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

Re: Part 2

[zelda_queen]

Really? When was that ever in the books? O_o I know that The Tales of Beedle the Bard confirmed that Muggles couldn't use magic even if they had a proper wand, but nothing on potions.

Actually, I forgot this when I first posted, but Merope *does* do magic once in the memory. She does a spell that ought to lift the pot she dropped off of the ground, but because she's scared and was just yelled at by her father, the spell doesn't work properly and the pot flies across the room and hits the wall hard enough to break in half.

Now see, when I read about that, I never really got the impression that Merope was supposed to be some cunning planner. Rather, I saw it as her having no one hurting or scaring her for the first time in her life, so she thinks "Tom Riddle will surely love me if only I had a chance to prove it to him!" And then she thinks that if she just gets things started with a love potion, she can get him to love her for real. Now obviously that was just my interpretation of it, but given how the views on love potions seem to be like they're something cute and romantic to get a guy to like you, it doesn't seem so far-fetched, especially since again I got the impression that Merope was a girl who was desperate for genuine love and because of a lifetime of abuse went for it in the wrong places. And while Dumbledore never actually said she was powerful (he just said that without her brother and father terrorizing her, she was able to work to the extent of her abilities), I never got the impressions that love potions were particularly difficult to brew.

Incidentally, and again this is just my reading of it, but I never did get the impression that Merope was treated as the bad guy and Riddle Sr as a blameless victim. All the books did was hammer in how Riddle Sr. and his family were total bastards and I generally got the impression that him abandoning his pregnant wife and unborn child was just further proof of that. At the very least, I never really got the impression that Merope was meant to be seen as someone evil or meant to be hated.

Anyway, that's all just how I saw it. ^^;;;