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Anise's Insightful Lumos Presentations by Anise
Chapter 1 by Anise
A/N: All right, y'all, here's the first of the two presentations I, well, presented. At Lumos in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. The first one is structured AS a presentation; the second one is structured more as a paper. The D/G content was added for this archive, since it wasn't appropriate for the conference, really.

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Love potions in HBP: their presence relentless, their theme constant. They are everywhere. What are they doing here? Well, there are a lot of theories, and we will get to those. But what I really want to concentrate on in this presentation is looking at the entirety of the presence of love potions in HBP. We’re going to see the context of love potions , how they fit into a much larger theme, and at last, how they relate to Harry’s emotional and character arcs, and his final decisions at the end of the book. While ships are absolutely not the focus, I do mention them eventually, and yes, this is a relentlessly non-shippy presentation, and if you want to see how I do that, stick around.

LP’s have shown up before HBP. In PoA, Hermione, Ginny, and Molly Weasley getting very giggly about LP’s And in GoF, Pansy Parkinson also accused Hermione of dosing Viktor Krum with an LP..However, HBP is the place where we see love potions by far the most.

First, we see them in the past.
1.) We first see Merope being obsessive about Tom Riddle, Sr.; Morfin points out that she’s always looking at him, peering through the hedge, hanging out the window. We see the behavior of someone who will use a love potion.

2.) Next, Dumbledore actually tells Harry that Merope did use a love potion.


Seven times in the present,
1.) Fred and George show Hermione and Ginny the WonderWitch love potions, we see that a lot of girls are clustered around them

2.)We see there’s a ban on these items at Hogwarts, and we learn later that this refers to love potions, since Romilda and the other girls did sneak them in.

3.) This is where Slughorn shows Amortensia to Harry in the Potions class, (where Harry feels “great contentment,” and Ron “grins lazily.” (pg. 231 HBP.) It’s the “most powerful love potion in the world.” And it’s made clear that “Amortentia doesn’t really create love… this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room.” (pg. 235 HBP) )

4.) "I'm not talking about your stupid so-called prince," said Hermione , giving his book a nasty look as though it had been rude to her. "I'm talki ng about earlier. I went into the girl's bathroom just before I came in here and there were about a dozen girls in there, including that Romilda Vane , trying to decide how to slip you a love potion. They're all hoping they're going to get you to take them to Slughorn's party, and thay all seem to have bought Fred and George's love potions, which I'm afraid to say probably work --"

5.) Then they discuss the fact that LP’s can still get into the school, even though WWW products are banned—because they’re disguised as “perfumes and cough potions.” And Hermione says they “aren’t dark or dangerous.” (pg. 386 HBP)

6.) After this, Romilda Vane shoves Chocolate Cauldrons into Harry’s hands, and he takes them. We later find out that these are indeed dosed with LP, as these are the ones that Ron eats later.

7.) This is the chapter where Ron eats the Chocolate Cauldrons that have been in Harry’s trunk for two and a half months, since he took them from Romilda Vane.

Love potions are here a lot. But their presence is even greater than just the number of times they literally show up, because they fit firmly into the much larger theme of deceptive magic in HBP, there’s more than in any other HP book, and almost every last bit of it relates to the manipulation of people’s behavior and especially their emotions. I wish I had time to spell out all of the general deception in HBP on the part of most of the characters, we will get into that a bit later, but the most important examples are the two that are not literally love potions, but are strongly related to them.

The first is Felix Felicis. In the same scene where we see Amortensia in Slughorn’s Potions class, we see this profoundly deceptive potion. It doesn’t really manufacture good luck, it only tweaks the circumstances, as Hermione will later say. HBP) Harry uses Felix or plans to use it three times, so let’s look at that. One time is against Slughorn to get the Horcrux memory; its use seems very justified, but he is being very deceptive and manipulative.
We see Harry pull off a very complex deception with Felix. He fools Ron into thinking he’s been dosed when he hasn’t, and when Hermione confronts him about it, reminds her of the deceptive magic SHE used on McClaggen. This whole incident emphasizes the “placebo effect”, the deceptive use of potions to control or change behavior, and/or to manipulate the subject’s emotions, can even work when the potion hasn’t actually been used. This is a really important point to keep in mind later, when we start talking about why love potions might be in HBP.

