I suspect J. K. Rowling shares Russell T. Davies's thing about death.
Nothing like it to lively up a story.
If you want to go looking for parallels between the Harry Potter and
Doctor Who moral universes, there are plenty. Both are strongly
concerned with the morality of killing, and
the...er...redemptive...um...power of...well...of *love*, actually
(gag! bletch!).
I've always been puzzled by Terry Pratchett's take on this, because in
most respects he comes across as an impeccable liberal, and yet I get
a strong sense that in the Discworld at least there are some baddies
who are just so fundamentally bad-to-the-bone that all you can do with
them is destroy them. Even though he portrays internecine political
conflict as horrifically wasteful, driven by greed and the amoral
manipulation of jingoistic sentiment, and often capable of being
resolved by relatively non-violent means (there's a kind of economy of
violence, in which small, contained acts of viciousness - usually
instigated by Vetinari, who doesn't mind a spot of state terror but
deplores inefficiency - head off more general disasters), his bogeyman
proper basically want thwacking with a stiff poker until they stop
moving.
Dominic
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