10 Things You Didn't Know About Harry Potter's Scar

5. The Scar Only Pains Harry When Triggered By The "Master Soul"

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire lord voldemort harry
Warner Bros. Pictures

Spoiler alert for all three of you who haven't seen Harry Potter yet, but in The Deathly Hallows, it's revealed that Harry is a Horcrux - a vessel containing a piece of Lord Voldemort's fractured soul.

This is the reason Harry can talk to snakes, and it's also what links his and Voldemort's minds together. But an unfortunate side effect of having this evil live inside his body is that Harry will often feel an immense pain in his forehead, something triggered whenever Voldemort is in the vicinity - or, because of that aforementioned mind-link, whenever ol' snake-nose feels a particularly strong emotion.

Over the years, this explanation has caused some confusion in the Harry Potter fan community. If Harry's scar hurts whenever Voldemort is around, why doesn't it hurt in The Chamber Of Secrets when he faces off against Tom Riddle? Why doesn't it hurt when he's near any Horcrux, the other pieces of Voldemort's soul?

The answer - which seems quite obvious, once you know it - is that Harry will only feel pain when he's triggered by the master soul, the piece that still lives within Voldemort. Since the other Horcruxes (Nagini, the diadem) are not master soul pieces - and Riddle is just a projection in The Chamber Of Secrets - Harry can face them pain-free.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!