WMG / Harry Potter The Forces Of Evil

Peter Pettigrew is pulling a Varys.

He isn't a coward and he isn't a fool. We have seen that he is capable of killing several people, and he has proved his competence by bringing Voldemort back to power. My guess is that he puts on an act of always sniveling and being frightened so as to be underestimated, and that he keeps proving himself to Voldemort just through his deeds.

Dolores Umbridge WAS a Death Eater

We know Voldemort had many plants inside the Ministry, and he would be expected to keep some of these very close to his chest, their true loyalty only known to him and themselves. The only evidence that she wasn't a Death Eater was Sirius saying so, and he would have had no way of knowing for sure and I don't remember him even giving a reason. She's clearly compatible with the party line (hatred of "half-breeds", no hesitation in using the Cruciatus Curse) and rose through the ranks of the new Ministry uncomfortably quickly for the former Minister's second-in-command (being that she was supposedly loyal to the old order, you'd expect them to lock her up rather than giving her another position of power). She was clearly in the Ministry simply out of a desire for power and no ideological reason, and it's easy to imagine her having her fingers in many pies in this respect: why be a mere Ministerial official when you can be a Death Eater and a Ministerial official? If Voldemort returns you can take your place at his side and if he doesn't you still have your place in the Ministry.

• A Death Eater in the know would have behaved differently. Voldemort wanted Harry to try to contact Sirius via flue, and fail, so Umbridge making it where Harry couldn't use the flues for that almost resulted in Voldemort's plan failing. Likewise, once she realized Harry was using her flue, the sane thing to do would have been to let him hang up and dial the Ministry of Magic. Or, having caught him, to make some insinuation that she knew he was trying to contact Sirius, and he'd never see Sirius again. But what all this means is that Umbridge had no idea what Voldemort was doing, not that she wasn't a Death Eater. Voldemort doesn't seem to have told Snape either. (When you think about it, Voldemort's plan shows remarkable confidence in Harry's ability. Harry has done a lot of things, but he's never escaped the school by himself and made it halfway across the country!)

Riddle and his Death Eaters are the last part of a Dementor plot to collapse Wizarding society

This comes from here - and it makes sense.

• Why, exactly, would the MoM keep the Love door locked? Because that was part of the bargain that got the Dementors working for them. But the Dementors aren't satisfied with the morsels thrown to them, and they want more. They want a cold world, filled with fear and hate, that they can feed from. Hey, look at the Death Eaters' aims: inspiring fear and hate! And it's not like anybody was around to protect Riddle as a child. They found the perfect candidate for the job - a wizard baby who would be around Muggles until he was old enough to go to school, by which time their Mind Rape would be complete.
• Dementors feed off happiness. They merely leave despair behind.
  • Then why does a ball of pure happiness chase them off? Shouldn't it be like candy for them?
    • The basic form of the Patronus Charm is like candy to them. What the basic form does is form a shield or decoy that the Dementor feeds off instead of the caster. Presumably, the attack form is like being bludgeoned over the head with a giant novelty chocolate bar.
  • Dementors feed off of misery. That's why they start breeding when Voldemort comes into the open. They are repelled by happiness, and so as a defensive mechanism they suppress happiness in their victims and feed off of the depression that arises as a result.
    • If the Dementors ate misery, then after they left, their victims would be happier. They showed up at that Quidditch game in the third book because so many happy people were in one place. People feel like crap when they breed because the Dementors are eating all their happy thoughts.
    • Who said the people at the Quidditch match were happy? For starters, it was a sporting event; at any given time at least have the crowd at a sporting event are unhappy with the game's progression. It was between Hufflepuff and Gryfindor, so it wasn't an interesting inter-house rivalry match you'd get with Griffindor and Slytherin, so it didn't create that kind of rapid obssession. Slytherin and Ravenclaw didn't have a vested interest beyond who would play who in the next game, so they aren't creating any strong happy feeling. Added in to all this is the fact it was a thunderstorm and the entire crowd was being rained on. It wouldn't be impossible that many of them were not happy at all. The only people who would be genuinly happy are the sadists who want to see who got injured worst playing in these awful conditions, and the die hard Griffindor and Hufflepuff fans who wanted to see who beat who. Been a while since I read the book, but I'm fairly certain it was just "powerful" emotions.
    • Or the Dementors do eat misery, but the feeding process is similar to a mosquito that injects you with anticoagulant so the Dementors use an emotional equivalent of an anticoagulant to bring up successively worse and worse memories to feed off of until you drown in them.

The Pureblood agenda is ironically the only thing that's kept wizards from dominating the Earth over Muggles.

The Wizardry genes are dominant, and they commonly occur as a mutation in the non-Wizarding population. Also, wizards can live 100 years longer than Muggles and have the opportunity to reproduce more. In a case like this, the population of wizards should be high in this world, about as common as brunettes. However, the Pureblood movement, which encouraged inbreeding and sticking to wizarding stock, has limited the spread of the genes. With Voldemort's influence gone and the movement losing favor, it's quite possible that in the next 1000 years, Wizards will outbreed Muggles.

