[Discussion split from thread Common Fandom Ideas You Hate]

The absolute demonisation of Dark Arts in Fanon and creating a counter to it by using so-called Light magic. There is, in canon no usage of the word light magic or light wizard. Fanfics also take a much more hardline view of Dark Arts then we see in Canon. Harry is not berated for using sectumsepra just because it is dark magic. His use of the unforgivables also does not bring about righteous fury from anyone else.

 

As for the Dark Arts, they have a really broad definition in canon from what we've seen. I'd say that anything from the Tickling Jinx to the Cruciatus and Fiendfyre is technically part of the Dark Arts, so the lack of demonisation makes sense. A large part of the fandom tends to wank Muggles, with the intelligence of the Wizards/Witches being bashed so that the Muggles look better by comparison. The Dark Magic hate might be part of reducing the intelligence of the average wizard/witch.

The term Dark Wizards, on the other hand, doesn't refer to simple practitioners of the Dark Arts (if I haven't interpreted things wrongly). That might have tripped up some authors.

Edit: there's also taking DM's bragging on Durmstrang 'teaching the Dark Arts, unlike Hogwarts', seriously. Considering it's Draco, it's probably an exaggeration. Either Durmstrang teaches 'harder' Dark Arts than Hogwarts does, or the shoddy DADA instruction means that they don't learn much. Also, Durmstrang possibly having separate Defence and Dark Arts classes.

 

My entire argument on the topic of dark arts is that utilisation of magics that we know for a fact is dark arts does not automatically make you evil. Many fanfics tend to really use the trope of dark arts being equal to evil and it's utilisation would automatically turn your soul dark (whatever that is even supposed to mean).

Moody also mentions that according to the Ministry he is not supposed to show his 4th year what real curses look like but that he disagrees. So, the 6th and 7th years in Hogwarts do at least get to see what real dark curses might look like. We also know that senior students access the restricted section for research in said magicks.

Also, the Aurors in the first rise of the Dark Lord did get permission to use Unforgivagles (I'm a little hazy on this but I think this is canon). That'd mean that its utilisation does not automatically make you evil. It appears to be more a case bureaucratic permission with dangerous magic.

It is no issue if an author wants to make his own version of the dark arts but a lot of people end up claiming that it is canon which is not true. The only thing of Dark Arts that we know is evil are Horcruxes.

Also, people tend to use the moniker Dark Lord as if it means something other than a self assumed title by Tom Riddle. Canon never states Grindelwald as anything other than a dark wizard and there is no use of a Lord title dark or otherwise anywhere in the books.

@ExperiencedGamer Onto your understanding of Dark Arts, forget about broad, I'd say there is essentially no definition of dark arts in canon, apart from the only thing that we know for a fact, i.e, dark curses are incredibly difficult to reverse and at times might be impossibly so. This we know for a fact from Remus in Book 7 after Snape severs Fred or George's ear and from Dumbledore's cursed hand.

As such, your argument of including the tickling hex as dark arts does not hold true by canon. If you think about it, it in fact is no different from all the arguments that Harry makes in fanfics of the so-called Light Magic being used to cause harm (Cast Wingardium Leviosa and throw someone off from a height).

 

@Johnny Farrar is that specifically about Dark curses or not?

As for the Dark Lord thing, yeah, exactly. LV is the (self proclaimed) Dark Lord. Not 'a' Dark Lord, nor is Grindelwald or anyone else mentioned anywhere as a dark lord.

 

I interpreted dark magic to be poorly understood magic, the uncharted frontier, where new spells are created by experimentation and emotional need, not by understanding the theory and created from the bottom up. Dark spells are similar to accidental magic that was successfully replicated; you still have no idea what's going on 'under the hood'.

That man was a Death Eater who fought to bring Voldemort back. He's not a good example of how using the dark arts all the time does not make you evil.

Crouch gave them a kill on sight order toward the end of the war. I think the only Death Eater who died was Evan Rosier, and that was apparently because he was resisting arrest. I contend that the Aurors generally did not use the killing curse, either because they did not practice it, they had other means of arresting the bad guys, or because they were afraid of being corrupted.

