Hello there people.

I had this thought the other day and I'm sorry if this question had been asked. I did search this several times and came up with nothing. No, actually, I came up with too many threads and couldn't be bothered to go through 1400 odd threads.

Call me lazy, call me what you will.

Anyway, my question is this:

I thought that the Killing Curse killed by ripping out the soul of the victim. If this is the case, how is this different from the Dementor's Kiss? In canon, it said that the Dementors don't kill, because you can exist without your soul as long as your brain worked and your heart beated. So if the AK curse ripped out the soul and only the soul, wouldn't you still live?

Unless I'm wrong from the start and the curse does something entirely different like stop the heart and kill the brain?

Or is every fanfiction different?

Or should I just accept that it kills and leave the matter alone?

Tell (or write) me what you think, please!

---Qwerty

 

I can't remember if that's what JKR said in canon, but my interpretation of the soul bit is that the killing curse metaphorically rips the soul from the victim, while dementors do so literally.

I don't think it stops the heart, the lungs, or the brains. It just stops life.

What irks me about this, is that solid objects are supposed to be able to block it right? (gravestones in GoF) So why don't clothes stop it? If its limited to density or something, then at least body armour should stop it. (But blow up in the process)

 

I don't think the Killing Curse kills by any mechanism. It just makes whatever it hits dead. Just like the Stunning charm makes whatever it hits unconscious, and the Tarantallegra makes whatever it hits dance. It just imposes an effect. Not through physical causes, but magical ones.

The cause of death when hit by the Killing Curse is the Killing Curse, not a heart attack brought on by the spell or anything like that. If it expelled the soul, it'd be the "Soul Expelling Curse". If it stopped the heart, it'd be the "Heart Stopping Curse". It isn't. It's the Killing Curse <_<

And to people who would say to all of that "Yes, but how does it do it?" (which would rather be missing the point of what I just said), I say this:

If you say the Killing Curse works by violently expelling the soul, how does that explain anything? Because then you have to explain how the Killing Curse expels the soul. Eventually you're going to have to say "the magic causes an effect to happen".

Edit: And yeah, we've had this thread before. http://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?t=1851 It took me about three seconds to search for and only 3 results came up, so I don't know what you're talking about when you say 1000s of threads. Methinks you have poor search skillz. But meh.

 

In magic, intent means more than mechanics. At least in the accepted HPVerse, as I understand it.

It's like the silly seeming minor jinxes and hexes. What possible mechanism is there behind a jelly-legs jinx? The AK causes acute symptoms of death. Method irrelevant.

 

My bad. o_o

 

Any other website and I'm sure some young kid would've asked that. Here, they're too afraid too.

On topic: Taure's explanation makes the most sense.

To reiterate: the Killing Curse kills whatever it hits. Nothing more to it.

 

Fixed that for you.

We should have a Taure-fanboys thread so they can all come out loud and proud. TFBT rather than LGBT.

 

My two cents:

The Killing Curse is a "necromantic energy" that, combined with living cells, make death.

So using a Killing curse in someone brain dead would kill all the other alive cells in the body.

Because it affetcs all the cells of the body, the Priori Incantatem shows a "complete" shadow of the victim, with behavior, memories etc.

About the body armor thing: It a magic thing, or better yet, every thing about Avada Kedavra is magic (like killing cells) so maybe the curse go to the living and changes its path to bypass the body armor (an effect that the naked eye can't see).

When talking about this curse, everyone can come up with this kind of bullshit that I did, so personally I just prefer to believe that its magic and appreciate Dumbledore's death.

 

About the body armor, the only reasonable idea I was able to come with was that victims think of their clothes as part of their image (when you imagine yourself you aren't naked, are you?; fapping doesn't count), pretty much like fur, horns or scales for animals.

 

That...makes a surprising amount of sense to me. Your clothes help define 'you' so if it hits your clothes, it may as well have hit you.

On a completely different note, is there any canon evidence of the killing curse making things burn or explode? Or does it just hit a wall, or the ground or whatever and do nothing?

And for that matter, does the killing curse kill plants?

 

In OotP one of Voldemort's missed killing curses hits the welcome desk at the MoM Atrium and it bursts into flames.