• When Harry entered Hogwarts there were 39 other firstyears. According to Word of God, the average intake of muggleborn wizards is about 25%. That's about ten muggleborn per year out of the sixty million that make up the population of Great Britain, so it's not exactly common. And it's not clear whether all wizards live as long as Dumbledore (barring accidents) or if it's just the magically powerful ones. And a large population is much more difficult to hide. Hell, it's entirely plausible that over the next 100 years or so, the Masquerade will become untenable because muggle population increases squeeze the Wizarding World out of its hidey-holes. They're outnumbered by about five orders of magnitude; the planet would bust a seam before they made up that sort of difference.
  • Wordof God thoroughly admits that she sucks at Math and that she imagined the population of the school at about 600~800 students, not the 280 that it would need to be if she had done the math. But yes, Wizardry is still quite uncommon, just not quite as bad as it seems. Also, the Hogwarts population does not take into account homeschooled kids, which no doubt some are in some of the more pureblood families. Also, in the 4th book, Malfoy says that he had intended to go to Durmstrang and that his Mother hadn't wanted him so far from home. So it is probable that a number of pure-blood and half-blood children study overseas. The sizes of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons are never mentioned; nor is it said that they are the only wizarding schools in their respective countries, although it is implied. Nor do we know how many other countries have wizarding schools.
  • Counter-argument: Muggle population density is utterly irrelevant to wizards, who can magically expand space in a Bag of Holding manner. Moody's seven-compartment trunk could probably be used as a luxury apartment - or seven efficiency apartments. It wouldn't matter if the population of Britain were a million or a trillion.
    • Also, Harry and his classmates were born during a civil war. Its entirely possible that the birth rate was dramatically reduced, meaning that there was a far lower intake of students than usual that year.
    • And then there's the possibility of the majority of wizards and witches being home schooled instead of going to Hogwarts. Population at Hogwarts doesn't necessarily equal total wizarding population of the U.K.
  • Regardless of the *wizarding* population at large, that doesn't change the fact that only, based on Rowling's vision of the Hogwarts population rather than her incredibly crappy math version, 28 new Muggleborns join British wizarding society every year. 700 million children are born in the UK every year. Since it's highly doubtful that there are more young Muggleborns being homeschooled, the likelihood of them rapidly growing the Wizarding population is slim at best. It's also likely based on the mass inbreeding of pureblood society that they have a low population as well. Most of magical society is probably Half-blood, meaning they bring with them a blend of modern muggle attitudes and wizarding traditionalism. As a result, they aren't going to go off any marry and have children with a much younger woman after the one they're with stops ovulating (note, it doesn't matter how old a wizard or witch can get, it doesn't mean they can have children later).
  • "700 million children are born in the UK every year", er, don't think you meant the 700 million there mate, the UK population is only 60ish million to start with.
• Dominant does not equal common. Dwarfism is also a dominant trait.

Voldemort's rebirth potion.

The reason Voldemort went through that incredibly circuitous plan with regards to Harry and the Triwizard Tournament is because the rebirth potion can only be used (or used to its full effect) if brewed on certain significant days of the year. Those dates are likely ones that are connected to death, like Halloween, or the rise of darkness over light, such as the Summer Solstice. The Summer Solstice is when the length of the day starts to get shorter, most likely carries a magical significance on its own, and often falls on June 24, in the old Julian calendar. June 24 is also the date on which the third task of the Triwizard Tournament took place, and I don't have much trouble seeing the wizards refusing to adopt the new calendar.

As for why Voldemort didn't grab Harry earlier, well, he's still weak and Harry is under the protection of the only wizard Voldemort has ever feared, who likely has who knows how many tracking charms on Harry, and has a phoenix that can teleport through all known wards, including the those of the Ministry, Hogwarts, and the Chamber of Secrets.

Voldemort is Haploid

Did you expect him to use his filthly muggle father's genes forever? Before he could garner the loyalty of pureblood fanatics he had to purify his blood. He wanted to anyway. Unfortunately, this left him with only a single set of genes (and a rather inbred one). He patched over the worst bits with snake dna. What he couldn't replace was the Y chromosome. Ever since the transformation, he's had no testosterone. This is why his voice is so high pitched. It also partially explains his obsessions. He can't have children, so the Slytherin line ends with him, so he must live forever. He can't truly be a man, so he must conquerthe world and grind it under his heal.

• So, after he purged his father's DNA from himself, he became a biological female with Turner syndrome.
  • Inheriting your mother's genes does not automatically make you female. Purging the DNA inherited from the father would not automatically female. As long as he retains his Y-Chromosome in his gamete, like what the OP mentioned, he would still be male

The evil plot in The Goblet of Fire made sense...if you're Voldemort.

Voldemort needed "blood of the enemy, forcibly taken." That means the victim had to be conscious and resisting. Any adult wizard would be likely to know a way to disrupt the ritual, and Voldemort couldn't take that risk. So it had to be someone young. Voldemort is proud, and insisted that the blood that resurrected him, that would henceforth be flowing in his own veins, must be that of the most worthy young wizard in Europe. Hence, kidnap the winner of the Triwizard Cup. Now, Harry sort of gets "points" for being his archnemesis and having blood with special properties, so Crouch was instructed to give him enough help to ensure he at least made it to the final challenge. At the last minute, Voldemort investigated the contenders and decided he didn't want Fleur or Viktor to win: no filthy mongrel part-Veela blood for him, and Viktor's loyalties were in question: if he turned out not to be Voldemort's enemy, the spell wouldn't work! Crouch was instructed to take the two of them out, but leave in Cedric^note  his blood makes you sparkle! as the "spare" in case Harry proved unworthy in the maze.

• "Kill the spare!"

On the Life-Cycle of Dementors and Lethifold.

