I think this chapter explained something which has struck me as strange for a long time:
If the killing curse can be stopped by love, how come only Harry ever survived? Its not like Lilly is the only person who ever loved anyone, nor the only person who would sacrifice themselves to save another.
Maybe the Potters possessed a new, experimental deathly hallow, one capable of stopping the killing curse (or, alternativly, an old one whoes purpose has been forgotton). It must have limits on its power, otherwise James and Lilly would have lived, and probably wouldn’t have been tested thoroughly, otherwise Lilly wouldn’t have seemed to panic so much (unless she was acting to stop Voldemort guessing).
This could be the stone which glowed, and it may or may not require a love/sacrafice to power it.
I have believed, ever since Q detailed how rituals work and we saw that Voldie agreed that Harry would be spared if Lily died (because seriously, she thought that would work?), that Voldemort accidentally triggered a powerful Ritual, with Lily as the sacrifice.
Hmm … is it possible that was deliberate? It doesn’t quite seem to fit … but then, they were pretty desperate.
Harry’s memory is false. Harry even notes that the memory is so old it should not even be there.
Q lied. To his ears her plea must have sounded something like “may I please lay down my wand?”.
Q never intended to kill Harry anyway, so he either doesn’t care about any protection, or maybe even prefers for it to keep Harry safe. (Especially if Q wants Harry to rule.)
Also, Lily was clever: maybe she tried to bluff Q into relaxing his guard by feigning surrender and thus attack him at his weakest. Possibly Q, playing at a higher level, realized this and accepted her offer of “surrender” out of amusement. So either Q saw through Lily’s feigned surrender or she realized that Q accepted her genuine surrender only because he thought she was trying to trick him and this triggered her into attacking him.
I thought about this for a while too, more than five whole minutes by the clock, and eventually I came up with a possible explanation.
It’s not that Lily sacrificed herself for her child. As you and uncountable other people pointed out, that must have happened innumerable times throughout history, even just among the witches and wizards. It’s that she sacrificed herself for her child when she could have lived.
Think of the oddness of the situation. The murderer arrives to kill the child, but not the mother. How often is that the case, historically? Then the murderer offers the mother a chance to live when she gets in his way, which is still stranger. When she rejects the offer to try to save her child, he does not bother to subdue her, but then chooses to kill her, which invalidates basically all of the explanations that I could think of that fit the above two criteria.
It’s not that she sacrificed herself for her child—it’s that the killer came with the express purpose of killing the child but sparing the mother, and she deliberately threw away that chance for her child. It never would have worked if he had come with the intent to kill her as well.
Which implies that Snape’s request was what was needed to give Lily that opening. Which further implies that Snape really did save Wizarding Britain, if accidentally.
I don’t believe I’ve shared the theory here before, I look forward to seeing if there are holes in the story that I have not yet discovered.
If Harry was saved by a Deathly Hallow and not by Lily’s sacrifice, then it should have saved James instead, since he was killed first.
One may counter that perhaps the Hallow had range limitations or something, but in any event it would have made more sense for it to be carried by/attuned to James or Lily rather than Harry. Among other things, they can defend themselves, and kill the person who unsuccessfully tried to kill them. Whereas even if Avada Kedavra was blocked by the power of love, all it would have taken was for another of Voldemort’s minions to be present and finish Harry off (possibly with a more standard hex).
That said, your criticism of the power of love is one I wholly agree with.
You are underestimating the irrational love that parents have for their children. When a family is in danger, parents constantly work to save their children first, even when doing so is stupid. It’s enough that the oxygen masks on planes have explicit instructions for parents to put on their masks first, because they can just put their kids’ on next if they are still conscious.
Not that I agree that such a new artifact existed.
Well, really, what evidence is there that Avada Kedavra EVER works on infants? There’s only one datapoint here as far as we know. It doesn’t particularly stretch the imagination that even the inventor of a Killing Curse might have been repulsed at the idea of the spell being used against infants even if they didn’t consciously consider the possibility.
