Harry Potter/Headscratchers/Other

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Harry Potter headscratchers that don't fit anywhere else.

Things relating to the Harry Potter universe in general go in Harry Potter/Headscratchers/Universe. Questions about Hogwarts go in Harry Potter/Headscratchers/Hogwarts. For a specific book, please go to their specific page:

  • Am I the only on who was bothered by the wizards' views of muggles and the Muggle world? From the book, it seems that most wizards are, at best, indifferent and ignorant of the Muggle world and, at worst, totally bigoted. In fact, the usual wizard view of Muggles seems to be a mixture of indifference and ignorance of the Muggle world and condescending attitudes. Even Muggle-borns seem to have little respect for Muggles. For example, Hermione temporarily erases her parents' memories and, while she seems genuinely upset about it, seems to have done it without their consent nor without considering the ethical problems with her actions. Now, I can understand not wanting Muggles to know about the wizarding world and that the Muggle-world must be awfully boring for the average wizard, but they generally seem to have absolutely zero interest in Muggle public affairs, technology, or culture. Most cultures in real life are somewhat insular, but not like this. Again, what bugged me was that, although there were few outright bigots (all of whom seemed to be pure bloods), even wizards with one or both of their parents being Muggles seem to view themselves as superior. Based on the way that Muggles were talked about in the books, you would think they were animals, sub-human. For a book with a major theme of unity, this seems pretty contradictory.
    • It's quite obvious that we're supposed to be bothered by the wizarding world's ignorance and bigotry towards Muggles and the Muggle world. Arthur Weasley said it himself when he mentioned a couple of wizards enchanting public toilets to spew shit at Muggles or whatever. It seems like good fun, but it's a symptom of a much deeper, much uglier viewpoint held by some wizards. As for Hermione mind-wiping her parents, that was more of a "desperate times, desperate measures" kind of situation. Hermione wanted to keep her parents safe from the Death Eaters, who hate Muggles and would not be above killing them for shits and giggles, especially if they knew they could use it to get to one of Harry Potter's best friends, so she did the only thing she could think of to keep them absolutely safe. Call it unethical if you want, but it was the best solution she could think of at the time, and she wasn't exactly happy that she had to do it.
    • That one incident with the eccentric witch who keeps getting herself captured by witch hunters and burned with fake fire is pretty telling about how some magical folk regard Muggles and their problems, even if it is one crazy person. One wonders how many Deatheater murders were covered up by The Troubles...
  • James and Lily Potter are killed, Sirius goes to prison, and Pettigrew gets away with murder but is thought to be blown up. On October 31. Harry knows all this. Why is it that he never mentioned to think about them on this day, instead fussing about missing the Halloween feast, and when he actually manages to go, having a grand old time at it? Even if he was a baby, it stands to reason that a generally compassionate and sometimes annoyingly broody character would at least think about his dead parents on the day they died, and not be exactly cheery about it. Most people remember their loved ones on the day they died, rather than their biggest worry being missing a feast or not.
    • For that matter, other anniversaries, important dates, and birthdays seem to be completely passed over unless they're relevant to the plot. Harry's birthday is the only consistent one we see mentioned; Hermione's birthday is rarely mentioned, and Ron's only is when it's relevant. Like when bad stuff happens to him on it.
      • This always, always bugged me, that Ron and Hermione's birthdays are barely mentioned. Even something in passing would have been nice.
      • Isn't it stated somewhere that Hermione's birthday is in early September, and therefore usually before Harry and Ron meet up with her? I'm sure her birthdays have been mentioned a couple of times. With regards to Ron's birthday: they're at boarding school, so it's not like they go out and celebrate. Would a paragraph saying "Happy birthday Ron, here's your present" really have made such a massive difference?
        • Hermione's birthday is in late September according to Word of God, but considering they all start school Sept 1 each year, they're all clearly at school. (OTOH, it makes you realized that her first year, she had no friends for her 12th birthday.) The books generally skip right over her birthday, from 'everyone shows up at school' to 'it's Halloween, time for something to happen'. Hermione's birthday is always before the main plot starts, so it's not like they're distracted. No Chamber of Secrets yet, Sirius Black yet isn't sneaking into the school, Harry isn't in the Tri-Wiz yet, Harry's not yet banned from Quidditch, Ron's not yet dating Lavender...frankly, as things seem to go from reasonable to bad each year, you'd think Hermione's birthday would be a bit of normalcy at the start of the school year.
    • The worst of it is CoS-8. On Halloween, the trio politely attend Sir Nicholas's Deathday party, full of ghosts and comical gruesomeness — and it's also his parents' Deathday.
    • Maybe he didn't remember exactly which night Hagrid had said it had been (he was getting a lot of new info then), and didn't feel like asking anyone later.
    • Regarding Harry's birthday, his parents' deathday, and holidays: The Dursleys hardly acknowledged Harry's birthday and holidays, so he's used to ignoring them; I wouldn't be surprised if they never told him the exact date of his parents' "car accident" and because of that there's no emotional connection between the two. As for other people's birthdays, Harry probably didn't (couldn't?) have many friends before Hogwarts, so he's not used to that, either. In the larger narrative of the series, it could be that A) they weren't mentioned because it didn't add to the plot (from The Hobbit, paraphrased: safe and peaceful rarely makes for good stories) and B) later on they couldn't have had time to celebrate them anyway.
  • If Galleons are made of pure gold, one Galleon equals GB£5 (at least that's what JKR says) and gold has the same value in the wizarding and the Muggle world, then a Galleon would have to be really tiny. That is: Weighing less than one fifth of a gram.
    • One theory is that over time, the goblins secretly changed Galleons and left only that one fifth of a gramm of gold in the new Galleons and standardized the price with Muggle money and the price of gold.
    • Possible, although most wizards wouldn't really like that. Another possibility is that the one Galleon / five pounds conversion is one of JKR's "oh dear, maths" moments and that the pound value of wizarding money should be much higher. There is a scene in Chamber of Secrets where Harry sees the Weasleys vault at Gringotts, which is almost empty and contains only a single Galleon and a small pile of Sickles. The Weasleys are poor, but not that poor.
      • There are a lot of children being supported by only one paycheck. I don't think it's that odd that the Weasleys, while not being destitute, don't have the extra money to put away in their vault all that often. That just means that they use up nearly all of Arthur's paycheck each month.
    • Perhaps, over time, wizards and goblins accumulated most of the world's gold, devaluing it in their communities.
      • My pet theory is that the wizards fixed the exchange rate at some point in the medieval period (before the Spanish devalued gold throughout Europe by bringing in huge amounts of plundered gold from South America), when five avoirdupois pounds of sterling silver to a gold coin the size of a Galleon was a high, but reasonable, exchange rate, and that the wizards, in their general bigotted conservatism, haven't bothered to adjust the exchange rate. There's probably a canon way to shoot that down, but it's my theory and I'm rolling with it.
    • Truth in Television: U.S. pennies are so worthless that they're not actually worth the metal they are made from, which is why it's now illegal to melt down pennies for profit.
      • They weren't always like that, though. And a lot of people are calling for their removal these days. It's acceptable to have an extremely low-denomination coin be worth less than the metal it is printed on, but the highest denomination coins? When there are no bills of higher worth to take up the slack? That's the stuff failed currencies are made out of.
    • Another theory is that goblins have figured out how to make coins (or other metal objects) that weigh virtually nothing. That way, if someone tries to sell them as gold to get some Muggle money, they wouldn't get anything for them because (to the immense confusion of all Muggles involved) a heaping sack of gold coins wouldn't even tip the scale. This isn't much of a stretch when you consider that goblins have figured out how to make things indestructible.
    • The idea that a Galleon is worth £5 is ludicrous in any case. Even at 1992 prices, can you imagine doing all your shopping with a large number of low-valued gold coins?
  • Why does everyone treat Ginny as a Mary Sue? If you think about it, the vast majority of the Weasleys have Sue-ish factors. Bill is described as handsome, cool, and a past Head Boy, Charlie works with dragons, Percy is smart, EVERYONE loves Fred and George, and Ron... um... you get the idea.
    • Several factors. First and most obviously, Harry/Hermione shippers hate her for ruining their ship. Secondly, in the fifth book, she rather suddenly went from "background Shrinking Violet character" to "hey, I'm an Action Girl now and I'm cool". Sure, the hints were there all along (standing up for Harry in Flourish and Blotts in Chamber, etc.) and she couldn't be the cute little sister with the big crush forever, but the transition seemed really abrupt and it did come after the Great Three-Year Gap between books four and five. (For the record, I don't think she's a Mary Sue, but I do think Rowling could have handled her character better than she did.)
      • This troper would be willing to bet that most people fall under the second category, even Harry/Hermione shippers. But that's part of Rowling's staggering inability to write female characters in the latter books: The poor weak women can't survive without their men, the stickler for the rules is okay with cheating, Harry and Ron are still so immature that this Troper doesn't see how any self-respecting girl/woman in the series could be attracted to either of them, etc.
      • Okay, something that people really need to keep reminding themselves of while reading the series: These characters are TEENAGERS. They're not supposed to act like Mature Adults; they're supposed to be teenagers in a high-stress, high-pressure situation, and they're going to act like teenagers in a high-stress, high-pressure situation. Especially when it comes to issues of the heart. To be honest, it's quite refreshing to read books in which teens act like teens. (Specifically to the above poster: Why Ginny and Hermione are attracted to guys like Harry and Ron is a good question. A similar question that crops up only all the time in Real Life is - why does anyone with a functioning brain fall for someone who insults them, beats them, or uses them for sex? The easiest answer is that people will do things for love [or what they think is love] that they wouldn't do for any other reason.)
        • Not having them act like fully grown adults is fine. Having them act completely opposite to the characters we've seen so far is not. Also, that explanation completely goes against what we saw in the epilogue. Relationships based on such unhealthy foundations (jealousy, laziness, etc) are probably not going to last 20 years without one of the parties ending up dead.
        • Because no one ever changes over the course of twenty years or anything...
          • It's the not being shown the change that is annoying. Why did they change, what happened to cause it, how did affect them etc etc etc.. No, we just got a *bang" they're different now"...
          • Exactly. A lot of people seem to forget that each book chronicles an entire year of Harry's life. If book characters can fall irrevocably in love with someone at first sight, then how come Harry can't develop a crush on a girl over the course of seven months or so? And Harry didn't hang around Ginny all the time, so her character development HAD to take place offscreen. It's mentioned that she has long chats with Hermione about Harry, and that her advice was to, effectively, become an Action Girl and get over him... which she does. It seems abrupt, yeah, but it's a good reflection of real life in that sometimes people we know change without us quite realising it.