As the dementor (the adult of its species) feeds on more and more fear and emotion, its cloak gets thicker and thicker, until the dementor preforms the Dementor's Kiss the outer layer of cloak (now imbued with the life force of the victim) sloughs off like a snake's skin at the next dark or secluded area. The part of the cloak that separated becomes a lethifold, which creeps into human homes while they sleep and eats them, deconstructing them and eventually (after the escape of the sated lethifold) reconstituting it into a sort of humanoid form within its body. It is possibly that the lethifold requires more than one average adult human to become a dementor, but based on the rarity of lethifold attacks that have not been proven to be hoaxes and the lack of density of a dementor's body, this is unlikely. While the increase in lethifold attacks in recent centuries may be due to an increase in the human population, and thus an increase in faked lethifold attacks, it is also quite possible that the increase in attacks is due to the constant feeding the dementors get at Azkaban, and the adoption of the Dementor's Kiss by the Wizard's Council and Ministry of Magic as legal punishment.

• At least one problem of this is that Lethifolds are only found in tropical areas, needing warmth and humidity. Although I suppose you can just alter this theory to say that, like a snake with skin, a Dementor needs a warm, humid area to shed the Lethifold and can carry it around (uncomfortably) for awhile before that. A Dementor who has performed the kiss needs to head South as soon as possible.

The snake that escaped from the zoo at the beginning of Philosopher's Stone was actually Voldemort

Think about it. Voldemort had the ability to turn into a snake. After he killed James and Lily (and turned Harry into a human horcrux) he went into hiding as a snake and ended up at the zoo. The day Harry was there, Voldemort recognized him. He decided he'd been in hiding long enough and escaped. Harry didn't actually set him free, he just thought he did. After Voldemort escaped, he found Quirrell and took up residence on the back of his head.

• Word of God said it was Nagini, if this troper remembers correctly.
• No. Word of God never said that... that snake was just a snake. It was a pretty non-evil one as well.
  • On the other hand, snakes can't wink (they can't even close their eyes), so it's anyone's guess what this one was.

Bellatrix Lestrange has a daughter

She was married, probably for a significant amount of time, and, when Narcissa is whining about Draco being made a Death Eater, she specifically says "If I had sons..."

• Thanks, I wasn't planning on sleeping for the next thirty years anyway... (Sorry, but I can't be the only person who is utterly terrified of the idea that someone like Bellatrix Lestrange would reproduce.)
  • Nope, you're alone on that one.
  • Hold it. I can make all of this worse. We never meet Bellatrix's husband. But who do we see her acting romantically around the most . . . ? (Hint: His name rhymes with Moldemort, and I have just given you nightmares.)
    • Sorry, but we do meet her husband - Rodolphus. in the "Goblet of Fire" Harry travels to Dumbledore's memories and sees Bellatrix and two other men appearing before the court. Later in the graveyard Voldemort says that Bellatrix and her husband are in Azkaban. And in "Order of Phoenix" during the battle in Mo M we hear Death Eaters calling Rodolphus' name - apparently, he's among them.
    • I think what they meant is we never really "meet" Rodolphus in the books besides some brief mentions and he does nothing of import but Bellatrix is a fairly large character for the series and spends her time being infatuated with Voldemort instead of ever interacting with her husband ever.
  • Helena Bonham Carter in the act of reproduction, and you don't want to see that?
    • Let's not confuse the actors with their characters, mmkay? See the very top of the page for the distinctions.
  • For all that's worth, when Romilda Vane, the girl who kept hitting on Harry in The Half-Blood Prince and gave him a box of chocolates with love potion in it, showed up, I thought that her description (dark skin, dark thick silky hair, pointy chin) eerily matched that of Bellatrix, and, to be honest, half-expected to learn they are related.
  • THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. Romilda Vane was Bellatrix and Rodulphus' daughter (not saying Bellatrix wouldn't have WANTED her to be Voldemort's but if she's a forth-year she was born two years after Harry, so during the time Voldemort was on the run, and he was pretty much asexual by that point anyway). Voldemort already forced one Death Eater child to be an inside agent for him during that year (Draco) and Bellatrix specifically mentions wishing that if she had sons they could have the same honour. Not children, mind you - SONS. Implication, she has kids (or one, at least) but not sons. What's to say she didn't go home and have a little chat with her daughter by way of 'See if you can't distract, sabotage, poison or murder the Boy Who Lived this year, hmmm?' Or even persuaded Voldemort to use Romilda as well, as a kind of back-up to Draco. And considering we don't hear from Romilda before or after...
    • Sorry, no. Bellatrix was in Azkaban at the time.
    • Her being Voldemort's works perfectly, actually. Harry Potter defeated V when he was one year and three months old. If V had gotten Bellatrix pregnant the day he'd been killed, Romilda would be exactly two years younger than Harry, obviously putting her two grades below. On top of that, Harry is very young for his grade, so Romilda could have been conceived all the way up to ten months before V was killed (I.e., born slightly before V's fall.) and still be two grades below. It's people three years below Harry that can't be V's kid. (Sorry, everyone itching to write the 'Dennis Creevy is the son of Voldemort' fanfic.)
    • Except for the little detail that Romilda is a Gryffindor.
    • Proves nothing. Maybe the fact that we never hear anything about Romilda in relation to the Lestranges (and why she goes by a different surname in school) is because she is a Black Sheep who, after being sorted into Gryffindor was all but cut off by her family. Given how Sirius was treated I wouldn't put it past them. Bellatrix could have seen this as a unique opportunity to make use of her otherwise shameful daughter, who of course was desperate to gain her mother's approval/love. This would also explain why Romilda only attempted to use a love potion on Harry to sabotage him, rather than poison to murder him.
    • Okay, YMMV on this one, but perhaps (and I realize I'm stretching it here) Vane is Romilda's middle name- Romilda Vane Lestrange. As in Vain. Vanity.

In the films, Voldemort customized his wand

There's simply no way Ollivander would create the overtly evil looking wand Voldemort wields in the films, let alone put it in the hands of a ten year old. The only explanation is that movie Voldemort customized his wand, or that it was altered by the nature of the magic he performed with it.

