in the taboo, you would put the taboo on the incantation, and then if people wanted nominative use of the curse rather than an actual use of it, they would just use the name rather than the incantation.

Grace: Okay.

Lorrie: It would be too much bureaucracy because, as Moody says, if all the Fourth years cast Avada Kedavra on him at once, he wouldn’t even get a nosebleed. You know how like Harry says Voldemort by accident and the Snatchers show up? There’s at some point a personnel issue.

Aurelia: I think we need to remove this out of a school setting, though, because I think you can work around the school setting if Hogwarts has wards and blah blah, this is a school, you learn that stuff. But in the real world, as in, once you leave school and you’re an adult and you’re part of the Magical society and you learned in school to not do that, I don’t think it would be that hard ever to be worse.

Lorrie: To me, this reinforces my feeling that Rowling’s interest in the series is more about the effects of these crimes on the caster’s soul than on the minute legal world-building details.

Irvin: Yes. But the minute legal world-building is what we’re interested in. Yeah. I really want to know because the taboo situation seems like such an easy fix. If it’s automatically unforgivable and they have the power to taboo certain words, why wouldn’t you? I wonder if it’s a magical limitation, because taboo-type magic, we only see done by Tom and by Dumbledore, so maybe the ministry just doesn’t have anyone who can cast that spell.

Grace: When does Dumbles do it?

Irvin: Oh, it’s a theory of mine that the deluminator magic is the same type of magic because it’s based on when someone says the name.

Grace: What an interesting theory.

Irvin: And for more, please read chapter 2 of Dumbledore: The Life and Lies.

Grace: I forgot that one.

Lorrie: I think Hermione’s curse on the list is related.

Irvin: Maybe. I’m not sold on that one.

Grace: My assumption was that she triggered it. I didn’t think that it was like immediately when that happened. I think that she had to know who did it, and then actually take it from the list.

Irvin: Oh, no, it was definitely automatic. Because Hermione said that whoever told Umbridge would have the spell, and she’s like, “Yeah, if anyone ratted, we would see them in the Great Hall. We would know who it was.” So, yeah.

Grace: Alright. Maybe.

Irvin: Yeah. Just for that, it was much more about intent and what was done, rather than specific things that were said. Because people can say, “Hey, we’re in Dumbledore’s Army,” and nothing would happen unless one was ratting it out to Umbridge. Sorry, tangent. Very sidetracked. But yeah, for the taboo, it’s either a magical limitation or a political one. I don’t know if it’s a question of privacy, like phone-tapping type of analogy where wizards are like, “We don’t want the ministry policing what we’re saying, so go away.”

Aurelia: Yeah, that’s a good point actually.

Grace: I mean they shouldn’t. Yeah, they shouldn’t want to police what they’re saying at all.

Irvin: The other magical bureaucratic solution that I thought of is the Trace. Because according to Deathly Hallows and all that, in the Trace — which opens up so many plot holes — the government knows what kind of magic is being performed and where at all times throughout Britain, which is why they know if puddings fly in Privet Drive or if Patronus charms are cast. Apparently, they also know every single spell cast in a wizarding dwelling, and they just don’t pay attention because there’s so many of them. But if that is the case, then wouldn’t it register every time an Unforgivable was cast, and Aurors would swoop down wherever the Unforgivable took place?

Grace: Okay, forgive me if I’m wrong. I thought the Trace was specifically for like the children. It wasn’t for adults.

Irvin: But it is within the vicinity.

Grace: Of kids. Okay. And that’s why Dobby– Yeah, but it is specifically just for kids, though, so the Trace doesn’t work for anyone who’s aged above 17, right? Am I wrong? I could be wrong in this.

Irvin: Hold on. God, I hate the Trace.

Lorrie: That’s how they said it.

Aurelia: That’s… yeah. Supposedly, anyway.

Grace: Oh, the schematics of following people.

Aurelia: I think the Trace is really limited and it’s not working greatly because clearly doesn’t just… it can’t tell you who’s actually casting anything. It’s just registering magic. And can’t even tell if it’s house elf magic or wizard magic.

Irvin: But it registers the effects of the magic.

Aurelia: Yeah, that’s true.

Grace: Also, in terms of this, this is another example of how bureaucracy and tracing of magic doesn’t work. The argument for tracing one word, the actual word but not the spell itself, is just going to be a mess. People mess things up all the time in small ways and large ones. I feel like this is going to be one thing where they’re constantly having to clean up messes. It’s just going to be a million…

Lorrie: That’s what I meant about the personnel issue.

Grace: Yeah. I don’t even think they have enough people to keep track of this, despite the fact that most people work in the Ministry of Magic.

Aurelia: But you could have the magic quill, and it would just slack up or something. I think you could work around that.

Lorrie: These are the practical problems of trying for a fascistic surveillance state. At what point do you want to police people’s utterances, mistaken utterances, thoughts, minds. If you’re Voldemort and you’re extreme, then you give everybody a Dark Mark so you know what they’re doing and thinking at all times. That makes him very happy.

Grace: Exactly! That’s the only way of keeping things straight, right?

Lorrie: Most people don’t have the power to see it through like he does. It falls apart very quickly.

Grace: I’m joking, everyone. I don’t think we should only surveil like that. Please. 

Lorrie: It also means that you’re burdened with having to know what they’re thinking and feeling all the time. Yeah, it’s a lot of paperwork.

Aurelia: Yeah. Although, counter-argument: I’m completely with you for all the right reasons, but in a world where you can obliviate people and where you can read people’s minds without them even necessarily knowing about it. Because if you’re not good at blocking your mind, you would probably not even realize someone’s actually invading your mind.

Grace: Someone snooping around in all your thoughts.

Aurelia: How much privacy did I have to begin with? Because that is good faith that you’re assuming no one’s breaking that law, either, but you’re not tracking that. So yeah, I feel like we’re going in circles.

Irvin: Yeah. I’m curious just from a historical perspective. The Unforgivables were deemed unforgivable in 1717, which was 25 years after the Statute of Secrecy was enacted. Do you think that had anything to do with it? That while it was a magical free-for-all, they were like, “Yeah, do what you gotta do.” But once the wizards had to go to hiding, it would then become very hard to explain why people were dead but in perfect health. Then they were like, “Alright, no. Shut it down, shut it down.”

Aurelia: Sadly, I think you’re right. I thought it should really not be.

Irvin: That’s one of my favorite sentences to hear.

Aurelia: I think it’s exactly what happened, but you would have hoped that they had better reasons to pass that.

Irvin: You really would have.

Grace: I’m adding that to the title thread. Sadly, I think you are right.

Lorrie: Following up on my thought that something that’s an Unforgivable means that the only thing you can do for yourself after you’ve cast one, is not to be forgiven by the victim but to have remorse and put yourself together by understanding the emotional impact of what you did. If you manage to do that after you’ve committed Dark Magic, then you have a new power: you have the knowledge of how to reverse Dark Magic. This is a power that is for people who know what it takes to cast a Dark Magic spell, know all that feeling, and then the greater power of feeling sorry for it and wanting to undo it. And that’s why we have the scene of Molly Weasley saying, “I can’t heal Sectumsempra. It’s Dark Magic.” But we know Sectumsempra can be healed by some people who know what went into it and feel bad about it. I think that is part of the reason that Dumbledore can assure people, “Oh, I know for sure that Snape’s remorse is genuine,” because we know Dumbledore has done dark things in his past and regrets them and Dumbledore definitely has the power to cure Dark Magic. He always calls for Snape; he knows Snape can do it, and the more innocent people on his staff can’t. I think that’s what’s behind what he says to Phineas Nigellus Black, when he says, “I don’t see why you have to send Harry to Slughorn. I don’t see why you don’t do it yourself.” And Dumbledore says, “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

Irvin: BAM!