The third example takes place in the Sectumsempra chapter, and the layers of deception all through it—in terms of plot, structure, the psychology of the characters—is astonishing. But what we’re looking at is, when Harry wants to take Felix in order to succeed with Ginny, to “tweak the circumstances,” to alter events by the use of a potion. And then he goes on to decide that the final Quidditch game could do the same thing. (has “become inextricably linked in Harry's mind with success or failure in his plans for Ginny. He could not help feeling that if they won by more than three hundred points, the scenes of euphoria and a nice loud after-match party might be just as good as a hearty swig of Felix Felicis.” (pg. 660) So Harry himself believes in a “placebo effect.”

The second love potion-related theme in HBP is Fleur. I think she’s so prominent in HBP for many reasons, but a huge one is, Fleur is and always has been a living LP, her effects on everyone who’s ever seen her are the same as the way the effects of love potions are described in HBP. There’s much more to say about Fleur, but I don’t have time, if anyone wants to know, please ask me in the Q&A section.

So, love potions and themes related closely to them are all over this book. Morally speaking, what are they in Harry’s world? This is very important, I think, when we begin to look at their structural meaning. Are they really harmless, as Hermione says? No, and I think it’s made clear.

Slughorn saying they’re dangerous, Tom/Merope, But something that stands out for me most of all is the way that they are connected to the Imperius curse. If we look at the way that the action of LP’s is unquestionably shown—(Ron/Romilda, Tom/Merope, Fleur’s effect on men and boys,) and compare it to the way that the effects of Imperius have been described, especially on Harry in GoF, the similarities are amazing. And then we see this scene:

Dumbledore asks: "Can you not think of any measure Merope could have taken to make Tom Riddle forget his Muggle companion, and fall in love with her instead?"
"The Imperius Curse?" Harry suggested. "Or a love potion?"

So Harry himself specifically links LP’s with the Imperius Curse.

Knowing that love potions are not presented as harmless, let’s go deeper and look at the structural level of HBP and how love potions tie in. Several characters go through a metaphorical journey in HBP through deception to facing the truth. Especially Harry . As a part of this, Harry is manipulated by Dumbledore (specifics) But maybe, just maybe, Dumbledore is being smart here, because when he sees how Harry is behaving, he doesn’t trust Harry with this information.

Harry deceives others and himself. We’ve seen a little of this with Felix, but It really begins after he gets HBP’s potions book, which has spells to manipulate people’s behavior, to deceive, to hurt people, and uses minor spells at first, but he gets led further and further into magic that he should not use. Eventually, he uses Levicorpus, the exact spell that disturbed him so much when he saw his teenaged father using it. That was one book ago. In HBP, there Harry is, blithely using that exact spell.
Finally, after he’s gotten in deeper and deeper with all this deceptive use of magic, he uses Sectumsempra. At first, Harry is “horrified by what he had done,” (pg. 663,); he’s covered in Draco’s blood, but this doesn’t last long, it doesn’t seem that as much as it bothered him to see his father hang Snape upside down in a memory, what Harry himself did was a lot worse.

At the end, though, Harry does have an undeception, when he renounces the HBP’s book and realizes that he has to go on with the quest alone. But how does this tie into the theme of love potions? Well, let’s look at the way that the traditional big reveal we’ve seen at the end of every book is handled in HBP. How surprising are any of the revelations at the end we actually get? They’re not. A lot of people even figured out that Dumbledore had to die. We know after the second chapter that Draco is going to be up to something, and that Snape will be, too. Harry tells everyone constantly that he knows what Draco’s up to, and he turns out to be right. But we were never really deceived on anything but the specific details of how Draco did it. The only real surprise about Draco is where he ends up at the end of his emotional journey, which is a very different place from what we’d been led to expect..And this is all fundamentally different from how the mysteries in previous books were handled. The real revelations at the end of this book are about emotions, and I think that’s why when Harry realizes who the HBP actually was, it’s an emotional realization, it’s about his feelings of betrayal, of having been used and fooled by that book. And then, he does have his emotional revelation about his quest.