• That is entirely plausible, actually. IIRC, at one point Ollivander says something about Lily's "first wand", which seems to imply that people generally replace their wands from time to time. A lot of things can happen to a wand, they are after all made of a thin piece of wood, and their owners usually keep them on their person at all times. It wouldn't be that far fetched to imagine that Voldemort lost his first wand (especially since he spent quite a long time without a body) and had to get new one, which also makes it easy to belive that he customized it.
  • It's plausible he customized it, mainly the handle, but the idea that he lost it completely and replaced it with the macabre-looking one from the films contradicts the priori incantatem factor which becomes a huge, plot-revolving point in the fourth and especially seventh books. Whatever the handle looked like over the years, the wand Voldemort uses to after being resurrected is outright proven to be the same wand he killed the Potters with and was sold to by Ollivander, with a two-of-a-kind phoenix-feather core, as a child in 1938.
• The "Tom Riddle's Wand" page on the Harry Potter wiki says that the wand riddle got from Ollivander's before he joined Hogwarts explicitly had a handle that appeared to be made of bone. Then again, the page also looks like a Self-Insert Fic with the wand as some sort of Mary Sue that keeps turning up every freaking time something related to Voldemort happens ("used his wand to create [a horcrux] using his childhood diary through the use of his earlier indirect murder of fellow student Myrtle by means of the Basilisk of the Chamber of Secrets", "continued to perfect his use of the Ollivander wand until he graduated from Hogwarts in 1945"), so I doubt its veracity.
• I never doubted that this was the case. Lucius also has the metal snake-head wand handle and pimp cane sheath. I always assumed that you could go to Ollivander (or lesser wandmakers/wand-customizers) and have your wand fitted with a new handle, strained, carved, bent, or other various cosmetic differences we see in the film.
  • At one time, it was common for young witches to have charms-er-decorative baubles on their wands shaped like hearts, moons and stars. Somehow, the image of a wand with a star shaped bauble on the end leaked out to Muggles and became their whimsical image of a magic wand. In Japan, wing shaped bauble paired with the previously mentioned shapes became popular with young witches. Somehow, this image got leaked into various Magical Girl anime.

The Dark Lord his Eternal Somethingness Lord Voldemort found the Chamber of Secrets because he was being a pervy little... perv, as a kid.

One day, while spying in the girls' bathroom and using his pet snake as a sort of makeshift periscope/lookout, or as part of a prank, he told it (in Parseltongue, so it could understand him and any girls in the room couldn't hear him) "Open the door". As soon as he said "open", the Chamber opened.

• This seems unlikely because of the impression given in the books that Voldemort was celibate.
  • Bellatrix's behavior towards Voldemort does reek of Unresolved Sexual Tension.
• It seems more likely that Tom Riddle discovered the chamber because of his Parseltongue, not that he discovered it by chance as a happy coincidence. It is unclear how parseltongue works, exactly; Harry can hear the basilisk speaking when he's in its general proximity, but it doesn't seem to rely on actually HEARING the snake. Other people with Harry don't hear any hissing or spitting when he hears it speak, on top of which it is traveling through the pipes so is separated from Harry by both a stone wall and a metal casing. This implies there is a mental or telepathic component to the skill, which Harry doesn't know about because he doesn't research the parameters of the ability nor does he try to develop his own ability any farther than what comes naturally. He relies on verbal communication with snakes in the same way he relies on verbal spellcasting even though it is possible to use magic without speaking. Tom Riddle was much older than Harry when the chamber opened for him, and he was also much more studious and interested in Dark talents which would be associated with Parseltongue even though the ability itself is not Dark. When Tom discovered he could talk to snakes he would probably have done all the study necessary to take full advantage of it, likely expanding the range in which he could detect snakes and potentially developing the ability to communicate with them nonverbally, allowing him to communicate with it through the walls. It must hunt sometimes and it seems it is only let out of the chamber in order to actually confront students, not just to access the pipes. Tom must have heard it at some point and realized what it was, and taking the opportunity to ask the basilisk itself how to get into the chamber. Of course, that would bring up the question of why Harry didn't hear the snake in his first year, as it was already there then.
  • The basilisk wasn't in the pipes until the Chamber was opened.
    • That we know of. There must be some method for the Basilisk to move about on its own without the help of the wizard controlling it. Eventually prey animals would stop going into the chamber area and it would need to be able to feed elsewhere. There may have been pipes built specifically for the Basilisk by Salazar Slytherin himself to allow it to move around, especially since most normal plumbing wouldn't be large enough to accommodate an animal of that size. Ginny Weasley opened the chamber which allowed the Basilisk OUT of the pipes and into the school, which is how it was able to see its victims face-to-face. It also seems to have been able to return to the chamber without her assistance, suggesting a direct connection between the pipes and the chamber somewhere. It's also possible that the Basilisk typically hunts at night, which would be why Harry may not have heard it until it began breaking habit in order to attack students on Ginnymort's command.

Death Eaters

Voldemort came up with the name because he tought his followers some dark magic to steal the energy released from decomposing corpses. So they gain a power boost and the surrounding earth does not get fertilized. Eating Death in a literal sense.

Voldemort had no plan to take over the whole world.

He only cared about England.

• Voldemort only cared about immortality. But for all we know he had intentions of conquering the rest of the planet once he'd secured Britain.
  • JKR has explicitly said Voldemort's deepest desire is to be "all-powerful and eternal". Literally not dying was only most of his ambition. Control and ongoing influence are vital to him as well.

Barty Crouch Jr. was under the Imperuis Curse when he tortured the Longbottoms.

