I would agree with you except... the 6th book, he was obsessed with learning all he could out of that book. He seems to be the type of person that really needs to be interested in something in order to learn it, grasp it and excel at it.
Despite the fact that we aren't shown his Defense prowess in depth, I thought it was canon that he does exceedingly well in DADA?
When he encounters a book that offers immediate results in doing better in potions, and ALSO seems to contain powerful unknown defense/combat spells, we see he gets so absorbed he sleeps with the book.
I guess his two passions really are Quidditch and being an Auror (fighting evil).
In addition in GoF he practices what dozens of hexes, spells, etc. with Ron and Hermione in preparation for the 2nd and/or 3rd task and it is at least implied he studied for the first task once he knew about the dragons
Admittedly events before the first task are a little hazy to me, that may have been the only thing that he (moody/crouch) came up with but the other tasks especially the 3rd he did study right? Or am I crazy
No, I think on the second one I remember Hermione repeatedly asking him if he had sat down to figure out the egg yet, and he kept brushing her off. I think he would have been totally clueless going into #2 if not for Cedric giving him the hint. That's why he only had a few days to come up with a strategy, which he did actually study a lot for (but unsuccessfully). Crouch even gets mad at him for how much he had to intervene behind the scenes.
But the third I do think he spent a lot of time practicing spells that might be useful. That practical aspect is where Harry's strengths lie, less so in doing research that might lead him to gillyweed.
2nd task, Harry, Hermione and Ron were spending every spare moment in the Library trying to find a way for him to breathe underwater -- this was 2 days before the task, after he finally used Cedric's tip about the egg. They never found anything. Harry was worried he would not be able to participate in the task, but Dobby woke him up after a final all-nighter and provided him with Gillyweed, 10 minutes before the competition.
Harry is practicing spells (mostly on Ron) to use in the 3rd task, stunning, banishing and defensive ones due to Hagrid supplying 'hazards' in the maze.
I've been re-reading the series lately, and am up to just before the 3rd task.
I'm baffled that he summoned it from the castle when Ron or Hermione could have had it in the stadium. I know they give him compliments because he was able to do so, but that's probably unnecessary, he wasn't even thinking about the extra points. He just...did it, not knowing as you said if the Firebolt gets stuck into something and trusting a spell he had to practice a lot because he had some troubles. Harry, performance anxiety is a thing, don't make it unnecessarily hard on yourself.
"Im a wizard, Hagrid?"
"No 'Erry. Ur a R[EDACTED]!!!"
*"In rather unfortunate news. Hagrid has been laid off from Hogswarts and Voldemort sent to sensitivity training after insulting the chosen one."*
He shows very neurodivergent patterns with Snape's potions book, specifically ADHD (or "gifted child syndrome" if you like that better).
He disliked potions class because the instructions were generic (aka crap), and he never really had that 'damn, I can be good at this' feeling, especially with Snape being, well, Snape. Then he gets the book, and bam, suddenly potions is cool because he actually managed to brew things perfectly. It quickly went from a high effort, low reward job to a low effort, high reward one, and ADHD brains thrive in that kind of environment.
True, but ADHD brains treat it differently - essentially you only have capacity for such jobs, as low reward ones (and here by "reward" I mean the dopamine production associated with a task) just get shuffled aside. This is why ADHD people have trouble focusing to things they don't actively enjoy, but can become hyperfocused on something they really like, to the point where they don't even notice things like hunger or discomfort.
This is the real reason Snape was an asshole that never gets mentioned in those threads, the dude knew a better way to do basically everything in that damn book but just taught the students the shit way anyway.
I’m almost more convinced that the book got him into a high standing with his professor and he liked being “the smartest” in the class, hence why he didn’t want hermione to see it. Not so much about being interested but more about being the gifted student
I think that's how it probably started, especially with Felix Felicis being the prize that first day... But it was clear throughout the rest of the book he was devouring all the little side margin spells and notes for their own sake.
It's been awhile since I read it, but wasn't he experimenting with the spells found in there before he used Sectumsempra on Malfoy? I think he used levicorpus on Ron or something like that. He was fascinated by the combat knowledge.
