So yesterday I was explaining who Dolohov was to my wife who has only seen the movies. In the discussion we talked about how Harry not pulling the trigger in the restaurant when he had him at his mercy resulted in Remus and Tonk's death. We also discussed how he cursed Hermione in the DoM, but because he was silenced she survived.

It got me thinking, how does being silent reduce your power on spells? Wasn't Snape an advocate of closing your mind and your mouth? If being silent reduced Dolohov's power (and therefore saving Hermione's life), why would Snape try to get Harry to perform silent spells? Wouldn't the trade off of having the spell be heard be worth having said spell at full power?

We see plenty of evidence of silent spell casting in the series especially in the duel between Dumbledore and Voldemort. Is it a power issue? Or just an oversight on JKR's part? I would love to hear what you guys think especially Taure on this issue.

If for some reason this issue has already been discussed please show me and I will take any and all abuse for not researching it properly.

 

Dolohov was not good enough at silent casting, either with that particular curse or spells in general.

 

Silent casting requires a nose twitch on the part of the caster, like Samantha on Bewitched. Dolohov isn't so good at twitching his nose.

Q.E.D.

 

I could have sworn you needed to prove something before you could say that...

 

I have a story for July's contest where a certain Death Eater may slightly disagree with you.

 

I can write a story where Harry Potter is a pumpkin. Is Harry a pumpkin?

 

Okay, point taken. I just tend to prefer writing Dolohov (and most Death Eaters, for that matter) as halfway competent.

 

There was a contest in July?

 

Ok, if Dolohov couldn't silent cast, he wouldn't have been able to curse Hermione at all. Some power is better than no power. And silent casting gives the element of surprise. If you don't hear the incantation, it's harder to react to it, or in Hermione's case, even figure out what the hell she got hit with.

Slightly more on topic, I suppose vocalizing the spell lends more 'intent' to it, making it more effect. Some spell's can't be silent at all, such as the Killing Curse and probably Cruciatus as well.

And sometimes, it may be quicker just to think the spell than to actually say it.

 

Didn't Bellatrix kill a fox with a silent killing curse in HBP?

 

I think that particulair spell simply isn't as strong when used silently. Dolohov is portrayed as to good of a fighter to have trouble with silent spells. If it had been someone else, it would have been different, because silent spells are more difficult to perform than verbal ones, so they might not always be just as powerful for the inexperienced fighter. But in this case, I'd chalk it up to being a peculiar quirk of spell itself.

 

It's like grunting in tennis. "I'm casting this as hard as I fucking can!"

Which helps explain why men watch women's tennis, if not the witches' dueling tournament.

Which helps explain those combat spells with the long incantation. You either learn to cast it well non-verbally, or you get taken out halfway through your incantation by someone using a piddling little stunner.

 

Don't know if it's been said before in this thread, but why not write this problem off as one of the numerous instances, where JK didn't really know what she was doing? Maybe it's not that Dolohov sucked at silent casting, but that JK just did it like this and then introduced silent casting in Half-Baked Plot with different mechanics, forgetting how Dolohov did it? Pretty sure it's the true answer to most of these discussion. That woman's imagination is amazing, but a consistent planner she is not. In my opinion, at least.

 

Say what you will about her writing, but she did have much of this stuff figured out beforehand. I imagine silent casting was something she considered from the start.

 

Perhaps we're all looking at this the wrong way. We assume because of fanon (unless it is indeed stated in canon) that the curse would have killed Hermione had it not been cast silently.

It could be that the curse, while potentially lethal, just didn't end up killing Hermione because she was young and had medical attention relatively quickly. They checked her for a pulse when it hit, and she had one, but no one ever said it was very stable or that the curse didn't still do a lot of damage.

I think there's a big leap in logic that I always jumped as well, but now that I read this thread I think it sound kind of silly.

tl;dr: Dolohov cast a spell that didn't kill Hermione because it wasn't an immediately lethal spell, not because his lethal spell was weaker due to being silently cast.

 

We don't assume silent casting made it weaker, because we expected it to kill Hermione. We assume silent casting made it weaker, because Madam Pomfrey said it did. Whether or not it would have killed Hermione otherwise doesn't really matter. All that matters is that the curse wasn't as strong as it was supposed to be, because it was cast silently.

 

I did write 'unless stated in canon.' Still fail, but I disclaimed my whole theory.

I can't honestly think of a good reason why it would be weaker. Seems rather silly. Maybe it was Deus Ex Machina in order to keep a main character alive while still having at least ONE of the six children actually get seriously injured by the apparently extraordinarily dangerous Death Eaters.

Without what happened to Hermione, I don't think many people would even consider death eaters that terrifying. I know they weren't supposed to kill Harry, but his friends didn't have any shield but authorial intent. Thus, Hermione takes a serious blow but lives.

 

Right on the head, methinks.

 

There's actually even a more obvious moment where Rowling kept one of them alive. When Ron summons that brain, Ginny is sitting against the wall, injured and defenseless. She yells something and one of the Death Eathers fires a spell at her to shut her up. But instead of a Killing Curse, they use a Stunning Spell. And that I don't get, because there is no way Harry could have been hit by that spell, so why hold back? Had they used a Killing Curse, they could have simply pointed their wand at Luna, who was lying unconscious on the floor, and say "the prophecy or she's next". Game over.