ALL BOW TO THE MIGHTY PAPERPUSHERS, WE ARE TRUE POWAAAAH! They said the USSR fell because of bureaucracy, FOOLS, it was because the Bureaucracy Fu was not as strong as the yanks ones, just like Voldemort's inadequate reading of the minor clausules led to his downfall. The smaller the clausule, the strongest it is, for they are critical and bite you harder in the ass.

 

I could imagine the next Dark Lord.

"LISTEN DARK LORD TAURE. I RATHER LIKE MY FRIENDS AND YOU ARE GOING TO KILL ME ANYWAYS. I WILL LET YOU KILL ME, BUT YOU CAN'T KILL MY FRIENDS. COOL RIGHT?"

It seems like such a silly and abusable thing that leads into so many future issues. I am going to pretend that it is the power of the plot forcing things to happen that way instead of attempting to logic it.

 

Huh. I hadn't actually made that connection before. Good point.

 

Why did you put the notion of a Dark Lord Taure into my head? Now I'm going to have nightmares for weeks.

 

Carefully contrived deus ex machina Dumbledore knew fuck knows how about.

 

If you're going to die anyway, your sacrifice means nothing because you didn't give anything up. Only if you could have lived unless you made the sacrifice do you have a chance to bestow the protection on someone else. Harry was a fluke, you're not supposed to get back up after you sacrifice yourself.

 

Personally, I thought the big examples of Voldemort's spells failing were his silencing spell over the crowd that didn't last too long, and Neville not dying when he was set on fire. Might also explain why Hagrid was able to get back into the fight, as well.

 

Question for a hypothetical scenario: If before killing Neville Voldemort had given Frank the option to join his ranks and live, in exchange for his sons life, would Neville have been protected as Harry was if Frank had still given his life for his son?

 

It has to be intended as a death-for-life sacrifice:

 

Alright, I think I can work it in then, thanks.

 

I wonder how effective the actual protection is. Does it only protect against magic? IE could Voldemort have levitated a giant rock and dropped it under someone who had Harry's 'protection.' Would the rock have killed them? Would a shield pop into existence and protect them from the rock? What about indirect harm such as Voldemort ordering someone to kill someone under Harry's 'protection.' If they used magical means? If they used mundane means?

 

-USER SUCKS COCK IN HELL-

 

I wouldn't think that his protection works that way. In DH Harry pointed out that "none of the spells [...] were binding". In other words, it was more of a subtle protection against magical attacks, a sort of passive protection that weakens the attack. You can see that when Neville broke the Silencing charm Voldemort tried to cast.
It wouldn't seem likely that a shield charm would appear and protect all of them, since that'd be more of an active defense. I don't think they'd be defended against physical attacks either, given that Harry's protection is more in the magical realm than anything else.

 

First: the word is Muggle—not mundane. There's no such thing as mundane in the Harry Potter world meaning a separation between magic and non-magic. /Pet-peeve rant.

On to the topic:

The answer purely rests on the position you take regarding the author. JKR is building a world that is all-inclusive of magic and separating it from the Muggle world. In that case, magical protection is protection from harmful magic i.e. any magic that will end in Harry's death and delivered by Voldemort. It is, IMO, the reason Voldemort knew he had to defeat Harry, and know one else should or could (the part of the prophecy saying so was unknown to Voldemort—but I believe that part of the prophecy refers to this idea as well).

Another option, however, is a structuralist reading. In this case, the sacrifice for another and later, the resurrection of Harry taps into the larger structures of sacrifice and resurrection, best known from Christianity in the west. A reading in this context highlights the absoluteness of both the sacrifice and its effects, making it impossible for the receiver to suffer harm due to the substitutionary (and truly, propitiational) death of the sacrificed one. Following this concept, then, JKR's world is one where Harry Potter can not be killed by Voldemort or others whom he willed to Kill Harry.

A post-structuralist/postmodern/Derridian reading, however, shows how the text undermined itself. Harry's protection wasn't his protection, but the very reason he was put in danger in the graveyard. His mother's love in his blood became not a protection, but the very element by which Harry was made vulnerable to the Killing Curse from Voldemort, and by doing so, stretching Harry's suffering out over a number of years before eventually facing the Killing Curse. Thus, "to be loved so deeply" as Dumbledore said, that it leaves a mark on Harry forever, was not only ineffective in the end, but allowed him to suffer much greater pains by putting him in place to be emotionally and mentally abused by his relatives, and then drawing even more harm and eventually, possible death for him and his friends until he had to sacrifice himself for them.

What does all that mean?

There is no yes or no answer. It's up to you, based on how you read the text.

 

I understand the first two suggestions you made, Joe, but this last one confuses me.

Harry's mother's sacrifice protected him from the original AK. Her sacrifice, as Taure suggested, allowed Harry to live, as she bargained her life for Harry's.

