The January Challenge: Lily revisited
The Challenge for January 2011:
Lily revisited
Lily revisited
Years ago (we've been around for a while, oh yes!)we had 'Severus and Lily' as a monthly challenge.
alicekinsno1 suggested to take a closer look at Lily's character:
Maybe something that discusses the character of Lily more deeply? I'd love to see what some of your ideas are for just how Lily went from treating Snape so harshly and talking back to James, to being the stereotypical "saintly mother" at the end of her life. There's something about her personality that doesn't add up.
That is to say, how her apparently selfless decision to die for her baby makes sense in light of the way she treated Severus or even James. With possibly a side comment about how despite being so powerful and gifted she didn't really show any of that by dying pleading for her baby's life without even trying to take on Voldemort.
Please post your entries here or in a separate post. I'm looking forward to your entries.
If you have ideas for new challenges, please post them here. (This is a new list, your earlier suggestions are still in the old post).
I don't see why Imperius is worse. This too is a subversion of the will, or perhaps more accurately - the won't. It causes one to lose judgment while the spell is in effect. Not being aware that one is acting on suggestion of another rather than one's own initiative is probably harder to recognize and therefore harder to counter.
In the case of Avada Kedavra specifically, Barty!Moody says "Avada Kedavra’s a curse that needs a powerful bit of magic behind it – you could all get your wands out now and point them at me and say the words, and I doubt I’d get so much as a nose-bleed." I don't think "waste" is the right word, though; Potterverse wizards don't have a "mana pool" or similar kind of limitation, and Barty seems to be talking about overall development of magical strength as a wizard matures.
Which means that for an adult, especially one who is practiced with the spell, there should be no meaningful limit in how many chickens or cows one AKs in a sitting. Though it would get tedious after a while.
Certainly 3 times and possibly a fourth, actually; don't forget Harry's use on the Inferi in the cave.
Right. Which proves the spell can work equally well on non-living objects. It's just another knife.
In my opinion it's the fact of direct force which can compel someone to do something they absolutely would not have otherwise done. Confundus is confusion.
Not being aware that one is acting on suggestion of another rather than one's own initiative is probably harder to recognize and therefore harder to counter.
I don't think we have any evidence whether Confundus is easier or harder to resist. Harry doesn't experience it from the inside, does he? (His resistance to Imperius is picked out as unusual.)
The overall point was about your assertion that Imperius and Confundus should have equal status because they did, or could be used to do, the same thing.
The difference in mechanism compared with Imperius does not make it a lesser violation of the person
Ok, well, I think it does, so, end of discussion I guess.
Something more metaphysical, apparently.
Or, scenario 2 - the DE confunds Lily and causes her to move out of the way.
Or, scenario 3, he Imperiurizes her to move out of the way.
All scenarios end with dead Harry and surviving Lily. But how does she perceive what happened?
In the first case, she knows she did her bit to resist but was outnumbered, overcome by a hidden attacker.
In the third, she knows shew as under a foreign influence. She knows she wasn't herself that moment.
But I think in the second, she would always have lingering doubts that maybe she moved of her own initiative, maybe she didn't love her baby enough or maybe she was cowardly or whatever. And that's the poison of Confundus as I understand it.
(For completeness - scenario 4 - the DE memory charms Lily, so she doesn't remember that Harry was her baby. Or perhaps she doesn't even register that he exists. In the aftermath she won't even understand what happened. Yes, that's horrific.)