12 Biggest Lies In Harry Potter We All Accept
House elves love slavery! Voldemort's a born charmer! It's Bellatrix's fault she's crazy!
In a series with as immersive a universe as Harry Potter has, there will inevitably be some inconsistencies and inaccuracies between books and films, from one novel instalment to another, and between the original story and its spin-off offspring. However as far as authors go, Potter mastermind JK Rowling isn’t a big believer in the Death of the Author, often taking to Twitter to correct inquisitive fans on minor details never included in the novels.
And this is where things become complicated.
Whilst Rowling’s additions to the series mythos are widely derided by fans of the series as a clumsy way to handle canon, her attempts to paper over plot holes have also led long-time fans of The Boy Who Lived’s story to uncover ever-larger issues with the narrative of the phenomenally popular franchise. S
ome of these slip ups are just plot snags, but a lot of them are fundamental problems for which the series doesn’t appear to offer any answer, like—Is a school which endangers its students as much as Hogwarts really that great? Why would anyone partake in the insanely dangerous Triwizard Tournament, and how boring would it be to watch? Why do wizards celebrate Christmas?
Join us as we take on these and the many other lies which we just sort of accept are part of life in Pottersville.
12. Hogwarts Is A Great School
Okay, first things first—we’re repeatedly told that Hogwarts is a fine institution, one of the wizarding world’s pillars of education, a heralded and highly selective home of learning.
So the lie here would
be everything listed above.
The school repeatedly hires frauds, charlatans, werewolves, amoral political actors and, on two separate occasions, dangerous criminals thinly disguised as other people, one of whom is possessed by literally the most dangerous wizard on earth, and that’s all for one Defence Against the Dark Arts job listing. Its curriculum doesn’t appear to include the three educational pillars of reading, writing, and arithmetic, begging the question of exactly how professors expect students to understand incantations, spells, and complex potions.
Speaking of said staff, they appear at worst disinterested in and at best mildly amused by the injuries which frequently befall students who fumble spells and potions, not to mention the fact that the school’s grounds contain, in no particular order, moving staircases, a lethally dangerous basilisk, a giant spider and his countless hungry offspring, and a three headed giant guard dog.
Again, we’re expected to believe this’s the best school Britain’s wizarding world has to offer, and not an incompetence factory primed to produce magical lawsuits and mystical broken bones.