Seems pretty obvious that a Killing Curse can’t hit anyone but the intended target. You don’t want dead that bystander you’re not thinking about. Also “I meant to kill someone else” would be a defense if arrested for it.
Given that, it can fade quickly once it’s moved past the target.
Seems pretty obvious that a Killing Curse can’t hit anyone but the intended target.
Hardly obvious to me.
You don’t want dead that bystander you’re not thinking about.
Just the mood is required to cast it, the “small crack” at the soul. A killing beam is then launched. The beam keeps going until it reaches a killable target, which it very clearly is then implied to kill.
I always find it strange when people are reading so many implications that clearly aren’t there, and are denying the implications that are...
I don’t remember anything about the spell not being able to hit anything but the intended target, either in canon or the MoRverse. What’s your source? Or, if there is no explicit source, what makes it “obvious”?
I just said. “You have to mean it”, so it’s odd that you could kill someone you didn’t mean to. Even if you interpret it as “You have to want someone dead, not necessarily the same person”, “if you’re arrested for killing with it, there’s no possible defense”, and “I meant to kill the Death Eater, but I hit the bystander” is a possible defense. Also nobody ever mentioned collateral damage.
Wanting to kill a specific person may be a requirement for fueling the spell, sure, but I don’t see why that necessarily entails everyone else being immune to what is essentially a profoundly lethal effect. Once a bullet is in the air, it doesn’t matter what motivated the firing of the gun.
The bit about nobody mentioning collateral damage sounds like an argument from silence. I’ll tentatively grant you the point about “no possible defense”, but to me it seems like Moody could well have been talking about deliberate, cold-blooded murder rather than all possible circumstances. I mean, by the time of the “no possible defense” line he’s already name-dropped the Monroe Act, which is nothing if not a big, fat exception.
FWIW, “You have to want someone dead, not necessarily the same person” is essentially how “intent to kill” works in a legal sense. That is, the distinction between murder and manslaughter is whether, by your actions, you intended to kill someone; under the law, it doesn’t matter whether the person actually killed was the person you intended to kill, or not.
Not that the rules of magic are necessarily modeled after modern US jurisprudence, but it might be that they both reflect a deeper moral concept.
What happens if Alice Attacker tries to kill you, and you try to kill her in self-defense, but end up killing Bob Bystander? The Killing Curse solves that one by having self-defense not count as intent to kill; does law do the same?
I think so (it’s been quite a few years since my brief foray into law school). Let me do some quick Googling...
Yep, there it is: Looks like it may vary in different jurisdictions, but
a defendant’s right of self-defense “transfers” (just as intent to kill does) from the intended to the actual victim...If the defendant, acting justifiably in self-defense against an aggressor, fires a weapon “wildly or carelessly,” thereby jeopardizing the safety of known bystanders, some courts hold the defendant guilty of manslaughter (or of reckless endangerment if no bystander is killed), but not of intentional homicide.
“if you’re arrested for killing with it, there’s no possible defense”, and “I meant to kill the Death Eater, but I hit the bystander” is a possible defense.
Well if you were using it fighting Death Eaters under the Monroe Act, and accidentally killed a bystander, and had fellow aurors to back up your story, you probably wouldn’t be arrested.
Well, in the original canon, Voldemort fires one at Dumbledore, and Fawkes catches it and is reduced to a chick (phoenixes being unkillable.)
Of course, evidence from the original canon doesn’t suggest it being able to pass through solid matter either, so that doesn’t mean a whole lot with respect to HPMoR, but the spell would have to fade pretty damn quick to not be a liability for being spotted through a wall after missing. If it does it sounds like the best suggestion so far for resolving Quirrell’s use of it in Azkaban, but that still leaves Moody able to snipe people through buildings.
Sniper!Moody isn’t a huge problem. Any halfway competent Dark wizard would plan for that kind of enemy (is the eye of Vance famous? anyway, anything that can help aim a Killing Curse through walls) and have wards in place to detect approaching and casting. It just makes walls transparent on both sides.
The Eye of Vance is well known enough that Moody was able to look it up and track it down, but not well known enough that he doesn’t bother hiding facts such as its ability to see in a full sphere and through obstacles.
If wards can be put in place to detect approach with that kind of precision (evidence, the Marauder’s Map, but that sort of thing may be beyond modern wizards, as it’s part of Hogwarts’ defense system and there’s no other evidence of location scrying magic,) then you get an Avada Kedavra stalemate between Moody and anyone ensconced in a sufficiently well protected stronghold, but a complete mismatch between them and any of the vast majority of people who can’t see through walls.
Considering that Moody was already a well known dark wizard hunter by the time he lost his eye, if the wielder can snipe people like this, it raises the question of how he got it from the person who had it in the first place. You’d expect a power hungry dark wizard to be able to use Avada Kedavra, and when you can actually see a full sphere around you through obstacles, it doesn’t take a whole lot of creativity to notice that if you can use spells that go through obstacles, you can use it to attack people who can’t see you.