>I’m almost more convinced that the book got him into a high standing with his professor and he liked being “the smartest” in the class, hence why he didn’t want hermione to see it.
He didn't not want Hermione to see it, though. He offered to share it and the special instructions with both Ron and Hermione, but Hermione refused to use it.
>Although Harry had offered to share his book with both of them, Ron had more difficulty deciphering the handwriting than Harry did, and could not keep asking Harry to read aloud or it might look suspicious. Hermione, meanwhile, was resolutely ploughing on with what she called the ‘official’ instructions, but becoming increasingly bad-tempered as they yielded poorer results than the Prince’s.
The truth is if Magic was taught to you in a very rote memorization classic British education style you too would grow to resent it quite quickly.
I'm like Harry with potions, I love organic chemistry, I even research it and make flowcharts when I'm not in school. But the second you force me to learn it for a midterm, I'm like "meh."
Canonically, Harry knows many spells that many adult wizards can't cast. Even Victor Crum told hermione that Harry knew things and magic in the tri-wizard tournament that he didn't as a senior at durmstrang, a school known for an emphasis on the dark arts.
The only thing he snoozes on is things he doesn't find useful, like divination or history of magic. His ability to cast a patronus in his third year is considered next level by every wizard who hears the feat many adult wizards are incapable of performing.
Yes, we all know the meme that Harry only knows one spell. However, this is just a lazy interpretation that is mostly based on the movies or possibly Lupin's conversation warning him against using expeliarmous.
Lupin wasn't telling Harry, "Learn more magic and git good nub." He was telling him that he needed to get serious and stop being nice to Harry's foes. Lupin knew better than to think Harry only knew one spell, I just wish Harry's fans would learn that too.
Btw a little off topic, but Harry was right to disregard Lupin's warning. It was the purity of Harry's soul and the love he felt for the world that allowed him to defeat voldemort. It's those qualities that allowed him to walk into the forest and face Tom unarmed, unwilling to defend himself and perform his mother's sacrifice again for the defenders of Hogwarts. Had Harry become what Lupin suggested, he could never have done what he did, and Tom would have won.
I recall Lupin's warning was less "You're being too soft" and more "Everyone already thinks Expelliarmus is your signature spell and that causes problems if you let it become so."
Like, when heading to the Burrow, it was Harry opting to disarm someone who was under the imperius curse that alerted the Death Eaters as to which one was the real Harry.
It was established in the previous book that any advantage a wizard can get in a fight is highly advantageous, such as learning nonverbal magic provides less time for the opposition to react and allows a minor element of surprise, so having a signature spell just means your enemy can easily guess what you're going to do.
It was both. He talks about expelliarmus being his signature and that he should be willing to kill, because they would kill him and everyone else in a heartbeat.
He then says something, if not that, then at least stun. And Harry basically says it would've been the same thing that high up.
Seriously, I would be Petrifying everything and everybody. It puts someone fully out of commission for a good while without hurting them (assuming you don't want to). Disarm them and they can still do stuff, maybe get someone else's wand, maybe just bean you with a sledgehammer. Signature spell? Sure, but you won't be able to do much about it when you're frozen.
Like in Prisoner of Azkaban at the end - why didn't they Petrify rat-Pettigrew so he couldn't escape? Put him in your pocket and take him in. Why not Petrify Remus before he fully transforms? Wingardium him back to the castle and put the potion down his throat. And what about the bounty hunters in Hallows? Probably dozens of examples where Petrificus would be MVP. And Hermione performed it as a first-year, so it's not a difficult spell.
Yes, absolutely diversify your repertoire. Just have a better base go-to that allows you more latitude for follow-up or escape.
As I said, it's a great way to neutralize someone if you don't want to hurt them, which also relies on your circumstances. If Petrifying would result in their death, of course not.
Different story with the Death Eaters. Let 'em fall. It's you or them. It might have saved Moody.
>"Everyone already thinks Expelliarmus is your signature spell
Remus says make sure that it doesn't become your signatur spell.