        • Ginny actually didn't turn suddenly into an action girl. She wasn't in Quidditch until almost half of the fifth book was finished (and given that at least 4 of her brothers were in the Quidditch team at some time, it was bound to happen), and Harry actually preferred someone other than Ginny (along with Neville and Luna) to join them in the DoM.
          • It would have been nice if it was Lampshaded in-book.
  • The goblin banks have customers store their money in what should be safety deposit boxes/rooms, which 1) forces the customers to ride through in the mine carts to withdraw or deposit money instead of doing it with a teller, and 2) makes it rather hard for the goblins to lend out the deposited money, one of the primary functions of a bank. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons for the repeated goblin rebellions is that the wizards force them to do banking in such a stupid manner.
    • It is entirely possible that the bank has safety deposit boxes as well as normal deposits. We just don't see the normal deposits. 2/3 of the vaults we have things that make perfect sense for them to be safety deposit boxes; the Lestranges' have a horcrux, and there was that other one with the Philosopher's Stone. The only one that raises eyebrows is the Potter vault. That one is a bit of a mystery. Maybe the Potters just wanted a vault for the novelty of it?
      • No, the Weasley family keeps their money as a pile of coins in a vault as well: in one of the books (the second one?) Harry rides in the mine-cart along with Molly and sees her taking some coins out of a vault.
    • The key here is the bank offers very tight security. The deeper the vault, the more protections are on it. Those that just want a place to store their money are probably few and far between, what with how many magical ways there are to break into a normal vault.
    • I put a guess a long time ago on the WMG page that the vaults are only had by very established families, such as the Blacks and Lestranges, and the ancestors of James Potter and Molly Weasley (nee Prewett). It's quite possible that the families have a single secure vault and individual members can have sort of checquing accounts on the side, like how Sirius was able to mail-order Harry's Firebolt despite being a wanted criminal and the only Black alive (Goblins just don't care about human politics that don't affect them as long as the mystical thumbprint is correct), that Harry was too young for a personal account, and that the Weasleys didn't want the hassle of validating a personal checque at every stop on Diagon Alley (especially because physical money is often a better reminder of how much you have left in a budget than a number on a page, when you're not dealing with particularly large numbers).
    • Two theories:
      • We don't really see how Gringotts works, aside from the vault system, their grave-robbing expeditions, and the fact that they exchange muggle money into wizarding currency. It is entirely possible that they have a system of Bank drafts you can use to pay, credits, investments, and the like. Still, it makes absolutely no sense to put their customers' money into individual vaults where it cannot be invested by the bank, used to hand out credits, etc. But then, it may be possible that the wizarding world does not do these kind of things and the goblins make most of their money by renting out secure vaults.
      • It is much more magical for Harry to take a wild cart ride, have a goblin open a huge vault door, and find a pile of gold than, let's say, walking up to the counter and getting an account statement that says "You own xx,xxx.yy Galleons". (You might also say that the whole thing is Awesome but Impractical ;-) )
    • I had the following rant on the Philosopher's Stone page before it got deleted: "Gringotts bugs this troper, because it behaves nothing like a real bank does. In a real bank, most people have accounts, where they store their money. This is a loan to the bank, which invests their money in businesses (such as loans to home buyers) to make profit for itself. In exchange, the bank offers people a relatively safe place to keep their savings, give them interests, and gives them convenience (several bank locations, ATM's, online payments, etc...). It is important to note the reason they can do the latter is because the bank doesn't keep your original money; a bank account is just information, a number saying how much they owe you, and when you withdraw money they simply make that number smaller. Transferring information is much easier than transferring physical items. There ARE safe deposit boxes, which you pay to maintain and which keep your valuables in an specific and safe location, but the overwhelming majority of the bank's costumers deal with them in the above basis. However, Gringotts seems to be nothing but a collection of safe deposit boxes. Every wizard doing business with them has a vault, and can store whatever they please there. Whatever they store remains there; the galleons Harry sees when he arrives are the very same ones his parents deposited years ago, and other objects of value (such as the Philosopher's stone) can be stored in vaults. It is never stated how the bank earns its money or what profit it gains from providing this service to wizards, but it can be assumed they are paid for it (it's interesting to note the Potters' vault remained in use, but there are several explanations; maybe payments are or can be done several decades in advance, maybe the goblins take gold from the vaults at regular intervals, or maybe Dumbledore or some other person made the payments before Harry arrived to reclaim the vault). Every time they want to access their money, they must travel to Diagon Alley and bring their key. Thus the bank offers no convenience and no interest, instead simply serving as a safe place to store goods - any goods - in exchange for a fee. In short, Gringotts is not a real bank; it is a glorified storage compartment center."
      • In many parts of the world, most particularly the Islamic world, banking as we know it is illegal, and what they call banks are basically places you pay a fee to hold your money. They don't do anything like interest, compound, or simple, they don't loan money in the fashion we understand it. In fact, this is how actual banks used to act in the West before the Catholic Church's ban on collecting interest was lifted. It is a real bank - it's just not a modern Western-style bank.
        • That's a stretch; most of the Islamic world has normal modern banks, since they're sort of necessary for a modern economy. The rise of specifically Islamic banking is actually a fairly recent phenomenon, and in practice, while they don't pay or charge compound interest per se, they have similar mechanisms to reward people for depositing money with them (in the form of periodic gifts when the bank is profitable), and charging for loans—for instance, a home loan takes the form of the bank purchasing the house while contracting with the buyer to sell it to them via periodic payments that include a mutually agreed-upon profit for the bank. The time value of money is too important a concept for banks not to charge for loans or reward savings, even if they don't do it directly by means of compound interest.
    • Originally, when the templars came up with the concept of a bank, the entire point was to keep your money safe and letting you take out said money at any city in Christendom with no handing out of interest involved (at that time, the bank client that pays for the bank services); the idea of the bank as investor came much later. Obviously, magical banking probably developed from the original bankers, and seeing that everyone can come to the bank magically in a literal blink of an eye, and ditched the second perpose of the banking system.
    • Who says that you have to move the money to make loans and transactions? That's why contracts were invented. When all the money that was available was big and heavy, IO Us and contracts were used to handle major transactions on a day-to-day basis, and the currency itself didn't make an appearance except at crucial points. That's how the modern gold supply tends to "move" - it changes owners, but it all sits in one location (like the New York Federal Reserve). The goblins could conceivably keep track of the transfers and move the physical gold every so often to reflect the end-of-month, end-of-quarter, or end-of-whatever balance.
      • Goblin culture is not like human culture (as seen by Harry Potter and friends getting into trouble during Deathly Hallows because the Goblins see the Sword of Gryffindor as belonging to them rather than to Hogwarts.) For all we know, the way Gringotts operates makes perfect sense to the goblins, and human wizarding society sees no point in trying to force them to change the system.
        • Or, perhaps, human wizarding culture did see a point to try to change them, or set up competing, less stupid banks...and six goblin rebellions later, says okay, whatever, we'll bank whatever stupid way you goblins want.
          • I'm no expert,but to me it seems highly unlikely that the goblins would entrust money that has been entrusted to them to a third party. It is, however, possible that Gringott's brokers loans rather than granting them outright. Someone comes to Gringott's and says "I would like to borrow money for X". Gringott's then sets up meetings with people who may be willing to lend money to other people for similar things, appraises your collateral or evaluates your business plan when relevant, evaluates your financial standing, suggests reasonable terms and draws up relevant contracts for a fee.
  • How come that in a series that is credited with re-popularizing reading among the youth, no one ever reads? I mean, they read a lot of texbooks, of course, but I don't recall a mention of a single novel. The only prominent work of fiction is the Tales of Beedle the Bard in the last book (and it's only important because of the clues in it). And no other kind of fiction either: no theatre, no movies, no TV (they have radio, so why not). What do these people do in their free time, apart from sports and games?
    • This is most likely another call back to the British boarding school books that Harry Potter is (somewhat) based on. TV, Radio, and (to a lesser extent) reading aren't very popular.
    • It could be argued that Lockhart's books are more recreational literature than textbooks.
    • Still, they're purported to be nonfiction.
    • If you could do magic and entertain yourself any way you wanted, would you really be reading or watching tv? Also, we only see most of the wizards in school, when they're swamped with homework. We only see Harry in the summer, and judging from the Dursleys, I doubt there are any recreational books in the house. We see Ron and Hermione too, but they're mostly talking, playing Quidditch, and doing housework when we see them with time off. Also, I'm sure Hermione reads tons of fiction when she gets the chance.
      • "If you could do magic and entertain yourself any way you wanted, would you really be reading or watching tv?" Uh, yeah. I mean, I have access to a computer, right, so why do bother buying books when I could just write one myself? Well, I'm not the world's best storyteller (nor, I imagine, are most people), so I pay people that are good at it to tell me a story.
    • If wizards could entertain themselves solely by doing magic, why would they need sports and games? And if Harry wanted to read books, he could buy them in the wizarding world - he has enough money for it. "they're mostly talking, playing Quidditch, and doing housework when we see them with time off" - well, that's what I'm talking about. I'm sure there are a lot of kids who don't read in their free time. But one would think Rowling wouldn't encourage this by portraying her heroes as such people. (By the way, I recall another passing mention of fiction, a comic book in Ron's room "The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle" in book 2. But that's all.)
      • This troper would just like to point out that the sports they play ARE magic. You don't notice them playing a good ol' game of football now, do you?
      • Magic to them is electronics to us. We have the internet, videogames, ipods, phones, etc. Why would we need sports when we can literally do whatever we want in digital worlds?
        • And yet people still do sports in their free time. Just the fact that there are other options does not change the popularity of most pastimes.
      • "Recreational reading" =/= "Novels and comic books". There are lots of people who love reading both fiction and non-fiction but prefer the latter, usually because they enjoy learning. Also, what do you mean, "no one ever reads"?! Snape has that really impressive library in his house just so he can show it off at the bitchin' parties he throws? [1] Tom Riddle was reading when Dumbledore met him at the orphanage, Ron buys Harry a book for Christmas one year and Harry's shown reading it at least once, Hermione's always got her nose in a book, and so has Dumbledore. And McGonagall, once she's done picking them up, I'm sure.
    • There's nothing saying that they never read. True, it's never mentioned that they do, but it's also not explicitly said that they don't. It's entirely possible that Harry spends his summers reading novels. It's just not mentioned because it's not important to the plot. It's the same as people complaining that nobody on Friends ever works. Well of course they work, it's just not shown because it's (usually) irrelevant to the plot. Remember that only bits and pieces of what's going on are actually detailed in the books. The author leaves out lots of mundane details of the day that aren't important to the story. This could very well be the case for recreational reading in Harry Potter.