And this is how the nature of the big revelations relates to the entire idea of love potions. What they’re really about is people facing the painful and difficult truth about their genuine emotions, when they’ve spent the whole book trying to deceive themselves—and yet, it’s also about a number of mysteries remaining that have not been answered or cleared up yet.

All of this is why, when we look at how this all fits together, that I can’t buy one idea about it. That LP don’t mean anything, they were just something JKR threw in there to be interesting. That dog won’t hunt. It just won’t hunt. Love potions are there for a specific reason that is thematic, and that is structural.

Some people would say that there’s a whole separate and yet intertwined body of evidence that Harry was deliberately dosed with LP, and that will be a big plot point in Book 7, and I’m one of those people.

However, there is another idea is that LP’s are an extended metaphor about the plot and character arcs of this book of emotional deception and finally the beginnings of emotional undeception. .

This I think is supported, by everything we’ve just seen: the relentless presence of love potions, the constant themes of deception and manipulation through the use of magic, and the instances in HBP of a kind of “placebo effect”. And finally because of the theme of the absolute necessity of finally facing one’s true emotions, the theme we see so strongly with Draco, Harry, Ron, and Hermione..

In this way, and looking at LP’s as a metaphor, Harry’s full emotional journey through deception into being undeceived makes sense including… well, here’s the shippy part and yet the relentlessly nonshippy part—the difference between emotional arcs in this book. Ron and Hermione, Bill and Fleur, and Tonks and Remus face their emotions and come together; Harry faces his emotions and parts from Ginny. When Harry decides to do this (and yet does not try to stop Ron and Hermione going with him on his Horcrux quest,) it is something that needs to be understood in terms other than shippy shippy shippiness. This choice is about plot structure. It’s a necessary part of Harry’s undeceiving himself at last about where he’s headed now, and his capacity for emotion at this point—whether it involves a literal love potion or not.

So finally, when you put all of this together, I think this is why LP’s are the key to HBP, whether they refer to the actual use of LP’s in the narrative or whether they are meant as metaphor. LP’s involve both emotion and the magical manipulation of human emotions. But sooner or later, the deception starts to break down and everyone has to at least begin to face the truth. Love potions encompass this major theme of HBP and they’re the only aspect that does.

Now when it comes to the specifics of why they were used, everybody is going to have their own opinions. We debate because we care. We come together in our differences; by respecting them, by respecting each other and ourselves, we show our respect for these books that we love so much.


END

P.S.: As y'all might have noticed, there's very little in here about the Creamtea/Anise Love Potion of Doom. Well, that was basically because Creamtea couldn't afford to come all the way from England!! Not to mention the fact that it's basically already been argued in her essays, as beta'ed and added onto by me. :)

However, what this presentation does is to lay the foundations for why the CLPT works. The biggest problem a lot of people have with it, I think, is that it all seems so unbelievable, and that "JKR wouldn't do that." But this essay talks about why JKR would do it.

As for Draco/Ginny, I talk a lot more about the canon possibilities of our favorite pairing in the other essay, which will be posted next. However, I will say this: before HBP, D/G looked about as likely to become canon as, oh, Harry/Hedwig. After HBP, I think it's in the realm of possibility. I actually would be willing to bet-- not the family farm or anything, but maybe, oh, about $100.00 or so-- that we'll find out in Book 7 that Draco's been interested in Ginny for a long time. Whether that interest is the least bit two-way, or will become so in canon, is more like a quarter bet, to be honest. But we're going to talk about why this possiblity even exists in canon, not fanon, in the epilogue to the next essay.


This story archived at http://www.dracoandginny.com/viewstory.php?sid=4637