6 Harry Potter Plot Revelations You May Not Have Caught the First 10 Times Through

If you’re anything like me, you’ve read the Harry Potter books somewhere in the neighborhood of eight thousand times—soon to be eight thousand and one. I have a stack of brand-new books I’ve been meaning to get to, and the sound you just heard was me throwing them all out the window. I’m always game for ignoring my responsibilities so I can reread Harry Potter, and in part that’s because, every time I do, I notice things I didn’t catch before. Here are six revelations I overlooked the first few thousand reads.
Everyone spent an afternoon trying to open the Horcrux without realizing it.
Slytherin’s locket was a big deal. Not only was it a Horcrux, but both Regulus Black and Dumbledore died because of it. Harry, Ron, and Hermione broke into the Ministry of Magic to retrieve it. Eventually, the locket turned them against each other and nearly killed Harry in a puddle of water.
But no one realized it was right under their noses the whole time they were living in Grimmauld Place. In fact, they once spent an afternoon trying to pry it open in Order of the Phoenix: “There was a musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune…also a heavy locket that none of them could open, a number of ancient seals, and, in a dusty box, an Order of Merlin, First Class, that had been awarded to Sirius’s grandfather…”
Fred and George threw snowballs at Voldemort.
I feel like we need to talk about this more. In Sorcerer’s Stone, Fred and George bewitched some snowballs to bounce off Quirrell’s turban. But what we now know is that the turban was meant to disguise the fact that Voldemort had affixed himself to the back of Quirrell’s skull. My question is this: did Voldemort think about this later? Sometimes when he was lying awake at night, did he remember two thirteen-year-olds once threw snowballs at his face? Did it haunt him daily?
Trelawney’s far-fetched predictions (technically) came true.
Trelawney was the one who made the “Neither can live while the other survives” prophecy, which is widely considered to be the only remotely correct divining she did over the course of seven books. But if you think about it, all the other nonsense she came out with ended up making a weird sort of sense.
In Goblet of Fire, she “divined” that Harry was born in midwinter instead of July, to general laughter. But Harry had a part of Voldemort’s soul inside him at the time, and Voldemort was born in midwinter. She also said, in Prisoner of Azkaban, that “when thirteen dine together, the first to rise will be the first to die.” She initially refused to join the Christmas feast because of this, but what none of them knew was that there were technically already thirteen people present—Wormtail was there, as Scabbers—and Dumbledore rose first to greet Trelawney. And it gets weirder. Later, in Order of the Phoenix, thirteen people gathered for a meal at Grimmauld Place, and who was the first to get up? Sirius.
Aunt Petunia mentioned Snape way back in Order of the Phoenix.
One of the biggest twists at the end of Deathly Hallows was that Snape had been in love with Lily, Harry’s mom. But Aunt Petunia actually told us about this two books previously. In Order of the Phoenix, Petunia revealed (to the shock of everyone involved) that she knew what Dementors were. She said, “I heard—that awful boy—telling her about them—years ago,” and Harry thought she was talking about his parents. In Deathly Hallows, however, we learned that the “awful boy” was actually Snape, and that he and Lily had been childhood friends.
The Vanishing Cabinet was broken because of Harry.
The Vanishing Cabinet was a major plot point in Half-Blood Prince. Malfoy spent the whole year fixing it so he could sneak Death Eaters into Hogwarts; it was a whole thing.
But what you might not have realized the first time around was that Harry set this whole chain of events into motion. In Chamber of Secrets, Harry got in trouble with Filch, and Nearly Headless Nick convinced Peeves to break the Vanishing Cabinet as a distraction. Years later, Fred and George shoved Montague, a Slytherin Quidditch player, inside the broken cabinet. Montague wound up in a toilet, and Draco, upon hearing his harrowing tale, realized he could use the Vanishing Cabinet to his own devious ends—if only he could fix it.
Dobby broke his promise.
Remember when Harry jokingly made Dobby promise never to save his life again after that year of wacky death-defying shenanigans in Chamber of Secrets? That quote was cute before Deathly Hallows came out. Now it’s just tragic, because Dobby returned to save Harry’s life one last time and died doing it. I wasn’t going to end this thing on a downer, but then I started thinking about Dobby, and if I have to be sad about this then so do you.