 

I don't think it goes that deep, Dark Magic is just Magic used with intent to harm, maim or injure someone. That's why Rowling goes through all the troubling of saying "Jinxes are Low-Level Dark Magic", "Hexes Medium", "Curses High". They are the closest thing we have to streamline "Battle-Magic" or "Martial Magic", the fact that it is called "Dark" doesn't mean its evil, but it is meant to hurt which doesn't mean its good. But I agree that the interpretation of "Light Magic that can harm" is pretty fanon as that's antithetical to the whole point, it's like putting a smiley face on a nuke and calling it a good nuke. It's a nuke dude.

 

I ran a search through my pdf-copies of the seven books, and there are actually two cases where the term Dark Lord is mentioned as a common term not necessarily pointing at Voldemort. First is in CoS when Ernie suggests that Voldemort tried to kill Harry so that there wouldn't be "another Dark Lord competing with him". The another is the label on the prophesy in the DoM in OotP: it refers to just "Dark Lord" without any article, as if the prophesy could point toward some other person somewhere in the future. Although the prophesy itself refers to "the Dark Lord"...

 

The difficult to reverse thing? It might very well be. As I said, we do not know. There is, in essence, no clarity on dark arts in the books. It might very well be specific to curses. But is there anything else in Dark Arts other than curses? Once again we do not know, except for Horcruxes. So, it's possible, there is. And Horcruxes are reversible.

So, the only hazy definition that we are left with is that a curse can be classified as dark when it is difficult to remedy or cannot be done. Is that all there is to the subject, probably not, cause we have Horcruxes.

He never really made an argument one way or the other. But we know from other sources that students do research dark magic for senior DADA classes.

This using dark curses makes you evil is a fanon thing. Harry was throwing Unforgivables around like candy in Deathly Hallows, nobody gave him shit about it.

Regardless, there is nothing in canon that would suggest this argument and as evidenced there are in fact opposing arguments, which is not to say that Dark Arts are good and canon agrees on this. Horcruxes, once again being an example.

More accurately, Sirius mentions that Crouch allowed the use of Unforgivables based on suspicion. Your interpretation that it only means the killing curse as such is not borne by fact. Also, I do not think it is ever mentioned that Evan Rosier was the only one. There is also nothing to suggest that Aurors did not utilise their permission. You are allowing fanfics to colour your reading of the canon. As Harry proves it in DH, Unforgivables hardly requires practice or that their usage has any impact on the caster.

That is in fact the entire point. That while there are dark magic that does cause you harm (Horcruxes), not all of them are so. As a matter of fact, other than Horcruxes we do not see any dark magic that harms the caster. Any argument otherwise is essentially fanon.

 

I would not describe using the Imperius curse on two people and the Cruciatus on one as 'throwing them around like candy'. I don't know of any fan source that claims wizards immediately become evil upon using their first or second dark curse.

I was saying that he is the only one mentioned. We have no evidence of any other Death Eaters who existed who were killed apart from him. It's interesting you make the argument that there is nothing to suggest the Aurors did not use the killing curse, when there is nothing to suggest they did use it. The fact that they brought in the Lestranges after they tortured the Longbottoms (Frank was one of their own) to insanity rather than killing them suggests they are inclined to arrest suspects rather than kill them, and it seems doubtful the Lestrange family would not have resisted arrest. Execution is not commonly used as a punishment, though there is the Dementor's Kiss, suggesting if anyone is killed as a punishment, the government would use the two birds one stone approach rather than a killing curse.

I did not specifically say that it meant only the killing curse; we just have no evidence that any other curses were used apart from the killing curse on Rosier.

Not only do horcruxes cause their creator harm, anyone around them suffers and demonstrably starts to turn evil. Sure, it's Voldemort's soul, but I fail to see how anyone else's horcrux would be pleasant to have hanging around your neck. In a memory in DH, Dumbledore states that Draco's soul would be ripped apart if he were to commit murder, meaning the act of using the killing curse, which was what Draco intended to use, rips apart the soul, which is why murder is a necessary step for making horcruxes. It's not simply killing someone that tears the soul, because then imprisoned muggle serial killers would lose their hair and have their eyes turn red, unless of course it was not the act of tearing his soul that caused Voldemort's appearance to change, but rather the continued use of dark magic.

