One justification I liked was that AK, being “fueled by hatred”, can only be cast by those who are already beyond the Moral Horizon. So it’s not the murder itself that’s so terrible, it’s that fulfilling the prerequisites for using AK means that you are a dangerous sociopath who cannot be safely let loose in the wizarding world.
Unfortunately this doesn’t cover Crucio and Imperius, which IIRC are even used by some “good guys” in canon. But I’m sure you could come up with some other fan-wank to explain them.
I like that justification too, in as much as it is the best of the possible ‘fan-wank’. Even so I suspect that Lily could have pulled off an AK if she had more of a chance. She had huge reserves of magical talent and a hell of a lot of hatred. Yet she still wouldn’t be a dangerous sociopath. In fact, the scariest thing about sociopaths is that they don’t even need to have overwhelming hatred to do brutally nasty things. The fact that most people need to be overwhelmed by emotion before they violate mores is what distinguishes them from sociopaths.
Oh yes, I was talking about canon; IIRC Lily Potter, or any non-Death Eater, doesn’t attempt AK there, does she?
Not that I recall. Mad Eye AKed a spider but technically that was a death eater impersonating Mad Eye. (Although nobody, not even Dumbledore, seemed to blink when Mad-Eye was AKing arachnids. That suggests that people within canon!verse do not all believe that casting AK means you are actually evil.)
One justification I liked was that AK, being “fueled by hatred”, can only be cast by those who are already beyond the Moral Horizon. So it’s not the murder itself that’s so terrible, it’s that fulfilling the prerequisites for using AK means that you are a dangerous sociopath who cannot be safely let loose in the wizarding world.
Unfortunately this doesn’t cover Crucio and Imperius, which IIRC are even used by some “good guys” in canon. But I’m sure you could come up with some other fan-wank to explain them.
I like that justification too, in as much as it is the best of the possible ‘fan-wank’. Even so I suspect that Lily could have pulled off an AK if she had more of a chance. She had huge reserves of magical talent and a hell of a lot of hatred. Yet she still wouldn’t be a dangerous sociopath. In fact, the scariest thing about sociopaths is that they don’t even need to have overwhelming hatred to do brutally nasty things. The fact that most people need to be overwhelmed by emotion before they violate mores is what distinguishes them from sociopaths.
Oh yes, I was talking about canon; IIRC Lily Potter, or any non-Death Eater, doesn’t attempt AK there, does she? The wiki doesn’t say so, at least.
Not that I recall. Mad Eye AKed a spider but technically that was a death eater impersonating Mad Eye. (Although nobody, not even Dumbledore, seemed to blink when Mad-Eye was AKing arachnids. That suggests that people within canon!verse do not all believe that casting AK means you are actually evil.)
Fake!Mad-Eye also told the class that actually casting the Killing Curse was extremely difficult and that none of them would be able to do it.
That kind of claim was usually the prompt for Harry or Hermione to pull it off a couple of chapters later. ;)
Or squishing spiders requires less evil than squishing people.