Lorrie: And a lot of people here that as Dumbledore saying, “Oh, that’s because you’re a Slytherin and you’re shallow.” That’s not. It looks like that’s what he’s saying. I don’t think that’s what it is, because after Dumbledore says, “I wouldn’t expect you to,” Fawkes starts crying, and that’s a sound of forgiveness or healing. And to me, Unforgivables, they’re more extreme. It takes a lot more to put yourself together, but anything dark that hurts other people requires that kind of remorse and can give you that power if you know how to do it. To me, the whole of the Half-Blood Prince novel is about making things forgivable as an act of mercy. It starts out with Slughorn running away from the Death Eaters because he’s done something so long ago that he thinks is so vile that it can’t be forgiven. He doesn’t want to talk about it, and it’s such an act of mercy. Also, Dumbledore has an ulterior motive, of course, but it is also an act of mercy to get… you can’t get the victims of Slughorn’s crime, Lily and James, to forgive him. He didn’t mean for them to die, but they’re dead. He can’t be forgiven by them. But you can get their son, and only Harry can give him that mercy. It turns out that what Slughorn did was forgivable, which we knew. When he was foolish and vain and gave away secrets to Tom, he didn’t mean to kill Lily Evans. Yeah, of course it’s forgivable, but he felt like it wasn’t. You can find somebody that can give the forgiveness, which Harry was, and that’s such a mercy. Dumbledore didn’t mean to kill Ariana whenever he cast whatever spell might have been the one to kill her, and Dumbledore dies because he still wants to get his parents to forgive him. He can’t; they’re dead, they can’t forgive him. And Sectumsempra, Harry didn’t mean to kill Draco. If he had, he would have been in such trouble because Draco would be dead. He couldn’t be forgiven. Nothing could be forgiven, even though it wasn’t his intention. Snape catches him. Snape punishes him so hard, and makes him write over the penalties from the stupid sh*t that the Marauders did 20 years ago to remind him, “You did something so, so bad. But it can be forgiven. I don’t like you, you shouldn’t have done it, he could have died — but it’s not an Unforgivable.” That’s all leading up to Snape killing Dumbledore. Yes it splits your soul when you kill somebody. You don’t have to be doing it to be evil. It can just be that killing having anything to do with another person… Death is going to tear you apart, whether it’s with or without guilt. What do you do to heal that? Well, you can’t go get forgiveness from the person you killed. I think that by that time, it’s about you and your soul and what you do to be whole before you die, leading up, of course, to the climactic end where Harry says “Voldemort, you’ve been chasing me all this time looking for answers, and this is the best I got for you.” By the time that Harry can say that to Voldemort, he has already also cast Unforgivables and knows what it takes to reverse them. It’s so uncomfortable that Harry, McGonagall, and all these good people do these things that are supposed to be an automatic life sentence in Azkaban, and Harry does the same thing that you’re supposed to do to put your soul back together after you commit these crimes against people. He gives his life to save others the same way that Snape did to feel remorse after killing Dumbledore, when Harry comes back from the dead after having agreed to sacrifice himself to protect other people. Harry sacrificing himself and letting himself die is a big sacrifice. Harry coming back from Kings Cross to go back into the fight, which is so, so tiring, is an even bigger sacrifice; but when he comes back, then he has the same power that happens when you commit Dark Magic, then you feel remorse and you make it up; then you can reverse it, you can heal it, and you can help other people. Or at least try to help other people come back from it also.

Grace: What an intriguing way of looking at this. Claps for Lorrie! Beautifully done. I love this theory, I really do. I really love how beautifully you’ve laid it out. I think that it’s an incredible way to expand on the reading. I think that there’s a great way of looking at it in here, really.

Lorrie: It’s also intriguing to me and important — the same way that Dumbledore’s statement to Phineas Nigellus sounds like an insult to Slytherin, but it’s not — it’s disturbing that when Harry cast his Unforgivables, he’s always using Draco’s wand. And it does not mean that Harry himself is so pure and only Draco is evil. I think it’s part of Harry understanding what it feels like to be Draco and that sometimes the need for it, whether you’re enslaving a goblin’s mind or whether you’re torturing somebody so your dad doesn’t get killed, it’s dirty. It’s complicated. Also, Harry understands the desire behind Crucio.

Irvin: And Harry and Draco are equally guilty, as far as Unforgivables are concerned. They’ve both done 2 out of the 3, but they couldn’t do the killing curse.

Grace: Exactly. They are also in love and they do get married.

Irvin: Because they have so much in common.

Grace: They do have a lot in common. They are in love, they do get married, and they do have children and it’s a beautiful time. That’s exactly what happens.

Irvin: Not biologically, I hope. You’re not into those Mpreg fics, are you?

Grace: I’m writing one currently.

Irvin: No, that is the one bridge that is too far

Grace: For me, too. But this isn’t yucking anyone’s yum. If you like that, that’s great. It’s just not for me.

Lorrie: It’s magic. It’s fantasy.

Grace: I’m writing it for all of you, see? This is self-sacrifice. I’m healing my soul right now.

Irvin: Yuck. I don’t care if it’s your yum. Yuck.

Grace: I never yuck yums. I don’t.

Irvin: I try not to, generally.

Grace: I think that’s an incredible reading. I think that there are certain things I disagree with it on, but that’s just because I have my own theories about this. I love the way that this plays out, I think it really does expand the view of how the books are written. I never would have seen this Phineas Nigellus theory that you have here, that he’s never cast… No, I literally just assumed that it was because, of course, Dumbledore would say something like that. So, what an interesting way of taking it.

Lorrie: It was because Fawkes was crying.

Grace: It’s a good giveaway. Yeah.

Lorrie: And because Dumbledore, he says it and he sounds so sad.

Grace: I assume Dumbledore’s always sad. No, I’m kidding. He’s not always sad. Internally, he is, for sure.

Irvin: He is, if you go by the films.

Grace: We should all watch the films together, honestly.

Irvin: Grace, don’t make me re-watch those films.

Grace: You’ve gotta do it. I’m gonna make you do it.

Irvin: Listen, you know I love you. You know I love our listeners. But I don’t know if I love y’all enough to sit through those films.

Lorrie: Irvin, here’s what I want from you. I don’t know how I can pay you for this somehow. I would love to go through The Secrets of Dumbledore film with you to see which lines you thought were written by Steve Kloves and which by JK Rowling.

Irvin: I feel like I could pick out the ten that were written by Jo and then call it a day.

Lorrie: Well, I’d love to do that with you.

Grace: Can we just watch all the movies together and just have a good old time?

Irvin: No, I have not watched Prisoner of Azkaban since 2004, and I have no desire to.

Grace: Irvin, I’m begging you. Irvin, please. PLEASE, IRVIN!

Irvin: I will do it if I can skip three and six.

Aurelia: That’s the only ones you want to skip?

Grace: But six is fun, and it’s got hot Tom in it. Come on!

Irvin: Well, I like the first two, and I’m okay with the fifth. I’m okay with the most of the fifth. Goblet of Fire’s just sort of entertaining in how messy it is, and seven and eight, well, are aggressively mediocre. No, we might have to skip 8 as well.

Grace: We’ll go back to the movies. I will say four is fun because I love the longer hair, and also the Tom return scene is also good. But we have to move on. I’m so sorry for bringing up the movies and dragging us through another tangent.

Irvin: All your fault.

Grace: It is all my fault. I will say, I will take this, I will regret it. I will turn it into the ability to be able to heal Dark Magic. So, there we go.

Aurelia: You took the wrong learning here, Grace.

Irvin: Missed a little bit of the nuance.

Aurelia: Your detention is more time with Lorrie to explain it to you properly.

Irvin: I think we should actually go through some of the users of these Unforgivable curses, because we’ve talked a lot about specific instances and what that tells us about the curses, what that tells us about the users. So I think if we enumerate all of them, I think we will be able to glean a lot more from it. I gotta say this was so much fun because Grace, Aurelia, and I were all in the doc yesterday at the same time, typing our notes on this. It was great.