Sure, Harry's protection became diluted - or maybe broken - after the graveyard, but to say that because of this, his entire life of suffering and sacrifice was meaningless or redundant, I find to be a stretch. I'm just lost on the leap of logic you used to posit that Harry's protection was rendered obsolete to the idea that his obsolete protection was the cause of his suffering. That loss of protection wasn't causal in Harry's stay with the Dursley's at least not the first fourteen years.

Also, I think the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy is important here. Harry would have sacrificed himself in any scenario in which Voldemort continued to pursue him or harm his friends. The harm that comes from this fight aren't tied to Harry's protection but his own feelings for the people around him.

Note: I did a cursory read of post-structuralism (not familiar with it) but it's not something to skim. The structuralist viewpoint I can understand, but deconstructing the text the way you have isn't something I've easily grasped.

 

Weird-ass deus ex machina plus JKR wanting to make Harry into some kinda magical Jesus.

 

Congratulations. The fact that you don't understand means your doing it right. (And, i say that only half tongue-in-cheek). According to Derrida and others, every text works to undermine itself. To understand that, realize that for Derrida, language is a game. Words are signs, but when they're written down, they become symbols that can be interpreted however the reader may read them.

So, as the classic saying goes: "Time flies like an arrow" can mean you are to measure the speed of a fly like you would an arrow, or that a bug called "Time flys" enjoy (like) an arrow, or that the measurement of time moves as fast as an arrow does. All of this works to decenter language from philosophy—words in and of themselves have absolutely no meaning. Furthermore, they're usually bound in binary relationships that render them even more meaningless. For instance, Cold has no meaning without Hot.

So, applied to the story above, that strategy for reading would say the very story that proposed Harry's mother's sacrifice for love, also undermines that very idea. Her sacrifice put him in places no loving mother would want him to be. It drew more pain to him than any loving mother would want. And, it eventually led him to his death after years of suffering at the hands of the Dursleys, Voldemort, Death Eaters, teenage cruelty at Hogwarts, and whatever else. Thus, her gift to her son was no longer a gift, but almost a curse within itself, the very thing from which she tried to protect him.

In short, Deconstruction (post structuralism or post modernism, although I probably shouldn't heap them all together like this) is like running a lawnmower through a book—usually for the purpose of watching words get shredded. The point of it, to be honest, is that it is the ultimate position of Enlightenment—man is centered as ultimate judge over all knowledge, but through a hermeneutics of doubt (they'll seldom link to that idea, usually it's to Nietzsche), such knowledge can't really be expressed through written symbol.

 

I have always been unsure as to the degree of the protection earned by Harry's sacrifice. Voldemort's spells did seem to all work initially; he was able to silence the crowds and blast his opponents through the air, after all. I realize that McGonagall, Kingsley, and Slughorn all survived, but the passage always made me think that Voldemort was aiming for a temporary respite in the duel so that he could kill Molly. Most of his spells were just cancelled after a short time due to the power of the sacrifice.

The problem is that, say, Avada Kedavra isn't a spell that can be cancelled like that. If it hits someone, and works briefly, they are going to stay dead. In addition, I am not sure why Harry would throw up a shield to block Voldemort from taking revenge for Bellatrix's deaths if the spell would have no effect.

The Jesus parallels are likely intentional, which adds to the death-for-life trade theory, and I suppose I could buy the explanation of the contract with Voldemort of Harry's death in exchange for the lives of his friends being powerful enough to block the killing curse, but the protection that we see exhibited in the fight doesn't seem quite that powerful. I could be completely wrong, though, since Harry does state that Voldemort wouldn't be able to hurt his friends anymore. I was just wondering about the differences between how the protection was portrayed and the theoretical limits it seems it should have. Does anyone have any thoughts?

 

I like to think that there's some similarity between the protection conferred by a loving sacrifice and the nature of prophecies in HP - that is, both appear to rely as much on pure magical effects as they do on the simple nature of people. This little exchange happens in HBP...

...which I think sheds a bit of light. Prophecies obviously have some kind of objective magical element, which is why they generally come true and why people put stock in them, but they also can be averted if the participants choose to act against them - which they usually don't. Free will exists, in other words, but the general contours of the future can still be dictated, because people choose to act in specific ways. So I'm sure there are ways around the protection, just like there are ways around prophecies, but because Voldemort wouldn't think to focus on those means, it's really all the same. Like how Harry could've died a handful of times throughout the series, and Voldemort could've used those opportunities to have him killed, but he survived because Voldemort insisted on killing him personally - the only way Harry would actually come back.

Or take Felix Felicis, for another example. The potion makes you luckier by subtly nudging you to make the right choices, helping you dodge a spell here or talk to the right person there. But if you decided to act against those impulses, I doubt it would physically restrain you, and there are likely also ways for others to ensure that a person under the effects is defeated.

So does the killing curse defeat the protection? I don't think so, but I also think the question is irrelevant, since nobody seems to have gotten hit with it, and that's remarkable in itself.