Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Students

Ravenclaw

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres/The Boy-Who-Lived/General Chaos

  • Badass Boast: What kills darklords, terrifies Dementors and owes you sixty thousand galleons?
  • Badass Bookworm: as befits a wizard.
  • The Chessmaster: he tries, with the best intentions, but he's an overambitious, dangerous amateur. This is pointed out by many characters, including himself.
  • Child Prodigy: to the nth degree.
  • Confusion Fu: Harry isn't just gratuitously unpredictable, he is also very efficient about it.
  • Crazy Awesome: Harry has a very strong tendency to explicitly look for flaws to exploit, thinking outside the box, taking the perspective no-one ever tried. His plans are outrageously shameless as a result.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Harry is not very patient with what he perceives as stupidity, and will violently mock it, especially if it gets people hurt.
  • Determinator: Heroic responsibility means you have to get the job done no matter what.
  • Did You Just Kill A Dementor?
  • Ditzy Genius: Deconstructed. He doesn't understand normal people very well, and has almost zero common sense. He tries to compensate for it with intelligence, but it doesn't always cut it. When you are a hero with ambitious plans to change the world, this is a huge liability.
  • Encyclopaedic Knowledge: His (foster) father was an Oxford professor, his house is full of books, he is intensely curious and has the intelligence to assimilate the knowledge. Do the math.
  • For Science!: Actually, for Humanity and/or for Truth, but Harry thinks Science is essential to serve the first and find the second.
  • Genre Savvy: When Harry hears "Ssalutations from Sslytherin to Sslytherin: if you would sseek my ssecretss, sspeak to my ssnake." when the Sorting Hat calls out Slytherin, Harry is Genre Savvy enough to know to tell McGonagall about it.
  • Guile Hero/Magnificent Bastard: The goals of a guile hero, the tactics of a magnificent bastard.
  • Grin of Audacity: he's usually represented with these in fanart. You can feel it in the text too, but they get much rarer after The Incident: Harry's gone grim.
  • Happily Adopted: Mostly.
  • Horrible Judge of Character: Towards Quirell. He wises up.
  • The Hero
  • Immortality Seeker: not just for him, but for everyone, "otherwise what would be the point?"
  • Innocence Lost: Harry becomes much harder, grim and cynical after the Azkaban episode.
    • And Harry just looked at the Defense Professor with cool eyes that would never flinch from anything; not even death, now. He was no longer in Azkaban, no longer fearful of the part of himself that was fearless; and the solid gemstone that was Harry had rotated to meet the stress, turning smoothly from one facet to another, from light to darkness, warm to cold.
  • Insufferable Genius: "I'm smarter and I know it. (*wiggles*)"
  • Intelligence Equals Isolation: Is terrified of this.
  • Large Ham: At age twelve, he talks like a book. And that's when he's being low key. When he tries to be a ham, it's spectacular.
  • The Leader: He leads the Chaos Legion primarily as a type 1 with a bit of type 4.
  • Mad Scientist: Harry — yer a wizard. Who knows Muggle science, and ain't afraid to use it. We are doomed.
  • Memetic Badass:

And from that day onward, no matter what Hermione tried to tell anyone, it would be an accepted legend of Hogwarts that Harry Potter could make absolutely anything happen by snapping his fingers.

Hermione Jane Granger

Antony Goldstein

Padma Patil

Slytherin

Draco Malfoy

Theodore Nott

Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle

Daphne Greengrass

  • Only Sane Girl. At least she thinks of herself that way.
    • Only up to a point:

"Well," Daphne whispered, keeping her voice as low as she could, "at least now I don't feel like the only sane person in Hogwarts any more."
"Because now you've got the rest of us as friends?" whispered Lavender Brown, who was tiptoeing along at her left side.
"I don't think that's what she means," General Granger murmured from Lavender's own left.

Blaise Zabini

Tracey Davis

  • Cloudcuckoolander: 'The girl went on stalking through the corridor, like she had dramatic music accompanying her that only she could hear.' This may or may not be connected to her previous association in the Chaos Legion.
  • Dark Magical Girl: After sacrificing her soul to Harry Potter.
  • True Companions: One of the reasons why Harry promised her his protection.

Hufflepuff

Neville Longbottom

Susan Bones

  • Masquerade: Suspected by the rest of SPHEW to be a "double witch", which is the magical world's version of someone who attends a super secret magic school.
  • Only Sane Girl: Probably the only one out of SPHEW, because she actually takes steps to prevent DOOM.
  • Doom Magnet: What Susan believes SPHEW to be.

Gryffindor

Ronald Weasley

  • Butt Monkey: Harry refuses to take him seriously.
  • Demoted to Extra: He is one of the generals of Hermione's army and has a battle with Neville but is ultimately a minor character in this series.
  • Ron the Death Eater: Inverted. He's treated completely in character... in a series where everyone else is OOC.
  • Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: When Hermione is framed for the attempted murder of Draco, Ron sends his condolences and approval, but not because he thinks Hermione is innocent.

Fred and George Weasley

  • Crazy Awesome: Manage to royally screw over Rita Skeeter by forging a betrothal contract between Harry and Ginny, manufacturing a lot of evidence that should have been impossible to forge, and did it all in a time frame of less than twelve hours and on a budget of forty galleons.
  • Noodle Incident: ...And then Obliviated themselves so that if they got caught, they wouldn't be able to divulge the details. It's implied that this is a fairly common procedure for the twins whenever they achieve some kind of grand-scale prank.
  • Overshadowed by Awesome: After Snape's apology speech...

At the Gryffindor table, where a cake waited with fifty-one unlit candles, Fred whispered, "I think we may be out of our league here, George."[1]


Teachers

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

Minerva McGonagall

Severus Snape

Filius Flitwick

Quirinus Quirrell/Tom Marvolo Riddle/Lord Voldemort/Jeremy Jaffe

Sybil Trelawny


Other adults

Bellatrix Black

Amelia Bones

Lucius Malfoy

Posthumous Characters

Godric Gryffindor


Armies

Dragon Army

The Chaos Legion

  • Break the Game Breaker: Quirrel forces Harry to downsize chaos after he curbstomps both other armies in the fourth battle. It works, they lose the next battle to Dragon.
  • Catch Phrase: Seamus claims that Harry frequently says "I find your lack of skepticism disturbing" while doing the Vader-choke gesture.
  • Chewing the Scenery: Are encouraged to do so.
  • Confusion Fu
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Some members (especially Harry) are guilty of this.
  • Crazy Awesome
  • Doomy Dooms of Doom: Their theme song consists of nothing but the word Doom repeated over and over again to the tune of the Imperial Death March from Star Wars.
  • Five-Bad Band:
  • Game Breaker: In the Battles after christmas break Harry starts using new or unexpected forms of magic in each battle to give himself an edge over the other armies.
  • Handicapped Badass: Harry is forced to split up his army. However, he manages to do a good job at fighting with his remaining forces, and may have possibly won if the Dragon Army hadn't copied their trick.
  • Mildly Military: Harry doesn't even attempt to impose any kind of military discipline.
  • Obviously Evil: Rigorously enforced by General Chaos, just for Lulz.
  • Only Sane Man: Seamus says that when you first join the chaos legion it seems like everyone in it is insane, then after a while you realize everyone else is insane.
  • Shout-Out: Mainly to Warhammer, H.P. Lovecraft, Ender's Game, Starwars, and Monty Python.

The Sunshine Regiment

  1. ↑ each candle was for one point Harry managed to lose during his first Potions lesson.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality/Characters?oldid=1952993"