Grace: It was very good. It was like an old 90s chat room.

Aurelia: At one point, I was adding one, and I was making a note for myself, “Need to double-check instance.” I was literally going out of the tab, coming back into the tab. Irvin’s already beat me to it. I was like, “Irvin, you’re too fast!”

Irvin: Yeah. I think you were typing one, and I was like, “Oh, that was a good one!” It was a lot of fun.

Grace: We like to cheer each other on. We have fun here.

Irvin: So first up: the Imperius curse, because we have our order. Users of the Imperius curse: there is Mulciber, the Death Eater who, according to Igor Karkaroff, specialized in the Imperius curse and forced countless people to do horrific things. There are both Crouches, Senior and Junior. Senior used it on his son for a very, very long time; Junior, other than for educational purposes, because he used it on Harry’s entire year. He also used it on Alastor Moody to keep him alive, but, I guess, keep him alive and sitting calmly in a trunk for nine months.

Aurelia: And to get information out of him.

Grace: I have to say: these two, Crouch and Crouch Jr., just winning cases for this curse. They’re so screwed up, they’re messed up. Particularly Crouch Sr., but yes. Oh my God. When I think of this curse, it’s those two that come to mind.

Irvin: Immediately. I won’t go into it because I have on prior episodes a lot, but Crouch Jr.’s relationship to the Imperius curse, his fierce antipathy towards it because of how it was used on him, I love so much.

Lorrie: He’s intense.

Irvin: But I also don’t quite understand how he used the Imperius to ask Moody questions. Does he Imperius Moody to answer him? Why not just use Legilimency or Veritaserum or something?

Aurelia: Maybe he can’t do Legilimency. He’s already in trouble with Snape for stealing stuff.

Irvin: That’s true, I guess. Yeah, because if you want to ask about at 19, I guess he may not have learned some of the finer Dark Arts that are the Death Eater arsenal. And what I actually found really interesting is he used Krum. He Imperiused Krum in the third task and then made the Imperiused Krum cast Crucio on Cedric. So we got layers of Unforgivables here.

Grace: There’s a lot there. Also, can I just say: Confundus, does it just confuse the people that it hits? Because I know sometimes, it seems as though they’re almost controlled in certain ways. So it just confuses a lot of them. Okay. Got it.

Irvin: Yeah. Just makes them disoriented.

Grace: So my constant state. Okay. Got it.

Irvin: I think Confundus is like getting someone really, really, really drunk.

Grace: Oh. See, that sounds like a fun spell. Okay, sorry, relax.

Irvin: You could cast Confundus on people, and then repair your soul. Okay, noted.

Grace: And feel okay about it later.

Irvin: Yeah. Actually, talking of layered curses — and I brought this up in a chapter episode a million years ago — Draco casts the Imperius on Rosmerta, who then casts the Imperius on Katie Bell. That is so impressive. Controlling someone enough to have them control someone else? The mental fortitude Draco must have while he is a super stressed sixteen-year-old. Damn, Draco.

Lorrie: He was scared.

Irvin: Scared, but really, mind is a steel trap.

Grace: Well done.

Irvin: And actually, both Malfoys have an affinity for the Imperius, because Lucius casts the Imperius on a lot of people.

Lorrie: On everyone.

Irvin: Yeah. Notably in Order of the Phoenix on Sturgis Podmore and Broderick Bode in the Ministry. Lucius is just strolling through the halls of the Ministry of Magic, throwing Imperius curses left and right on the off chance he hits someone. My God. It’s also so different because Lucius casts Imperius willy-nilly, while Draco was so intentional and so focused about it.

Grace: When you get to that level, you can just go off, I guess. It’s that level of dark wizard. Just cast it willy-nilly. That’s all you need. Over with Yaxley, though, or with Thicknesse. That one? Oh, that one rocks. That one slaps. What a good way to cast it, yes.

Irvin: Well, everyone is so impressed.

Lorrie: I was impressed.

Grace: I am also impressed.

Irvin: When he actually says it, everyone is like, “Oh my God. Whoa. Yaxley, you’re so cool.” Dolohov is clapping him on the back. Everyone’s like, “My God, Yaxley. MVP. MVP.”

Grace: Everybody opens up the bottles of champagne, spills everywhere.

Irvin: Yes. Also, everyone go listen to our Death Eater episodes plural.

Grace: They’re so good. I love them.

Irvin: Those were so much fun.

Grace: On a scale of Avery’s, how many Avery’s is Yaxley? What’d you say?

Irvin: I don’t remember what we said, but at least four or five.

Grace: I think that he’s pretty good. I was gonna say three or four, so we’re pretty close.

Irvin: Yeah. Someone needs to go back through that episode and actually write down our Avery rating, because this was so much fun.

Grace: I’ve referenced that system twice on different episodes.

Irvin: The Death Eater episodes were so seminal in Alohomora lore. We have Avery ratings, we have the Death Eater protocol. I love those episodes.

Grace: They’re very good.

Irvin: However, not only Death Eaters use the Imperius curse, because McGonagall uses it on Amycus Carrow during the Battle of Hogwarts, where she’s just had it by that point. Because she could tie him up, use Mobilicorpus or anything. She’s like, “Imperio. Go sit over there. I’m done.”

Lorrie: Yep. Do it to yourself.

Irvin: And Harry uses it on Travers and on Bogrod during the Great Gringotts Caper. I was always a really big fan of this, actually, because I think it’s such a great moment and it shows how this is war, tough choices, ethical quandaries. Harry has to do some sketchy things just because of how “world-is-ending-important” it all is. I thought it was really, really great.

Grace: I disagree.

Irvin: I’m so glad.

Grace: I don’t agree. I think that it would have been much more interesting if we had found a way story-wise for Harry to have avoided those three spells that had so much emphasis put on them. Just avoided them completely, because we’ve seen so many examples of how differently Harry thinks from Tom. If he managed to think differently up until the very end, I think it would have been more impactful.

Irvin: But he did, in terms of the killing curse. That was the bright line that couldn’t be crossed. I like that Harry had to dance up to it, but wouldn’t cross that final line.

Grace:  I don’t know. It’s still human rights violations, I would say. I think it just would have been more impactful and creative, had he not touched those.

Lorrie: I like that it makes it more complicated by not dividing the world into people who would and people who wouldn’t. And I also like that this is part of Harry not being afraid anymore of the Slytherin in him, and it makes him understand well Draco and Snape better.

Grace: Casting those spells doesn’t make you a Slytherin.

Lorrie: No, no, but understanding that doing what you have to in the situation, seeing how much is at risk, what is the terrible thing you can choose to do that hurts the fewest people, that might save the most people? And then telling yourself, “Don’t object to it now. Do what you have to do to get people out of this, and settle with your soul later.” It makes him understand a more complicated, realistic take on life in war.

Irvin: Yeah. It’s also, I think, one of the first times where Harry does something Voldemort would do but doesn’t freak out about it. So much in the earlier books, he’s like, “Oh my God. But what if? Am I like Voldemort? I can’t do something Voldemort would do.” And here, he’s just like, “I gotta do it. This is what it’s come to.”

Grace: It just set some very strange standards. I think, just me personally, I’m not a huge fan of the idea of this. I understand the arguments that you’re making; I think that they’re valid, I think that they’re interesting as well. I think that they’re great ways of seeing the books, much in the way that I think that book 7 isn’t my favorite. I think that there are other ways of handling Harry showing that he understands the seriousness of war, but remains someone who would be considered much more of a defense individual and a pacifist if he can manage it.

Irvin: If he can manage it, yes.

Lorrie: If he can manage it.

Grace: It’s an interesting take, and I just don’t think that… there are three very specific curses, and I think that there are other creative ways of handling situations.

Irvin: The experience of me and Lorrie being on the same side, arguing with Grace. I was like, “Oh my God, this is bizarre.”

