Mugglenet.com's Harry Potter Should Have Died - Emerson Spartz [62]
Yet once again, Voldemort has to ruin Harry’s happiness by targeting someone close to him. Thanks to the house-elf Kreacher’s treachery, that person was unfortunately Sirius Black. In OotP, Harry is tricked into thinking that Sirius is being tortured, so he gathers his friends to go and rescue Sirius only to find out it is a trap to lure them to the Ministry. And then the tables are turned and Sirius arrives to help save Harry, and it almost works out with a happy ending—Dumbledore arrives and the fighting almost stops. But Sirius taunts his cousin Bellatrix during their duel, underestimating her willingness to destroy anyone opposed to the Dark Lord. And then she strikes, her spell pushing Sirius backward through the Veil of Death where he disappears with a look of surprise on his face. And millions of readers gasped in horror.
Sirius is such a cool character that readers could scarcely believe J.K.R. would kill him off—what a waste! But he probably needed to be out of the way so that Harry could face his destiny alone in HBP and DH. However, there is no doubt that the Potterverse was a lot darker and more menacing without his cheery arrogance and bark-like laugh. He has so much potential and then suddenly he is just snuffed out in the prime of his life. There were many theories that he would return to Harry’s side by the end of the series, either back through the veil or through the two-way mirror he gave Harry as a parting gift. But no, Sirius can’t return from the dead, and he doesn’t even have a grave like Dobby or Dumbledore. But in DH, when Harry uses the Resurrection Stone, Sirius appears in a younger and more handsome form, to guide him through the forest. For Harry and many fans, Sirius will never truly be gone.
Albus Dumbledore
Since Dumbledore is friends with Nicholas Flamel, one of the oldest men alive at 665 years old as we learn in SS, he surely would have learned some tricks for living a long life. So readers can’t accept that Dumbledore’s health is going downhill in HBP, even with the hints about Snape having to save him after Dumbledore put on the cursed Peverell ring that blackened his hand. Toward the end of the book, he is still able to roar back with a huge ring of magical fire when some undead Inferi attacks in Voldemort’s cave, so in HBP it seemed only logical to think that Dumbledore still had a lot of life left in him.
But Snape merely gives Dumbledore a reprieve from death—a type of life support that can’t last. He would have died naturally after a year when the curse grew stronger, but on top of that Dumbledore also drinks an evil potion in the Inferi cave. And on top of that, he makes Snape promise to kill him so the Death Eaters such as Fenrir Greyback won’t mutilate his body [DH, p. 683]. Secretly, Dumbledore has other plans about his death, such as wanting Snape to be master of the Elder Wand and to bury it in Dumbledore’s tomb so it won’t ever be used again. That doesn’t work out for Snape, but Harry does become master of the wand, and that saves his own life.
It’s heartbreaking that Snape has to agree to carry out such a plan for the one man in the world who trusts him. Dumbledore is like the good father Snape never had, and Harry thinks of him as a wise old grandfather. They both have to watch him die and fall off the tower in one of the most emotionally devastating scenes of the entire series. Dumbledore sees death as just another natural step, and faces it bravely, but fans hoped beyond hope that he would still be alive and that Snape just faked the Avada Kedavra somehow. Alas, he was really dead, broken at the bottom of the tower. But in DH he appears to Harry in a peaceful vision of heaven, just as calm and wise as