 

I seriously doubt nobody had used the Killing Curse on enemies repeatedly among the Death Eaters. Nobody said anything about them looking like that. That leads me to the conclusion that it's unique to making Horcruxes.

Maybe the soul heals on its own or something, only leaving something like a... scar on the soul, with the act of making a Horcrux making the tear permanent. Or at least far worse than it would have been otherwise.

Edit: I seriously doubt that it's only the Killing Curse. Tom made a Horcrux out of Myrtle's death somehow, and she was killed by the basilisk. Or rather with the basilisk, as in, used as an instrument of murder.

 

Can't say I have strong opinion on what should be considered a dark magic, but if I were to write HP fic where I would need to explain it then a dark magic would be spells that were intentionally created to be hard to be reversed. That's the difference between any other spell that can injure a person, but can be easily healed and curses that need to have a specialised spell, a counter-course to reverse them.

The spells that were created to be hard to reverse, but by now have a popular counter-courses, are technically dark arts, but nobody calls them that.

 

Another thing that bothers me is the quantifying of the soul with numbers many fanfic authors do. As in, original Voldemort contains (checks math on a calculator) ~14.28 percent of his initial soul (1/7) or 12.5 percent (1/8) or whatever. Worse, that he contains 1/256th of his initial soul.

As in, is the soul something that can be counted with percentages, or any kind of numbers? That part of fanon on this particular Dark(est) Art has always seemed idiotic to me.

@Celestin : so, anything that requires a specific counter, though in some spells, the counters are common knowledge? Not sure what I think of that.

 

Well, it's that or the quantity. Regarding your other post about the fraction of the soul that breaks, I believe Taure had a post about that; that killing only breaks a fragment off the soul, which is intended to be a small piece. Most likely, Voldemort killed people all the time, and the Death Eaters only killed people under orders or when they had to, perhaps not wanting to spill magical blood. The list of people killed by Death Eaters is pretty short for how many of them there were. I'm sure quite a few of them would be willing to kill people, but even in their demonstration at the World Cup, I don't think anyone was killed. The Lestranges by contrast were enthusiastic practitioners of the dark arts, and they look the part, though they are not nearly as old or experienced as their master.
The Pottermore on Quirrell says that he was initially interested in dark magic from an academic perspective, but gradually he was corrupted and he sought out Voldemort so that people would laugh at him no longer. He states that Voldemort only started actually possessing him after he failed to steal the Stone from Vault 713, so I would think what corrupted him was delving into dark magic. Rereading the last few chapters of PS, it seemed his master had to shout orders at him, so the possession mostly served the purpose of getting him past the problems of his cowardice and failing at everything.

 

It's a difference between the Severing Charm and the Sectumsempra. Both cut, but one can be healed by a spell that will heal a normal cut and the other needs to be reverse in a specific way.

My assumption is that you actually need to intentionally work on a spell to make it hard to be reversed and it can't just happen.

The middle ground are spells that were hard to reverse, but are familiar to everyone. They started as a dark magic and count like one in DADA, but it's not what everyone is talking about when talking about someone's skill in casting a Dark Magic.

 

Imagine how horrifying the body-bind curse would have been before the countercurse was created - and that was common knowledge in first year. It makes me think that what counts as capital D Dark Arts right now might not be so indefinitely. (other than the unforgivable 3, I suppose)

 

I like the idea that the Dark Arts are all fundamentally magic that can affect the soul. This seems reasonably canon compliant to me. Horcruxes are canonically soul-magic. The darkest of dark creatures sucks out the soul, which is considered the gravest punishment that can be met out. The unforgivables all leave no physical trace. Why? Perhaps because the killing curse shreds the soul from the body, cruciatus tortures the very soul while the imperius enslaves the soul. Fiendfyre is certainly also considered dark, and what is its most notably feature? It can destroy the soul fragment of a horcrux.

This also fits neatly into the idea of why the dark arts are such taboos. Wizards brush off physical damage as mere inconvenience, but they have pretty tangible evidence of the existence of a soul, which they believe is truly permanent. Perhaps this connection is no longer even made consciously, after centuries of restricting the knowledge to the select few.