Aurelia: I think for me, part of that is the prophecy and why he’s not literally walking to his death yet at this point. I think he’s already mentally getting ready for it. So he’s probably thinking, “I might not survive anyways. What’s gonna happen?”

Irvin: And the one other person that we witness using the Imperius curse is actually, as mentioned, Voldemort.  

Aurelia: WHAT?! Shocking.

Grace: No, no, no. Impossible.

Aurelia: He would never.

Irvin: But the shocking part is how little he almost would never. The shocking part is how little he uses it. I only count two instances, both in Goblet of Fire. He uses it on Harry in the graveyard during his three-act musical for the Death Eaters.

Lorrie: He makes Harry dance.

Grace: It was a shimmy and a shake, you know.

Irvin: Yeah. And presumably, he’s the one who puts Crouch Sr. under the Imperius, but it’s ambiguous. Crouch Jr. during the Veritaserum chapter says, “My father was placed under the Imperius curse by my master. Now my father was the one imprisoned, controlled. My master forced him to go about his business as usual.” Yada, yada, yada. My understanding of that is that Voldemort was the one actually doing the Imperius.

Grace: Yeah. That’s what I understood, too.

Irvin: The more interesting part is that Voldemort doesn’t use it once he is back to his body and back to Voldemorting as usual, because he would much rather–

Grace: (laughs) I’m sorry, that’s going on the list. Voldemorting as usual.

Irvin: Actually, that’s my vote for the episode title

Grace: That’s very good.

Irvin: But yeah, he would much rather control people through making them fear him than magical means.

Grace: This plays into my theory that he doesn’t do things unless they’re necessary. He’s not going to put forth the effort unless it has to be put forth. He’s not gonna control everybody with all this massive power he has. He’s going to save that for when it’s necessary.

Irvin: No, he puts in much more effort to controlling them through non-magical means. Imperio would be the easy way out here.

Grace: But then you have to split your power between many different sources. So, if you’re going to Imperio one person, you have to have a bunch of other people. It just makes more sense to force people under your will and expect them to carry out the task, which doesn’t always work out as we see many times.

Irvin: Yeah. He’s doing the long con.

Grace: Yeah, it’s a long con.

Lorrie: But also a Dark Lord has the right to have some fun. Scaring people into doing things instead of Imperio-ing them amuses him. Imperio is boring.

Aurelia: I like that the reasoning for it is he wants to have fun.

Lorrie: He amuses himself all the time.

Irvin: Listen, Cyndi Lauper once sang: Dark Lords Just Want to Have Fun. Grace, did you and I go to the exact same place for that?

Grace: Yeah. Okay, that’s going on the list, too. But I gotta say, Lorrie. Where are you seeing that? Because I believe you, I might have missed something. Where is he just having fun?

Lorrie: For example, at the beginning of Deathly Hallows, he teases Bellatrix about being related to a werewolf, and he’s just being mean.

Grace: Yeah. It’s his sense of showing superiority and making sure that people stay in their place. I guess maybe that’s having fun. It’s so hard to say with Tom, because like you don’t really see… This is the thing about the series, is that you only see the scenes where he is being big bad. He’s only doing the wrong things. You never see him struggle, you never see him upset, you never see him have fun, you never see him laugh at something funny. These are things that humanize characters, and Dumbledore very specifically does not want to humanize Tom for Harry.

Irvin: We see him upset when he finds out about the horcruxes. I’m sure we see it.

Grace: I mean, upset over things that are not in placement, not in regards to storyline things. Things that are character-driven things, smaller things. You see Harry upset about Quidditch; that doesn’t have to do with anything in the greater sense of the series. You never see Tom upset that he can’t afford better robes or something. That’s a humanizing moment, yet you never see these things. So I would say that you don’t get to see Tom have fun, because Tom can’t be a character in Harry’s eyes. If that is the case, Dumbledore’s arguments start to fall apart.

Lorrie: Well, Harry doesn’t see it, but we do. Harry doesn’t see Voldemort having fun, but we see it when he’s…

Irvin: Dark Lord ascending, he’s having fun.

Lorrie: Yeah. And when there’s…

Grace: But that’s also performative fun, right? He’s performing in that moment.

Irvin: Oh, okay. I have one. In the Riddle house, when he’s like, “You will do something many of my followers would give their right hands to do.” That is him having fun.

Grace: He’s also, yet again, performing and controlling people.

Irvin: He’s not performing because Wormtail doesn’t get that reference, and there’s no one else to perform for. That is Voldemort just amusing himself.

Lorrie: Yeah. Who cares about performing for Wormtail?

Grace: But there’s some wonderful notes about Crucio here that I would love to dive into.

Irvin: Yes. Well, in terms of users of Crucio, obviously the first one that comes to mind, the woman who is synonymous with the spell, is one Bellatrix Lestrange, who uses it on anyone and everyone she comes across.

Aurelia: Yeah. Notedly, Neville and Hermione see it and then we know about her and her gang of friends. Rodolphus, Rabastan, and Crouch Jr. fought Neville’s parents.

Irvin: Yeah. So I actually want to trace the question, and obviously we have zero way of knowing the answer. But do we think all four of them were torturing the Longbottoms? Or, and I could see this as Bellatrix takes lead in torturing them, and the boys just stand back and watch a master at work.

Lorrie: I think torture is one of the perks of being a Death Eater. I think they all love doing it.

Aurelia: That was not what I was going to say. I understood from when we go into Dumblrdore’s memory into seeing the hearing of Crouch, Jr. that all four of them convicted for doing it.

Irvin: Well, because you can’t really separate who was doing it after the fact, right?

Aurelia: Well, you could look at the wands and see who performed the spell.

Lorrie: This is also super gross, but there’s a group sex aspect to this. If you’re sadistic like this, then the excitement of doing something like this together and reinforcing each other’s satisfaction seeing the victimization of these two people. Actually, the whole series is about how magic is stronger when groups of people do it together, whether it’s Crucio or whether it’s making the Marauder’s Map.

Irvin: Eew. I’m sorry, EEW.

Lorrie: Well, Death Eaters are gross.

Irvin: But Crouch Jr. Is 19. He’s this nineteen-year-old Hufflepuff boy who fell in with these 40-year-old Death Eaters. Oh my God. Won’t someone think of the children?

Lorrie: He’s smarter than all of them together.

Grace: In this series, they’re never thinking of the children. Are you kidding me?

Lorrie: They’re always thinking of the children.

Irvin: Oh, poor Barty.

Aurelia: I also thought part of why the Longbottoms end up being in the mental state that they are is because four of them did it at the same time, because it wasn’t a long time period, per se. It was days.

Irvin: We don’t know that. They could have been at it for ages. In fact, that always was my impression.

Grace: That they were out there a while, yeah.

Lorrie: They probably were, but it’s the same as when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are 13 and they do Expelliarmus on Snape. One of them could never have done it, but the three of them together, you can do it.

Irvin: Alright, I want to move on from that.

Grace: We’ve sat in this uncomfortable notion for too long.

Lorrie: These are Unforgivables. They’re gross.

Irvin: Well, Bellatrix is an icon. Voldemort also uses Crucio very, very frequently; much more than Imperio, mostly as a way of maintaining discipline in his ranks. He Crucios Avery a lot.

Grace: Being the HR manager is very difficult.

Irvin: It is. It’s a thankless task.

Grace: You gotta go from the boss to the employees. You’re the middle person and you’re going to take a lot of the brunt of that. Oh Avery. We knew you well.

Irvin: He also uses it on Harry. That is Harry’s first taste of having Crucio cast on him. In the graveyard. In the graveyard, Voldemort casts all three Unforgivables at Harry. It’s a very nice recap of what we’ve learned.

Grace: It’s a good time sampling, really. It’s just a good review.

Aurelia: It’s so nice of Tom to always attack at the end of the school year so Harry knows what’s happening.

Irvin: It’s essentially the final exam. This is Harry’s final exam.

Aurelia: So now that my Death Eater taught you these three spells and their meaning, let’s use them.

