Harry's protection

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 112875

> Snow wrote:
> Yes! Exactly. The curse that was used by Voldemort to kill Harry 
> could not be the AK curse (but it was a killing curse) because as 
> Fake Moody said there is no countercurse to an AK. Along with the 
> fact that Tom Riddle quite plainly says, "So. Your mother died to 
> save you. Yes, that's a powerful counter-charm." 
> Riddle admits that the curse was countered by a charm therefore the 
> AK which cannot be countered could not have been the killing curse 
> that was attempted by Voldemort on baby Harry. There is also the
fact that Harry only remembers one flash of green light that
accompanies the AK curse, which killed Lily. <snip>

Carol responds:
JKR has said that Harry didn't see Lily die. Maybe the door Lily was
blocking was closed (and LV wanted her to "step aside" so he could
open it). If so, then Harry would have only one green flash--from the
AK aimed at him.

My understanding of a countercurse is that it's a spell used to
counter another curse *after the fact.* Lily's protective charm (which
I think was triggered by the combination of her self-sacrifice and the
AK that hit Harry) would obviously have been placed on him *before*
the fact. If I'm right, Lily performed a charm (or "countercharm," to
use Tom's word, which admittedly muddies the waters a bit, especially
since he seems to think that her self-sacrifice was all that was
required to save Harry), not a countercurse; ergo Crouch!Moody's
statement about there being no countercurse is not contradicted. I do
agree that the charm worked in a way similar to Protego: it created
the lightning scar, which acted as a sort of shield that deflected the
AK back onto Voldemort. (How some of LV's powers were deflected onto
Harry I can't begin to guess.) Also Crouch!Moody refers to AK as
"*the* Killing Curse" (GoF Am. ed. 215)--not *a* killing curse or the
unforgiveable version of the killing curse but the one and only
killing curse. While there may be other curses that can be used for
killing, Avada Kedavra appears to be the only one specifically
intended for that purpose and specifically referred to by that term.

Dare I suggest that maybe JKR hadn't thought out all the details and
implications when she wrote the first two books and that we're bound
to find inconsistencies between them and the later books? (The idea
that Neville's family thought he might be "all-Muggle" rather than a
Squib is another example.) Maybe, like LOTR, "the tale grew in the
telling," but unlike Tolkien, she didn't have the luxury of "rewriting
it backwards" because the earlier books were already published and
highly popular, and she was under pressure to write the new ones
rather than revising the old ones for consistency. (Consider Tolkien's
revision of the Gollum sequence in "The Hobbit"; he rewrote it twenty
or so years after the original publication to tell "what really
happened," and actually threw the blame onto Bilbo for reporting the
story untruthfully in the Red Book. JKR has dismissed a few of her own
inconsistencies by similar means--Marcus Flint was held back a year
being the best known. Who knows what we'll see when she revises the
books, or whether she'll even spot the inconsistencies that are so
obvious to her more attentive readers?)

Carol, who is not blaming JKR for not having the time to revise her
books, but does wonder how she can possibly tie so many loose ends
together without still more inconsistencies and some glaring plot holes