When Alastor Moody had lost his eye, he had commandeered the services of a most erudite Ravenclaw, Samuel H. Lyall, whom Moody mistrusted slightly less than average because Moody had refrained from reporting him as an unregistered werewolf; and he had paid Lyall to compile a list of every known magical eye, and every known hint to their location. When Moody had gotten the list back, he hadn’t bothered reading most of it; because at the top of the list was the Eye of Vance, dating back to an era before Hogwarts, and currently in the possession of a powerful Dark Wizard ruling over some tiny forgotten hellhole that wasn’t in Britain or anywhere else he’d have to worry about silly rules. That was how Alastor Moody had lost his left foot and acquired the Eye of Vance, and how the oppressed souls of Urulat had been liberated for a period of around two weeks before another Dark Wizard moved in on the power vacuum.
So, it cost the very experienced Moody a great deal, and that was him going all out (‘silly rules’). I don’t think we can rule out that the “powerful Dark Wizard” wasn’t effectively employing the omniscience of the Eye.
Shooting someone with Avada Kedavra through a wall isn’t going to result in the loss of any body parts though, and can be employed before face to face engagement is even an option, unless Moody had some way of teleporting straight into the wizard’s stronghold, which would imply some pretty lousy security.
If the Eye of Vance lets you AK people through buildings, I wouldn’t think the added security of having it would be worth enough to Moody to overcome the risk of trying to acquire it, which would probably be phenomenal unless whoever had it before was an idiot.
It’s much harder though, to dodge a bolt that comes straight out of a wall without any warning because you can’t see the person who fired it, who if they have much sense has deliberately moved around so that they’re not only attacking from a point where you can’t see them or fire back, but from an angle where you won’t see the beam either.
All the best ways I can think of to take the magical eye from someone who can do that, and lives in a place without “silly rules” against actually doing it, wouldn’t place me in a position to lose limbs in the encounter. If he’s not as Constantly Vigilant as Moody, he might be poisoned, but assuming it wouldn’t destroy the eye or render it unretrievable, I’d sooner call in an airstrike. Although it’s chronologically too early for transfigured predator drones, which would be my top choice.
Since every time a new magical element like this is posited, the obvious thing to do is ask how someone like Quirrell could abuse it, I’ll note that Canon Voldemort was capable of instantly creating a better-than-new magical prosthetic for Peter Pettigrew after the latter sacrificed his hand for a ritual.
Limb farming his own Death Eaters is thinking too small, particularly since the prosthetics might be identifiable. I’d go with “Imperius innocent civilians into casting the ritual for you and then memory charm them so they don’t notice their limbs have been replaced.” Although maybe you don’t need to replace their arms, since even when they do find out, what are they going to do about it, really?
I know that this is quite old, but it bears mentioning that consent is often a huge issue with magic, for more or less precisely this reason. We also know that it is important in the Potterverse as well, since Pettigrew’s line was:
Flesh of the servant, willingly sacrificed, you will revive your master.
Not to mention:
Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken, you will resurrect your foe.
This shows that consent is important on both ends. Imperius could easily not count as actually giving consent.
Seems pretty obvious that a Killing Curse can’t hit anyone but the intended target. You don’t want dead that bystander you’re not thinking about. Also “I meant to kill someone else” would be a defense if arrested for it.
Given that, it can fade quickly once it’s moved past the target.
Hardly obvious to me.
Just the mood is required to cast it, the “small crack” at the soul. A killing beam is then launched. The beam keeps going until it reaches a killable target, which it very clearly is then implied to kill.
I always find it strange when people are reading so many implications that clearly aren’t there, and are denying the implications that are...
No doubt they feel the same way.
I don’t remember anything about the spell not being able to hit anything but the intended target, either in canon or the MoRverse. What’s your source? Or, if there is no explicit source, what makes it “obvious”?
I just said. “You have to mean it”, so it’s odd that you could kill someone you didn’t mean to. Even if you interpret it as “You have to want someone dead, not necessarily the same person”, “if you’re arrested for killing with it, there’s no possible defense”, and “I meant to kill the Death Eater, but I hit the bystander” is a possible defense. Also nobody ever mentioned collateral damage.
Wanting to kill a specific person may be a requirement for fueling the spell, sure, but I don’t see why that necessarily entails everyone else being immune to what is essentially a profoundly lethal effect. Once a bullet is in the air, it doesn’t matter what motivated the firing of the gun.
The bit about nobody mentioning collateral damage sounds like an argument from silence. I’ll tentatively grant you the point about “no possible defense”, but to me it seems like Moody could well have been talking about deliberate, cold-blooded murder rather than all possible circumstances. I mean, by the time of the “no possible defense” line he’s already name-dropped the Monroe Act, which is nothing if not a big, fat exception.
FWIW, “You have to want someone dead, not necessarily the same person” is essentially how “intent to kill” works in a legal sense. That is, the distinction between murder and manslaughter is whether, by your actions, you intended to kill someone; under the law, it doesn’t matter whether the person actually killed was the person you intended to kill, or not.