If we want to expand on this concept, we may say that all curses require the soul to be healed to be counter-acted. That's why specific counter-courses are required, which are themselves partly taboo due to their direct interaction with the soul. You cannot re-attach an ear that's been cut-off because the soul no longer recognises it as part of itself.

I would also posit that this can be used to explain unicorn blood and phoenix tears. The latter acts directly to heal the soul which facilitates healing otherwise. Healing through unicorn blood is darker - it forces the body to heal but does nothing for the soul. It may rescue you from the brink of death, but the terrible cost is that your soul no longer recognises your own body. You are essentially possessing yourself; truly a half-life.

As cheesy as "soul-magic" can often be, to me it's certainly a more interesting take than "dark magic is just wingardium leviosa to hurt someone writ large".

 

I wrote somewhere a while ago an idea that Dark Magic is perhaps simply magic that doesn't have a counter yet. Sort of "unexplored magic". That's why you can't reattach a body part that's been removed by a dark curse: it's because you don't know how to do it, not because there's some innate quality to that curse that prevents it.

Some of these effects that don't have a counter corrupt the soul, others don't. Perhaps some ordinary "light" magic would have similar results (i.e. turns you into an unrecognizable monster), but the counters for those effects are so well known that you just go to your yearly visit to a healer and they remove the effects before anything bad begins to show.

Maybe house-elves are a race born of wizards who were a bit too enthusiastic with soul-eating cleaning spells before some purifying ritual was invented...

 

I tend to have Dark Magic as a combination of two things:

1) By law. Different governments classify different spells as Dark or not. This can be for whatever reasons. Eastern Europe tends to be more lenient to what it considers illegal while Britain has a much larger list. Usually, the spells that are considered 'dark' are those that have little use outside of violence, those who have no counter curse or those that can cause a large amount of accidental destruction.
--- It is often the Department of Mysteries job to breakdown new spells, classify them and make counter curses if need be.

2) Feelings. Many dark spells are fueled by some sort of dark feeling, like the unforgivables. This can be a dangerous slope. If you keep pushing darker emotions to the front of your mind to power these spells, these emotions become more present and start affecting you. I based this on depression, where you can get caught in a downward spiral that is so hard to escape from. And in your rage and depression, you can hurt the people you love.

I feel like this is a good mixture of canon and fanon. Nothing is as simple as it seems.

 

I like your interpretation but I'd simplify the terminology:

There is no light magic, just magic. Dark magic is called so because it's unknown - like being in the dark about something.

How it could fit into canon:

If you create a new spell and register it, teach others how it works and how to reproduce it, you're in the clear as a good wizarding citizen. Good job! It's not dark magic, even though it's new and relatively unheard of, people can look up how to reverse the effects.

So the only people left really hiding their spells are the ones who don't want people questioning why they made a spell that slaps children, or they're paranoid bastards that want a leg up on the competition. Whoever created the killing curse would have been perfectly able to tell you how to block it, or perhaps even reverse it - but they kept it to themselves and trained their minions on how to cast it, instead: causing suffering throughout history. Hence why dark magic is so looked down upon.

Dark magic being the term for unknown magic means you can research it! For the killing curse, there have been teams of wizards working on the counterspell for centuries, even with loved ones optimistically under preserving charms, cursing the wizard who made the spell dark in the first place.

This aspect to dark magic explains why you might study it at Durmstrang. They're not teaching children about Dark magic solely to be able to cast it, but rather explaining the often violent history and advances in research behind the dark spells, diving into theory on how developing new magic is done. I believe it's canon that Hogwarts students learn how to make counter curses in Defense too, perhaps by studying how previously dark magic has been solved in the past.

All that gives me a plot bunny: Harry, the lucky fucker who got to study the killing curse from multiple sides, goes on to develop the counterspell. Cue cultural chaos. (Hey, it's not necromancy if it's cursebreaking)

 

I think I support an extremely simple definition of dark magic, that bypasses a lot of knots things get tangled in otherwise.

The Dark Arts is the art and science of causing harm with magic.