Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (novel)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Slughorn is a big fat pedophile.
  • Base Breaker: The book that ignited the greatest quantity of flame wars on forums. Especially over the Ship Sinking.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: The Burrow-burning and Bellatrix's appearance in The Movie.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Hey Draco, that's a nice suit you got there.
    • Of course, it helps that Draco starts to become a lot more pitiable by the end of the book, what with it being revealed that he's terrified of dying and/or causing the death of his family.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In the first book, Ron sees in the Mirror of Erised himself as Head Boy and holding the Quidditch Cup. He manages both (almost, as he became a Prefect) in this book and film.
  • Internet Backdraft: Outside of the Ship-to-Ship Combat, words can not describe the level of backlash fangirls displayed when Blaise Zabini was revealed to be, wait for it, black.
    • Which was followed by 'Wait, Blaise is a DUDE!?' Pretty much making thousands of Female Blaise fics void.
      • They're not void, they're just a different genre now.
    • The rage over Harry/Ginny, on the other hand, could get truly scary. But, of course there are ways of dealing with this...
    • There were also a lot of complaints from non-shippers who were bothered by the book's focus on romance. Probably at least in part a Hype Backlash due to the massive focus those subplots got in the eyes of the rest of the fandom, but even so, it's a little Fan Dumb that they expected a book about 16-year-olds at a boarding school not to discuss dating and romance.
  • It Was His Sled: Snape kills Dumbledore.
  • Magnificent Bastard: The Half Blood Prince himself, Snape.
  • Memetic Mutation

Snape kills Dumbledore!
Nooo! You bitch! You bitch!

    • Similarly, "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE ON PAGE 606/596." (page 606 is commonly used as it has Harry explicitly saying "Snape killed Dumbledore," but the actual death occurs on 596. Or 566/556, depending on which edition you're reading.)
    • Amusingly, someone changed the Wikipedia page for the book to spoiler the ending. The IP address traced back to the HQ of the Minnesota Republican Party.
    • "Snape!" ejaculated Slughorn.
  • Never Live It Down: Poor, poor Ginny. There's no evidence that she goes further than kissing with anyone, and with a grand total of two boys before Harry, and yet the bashers are all too happy to label her the "Hogwarts whore".
  • Nightmare Fuel: One word: Inferi.
  • Relationship Sue: Some fans complained that Rowling made Ginny into one in this entry, even the Harry/Ginny shippers. Some of this may have been Die for Our Ship, but that can't account for all of it. She comes across as extremely shy and is revealed to have a crush on Harry in Book 2, and turns out to be critical to the plot, with Harry risking his life to save her. However, rather than use this perfect opportunity for a Relationship Upgrade, she was Demoted to Extra in Books 3 and 4. She had a larger role in Book 5, but was still not plot critical and more-or-less interchangeable. Then, all of as sudden, in Book 6, with no buildup, she gets a huge role upgrade, is the pretty and popular girl who every guy lusts after, and Harry is madly in love with her and experiencing "chest monsters" when he sees her. While Rowling has insisted that she always intended for Harry and Ginny to end up together, the events in the book suggest she hadn't thought of this until she wrote this book and regretted not using their experience in Book 2 for a Relationship Upgrade, and quickly tried to do a Retcon in this book to make up for it.
    • The intensity of the accusations does bring up more than one eyebrow raise. Specially considering the terrifying level of hate thrown at both Ginny ("slut", "bitch", "fat whore", "Harry's love slave", "not odd enough unlike Hermione") and Bonnie Wright ("ugly", "bad actress", "bitch", "uglier than Emma Watson"). and it's aboslultely no coincidence that Harry/Hermione shippers are the ones who have the worst part of the Ginny hate, reaching the truly terrifying extreme of gunning for Ginny's torture/rape/spaying/death'.
    • It's especially strange to hear Rowling say Ginny and Harry were supposed to hook up when Order of the Phoenix showed Ginny was completely over Harry, even pointing out that Ginny is no longer shy and love-stricken like she was before.
  • Romantic Plot Tumor: The Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione story lines became the main focus during the second act of the book.
    • In-universe, Harry is thoroughly sick of Lavender Brown and Ron's relationship.
    • This is even more so in the film
  • Scrappy Chapter: The first chapter, a dialogue between Fudge and Random Unimportant Muggle PM, is this. You can feel free to skip it and not miss anything vital.
  • Ship-to-Ship Combat: This book caused the shipping wars in the fandom to go nuclear, to the point of JK Rowling accusing some shippers of Fan Dumb in an interview.
    • Technically, it was Emerson, the founder of Mugglenet, who said it. Rowling's reaction to this was akin to "Oh shit. Did you just say that? Do you want the rabid shippers to slit your throat in your sleep?" and she refused to call "a significant part of my fanbase 'deluded'". In spite of her refusal, angry fans made it seem like she had personally insulted them and spat into their faces.
  • Strangled by the Red String: Some of the dislike against Harry and Ginny becoming the Official Couple is because of Die for Our Ship, while the rest is because of this. They fall in love after having had no meaningful interaction besides Ginny's briefly stated crush on Harry in book two (in which she was eleven, making it look like just a meaningless schoolgirl crush). Not helping are the rather Narmy descriptions of Harry feeling like he has a "chest monster" that pops up whenever Ginny's around. To make matters worse, they spend even less screen time together in the last book. By the epilogue, they're Happily Married, leaving even those who took no sides in the shipping scratching their heads. The film version tries to avert this by expanding Ginny's screen time, giving her more sequences alone with Harry, and having them not break up at the end. However, this still suffers on account of how much of the books are left out of the films.
    • Even worse is that after their hookup is rushed, the readers don't even get to see any of it. They kiss and become a couple, and there's a jump to a few weeks later, where they're briefly shown together in the Gryffindor common room before Harry has to leave with Dumbledore.
    • Of course, Harry and Ginny are nothing compared to Lupin and Tonks. The two were literally Ships That Pass in the Night. In Half Blood Prince, Harry sees Tonks upset several times and thinks it's over Sirius dying. Then the climax reveals that Tonks is deeply in love with and wants to marry Lupin despite the two having no direct interaction whatsoever before that.
      • ...Except that they were both part of the group that came to get Harry at the beginning of Order of the Phoenix (not to mention that they're both part of the Order to begin with). They probably talked on the way over to the Dursleys', and it's not like people just stop talking to each other or somehow don't bump into one another when they're part of the same group. And it's not like they're present in the bulk of the story, so unless they were the viewpoint characters, there's really not much of a way around it seeming rushed and tacked on (which it seemed to be, but Tonks was only introduced in OotP).
  • Unfortunate Implications/Artistic License History: Fudge uses "he" to refer to a strong female Muggle character.
    • Who? When?
      • Margaret Thatcher, in the first chapter of Half-Blood Prince. The Prime Minister in the book is supposed to be John Major, who was PM in 1996, the year when the meeting between Fudge and the PM was held. The "he" Fudge and the PM talk about is the current PM's predecessor, which was Mrs Thatcher.
        • Given who we're talking about, it's an easy mistake for Fudge to make.
      • I don't think the Prime Ministers in the Potterverse have any relation to the Prime Ministers in the real world at the time the book supposedly takes place. Our Prime Ministers Are Different and all.
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