• He says at the end of the book he hates nothing more than a Death Eater who walked free, so why was he trying to get off of a crime at his trial? He didn't know what he was doing. Kid grew up being the "Well Done, Son" Guy, and getting no love from his father. His mother who loved him died, and he was left into a family with a man who hated his very existence, even more since he tarnished his reputation forever, and a house elf who did what she could. Its possible that the Imperius Curse, if used for too long, might give its victim severe brain damage or cause insanity, he's the only character we know was under one for many, many years. He may have joined willingly to spite his father, or out of the lack of love he received from his father, whom he quite possibly admired, and was fairly loyal, but did not torture the Longbottoms of his own free will, since Voldemort calls him his most loyal servant. Or he was Imperiused by another Death Eater, and not Voldemort. His insanity from being under the Imperius for so long drove him to become a loyal member of the Death Eaters by the time Voldemort came calling. Due to his father being the one who imprisoned him, he grew to hate him, and hate him for putting him in prison, so he grew closer and closer to the Dark side, because in his eyes, the good side was made up of jerkasses like his father and the court who put him in prison, and Voldemort and his Death Eaters were far more accepting than his own father was.

Bellatrix is responsible for Moody losing his eye.

Moody still had two normal eyes at Karkaroff's trial, which takes place after the end of the war. So how did he lose the eye? Well, when the Lestranges and Crouch Jr. were being captured by the Aurors, Bellatrix threw her knife at Moody out of spite and it hit him in the eye. You'll notice that Moody isn't mentioned being present when Harry sees the trial of the Lestranges and Crouch Jr. That's because Moody was in St. Mungo's at the time.

• Seems like a reasonable theory, but I feel like that would have to be one hell of a lucky shot with a knife, especially from straight on enough to hit Moody right in the face without him reacting at least reflexively to turn his head or to knock the knife away with magic. He also had several scars around his face and a missing leg. TT always thought he got caught too close to some sort of explosion. Blasting curse, maybe? For what it's worth, Evan Rosier is given 'credit' for taking the chunk out of Moody's face, and although both of his eyes were there, maybe one of them was wounded and losing function and eventually got to the point where Moody said, "Screw it, I'm not going to be able to duel properly with one of my eyes messed up," had the bad eye taken out himself and replaced it with the magical one.

Death Eaters Killed Mr. and Mrs. Evans

Lily and Petunia's parents were killed by death eaters, either as part of random muggle killings or directly because of Lily's involvement in the Order. Either way, this explains why Harry has no maternal grandparents, and also explain why Petunia, in addition to jealousy of Lily's powers, has such a fervent hatred of the magical world — she, like Harry, lost her entire family to Voldemort. But instead of blaming Voldemort, she blames the entire existence of magic and prefers to deny its existence and live a "normal" life.

• Jossed. Jo says there is "nothing sinister" about either their or James' parents' deaths.

Voldemort did not hide the Diadem of Ravenclaw in the Room of Lost Things

There's no possible way to think 'No one has ever found this room before' when looking the Room of Lost Things, which is full of a thousand years of junk. Clearly, people are in and out all the time. (In fact, there's a real question of just how much stuff got there, even with house elves using it as a trash can.)

But instead, let's look at the other way: You get the Room of Lost Thing by asking for somewhere to hide things. Perhaps the Room of Requirement is very unoriginal, so it can't think of anything to fill such a room with. So when you ask for that, it goes and gets everything anyone ever left behind in the Room of Requirement, and piles it up.

It puts the junk in the same location each time because people inevitable want to find their stuff again, creating the illusion that each thing has a 'place' and the Room of Lost Things exists all the time and has that stuff in it. But it's just recreating it from the stuff that house elves threw away and other people left behind in the DA room and stuff like that.

In other words, if someone leaves a textbook in the DA room, it would show up in the Room of Lost Things somewhere next time someone called that up. And, obviously, it would show back up in the DA room also if someone recreated that. When no room is active, it's in Hammerspace somewhere. (For some Fridge Horror, imagine what happens when you come out of a Vanishing Cabinet in Hammerspace.)

So basically Voldemort thought he found some other room, and never realized the Room of Requirement was anything other than that specific room. He hide the Diadem in 'that' Room, never realizing that he had entirely created the place out of thin air. And it got used the next time someone created a room filled with unspecified stuff.

This raises some interesting questions of what room Voldemort thought he found. Considering he spent years looking for the Chamber of Secrets, perhaps he first found 'The Room to Show The Heir of Slytherin Where the Chamber of Secrets Was' or something like that, and the Room, in fact, showed him. Or perhaps he was also looking for a secret room to have to do with Ravenclaw, which is why he left the Diadem there.

• Or maybe it wound up in the Room of Lost Things because, y'know, Voldemort actually did lose the darn thing.
• Or perhaps because there's so many things in the Room of Lost Things, it would be inconspicuous unless you're actively looking for it.

The wizard in the portrait in the muggle prime minister's office is an ancestor of Dolores Umbridge

Well, the only description we get of him is that he's small, ugly, and frog-like, and he announces himself with a distinctive cough...

Dementors are The Corruption.

Remember what Lupin said about dementors? They turn you into "something like itself." What if that was literal? It's mentioned that they breed... what if the Kiss, if extended, could turn you into a dementor?

