I was browseing FA when I found this yes on perphaps our love for Hellatrix being a bit connical or at least not absuurd as most people think

Essay: Evidence that Harry is attracted to… Bellatrix Lestrange?!

I was just as incredulous as you when I first came to that conclusion. The first time I was reading Book Five, I would knit my eyebrows in puzzlement every time I came across one of the numerous clues hinting on something Harry doesn’t quite realise himself. But after no end of thought, I am starting to think perhaps those Harry/Bellatrix shippers do have a basis in canon. I’ll try to show you what I mean in this treatise.

Of course, the fact that Bellatrix killed Sirius renders any attempt at a relationship between the two utterly unrealistic, but nevertheless it is interesting to see how some authors pull it off.

I’ve made a compilation of the passages I’ve seen in the books that hint in this direction (bold/emphasis is mine). All quotes have been taken from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, children’s hardback Canadian edition (Bloomsbury-Raincoast). The page references between parentheses may differ slightly from other editions.

Let’s see the first sequence that struck me as somewhat allusive:

‘Lestrange …’ Harry said aloud. The name had stirred something in his memory; […] though it gave him an odd, creeping sensation in the pit of his stomach.

Then Harry remembered. He had seen Bellatrix Lestrange inside Dumbledore’s Pensieve […]: a tall dark woman with heavily-lidded eyes, who had stood at her trial and proclaimed her continuing allegiance to Lord Voldemort, her pride that she had tried to find him after his downfall and her conviction that she would one day be rewarded for her loyalty. (106)

The ‘creeping sensation’ might have been JK Rowling’s attempt at foreshadowing, but it is rather implausible that Harry had an instinctive knowledge that this woman was going to do something terrible to him. How many of us have presentiments like that, especially if we’re barely 15 years old?

When Harry sees the name Lestrange on the Black tapestry, he recalls not Rodolphus or Rabastan, both of whom he saw at the trial and who had also been involved in the Longbottoms’ torture, but only Bellatrix, and with what detail he remembers her! It’s obvious that she made a strong impression on him the first time he ‘saw’ her.

In fact, in that snippet, Harry certainly remembers her well enough. It’s almost as though he recalls her words by heart, which isn’t the case for his friends’ words or the theories of magic he studies. Additionally, we must remember that the books are written from Harry’s point of view, and in the above description, the hatred and disgust Harry should logically be feeling towards someone like her – a Death Eater who had tortured his friend’s parents into insanity – is suspiciously absent. Here, Harry doesn’t even think of what she has done, but instead he clearly recalls the words and emotions she has expressed at her trial. If you pay enough attention, you can almost sense a bit of … something that seems almost like wonder or admiration in this excerpt, which is supposed to be from Harry’s mind.

Then, of course, there are the more blatant clues.

Their glass might be shattered, but still the little black-and-white people inside them [the silver-framed family photographs] peered up at him haughtily, including – he felt a little jolt in his stomach – the dark, heavily-lidded woman whose trial he had witnessed in Dumbledore’s Pensieve: Bellatrix Lestrange. (445-446)

If my memory is correct, that’s the same reaction Harry has every time he looks at Cho Chang.

But Harry’s eyes were drawn to the picture of the witch. Her face had leapt out at him the moment he had seen the page. She had long, dark hair that looked unkempt and straggly in the picture, though he had seen it sleek, thick and shining. She glared up at him through heavily lidded eyes, an arrogant, disdainful smile playing around her thin mouth. Like Sirius, she retained vestiges of great good looks, but something – perhaps Azkaban – had taken most of her beauty. (480)

All right, there’s no more doubt here. We discover that Harry had found her highly beautiful when he saw her at the trial, and even in the photo that was taken in Azkaban and where her appearance is unkempt, he still believes she is good-looking. Apparently, the fact that she is Voldemort’s most loyal Death Eater, and the crimes she had committed, do not deter Harry from marvelling at her appearance. Even more evidence is provided later in the same scene:

Hermione nudged Harry and pointed at the headline over the pictures, which Harry, concentrating on Bellatrix, had not yet read. (481)

Concentrating on her? Why on Earth would he be doing that? He has a newspaper in front of him and an article he obviously considers important, but instead of reading it, he is ‘distracted’ by the portrait of a beautiful witch and keeps staring at her, forgetting everything else.

You could object that Harry is merely admiring the typical Black good looks because, perhaps, her features remind him of Sirius’s. The problem with this, however, is that we do not see Harry thinking of how handsome Sirius is, except in the scene in Snape’s Pensieve. He makes such reflections about Bellatrix, on the other hand, nearly every time he sees a picture of her.

Then, we have the scene of Harry’s date with Cho in Hogsmeade. They are walking past the poster stuck up in the window of a shop and Harry finds himself ‘staring once more at the pictures of the ten escaped Death Eaters’. In fact, he is so sidetracked that he barely hears what Cho, the girl he supposedly has a crush on, is saying.

