I think the reason why AK is the way it is, is well, every Death Eater and their children can cast it. It's almost like, the standard issue dark spell for the aspiring dark wizard.

Why would you need to use a vast array of spells in the face of Avada Kedavra? How do Dumbledore and Riddle show their might with their broad repertoire of magic when they only need the one spell?

I do think the way it was described initially in Book 4, the Killing Curse should have been an extremely hard to master spell, which took a lot out of its caster. Maybe even something only Voldemort himself could pull off.

But it seems to have been relegated to the Death Eater equivalent of 'stupefy', and thus had to be something people could easily block somehow.

It seems 'unblockable' means that it can't be blocked by purely magical shields.

 

THIS.

The Killing curse kills. Like the piercing hex pierces things. You can't use a piercing hex to gouge chunks out of a wall, as the spell pierces.

I've always felt that the Killing curse should only have an effect on living things. And maybe gold, cuz gold's weird like that.

But if the Killing curse hits something that isn't alive, it should either pass through with no worries, just stop instantly, or explode. If it passes through, then you really do need to wear an actual bee suit during duels. Then you'd be safe. I can't imagine the curse just stopping - we've already had clothes brought into this. And the explosion always made me feel meh-ish.

I much prefer to think that AKing someone is a call of death thing. If that green light hits something alive, it no longer is. If it hits gold, wacky hijinks ensue. Anything else? Sod it, nothing happens.

 

I agree with Evantide1. Summoning something to block the Killing curse is *not* easy. I think it's a step below, for example, the ability to dodge or catch a bullet: possible, but very fucking hard.

Regarding the clothing never blocking the Killing Curse, I think the spell reaches an absorption point once it's in a certain proximity to a live body. Bypasses everything else, attaches to your "life," and snuffs it out.

 

:facepalm

That's... the most retarded thing I've heard all day. While magic can do and undo lots of things, death and pain are most definitely not magical processes. Magic can trigger them in an inexplicable way, sure, but that doesn't mean it altogether ignores the physical reality that is subjected to it. It doesn't change the definition of instant brain death, nor does it give pain receptors to everything it touches, just so that a curse can take effect.

Ah well, if logic is prohibited here, then I guess I'll just take that shit to fanfiction.

 

The way in which each of those curses causes pain and death is most certainly magical - and not at all logical.

Muggle diagnostics cannot ascertain how someone who's been struck with the Killing curse has died. They cannot say if it's brain death, or heart attack, or whatever; I forget the line, but it's something to the effect "they were suddenly alive, and now they're not." There's not a single fucking thing about that that's replicable in nature.

 

Eh, are we even speaking of the same series? HP ain't no Dresden Files...

Next you say that the Imperious Curse works by altering brain chemistry?

 

Which is what I meant by "Magic can trigger [pain and death] in an inexplicable way".

But but but... Brain death is an effect, or more precisely, a stage of death, not a cause, like heart attack or asphyxiation or anything else... :facepalm Okay, things go like that: when you die, regardless of the cause (well, maybe except either the heart, the lungs or the brain getting damaged beyond repair), first there's heart death, then lung death (or I might be mixing up the two), and then finally brain death, which is the final stage (and the necessary one for declaring an individual truly dead). With the Killing Curse, the first two steps are skipped. *Magic* causes instant brain death. Of course no such thing exists in nature, and I'm not sure if it's even a theoretical possibility.

True that, but it's no surrealist painting either, and what Mordecai said sounded too much like something JKR would respond if questioned about the intricacies of the Killing curse. Maybe it's just me, but that's not a satisfying answer. Anyway, as I've said, if these speculations don't fit in with canon, I'll write them into a fanfic or something, just as an exercise in creativity.

I will claim nothing of that sort. Mind magic must be infinitely more complicated than that, and I'm no neuroscientist.

 

I don't give a flying fuck if it satisfies you. Magic...is magic. The spells cause the effect they have. They are not limited by their physical environments, by physics or by whatever fancy you take in your head to apply to, what is quite blatantly, magic. It is the impossible, the unknowable, the undefinable. You cannot explain how someone hit by the killing curse died. They just did. You cannot explain how the cruciatus causes people pain. It just does. You cannot explain how the levitation charm makes the feather float. It just does. It doesn't do some funky gravity inversion. It makes that feather float by making that feather float.

 

And there you have it. JKR made the magic of HP series entirely illogical and incomprehensible. When writing fanfiction many author's, myself included, choose to ignore this, but that doesn't make it any less canon.

 

Well then we're even, because ^this is the most retarded thing *I've* heard all day. No, death and pain aren't magical processes, but surprise, surprise, both can be brought about - wait for it - magically.

