Slytherins come back and some other staff

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 180289

Lealess wrote:
> <SNIP>
> An example of a deduction: When Harry says to Dumbledore that he
never killed anyone if he didn't have to (paraphrasing), that is
similar to a loaded question, e.g., "When did you stop beating your
wife?" Unless Dumbledore answers, "I never killed anyone," we are left
with the presumption, Harry's presumption, that he did, in fact, kill
someone. That Dumbledore killed someone is a perfectly valid deduction
within the text, I think.
> <SNIP>
> 
Alla responded:
> 
> Valid? Sure it is, but I do not call it a valid deduction within the
text, I call it valid text based speculation, because to me it is 
based on vague, completely unsupported by canon assumption that Harry
in turn has ANY reason to make this assumption.
> 
> For that reason this assumption is really to me not that different
from assuming that Slytherins came back, some  of them I mean. Oh and
again **I** did not make that assumption, but I totally thought it was
the valid one.

Carol responds:
FWIW, I think Harry's reference to DD's never killing if he could
avoid it (and DD's implicitly agreeing, perhaps with Ariana in mind),
results from JKR's own memory lapse. She remembers putting the words
"never killed if he could help it" in the mouth of some character
(Sirius Black in GoF, as it happens), but forgets that the words
referred to Mad-Eye Moody rather than Dumbledore. I can't prove my
speculation, of course, speculations being by their very nature
unproveable, but she's made so many similar lapses, both in canon and
in interviews, that I think it's at least plausible. Meanwhile, we as
readers are free to view the words as a lapse, apply them to Ariana,
or speculate that DD did indeed kill somebody (despite killing neither
Voldemort nor Grindelwald when he had the opportunity, or Draco, for
that matter) and despite being able, at least before he injured his
hand, to escape from virtually any predicament using either Fawkes or
his own unbeatable wand. Just how Harry, all of whose encounters with
Dumbledore are on page word for word, would have learned about that
supposed killing of someone because he had to is unclear, and just who
would have needed to be killed by the super-powerful Dumbledore is
unclear. He doesn't kill Barty Crouch Jr. and disapproves when Barty
is soul-sucked. He doesn't kill young Snape, who approaches him as a
known Death Eater. We never hear of DD personally battling DEs during
VW1, either. That seems to have been the job of Aurors like Mad-Eye
and the Longbottoms, and the younger Order members like the Prewitts
and McKinnons (who perhaps only defended themselves when they were
attacked). There's not a single reference in canon to DD battling a
Death Eater, only to his hexing the Auror Dawlish and dueling LV and GG.

Carol, not commenting further on what Harry glimpsed and hurriedly
interpreted as reported by the limited-omniscient narrator in the
Battle of Hogwarts except to note that he's probably in a state of
exhaustion if not shock, having just witnessed several deaths close at
hand and then "died" himself