‘Yeah,’ said Harry, tearing his eyes away from Bellatrix Lestrange’s face to glance up and down the High Street. ‘Yeah, that’s weird.’ (493)

Instead of looking at the girl he likes when they are on their first date, Harry’s attention is, once again, caught by the picture of the female Death Eater, and when he answers Cho’s comment, it could not be clearer that his mind is elsewhere and he is trying to clear it by taking a quick, absent-minded look around the street.

In the following excerpt, however, Harry doesn’t seem to find her attractive at all anymore. But considering the situation, I would not find it surprising. She is about to torture his best friend’s sister to insanity, and Harry’s head is filled with worries about Sirius and guilt over bringing his friends into danger, so he doesn’t have the time to think about anything else.

The woman stepped forward, away from her fellows, and pulled off her hood. Azkaban had hollowed Bellatrix Lestrange’s face, making it gaunt and skull-like, but it was alive with a feverish, fanatical glow. (691)

No, I would say here, there is nothing to imply that Harry sees Bellatrix as anything more than a crazy, disgusting follower of Voldemort. At the moment, at least, because this doesn’t negate all the insinuations I’ve picked up.

Then there’s also the fact that Harry almost always refers to her by her first name in his thoughts, which isn’t the case for other people he barely knows and, to boot, loathes. It would be expected of him to think of her as Mrs Lestrange, or perhaps even ‘Sirius’s cousin’, but not her first name. Do we see Harry referring to Umbridge as ‘Dolores’ when he’s thinking of her? Never. But when it comes to Bellatrix, he’s doing it all the time: ‘You’ll have to smash this if you want to attack any of us,’ he told Bellatrix; or ‘What kind of prophecy?’ repeated Bellatrix, the grin fading from her face; or even ‘Shut your mouth!’ Bellatrix shrieked and ‘Get Potter!’ shrieked Bellatrix, and she ran at him; he dodged her (691,703), to name a few examples.

Even after she kills Sirius, Harry is still thinking of her as ‘Bellatrix’ instead of the expected ‘Lestrange’ or ‘the woman’ or even a more offensive word. When he chases her down to the Atrium, her progress is described through Harry’s eyes, such as He wrenched open the door into the circular black hall and saw Bellatrix disappearing through a door on the other side and Bellatrix was almost at the telephone lift at the other end of the hall. (714)

It must be noted that the anger – no, scratch that – the rage Harry experiences after Sirius’s death is far beyond his years. We have seen his thoughts when he’s angry at Snape – like the time he finds himself whishing he knew how to cast the Cruciatus Curse so that he could use it on Snape (GOF262) – but this time, his rage surpasses anything he’s felt before. Actually, when he was faced with who he thought was the man who had betrayed his parents, in the Shrieking Shack, he did not have the courage to actually do something, even though he wanted to kill him to avenge his parents. No, his anger had not been strong enough. And when he had had the time to calm down slightly, he even stopped Sirius and Remus from killing Peter.

In chapter thirty-six of Book Five, however, we see proof that Bellatrix Lestrange is able to rile Harry into a depth of anger that goes beyond anything he had ever felt before. He is so angry with Bellatrix that he imitates her. This is proved by two instances: one is ‘And he knows!’ said Harry, with a mad laugh to match Bellatrix’s own, and other is when he casts the Cruciatus Curse on her.

But Sirius’s death doesn’t seem to have put off Harry’s strange fascination with the Death Eater woman. When we read she was already back on her feet, breathless, no longer laughing (715) – but how in the world does Harry know she is breathless, when he’s a good ten feet away from her, on the other side of the fountain? She hasn’t spoke, so he cannot have heard her breathlessness in her voice – then how does he know it? Unless he has been watching her with really, really extreme attention … If he hates her so much, he should be glaring at her in hatred, and this hatred would cloud his perception, disinteresting him from anything else, such as outward details of his surroundings.

‘Don’t waste your breath!’ yelled Harry, his eyes screwed up against the pain in his scar, now more terrible than ever. ‘He can’t hear you from here!’ (716)

Harry is obviously in excruciating agony, and it is very difficult, and painful, to speak when you are feeling like that. Yet when Bellatrix begins doing something that Harry probably takes for a sign of insanity – talking to someone who isn’t there, or so he thinks, failing to interpret the pain in his scar as a sign of Voldemort’s proximity – he goes to the trouble of informing her of the futility of her actions. Usually, when we see an insane person do something pointless, we don’t bother pointing it out to them unless we’re feeling abnormally kind-hearted. And if the person has just killed someone you cared about, you wouldn’t bother advising them not to ‘waste their breath’.

