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.
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.