Not that the rules of magic are necessarily modeled after modern US jurisprudence, but it might be that they both reflect a deeper moral concept.
What happens if Alice Attacker tries to kill you, and you try to kill her in self-defense, but end up killing Bob Bystander? The Killing Curse solves that one by having self-defense not count as intent to kill; does law do the same?
I think so (it’s been quite a few years since my brief foray into law school). Let me do some quick Googling...
Yep, there it is: Looks like it may vary in different jurisdictions, but
Well if you were using it fighting Death Eaters under the Monroe Act, and accidentally killed a bystander, and had fellow aurors to back up your story, you probably wouldn’t be arrested.
Well, in the original canon, Voldemort fires one at Dumbledore, and Fawkes catches it and is reduced to a chick (phoenixes being unkillable.)
Of course, evidence from the original canon doesn’t suggest it being able to pass through solid matter either, so that doesn’t mean a whole lot with respect to HPMoR, but the spell would have to fade pretty damn quick to not be a liability for being spotted through a wall after missing. If it does it sounds like the best suggestion so far for resolving Quirrell’s use of it in Azkaban, but that still leaves Moody able to snipe people through buildings.
So that’s why Dumbledore set a chicken on fire—he was reviving Fawkes!
Sniper!Moody isn’t a huge problem. Any halfway competent Dark wizard would plan for that kind of enemy (is the eye of Vance famous? anyway, anything that can help aim a Killing Curse through walls) and have wards in place to detect approaching and casting. It just makes walls transparent on both sides.
The Eye of Vance is well known enough that Moody was able to look it up and track it down, but not well known enough that he doesn’t bother hiding facts such as its ability to see in a full sphere and through obstacles.
If wards can be put in place to detect approach with that kind of precision (evidence, the Marauder’s Map, but that sort of thing may be beyond modern wizards, as it’s part of Hogwarts’ defense system and there’s no other evidence of location scrying magic,) then you get an Avada Kedavra stalemate between Moody and anyone ensconced in a sufficiently well protected stronghold, but a complete mismatch between them and any of the vast majority of people who can’t see through walls.
Considering that Moody was already a well known dark wizard hunter by the time he lost his eye, if the wielder can snipe people like this, it raises the question of how he got it from the person who had it in the first place. You’d expect a power hungry dark wizard to be able to use Avada Kedavra, and when you can actually see a full sphere around you through obstacles, it doesn’t take a whole lot of creativity to notice that if you can use spells that go through obstacles, you can use it to attack people who can’t see you.
For context, the original backstory:
So, it cost the very experienced Moody a great deal, and that was him going all out (‘silly rules’). I don’t think we can rule out that the “powerful Dark Wizard” wasn’t effectively employing the omniscience of the Eye.
Shooting someone with Avada Kedavra through a wall isn’t going to result in the loss of any body parts though, and can be employed before face to face engagement is even an option, unless Moody had some way of teleporting straight into the wizard’s stronghold, which would imply some pretty lousy security.
If the Eye of Vance lets you AK people through buildings, I wouldn’t think the added security of having it would be worth enough to Moody to overcome the risk of trying to acquire it, which would probably be phenomenal unless whoever had it before was an idiot.
It could be used to force other actions, per Quirrel’s excuse to Harry, and the forced choices lead to limb loss.
It’s much harder though, to dodge a bolt that comes straight out of a wall without any warning because you can’t see the person who fired it, who if they have much sense has deliberately moved around so that they’re not only attacking from a point where you can’t see them or fire back, but from an angle where you won’t see the beam either.
All the best ways I can think of to take the magical eye from someone who can do that, and lives in a place without “silly rules” against actually doing it, wouldn’t place me in a position to lose limbs in the encounter. If he’s not as Constantly Vigilant as Moody, he might be poisoned, but assuming it wouldn’t destroy the eye or render it unretrievable, I’d sooner call in an airstrike. Although it’s chronologically too early for transfigured predator drones, which would be my top choice.
Maybe a dark ritual involving sacrificing a limb to blind someone or something?
Maybe, but I doubt it.
Since every time a new magical element like this is posited, the obvious thing to do is ask how someone like Quirrell could abuse it, I’ll note that Canon Voldemort was capable of instantly creating a better-than-new magical prosthetic for Peter Pettigrew after the latter sacrificed his hand for a ritual.
Limb farming his own Death Eaters is thinking too small, particularly since the prosthetics might be identifiable. I’d go with “Imperius innocent civilians into casting the ritual for you and then memory charm them so they don’t notice their limbs have been replaced.” Although maybe you don’t need to replace their arms, since even when they do find out, what are they going to do about it, really?
I know that this is quite old, but it bears mentioning that consent is often a huge issue with magic, for more or less precisely this reason. We also know that it is important in the Potterverse as well, since Pettigrew’s line was:
Not to mention:
This shows that consent is important on both ends. Imperius could easily not count as actually giving consent.
Moody can still dodge.
That is not obvious at all, at least to me. Or Harry, who seemed to interpret it in terms of risk to bystanders.