Sending Voldie through the Veil (Was: Where will the "great battle" be)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 161953

Carol earlier <thoroughly snipped>:
> > the only way I can think of for Harry to kill a de-Horcruxed 
Voldemort without AKing him is to send him through the Veil.
> 
MercuryBlue responded:
> If the Horcruxes aren't there anymore, what's keeping Harry from 
> decapitating Voldemort with a spell or the Sword of Gryffindor? Or 
> strangling him with magic or a length of rope? Or putting a bullet 
> or a Reducto through his chest? Or--heck, pick your poison (ooh, 
> poison, that works too), there's certainly enough ways to die. Blunt 
> force trauma probably won't cut it, given how Hagrid reacted when 
> told that the Potters supposedly died in a car crash (that and how 
> it's been years since anyone's died in a Quidditch match, when 
> taking a ten-inch iron ball to the head is not a terribly uncommon 
> occurrence), but there's still umpteen billion ways to kill someone, 
> and I can't see why Voldemort would have put in the effort to 
> protect himself against as many of them as he could think of. Why 
> would he bother with a spell against burning to death and a spell 
> against drowning and et cetera and so forth, when the existence of 
> his Horcrux(es) meant he couldn't die?
> 
> MercuryBlue
>

Carol responds:
I'm not talking about the mechanics of killing Voldemort. There are
multiple ways of doing so, with AKing being by far the simplest and
cleanest in terms of creating a bloodless corpse. I'm concerned about
*the act of murder*, which I don't want Harry to commit. My concern
about AK in particular is that it's a Dark curse, the weapon of the
enemy, specifically created as a murder weapon. I'm also worried about
its soul-splitting effects. But substituting a more brutal and bloody
form of murder won't avoid that problem. It will just make the murder
messier and more violent, like our Muggle methods.

I know that you'll argue that killing in combat or in self-defense is
not murder, but one of my concerns is the effect on child readers if
Harry murders Voldemort in any of the ways you're talking about. Kids
get enough--more than enough--of that sort of thing in video games,
TV, and movies. I want Harry to rise above that sort of brutality and
violence, to find a way to save the WW that does not sanction violence
for the good guys--not to mention that if Harry's weapon is Love, as
Dumbledore says it is, his method of destroying Voldemort must be
consonant with that weapon, as none of your suggestions is.

I'm also concerned about the psychological effects that the act of
killing, even in self-defense, would create in the mind of a
seventeen-year-old harry. Snape, I think, is suffering the tortures of
the damned after killing Dumbledore, whether he had any choice in the
matter or not. (See the anguish he's in when the narrator compares him
to the dog in the burning house.) Soldiers defending their country
suffer what used to be euphemistically referred to as combat fatigue,
including nightmares decades later and other permanent psychological
damage. I don't want Harry to tarnish his innocence, much less to feel
guilt of any sort for ridding the world of Voldemort, or to suffer any
sort of psychological consequences. 

He himself thinks in OoP that he has to commit murder or be murdered.
I want to see a way out of that dilemma. There's a reason why Mad-Eye
Moody never killed if he didn't have to. I don't want Harry to have
to, or at least I want him to do it in a way that doesn't seem like
murder, that allows both him and Voldemort to see that death is not
the end of everything that LV thinks it is. Only sending him through
the Veil can do that, IMO. (And there's the secondary consideration of
getting Sirius Black's body back. It also provides a way for JKR to
bring in the power of possession, Harry possessing Voldemort rather
than the other way around.)

On another note, I don't think that a spell against burning to death
or antidotes against poisons would be a waste of voldemort's time. He
has the Horcruxes to anchor his soul to earth, but his body, as he
learned to his detriment at Godric's Hollow, is still mortal. If he
were to defeat Harry, he would be wise to take precautions against
disease, old age, poison, and whatever else might destroy his body,
Prophecy or no Prophecy. Immortality without a healthy body is not
much use.

Carol, who thinks that sending Voldemort through the Veil fits the
Love requirement and the Prophecy better than any method we've yet
seen and certainly better than decapitation (which I expect will
happen not to LV but to Nagini)