    • It also barely ever mentions people going to the bathroom or bathing/showering, but are we expected to believe they were holding it in and never washing for seven years? Things that aren't relevant to the plot tend to not be mentioned.
      • This. What we be the purpose of writing "And then Harry lay on his bed and read a good book for a few hours"? That's incredibly boring to read, and doesn't advance the plot or provide the reader with any sort of enjoyment. And people are mentioned reading recreation-ally. Hermione gets books out of the library "for a bit of light reading", and just because they're history books and therefore educational doesn't mean they aren't recreational.
      • The point here is that the Harry Potter series supposedly got an entire generation back into reading, and yet the title character isn't into reading. The 'Friends' analogy is useless, because that's an adult show that isn't hailed as being something that sends a good message to kids. And it's not that hard to sneak in a line that tells us Harry has been reading. "Exhausted, Harry grabbed The Great Misadventure of X and Y and read some of the entertaining book before going to sleep". "The situation Harry was in was rather odd, and it reminded him of something that had happened in the book X and Y's Clash of Minds". "It was incredibly boring, and at that moment Harry wished he were somewhere comfortable reading the The Extraordinary Escapades of X".
      • If anything, that seems to enforce the prior point of talking about reading books being boring. Yes, it might have been nice to do once, but for me, constantly referencing other books would tend to ruin the tone the books are painting. He was shown reading Qudditch through the Ages in the first book, but had it confiscated, and that was I believe the last time we saw him reading for his own enjoyment outside of the Half-Blood Prince's book.
      • Why would people be reading fiction, exactly, when there are real life fantasy creatures and warriors having adventures like the ones Gilderoy Lockhart Obliviated. It would be far more awesome to read about adventures that really happened than to read about something some random shmuck thought up.
      • The same reason People read Tom Clancy novels in Real Life, the fact that similar things actually happen doesn't make it any less entertaining.
    • I wouldnt call Quidditch throughout the Ages the most necessary book. And if I'm not mistaken, Harry does mention that he'd rather be reading it than something else (I can't rember what right now; sorry). Also, doesn't Ron give Harry a book called "12 failproof ways to charm a Witch"? (Again might not be the exact wording.)
    • The Quidditch book and Ron's book don't count, because they're nonfiction. A lot of nonfiction books are mentioned; when I asked the original question, I was talking about novels.
      • Why are you discounting anything that's isn't fictional? I know your original question was worded as them not reading fiction, but the way you worded it you act as if getting enjoyment out of reading nonfiction doesn't matter or count or something. The characters are shown to read recreationally, why should the fact that they're reading nonfiction mean that it doesn't matter as much as fiction?
      • Well, it's not just that characters don't read, but that the wizarding world doesn't seem to have any fiction aside from the Tales of Beedle the Bard. For that matter, Hogwarts teaches nothing about culture: no literature class, no music class, no visual arts class. Harry and Hermione never heard of the tales after spending years in the wizarding world, even though they're as popular for wizards as Grimm's fairy tales for us.
    • Maybe it's a case of Truth in Television? I love reading, I could (and I do sometimes) spend my whole day reading. However, not during the school/college terms, because I had/have a lot of reading to do there anyways, and reading a book for my pleasure feels like procrastinating.
    • If the characters think a book is way more interesting than the plot they are in, why am I not reading that book instead?
  • It always puzzles me why Lily Potter screamed and cried and begged Voldemort to kill her "instead." Did she actually know that she was pulling a Batman Gambit, or was it a lucky break? If not, her pleas were idiotic because nothing would stop Voldemort from going ahead and killing Harry anyway. And even assuming she did know, what did she stand to lose by going Mama Bear and trying to beat Voldemort to death with a pole lamp or something?
    • She was a mother pleading for the life of her child. Anyone ever hear of Sharon Tate? What happened to Lily had its parallels in real life. Sick real life.
    • I dunno, her actions indicate that she must have known something about the power of a sacrifice. Otherwise, you'd think she would have tried to fight him off. By all accounts, she was a pretty accomplished witch and she might have been able to hold her ground for a bit.
      • I don't recall, did she have a wand to hand? Without one, it seems like she wouldn't have many options.
      • It's stated in Deathly Hallows that Lily (as well as James) was indeed wandless.
    • To the OP of this: What could Lily have done? Maybe she knew she didn't have time to grab a nearby weapon and start beating Voldemort with it. That, and she probably knew it would have been futile anyway. May as well die with dignity. :/
      • In this troper's opinion, it's more dignified to go out fighting than to beg.
    • Well, for one, Lily's probably desperate. Besides, Voldemort DID give her the chance to survive, maybe she thought that if she allows Voldy to kill her instead, he won't kill her son?
    • She's a mother who loves her son. She probably knew Voldemort wouldn't spare him, but it's not like she wasn't going to try. Besides, it really would suck to have your one year old son killed while you're still alive and didn't really do anything to try to save him.
  • So if handing a house elf clothes sets them free, are house elves allowed to handle their master's laundry, or does that have to be entrusted to someone else? Or is there enough leeway between "give" and "wash" so as not to give credence to loopholes?
    • I'm pretty sure that the laundry was handled by the wizards in the house, much to their displeasure (though I wouldn't put it past the Malfoys to hire a servant just to magically clean their laundry). I recall Dobby stating something along the lines of "They made sure not to pass me so much as a sock." So, it seems that the House Elf's master(s) could free them even unintentionally, with the mistake of giving them any form of clothing. Remember, in Chamber of Secrets, Harry tricks Lucius into freeing Dobby; obviously he wasn't actively saying or thinking, "This is to free Dobby". So, the wizard doesn't even have to know there is clothing to hand it over.
    • I think that the clothes have to be physically handed to the house elves by their masters. So the family can just put the clothes in a laundry basket and then ask the house elves to wash them. Otherwise, whenever the masters ask the house elves to clean a room, they would have to go through the whole thing first to make sure there aren't any clothes not in the right place.
      • Then Hermione's plot to free the elves by hiding self-knit hats in Gryffindor tower would not have worked and the elves would not have refused to clean there. All in all, the "clothes rule" does not really make sense.
        • I had assumed the elves were just insulted by Hermione's tactic, so they refused to clean there. I never once thought that she had the authority or ability to accidentally free a house elf using this tactic. After all, the only reason Dobby was freed was because Lucius Malfoy dropped the diary with a sock and Dobby got it, twisting the rule to his advantage.
    • I always thought that handing a house elf clothes simply gives the elf the option to leave, and they can choose to accept or reject the option; since a vast majority of the house elves we've seen are happy with their lot in life, one can probably freely hand them clothes without fear of them skipping off. In Goblet of Fire, Crouch hands Winky clothes and has to follow it up with a explicit order of dismissal. So the only people who need to be careful about clothing are those with really rebellious elves. Hermione's ploy to free the elves was probably more insulting than actually effective.
      • If it only gave them the option to be freed, what's the point? Why couldn't Crouch just order her to leave if it didn't break the binding? And I still don't see why Hermione thought she COULD free the house elves even if she shoved socks into their hands. She is a student. She is not an owner or part-owner of any of the elves. Maybe the other faculty members could free elves, but I'm inclined to think that's just something the Headmaster can do.
      • "Why couldn't Crouch just order her to leave if it didn't break the binding?" Tradition maybe? Logically, there's really no reason why giving clothes to a house elf should, in and of itself, set them free. They're just clothes. For that matter, there's no logical reason for house elves to eschew clothes in the first place. I therefore surmise that the house elf/clothes connection is nothing but an ancient tradition whose origins have been lost to time, not any kind of real binding magical contract or anything. Giving a house elf clothes is symbolic of setting them free.
    • But there is a magical bond between a house elf and its master that has to be broken somehow for an elf to be set free. We know there's a tangible bond because Kreacher was able to get out of Voldy's cave when Regulus summoned him. Presumably a house elf's obligation to punish itself for disobeying an order is also part of the bond. I always assumed that somehow the giving of clothes somehow broke it literally as well as symbolically, otherwise how could Lucius have accidentally set Dobby free?
      • I'm not sure there is much of a difference between symbolic and literal when it comes to magic. Dobby was able to interpret, inside his own head, that he had been 'given clothing' and hence was free. Other elves who did not want to be free presumable would be able to interpret being randomly handed a sock as 'Master wants me to hold his sock for him.', not 'Master has given me a sock, and freed me.'. Which is why Crouch explicitly states what he's doing with Winky, so it can't be misconstrued. Think of house elves as Literal Genies...they must follow orders, but the normal ones follow general intent and probably don't need many orders, whereas Dobby managed to twist his master's 'orders' to freedom. (And my theory is that he does the same thing later to teleport into Malfoy Mannor. He was 'freed', but not explicitly 'fired' or 'banned', and thus he still has whatever teleport privileges he had earlier.)
  • Why aren't the Dursleys punished for what they did to Harry at some point? Okay, revenge isn't exactly nice, but they abused him practically the whole time he lived there. So at least some payback would not only be in order, but downright mandatory.
    • You're complaining because the hero was able to show restraint and not abuse his power?
    • Is it abusing one's power if the target deserves it? Being kept in a cupboard, starved, beaten by his cousin's gang... In most jurisdictions, it is a crime to neglect and/or abuse a child, yet they seem to get away scot-free.
      • What exactly are you looking for here? Dudley gets a pig tail that they have to surgically remove, Vernon's sister gets blown up like a balloon and nearly floats away, Dobby pooches Vernon's big business deal, their house gets invaded by owls repeatedly, Dudley's soul nearly gets eaten by a Dementor, and they have to flee their own home and live on the run for all of Book 7. It would have been nice to have Harry throw some of their abuse back in their faces, but they did take their share of lumps. Um hello? Doesn't any realize that the entire reason Dudley got fat is "Karma" abuse to the Dursleys (for not treating Harry like a son). I wish we could see excatly what was in that letter Dumbledore left for them (Pentuina espically)


      • First of all, exactly how many of those are intentional on the part of any of the protagonists? For it to be payback, you have to be fully aware of what you're doing, and do it with the intent to hurt/get revenge on the other party. Otherwise it's just karma.
      • Karma and payback go almost hand in hand. Even if it's unintentional, Harry would still be happy to know that the Dursleys are suffering.
      • No he wouldn't. That would completely go against all the Character Development he had in the series. And at the risk of sounding preachy, I'm going to point out that in real life, hurting someone because "they deserve it" is still wrong. It just makes you a cruel person as well. Besides, why does Harry even need payback? He gets to live a life of adventure and excitment. The Dursleys are destined to live dull lives in suburbia.
        • And torturing someone who was nasty to your teacher wouldn't go against said character development? That's not hurting someone solely because "they deserve it"?