Irvin: But Harry then ends up using Crucio. He attempts it on Bellatrix and Snape, and then succeeds in using it on Amycus Carrow. Let’s circle back to this because I always liked Harry using Imperio. I really, really, really did not like him using Crucio. I objected to that a lot more. I’ve slightly come around on it in the ensuing years because I see what Jo was going for, in terms of just… he is drained. It has been a day for him and it has also been a 17 years for him, and he’s at that rawest nerve-breaking point, but I do think I would have liked it better if he hadn’t used the Cruciatus.

Aurelia: I think I was more shocked the first time he attempts it, but he doesn’t attempt it on Bellatrix. I was like, “What? Really? Are we doing this?” by the time he does it to Carrow. So I was like, “Well, I guess this is Harry’s second go-to by now.”

Irvin: It’s how he lashes out..I don’t know, it seemed so less justified. With Bellatrix and Snape, you can see where he’s going with that, the righteous anger bit. With Carrow, he spit at McGonagall, which is a very shitty thing to do, but I don’t think it justifies torture.

Lorrie: Well, yeah. It’s meant to make us be troubled. He was not losing control; he premeditated that and it wasn’t necessary.

Aurelia: Which is probably why he was successful: because he was not in that headspace.

Lorrie: Yeah, and like Bellatrix said, “You have to mean it.” And he meant it.

Irvin: And the one character moment I can’t ever get past — literally one of my least favorite character moments in the entire series — is when McGonagall commends him for it and calls him gallant. And I’m like, “That is wrong on every level. It’s wrong from like a thematic standpoint of the books we’re reading. It’s very, very wrong from my character standpoint. For McGonagall, it’s very out of character.

Grace: Yeah, if I read that in a fanfiction, I would have instantly stopped.

Irvin: One out of five stars, OOC, do not recommend.

Lorrie: I have never understood that reading of McGonagall saying that, because I always read it as her not knowing what to say because, obviously, Harry shouldn’t have done it. She’s kind of shocked, like, “Did you just…? Well, I guess it was gallant.” But I never thought of it as… I thought of it as her not knowing what to do with it, the same way we readers were supposed to not know what to do with it. Anyway, that’s how I read it.

Irvin: I like that a lot better.

Grace: Yeah, I do like that one. That is more in line with the character that we know. But yeah, it’s a strange situation. Yet again, I’m not a huge fan of him using any of the spells, but we already know this. We’ve already gone through it.

Irvin: I feel if someone was like, “Take out one line from the Harry Potter books,” I might do that one.

Lorrie: If I were the beta for that chapter, I might say, “Could you go back and make it clearer that she’s just flummoxed? ‘You know you shouldn’t have done that, but…’”

Irvin: But Lorrie, I’m really glad that you’re here and you gave me that reading of McGonagall, because it’s something I’ve struggled with for 15 years since I read book seven. I really needed that.

Grace: Yet again, book 7. There’s a lot of ways that that could have ended. There’s a lot of ways this could’ve been taken, yet here we are.

Irvin: Book 7 is when things were… It has the highest highs. There are moments of that book that are just poetry in motion. And then there are some things that it’s just like, “This was not a choice I would have made.”

Lorrie: I think it’s a genuinely difficult book to understand. Some of that is because the historical pressures under which it was written. The secrecy made it not available to the kind of editing process that normal writers get. Some of it, I think, was intentional, and it’s actually on us to work at it. I think Harry doing this filthy Cruciatus curse, that was not necessary and totally premeditated, is intended to be as difficult as we find it.

Grace: Harry, you’re gross right now. I don’t like it. Bad, bad boy.

Irvin: Well, okay. Talking about gross things and gross people doing gross things: The other people who use Cruciatus throughout the text, presumably Lucius Malfoy and Dolohov; we don’t see either of them actually explicitly using the Cruciatus, but both of them are remarked upon for torturing in Death Eater service in Goblet of Fire, with the presumption that they are using Crucio. Among the other Death Eater ranks who use it, does Crouch Jr. actually use Crucio on anything but spiders? Because we know he uses it on spiders as part of his pedagogy, and technically he secondhand uses it through Viktor Krum on Cedric. But do we ever see Crouch Jr. cast Crucio on a human being himself?

Grace: I hadn’t been paying attention to it. I don’t think he does.

Lorrie: I don’t think so.

Irvin: Interesting.

Grace: God, he’s such an interesting character. We could go on forever about him.

Irvin: I don’t know what I’m making of that, but I’m making something.

Aurelia: It goes back to the Bellatrix situation. If you believe like I do, that he did it on the Longbottoms.

Irvin: Yeah, okay. Sorry. It’s very interesting that he explicitly uses the others. Crucio, he’s always dancing around and tiptoeing towards, but we don’t see it.

Aurelia: Maybe that is because Longbottoms have happened, and he lost his taste for it.

Irvin: Ooooooooh. Sorry. I’mma just bask in that thought for a minute and go write a book about it.

Aurelia: You’re welcome.

Irvin: Thank you. Grace, go on.  I’mma sit with it.

Grace: This is my own personal headcanon and there’s nothing to support this, but it just seems in character: my headcanon is that anyone that you see in the Inner Circle has cast all three. I assume that he has in many ways, but who can say? It just seems, to me, much more logical of Tom to have tried them in this way.

Irvin: You think it’s part of Death Eater initiation?

Grace: I think so, and they all go for a communal tattoo and have drinks afterwards.

Lorrie: Yeah, I disagree. But like you said, there’s nothing to tell either way.

Grace: Yeah, this is just how I read the character and how I’ve known him. I think that this feels much more Tom than it does a lot of other things. Also proving loyalty in general. 

Lorrie: My reading of it is that he would not have required anyone to do something that wasn’t already their own secret vice, because getting them to do stuff that they might not want to just to prove loyalty to him is not as efficient. Remember when he says, “Oh yes, I will have assignments for you to indulge your appetites.”

Grace: Okay. Let me expand, because I do agree with you.

Lorrie: But if your appetite is not for some things, then why would he bother with that? He would just find the thing that’s your catnip and just focus on that.

Grace: It’s a way of testing them, as well. His will supersedes theirs. If he wants it to be done, he wants to make sure they will make it done.

Lorrie: But on the other hand, because he has the Dark Mark, he doesn’t need any further tests than the fact that he can just read their minds all the time.

Irvin: I don’t think he can read their minds with a Dark Mark.

Grace: I don’t think he can read their minds with a Dark Mark, either.

Lorrie: Well, he doesn’t need to for Legilimency reasons. He does not doubt his legitimacy abilities at all. But also, I don’t think Snape has ever cast an Unforgivable until he does Avada Kedavra.

Irvin: I disagree with that.

Grace: This is where I differ from you. I think he casts all three. I think he casts all three and he did them many times, but this is another completely different way.

Lorrie: But we’ve never seen anything of it.

Aurelia: But that would’ve been during his proper Death Eater days, so we don’t see those.

Lorrie: But Bellatrix complains. Bellatrix complains about him, that he never does anything.

Irvin: Yeah, now in the post-resurrection era.

Grace: It can be read in many ways. I’m sorry. I got us off topic with this and I apologize for that. It’s just I felt that it feels like something he would impose, and I love your thought process in saying that he’s going to use this catnip style, that he would actually do it this way. I think it’s one step in a many-step process. I think that might be one of them. I think the catnip definitely plays in, though.

Irvin: Yeah. I think he definitely would rather just have Death Eaters who are happy to be there and enjoy the process, so I think he would have, more or less, just let them do whatever they want as long as it was evil. But that said, we do see him subjecting Draco to it.

Lorrie: To what?

Irvin: Forcing Draco to do Unforgivables he doesn’t want to do.

Lorrie: Yeah, but he’s enjoying it. He’s using it to punish Lucius. It’s not to just initiate Draco. It’s because he knows this is going to poison Draco’s soul and upset his parents.

Grace: Two birds, one stone, baby.