It's a bit of an anomaly, really. I guess you could explain it away with something like saying that there were wands in the desk and the magic reacted. Or something.

 

It's a bit out there, but you could say that when an object is hit with the Killing Curse, it exploding is a sort of "death" in that it doesn't function as it should anymore. A chair exploding after being hit with the killing curse wouldn't provide you with a seat, for example.

Or the magic just freaks out because it's hitting an inanimate object and explodes to release energy.

 

It obviously just toggles the boolean value for life from TRUE to FALSE. Any other effects are bugs.

 

Magic does not follow logic.

But following the thought that the Killing Curse simply makes things dead, Zed's explanation is pretty much the only plausible, though you could create some grandiose magical theory explaining the thing Zed said in a sentence if that's your fancy. Explaining it with wands reacting to the spell is pretty much side-stepping the issue and diverting the attention.

 

The problem is that, IIRC, there are occasions that Killing Curses have hit things and nothing has happened.

 

Wouldn't be the only time there is contradicting things and errors in the books.

To be honest I just think Rowling herself hasn't thought about the effects of the Killing Curse impacting on inanimate objects, but simply decided to elevate the fight in the atrium by adding more fire.

Therefore, it's up to each fanfiction author how they want to develop this, since Rowling is neither consistent nor descriptive about this matter.

Reaching a fanon consensus about this issue would be as unlikely as deciding on a set spouse for Harry, hence you can simply try to influence those in your immediate vicinity to your way of thinking. DLP is perhaps a good place to start.

 

This and more.

I understand the changing point of view of the main focus. You follow a child up to near-adulthood, and as that time changes, so do perceptions.

What you end up with is a series of vignettes from a growing mind. Sharp clarity and muddled memories in equal parts.

We must remember, this isn't a universe nearly as rich as some. Some rules were never made. I can blame stingy editors or publishers, bad continuity, or just lack of need. I think that's why this genre is so heavily focused on as well. We as readers have to fill in the gaps. It's conductive to us.

 

I personally don't remember any canon instance of the Killing Curse doing nothing. The desk Taure mentioned did in fact explode, and before that, the Magical Brethren statues, animated by Dumbledore to leap in front of Voldemort's AK aimed at Harry, exploded as well, or at least broke apart.

Unless I'm badly mistaken, at the climax of HBP, the big blonde Death Eater, who was throwing around AKs, ended up collapsing part of the tower stairwell with a missed Killing Curse.

For a bit different example, Voldemort's rebounding Killing Curse blew apart the Potters' cottage in Godric's Hollow when it failed to kill baby Harry. And of course, the two AKs Voldemort launched at Harry at the end of DH either (a) blasted both him and Harry into a sort of limbo/purgatory, or (b) flat-out killed Voldemort himself.

On a separate issue, I have been wondering about silent spell-casting and the Killing Curse. I have wracked my brain, but I cannot think of a single instance in canon where the Killing Curse was cast silently. Every time Voldemort casts it, he speaks the incantation (his fight with D'dore in the MoM... I can't be sure), and you'd think if anyone was going to cast it silently, it would be Voldemort. Of course, his psychopath/sociopath personality would likely get off on yelling the words and seeing that instant of fearful recognition from his victim, so that may be a bad example.

There is one example I can readily recall where you do NOT hear "Avada Kedavra" as the Killing Curse is used, and that's at the beginning of HBP, when Bellatrix is following Narcissa to Spinner's End, and Bellatrix AKs the fox by the riverbank. My theory on that is that the narrative perspective is from far enough away that the reader doesn't hear what Bellatrix says, so unless someone can point out a definite instance where the Killing Curse is cast silently, I feel that maybe it's one curse that has to be spoken aloud to be cast.

Make sense? Ideas or thoughts?

 

Off the top of my head I can think of one instance of a Killing Curse doing nothing: there is one in the Dumbledore vs. Voldemort fight that bounces off a Centaur statue.

With regards to vocalisation, you have the silent one cast by Bellatrix, and Voldemort did indeed cast Killing Curses silently in the MoM fight. He just cast a couple verbally as well.