• Holy crap this theory makes WAY too much sense. Dementors seem to have some form of sentience and independence, as they seemed quite content to serve as the ministry's enforcers before Voldemort came along. What if a dementor is a person that has had their own soul sucked out and in turn becomes a soul-sucker in the attempt to fill the void of their own soul not being there? That seems to fall in line with the Fate Worse than Death wizards say that the Dementor's Kiss is. After all, wouldn't it be more efficient (and actually somewhat more humane) to execute the most severe criminals by Avada Kedavra or something? But forcing them to live the rest of their existences as a Dementor that (up until post-war) does the Ministry's bidding? No wonder the lot of them turned against wizardkind the first chance they got.
  • Jossed. As cool as it sounds it's wrong. What happens is that in book 3 it was mentioned, for a brief moment, that dementors breed (They breed off the grounds but still) So unless the Ministry brought some prisoners along... Also when you have the kiss you loose your soul but you still live. The reason why it's a fate worse then death is because 1. You can't go to heaven or where ever people go when they die and 2.You just exist. You feel no emotions, you have no want or hate, you just exist. You basically turn into a doll. So it's a way, a very cruel way, of dealing with the worst criminals without killing them. You just wait for them to die. Also if you tell a soulless person to do something, they do it. Eat, sleep, walk. They can do the basics.
  • Do the basics? Really? Rowling says that the effects of the Kiss put a person into a Persistent Vegetative State. Otherwise, the kissing of Barty Crouch Jr. wouldn't have been such a big problem. The fact that Barty Crouch Jr. couldn't talk about Voldemort's return is pretty much the one event (even more than Voldemort's return itself) that sets off the main plot of Book 5.

The Dementors were already under orders from Voldemort to kiss Barty Crouch Jr. if he got captured in his mission at Hogwarts.

• It was all part of Voldemort's plan. And would have had several benefits. First off, the only thing that could trump Veritaserum was Crouch not being able to talk at all. Second, Voldemort knew there would come a point where Fudge, as idiotic and power-hungry as he was, could no longer ignore the obvious signs. At the time, Voldemort's army was not nearly enough to take on the full weight of Wizarding Britain. Thus, he was able to divert the attention of much of Wizarding Britain by manufacturing a power struggle between Dumbledore and Fudge. This not only served to destabilize Dumbledore, but also fractured the relationship between The Ministry and Harry to the point that Harry would never again seek their aid. It obviously would have made for a less compelling story, but things might have turned out a bit differently if the Ministry had spent Harry's fifth year looking for Death Eaters instead of running a smear campaign against Harry and Albus Dumbledore. That eleven months or so of stall time was enough for Voldemort to build his army to the point where he could bring the war back into the open.

Umbridge was literally soulless.

Like how Voldemort was magically and possibly biologically missing something, Umbridge was missing something that makes humans (and emotionally human-like beasts and beings), well, human, at least in the figurative sense. The thing she was missing was or was part of or encompassed that which dementors eat during the Kiss, and which kills your mind, spirit, and (if you're lucky) autonomic processes if it or something to which it is attacked is removed. The last thing we saw of Umbridge, she was unconscious in a room full of hungry dementors with no patronus. The last thing we hear of her? Word of God that she's in Azkaban. Not St. Mungo's, not a cemetery, Azkaban. The most disturbing part of this is that not only are they absolute worse and most literally inhuman dregs of the human species immune to wizardry's greatest punishment, but that the punishment is practically the only reason some inhabitants of Azkaban stay in Azkaban (since the walls and doors seem to be just concrete, wood, and steel, and the crippling depression has been counteracted multiple times in canon), and they know it. If Umbridge figures out how to get out of Azkaban's physical location without attracting the attention of the Aurors on the top floor (not difficult if her cell is anywhere near an outside wall), all she'd need to do would be to tread water or swim until reaching land (even if that land is a tiny island covered in quintapeds) and wait until her magic began to recover.
In one small comment, possibly one she hadn't even thought about before the question was asked, Rowling accidentally confirmed that there are people potentially more dangerous than Voldemort, and the only thing keeping them in line is the only thing that can't kill them which is deadly to a normal wizard or muggle.
(Oh, and yes, I know Umbridge is most likely quite out of shape based on descriptions of her stature and her personality type. She's just a case study that proves the possibility. Imagine Ted Bundy as a wizard: Charismatic, healthy, a confirmed psycho- and sociopath... Now imagine him having spent two years scraping through a wall and swimming/floating to mainland Europe, then trying his hand at becoming the next Hitler/Grindelwald/Voldemort with wizards as the Jews/Muggles. A bit scarier than the idea of an acharismatic, overweight toad escaping, neh?)

• Alternatively, she has a soul. Just a soul so bleak and horrid that the Dementors didn't want to touch it.

Why Voldermort was much more successful in the second war than the first.

First off, the First War lasted 11 years. Thats many sons and daughters were sent to the "front lines" as they got out of Hogwarts were killed by Death Eaters, leading to far fewer younger people in the ranks of the ministry and fewer able or willing to fight Voldermort the second time around, and the ones that were left were much older and all had the scars of war. Conversely, while unforgivables were allowed to be used against Death Eaters by Aurors, a lot more of the Death Eaters were still alive by the second war, many of them never jailed, and had caused the Ministry to burn bridges with potential allies in the post war era.

Also, because of the war, the Ministry of Magic and the Wizarding world in general became very reactionary, unable or willing to act first, and wanting to do anything to avoid another war. The side of the light was left very weak, and very easy to exploit.

• The key difference in capabilities don't change between Wizarding Wars. During the first year or so of the Second War, Voldemort wasn't trying to do very much, as he was keeping quiet. The one major operation we see the Death Eaters pull is botched by a bunch of 15 and 16 year olds. The Order shows up and saves them, but by smashing the prophecy, the mission was essentially a failure already. The order made it a bigger failure by making it impossible for Voldemort to operate in secrecy any longer. Voldie and company start doing well as soon as Dumbledore dies. And, naturally, Dumbledore didn't die because Voldemort actually came up with a plan that would kill him. Dumbledore knew exactly what he was doing, but decided he was dying anyway.