Irvin: My reading of him forcing Draco to torture Rowle and Dolohov, which mind you, we don’t see Draco actually casting the Cruciatus. But also Voldemort says, “torture them.” I think it’s implied.

Grace: I think it’s implied, yeah.

Irvin: I think it’s much more about breaking Draco and turning him into a Death Eater. I think because Voldemort realizes he needs to recruit the next generation, and he finds Draco a very promising candidate if only he didn’t have these like weird moral hangups. And that’s about very much forcing Draco to use Unforgivables he doesn’t want to to turn him into a proper Death Eater.

Grace: We see him do this time and time again.

Lorrie: I disagree. I think he’s doing it purely to punish Lucius. I don’t think he thinks Draco is a big deal, and I don’t think he ever intends to depend on any of the Malfoys ever again.

Irvin: And we’ll just have to disagree on that one.

Lorrie: He’s just going to move into their house.

Grace: Well, yeah. He wants a throne to sit on and wants a really nice house.

Irvin: Listen, who of us doesn’t?

Grace: Yeah, for sure. Okay. I think that we’ve seen it in the past a lot with him. He tried his best with Regulus. Regulus didn’t quite work out. It actually worked with Bellatrix and with Lucius; it’s just not working with Draco the same way. So you get what you get, and you try it again. You miss all the shots you never take.

Irvin: Voldemort likes recruiting young, promising, dark wizards out of Hogwarts. Keep in mind that Regulus, Barty, Snape, all these people were 18 when they joined. Now, Voldemort’s whole Death Eater circle is getting up there a little bit. They’re all middle-aged plus, and he’s like, “No one lives forever except me.”

Grace: You’ve been looking a wee bit crusty, One of them just got crushed in the Ministry.

Irvin: They can’t quite chase teenagers around the way they used to.

Grace: Okay, I’m sorry. Going back to our list.

Irvin: Okay. So other promising Death Eaters who might use it upon being recruited are Crabbe and Goyle, because apparently Crabbe and Goyle are excelling in Dark Arts class once the curriculum becomes learning the Cruciatus curse. And we actually see Crabbe Jr. cast the Crucio in the Room of Requirement when he’s like, “This is my final exam. Look at what I’ve learned.”

Grace: I’m glad he’s excelling in something.

Irvin: Really. He was taught it by Amycus Carrow who also very much likes the Cruciatus because we see Amycus cast Crucio in the Battle of the Tower, when he keeps trying to hit Ginny with it, along with one of the grossest lines of all time: “You can’t dance forever, pretty.” Just the grossest. I think that this is Aurelia’s note, and it was an excellent one: Grindelwald, as a teenager, casts it on Aberforth, and Aberforth is like, “I’m not a fan of what’s happening here.”

Aurelia: Yeah. That’s a good reason, isn’t it?

Irvin: Also, it shows what an impact it had on Aberforth that 130 years later, he brings it up as part of the story, because it’s not really relevant to the story. He’s like, “Yes. Then we were dueling because we didn’t get along and spells were flying. BTW, got the Cruciatus used on me. That happened, and then Ariana lay dead on the floor.”

Aurelia: Which probably shows us another emphasis for, “These are really not good curses, and the Wizarding community frowns upon for using them.”

Irvin: Yeah. And honorable mention because I don’t think we actually see her using it, but Umbridge intends to use the Cruciatus on Harry, and she is so excited about it.

Lorrie: She’s very happy.

Irvin: And then, there is one more instance in the books of a Cruciatus user, and that is Babbity Rabbity.

Grace: This shocked me. This threw me for a loop. This is a lot.

Irvin: In the fairy tale Babbity Rabbity: The Cackling Stump, near the end, Babbity Rabbity threatens the king with “pain that will feel like an axe in your own side every time he hurts wizards or witches.” Dumbledore, in his notes, says that this is reminiscent of the Cruciatus curse, because when Beetle was writing his fairy tales, they weren’t outlawed. So yeah, Babbity Rabbity, y’all.

Grace: That’s wild. That’s a lot to think about. Then again, fairy tales are also screwed up in a lot of ways.

Irvin: Yes, this very much fits in with all our fairy tales. Because yeah, a lot of our fairy tales end up with the villains being tortured at the end, when you think about it.

Grace: Like the iron shoes?

Irvin: Yep. That’s what I was thinking of.

Grace: Woof. And Pinocchio, that’s not an original fairy tale. I think that was made in the 1800’s, but the original is screwed up. That is pretty wild. Pinocchio’s just got a lot of weird elements in it. Look it up, guys. Italian fairy tales are weird. So what’s happening? Who’s killing people? Let’s jump on in.

Aurelia: Your friend.

Grace: My friend, my preference if I was going to clock out from any of the Death Eaters, because at least I know it’ll be quick.

Irvin: Yeah. Well, Voldemort, just anyone, everyone. It’s his default. Aurelia, you were the one who put Crouch Jr. as fake Moody.

Aurelia: Doesn’t he kill his dad before he turns him into a big bone?

Irvin: Yes, that’s very true. See, that’s what we call escalation. Crouch Sr. cast Imperios on him, and he responds with Avada Kedavra.

Grace: You have to be very careful with these things, okay?

Irvin: Slippery slope.

Grace: It’s a very slippery slope.

Irvin: Imperio is a gateway Unforgivable.

Aurelia: 17 years of Imperio. How many years are there?

Irvin: I think it’s 14.

Aurelia: Okay, let’s say 14 years of Imperio. Is that equal to one Avada Kedavra?

Grace: Sliding scale.

Irvin: It’s a 14:1 conversion rate.

Aurelia: Are we losing our minds? Maybe.

Grace: So if we do it for 13, they haven’t earned it yet, really.

Irvin: This is my favorite part of the episode, when we get loopy at the 3-hour mark.

Aurelia: We’re also now getting to the one where you beat me to looking up which one.

Irvin: Yes. One Bellatrix LeStrange. Aurelia was like, “Does she?” and I was like, “Yes, Bellatrix kills a fox in the Spinners End chapter.”

Lorrie: And I don’t think it was Avada Kedavra. We see it was green light, but there’s more than one spell to kill people or foxes.

Irvin: I’m sorry. I think if there’s a green light and something falls dead, I think it is a very, very clear implication it’s Avada Kedavra.

Lorrie: Oh, there’s other killing curses we see that are not Avada Kedavra.

Irvin: No, there aren’t. We hear of them. We don’t see any.

Lorrie: Molly Weasley.

Irvin: Yes. but there’s no green light.

Lorrie: But what I’m saying is, Avada Kedavra is a killing curse, but not the only one.

Irvin: Yes, but again, it has a signature green light.

Lorrie: There’s green lights for other things, too. Anyway…

Irvin: So the impressive thing that I found about Bellatrix’s killing curse on the fox is that it was cast non-verbally, and I think this is the only explicit nonverbal use of an Unforgivable. The only one that comes close is Voldemort in the Department of Mysteries, when he’s dueling Dumbledore: “By which time, I shall be gone and you dead,” spat Voldemort. He sent another killing curse at Dumbledore, but missed.” We don’t know if he cast it non-verbally, or if he just said Avada Kedavra and the narrator didn’t feel the need to tell us, but yeah. But Bellatrix on the fox, that’s a clear nonverbal killing curse, which I feel is really damn impressive from a magical standpoint.

Grace: That is remarkably well done. You don’t see that anywhere else.

Irvin: Yeah. It really goes to show how formidable Bellatrix is.

Aurelia: Are you changing your mind, Grace? Do you rather want Bellatrix to do it?

Grace: No, she’s still gonna torture me. No no no no no. This doesn’t convince me of anything. If anything, I’m thinking back to the moment for the duel and the Department of Mysteries and I’m like, “God, every single time Tom is talking to Dumbledore, it’s always just like, ‘Senpai noticed me.’” The whole thing is just an angry version of, “Why don’t you look at me, ever?”

