I was wondering how in the world Love saved Harry and made him into the Boy-Who-Lived. Voldemort probably killed other children, and their parents probably also died for them, so why didn't they not die and 'kill' Voldemort, why would it work on Harry, and not all of the other children? I was just wondering, if you can give answers please do give them.

 

A cursory lexicon search, or even a brief search of this forum, would answer that question for you.

 

They key is not that Lily died, but that she died after Voldemort gave her the choice to live, to which she said "take me instead". She made the active and free choice to offer her life to Voldemort in exchange for Harry, and Voldemort implicitly accepted it by killing her.

This is why it was so crucial for Harry not to fight Voldemort in the forest in DH. If he had resisted Voldemort in any way, it would not have been Harry freely accepting the deal Voldemort offered to Hogwarts: give me Harry and none of you will be harmed. Harry took Voldemort up on the offer, sacrificed his life freely in exchange for the inhabitants of Hogwarts, and therefore the people at Hogwarts were protected from Voldemort's magic (even though Harry didn't stay dead).

So... it wasn't love, it was contract law XD

 

Lol, so you are saying that contract law saved one year old Harry from dying, though that could be true.

 

Paperwork. Stronger than Voldemort.

 

Which is ironic; tearing down the ministry and all of its dammed paperwork was clearly his primary goal.

I'm pretty sure that if harry hadn't been around to stop him, Voldemort would have tried to completely eradicate the ministry on a work day and would have been felled by one of those flying paperwork aeroplanes hitting him squarely in the eye.

 

Although I think it's true that offering oneself to die in place of another is key, I think that sacrifice must be driven by love. I doubt any other motivation would have the same effect. So let's say some guy sacrificed himself to buy time for someone else to accomplish a task, that motivation probably wouldn't cut it and there'd be no old magic at play. Just my opinion on this particular feat.

 

Well, I agree that it has to be motivated by love, but I think (at least in JKR's mind) all self-sacrifice is by definition an act of love. Greater love has no man, and all that.

I mean, Harry's love for the entire population of Hogwarts is considerably more abstract and general than Lily's love for him, but it has the same effect.

 

True, although did Harry's act of sacrifice really protect all the defenders of Hogwarts, as his mother's did for him? Would Voldemort's Killing Curse have backfired from any of those people? I haven't read Deathly Hallows since the week it was released, so I can't recall if Voldemort did kill some people in Hogwarts after he thought he'd killed Harry. But I reckon if he had tried to use a Killing Curse, it still would have worked. So maybe Harry's abstract love for everyone in Hogwarts was actually insufficient.

 

Here's the section:

 

Taure, I don't think Harry really understands what he talks about in that scene.

We never get much information about Lily's little "old magic" trick. Somehow, I doubt that a mother dying to protect her baby is such a unique occurrence, even if you add the "offered to live" factor. I always thought that Lily actually performed some sort of obscure ancient ritual of sacrifice, like the one detailed in "Sitra Ahra".

The "power of love", as I see it, is having friends and family who actually love Harry and are willing to die in order to defend him, so unlike Voldemort's fearful followers. See Dobby, for instance.

 

On what basis do you think Harry is wrong? We see Voldemort hit many people with spells in the battle and none of them are harmed, which Harry specifically points out in that section. The same protection Lily gave Harry is manifestly in effect.

I don't think there's any textual evidence to support any kind of active spell by Lily, even before you see Harry do the same thing without any such spell. It was always presented as a simple act of sacrifice, and Harry's Dementor-induced memories back that up.

 

When you add together all the factors that came together in this case, it becomes a bit more plausible for the Harry scenario to be unique. Not inevitably so, mind you. Just plausible. Here's the probability reducing stuff:

1. The wizarding world is small; three or four orders of magnitude smaller sounds about right. Reduce the odds accordingly.

2. The mother has to be killed first before you can make an attempt on the child.

3a. The mother must receive a legitimate offer to "step aside" and live. This rules out many cases in which children would be killed. e.g., where the goal is to kill the entire family. And possibly also where the attacker is just toying with the mother, saying that he would let her live even though he intended to kill her all along.

3b. The attacker must have limited patience with his offer to the mother to live, as Voldemort did. It would have been easy for Voldemort to physically move her out of the way and restrain her, and then kill Harry.

4. The mother must be well positioned at the time of the attack. Again, if she's physically out of the way, it makes it more likely that the attacker will simply go for the child first.

Then there are these other things that aren't required, but still combine to make the Harry scenario a lot more notable.

1. The attacker should use the Killing Curse, even though there should be many other curses that would be sufficient for killing a child. I'm sure it's technically possible for these other curses to fail and rebound on the attacker, but it hardly seems so special that way, does it? Those other curses aren't unblockable anyway.

2. The murder target would most likely be a dependent child. Children who are of age are less likely to be in a position where their mothers could sacrifice themselves for them.

3. The attacker should have a Horcrux. If he doesn't, he's simply killed outright by the Killing Curse, and we don't get all of that interesting stuff about lingering protection, curse scar soul transfers, and so forth.

4. The whole thing needs to be recorded into history. If the incident isn't well-witnessed, the story of it is less likely to be spread and believed. If the killer isn't as famous and notorious as Voldemort, fewer people will care.

 

Do we? I might be wrong, but I don't remember specifically reading about Voldemort hitting anyone, only that he dueled Slughorn, Mcgonagall and Kingsley at the same time, who I suppose could protect themselves.

Harry says none of Voldemort's spells struck, but did he really have any opportunity to notice it among the pandemonium? it just seems like something he assumes but we never get any actual written proof of. He did actively shielded Molly, after all.

True, but the ritual doesn't have to be performed on the spot, it might be something she did beforehand, maybe even on Dumbledore's advice. We were simply never given enough specifics about that protection, and neither did Harry, so he thinks it's just a simple act of sacrifice.

And yes, Blazzano, I do believe that even with all those factors, the situation could have occurred numerous other times, though it is likely that people didn't really paid thought to those incidents. Rowling gave us some story about a wizard who turned his seven Squib sons into hedgehogs or something, and it's not so absurd to imagine a wizard who murders a baby because, say, he discovers that his wife cheated on him and it's not really his own baby. Those things happen in the real world all the time.

So there's not much proof either way, but it seems more likely to me that Harry's survival wasn't just accidental. It might have even been Fate itself protecting him.

 

Let's be honest. Love didn't save Harry, plot armor did. Without that little bit at the beginning which kicked off the series, there would be no series as we know it. JKR tried to make it seem less so by killing off a number of minor characters in book 7, but Harry still lived because of the DM Fiat of JKR's will. She, as the author, decided he was going to live for her "happily ever after" (seriously, fuck that epilogue), so he did.

 

Voldemort lands spells on multiple people, including McGonagall, Kingsley and Slughorn. Harry then tells us none of them were harmed, something which is immediately and visually apparent, and that this is because he has invoked the same protection as Lily did.

It's hard to see how this isn't clear cut.

 

So...Voldemort needed a better lawyer and Harry had the best one in the whole verse: Albus Dumbledore.

Never thought of it like that. Good one!

 

I wouldn't be quite so quick to mock the contract idea as paperwork... our modern idea of a contract has all kinds of bureaucratic notions attached to it, but at its base is something much more primal. Humans have been making deals for all of recorded history.

Harry's DH moment has been said to be Jesus-like, and Jesus' sacrifice was also essentially contractual: a new deal (covenant) that replaced the Abrahamic deal, a contract between God and Jesus whereby Jesus indemnified humanity's sin. God sees original sin and says "everyone must die" and Jesus says "take me instead".