Dutchman Dirk Willems was a religious prisoner who escaped in 1569, but when the guard pursuing him fell through the ice of a river, Willems turned around to save the guard. He was then recaptured and burned at stake.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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I think part of Potter lore is that you physically can't cast killing spells unless you're already ontologically evil somehow. Harry tries doing the torture curse a few times and it doesn't work because his soul is too pure or whatever.
It's so liberal. Good team and bad team.
if I recall, he does the imperious curse successfully a few times, so it's not like he can't or is even above using unforgivable curses.
Beyond Harry's unwillingness to use the killing curse in that instance, what's wild to me is that nobody that's not ontologically evil uses the killing curse. Like, the adults are all mad at Harry's stupidity for giving away his position by using a nonlethal spell, but all of those adults are also not using the killing curse. This suggests a hegemonic worldview where it's obvious and sensible that you should want to kill your enemy, but it's only acceptable if you do it in an indirect and roundabout way. It's fine to stun or petrify them so they fall off a broom and die on impact with the ground, but it's beyond the pale to kill them directly with a spell.
Unforgivable Killing curse = not morally okay
🅱️one Removal spell = morally okay
what's not to get
Maybe all the wizard cultures where actually doing useful combat magic was acceptable died out because they all abacadabra'd eachother to extinction during the stone age.
Also he had no problem casting a spell on draco that slashed him open. Killing curse that leaves no mark requires you to be evil, but you can cast sword without knowing what it'll do
Why can't he cast the "make target have a stroke" spell or "have the target's heart and brain switch places" spell?
i'm aware i'm putting way too much thought into a work that does not merit it, but it's interesting that the biggest source of internal conflict for harry is the question of whether he is, fundamentally, like Voldemort. Of course, the series being what it is, the conclusion Rowling reaches is "no, actually all the symbolism and the sorting hat and the scar and literally containing a part of voldemort's soul was just a big misunderstanding. good boys love their mommy and voldemort is a bad boy and always has been."
if you choose to read the whole series as a more-than-incidentally liberal psychodrama, with Harry the scion of the End of History and Voldemort the spectre of 20th century fascism, it's all a bit too revealing.
there are occasional hints that Rowling is making a contrast with wizard society and Voldemort's followers, so I know what you mean. It's an inevitable contrast to make in the first place, there's always going to be a "we're not so different" moment in the kind of genre fiction she was going after. It happens in Star Wars and Lord of the Rings too.
But what's really interesting is that it doesn't go anywhere. Usually the hero overcomes both the villain and their own shortcomings to become something better than either, but that doesn't happen. Very direct contrasts are made too, like Harry being a chosen one, how wizards treat goblins and elves, how wizards are resistant to change. It's shown their bureaucracy isn't above wiping memories or using outright torture by putting people in a prison with monsters made out of depression. Even as a kid that's what I thought the point was, to show wizard society and Voldemort were two sides of a dying system that Harry was born to overcome. I was a kid but I was familiar with Star Wars and that was Luke's general arc.
Except it doesn't go anywhere. Harry sticks to his liberal pacifism and defeats Voldemort on a technicality. Wizard society goes back to exactly how it was with no changes whatsoever, nor is any comment spared on it. Voldemort is considered a strange anomaly rather than the inevitable conclusion of allowing Slytherin to exist. And all of that despite earlier books saying outright that Voldemort and wizards like him had been festering within wizard society for centuries, building up to this moment.
Fuck JK Rowling