Irvin: Yeah. Also, Bellatrix only kills foxes. The people, she tortures.

Aurelia: I love foxes.

Grace: Me, too. It’s upsetting. I don’t like it.

Aurelia: What have foxes ever done to you?

Grace: I know. Jerk!

Irvin: Question, Aurelia. When did the fox hunting ban go into play in the UK?

Aurelia: You think I know that, top of my head?

Irvin: Well, we watched an entire musical about it in July.

Grace: What?

Irvin: Aurelia and I went to see Tony Blair: The Rock Opera when I was in London, and Blair was the one who introduced the ban on fox hunting as prime minister. So there was a man in a giant fox costume.

Aurelia: That would’ve been quite late, then.

Irvin: Because the Spinners End chapter takes place in July 1996, which is towards the end of Tony Blair’s premiership.

Grace: There’s a wild back story to this question. There’s a lot to this.

Aurelia: It was banned in 2004. Not in Northern Ireland, because Northern Ireland never does anything interesting.

Irvin: Sorry. Got my timeline mixed up. Blair was only elected PM in 1997. This was John Major’s ministership. Sorry. Yes. So technically, when Bellatrix killed the fox, it wasn’t illegal. She was just fox hunting like the British aristocrats.

Grace: Good for her, I guess. That’s screwed up. It doesn’t surprise me at all about her. I think she might have been a little bit sad and disappointed to learn it wasn’t illegal.

Aurelia: Well, if she never learned about it, she dies before it’s become illegal.

Irvin: But if she was still alive, that would have killed her.

Grace: It would have been very upsetting. It would’ve been something she had to sort through internally.

Irvin: I also wonder, going back to the nonverbal bit, if from a Doyle-list perspective the reason Crucio and Imperio are never cast non-verbally is because they don’t have a distinct look. If someone casts Imperio or Crucio, you wouldn’t know what that looked like. When Unforgivables are cast, it always tells so much about the caster and the castee and all that. You need to know that someone’s doing it when they’re doing it. Whereas with Avada Kedavra, when a jet of green light is flying, you’re like, “I know what’s going on.”

Aurelia: Yeah, that’s a good point actually. I think, in general, we don’t know enough about which spells have light effects and which ones don’t.

Irvin: I presume most of them have some kind of light effect, because you always see spells flying at you or bouncing off, so there’s a clearly visual element to them.

Aurelia: Yeah. It’s a bit hard to duck something if you don’t see something.

Irvin: Yeah. Just from a narrative perspective, it’s helpful if we only have a few signature visuals. Jet of green light, scarlet light, that kind of thing.

Grace: For dramatic purposes. It helps with being able to tell the readership something without actually having to spoon-feed them. So, yeah.

Irvin: Also, of course, Jo’s whole visual dichotomy: green, Slytherin; Avada Kedavra, bad.

Grace: Bad, terrible, rotten, awful.

Irvin: Red: disarming, Gryffindors, love it. Nothing but good things.

Grace: Nothing but good things. All the bad things are the green things. Take them away, make them die, they deserve to go back to that.

Aurelia: All the plants, all the trees.

Grace: All the plants and trees, kill them all.

Aurelia: I think Percy as Minister is taking that too hard.

Irvin: Jo just really likes fall. She likes it when the leaves are changing color, she doesn’t want all that greenery.

Grace: Get it out of here.

Irvin: Exactly. She’s like one of those like girls who loves pumpkin spice lattes and is yelling at trees. “Why don’t you die? This is fall!”

Grace: It’s become unhinged at this point.

Irvin: Yes. Also. Oh my God. You guys, I got a pumpkin spice Native deodorant for the fall, and I am so excited. I’m living my best life.

Grace: We have to get that. I’m telling my husband right now. We have to get pumpkin spice Native deodorant.

Irvin: We are no longer sponsored by Native, but I smell amazing. I smell like fall right now.

Aurelia: I’ve seen the… [intelligible, crosstalk]

Irvin: Okay, right. Other killers in the text.

Aurelia: Alright. Thorfinn Rowle.

Irvin: Yes. He’s casting killing curses willy-nilly during the Battle of the Tower and kills poor Gibbon. R.I.P. Gibbon.

Grace: Gibbon, we knew you well.

Aurelia: So well.

Grace: We did.

Irvin: Crabbe, both Senior and Junior, attempt to hit Hermione with a killing curse.

Aurelia: Well, that seems like a fun family sport.

Irvin: Yeah. This is such a cool connection. Again, see the Death Eater episode, but they have a whole thing in common. Crabbe tries to hit Hermione with the killing curse in the Department of Mysteries before becoming a baby head, and then Crabbe Jr. tries to hit her with the killing curse in the Room of Requirement. He’s so horrible about it; he’s like, “Oh, it’s that Mudblood! Avada Kedavra!” It’s like, “You, sir, are terrible.”

Grace: Oh, God. So many implications here. You would have been in so much trouble. Wait, no. Not for Hermione, but in case it just hit Harry. That would be bad. 

Irvin: Also, Peter Pettigrew kills Cedric. R.I.P. Cedric.

Grace:  A very good boy. Everyone shed a tear.

Irvin: I’m sorry. That moment just brings me back to the Harry Potter exhibit with Grace and Lorrie.

Grace: Oh my God.

Irvin: Aurelia, I don’t know if I told you this story, but at the Harry Potter exhibit in Philly, there’s a Portkey exhibit, right? So we all go, and I’m in my Hufflepuff robes, all in yellow and black, showing house pride, and we touch the Portkey and it’ll take you somewhere fun. And when I touch it, it takes you to the graveyard. And I go and I was like, “Oh my God, they’re gonna kill the spare. I’m the Spare!” And I just ran screaming from it. It was so creepy.

Grace: Oh, my God, what a fun exhibit. That was a lot of fun.

Irvin: That was a blast.

Grace: I got to go to the Chamber of Secrets. Holla!

Lorrie: That was beautiful.

Irvin: And then Lorrie and I were just standing in the horcrux Chamber of Secrets space, waiting for Grace to see it so we could see her reaction.

Grace: It was so fun. It was great. That was a good time.

Irvin: That was a blast.

Grace: Do we get our honorable mention here?

Irvin: Oh no, there’s one more. Lorrie, perhaps you should tell us who the last person we see using the killing curse in the text is.

Lorrie: The last person?

Irvin: Hint, there’s a reason I’m asking you.

Lorrie: It’s not, though, is it?

Irvin: No, not the last one chronologically. The last one we’re bringing up right now.

Lorrie: Oh, okay. Sorry. Well, Snape is very, very unhappy to have had to use the killing curse on Dumbledore and resents it very much.

Irvin: Yes, very true!

Lorrie: He didn’t enjoy it.

Grace: But you’re so very good at it, Mr. Snape. Just so very good at it.

Lorrie: If he didn’t do it well, then everything would have been screwed up. He had to do it well, as usual.

Grace: So forced, so put upon. 

Irvin: Don’t you hate it when competence is demanded of you? Story of my life.

Lorrie: If you want competence, he’s your guy. Sure. Should I be the worst person ever? All right. Fine.

Irvin: But if I’m gonna be the worst, then I’m gonna do it right or wrong, as the case may be.

Lorrie: I commissioned a fan artist to do a whole comic strip about the day that Dumbledore asked him to do that, and he’s writing, “Dear diary, you will not believe what my boss…”

Irvin: Is the diary a horcrux?

Lorrie: No, It’s just some crappy little diary that he bought a long time ago.

Irvin: And then… not canon, but Aurelia thought it was worth mentioning anyway.

Aurelia: Oh yeah. We talked about it earlier, but Lucius Malfoy for some wild reason does it at the end of the Chamber of Secrets movie. When he realizes Dobby is no longer his possession, and he’s like, “You cost me my servant. I will kill you!” Okay, Lucius.

Irvin: Let me kill this 12-year-old boy in a school.

