Harry - enamoured though he was with the fiendish cleverness of the Prince - would have imagined in his wildest dreams that the spell might possibly have left his opponent bleeding out and near death on the bathroom floor. I think the shocked horror with which he watched Snape tending to Draco is proof of that, you know?
See, I can go with "Harry didn't expect that" only up to a point. 'Cause this was a spell he reached for to counter an Unforgivable. At a minimum, this suggests that while he didn't know exactly what Sectumsempra would do, he was counting on it to be fairly bad-ass. In other words, he knew it was "for enemies" and he apparently believed it was a viable counter-measure against a curse that he knows puts a world of hurt on a person. So it's like yes, Harry was ignorant, but not so ignorant that it absolves him of culpability. He hoped it would do damage; if he hadn't, then he would have used one of the other retaliatory/defensive spells he knows. That it did a level of damage he wasn't prepared for doesn't obviate the fact that he wanted it to do damage at all.
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Date: 2006-11-15 08:38 pm (UTC)See, I can go with "Harry didn't expect that" only up to a point. 'Cause this was a spell he reached for to counter an Unforgivable. At a minimum, this suggests that while he didn't know exactly what Sectumsempra would do, he was counting on it to be fairly bad-ass. In other words, he knew it was "for enemies" and he apparently believed it was a viable counter-measure against a curse that he knows puts a world of hurt on a person. So it's like yes, Harry was ignorant, but not so ignorant that it absolves him of culpability. He hoped it would do damage; if he hadn't, then he would have used one of the other retaliatory/defensive spells he knows. That it did a level of damage he wasn't prepared for doesn't obviate the fact that he wanted it to do damage at all.