The editor was sobbing

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 167040

funkeginger wrote:
>    What are you guys saying that Harry is just going to take
Voldemort's powers and not kill him. Then how will the story end? DD
said in the Half Blood Prince that Harry did not have to kill
Voldemort, I know but he also said that if he did not, a lot of chaos
would happen. And anyway even when Voldemort did not have his powers
he was still danger.
>    Even if Harry takes his power he still needs to kill him he still
too evil to live . Have you ever heard the expession evil never
sleeps? It means that evil will allow start trouble no mater how weak
it is, you should take that in to Mind when you look at Voldemort
without his power. He will still bring fear and chaos around the
Wizarding world so he needs to die .
>
Carol responds:

I don't know about anyone else, but I agree with you that Voldemort
must be utterly destroyed and that means he must die, not be turned
into the world's ugliest Muggle. "Neither can live while the other
survives" appears to me to mean that Harry can't truly "live" while
Voldemort inhabits the earth ("survives"). And vice versa, of course,
but I think Harry will not only triumph but live (with his own powers
intact).

However, I, personally, don't want Harry to use Avada Kedavra or any
other Dark Curse. The Unforgiveable Curses, it seems to me, corrupt
the mind and the soul. (Look at the Crouches, for example, or at the
probably irredeemable Bellatrix Lstrange.) I wish that Harry, who
knows what a Crucio feels like, would stop attempting to cast one, and
I think it would be simply wrong, an inversion of the morality of
JKR's world, for Harry to use the weapons of the enemy to kill him. I
would prefer for him to bring about Voldemort's death in some other
way, such as forcing him to go beyond the Veil (or summoning Fawkes to
act as suicide bomber?) rather like the One Ring's falling into the
Cracks of Doom causes Barad Dur to crumble and Sauron to fall into the
abyss, never to rise again.

I know that Harry thinks that he has to "kill" Voldemort. He even
thinks of it, after he first hears the Prophecy, as having to commit
murder or be murdered. I know all the arguments about self-defense not
being murder, about soldiers having to kill, and none of them gives me
any comfort. I don't want Harry to suffer the anguish of having killed
anyone, even Voldemort, who is hardly human and, as you say, has to
die. So I cling to the hope that Voldemort will die in some other way,
and the U.S. cover fans the flames of what would otherwise be a
forlorn hope.

Carol in Tucson, where the birds are chirping and the lupine has
finally decided to join the poppies in blooming along the roadside