For that matter, considering how important it is for a certain kind of thought to be used for both the AK and the Patronus (or status of the soul), perhaps an infant’s innocent outlook on life offers it protection from the curse.
Unless someone were to step up and risk death or infanticide, there’s no way to disprove it, but I doubt there would be many volunteers for an experiment like that.
Well, the Killing Curse works on animals, or as Professor Quirrel puts it, “anything with a brain,” so that’s gotta count as some kind of evidence that AK works on infants. They should possess the same “innocent outlook” an infant has.
Plus, I thought it was part of canon that Death Eaters were known to have Avada Kedavra-ed whole families during the first war on Voldemort. We don’t know explicitly of any other attempts to Avada Kedavra infants, but it stretches the bounds of plausibility to think that nobody else has ever tried to Avada Kedavra a baby in the history of the curse. Distraught mothers trying to kill their babies is common enough (too common), and AK would probably seem like an attractive option to such witch mothers. No pain, no struggle, just death. That’s not to mention the infanticide that happens during wars and feuds.
I considered the fact that it kills animals and everything with a brain. However, it seems to me that if the target’s state of mind can have any effect on the outcome of the spell (and that’s a pretty big /if/), then it might well be working under the same principle as the Patronus vs True Patronus—animal minds don’t understand death and therefore don’t offer as much protection from death. The obvious linchpin here is ‘to what degree do one-and-a-half- year-old infants understand death?’ If it’s similar to either an animal or an adult human, they wouldn’t have any protection.
As for AKing infants during war, I do think it is likely that it’s very difficult for normal people to do. The Avada Kedavra curse has much stricter requirements for casting it than other curses capable of killing—it requires you to want the target dead, but it also requires you to hate the target. I don’t think a distressed mother trying to prevent her child from suffering would be able to cast it even if she had cast it before (unless she’s an occlumens, I guess). And most infanticides are accidental, not deliberate (though we tend to hear about the deliberate ones because they get publicized more).
And as for soldiers/Death Eaters, there are other curses that can be used to kill people that are probably easier to cast on infants and don’t require you to be so conscious of and hateful towards an infant. There’s a lot of reasons why I think AK would be virtually impossible for a normal person to cast on an infant, but chief among them is that you have to be aware of the realities of your action when you cast AK. That means you can’t dehumanize your target and you can’t dissociate yourself from your action. As the mechanics of AK are explained, you pretty much have to be someone like Voldemort to pull it off [edit: against an infant].
Granted, infants might have accidentally been caught by the Curse, since it is said to be indiscriminate once it’s been launched. In that case, assuming infants can’t be intentionally AKd (a hypothesis that obviously hasn’t been tested), it would serve as a test between an innate protection and something built into the spell that only prevents the targeting of infants.
The Avada Kedavra curse has much stricter requirements for casting it than other curses capable of killing—it requires you to want the target dead, but it also requires you to hate the target.
I think you’re mistaken there, or working with an extremely loose definition of “hate”. Did Voldemort hate the infant Harry when he tried to kill him, even though his knowledge of Harry’s threat status was purely intellectual and abstract? Did he hate Lily, whom he appeared to treat with dismissive amusement at most? Or that groundskeeper at the Riddle mansion in canon? Did Moody hate the spider he used to demonstrate AK back in canon?
While we’re at it, did Quirrell hate Bahry, at whom he cast AK with the alleged intent to miss?
I trust you see the point. We have far too many cases of AK being cast at random bystanders, perfect strangers etc. to claim that in each case the caster was feeling a personal hatred of the target rather than merely a brief, focused intent that the target die.
In HPMoR, Moody says—regarding casting AK—that it’s easier to do after the first time, and that might be interpreted as saying that only the first time you cast it do you have to muster up a deep, personal hatred. Afterward, a more generalized hatred seems to work, which would be the case for any of the examples above. He DOES say that you need hatred, though. Again, it seems like a parallel to the Patronus Charm, since that also seems to be easier to cast once you’ve done it once.