Koschei was a Dark Wizard that created a Horcrux

Koschei is a Slavic Fairy Tale villain described as having his soul separate from his body and hidden. When his Soul Jar was destroyed he died. This may be exaggeration, he was simply killed after this happened.

Grindlewald was a descendant of Koschei

They seem to have come from the same area and were both powerful Dark Wizards. However Grindlewald decided not to create a Horcrux because of what happened to his ancestor.

Voldemort never believed in the prophecy, and acted on it only due to propaganda needs

Trelawney's prophecy was given in a pub, and Snape wasn't the only one to overhear the first part. At first Voldemort didn't care, but then noticed that people started resisting more due the coming of the Chosen One to defeat him, and, after a quick check at the register of births, decided to go after Neville and Harry to make it an Hope Spot. Then Lily made that Avada Kedavra backfire on him, and he was stuck with the need to prove himself stronger than Harry to quash any hope of resistance.

Even if Voldermort succeeded, he was doomed for failure in the long run.

Harry dies at the final battle. Voldermort is both headmaster and Minister of the Ministry of Magic. The Bad Guy Wins, the heroes fail. This is the end...

Well, no. He has to face two fights. The rest of the world's wizards are not going to be happy with the obviously evil actions. If nothing else, muggle hunting, or sending creatures that eat happiness fly through the sky is the greatest threat to the international treaty of wizardy secrecy. Whatever isolationists kept other wizard nations out of the war cannot stand by, particularly if Voldermorts ambitions are not contained by the British Isles.

Also, remember, the Prime Minister knows wizarding world exists. Once all sources of news with the wizarding world are severed, and his favorite guard, who he knows is a wizard, disappears, he may put two and two together. The further things go to @#$^ in Britain, the more and more he may screw the secrecy and take [i]direct[/i] action, and show Voldermort just how powerful muggles really are.

• Voldemort actually wouldn't have made it out of the room. As far as we can tell, all his Death Eaters were down, and he was surrounded by people who, thanks to Harry's sacrifice, had protection from Voldemort. And that mean they literally could grab his skin and burn him, like Harry did to Quirrell, while he could not hurt them at all. And he's at Hogwarts so he can't apparate away, and he has no Horcruxes so can't just leave his body behind. He could use the Elder Wand to throw up protections or fly out a window or something, but it would look pretty stupid for him to defeat his 'ultimate enemy' and then have to run away in full view of everyone, so he'd probably egotistically try to keep fighting.

Tom Riddle used a crude Cruciatus Curse on Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop

Who else do we know that's been shocked into silence as a result of magic? That's right: Neville's parents, who were driven insane by Bella's Crucio. Tom did something similar, but, being only 11 or so, couldn't drive them crazy (but did mute them).

Regulus and Bellatrix weren't the only Blacks to be Death Eaters

• Just a thought I've always had. Sirius said that Orion and Walburga (his parents) were not Death Eaters, despite seeming like the types, but strongly supported Lord Voldemort's ideologies at first until around the time when Regulus died. He never says anything about any other members of his family however. It's possible that the parants of Bellatrix, Andromeda, and Narcissa could've been Death Eaters, Cygnus and Druella Black are their names. Cygnus was around Tom Riddle's age so he may have been a member of his gang at Hogwarts. Druella was born a Rosier, the Rosiers are known to be Death Eaters with one member of the family being a friend of Tom Riddle, and another, Evan Rosier, being a friend of Snape. It's likely that thefamily in general were strong Voldemort supporters.

• Another Black that may have been a Death Eater was Araminta Meliflua Black, who according to Sirius tried to pass a bill at the Ministry to make muggle hunting legal. Sounds like something a Death Eater would want.

Bellatrix was an apprentice to Voldemort during the First Wizarding War

• Think about it, she seems to already be a high ranking Death Eater despite having been one of the younger ones by the end of the First Wizarding War, and she mentioned once that Voldemort taught dark magic. Soon after she graduated from Hogwarts (or even during her last years) Voldemort would've noticed her prodigious skill and pure-blood background and taken her under his wing, probably using his charm. He taught her how to be a great dark witch, and may have even been the one to teach her occlumency and legilimency. This would explain why she is so fanatically loyal to him. Barty Crouch Jr. may have also been an apprentice as he showed similar levels of loyalty.

In the fourth movie, when Igor sneaks into the room where the goblet is kept, he is in fact there to manipulate things so that Krum will be chosen as a champion.

Dementors can mate(and sometimes they even reproduce)and will offer human emotions(and human souls)to one another as part of a mating ritual.

It‘s a “giving food in order to have sex“ sort of thing.

Voldemort subconsciously sabotaged his own plans.

Yes, Voldemort is a bad, bad guy who does evil things, but he's also his own worst enemy. The overly complicated plans, the "Give him back his wand" thing, telepathically revealing the location of all the horcruxes. He even destroyed himself at the end... it's all a cry for help from his well-buried conscience.

• I honestly don't whether to glomp you or strangle you for that.
  • Not to mention the whole thing about making Horcruxes out of extremely conspicuous items rather than a random pebble or something. Vanity? Or self-sabatoge?

Cornelius Fudge is a Death Eater.

Or he's sympathetic to them. Look at what he did. He killed literally the only person who could corroberate Harry's version of events at the end of Goblet of Fire. Oh, he didn't do it directly; he let a Dementor do it, which conveniently allows him to plead stupidity (which Dumbledore no doubt believed). However, it would take utterly gross incompetence or negligence for someone to allow a witness to be killed in that fashion; it just makes more sense that it was intentional.