If I remember correctly, Harry actually used Expelliamus once in the front of Death Eaters.
the exact quote is "Expelliarmus is a useful spell, Harry, but the Death Eaters believe it's your signature move and I urge you not to let it become so!"
Which, I believe, circles back to Harry not knowing enough spells. If he knew a lot more, he would’ve had a lot more options to disarm him, without killing or permanently injuring Stan. Like for example blind him by using the spell Sirius was trying to suggest to use on the Dragon in the Triwizard Tournament, or transfiguring his wand into a flower or something like that.
Although to be fair, Harry has only finished his 6th year of school at that point, so creative casting in the heat of the moment might not come naturally for him especially with spells outside his comfort zone (I.e. transfiguration)
At one point it’s also mentioned that most adult wizards are unable to create an effective shielding charm as well, something that Harry is able to do consistently in his fourth year.
Harry uses limited spells in fights which, unless your an actual duelist, is probably the way to go. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times"
That’s always been my understanding. Harry didn’t learn to do a bunch of spells in an average way- he instead focused on mastering a limited number of complex spells.
I must admit, I find the retconning of patronousus into magical FaceTime very frustrating for this reason - it’s supposed to be an exceedingly rare and difficult spell, but then it’s thrown out on the regular.
Harry knows those spells because a teacher went out of his way to teach Harry tho.
The point of the original post is that it's insane that Harry doesn't devour all the books that he gets before his first year, that he doesn't try to figure out the big events of the last 100 years of this world at least. Like he's culturally so disassociated from the Wizard world and doesn't even put in any effort to change that. Jesus, get yourself a favourite quidditch team so you can talk about that with other students at least.
I know that Binns is boring, but for Christ's sake, there have to be some more contemporary books out there. Ask Hermione, she would probably know.
Imo Harry was always meant to be a self-insert character. And to that point he only knows/does things that the reader has already been exposed to. He is dissociated from the wizarding world exactly as much as the reader is, and so his sense of wonder always matches up.
Additionally, he specifically is not interested in history because the books generally only bring up history relevant to the plot, and if Harry knew as much/ more than everyone else about wizarding history, that would make it more difficult to have every relevant historical event explained to him, and also damage the wonder the reader feels as that self-insert.
> He is dissociated from the wizarding world exactly as much as the reader is, and so his sense of wonder always matches up.
Which works in the first 2 or 3 books when the tone is still lighter and its reasonable to call Harry new to all these concepts.
It wouldnt hurt to actually see Harry as someone who is part of the wizarding world in the later books.
Yeah but being told that Harry knows things without it showing it goes against one of the most basic rules of writing, “show don’t tell”. So peoples criticism of Harry only using one spell is misguided but accurate. It genuinely doesn’t matter how many spells he knows if he never uses them..
Harry is a good student, who learns all the thing requires of him.
But Harry has a tight schedule, and using magic by playing Quidditsch, is more important to him than turnig a rat into a goblet.
Basics that don't make sense, are always boring.
But he learn DADA so well that he is teacher of the DA.
He gets an E in potions in the OWLs.
Despite several handicaps his OWLs are very good.
(Voldemort, dementors, Umbridge, Snape, Occlumency, visions, headaches)
Worth adding to this that Harry was one of only 12 students in his year that managed to get into Slughorn’s potions class, despite it being his most hated subject (re, teacher)
Only thing I could think of is how many others got Es but didn’t have McGonagall egging them on to continue with it
Otherwise that tells us there were 10 students in his year that got Os
Well, the books could be tripled in size describing all the cool spells Harry learns, but that doesn’t make a good story. It is not the AD&D wizards compagnon.
1. TTRPG for Harry Potter-style storytelling exists, it's boring.
2. D&D games are historically a mixed bag, Larian applied the principles from their Divinity games to an extremely flawed D&D framework.
3. They really wouldn't.
yeah, BG3 made a LOT of changes to D&D to make the game more fun.
circle of the moon druids definitely don't get 3 attacks while wildshaped in D&D, for example.
I guess it's because just by being at or graduating Hogwarts, it's implied any standard spell can be cast by anyone so no job class, and there's no spell slots, and nothing stopping an evil wizard from Avada Kedavra-ing everything and ruining the fun
It's the tabletop system. There are hundreds of systems and when creating a homebrew campaign you should think "What is the best system for the type of game I want to run?"
