Ask Us Anything!

[alt_moderator]

The cast thread is filling up rapidly, and while we don't have to fuss about comment collapse, it is getting difficult to navigate...

So here's a new post, where we're asking YOU to ask US: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

Comments

[gwendolyngrace]

Regarding Tony Parkinson - it should be generally pointed out that he was far from the only DE with 'questionable musical tastes.' Lucius himself liked some bands that did not strictly speaking produce exclusively wizard music.

The Doylist answer unfortunately goes back, in part, anyway, to Pansy's original player, who introduced elements to Pansy and Tony's backstory very very early in the narrative, when in retrospect it might have been better to withhold some of those thoughts and revelations until later. But then, we would not necessarily have gotten such great Pansy and Sally-Anne and Pansy and Ron relationships, so, everything-works-out-in-the-end.

In a more global answer to your entry, however, about whether Tony was "loyal," bears some examination. Tony was deliberately sitting on the fence about joining the DEs until Lucius basically talked him into it. He was not a particularly bloodthirsty guy, though it should be noted that that does not mean he was necessarily unbiased against Muggleborns and Muggles, but he was into self-preservation and Not Getting Involved was high on his list of priorities. Lucius convinced him that the battle was going to swing decisively toward Voldemort, and that anyone who was NOT on-side before the end would be in a far worse position, relatively speaking, than those who could claim to have joined before the rush. So, Tony ponied up, basically, and then got his ass handed to him from Alecto's friendly fire.

For a long time, we left it open exactly what had happened and how he came to be crushed by that wall. But when we did light on Alecto as the culprit, it worked so well we had to use it.

[(Anonymous)]

But you can believe in a cause and still not want to fight for it! So...I guess what I'm really asking is, did he buy into the Protectorate's garbage? Did he believe Muggles deserved to be rounded up like cattle and enslaved, or was he just going along with it in order to keep his family safe?

And omg, now I'm dying to know which muggle bands Lucius liked. I can't really picture him listening to acid rock...

[gwendolyngrace]

I think he was somewhere in the middle. He (and Lucius) considered things like Muggle music "slumming," like white people in the 20's going to jazz clubs in Harlem. He was a racist, just not a violent one. If he'd been free to express opinion, he would have said the Protectorate was going too far too fast. If he had survived the war, he would have been in the much more moderate camp about what to *do* with the Muggles once they'd won, but over time, he likely would have become more and more callous about it all.

FWIW, even Lucius wasn't originally thinking through the implications of enslaving an entire population (other than the abstract "We should put them all in their place")--Voldemort's insistence and charisma and mania is what led to all the DEs collectively moving the needle. When he pitched taking the Mark to Tony, Lucius at that time stressed that only the "loyal" people would be trusted to appropriately cherry-pick Muggle cultural assets--and that by deigning to like something Mugglish, they would by definition be relieving it of some of its taint (within their own circle. Not generally.) Tony saw which way the wind blew and he agreed with Lucius that if they were going to be able to enjoy the "privilege" of picking and choosing which bits of Muggle culture to embrace with impunity, then he needed to be an active ally to Voldemort.

As for Lucius' taste in music, well, we already know that the Warlocks either were or were a closely-related band to the Beatles (fun fact: their names are all anagrams of the Beatles' names) and if they weren't actually the Fab Four themselves (I think they were, leading a complex double-life), then they at least covered almost every song in the Beatles' catalog. I think *most* of his music consumption was from Muggle bands that never recorded much--thus little evidence of his "transgression" would have survived. He liked other British Invasion bands (The Who, the Kinks), and was heavily into British blues (especially Fleetwood Mac and Eric Clapton), but not so much Psycheldelic rock (with a few exceptions like Pink Floyd and when the Beatles/Warlocks and the Yardbirds went psych). Once the sound changed to electronica, he was Out, and drifted back to more wizard-produced music, as well as the ever-present classical music.