Side note: what characters have been seen to cast both Patronus and AK? Snape does it in canon I think? Does he ever cast his Patronus after he kills Dumbledore?
I realize that doesn’t particularly help my argument that AK’s casting requirements might prevent its use on infants and it can’t be taken as any kind of explanation for how AK is shown to work in canon. But I think you do still need to want the target to be dead, and that might be a higher bar to reach with an infant.
I just wanted to point out that we don’t really have a lot of data on how AK works or if it works on infants specifically. So in order to explain what we see as an anomaly (an infant surviving the unsurvivable Killing Curse), we don’t necessarily need an explanation like a mother’s love protecting the infant or an unknown and mysterious new Deathly Hallow. The AK having a built-in protection against its use against infanticide is no more complicated than any of those explanations. Rather than settling on any of those explanations, I wanted to encourage people to keep thinking, because none of them sound completely right!
Side note: what characters have been seen to cast both Patronus and AK? Snape does it in canon I think? Does he ever cast his Patronus after he kills Dumbledore?
Yes, in book 7 he used his patronus to lure Harry to the lake where he left Gryffindor’s sword.
Did Moody hate the spider he used to demonstrate AK back in canon?
IIRC, that was Barty Crouch, Jr. disguised as Moody, not Moody himself. Not a very major point, but my model of Rowling says she’d be more likely to write a generalized hatred for all living things into one of the bad guys than into a good (if rather spooky) one.
The resurrection stone functions as an anti-killing-curse device in the books. I think the model is that avada kedavra cuts the soul from the body, and the resurrection stone can hang onto your soul for a bit and glue it back into your body.
What? No, it doesn’t. It allows Harry to qualify as “master of death” (thus fulfilling an old prophecy, presumably) and lets his dead family and friends comfort him before he sacrifices himself. He survived because horcruxes be complicated.
I think this chapter explained something which has struck me as strange for a long time:
If the killing curse can be stopped by love, how come only Harry ever survived? Its not like Lilly is the only person who ever loved anyone, nor the only person who would sacrifice themselves to save another.
Maybe the Potters possessed a new, experimental deathly hallow, one capable of stopping the killing curse (or, alternativly, an old one whoes purpose has been forgotton). It must have limits on its power, otherwise James and Lilly would have lived, and probably wouldn’t have been tested thoroughly, otherwise Lilly wouldn’t have seemed to panic so much (unless she was acting to stop Voldemort guessing).
This could be the stone which glowed, and it may or may not require a love/sacrafice to power it.
I have believed, ever since Q detailed how rituals work and we saw that Voldie agreed that Harry would be spared if Lily died (because seriously, she thought that would work?), that Voldemort accidentally triggered a powerful Ritual, with Lily as the sacrifice.
Hmm … is it possible that was deliberate? It doesn’t quite seem to fit … but then, they were pretty desperate.
There are at least three plausible explanations:
Harry’s memory is false. Harry even notes that the memory is so old it should not even be there.
Q lied. To his ears her plea must have sounded something like “may I please lay down my wand?”.
Q never intended to kill Harry anyway, so he either doesn’t care about any protection, or maybe even prefers for it to keep Harry safe. (Especially if Q wants Harry to rule.)
Also, Lily was clever: maybe she tried to bluff Q into relaxing his guard by feigning surrender and thus attack him at his weakest. Possibly Q, playing at a higher level, realized this and accepted her offer of “surrender” out of amusement. So either Q saw through Lily’s feigned surrender or she realized that Q accepted her genuine surrender only because he thought she was trying to trick him and this triggered her into attacking him.
Oh, it was clearly sarcastic, from the context—but perhaps the ritual didn’t care.
Perhaps Harry was wrapped in the invisibility cloak when the AK hit him?
