A Harry Potter question

[fpb]

It seems to me that there is a tendency among fic writers to assume that, even if the Dark Lord is defeated, the Malfoys will somehow wiggle through and remain an influential family. Is it only my impression, or does anyone else notice the same thing?

Comments

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

No - I'm still trying to finish a Dorcas Meadowes/Fabian Prewett fic. (I killed off my leads 2/3 of the way through, and I've been beating my head against a wall for a year.) If I ever do finish the fic, though, the last scene is Lucius and Dumbledore haggling over Harry.

Lucius resigned from his job at the Ministry, with a veneer of respectability, and lives quietly at home with the family after "the Bellatrix scandal". He's afraid of Dumbledore becoming MoM after Bagnold resigns, and screwing around with the control he has left. Dumbledore isn't interested in the MoM job, but he wants carte blanch with the Boy Who Lived. Hence the "testimony" at the trial that never was - Dumbledore said Sirius was the secret keeper, even though he couldn't know, and in my mind, no one asked. That had to be to keep the OotP from rescuing him. (They already operate outside the Ministry rules.)

Lucius knows Sirius is innocent, and he can screw up Dumbledore's plans if that information comes out. So the two of them agree to keep out of each other's way, and mutual friend (and hero-worshiper) Fudge gets Dumbledore's backing for MoM.

As far as canon evidence goes, it's pretty light, but Dumbledore has Fletcher and Hagrid, so I'm extrapolating that to mean a link to Knockturn Alley. We've seen Malfoy there, and no one in the Minisry seems to think it is a big enough problem enough to restrict travel there. For all the "raids", we never see the MoM destroy anything - it just gets shifted into and out of Knockturn Alley or the Dept. of Mysteries.

The biggest hole I want to fill is Hagrid. Dumbledore rules Hogwarts - most of the time - so Hagrid can act as he likes there. But how does Hagrid, whose wand was taken away, function in the "outer" magical world without it? The pink umbrella must have a counterpart for the other people that "lost their magical rights". How does a Dark Lord grab those disenfranchised ones? If he can't, why would they support the Ministry?

My answer to that is a Ministry-friendly Dark family - the Blacks. They're protected by the ministry, and have they loyalty of people "outside the law". In return for the Ministry looking the other way, or giving them the Order of Merlin, etc, they keep the potential "wild wizards" in some sort of order. Chaos is their power, and the Ministry is their customer.

There are probably a lot of holes in that, and it's pretty weak if you hold it next to Pharnabus's essays, but that's my theory until a beta shows me the error of my logic.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

One thing that springs to mind is that Hagrid's wand was not taken away. It was snapped in two and the pieces given back to him. The scene at Olivander's in PS/SS seems to me to make it all quite clear. The pieces are in the pink umbrella. All the same, yes, there must be quite a few people who suffered similar punisments and are disgruntled.