My theory is that Harry is, in a way, fascinated by Bellatrix Lestrange. He hates her, both before and after she kills Sirius, but he is somewhat … mesmerised by her, as proved by his tendency to stare at her (or her picture) on every available occasion and his startling familiarity with her, demonstrated by his thinking of her as ‘Bellatrix’. The fact that it is she who kills Sirius is what makes him feel even angrier, probably against himself for ever thinking that kind of thoughts about her. That’s just a theory, though.

I am not here to convince you that he’s in love with her or something, because on that I agree with you – it’s ridiculous. No, I’m just making an observation of a rather curious aspect in the last book on which no one has commented so far. I like analysing (or maybe you’ll say overanalysing) various characters, their behaviour, and the possible reasons behind such behaviour. Besides, there have been even more unrealistic pairings suggested in various fan communities, so why not give some thought to one that seems even slightly canon-based, as unbelievable as it is that JKR would even suggest such a thing? Then again, there are some other things JKR has written apparently without being aware of their implications or of how the readers might interpret them …

I am surprised that no one has noticed all this before. Even the fans of the Harry/Bellatrix pairing (which, I insist, is highly improbable and practically unfeasible, but isn’t that what fanfiction is for?) do not appear to have paid attention to those details in the fifth book, because I have yet to see a single one of them present the pairing in a canon-based way – which it is, might I add. Perhaps I’ll write one myself, once I’m done with my currently unfinished stories …

Lastly, as I specifically said, this is just a theory - and there are certainly more absurd ones out there.

 

this has also been posted here before @ http://darklordpotter.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=5509&highlight=essay#5509

in June. I do like the points the essay brings forth, not matter how no way in hell its gonna happen it is.

I find myself not caring much for Bella anymore after HBP anyway -(

 

Seriously, the total lack of Bella in HBP was a crime. She should at least have been a part of the assault team on Hogwarts at the end of the book. Yeah, I know she was around for that UNBREAKABLE VOW shit, but...

 

i still like bella because i dont think HBP should even be counted as a book

 

HBP isn't a book its JKR selling out.

 

I wonder, can it simply be called selling out when she's selling out for millions and millions of dollars in book and movie money?

I propose we call it "Fuck you all loyal fans, I'm gonna get meh fame and meh mad loot, so heres some utter bullshit I wrote inbetween being bent over the kitchen counter making more spoiled kids to spit out and then being screwed in the bum" -ing out.

If you get a hold of the book, you can even smell the proof that what she's doing?

Why I say? Because the whole book just reeks of shit

 

that very long you think we can shorten it?

 

K shorten it to "Fuck you pay me"-ing out.

 

kool...now i want kill her for making bella like that by "Fuck you pay me"-ing out

 

right after OOtP but before that-peice-of-bull-shit-called-half-blood prince
i saw bella as an crazy,evil seductress...think od all the fun you can have with one of those...*starting praying to god for one*lol

 

Yeah I prefer OotP Bella. Her character in that book actually has depth. I had such a funny conversation with this girl who lives next door to me today.

Her: Why does book 6 suck so much?
Me: JKR sold out.
Her: Why doesn't someone beat some sense into her?
Me: I don't know, but the thought has crossed my mind.
Her: I hope she dies a horrible painful death for ruining an otherwise good series.
Me: *stunned silence*

Anyways then the topic of Bella came up. And she asked a good question. Why is Bellatrix Mrs. Mental Insanity 1996 in book 5 then barely 3 weeks later the perfect portrait of sanity?

 

anyone who thinks like that should sing up for this forum....anyway we need more girls

 

thats not a bad thing for all harry/bella fans

 

ah Bella in OoTP was the only thing In that book I liked well Half-Blood Prince was a giant grap floating the toilet I still do not loath it as much as I do Order.

anyway I didn't reallize that this ha dbeen posted early so I apologize for that

 

I'm going to be different, and say I liked Bella in HBP. I think some of you read way too much into her character in OotP by the sounds of it. I mean, she was just out of prisin recently, and was in the company of very different people, doing different things between her main appearances. Some of you are making it sound like she underwent a Tonks-caliber change, she's still a snide bitch, shes still a Voldie fangirl, and she is still evil as hell. She doesn't talk in baby voices to everyone, she was taunting Harry (if I remember correctly). It wasn't like pure unadulterated insanity defined her.

As for Harry/Bella... its a cool ship, but almost no one writes it right. IMO.

 

^Err... I guess my cookie reset. That was me.

 

i minded more that we only saw her once... ONCE! and it was in one of the shittiest chapters in the the history of shitty chapters.

 

The chapter was shitty, but considering most peoples opinions of the recent books I have to ask, would the high risk of Rowling screwing up her character more than just making her 'too sane' be worth the trade off for more screen rtime for Bella? I rather like that Rowling is keeping her sniper rifle, err... 'pen', off of Bella. It leaves the fanfiction potential much better off for it. Well, if it weren't for the fact that some only seemed to like her percieved insanity.