Seems like something Voldemort would’ve noticed.
I thought about this for a while too, more than five whole minutes by the clock, and eventually I came up with a possible explanation.
It’s not that Lily sacrificed herself for her child. As you and uncountable other people pointed out, that must have happened innumerable times throughout history, even just among the witches and wizards. It’s that she sacrificed herself for her child when she could have lived.
Think of the oddness of the situation. The murderer arrives to kill the child, but not the mother. How often is that the case, historically? Then the murderer offers the mother a chance to live when she gets in his way, which is still stranger. When she rejects the offer to try to save her child, he does not bother to subdue her, but then chooses to kill her, which invalidates basically all of the explanations that I could think of that fit the above two criteria.
It’s not that she sacrificed herself for her child—it’s that the killer came with the express purpose of killing the child but sparing the mother, and she deliberately threw away that chance for her child. It never would have worked if he had come with the intent to kill her as well.
Which implies that Snape’s request was what was needed to give Lily that opening. Which further implies that Snape really did save Wizarding Britain, if accidentally.
I don’t believe I’ve shared the theory here before, I look forward to seeing if there are holes in the story that I have not yet discovered.
If Harry was saved by a Deathly Hallow and not by Lily’s sacrifice, then it should have saved James instead, since he was killed first.
One may counter that perhaps the Hallow had range limitations or something, but in any event it would have made more sense for it to be carried by/attuned to James or Lily rather than Harry. Among other things, they can defend themselves, and kill the person who unsuccessfully tried to kill them. Whereas even if Avada Kedavra was blocked by the power of love, all it would have taken was for another of Voldemort’s minions to be present and finish Harry off (possibly with a more standard hex).
That said, your criticism of the power of love is one I wholly agree with.
You are underestimating the irrational love that parents have for their children. When a family is in danger, parents constantly work to save their children first, even when doing so is stupid. It’s enough that the oxygen masks on planes have explicit instructions for parents to put on their masks first, because they can just put their kids’ on next if they are still conscious.
Not that I agree that such a new artifact existed.
Well, really, what evidence is there that Avada Kedavra EVER works on infants? There’s only one datapoint here as far as we know. It doesn’t particularly stretch the imagination that even the inventor of a Killing Curse might have been repulsed at the idea of the spell being used against infants even if they didn’t consciously consider the possibility.
For that matter, considering how important it is for a certain kind of thought to be used for both the AK and the Patronus (or status of the soul), perhaps an infant’s innocent outlook on life offers it protection from the curse.
Unless someone were to step up and risk death or infanticide, there’s no way to disprove it, but I doubt there would be many volunteers for an experiment like that.
Well, the Killing Curse works on animals, or as Professor Quirrel puts it, “anything with a brain,” so that’s gotta count as some kind of evidence that AK works on infants. They should possess the same “innocent outlook” an infant has.
Plus, I thought it was part of canon that Death Eaters were known to have Avada Kedavra-ed whole families during the first war on Voldemort. We don’t know explicitly of any other attempts to Avada Kedavra infants, but it stretches the bounds of plausibility to think that nobody else has ever tried to Avada Kedavra a baby in the history of the curse. Distraught mothers trying to kill their babies is common enough (too common), and AK would probably seem like an attractive option to such witch mothers. No pain, no struggle, just death. That’s not to mention the infanticide that happens during wars and feuds.
I considered the fact that it kills animals and everything with a brain. However, it seems to me that if the target’s state of mind can have any effect on the outcome of the spell (and that’s a pretty big /if/), then it might well be working under the same principle as the Patronus vs True Patronus—animal minds don’t understand death and therefore don’t offer as much protection from death. The obvious linchpin here is ‘to what degree do one-and-a-half- year-old infants understand death?’ If it’s similar to either an animal or an adult human, they wouldn’t have any protection.
