Harry using Crucio

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 174137

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Vincent Maston 
<vincent.maston.ml at ...> wrote:

> 
> If you want a nice little book full of nice people always beeing 
> nice to each other, I don't think that a series beginning with the 
> murder of a baby's parents right in front of him is the right 
> choice.

Mus: Wasn't the point of that murder that Voldemort was evil and to 
be condemned and combatted for it?

In an earlier post (#172472), BetsyHP, in a response to CJE Culver, 
commented:

 
> Betsy Hp:
> Turns out this wasn't a battle between good and evil.  It was 
> between bad and worse.  And yeah, Voldemort was definitely the 
> more brutal of the two.  But in their subtle evil, the "good" guys 
> may be even more dangerous.
> 
> They aren't good by their actions.  They use the same methods 
> their enemies use.  They aren't good by their endgame.  The WW is 
> left exactly as it was when Harry is first introduced to it.  The 
> only thing missing is the immediate threat of Voldemort.  But the 
> constant pressure of hiding themselves from the Muggles, the 
> quartering of their people into good, okay, questionable, and bad 
> (as illustrated by Hogwarts) remains.
> 
> So yeah, I had a similar question as your son's.  Only mine was 
> directed to Harry and company.  "I thought they were good?"

Mus: She puts it better than I could.  I have no problem with a book 
about the battle between bad and worse - there's lots of them 
available, and if JKR were to write one (or seven), I'd have no 
objection at all.  I do, as a reader, have problems with a writer 
who sets up a moral struggle between good and evil, between good 
choices and bad choices, and then discards that arc with no apparent 
reason.  There was, in 700-odd pages, ample space for some 
justification of those Unforgivable curses, or reflection on their 
use, but both are simply absent. 

In the end, it seems that Quirrell was right: "A foolish young man I 
was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord 
Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil, 
there is only power, and those too weak to seek it ..." [PS UK(PB) 
Ch17, 211]

Mus, who's now wondering if Lyra should have become a Cardinal.