      • Why do people insist that Harry was serious when he said he attacked Amycus because he disrespected McGonagall? Neville explicitly told the trio that the Carrows had been actively torturing students all year. If we know anything about Harry, it's that he has a bit of a hero complex. He feels guilty for not being there when his friends needed help. Amycus should've got far worse than a quick blast of the Cruciatus Curse.
      • It didn't even seem to be a full Crucio; it just hurled Amycus backwards. it didn't drop them to the floor screaming in pain. Besides, personally, if I was a wizard in a fight, I'd just scream the first spell which came to mind, and be hard pressed not to accidentally AK the enemy. Harry's thinking of Amycus torturing students, the Cruciatus Curse springs to mind, and BAM!
    • Alright, I have an inverse problem - what is the deal with Dursleys? I'm trying not to see their characterisation and very existence as a terrible error, but I can't really find a good excuse (or any, for that matter). They start a bit extreme, but as part of a standard fairy-tale-like "evil stepmother" deal. This is fine. But they progressively get worse, past extreme, past over-the-top, well past ridiculous. They hate Harry with a passion that can't be explained by the fact that they consider him a freak, that they are afraid of him, and that they regard him as an unwanted burden. They really, really go out their way to abuse him. And it actually gets even more inexplicable later(!). We are given a Hand Wave that Mrs. Dursley is resentful about her sister and that Dursleys abuse Harry because of their fear and resentment for wizards. It is implied, strongly, that at one point they just try to pretend he doesn't exist as much as possible. Why, then, their downright bizarre Christmas "gifts"? It's not that they just send him crappy gifts (which they shouldn't, because they are said to want to forget Harry even exists). They send him stuff like napkins, toothpicks, and used socks. This is ridiculous and looks like an exceedingly cruel mockery and insult. It's far, far worse than giving no gift at all. So, to sum it up: their behaviour is extremely grotesque. It seems hard to find an explanation for it other than it being a childish fantasy about evil, evil step-parents, but taken to proportions that would make Cinderella wince. Given the message of the books (Muggles are not that bad, and wizards are sometimes silly in their ignorance about them, to the point where they behave stupidly just because of their aloofness and arrogance), the fact that the only Muggles we get to see are too over-the-top for even parody... it seems kind of strange, and difficult to explain. Also, no evil wizard could possibly be worse for Harry's well-being than Dursleys, the way they are shown mid-way through the series. They act positively psychotic, they could kill him in his sleep for all we know. Is there any reason or explanation for this other than Rowling being uncharacteristically Anvilicious about the "bad guys"? Nothing else in the series turns out to be THIS black-and-white.
        • About the presents, I read on another JBM page that it was implied in an interview that every Christmas, Hedwig would go to the Dursleys and harass them until they gave her something to take back to Harry, even if it was something crappy like a tissue.
      • Really, I think the Dursleys are only bearable because their behavior is so over-the-top, unrealistically violent. If Jo had toned them down, it would have been much less "ha-ha, stupid Dursleys" and more "HOLY FUCK! WHERE'S CHILD SERVICES WHEN YOU NEED THEM?!?!?!" We got a glimpse of toned-down (and much, much scarier) parental abuse in OotP, when Harry accidentally saw Snape's memory of his father yelling at his mother. It was horrible for the half-sentence of page time it got, simply because it happens far too often in far too many houses in the real world; why on Earth would anyone wish for two or three chapters of each book to be devoted to that? Also, notice that the older Harry gets, the less afraid of the Dursleys he is, despite the fact that they get more and more over-the-top as the series goes on. In the first two books, he's a little kid and hasn't seen some of the horror that exists outside Number 4 Privet Drive, so the Dursleys are legitimately scary. By the third book, Harry has faced down and defeated Voldemort twice, so Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia don't appear to him as much more than bags of hot air (notice this is the first book where he actually mouths off to Vernon's face?) and Dudley is a minor, if persistent, annoyance. Harry only gets less and less afraid of them from there, until Book 7, where he carries on an entire conversation with him in which he's nothing less than sarcastic and condescending the whole time. It's probably an allegory for overcoming your fears, as much as anything else in the books.
      • My issue is specifically with Aunt Petunia. It's revealed in Deathly Hallows that the reason she hates the magical world is that as a kid she was jealous that she wasn't a witch and that jealousy turned into bitterness and eventual hatred over the years. Even so, don't you think that she'd be at least a little bit sad that her sister died? Just a teeny tiny bit? I can see jealousy over wizardry being a reason not to talk to somone for years, but to show such open apathy over their death feels like a severe Moral Event Horizon.
        • Unless, of course, she was hiding how she felt about her sister because of the hatred-turned-jealousy, burrowing it down inside of herself until she didn't think about it much at all. Granted, that's not really a good way to live, but...
        • Harry's situation may not have been told to the Muggle Child Services, but there are wizards - decent adult wizards - who know of how he is being treated. I get that the wizarding bureaucracy is rather incompetent, and Dumbledore knows about the spell keeping him safe, and Sirius is on the run and helpless to be his godson's new guardian, but you would think that Molly or Arthur Weasley, given that they were told that the Dursleys were starving Harry, would do something more than offer to let him stay with them for the summer. Is there no one they can report this to? Once again, not the Muggle Child Services, but given that it's famous Harry Potter, you'd think it would be easier to get the wizard government to intervene, even if they have non-interventionist ideas about private family matters. Maybe Dumbledore told them about the spell, given that they are members of the Order, but they don't seem to have been too heavily involved in that until Voldemort's return.
        • How about Sirius? I can mentally picture him standing there firing hexes at the Dursleys and screaming something about how he's already got the Dementor's Kiss waiting for him if he's ever recaptured, so why the hell not? I mean, what are they going to do if he kills the Dursleys, sentence him to Azkaban?
    • What bugs me about the Dursleys' behavior is that they're so convinced that magic is an unbearable source of shame, that they think it's better for everyone to believe they have a dangerous criminal for a nephew than a wizard. They actually claim that they're sending Harry to a reform school rather than Hogwarts. Yet wouldn't most people conclude that raising a kid who needs to go to such a school is, in itself, a black mark against the Dursleys as parents?
    • So I disagree with the idea that Harry should get revenge on the Dursleys, but I'm all for punishment (of Petunia and Vernon at least, I'm not sure how much you can really blame Dudley). I mean, they abused Harry, they should go to jail for child abuse.
      • Or, if not jail, at least someone from their world should've called them out on it. It's one thing for Dumbledore—a wizard, hence someone they can always dismiss as a "weirdo" and opt not to listen to—to chew them out, and quite another for their fellow-Muggles to do so ("You did what to your nephew? That poor kid! A wizard? I don't care if he's a space alien, you bastards locked up an eleven-year-old and starved him!").
    • Alternate theory: In the first book, they talk about "squashing it out of him." Perhaps they don't hate Harry as much as it seems, and they are trying to give him what they honestly see as the better life. Maybe if his eleventh birthday had passed without event, they would have eased up and things could have been salvaged a little, but when it didn't, they got desperate and started trying harder despite knowing they were bound to/had already failed, and it was a convenient way to vent whatever frustration they had in their lives that they were already used to. Love will make you do much worse things than hate, and it gives the Dursleys and the series another dimension. I will grant that the Dursleys kind of have to be hateful, bitter, narrow people anyway, but someone can be hateful and bitter and narrow without being cartoon evil. I will also grant that there's no canon evidence for this, but I'll chalk that up to a) it's a children's series, and thus I don't expect moral ambiguity, and b) JK seriously sucks at writing believable villains (seriously, ask any fanfic writer/roleplayer who tries to write from the villain standpoint. It's nearly impossible to do without just giving up and doing it For the Evulz).
      • Another theory: Dumbledore, through Harry's life, has been intervening and keeping hidden from Harry. The Dursleys slip some abuse beneath the radar, though: Dumbledore's not omniscient.
        • Jossed by Half-Blood Prince—when confronting the Dursleys Dumbledore states explicitly that Harry has "known nothing but neglect and often cruelty" at their hands, thus indicating both that the Dursleys never had any good intentions towards Harry, and that Dumbledore was aware of this.
  • What's up with the 'wizards are born not made business'? It sounds something a racial eugenics doctor came up with!
    • And the problem is? The way JKR defined her 'world', the ability to control magic is based on a genetical trait, like e.g. hair color. If it were just a matter of learning, it would be a wholly different world: no Masquerade, no Fantastic Racism... Overall, the whole plot of the series would not make sense any more, as the main reason for the war is said racism.
    • A lot of things are determined in large part by genetics at birth, like height or intelligence. Why should it be surprising if magical ability is, too? What seems odder to me is that there seems to be a bimodal distribution of inherent magic ability, with most people being Muggles (no magic ability).
      • The wizard gene is recessive, which explains the significant amount of Muggleborns. Squibs come about because somehow inbreeding makes the gene more easily mutated.
      • Indeed — somehow, wizard genes remain an extreme minority, yet clearly are dominant (nearly all half-wizards are fully magical themselves). Go figure…
        • Well, actually it is quite possible that magic is a dominant trait. A trait can be dominant but still rare. Dominant just means, if you have the gene, you're going to show the trait. That doesn't mean that the gene is very common, however. For example, it is theorized that the genotype for having six fingers is actually a dominant gene. The gene in question still happens to be incredibly rare, so unless you have the gene in the first place, you won't be born with six fingers. With the magic gene, only a few humans have it, but those that do have a very high chance of passing it to their offspring. In the case of Squibs, they were just unfortunate enough not to get the magic gene, therefore they show no magic qualities.
        • Given the propensity that wizards and witches in the series seem to have for messing themselves up with botched spells, getting maimed by magical creatures they're trying to wrangle, or being killed outright in covert civil wars against the latest Dark Lord, one could argue that magical ability is being selected against, not selected for. Consider how many Muggle deaths vs. how many wizarding deaths take place in the seven years of the series, and then ask yourself if natural selection is really on the "magic gene"'s side.
          • The problem with this, however, is the fact that we've been told that all 'Muggleborns' are actually descended from squibs at some point so it's not like all of the Muggleborns have the same DNA mutation that their ancestors didn't have. If that were the case then they wouldn't need to be descended from Squibs. It has to be recessive because there was magic in their line somewhere and yet their parents themselves didn't have magic.
      • This troper doesn't know much about genetics, so feel free to tell me how wrong I am, but I was thinking that because the wizards have such a separate society, only a tiny minority would marry Muggles (I don't like the series, agree wholeheartedly with most of the stuff on this page, and find it very difficult to get 'inside' a world which just makes no sense whatsoever, but I would say that this one might be explicable.) So most wizards would have two magical parents and there would be a high proportion who had two dominant magic alleles, which would account for the fact that most half-wizards had a magical gene - one parent has two dominant alleles = all children have at least one dominant allele. Okay, that's the amateur genetics explanation, you can disagree now.