Grace: In defense of Jason Isaacs, he did not know what he was saying, and someone had just said this is a bad curse. Because he had asked someone, “What’s a bad curse I could say at the end of this,” and they told him about Avada Kedavra and he’s just like, “Okay, I guess I’ll just do that.”

Aurelia: I’m not blaming Jason Isaacs, but other responsible people were there.

Irvin: We would never blame Jason Isaacs.

Aurelia: To tell him, “Well, maybe not that one. Just use a different one.”

Grace: It was a creative decision that I don’t understand. It does look cool on camera, I will say that.

Irvin: Yeah, the irony being is that the killing curse is the only one we don’t know that Lucius was using.

Grace: Yeah. Actually, we never see him use that one. Well, way to go, movie Lucius. You did it. You beat them.

Irvin: All right, and I believe with that, those are the three Unforgivable curses.

Grace: In every way.

Irvin: Crucio, Crucio…

Grace: There’s so many good songs for these. And let me say: Lorrie, you were incredible. You also wrote lyrics for the Unforgivables song.

Lorrie:  I did. And I’m a terrible singer, or I would sing them.

Grace: I’m not gonna sing the whole thing. I will just do the first word, and that is it.

Irvin: No. Well, someone has to.

Grace: No, no, it’s not gonna happen. No.

Irvin: Yes. Grace, you are like Snape: you are competent, and we are demanding it of you.

Grace: I’m not even competent at it. All I wanted to do is thank Lorrie and her brilliance.

Irvin: No! No gratitude until it’s sung!

Grace: No. Lorrie, tell me all about your book and how great you are.

Lorrie: Well, the lyrics go, “That’s why my life is unlivable: your failed, wimpy Unforgivable. I’ll make your 8 lives unlivable, too.”

[applause]

Irvin: Snaps.

Lorrie: Because my theory is that Voldemort’s AK has never worked on Harry because he didn’t mean them.

Grace: We talked about this theory. This is a good one. It’s solid.

Lorrie: You can’t kill the one person who might have answers for you. Anyway, yes, my book.

Irvin: Your book!

Lorrie: Snape: The Definitive Analysis of Hogwarts’s Mysterious Potions Master is now out wherever books are sold from Media Lab Books. Buy it, leave a review. There. I’ve done my bit now.

Irvin: Yes, everyone get the book. It has this gorgeous, sexy, black cover. Also, if you’ve read my Dumbledore book and you know that half of it is just, “Well, Lorrie said this, so I’m gonna say this.” You need the two together, so everyone, go buy the Snape book.

Grace: They’re both very, very good books.

Aurelia: You should offer them as a bundle.

Irvin: Oh, 100%.

Grace: Lorrie, your website’s LorrieKim.com, right? That’s LorrieKim.com. Go check it out, guys. This book is… I loved it. I loved this book so much, and I can only imagine that it gets better with the edits that you’ve made to it. So can’t wait to see.

Lorrie: Thank you.

Irvin: Lorrie, thanks so much for A) telling me we should do this episode, B) coming on this episode and being brilliant as usual. This is a blast.

Lorrie: Thank you for having me, especially since you don’t agree with me on anything.

Irvin: Not a thing.

Grace: You did, during this episode. You did, cause I was the disagreement. So that was fun. Good time.

Irvin: Yes. History was made here, right here, ladies and gentlemen.

Grace: Hopefully, history shall be made again with the next episode. It’s going to be a chapter revisit of Order of the Phoenix. Yet, again, I was about to say Ocarina of Time; that is not what it is. Order of the Phoenix, chapter 21: Eye of the Snake. We all become Barty Crouch, Sr.

Irvin: And listeners. If you want to be on the show for that episode, you can visit our website, alohomorapodcast.com, and choose Be On The Show. Follow the instructions to send us your audition. You just need a microphone and a pair of headphones, and if you’re chosen to guest host, we’ll walk you through the rest. And while you are on the website, be sure to visit the topic submit page to tell us what you’d like to hear us talk about on future episodes, or just call any of us and tell us, like Lorrie did. Either way works.

Aurelia: That works. If you don’t have our phone numbers, you can contact us on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Spotify at AlohamoraMN. Quick reminder that you can now find us on Amazon Music. That is amazon.com/alohomora. We are on Facebook at facebook.com/openthedumbledore. You can leave us a voicemail. Just go to the Be On The Show page, and there you’ll find the instructions on how to do that. And if you’re so inclined, please don’t forget to leave us reviews. We love if they’re five stars, but please just review how you feel. And you can find our website on alohomorapodcast.com. You can also email us at alohomorapodcast@gmail.com.

Grace: We know you love giving those five star reviews. Come on, come on. We know you love it.

Irvin: Yes. We would like 1.67 stars / Unforgivable.

Grace: Please, please, please, please do this. I will say: big thanks again to Camille Jacques and Oliver Hetherington Page for sponsoring the episode. YAY!  You’re the best! For the ad-free version of Alohomora, which I know you guys are all interested in hearing, you can also head over to Patreon to be one of the cool kids and become a sponsor for as little as two dollars a month. That is nothing. You get access to Dumbledore’s Office, our Discord page, our Facebook page, episode sponsoring, exclusive clips, bonus episodes, all these little cool things. So just head on over there. There’s so much to see. I think it’s patreon.com/alohomora.

Irvin: Yeah, that’s the one.

Grace: Hell, yeah. It has been a lovely episode and I enjoyed every second of it. Thanks so much, you guys. My name is Grace.

Aurelia: I’m Aurelia.

Irvin: And I’m Irvin. Thank you for listening to Episode 359 of Alohomora:

Aurelia: Imperio!

Grace: Crucio!

Irvin: Avada Kedavra! Open The Dumbledore!

Narrator: Alohomora is produced by Tracy Dunstan and edited by Patrick Musilek. It was co-created by Noah Fried and Kat Miller, and is brought to you by APWBD, LLC.

Lorrie: There’s some scene where Death Eaters are about to torture Harry, I think it’s in the end of Goblet of Fire. They can tell that torture’s about to happen and he’s starting to hyperventilate, like how he and Bellatrix and Umbridge do when Crucio is about to happen, so he’s actually getting excited about this.

Irvin: Really?

Grace: I don’t remember.

Irvin: I have no recollection of this.

Lorrie: I will find it.

Grace: You might be right. Let me look through my notebook, but that’s… maybe you might be correct? We don’t have to do it right now because I know that we’re in the middle of stuff, but I know that this is… where are we? Where Is it? My handwriting is all over the place. Could that also be performative though, even if he was panting? Because, yet again, he’s in a crowd of people doing things. I think you get a lot more substance when you see people struggle on their own or be happy on their own. Maybe… the word play could definitely be him having fun.

Lorrie: He really likes his jokes.

Grace: He loves a good joke. He loves a good wordplay joke because he comes back to it a lot. But that really doesn’t tell you a ton about his character. He likes wordplay, I guess.

Lorrie: He thinks he’s hilarious

Grace: He thinks he’s hilarious and clever. Also, I think he’s hilarious and clever, too. I’m very easily amused.

Irvin: Grace, you and Voldemort have that in common.

Grace: We do, we do.

Irvin: In fairness, Dumbledore also thinks he’s hilarious and clever, and I think that, too, so Dumbledore and I have that in common.

Grace: AYE!!! I do love Dumbledore. I do. So does Tom in many weird ways.

Lorrie: Snape does not think he’s hilarious. He does think he’s clever; he does not find himself hilarious.

Grace: No, he does not. I think that we’ve discussed this before, and I won’t go into it because we need to go on Crucio stuff. But I also think that Tom thinks that Snape is his best friend.

Irvin: Actually, I would agree with that.

Grace: Yeah. He’s like, “My best friend Severus just came back. Everyone, let’s go get manicures!”

Irvin: Yeah, and Snape is like, “Yeah, so he thinks we’re friends.”

Grace: Dragging him around.

 Irvin: “I don’t know why he thinks we’re friends.”