No. It's the killing curse, and avada kedavra is nothing more than an incantation. It's definitely not an 'AK', either.

Fucking Hermione Granger.

It's all her fault, for answering "avada kedavra" in Defence Against the Dark Arts. Fake Moody should have beat her ass for that. She broke one of canon's cleanest, easiest, gentlest, sexiest spells.

 

I suddenly thought of this cracky plot bunny: Harry as a kid doesn't realise he can do magic, but fantasises about it. He tries to say 'abra kadabra' to scare Dudley, but gets the words muddled up - he accidentally casts the killing curse instead. :awesome

 

LOL, awesome.

Doubt it would work, though, given the whole focus requirement fake Moody talks about.

And yeah, I like Hermione, but I've always found it rather out of syntax that she answers "Avada Kedavra" rather than "The Killing Curse". Of course, that still doesn't excuse calling it the "Avada Kedavra Curse", as nobody AFAIK says it that way.

 

hahaha do it.

 

I say, "Meh."

Would a young Harry contain the emotional fuel required for the killing curse, though? I know that the Cruciatus curse requires the caster to actually want the target to suffer (righteous fury not withstanding), so what would the killing curse require of the caster in order to be successfully activated? And would a young and bullied Harry have it within him? Would it even be possible wandless, and at such a young age?

(I think the 'Fake Moody' from book four explains the mechanics behind the three Unforgivables, doesn't he? I need to rebuy the book).

 

@Ichor

Shhh! Don't get in the way of the crack!

 

This might work a bit better as a Pre-CoS one-shot, if the author finds a realistic way for Harry to still have his wand on him after Vernon locked up his school things.

 

IIRC, Fake Moody specifically says about the Killing Curse, paraphrased, "You kids could point your wands at me now and try and cast the Killing Curse, and I doubt I'd get so much as a nosebleed."

 

You could have a young Harry learn about magic by realizing that the "Avadra Kevadra" words create nosebleeds in his targets. Only later, after his visit to Diagon Alley with Hagrid and he gets his wand, and after a particularly bad bullying session by his cousin and minions, does he point his wand at his cousin and cast his first proper spell: a "nosebleed" spell that, unfortunately, results in a bright green flash that knocks him dead.

It could be a one-shot or perhaps the start to an Azkaban crackfick.

 

That could work!

 

This could have several possible extrapolations. It could be taken to mean the Moody never teaches the class the wand movements for the spell, so the spell won't work properly. Most people just read it as no one has enough hate in their heart or the will to kill to 'fuel' the spell.

I personally like to thing that a spell as potent as the killing curse would have a complex wand movement to go with it rather than just point and click.

Of course, I could just be way off topic here.

 

Probably because he also says they lack the power to cast it.

Also, on the topic of spell names, I don't think it unreasonable that the magical world would end up developing nicknames for spells, or calling them by their incantations. Why? Because a large quantity of fanfic writers have done so, which seems to suggest that this is the kind of thing that people would do. It's not like saying the incantations will lead to them accidentally casting the spell.

 

Except of course that he demonstrates the spells in front of the various classes, with the imperius curse being used on the entire class. Plenty of chances to memorise the wand movements.

 

^This.
Plus, Harry manages to use both the Cruciatus Curse and the Imperius Curse the first times he uses them.
He doesn't do them that well, but they're functional.
Though on that note, when Harry uses Cruciatus on Carrow, it works pretty well, much better than it did on Bella.

 

That's because someone spitting on a teacher he has a reasonable relationship with made him angrier than someone killing the closest thing he had to a father. Might be a small detail, but this was actually the most annoying thing about DH for me.

 

I'm of the opinion that learning the patronus charm helped to some extent - learning to fake a sense of happiness in order to fuel a spell would require a similar if opposite mental twist to anger, hate, and so on - and he'd have learned the magical mechanisms of applying emotion to magic.

But that's just speculation. I could be wrong.

Whether or not the Unforgivables are hard to cast, the general public wil always want to believe that they are, because the knowledge that a fifteen year old with a stick can kill you is pretty scary, especially in a world where all fifteen year olds have said sticks. Perhaps the fact that they're easy to cast would be part of what made them so 'unforgivable'; the Ministry makes them hard to cast by adding a sentence that few people would be willing to risk.

 

I always found it strange how, in a magical world where there ought to be as many ways to kill someone with magic as there are household charms, that there were only three Unforgivables with so much stigma behind them.

Maybe CareOtters is right in that what made them so infamous was that they were the most common.

...Or maybe J.K. just wasn't very good at thinking more broadly about the issue at hand. Which - it would be that. Anything else is just unnecessary rationalisation, really.

 

Of course the Killing Curse is easy to cast. Even Molly Weasley managed to do it (unless she had secret ninja training we don't know about, which would explain how she could defeat Bellatrix ).

But more serious, I've never understood why anyone bother with other spells in battle when you could use just AK. It can't be blocked and and it kills instantly, so why use anything else when you want to end your opponent's life?

 

^ And this is why I have a grudge against Rowling. She came up with a super!spell that makes everything else in battle redundant. Woo.

 

^This. We see this to some extent in canon, and Taure's magical theory explains it pretty well. When Voldemort and Dumbledore duel there's basically Killing Curses and transfiguration being thrown around, nothing else. Almost everyone else, except for Flitwick and Mcgonagall, who do a bit of battle transfiguration against Snape for a few seconds, use a a variety of curses/hexes.
It might be that an Avada Kedavra takes a bit of time to use(like it requires concentration that's hard to use in battle...), and other spells don't.