    • A surprising number of people have had this problem with the series… at some level, we bring to our books the assumption that "wizards" (in any context) are "better", so when we read that they are born-not-made, it feels morally wrong. The whole point in the Potterverse, however, is that even though they are physically capable of more than Muggles are, they are not "superior" in a racial sense. If this makes sense: eugenics would be wrong even if it were right.
    • I always assumed that magical ability was less about genetics and more about pure luck. If you're born of muggles, it's just some sort of magic that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with genetics at all. As if there was just some sort of spare magic or something in the air that gravitated towards the parents of the soon-to-be born child and made them magical. If you're born of one or two magical parents, you're much more likely to take in this magic ability and be born with powers because it's more likely that this magic that floats around naturally is around the places you frequent (i.e. the magical world) and you have an easier time taking in this magic than some. Of course, in the case of Squibs or even some potential muggleborns or half-bloods, it could be that something within them or their genes makes it so that the magic doesn't take and they are left with no powers. In short, my idea is that your powers are "born-not-made", but it's not something about your genes or your parents, but something that is pretty freak and random. People have no control over it and can't learn it, but it's also not something that's passed down through DNA or something. It's just this weird aura that acts up sometimes and creates these witches and wizards.
  • Why are magical creatures (including humans) so rare? They seem to be far more capable of surviving, yet evolution seems to have favored the non-magical creatures. In fact, it's apparently possible to duplicate food using magic. You'd think once something works out how, it would take over the world.
    • It seems that the non-magicals out numbering the magicals is a factor as much as the magicals being content to not advance their way of life. It also comes down to wizarding kind trying to separate the worlds as much as possible by trying to keep the magical creatures secret.
    • Given that many mythical creatures, including Rowling's, are Mix-and-Match Critters, ordinary evolution wouldn't account for their existence anyway. However, it does seem that however they first formed, they should subsequently outcompete non-magicals. Maybe they need to be in the presence of wizards to survive?
      • That could very well be. Indeed, in many cases it's speculated that certain magical creatures were created by wizards long ago in the dimmest mists of time. Hell, maybe they all were.
    • At least in the case of humans, it could be related to the Immortal Procreation Clause. Dumbledore was over 100 when he died, and Bathilda Bagshot was even older (she was an adult when Dumbledore was young) and died after' Dumbly. It's possible this applies to other species too, the only magical creature we see dying of old age was a fifty-five-year-old acromantula. Add in various recent wizarding wars and the Ministry's regulation over magical creatures, it's not that farfetched that populations would be kept small.
  • How do wizards tell the difference between magical and non-magical creatures? It seems unlikely that they understand the Van der Waals force, so they'd think geckos are magic, but they haven't hidden the existence of geckos.
    • Perhaps there are ways to sense the innate magic of such creatures.
    • They don't hide each and every magical creature. Kneazles can pass as highly intelligent cats, Mail-Owls look like regular owls. Overall, it is possible that they only hide those creatures that would endanger The Masquerade when they are seen by Muggles.
      • Of course, at some point, this gets circular — in the case of many of the creatures, they would endanger the masquerade only because Muggles have never seen them before.
      • I think the idea is to hide magical creatures that can't be explained by Muggle science, and everything else they just count as Muggle animals, like goats. They produce bezoars, wich are classified as magical but goats arn't, and i know people will say "how do they know what muggle science can explain when they don't know about muggles?" Well, that's simple, there's a whole section of the Ministry for people who know about muggle things. How else could you explain Muggle Studies teachers?
    • For that matter, how did flobberworms ever get on the list of magical creatures? By their description in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, there's nothing magic about them whatsoever. Granted, their secretions get used in potions sometimes, but so do bits of mundane animals, like cricket wings or snake scales.
  • Why do some people reckon that the Theme Naming of the Black bloodline is astrology, when even without the Word of God on this matter, the most superficial inspection would reveal that it isn't? Astrology concerns itself only with those constellations which lie on the ecliptic, such as Scorpius (or Scorpio as the astrologers call it), and not even all of those—they ignore at least one (Ophiucus). It doesn't deal with constellations which aren't on the ecliptic, such as Draco, nor with individual stars, such as Sirius (Alpha Canis Major).
    • They are just confusing Astrology and Astronomy?
      • Probably.
    • Actually, astrological signs are different from constellations, despite the similar names for some of them. Astrological signs are measurement of ecliptic longitude. Constellations are something quite different. For example, the first sign is Aries, and if 0 is at the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere (which, generally, it is), then the Sun's ecliptic longitude will be 0 Aries at the spring equinox, even though that point might not be in the constellation called Aries. The Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are corresponding to the astrological signs, not the constellations of those names.
  • Okay, this also has to do with Hogwarts, but mainly the series in general... why the heck is Hagrid not allowed to use magic? The first book establishes that it's because he was expelled. However, once he turned seventeen, he should have been able to use magic regardless of whether or not he finished Hogwarts. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Fred, and George also did not finish Hogwarts, and they're still allowed to do magic. Granted, he was accused of summoning a monster that killed someone, but even after his name was cleared and he got a cushy teaching job, they still didn't allow him to go to Olivander's and get a new wand. If it has to do with the fact that he was expelled from Hogwarts rather than dropping out like the protagonists did, it still seems like Disproportionate Retribution. Also, Sirius and Bellatrix broke out of jail and still manage to do magic just fine, so what gives?
    • Half-breed prejudice, maybe?
    • He is not allowed to use magic, as in, it's against the law for him to be caught using it, otherwise he is physically able to do it. They took that right from him because of the circumstances of his expelling, as was shown in Chamber of Secrets. Then, when his name was cleared, he probably got the right back, but by that time he was so unused to not using magic normally that he didn't bother with difficult stuff. It's probably illegal for Sirius and Bellatrix to use magic too, but since there is no way to actually take their powers without taking their wands...
    • Possibly he would have to make a legal appeal to the Wizengamot, or whichever body he would appeal to. At which point he would say, "No, I didn't release the creature from the Chamber of Secrets, that was You-Know-Who. All I did was illegally raise an acromantula which escaped into the Forbidden Forest. Then I found it a mate and now there's a whole pile of 'em living in there."
    • Do we know for sure that he wasn't allowed to go get a new wand? Perhaps he just chose not to. He's been living without the legal right to use magic (but physical ability to) for 50 years. I'm sure he's gotten used to living without it. On top of that, the characters we know who didn't FINISH school DID take their OWLs, which may be part of a legal issue about adult wizards and witches being allowed to use magic. Hagrid was expelled as a third-year and never took any of the standardized tests. One last thing may be how, exactly, the 2nd book was resolved in terms of Hagrid. We know, as the readers, that Hagrid is innocent. Dumbledore knows this, and presumably most of the faculty do as well. It's suggested that he presented SOMETHING to the Ministry that allowed them to hire him on as Professor, but we have no idea how this was accomplished. Showing that the Basilisk is still in the Chamber and presenting an (empty) diary with a basilisk fang stuck into it won't definitively prove Hagrid innocent - particularly since so many people believed the Chamber of Secrets was a myth that they probably never suspected Hagrid killed Myrtle by actually using the snake, which would make it hard as hell to connect his expulsion with this other incident 50 years later. Sadly, the good guys knowing that Hagrid is innocent doesn't mean that the Ministry would give him full wizard rights back, even if they did let Hogwarts employ him as a teacher.

um hello?? Hagrid still HAS used magic even though he isn't allowed too. 1)Dudley's pig tail, 2)fire in the hut-on-the-rock, 3)those giant pumpkins. What do you think the umbrella is holding?!!

  • Since wizards are practically powerless without their wand, why don't any of them use wrist straps?
    • There probably are wrist straps or wand holders of some sort; it's just never touched on in the series. It's quite common in fanon that most adults have a wand holder that allows for easy access of their wand.
  • This could probably fit with the Dursley entry above, but if they have been shown to not give a shit about Harry, why did they give him glasses? We've seen what the world looks like to him without his glasses (It's a slight blur), so it's not like Harry's Blind Without'Em. And giving a kid glasses to correct his vision implies you care enough about that kid to help him see a bit better. If anything else, it'd probably amuse them to see Harry struggle to read small print (very small print, like on a ketchup label or something). Did the school force them to give Harry glasses or something?
    • The school theory is entirely possible. At least here in Germany, you have several medical check-ups during primary school. Usually at least one Tetanus vaccination, one or the other dental check-up, and a general physical examination before you start swimming lessons in fourth grade. The latter one includes, among other things, an eyesight test.
      • (OP here) Interesting. But could a school really force the parents to give their kid glasses? What could the school board do if the Dursleys, say, refused and kept sending Harry to school w/o glasses? Sue them? Call Child Protection Service on them?
        • The latter possibly. Keep in mind, though, that their whole charade was they were taking in their 'good for nothing' nephew and helping him out of the goodness of their hearts. To the neighbors, he was a troublemaker that wasn't thankful for the things his aunt and uncle did for him. It would look bad if suddenly he was complaining about being unable to read as well and his aunt and uncle didn't give him some corrective lenses. Someone might start to think "maybe the Dursleys aren't as perfect as they look" and call child services.
    • Except the Dursleys can just lie, "We gave our ungrateful nephew some contacts!" and they would think nothing of it.
      • Were contacts popular/viable in the 80s and 90s? I wouldn't know.
        • I'm pretty sure they were.
          • Except for the fact that opticians won't allow contact lenses until you're old enough. I wasn't allowed to get contacts until I was fourteen or fifteen.
      • The problem with this is that you can see contact lenses in people's eyes if you look close enough and know what to look for. Also, it would look strange to the teachers when Harry still cannot read small stuff on the blackboard with his 'shiny new contacts'.
    • As far as the quality of Harry's eyesight goes, it was established in book 7 that it's actually pretty bad without his glasses. After Ron, Hermione, and the others take polyjuice potion to turn into decoy-Harries in chapter 4; Hermione comments that Harry's eyesight "really is awful," before putting on glasses.
      • I think it's because compared to her perfectly normal 20/20 vision, Harry has bad eyesight. We've seen the world through his eyes w/o glasses and it's just a fuzz. It's not like he's totally blind without it.
        • If you're talking about the movies, that doesn't count. A movie can't show what it's like with really bad eyesight because the audience has to be able to recognize what they're seeing. So the movie makers have to tone down the blurriness so that things are fuzzy but still recognizable.
      • Thus, I suppose it was a minor case of Even Evil Has Standards. Malnourishing and mistreating Harry is one thing, but leaving him without a mean to properly perceive the world is another altogether. What if he gets hit by a car because of that? Dumbledore would be most certainly not amused.
      • Also, a child Harry's age would get his mostly-cheap-and-unfashoinable glasses for free on the NHS, and would have been perfectly able to get them himself.
