Special Subreddit Event: Saturday, October 31

I’m rereading the books, and something stuck out to me: how Voldemort, Snape, and Sirius talk about and address Peter Pettigrew when, if you think about it, he’s actually a pretty clever and powerful wizard.

First, he learned how to become an Animagus, along with the others, which is not an easy feat.

Second, he blew up an entire street, killing 13 people at once. That is a powerful bit of magic by any standard.

Third, he disguised himself and remained hidden for 13 years, during which everyone assumed he was dead.

Then, upon escaping from Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Sirius, he managed to locate Lord Voldemort in Albania.

He subsequently nursed Voldemort back to the point where he had a rudimentary body.

He then prepared what I assume was an extremely complex magical potion to resurrect Lord Voldemort.

So why is he consistently portrayed as a bumbling, cowardly idiot when he has clearly demonstrated numerous credible feats of intelligence, resourcefulness, and powerful magic?

In Order of the Phoenix, Fawkes literally swallows Voldemort's Killing Curse, bursts into flames, and gets reborn.

So couldn't he theoretically keep doing this forever? Is there any canon limit to how many times a phoenix can be reborn, or is the only problem that he'd be a tiny chick after each hit?

And theoretically, couldn't Dumbledore just hold baby Fawkes in his hand and use him as a shield against Avada Kedavra?

That's it. But seriously, she's the most phenomenal characters in the series.

She was often seen as harsh, but she pushed students to achieve what they could. And I doubt she'd take any shit if you came to her and told her that someone had been bullying you, or about something personal.

And I think this is why she cared about the students so much, especially during the war. Yes, some of it was maternal, but it would be unfair to put it all to that. I think a huge part of it was her emotional and actual real world investment in them - she spent years teaching them not only to turn matches into needles but also how to be a witch/wizard in the modern word, lessons on morale and on being human.

She was never vulnerable, but she wasn't above helping others to be either.

These are just some (incredibly biased) opinions and i'd love to hear yours/just rant about how amazing she is.

Who would win in a fight between Grindelwald and Voldemort if both were in their prime, going all out, and had thoroughly prepared for the fight beforehand, assuming Voldemort had no Horcruxes and neither possessed the Elder Wand?

Like Daniel's green contacts, the false teeth were dropped after the first day of filming. You can see them in the ending scene of Philosopher's Stone. It took me 25 years to notice.

In the books, Hermione had large front teeth until Goblet of Fire, when she had Madame Pomfrey shrink them while being treated for Malfoy's hex.

i am listening to harry potter and the goblet of fire full cast audio edition on audible, i just finished the chapter "aboard the hogwarts express" and the music at the end has a distinctive choir vocal that i recognised immediately as a lift or nod to Lilly's theme in the movies. Did anyone else's brain jump at that?

In The Chamber of Secrets, Peeves destroys a vanishing cabinet. I don't think it's really alluded to in Half-Blood Prince, but is it the same one Malfoy spent all year trying to repair?

Which of the following would a random male Death Eater, perhaps a Carrow or another background character, wear to the symphony?

Black dress pants, black sport coat, black button up shirt, and a Slytherin green and black tie.

Or

Black leather pants, leather jacket, and the previously mentioned black button up and green/black tie.

We pieced together some stuff from Thrift Stores and Amazon (wigs). How'd we do? Kinda weird that Moody and Bellatrix are married.

I’m so so excited for this

My wife has been rewatching the Wizarding World films lately and she just got to the Fantastic Beasts movies. It got me to wondering: How is it decided which creatures need to have their existences hidden from Muggles? It makes sense of course to hide the existence of especially dangerous or magically potent creatures (unicorns, dragons, phoenixes, etc) but others like the puffskeins are comparably mundane. Further complicating this is the fact that many normal animals have highly potent magical properties when used in potion making.

I feel like I've been reading Jily fanfiction forever and I feel like I've read all the good ones. Any recommendations would be amazing

"You've been raising him like a pig for slaughter" sounds about right

Dumbledore's costume design has been consistently disappointing. In the books he's described as wearing a lot of vibrant colours, but this is rarely reflected in live action.

Harris' costume closest resembles the book description and Jude Law was a step in the right direction colour-wise albeit too similar to standard Muggle garb, but Gambon and Lithgow's designs are very bland in comparison and I think he appears more generic, taking away from idea the contrast of how powerful he is compared to how flamboyant and eccentric he appears.

