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.
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.