As for AKing infants during war, I do think it is likely that it’s very difficult for normal people to do. The Avada Kedavra curse has much stricter requirements for casting it than other curses capable of killing—it requires you to want the target dead, but it also requires you to hate the target. I don’t think a distressed mother trying to prevent her child from suffering would be able to cast it even if she had cast it before (unless she’s an occlumens, I guess). And most infanticides are accidental, not deliberate (though we tend to hear about the deliberate ones because they get publicized more).
And as for soldiers/Death Eaters, there are other curses that can be used to kill people that are probably easier to cast on infants and don’t require you to be so conscious of and hateful towards an infant. There’s a lot of reasons why I think AK would be virtually impossible for a normal person to cast on an infant, but chief among them is that you have to be aware of the realities of your action when you cast AK. That means you can’t dehumanize your target and you can’t dissociate yourself from your action. As the mechanics of AK are explained, you pretty much have to be someone like Voldemort to pull it off [edit: against an infant].
Granted, infants might have accidentally been caught by the Curse, since it is said to be indiscriminate once it’s been launched. In that case, assuming infants can’t be intentionally AKd (a hypothesis that obviously hasn’t been tested), it would serve as a test between an innate protection and something built into the spell that only prevents the targeting of infants.
I think you’re mistaken there, or working with an extremely loose definition of “hate”. Did Voldemort hate the infant Harry when he tried to kill him, even though his knowledge of Harry’s threat status was purely intellectual and abstract? Did he hate Lily, whom he appeared to treat with dismissive amusement at most? Or that groundskeeper at the Riddle mansion in canon? Did Moody hate the spider he used to demonstrate AK back in canon?
While we’re at it, did Quirrell hate Bahry, at whom he cast AK with the alleged intent to miss?
I trust you see the point. We have far too many cases of AK being cast at random bystanders, perfect strangers etc. to claim that in each case the caster was feeling a personal hatred of the target rather than merely a brief, focused intent that the target die.
In HPMoR, Moody says—regarding casting AK—that it’s easier to do after the first time, and that might be interpreted as saying that only the first time you cast it do you have to muster up a deep, personal hatred. Afterward, a more generalized hatred seems to work, which would be the case for any of the examples above. He DOES say that you need hatred, though. Again, it seems like a parallel to the Patronus Charm, since that also seems to be easier to cast once you’ve done it once.
Side note: what characters have been seen to cast both Patronus and AK? Snape does it in canon I think? Does he ever cast his Patronus after he kills Dumbledore?
I realize that doesn’t particularly help my argument that AK’s casting requirements might prevent its use on infants and it can’t be taken as any kind of explanation for how AK is shown to work in canon. But I think you do still need to want the target to be dead, and that might be a higher bar to reach with an infant.
I just wanted to point out that we don’t really have a lot of data on how AK works or if it works on infants specifically. So in order to explain what we see as an anomaly (an infant surviving the unsurvivable Killing Curse), we don’t necessarily need an explanation like a mother’s love protecting the infant or an unknown and mysterious new Deathly Hallow. The AK having a built-in protection against its use against infanticide is no more complicated than any of those explanations. Rather than settling on any of those explanations, I wanted to encourage people to keep thinking, because none of them sound completely right!
Yes, in book 7 he used his patronus to lure Harry to the lake where he left Gryffindor’s sword.
Upvoted because this line is music to my ears.
IIRC, that was Barty Crouch, Jr. disguised as Moody, not Moody himself. Not a very major point, but my model of Rowling says she’d be more likely to write a generalized hatred for all living things into one of the bad guys than into a good (if rather spooky) one.
The resurrection stone functions as an anti-killing-curse device in the books. I think the model is that avada kedavra cuts the soul from the body, and the resurrection stone can hang onto your soul for a bit and glue it back into your body.
What? No, it doesn’t. It allows Harry to qualify as “master of death” (thus fulfilling an old prophecy, presumably) and lets his dead family and friends comfort him before he sacrifices himself. He survived because horcruxes be complicated.