Fannish 5: Five Unfortunate Uses of Pregnancy

[gehayi]

From fannish5: Five unfortunate uses of pregnancy as a plot device.

CAUTION: HERE BE SPOILERS. A lot of them, really.

In no particular order:

1) Phoebe Halliwell's pregnancies on Charmed.

Comments

Part 1

[gehayi]

Merope may have been a witch. However:

1) We never see her cast a single spell successfully. She can't even fix a broken pot, and Reparo is pretty basic.

2) It's canon that magic tends to emerge in times of stress. Children can fall from great heights without being hurt. Harry ended up Apparating away from some bullies and inadvertently made the glass in a snake's cage disappear. Yet even when Merope is being choked by her father, she doesn't do any magic--on purpose or inadvertently. And there really isn't a way to prevent inadvertent magic.

3) Marvolo Gaunt calls Merope a "dirty Squib." It's pretty clear, too, that to his mind, this is the worst thing that he could call her. That argues that he had reason to do so.

4) Marvolo Gaunt never opened mail; indeed, he told a young wizard from the Ministry of Magic this quite proudly. If he never opened mail, I'd say his kids never opened their Hogwarts letters...if, indeed, Merope ever got one at all.

5) Morfin may have received some training; the Ministry of Magic regarded him as a wizard. But its representative seemed surprised that Marvolo had a daughter.

6) Marvolo and Morfin display snobbish contempt not only for Muggles but for other wizards. We never see Merope do either; she displays no arrogance or hatred, and her father is outraged that she would deign to look at a good-looking young Muggle.

TR dumping his GF to take up with someone who was apparently considered lower than dirt by everybody in the area, and with whom he only had a species in common

I'm a guy myself, and I've watched guy behavior for decades, and I can't think of a single case of anybody doing anything like that.

I can.

We're not really approaching this from the same angle. You're taking it as given that Tom Riddle, Sr. spent a lot of time with Merope, perhaps seemed to have a real relationship/marriage with her. I think that a rich, good-looking guy who's accustomed to getting his way might take a look at an ugly, odd, shy young woman who adored him and see just how far he could push her. He might even find it entertaining...for week or two. Until he got bored with the game.

The kinder people in town wouldn't understand such behavior. They'd find it bizarre and inexplicable and would say so. The crueler ones--his cronies, perhaps--would have no problem accepting why he was doing this, but they certainly wouldn't talk about it. That would mean admitting that they'd known what was going on and could have stopped it. People are very good at denying that the guy next door can be a wife-beater, a child abuser or a criminal. And leading a girl on in order to have sex with her isn't a crime by any stretch of the imagination. Most people would pass that off as "Well, guys will be guys." Some people would even argue that he was doing her a favor--after all, who would want to screw someone that ugly and stupid?

Re: Part 1

[ravenclaw_eric]

As far as Merope's relationship with her father and brother goes, I don't think you understand psychological dominance...what Modesty Blaise's right-hand man Willie Garvin called "the old P.D." in A Taste for Death.

If Marvolo and Morfin had bullied and dominated Merope from her earliest memories, it wouldn't matter how powerful a witch she might potentially be...she'd have it burned into her brain that they were stronger and there was nothing she could do. This is also called "learned helplessness." When my Mom was going for her Master's in child psychology, I read a lot of her texts, and I read about tests on dogs, using electric shocks. Once the dogs got it into their heads that there was nothing they could do, they would just endure the shocks, even if escape was perfectly possible.

This is how many animals are trained. You may have been to a circus and seen an elephant quietly submitting to being tied to a stake it could pull up easily. This starts when the elephant is a calf; they tie it to a stake it can't pull up, and the elephant gets the idea that it can't pull a stake up, and never loses it...even when it's full-grown and more than strong enough to do so.