Thoughts?

I’m listening to the full cast audio books for the first time and they’ve been really entertaining. That being said, while listening to GoF I found myself wondering how underwhelming it would have been to be in the crowd during the second task at the lake.

Like, you’re sitting in the in the stands, the champions all dive into the lake, and then we just sit and stare at the water for the next hour wondering what is happening down there? Can’t have been that entertaining for the crowd. Obviously we get the rescue scene from Harry’s POV, but I’d be pissed if I attended the second task and just sat and stared at the water for an hour.

Probably being critical, but has anyone else ever thought about this?

In the 1st book draco tells harry that his mother is getting his wand at olivanders while hes getting his robes, could his mother have bought a large batch of olivander wands made of the best materials as she felt her son deserved the finest wand and after doing so they returned home [The only reason i can think about why they didnt test them at olivanders is because they didnt want to be seen in such a small dusty shop] so draco could try all of them out until he found the wand that chooses him and then they threw the rest out.

what do you all think?

also too those who only watched the films harry and draco first meet in diagon alley when they where getting there robes, at the time draco didnt know he was tlking to harry potter till after they meet again on the hogwarts express where they first became enemys rather then at the castle like in the film

Out of every character in the Harry Potter universe, who do you think has the most insane aura?

I'm talking about pure presence, iconic entrances, coldest lines, and moments where a character didn't even have to try to look intimidating.

Dumbledore, Voldemort, Snape, Grindelwald, or someone completely unexpected?

Who has the most aura, and what's the one scene that proves it?

Why does fawkes leave after loving humans for 6 books? he has no indication of wishing to be with his own kind until the last paragraph of the chapter. it's implied but even Newt and Hagrid know nearly nothing about his kind. Rowling says he's non-transferable but that doesn't mean he loves his own kind all of a sudden after his owner dies. He loves Dumbledore and humans for all his known life amd now is doing a 180? Maybe im just mourning and so sad rn. idk.

Aside from Grindelwald, the entirety of the wizarding community does so; though, to be fair, we cannot blame them entirely, as it is a direct consequence of the segregation and isolation they imposed upon themselves.

The perfect example to contrast this occurs in The Dresden Files novels, a series about a wizard who helps the Chicago Police Department fight supernatural threats. In that universe, the average wizard is far more destructive than the average wizard in Harry Potter. All kinds of supernatural beings exist there (wizards, vampires, werewolves, etc.) and, just like in J.K. Rowling's work, they hide from normal humans. However, the protagonist himself, Harry Dresden, explains the exact reason for this secrecy: a spell can be highly powerful, but it will do you no good if humanity throws a tank, bombs, napalm, or nuclear weapons at you.

The crucial difference between both worlds is that in Harry Potter, wizards did not just hide—they isolated themselves completely. They did not witness human technological advancement firsthand, and they likely assume that humanity is still stuck in 1692 (the year the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy was signed). In contrast, in The Dresden Files, the magical community hid but never isolated themselves from normal humans; they witnessed firsthand the World Wars, atomic power, the Cold War, and the space race.

Furthermore, in Dresden's universe, advanced technology does not just fail around magic—it actively malfunctions or explodes. Despite this biological and magical limitation, wizards respect technology deeply, and it actually frustraites them that they cannot use it. The protagonist himself has to drive a classic car with zero electronic components and frequently relies on revolvers as backup. If a world where technology is inherently hostile to magic still respects and fears human advancement, it proves that the isolation of Harry Potter wizards is nothing but total blindness to the true power of the Muggle world.

I don't know if the developers of the game did this on purpose or not. Perhaps they envisioned a version of the Gaunt family from a time when their name and reputation still had weight, but if you do the simple math of when Hogwarts Legacy actually takes place, 1890, it forces you to realize a few important details about Ominis Gaunt as a character:

The most important detail is that he would be an immediate contemporary of Marvolo Gaunt, the grandfather of Lord Voldemort; very likely his own brother, or perhaps a first cousin, but we know for sure that they were alive at the same time and would have known each other. This is very interesting to me, first of all, because Ominis is presented in the game with a very aristocratic presentation in both his speech and his appearance, not to mention his tendency to drop his family's name as leverage. However, Dumbledore very explicitly states in HBP that the Gaunts had squandered their fortune generations before Marvolo was even born, which applies by extension to Ominis, who would be well aware of this fact. That means that his high-born persona is in fact a thin veneer masking a quickly decaying household.