And no, the Cruciatus doesn't magically give a spider pain receptors, just pain. Agonizing, unbearable pain. End of story. No, there's no magical instant brain death, severing of neural networks, disconnect of the medulla oblongata - just death, that's all. It's not some quasi-scientific mercy surgery or something; it's "he/she/it went from living to dead."

It's called magic for a reason, and that reason is because it's unexplainable. And that's the way I like it! I don't want to read a story where the author tries to apply his or her half-ass knowledge of tenth-grade physics in a cringe-worthy attempt at 'splaining how the magic works. Just no.

All the explanation I need, I can get covered by (a) name of the spell, (b) the incantation, (c) the wand movement, (d) a description of how it looks or feels to the caster or the opponent, and (e) the ultimate effect of that spell. And of those, none of them are always required for me to feel like I get the idea.

I can read context clues, and if I read, "Bill staggered under the onslaught of spellfire raining down. His concentration wavered and the shimmering barrier winked out of existence, and the last thing he registered was the sight of a sizzling blue flash, a brief moment of weightlessness, then the cool darkness of oblivion," -

- I don't need to know that whatever that spell was, hit Bill in the sternum, accessed his bloodstream and made it's way to his skull, became a pair of Wookie hands and shook his actual brain to knock him unconscious, and added a concussion for good measure.

You say you want logic? Fine, I applaud you. But "logic" needs to be reserved for things to which it pertains, and stick to the places where it's welcome. Those are the places like "plot," "character development," "dialogue," "motivations," "reactions to events," and "internal consistency."

If I have the misfortune of stumbling onto a story that delves deeply into Harry and Flamel debating the supposedly scientific nuances of whether a Killing Curse to the pinky toe will kill our protagonist as dead as if it hit him in the molars, and yet the plot centers around Dumbledore hiding Harry's enchanted nunchucks for the past six years, I'm not going to be impressed, and I'm going to hope that story finds its way to the DLP WbA so I can shit on it with abandon and aplomb.

And of course, Blaise had responded effectively before I even *got* to this thread, but I still wanted to call Damask a dumbass.

 

It does annoy me when people toss around the word troll. This is fiction and people's personal interpretation of it. What I read and think of a story doesn't have to be exactly the same as everyone else. Its this variation of comprehension that is the beginning point of the wide and eclectic world of fanfiction.

So to Damask with respect- You could try and explain every spell scientifically but to me that just diminishes magical ambiance of the world. It's not wrong; it's just not to my tastes. In the end you will end up limiting the magic. That isn't necessarily a problem but one of the biggest attractions of the world J.K. created is lack of limit in her magic.

To me most of the spells work exactly how they are named and described. A bone breaking curse will cause a bone to break. A Bludgeoner has a physical impact effect. To me the big three move beyond conventional magic and delve into the more arcane and hence dangerous. A call of death. An irrepressable torture and a supression of will. What you are describing to me would be lesser dark arts. Not a killing curse but maybe a mind death curse.

 

Ah well, this debate is ultimately futile, as any other debate where participators start off from completely different premises. That's fine, I guess; my mistake for implying that "a wizard did it" explanations are in any way inferior to thorough exploration of magical theory. Yes, after all people do have different preferences in fiction.

And Portus, never mind that you've grossly misrepresented my views, or how I would write said fic, but being more impressed by more substantial explanations of magic than by half-assed reminders that it's magic we're talking about doesn't really make me a dumbass. Rage much?

Hw597: Your post explains exactly where I went wrong in this debate, and you're mostly right in every aspect here. Time for me to walk out of this thread, I guess.

 

What you're missing is that spells aren't just an example of cause and effect, they're more like concepts given magical form. So the Killing Curse is, in fact, the concept of death in a spell. Death is inevitable, so the Killing Curse is unblockable. The cruciatus curse is the concept of torture taken to the logical extreme. The levitation charm is the concept of levitation given form through spells.

There is no pseudo-science to magic, there is only concept and spell.

 

Interesting theories.For me Magic has always been one more dimension that is present in HP's world.

Everyone whether Muggle or wizard or even a piece of furniture has a presence in this dimension not in terms of Magic power but more of the likes that there is something occupying this space.

So when a spell is cast it interacts with the presence in the Magic-dimension whose effects spill over to perhaps the physical or the mental world.

Say the killing curse is cast,this curse interacts with the presence in this dimension and damages it so that the presence becomes one without the soul and this reflects in the physical world as a dead body ergo spell success.

Lots of holes in the theory,I know but to each his own.

 

That's not really the case. Remember the big blond Death Eater whose only combat spell seems to be the Killing Curse? The dude is a one trick pony to be sure, but his casual use of the AK pretty much directly contradicts what you're saying.