      • Remeber, they had him doing all the housework. They might've been annoyed when he started dropping/breaking things because he couldn't see.
  • Something just occured to me. What if a witch/wizard were born blind or deaf or paralyzed? What happens to them? Do they learn magic that enables them to see/hear/move? Or are they just SOL in the magic department?
    • There does seem to be a treatment available for blind wizards, as Moody has a magic eye. Presumably it's not the only one. Deaf wizards may have a similar treatment available. Wizarding medical technology seems far and away superior to our own—Harry was nearly killed on more than one occasion playing Quidditch, but he walked away unharmed, so it's probably safe to say that it's pretty unusual for someone to have a condition that's not at all treatable.
    • Blind? Magic eye. Deaf? Reparo on eardrum. Paralysed? Reparo on spinal cord. These guys can heal shattered skulls in seconds, it's not hard for them to repair disabilities.
    • They're trained to deal with Basilisks, Mandrakes, and Fwoopers!
  • Why do wizards celebrate Easter and Christmas? Surely as religious holidays, those events have no significance for wizards. I can understand Christmas, since, hey, free presents, but Easter shouldn't be celebrated by wizards since they don't really have any religion (certainly not Christianity, anyway).
    • You have to step back and remember that this is a magical world. In this universe, any historical/religious figure could have been a wizard or witch (a common idea in fanfiction is to have the Greek Pantheon based on Witches and Wizards). Perhaps due to the various actions of wizards and witches, the magical world still celebrates certain holidays for different reasons than Muggles. We never see much about religion besides Dumbledore's belief in the "next great adventure", but that doesn't mean the magical world doesn't have a religion of some sort. It's entirely possible that the religious holidays are various magically important holidays as well.
    • Not to mention the fact that many of the students are Muggle-born. If nothing else, they have holidays so that the wizard child can go celebrate religious holidays with their still-Christian parents.
    • Besides, how do we know that they're not Christian? The characters in the books don't go to church, but neither does most of the UK most the time, and the Muggles and Muggle-borns seen in the story don't make any mentions of faith either. Sure, you could make the argument that they might hold a grudge over the whole burning/hanging/torture hullabaloo, but the various monarchs of England did more to Catholics (then Protestants, then Catholics again) than they ever could have done to wizards without wiping them out. That doesn't mean that all the Catholics (then Protestants, then Catholics again) up and left and said that they weren't going to be English anymore. They probably just subscribe to a version of the faith that doesn't say mean things about witches, in the same way that modern LGBT faithful mentally edit out the Old Testament bits about gays and shellfish.
    • Jesus was actually a wizard who wanted to help the Muggles. But, some of the them didn't like what he was doing and so, instead of the boring standard burning, they hung him on a cross.
    • Given the time period that the wizards chose to withdraw from the world, I've wondered if they might be gnostic. It wouldn't conflict with their practicing magic, and the above explanation would fit as well, just add he made them think that he was on the cross.
    • Ron actually says "Thank God" in OotP when he's talking about Snape not staying for dinner, and a few chapters later Sirius sings "God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs". As mentioned before, much of the UK isn't particularly religious, and a phrase such as "thank God" would be thrown around fairly casually. Plus there's a church in Godric's Hollow, a mixed Muggle/Wizard community, so it's a stretch to say that wizards don't go to church. It's likely that there are Christian (or Gnostic) wizards, but for the most part they're fairly apathetic to religion, only keeping up Christmas and Easter traditions.
    • More definite examples are the St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. But most importantly, the quotes on the tombs in Deathly Hallows are from the Bible: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matthew 6:21) and "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (1 Corinthians 15:26). So Christianity certainly exists among wizards.
    • Uhm. It's easily forgotten sometimes, but both Christmas and Easter are originally pagan holidays, that have been around since well before Christianity... and were adopted (and adapted) by the church. Perhaps the Wizarding world celebrates both holidays in their more traditional ways (opposed to the Western Religious one).
    • It is certainly possible. The most common explaination that I've seen is this: look at what the Bible acrtualy forbids; conversing with demons to gain these powers. Wizerding traits are genetic in Rowling's world, and would most likely be seen by Christian Wizards as a gift. You wouldn't burn Samson or the the Saints as witches for doing supernatural things.
    • Most people don't give any religious significance to religious holidays after all. The wizarding community probably thinks one set of reasons for sweets, fatty foods and alcohol is as good as another.
  • Choice - I've actually inserted this elsewhere, but now I think it deserves its own section, because there does seem to be a fair bit of fridge logic going on here. Rowling insists that choice is what matters in her universe, but what she writes seems to contradict this. Firstly, the sorting hat. At eleven years old, you are defined. Even things that are choices, such as loyalty, courage, and hard work, are treated as innate qualities, and your fate is decided. I think it's fair to say that, if choice is in any way relevant, eleven year old children cannot make an informed one. There's a reason, after all, that eleven year olds are hardly ever tried for crimes in adult court. So how exactly can the hat tell who you will become at that age if you have any choice in the matter? Look at Harry. He chose Gryffindor, not because of any overriding principle, but because of trifling eleven-year-old reasons and the House's reputations. Voldemort provides another example. His chance of redemption comes from Harry's blood. Why is this? What choice do you have in your blood? Do choices affect your blood? If Harry's blood is innately good, then so is he and therefore chose nothing. In fact, the oft-cited statement "It is our choices, much more than our abilities, that prove who we really are" demonstrates this even more starkly. Rowling seems to be saying that choices matter, but she is in fact saying the opposite: that who you are determines your choices rather than your choices determining who you are (see Rachel Dawes conversation with Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins for comparison). In the Potterverse, your choices only illuminate your true nature, they don't really affect anything. Now this would be fine, if Rowling believes in determinism and writes to reinforce that, bully for her. The Fridge Logic comes in because she proclaims the virtue of choice and free will but writes things in a way that makes them irrelevant. I'm not sure if she's simply philosophically muddled or intentionally contradicting herself.
    • The idea with his choice in the Sorting was that Harry was rejecting everything that Voldemort symbolised. He wasn't rejecting it because 'Oh yuck Slytherin!' but because 'That's where Voldemort came from.'. The Voldemort's redemption thing doesn't mean that Harry's blood is innately good, it means that it contained an innate good force (i.e. Lily's sacrifice) that didn't affect Harry, but offered a way to repair the damge to Voldemort's soul, if he chose it. And I don't really see anywhere in the series where someone isn't able to choose differently, no matter who they are. Malfoy is offered the choice to turn away from Voldemort, repeatedly.
      • It wasn't just Voldemort. It was the fact that Harry was faced with all sorts of negative information about Slytherin, real and propaganda, and thought the other, less-maligned houses would be better. He knew that Draco, who he didn't like, wanted desperately to be in Slytherin and was sorted there before him. He knew that his new friend Ron hated Slytherins. He heard Hagrid's clearly exaggerated claim about every evil wizard ever being from Slytherin. He knew that Voldemort had been in Slytherin. He thought that (though he admitted this might just be his newfound anti-Slytherin bias) they looked like an unpleasant lot. If it was just the Voldemort issue and he hadn't heard everything else, he might not have been so keen to end up somewhere else. And really, who would want to end up in the evil house full of future murderers that contains someone you don't like and is hated by your one wizard friend that also contained the wizard who killed your parents? Under those circumstances, I think it was a choice anyone would have made.
      • It wasn't just Slytherin that Harry had heard bad things about: he'd heard a disparaging remark or two about Hufflepuff as well, and withheld judgement until he'd actually met a few of them. And his initial dislike for Slytherin came as much from the bad attitude he'd sensed in Draco in the robe shop and on the train as from what Hagrid had to say about that House. Remember, Draco was trying to be friendly on the train, at least to Harry; it's because he was also rude to Ron that Harry decided to believe the criticisms of Slytherin were justified, not just talk. There's where he made the (Lampshaded!) choice of whom the "right sort" were, and he made it on the basis of direct observation of Draco's and Ron's behavior, not just dissing between the Houses.
      • Dumbledore does believe Hogwarts sorts too soon, but then the Hat is an ancient magic artefact, not something which can just be overruled. Also, Harry's blood was not inherently good per se, but the light magic enchantments on it meant it could somewhat counteract the effects Voldemort's Horcruxes had on his soul, which he chose to make. Voldemort would still have had to choose to feel remorse, the blood just gave him a second chance.
    • Sorting doesn't define a person's "fate", just their school life. There's no indication that school house has any impact on adult life (beyond, perhaps, mundane networking, but even then The Slug Club is house-neutral and seems far more effective). The houses only seem important in the series because it takes place almost entirely in the school itself.
  • I know that a gun would never turn up in the books and are exceedingly rare in the UK, but purely hypotheticaly, how effective would a gun be against a wizard? Personally, I just don't see a wizard being able to react fast enough to defend themselves, but I've had several people disagree and I'd like to see some other opinions on this.
    • Muggle vs. wizard combat has been discussed extensively above and elsewhere, with no clear consensus emerging. Personally, I am of the opinion that it would look something like The Salvation War: individual wizards might be able to cause a lot of damage under the right circumstances, but there is no way their flashy powers would enable them to overcome our collective advantages or their collective cluelessness.
      • To paraphrase wizard Winston Churchill: they may be clueless, but Muggles have no magic. One day they may not be clueless, but Muggles will never have a wand. In other words, a Muggle may be able to take a wizard now, but if it came down to open war between mage and man, I wouldn't be surprised to see a come-from-behind victory for wizardkind.
      • You're assuming muggles don't vastly outnumber wizards worldwide, which is strongly implied throughout the series. So if you had a fight between, say, a few dozen wizards with wands and a few hundred Muggles with machine guns and heavy artillery? Yeah, I'm betting on the Muggles.
        • A-a-a-nd then the wizards turn invisible and teleport behind the Muggle lines and right into their HQ, and the Muggles are fucked, and then the wizards Imperus the Muggles and order them to turn on each other and the Muggles are properly fucked, and then the wizards summon some Dementors, and the Muggles are completely fucked.
        • I don't think you quite understand how small the wizard population is in comparison to muggles. I don't quite remember where I read this, but I believe the ratio is like 1000:1. So yeah, the wizards are fucked.
          • Even if the muggles declare war on the wizards simply for existing so it's a completely justified war for the wizards (which is unlikely), the plot to kill six billion people and commit the biggest genocide in human history is not going to meet approval from all quarters. You're going to have some wizards fighting no the side of the Muggles in order to stop them from being completely wiped out and casting protections. Not to mention that once the wizard starts casting spells, people will notice and those who are armed can take the wizard down, no matter how many Muggles are also killed.
