Skip to main content

harry potter - What happens when Veritaserum and a Fidelius Charm meet?


The title kind of explains the question.


If a Secret Keeper was given Veritaserum, what would happen? What if the Veritaserum was willingly taken?


EDIT:


Given the answers here, I'm not sure which to pick as they both use canon sources. I will give this question another 24 hours for votes to pour in before accepting.



Answer



The first thing I'd say is that Veritaserum is only one tool. It may be magic, but it is not invincible, it is not infallible. Rowling has gone on record saying:




[Veritaserum works best on] the unsuspecting, the vulnerable and those insufficiently skilled (in one way or another) to protect themselves against it.


Source: accio-quote



As such, in no sense can Veritaserum be relied upon to always force the truth out of someone. That, I think, is worth bearing in mind.


Secondly, the magic of the Fidelius Charm to me is rather beautiful. It's about fidelity, loyalty, trust and friendship.



'An immensely complex spell,' he said squeakily, 'involving the magical concealment of a secret inside a single, living soul. The information is hidden inside the chosen person, or Secret Keeper, and is henceforth impossible to find - unless, of course, the Secret Keeper chooses to divulge it. As long as the Secret Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting-room window!'


Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - pp.152-3 - Bloomsbury - Chapter 10, The Marauder's Map




To me, the element of choice there is all-important. The spell is broken if your Secret Keeper betrays you. It's about betrayal, infidelity, treachery.


Of course, you could choose to betray someone under duress. I would argue that if the information was tortured out of you - well that would be forgiveable, but you have still elected to give your friends up. I mean, the torture might send you out of your mind, you might lose all control and hardly know what you were saying any more, but it's still a decision you take. Overriding that autonomy with a potion that would just send your secrets pouring out of you would be different, to me. That wouldn't be betrayal. If I'm tortured into giving up your whereabouts, I have given you up - however understandably. But if somebody finds where you are by searching my house and discovering the information - well, I've been a bit careless, but I have not given you up.


So I would argue that to break the Fidelius Charm, it would have to be elective. You would have to make a decision - however constrained and inevitable that decision was. As such, Veritaserum, which would not enable you to make a choice, would be defeasible by that. It would not be able to get that information out of you.


So, Veritaserum can be fought by certain means. If you do not have those means or have failed to employ them, it will reveal your secrets without you having any control over them. As such, when it works, it cannot force a betrayal. As such, it cannot break a Fidelius Charm. As such, that is another means by which it may be fought.


Having said that, I think it's an interesting question whether extreme torture would also be vulnerable to that. I would argue that if the torture got so extreme that you lost all control, that too might not break the Fidelius Charm, because it's not a choice. However, up to a certain point in the torture (and it gives me no pleasure to speculate on where that line might be drawn), in giving up the information, you would be choosing to sacrifice your friends' lives to save you from pain. Which would be betrayal, however understandable. Which would break the Charm.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

According to TVTropes ( usual warning, don't follow the link or you'll waste half your life in a twisty maze of content ): In Ghostbusters, it's strongly implied that Dana Barret, while possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper, had sex with Louis Tully, who was possessed by Vinz Clortho the Keymaster (key, gate, get it?), in order to free Big Bad Gozer. In fact, a deleted scene from the movie has Venkman explicitly asking Dana if she and Louis "did it". I turned the quote into a spoiler since it contains really poor-taste joke, but the gist of it is that it's implied that as part of freeing Gozer , the two characters possessed by the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper had sex. Is there any canon confirmation or denial of this theory (canon meaning something from creators' interviews, DVD commentary, script, delete scenes etc...)? Answer The Richard Mueller novelisation and both versions of the script strongly suggest that they didn't have sex (or at the very l...

Why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize Missy right away?

So after it was established that Missy is actually both the Master, and the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS number... ...why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize her right away? I remember the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums stating that Timelords had a way of recognizing other Timelords no matter if they had regenerated. And Clara should have recognized her as well... I'm hoping for a better explanation than "Moffat screwed up", and that I actually missed something after two watchthroughs of the episode. Answer There seems to be a lot of in-canon uncertainty as to the extent to which Time Lords can recognise one another which far pre-dates Moffat's tenure. From the Time Lords page on Wikipedia : Whether or not Time Lords can recognise each other across regenerations is not made entirely clear: In The War Games, the War Chief recognises the Second Doctor despite his regeneration and it is implied that the Doctor knows him when they fir...

story identification - Animation: floating island, flying pests

At least 20 years ago I watched a short animated film which stuck in my mind. The whole thing was wordless, possibly European, and I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it... It featured a flying island which was inhabited by some creatures who (in my memory) reminded me of the Moomins. The island was frequently bothered by large winged animals who swooped around, although I don't think they did any actual damage. At the end one of the moomin creatures suddenly gets a weird feeling, feels forced to climb to the top of the island and then plunges down a shaft right through the centre - only to emerge at the bottom as one of the flyers. Answer Skywhales from 1983. The story begins with a man warning the tribe of approaching skywhales. The drummers then warn everybody of the hunt as everyone get prepared to set "sail". Except one man is found in his home sleeping as the noise wake him up. He then gets ready and is about to take his weapon as he hesitates then decides ...

warhammer40k - What evidence supposedly supports Tau as related to the Necrontyr?

I've heard of rumours saying that the Tau from Warhammer 40K are in fact the Necrontyr. Is there anything that supports this statement, in WH40K canon? I just found this, on 1d4 chan 1 : Helping Necrons? Or are they Necrontyr descendants? An often overlooked issue is that Tau have no warp signatures, just like Necrons, hate Warpspawns and Warp in general, just like Necrons, have the exact same skull shape,stature and short lives, and the overwhelming need for Technology and beam weapons, JUST LIKE NECRONS. GW may have planned a race that simply prepares a pacified, multiracial galaxy for Necrons to feast upon, supported by Ethereals that have a C'tan phase blade. Then there is a reference of "dark seed in east" by the Deceiver, so the tricky C'tan might give Tzeentch the finger in the JUST AS PLANNED competition. Or maybe GW just has so little creativity that they simply made a new civ conforming to an Old One's standards without knowing it. Is this the connec...