'Clue to his vulnerability' (Coming to a conclusion )

[pippin_999]

> Carolyn:
> Well, my interpretation of his attempts to use Crucio is that he 
> meant them as much as he was able to at the time, and would 
> definitely have been very glad to have caused some serious hurt to 
> Bella and Snape. There is no doubt he wanted to avenge Sirius's 
> death, and I think it unlikely he would have felt sorry if he had 
> managed to kill her. Undoubtedly he now thinks the same way about 
> Snape. The sectum sempra incident is a bit different, in that he 
> stupidly had no idea what the curse would do, and not unreasonably 
> assumed it to be another schoolboy jinx - yes, he intended to hurt 
> Draco, but certainly not fatally.

Pippin:
Even the innocent unicorn will lash out when it is hurt (GoF Weighing 
of the Wands), so the mere fact that Harry wants vengeance or that he 
wanted Bella or Snape to suffer in the worst way he could think of
does not, in JKR's eyes, make Harry guilty. I disagree that he would 
have been glad if the curse had worked -- I don't see any canon for 
that. We're not told that he felt stupid or disappointed that it
hadn't, for one thing.

Harry has often amused himself with thoughts of Snape or Dudley
being punished, but he's never gotten beyond the thought and tried.
He certainly wasn't glad to see Dudley attacked by dementors,
even though he'd been entertaining the thought of sending Dudders
home as something with feelers moments before.

Carolyn: 
> I'm not sure I know what you mean by 'the invested reader'. If you 
mean a child absorbed in the series might take away some 
understanding that it's a good idea to think before you act, 
generally a bad thing to kill people and as a principle for life,
try  your best to do the right thing, well..duh.. ..but probably
adults might have worked those things out for themselves, no? 
> 
> Without really wanting to revisit all the tiresome adult/child 
readership arguments that have raged backwards and forwards over
the  years, what exactly would the 'invested' adult reader find
compelling  about these sorts of simplistic moral messages? 


Pippin:
A simple message can argue against a complex one, especially on the 
grounds that the complex one is overly complicated <g>

But that's not really what I had in mind. We are, I presume, going to
be in an excited frame of mind as we read Book Seven. Its message
is going to make an impression on us whether it has merit or not;
or at least that's the psychological theory.

We have been told that there is some religious content coming.
That's a bit scary, or should be, since, IMO, all religions come down
to the same thing: "You have to change your life." Now maybe she
will be so heavy-handed and sacharrine that it will break the spell,
or maybe the changes being advocated are changes I am trying
to make anyway, but there is a reasonable possibility that they are
not. Then I will have to deal with the conflict, which could certainly
be disruptive to the life I have now, one way or another.

So if I said, in advance of reading the book, that it was going to be
just childish nonsense and there was no possibility of my taking its
ideas seriously, I think I'd be whistling in the dark.

Pippin