You're right Taure. I just checked the Harry Potter Lexicon and it said nothing about needing hate. I must be rusty on my Harry Potter canon.

 

Taure, we don't even know if Crucio needs an emotional trigger.

A) Harry fails at magic
B) He uses it on random ministry worker Q but can't use it on the woman who killed his guardian? Seriously?
C) Bellatrix is fucking insane. She'd mindfuck Harry without thought.

I personally don't think it has an 'emotional' trigger any more than being able to torture someone requires an 'emotional' trigger.

 

In my opinion, the AK was only put in the books because JK needed a spell that could kill, but wouldn't provoke savage imagery for the kids. Its a shit spell thats only redeeming qualities seem to be the shield piercing and stealth muggle killing (Because wizards would know what it was).

Its a lot easier to reducto someone then use massive amounts (Or so I assume) of magic and risk life in prison. This is why I don't really give a shit about other spells that can kill instantly.

 

Except a Reductor curse wouldn't kill someone, unless it was maybe aimed for the head. The Reductor curse is something that's been massively over powered in fanon. In canon it was only about the strength of a strong kick. What you're thinking of is Confringo.

 

Reducto knocked a hole in a thick hedge in about 3 goes. Semi powerful.

 

The point remains that there are spells not nearly as hard as the AK that will still kill people. There would also be less jail rape as well.

 

A phrase that's always struck me as odd is Crouch/Moody's lecture on the Unforgivables, where he says the class could try to AK him all day and all he'd get would be a nosebleed.

Seems he's either being hyperbolic or there should be more than one survivor of the killing curse.

 

I always assumed that was part of the indicator that an AK requiers a fair bit of power. I assume the 'only one person has survived a killing curse' refers to a fully formed killing curse. Surviving the half non-existant warped palest reflection of a killing curse probably happens a fair bit more often.

 

A well-cast (by student standards) Reductor curse disintegrated a table. If you ask me, that's a reasonably powerful spell.

I always thought that Avada Kedavra required some sort of serious emotional trigger. With what Pers said, it seems like there must be something at work behind it and I always put it down to will power. Bellatrix says to use the Cruciatus curse, you have to want to cause them horrible pain. I always pinned the same for AK. You have to want to kill them, as a primal urge.

 

Impostor!Moody, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 14: The Unforgivable Curses.

This suggests, to me, that at least Avada Kedavra and the other Unforgivables, and possibly Dark Magic in general, is fueled by negative emotion. But interpret as you will.

 

I interpret that as that you'd need to have hate to be willing to use them in the first place, not that it's a magical requirement. This is backed up by the fact that, in DH, Harry casts the Imperius without any hate at all.

 

I think you'd be wrong as he goes on to talk about how they couldn't give him more then a nosebleed.

Why else wouldn't they be able to do it?

 

If all you needed to cast magic were the wand movements and incantations, then there'd be no need for Hogwarts. How far along you are in your magical education seems to count for a lot - how much experience and practice you have at magic. Otherwise first-year students would be able to read the incantations for NEWT level spells and go around casting them without a care in the world. Which obviously they don't do. As a student grows older, they gain more experience with magic, and are able to perform spells that they weren't able to perform before.

TL,DR: Not enough magical skill at that stage of their education.

 

Its been bugging me; what does

mean?

Yeah, one of the great flaws of Harry Potter is cast-time; in canon and most fanon, people just point, say, and shoot, theres no time to do the wand work.

Oh, and Harry did have a trigger when he cast Crucio; a DE spat on McGonagall, and he 'really meant it'.

^^Deathly Hollows, Page 593 -- or, so says this guy.


Thanks, Ryu.

 

See: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TL%3BDR

 

SO someone spitting on a teacher who was nice to him brings him more anger than someone murdering what he perceives as his last chance for lasting happiness in a guardian? Really?

I agree with Taure. It's about having the willingness to use them. Plus, have you seen the movie The Last Samurai? There is a scene where a general tells a man to shoot him. He points a gun at him and tells him he will die if he does not shoot him. The man can barely load the gun, and when he finally does his shot is far off.

This is what I believe Moody and Bellatrix are talking about. Even if they were able to perform the spell correctly, they wouldn't have the balls to do it.

 

'I'm not torturing him for me, and my much ignored dark tendencies, which have festered since losing my mentor, being captured and tortured, being hunted by my government and my would-be murderer, blah blah blah, its for my teacher! Never mind righteous anger doesn't work for the curse, as Bella already stated! Crucio!'

Yes, I agree with most of your points, though; just the Dark Magic stuff. Why is it illegal? I've always thought that constant exposure to hate, lust, et cetera is bad for living in an urban society, not the fangurl standard of 'its bad fer ur soul!' or 'policians wurnt powerful enof!'.

 

The fact that this discussion even exists is JKR's legacy to the fannon world. We understand very little about how spell casting works, let alone individual spells.

 

Quoted for fucking truth man. If only JKR had actualy explained magic a little. I just finished the first Dresden Files book and I undestand more about that series magic than Harry Potters.

 

JKR certainly didn't do much explicit explanation of the magic in the HP books, but we do have 7 books full of people doing magic - it's not too hard to put ourselves into the role of scientists, look at the (fictional) empirical "evidence" and form a hypothesis. Yes, in many vague areas the evidence we have is only partial and/or can support a variety of different hypotheses, but isn't this true of the real world also?

Personally, I quite like the vagueness. You can easily imagine the scholars of the wizarding world arguing over the same things that we argue over here about magical theory and so on.