 

The killing curse doesn't kill in a muggle way (causing a heart atack etc) at least in canon.This is shown by the fact that when voldemort killed his family,the muggles couldn't tell how they died

 

If you only use one spell, you'll eventually start to get better at it, even if the spell is hard. Just look at the way Harry improved at the Summoning Charm.

I do think most wizards won't be able to effectively use the Killing Curse in battle. Not only is the curse itself difficult to cast, because you actually have to want your target dead and the spell itself seems to be difficult as well, but performing such a feat of magic in a high pressure situation is even worse. To cast a spell well you need concentration and the right intent, wand movement and incantation. That's probably pretty difficult when things are exploding all around you. It doesn't really surprise me even adult wizards like the Death Eathers in the DoM sometimes stick to simpler spells like Stupify and Expelliarmus. Better a succesful Stunning Spell than a failed Killing Curse after all.

That would mean only truly skilled wizards, those that happen to have a talent for it and those that practiced it a lot will be able to use the curse in a battle situation, without the need to take more time than normal. Others will stick to curses they happen to be good at.

 

There's so much fail in this thread I don't quite know where to begin.

A) The killing curse does exactly what it says on the tin, it kills. There's nothing else to it. One second you are alive, the next you are no more. You are an ex-wizard.

B) It's not difficult at all to put something between you and the killing curse. Locomotor <Insert Object Here> works perfectly well. Not to mention that Mrs Weasley managed to banish the twins' TTTs to the bin, showing that you can banish objects to a particular location. Or the thousands of other ways you could magically get an object from one spot to another.

C) There's a whole bunch of reasons people don't throw the killing curse around like an idiot. As mentioned above, Thorfinn Rowle did at the end of HBP and ended up accidentally killing Gibbon. As it's unblockable, instantaneous and universally lethal (except Harry), it's a dangerous thing to fuck around with, unless (like Voldemort) you consider no life other than your own of any significance. This also ties into:

D) It's logical for an awful lot of higher-tier duelling to be about using obscure magic. Assuming that your opponent has enough time to react to the spell you're using, you're going to want to pick a spell that's unknown to them so they're unsure if it's something they should shield, something they should avoid, something they block physically. Everyone knows the killing curse, just like everyone knows stupefy. They know to get the fuck out of the way or put something between you.

E) The third and probably most important reason most people don't use the killing curse all the time is that even Voldemort appears to have to use the incantation every time he uses it. There's no subtlety to it, no masking what you're about to perform and it's a fucking mouthful of a spell. You try shouting avada kedavra quickly and clearly and see how far you get with it.

 

I've always believed that the killing curses unblockable status really meant unblockable with magic. Snape says 'time and space matter in magic' and so it seemed to me that a curse being blocked by a physical barrier (within reason, depending on the spells potency, not a piece of scrap paper for an AK) goes without saying to magical society.

The same way if someone fired a spell off the top of the bullring you wouldn't expect to see the spell whizz past Glasgow, still chugging away. Being unblockable by magic would make it scary enough to any wizard. The individual aptitude and will that matters so much in a witch or wizard can be outdone by anyone a bit vicious. The intent behind the spell has probably got to scare most ordinary folks too.

 

I once posted my thoughts on this as well: that the Killing Curse was one that *had* to be verbalized, and was roundly dismissed. My rationale was that Voldemort had always vocalized it, and if a prodigy like Voldemort wasn't casting it silently, there must be reasons.

I gave several examples, and with this being post-DH, I had many. Crouch and Wormtail in GoF in addition to Voldemort, Voldemort vs. Harry in OotP, Snape in HBP, and Voldemort again (lots of times) in DH.

Of course, there's the counter-examples of Voldemort vs. Dumbledore in OotP, Bellatrix in the beginning of HBP (the fox), the big blonde dude already mentioned, and maybe another example or two. These were all cited and Voldemort saying it out loud was waved off as, "He likes to strike fear; what's going to strike more fear than hearing someone like Voldemort incant the Killing Curse?" I can't argue the validity of that last one.

My reply though was (and still is) that Harry wasn't close enough to the Dumbledore/Voldemort tilt to hear everything, Bellatrix *was* trying to be stealthy, Harry was hardly processing everything he heard being shouted in the Astronomy Tower, etc. And we never see it explicitly stated that someone cast a "non-verbal Killing Curse."

So anyway, I think it's a nice idea, and even though I wrote Bellatrix as casting a string of successive non-verbal AKs in Geminio, I still feel it's a cool idea to have that one unblockable, irreversible, pants-shitting curse require a spoken incantation. It gives it another layer, and to some very small extent, makes it a little less all-powerful.