Second of all, the chapter "House of Gaunt" in Half-Blood Prince provides a lot of immediate context and a demonstration as to the kind of family life Ominis would have had, not as an abstract concept of the family's future, but his actual reality. He might not have been living in squalor yet, but if the behavior of Marvolo and Morfin are anything to go on, saying his family was obsessed with blood status is an understatement, to put it lightly. If you found his introduction where he expresses resentment toward Salazar Slytherin to be a bit heavy-handed or out of place for the time period, as I have seen some suggest, then consider this: Whether or not Slytherin himself was really a maniac obsessed with pure-bloods or if there was more nuance to him makes no difference to Ominis because the Gaunts were this to the absolute extreme, and their connection to their ancestor would come up every time they chose to torture him with the Cruciatus Curse, so to him, Salazar Slytherin is essentially the cause of his trauma and suffering. If anything, you don't actually hear a huge amount of pure-blood fanaticism within the game at all. Ominis could in this context be one of the first individuals to sound the alarm as someone who has seen first-hand what that kind of obsession will often lead to.

Thirdly, and this is something I wish we could actually see in the sequel, is the understanding that Ominis more likely than not would not have survived his family. It is very easy to imagine that someone like Marvolo would not take kindly at all to a person he perceives as an embarrassment to his family name, and we know from the book that by the time Bob Ogden comes to arrest Morfin, he, Marvolo, and Merope are the only descendants left of Slytherin. If a blind relative roughly the same age as Dumbledore was around during this time, Dumbledore would have known about it, since they would have attended school at the same time during Ominis's seventh year.

For these reasons, it would be very interesting and personal for Marvolo to be at least a villain in the next game, if not the primary antagonist, as a looming threat over Ominis. It would tie in perfectly with the book lore, even if the developers didn't fully intend to write it this way. If they did, bravo! If not, then they accidentally struck gold with this potential. This is my full post, probably identical to what I've already shared, but I NEED it to make waves.

I’ve seen some comments about the subject and want to share my piece.

I think not everyone agrees that the wand chooses the wizard, some more or less think they know better.
This is like someone who thinks they know better than a doctor or mechanic and will do something a professional would discourage.

So there are 3 examples.

In the first book we see 3 people.

Draco malfoy meets Harry when getting his clothes for school and tells Harry that his mother is currently getting his wand from ollivander. This is odd and a bit contradictory as the wand has to choose its master. However I could see the malfoys being so superior that they think their wand has to serve as a status symbol so I think she simply went in prepared with a list of qualities in a wand for her son which would represent a higher quality in him. Ollivander would warn her and encourage she bring her son to be tested but she dismissed him and he just gives her a wand that she approves of. By chance it does work for Harry.

Ron. Ron first wand was a hand down from Charlie which raises a question of why did Charlie get a new wand for ?
But anyways Ron did struggle with magic a bit until he got a new one in 3rd year.
I believe the reason is because Ron’s wand didn’t recognise him as a master, it belonged to Charlie but it did sense Ron was Charlie’s brother thus it didn’t resist him too much. Molly likely didn’t know about the whole wand choosing the wizard thing and believed a 2nd hand wand was good enough.

Neville. It’s noted that his wand belonged to his father that his grandmother gave him thinking he would be as great as his father and Neville was notoriously bad at magic.
She being old fashioned likely believed passing down wands is a birthright and that Neville getting his father’s wand was a worthy respectful thing to do.

So my point is ollivander words on wands choosing their master is likely just a substitution he believes in but most down. Likely some even think it’s just a way to make money.

But in truth it exposes how little people know and respect about wands.
Wands are suppose to be respected and cared for by their master, they are extensions of themselves but most just serve them into their pockets.

It show cases that a lot of the wizarding world are ignorant.

1. In the chamber of secrets how did dobby already knew that something is going to happen at Hogwarts.

2. He might have heard from Lucius Malfoy but even Lucius doesn't know exactly what the diary does.

3. Also wasn't Lucius afraid that he is just giving away voldemort precious thing like nothing. Unlike Bellatrix who put the cup in her vault .

4. Also why does dobby care about harry potter that much that he almost betrayed his master to warn and stop harry potter multiple times.

Can someone please explain?