            • The majority of wizards are not purebloods, which means, the majority of wizards will have Muggle family members within two generations if not in their immediate family. This makes 100% compliance with Muggle genocide from the wizarding population extremely unlikely. Frig, it would make 10% compliance extremely unlikely. On the flip side, it also means that there will exist a nontrivial amount of sentiment on the Muggle side for finding some solution less extreme than 'kill every person with the wizarding gene'.
        • The above depends on assuming that a Muggle-Wizard war would be fought like the conventional, big battle-field style battles of WWII. This is patently rediculous. Magic in Harry Potter is perfect for non-conventional, asymmetric gurilla warfare. Think about it, your soldiers, vehicles, and bases can become invisible, they can be teleport instantaneously between remote locations, and everyone in the population is trained in the use of a weapon that can heal, incapacitate, maim, and kill. Not to mention that in a real war, you do not need to kill everyone (or even 99% of the population) you just need to do enough damage to awe your enemies into surrender, and Shock and Awe is the Wizard's strong suit ("Listen up, we can bend the laws of physics and reality by talking fast, so submit to us before we turn your extended family into gerbils."). With good planning, Wizards can do pretty well in a war. And if all else fails, they still have Dementors and the Inferi.
          • The problem is the "with good planning" caveat. Name anything wizards, especially non-muggleborn wizards (the only kind who'd be up for attacking muggles in the first place, really) have less of? In fanfic the muggles could be in severe trouble. In canon, the amount of wizarding ignorance of muggle capabilities and weak points is matched only by their complacency and arrogance.
      • And Muggles, despite the purebloods' claims, still give birth to and/or father a healthy percentage of the next generation of wizards. Yes, wizards might be able to conquer the Muggle population, but how much good will that do them in the long term, if all it achieves is to make Muggle-dom so hateful of their kind that every Muggleborn kid in future generations is going to get put down like a rabid dog by his or her own family, terrified of the "monster" they've produced? Sure, Voldemort's fans might convince themselves that's a good thing, but check back in a few hundred years and all you'd have left of wizardry would be a few pathetic, inbred remnants like the Gaunts.
  • Does anyone else think that Dumbledore hating Dementors is fantastic racism? I mean, sure the Dementors eat happiness, but it's just the way they evolved. Similiarly humans and many animals eat meat because our metabolic processes were designed to do so, and eating meat requires the animal to die, while all Dementors do is make people unhappy for a bit. While it is true that the Dementor's kiss is truly a horrifying experience, it is once again on par with humans and animals killing for food. Dementors only do their kiss on people who they happen to know are evil, they never do it on someone innocent (unless they were told the person was evil); in this sense, Dementors can be seen as lawful neutral, they do what they do to survive and kiss those who their boss tells them to. And it's not like a person who was kissed can't be put out of their misery. Because they feed on happiness, that means that working as Azkaban guards must really suck. They really put their well being on the line for the people they work for.
    • How can that be 'racism' if they're only doing what they have to do? If lions regularly leap out of the woods and ate people, at what point does 'racism' come into a dislike for them?
      • Actually, I think the Dementors eating souls means that those souls are destroyed. They aren't just sucked out, sustain the Dementors, and then pass through them to the afterlife. Those souls are gone forever. Those who have lost their souls don't need to be put out of their misery because they aren't in misery, they just no longer exist. This may be how the Dementors evolve but it's the worst thing that could happen to anyone. Ever. Far worse than simply dying. And the Dementors don't only destroy the souls of the evil people. We know that Sirius, at least, was imprisoned unjustly and I highly doubt that he's the only one this has ever happened to. Crouch Jr. was not ordered to be kissed and Harry and Dudley certainly didn't deserve to have their souls destroyed. Not to mention that the Dementors get to do whatever they want to once they side with Voldemort again.
    • We've seen the Dementors attack innocent people. The only time they've made people mildly unhappy is on the train to Hogwarts, and that was because the people were children who didn't have unhappy memories. People with unhappy memories are basically reduced to gibbering wrecks around them, and that's just from their mere presence, not their Kiss. "And it's not like a person who was kissed can't be put out of their misery."- I find this a pretty disturbing viewpoint, to be honest. It's fine that the Dementors give a fate worse than death to people, since we can just kill those people if it happens. And the fact that they attack on command doesn't make them lawful neutral, it makes them "just following orders", which most humans would agree is no justification for evil deeds.
    • Except that's not true. The Dementors allied themselves with Voldemort at the first chance they got. From what we can tell, the Dementors don't guard Azkaban and restrict Kissing to the guilty because of any moral or ethical obligation, they do it because it's currently in their best interests to do so. Once Voldemort makes them a better offer, they scarper. As far as it being natural for them... well, maybe it is. That doesn't mean we have to like it. They're our predators. If the food that we ate was clever enough to figure out that we eat them on the daily, they probably wouldn't like us much either.
    • The Dementors don't seem to be living creatures. A Patronus is the only thing that can keep them at bay, and there doesn't appear to be a means of killing them. This leads me to believe that they are originally wizard-created beings, or at least are dark spirits who were raised by wizards. Their purpose is explicitly to cause misery, and Dumbledore disagrees that they should have existed in the first place. What is more distressing is that they are nowhere to be found in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. That book explicitly lays out that the Ministry classifies all life in the wizarding world to be either "Being" (wizards, ghosts, goblins, house elves, etc) or "Beast" (Acromantula, Kneazles, Basilisks, Flobberworms, etc). The book makes special mention that centaurs and merpeople are classified as beasts by choice. It features an entry on werewolves that makes no similar distinction (although they mention that they only got the second highest danger classification, rather than the highest, because they are only active once a month). The distressing part is: The Ministry of Magic writes off werewolves as animals, but Dementors are beings.
      • "Being" only means "sentient", not "nice" or even "civilized". There are plenty of evil creatures that aren't in Fantastic Beasts, and werewolves in human form are classed as "Beings".
    • I always thought of the Dementors as a Neutral Evil / True Neutral Wild Card, myself. You know, as if switching sides instantly because the other faction has better prospects, draining positive emotions and eating souls wasn't at least some evidence for Blue and Orange Morality. Or possibly Blue And Orange Insanity.
  • Why the hell are the Ministry and St. Mungo's not in Diagon Alley? The Ministry in particular is a challenge—every morning and evening, hundreds of witches and wizards have to enter and leave, and we can see how much special effort has been made to conceal its entrances, and given how totally incompetent wizards are at concealing themselves among Muggles, I can only imagine how many incidents they have to handle every year where some wizard accidentally does something to reveal themselves and the Obliviators have to come in and deal with it. What kind of sense does that make? If the entrance were in Diagon Alley, people could just apparate into the Alley, or get there via Floo Powder, and just walk right in via, you know, a door. Come to think of it, how does Arthur get to London every morning anyway?
    • um about St.Mungo's its explained why its NOT in Diagonal Alley Moody explains it when they go to see Arthur there. Its because there was no place in Digonal Alley big enough for St. Mungo's.
    • We only see the hard way to get into the Ministry and St. Mungo's because Harry can't apparate yet. At the age of 17, most people have an apparation license and can teleport instantly. I'd assume there's a designated area before the entrance to apparate in, and then they get their wand checked at the Ministry or go to the front desk at St. Mungo's. Keep in mind that Wizarding transpiration is a lot more advanced in some ways, so they don't usually have to worry about going in the Muggle way.
      • I don't think that's true, after seeing how many of the employees are going in via the bathroom in Deathly Hallows.
        • Except it's specifically mentioned in the book how only the highest ranking officials (read: Death Eaters) are cleared to use the Floos or Apparate and how big of a hassle and irritation it is for everyone to have to use these weird guest entrances.
  • Wizards really are the most easily brainwashed people in the world. The general wizarding public seems to do a complete 180 on their opinion of Harry Potter about once every other year. Yes, there seems to be only one "real" media source in the Daily Prophet and only one big tabloid in the Quibbler, and the Ministry's making a concerted attempt to shape public opinion, but really. After 12 years of thinking of someone as a hero and savior, then flipping to thinking he's responsible for killing muggle-borns at Hogwarts, then back to thinking he's a hero, then to thinking he's a lying attention-whore, then back to thinking he's the chosen one, then back again, all in the space of 7 years?
    • This troper finds it unlikely that those sources are taken totally seriously. There are more magazines, plus Wizarding radio, so it's fairly likely that the Prophet isn't everyone's main source of news. I also think that The Ministry and the Death Eaters massively underestimated the intelligence of wizards or people in general. Also, major news networks will run a blatantly biased piece one year and then run another that contradicts the first a year or two later, in Real Life... though they get called on it. Other characters (than those closest to Harry) mention that the Prophet's view of Harry doesn't add up, so wizards probably aren't that easily brainwashed... just those who are stupid enough to only read the Prophet and then take it seriously.
    • You're also assuming that every wizard even pays much attention to the news.
    • Also, just think how the media influence people's opinions in real life.
  • If the Dursleys hate Harry so much, why do they go through great measures to make sure he doesn't go to school? Wouldn't that mean he'd be out of their hairs for 10 months?
    • It's more about their fear of wizards and Harry learning to be one, plus just enjoying Harry's misery at not being able to go. They would rather have him with them and have all of them be miserable than have him go and let him have a good time.
  • Where did the fear of Voldemort's name come from? It's handwaved as saying that names contain power, but no one else's name seems to carry that sort of stigma, or have any kind of power to speak of.
    • Two words: The Taboo. Of course it makes DD an even bigger idiot for insisting that Harry uses it.
      • Not really. The Taboo was only possible because Voldemort controlled the Ministry, something he never managed to pull off in the first war. Additionally, in the second war everyone (well, everyone not off hiding in the woods with a limited source of information about the outside world) knew about the Taboo so it stands to reason that everyone would know if that had been the case in the first war and yet no one mentions it. When Harry asks Hagrid why people don't say it, he doesn't say anything about how in the old days saying it would get you killed. Dumbledore mentions that he's repeatedly tried to get McGonagall to say 'Voldemort' the very day after he disappeared when their dialogue indicates that this is the first time she's seen him since hearing the news. And maybe if there was a Taboo Dumbledore would say it anyway and feel perfectly safe doing so but he certainly wouldn't encourage the practice and get his allies tortured and killed. The Taboo in the second war does not make Dumbledore an idiot for encouraging - not insisting - Harry to say 'Voldemort' because he had no way of knowing that Voldemort would take over the Ministry one day and decide to take drastic measures to stop people from saying his name.
