Disarming spell/ Character's choices

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 185492

Mapgie wrote some time ago:
> > > I don't have a big problem with it--I get why it works. I'm just
 saying that as the solution to the problem of "how do we have the bad
 guy killed but still make a point about how our hero is morally 
superior for showing mercy" it works because it lets you have it both
 ways. You make one choice but there's no real suspense that we won't
 get the consequence of the other. 

Carol responds:

I don't see a problem, frankly. Of course, JKR wants Voldie dead,
Harry alive and victorious, *and* Harry with his "pure" soul intact,
Crucio or no Crucio (okay, that's the part I have a problem with). Of
course, she wants to have her cake and eat it, too--to find a way to
have Harry defeat Voldemort without having to kill him, especially
using the very spell with which Voldie murdered his parents. Harry's
grim interpretation of the Prophecy as meaning that he has to "murder"
or be murdered is proven wrong (he's "murdered" but doesn't die; he
destroys Voldemort without killing himself--without soiling his hands,
so to speak--through his usual luck and a twist of fate). Yes, it's
somewhat contrived, but I wouldn't want it any other way, especially
in a children's book. 

But, as I said in another post, JKR wants more than just having Harry
destroy Voldemort without directly killing him or using the evil spell
that he associates with his enemy, the spell that killed his parents.
(Yes, Snape used it, apparently without damaging his soul, but under
very different circumstances, and in his case, AK was the best spell
for the job--quick, painless, lethal, and in character for Voldemort's
right-hand man. I suppose we could argue that an AK would put
Voldemort out of his earthly misery, and certainly his death would be
a good thing, but killing is still killing, and Harry would not be
offering a dying old man a painless death at his own request as Snape
was. In Harry's eyes, it's still killing in cold blood, still murder,
even though the victim is a murderer many times over, not to mention a
torturer, coercer, and would-be tyrant.) 

*JKR wants to bring the story full circle*, with Voldemort again
struck by his own AK, this time permanently destroyed because he has
no more Horcruxes to anchor his battered soul to earthly existence.
Lily's love has already done its part and won't work this time. The
drop of blood that saved him when he sacrificed himself will no longer
save him because the link with Voldemort was severed along with the
soul bit in Harry's scar. How, then, can JKR have Voldemort's AK
rebound on him a second time, this time permanently destroying him? A
Protego won't work against an AK. Harry's own wand won't work against
Voldemort's--we'd just have another Priori Incantatem--so one or both
of them must have different wands. JKR's solution is to have Harry use
Expelliarmus--the underrated spell that she introduced back in CoS
through Snape and the least violent of the defensive spells--and to
have the two spells strike one another as we've seen them do before,
but instead of being deflected onto bystanders as when Harry's
boil-causing curse hits Goyle and Draco's Densuageo hits Hermione, she
has to make sure that Harry's Expelliarmus succeeds, giving him (with
his Seeker's reflexes) Voldemort's wand while Voldemort's AK rebounds
on him. How to make that work? She has to find a way to make Harry the
master of the wand Voldemort has chosen to use in place of his own
(which, ironically, would have quite willingly killed Harry!). Her
solution is the whole convoluted Elder Wand plot.

While I don't like much of anything about the Elder Wand or the
Hallows, from the inconsistencies to the "need" to kill Snape via
Nagini, I understand perfectly the need for plot symmetry, going back
to the beginning but with a different ending (with Snape as an
integral part of the plot). Thematically, too, it works to have Harry,
who as a baby of fifteen months accidentally deflected an AK onto
Snape, deflect a second AK, hoping that his method will work, by using
an innocent defensive spell against a deadly one, making Voldemort the
agent of his own death, just as he had been the agent of his own
vaporization at Godric's Hollow.

Possibly, JKR could have brought about this exact outcome in some
other way, or at least she could have handled the Elder Wand plot more
skillfully so that it was less confusing and more consistent. But
somehow or other, she needed to have Harry permanently vanquish
Voldemort, not by "murdering" him but by having him struck a second
time by his own AK, in itself a highly satisfactory ending that leaves
her hero (unlike poor Frodo in LOTR, who also destroyed his enemy
indirectly with the help of luck or fate) morally and physically
unscathed. (Harry gets a Victorian-style happy ending for his journey
from Innocence through Experience to Wisdom: domestic bliss. As she
suggested in some interview somewhere, she's making up to him for all
the suffering she's put him through by giving him Ginny, her idea of
his ideal wife.)

At any rate, *if* that's what she wants, how better to do it than to
have him destroy Voldemort by having Voldemort's Killing Curse rebound
on himself?

Carol, who has no problem whatever with the circular plot structure or
not having Harry "murder" Voldemort (though the Elder Wand subplot and
Harry's Crucio are other matters entirely)