• The Dementor was under orders from Voldemort to waste any potential witnesses.
  • If Fudge was willing to walk around with a Dementor, then he almost certainly knew how to cast a Patronus Charm. A flick of his wand could have saved Barty Crouch Jr.
• The explanation they offered seems pretty reasonable, Fudge was terrified of the idea of Voldemort rising to power again and would do anything to remove evidence of that, not only to keep society from finding out and freaking out but also to maintain his own denial.
  • A boggart posing as a dementor was enough to stop Harry. The real dementors work by screwing with your mind. Fudge is hardly the most competent person around, AND he's dealing with an international crisis (somebody's been kidnapped at the Triwizard Tournament), so it's doubtful Fudge would have been able to do anything. The reason Dementors don't waste Ministry folk is because that's against the treaty. Plus, this is Barty Crouch, who tortured the Longbottoms to the point where they turned insane- Fudge isn't the sort to think anything through, so he might have even supported the Dementor. So, incompetence, not malice.

Slytherin sorts for sociopathy

Ambition, guys, ambition... Ambition and sociopathy have a high correlation.

Had Harry died before Voldemort at or after the end of the fourth book, Voldemort would have eventually gotten Harry's body without the need for a resurrection spell.

Assuming Harry is an accidental horcrux (rather than or in addition to whatever technicality Word of God seems to say is the case), his corpse would have had the same inherent protection as the other horcruxes and been immune to decomposition (Harry's life was the only reason he kept growing and possibly was able to become ill). Under the premise of the guess, Voldemort uses spells to form a temporary body around or from the item or transfer its piece of soul to a new vessel like Quirrel's head, and the item is then used up in the creation of a new body. On a related note, see the next guess:

Umbridge was not fired after Kingsley Shacklebolt became Minister

Instead, she was made the sole staff member of the Centaur Liaison Office. It is well known that that office is the absolute worst job in the Ministry, since no centaur has ever shown the slightest desire to liaise with the Ministry of Magic. That, combined with Umbridge's phobia of centaurs, makes it, in this troper's opinion, the perfect job to keep her in, one she couldn't even resign from, so powerful is her need to hold on to whatever power she had left.

• I love you. That would be Laser-Guided Karma for the evil pink one ...

Draco had asked Dobby to hex those Bludgers

It was his first game against Harry and he was willing to do anything for the glory of victory. Using his family elf to cheat seemed like a good idea. After he asked Dobby to make the Snitch biased to fly towards him, the elf (secretly seeing a way to accompolish his own objectives) pointed out that this might be too obvious, so they agreed on a trick that would be harder to trace back to them and could seriously injure Harry, a bonus for them both, but for completely different reasons.

• Come to think of it… the Malfoys could have asked Dobby to do almost everything he did to keep Harry out of Hogwarts, but for completely different reasons than Dobby's. Draco just wanted to make his rival's life miserable, while Lucius didn't want that meddling kid to get in the way of the plan to kill the Muggle-borns and bring back Voldemort.
  • It's stated in book 6 that Lucius had no idea that the diary was a horcrux. Bringing Voldemort back wasn't part of the plan. His only goal was to to disgrace the Weasley family.
    • Although the only source for that was Dumbledore's deductions.

Abraxas Malfoy was a Death Eater

• While we know almost nothing about Draco Malfoy's grandfather Abraxas, he may have been a Death Eater like his son. According to J.K. Rowling, Abraxas was involved in some kind of shady plot to force the first muggle-born Minister of Magic to resign early in 1968. This was only a few years before the First Wizarding War officially began and naturally Lord Voldemort would not want a muggle-born minister. This could also explain why Lucius was so high ranked as a Death Eater despite being only in his mid-late twenties when Voldemort was first defeated, it was due to his father's role before the war. It's possible that he was dead by the time Voldemort was revived (We know he's dead a year later) which would explain why he wasn't called forward at the graveyard or why Slughorn didn't seem bothered by Draco's mentioning of his name.

Herpo the Foul is an ancestor of Salazar Slytherin

• Makes sense when you think about it. Both were powerful dark wizards who knew how to breed basilisks. Plus both were parcelmouths which is generally associated with the Slytherin/Gaunt family line. Also the two both look very similar.

Barty Crouch Jr. knew Occlumency

Or some similar way to intrude on, and copy Moody's personality. Because seriously, there is no way he could hang around people who knew Moody for a year without anyone noticing, unless he had right-out supernatural imitation skills.

Dementors are actually cured by any food that the eater likes.

Chocolate is just the default because it's a food that most people like. But if someone who didn't like chocolate got demented, then chocolate wouldn't work and they'd have to eat a food that they did like.

The name Bellatrix has a second meaning.

• Bellatrix is a star in the Orion constellation, representing the legendary hunter's left shoulder. The right shoulder is Betelgues; the writers of Beetle Juice name the title character after "Orion's right armpit."

Voldemort's half blood status, is ironically why he is so powerful.

• His mother's magical abilities were likely not just hampered by her father and brother's abuse, but by the Gaunt family's many generations of inbreeding. Her union with his Muggle father, and thus the introduction of fresh and healthy genetics, were almost certainly what allowed him to be capable of such powerful magic from his earliest days. As much as Voldy loathes dear old Dad and being half Muggle, he undeniably has him to thank for being as strong as he is.

Umbridge's Boggart form is Harry.

You'd expect it to be something like a centaur, a werewolf, or the truth coming out about her family. But she sees Harry as the biggest threat to everything she has worked towards for herself, and he represents justice for those she hates and the truth that she refuses to acknowledge.

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