      • Yes, really. You don't know that - it's just as possible, that he could use it any time, but didn't see the need prior to DH, because he already knew where Harry was, but couldn't reach him. Harry's isn't told a bajillion other important things either, so it is not a valid argument. "If it was a good idea DD would do so" is not a valid argument either - that is what we call a Plot Hole. If DD didn't expect V to take over the Ministery (which is, I remind, completely incompetent, helpless and corrupt), then he's an even bigger idiot and a lousy strategist. The Taboo wasn't meant to stop people from saying V's name - it was to track down those few who, by courtesy of DD, were dumb enough to use it.
        • When Ron tells Harry about the Taboo he says "The name's been jinxed, Harry, that's how they track people! Using his name breaks protective enchantments, it causes some kind of magical disturbance - it's how they found us in Tottenham Court Road!" and "It was only people who were serious about standing up to him, like Dumbledore, who dared use it. Now they've put a Taboo on it, anyone who says it is trackable - quick-and-easy way to find Order members!" The Taboo was not solely for the purpose of catching Harry. It was for the purpose of catching any of the people who were seriously opposing him. Harry isn't told lots of important information, true, but surely if all the adults, at least, knew about the Taboo and Dumbledore knew that Voldemort was coming back one day, he wouldn't tell Harry to say 'Voldemort' all the time. If saying 'Voldemort' does nothing then using the name is a nice way of being brave. If it DOES still break all enchantments and make you easily findable, then saying his name is a stupid thing to do. Dumbledore, again, could get by doing it but he's not going to get an eleven-year-old boy to do it. That would be criminally stupid. I never said that "If it was a good idea DD would do so" was my argument, you know. I know he makes mistakes but telling Harry to say a name that will make it so he can be found by Voldemort any time the subject of Voldemort comes up (and if he's on the run from Voldemort, this will be a lot) without telling him the risks...NO ONE would be that stupid and a lot of the people who just say 'oh, don't say that name! It's scary!' would really have a better reason if saying his name was literally dangerous and they have no reason to hide this information from Harry. And I also didn't say that Dumbledore never expected Voldemort to take over the Ministry, just that he never expected him to take over the Ministry and then make his name Taboo so that anyone who used his name could be tracked. It's the second, italicized, part that Dumbledore didn't expect. Ron only finds out about the Taboo after he's away for awhile and he acts like it's something completely new whereas (even if it was in place beforehand but Ron didn't know until now) if it was explained to him then it would have been explained in terms of 'the Taboo is back' or 'so now we need to start worrying about the Taboo again' instead of 'there's this new Taboo' which it clearly was. Remus ran into them and didn't tell the about the Taboo even though he gave them a lot of other information. Kingsley was apparently almost caught by Death Eaters after he said Voldemort and there's no way he knew the Taboo was going on beforehand and yet was still stupid enough to invoke it after the Ministry fell. Plus something as widescale as the Taboo really is going to require the use of the Ministry and its resources. The only way that underage childrens' magic can be tracked is through the Ministry, after all, and that's just as widespread and large-scale as the Taboo. It really makes no sense on a number of levels for the Taboo to have been in place all this time or in place during the first war and now in place again and the fact that Dumbledore makes mistakes and Harry isn't told everything doesn't change this.
  • How on earth is the Wizard Economy supposed to work? Unless I'm mistaken, it seems like transfiguration lets wizards either create or duplicate whatever they want. While there might still be a demand for things such as, say, Ollivander's wands, because they're unique, how do they deal with the fact that a wizard has little to no need to actually purchase things?
    • Because Transfiguration and Conjuration is hard, and Wizards are lazy. They could make it themselves, if they took the time to remember how, or research it to learn how, or they can go down to the store and buy one, ready made and probably of better quality than whatever they cobble together.
      • Not sure about Transfiguration, but I don't think conjuration is permanent?
  • If Hogsmeade is the only all-wizarding town in England how come it's right next to Hogwarts which is in Scotland? Did Not Do the Research?
    • According to PoA: " 'Do you know much about Hogsmeade?' asked Hermione keenly. 'I've read it's the only entirely non-Muggle settlement in Britain -' "
  • This might be a bit of a weird one, but it always irked me how the wizarding world treated poor Harry throughout the series. For the first few books, they treated him like a hero (when in reality, he was just lucky), but after the fourth book, they suddenly start looking down upon him because they refuse to believe that Voldemort had really returned. And it gets really bad in the last book, when the whole government (under Voldemort's control, mind you) is actively persecuting him! Then I realized that much of the wizarding world (the older inhabitants, at least) are a bunch of hypocrites who really don't care about Harry, and are more interesting in following the crowd! ...Sorry, I just needed to vent about something that's been bothering me for quite a while... and perhaps JKR did it on purpose for us to really side with Harry...
  • Ok, the theme of the books is that the Power of Love is the most important/powerful thing and Dumbledore is the main advocate for this, who goes on and on at length about how incredibly important it is and how Voldemort's evilness stems entirely from his inability to love. And then Rowling's Word of God about his backstory states that he had one bad experience with love, decided that it makes you evil and stupid, and avoids it like the plague for the rest of his life, all the while still preaching to everyone else about how great the power of love is. What? Granted, it was the mother of all bad experiences, so his reaction is fair enough, but it doesn't mesh well with the theme of the whole series. Did Rowling drop the ball on that one, or am I just missing something?
    • And to think that some people seriously accuse Rowling of fawning to the gay folk. The actual message seems to be the polar opposite.
    • This is how I see it: Dumbledore realizes how being in love affects his own decisions and decides to avoid it entirely. That's his individual decision, though. He also realizes that it can make people do great things and is overall a powerfully positive force, and therefore continues to advocate love as the most powerful thing ever. Besides, it's not like he avoids all types of love entirely, just romantic love. He obviously loves Harry and McGonagall and plenty of others, it's just that it's not romantic love, because not all love IS romantic.
      • Agreed. One of the most powerful and often-mentioned loves there was in the series was Lily's very-much-not-romantic love for Harry that saved him and it wasn't Harry's love for Ginny that threatened Voldemort.
  • Why exactly are Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans popular at all? Regular companies without magic can create candy that tastes like vomit or earwax but don't. Why? Because no one wants to eat something that tastes like that. Companies make candies that people actually want to taste like chocolate and cherry. Admittedly there are people who like mouth-watering candies that make your eyes water, but they aren't a majority and those candies aren't stocked in large amounts.
    • But thats the appeal! You buy chocolate, you get chocolate. You buy a bag of Bertie Bott's, you could get anything. Could be chocolate, could be toast, could be ants, could be boogers. Every bean is a gamble. They also seem to be more popular with kids (the one time Dumbledore ate one, he had his Nostalgia Goggles on), who can appretiate the "danger" and the grossness. There is a social factor too: You can't say much about sharing a chocolate bar, but with the Beans you and your friends have something to talk about with every bite.
      • Errr, that's the point. People want the "you buy chocolate, you get chocolate" thing. There is a reason that so many laws exist about consumer product labels, truthfulness of. When people are reaching into their pocket and hauling out hard-earned cash, they want to be assured that they are getting exactly what they pay for. The whole 'blind bag mystery pick' thing is something that most people don't want, and at minimum will expect to pay a seriously discounted price if they do want. So how does Bertie Botts stay in business?
  • Why didn't any of the characters simply apparate out of tight situations? I can understand Dumbledore and Snape, since it's impossible to apparate in/out of Hogwarts, but what about Lily, James and Harry? If she heard Voldemort coming, she probably had more than enough time to grab Harry and just apparate to a safer place, and I don't seem to recall there being anything mentioned about how "they couldn't have done that because so and so".
    • They didn't have their wands with them (established in DH). Unless you are crazy powerful and can do wandless magic (i.e. you are Dumbledore/Voldemort), you need a wand to Apparate.
    • The usual MO seemed to be putting up anti-Apparation wards.
  • How did Quidditch matches end before the introduction of the Golden Snidget and later the Snitch? Current rules only allow the game to end when either the Snitch is caught or the two captains agree to end the game. So before the Snitch, were all matches won by forfeit? Or was there a score or time limit for the game to end that was eliminated when the Snitch was introduced?
    • Having a match decided by who gives up first sounds like a really stupid thing to do as then it's not a matter of who is the better team but by who is more stubborn. The teams could just glide around not doing anything and waiting for the other ones to quit. The first-to-whatever would work best for an elimination-style tournament because teams that often won would have around the same point total and it would mean that some teams only got to play one game a season. I think the most likely and sensible answer is that before the Snitch there was a time limit.
    • Having every match won by forfeit before is stupid and illogical... which considering how we know the wizarding community acts most of the time, means that is the most likely option.
  • I can't find this anywhere: Why is quidditch have rules that mean that if you play seeker for team Awesome, which has fifty points, and the other team, team Goblin, has four hundred points, then you can either catch the snitch and lose or do nothing? Why did Krum catch the snitch in Goblet when he doomed his team that way? And how many beatings did he recieve for that by his angry teammates?
    • Presumably none. As was explained in the book, Krum knew that his team was getting hammered and couldn't win. He had the choice of catching the Snitch as soon as possible so that he could end the game on his terms or waiting until they were losing by an embarrassing degree...which also risked the other Seeker catching the Snitch instead.
    • The opposite team was outscoring them 17 to 1. If Krum didn't catch it right away the score would have been even more embarrassing.
  • Why do all means of scoring in Quidditch grant points in multiples of ten? Chasers get 10 points for scoring a goal with the Quaffle, and Seekers get 150 points for catching the Snitch. How is that any better than having a Quaffle-goal win 1 point and a Snitch-catch, 15? Unless there used to be another means of scoring single points, or of losing single points as a penalty, using multiples of ten just seems like unnecessary score-inflation.
  • What's the point in training to become an Auror? The ones we saw seemed no more competent at defeating Death Eaters than normal Hogwarts students.
    • The six people who went to the Ministry are hardly 'normal Hogwarts students' and Aurors are more competent than them, if only by virtue of knowing more magic. Aurors also don't exist solely for the purpose of catching Death Eaters or else there would be no Aurors when the books start. Asking why bother having Aurors if there are stronger Death Eaters is like asking why bother having police if a criminal could still shoot them.
    • Also, the Ministry Six actually being able to fight Death Eaters head-to-head is an artifact of the film version. In the book version the kids got their asses kicked by Bellatrix and her squad with the Death Eaters hardly breaking a sweat in the process, and were saved only by the arrival of the Order of the Phoenix.
  • And what kind of people call themselves "Dark" without irony? Light makes sence because anyone could call themselves that? Humanity's worst monsters typically either think they're saving the world or don't care what anyone calls them.
    • Maybe an outbreak of Then Let Me Be Evil. Maybe they tried to give themselves a badass-sounding intimidating name and failed. Maybe they were given the moniker by a newspaper and it stuck.
  1. ↑ Can I have a "holla" for all the book sluts who started fanning themselves when they saw Snape's sitting room in the movie, and not just because Alan Rickman was sitting in it!
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