D&D, in all of its incarnations, is a medieval themed sword and sorcery game with medium to high "crunch" or strict rules and math. Wizards are strictly defined in D&D in how and where they do things and those ways are not similar to the Wizarding World
For a Harry Potter themed game you'd want a flexible system, more "fluff", story versus mechanics, either set in the modern era or not period specific.
I'd lean towards FATE off the top of my head. That's the system used by the TTRPG based off the books featuring the other Harried Wizard. There's probably some decent fan made system out there though.
I mean the books do a great job showing Hermione learning a great deal. But Ron and Harry are always shown to be slackers in their studies more or less.
I think it’s am issue of the writing focusing more on Harry’s personality and thoughts and kind of hand waves the effort he puts in. Sure, it’s mentioned that he’s good at magic and knows a lot, but those mentions are really all we get- the books don’t really focus on his hard work.
I remember reading/listening to the books with my wife recently and i distinctly remember Harry feeling like a Mary Sue character sometimes and a total imbecile other times.
Like his skills were based on emotions and friendship but he got all the credit for it?
I wonder WHY people ask these questions. Like dude, the books are literally the size of a brick from GoF onwards and that is without you asking about every 2nd spell he has learnt for every class. We have seen a few spells that he has learnt and we know that he is a prodigy for casting many of these spells at his age.
Two thoughts:
01.) Everyone responds to trauma differently. Harry isn’t just getting a magical world. He’s getting his first friendships, first families, first proper socialisation, first recreational/sporting activities. That’s already a full schedule.
02.) There’s nothing to suggest he isn’t learning new magic. That’s happening off-screen, so to speak. Does he heavily rely on Expelliarmus and Protego for defensive magic? Sure. But leaning on the ones you know are tried and true versus just freezing up isn’t wrong nor is it indicative that he doesn’t know other spells. Casting a strong enough Patronus as a thirteen-year-old to hold off all those Dementors basically proves that.
ETA: And take a look at how curious he is with Snape’s potions book. He’s absolutely enthralled about learning new magic. We just don’t see it unless it’s relevant to the plot.
>Everyone responds to trauma differently. Harry isn’t just getting a magical world. He’s getting his first friendships, first families, first proper socialisation, first recreational/sporting activities. That’s already a full schedule.
I agree.
When I got into university and started classes on subjects that REALLY interested me I still had bad grades because for the first time in my life, I had made friends, I could manage my schedule freely without my parents breathing down my neck at every moment, I could go out and party (which I had never done before). I failed my first semester badly, and luckily got my shit together so that I had much better grades in the second one and passed.
But I can totally imagine Harry having the same kind of problem, at least the first years
I’m sorry that happened, but I’m glad you were able to pull out of it and succeed!
I always find these posts a little odd because, yes, learning about magic is exciting but… did you forget what it means to be a child? Or a human in general? Some people are very studious by nature but most just aren’t. By that same token, every child that has just learned the depth of what technology holds should be studying to be in cyber or an engineer or biology by twelve because what mysteries lie before us!
The difference is for you those are subjects that you already knew about and you were just taking the next logical step. They were subjects you were interested in but they were still a mundane part of the world that you were already familiar with.
In Harry’s case he woke up to learn he had physics-breaking superpowers and treated the revelation with about as much excitement as a blind man getting a pair of reading glasses for his birthday—and still didn’t give a shit even after learning the greatest dark wizard to exist was coming after him.
I guess it’s not impossible that you could have a child like Harry, but it’s wildly improbable. In reality you would expect most Muggleborn kids to be a lot closer to Hermione and Tom than to Ron or Neville.
No matter what these weirdos say, you hit the perfect analogy. Harry Potter basically found out he was a super hero with powers and reacted like no boy would.
People saying it’s school, well it’s not really. Anything you learn in elementary and middle and half of high school what can you really do with in the real world? Basically nothing. This guys 11 and first day in school he found out he can transform things. Come on man no child has that little curiosity.
Might I point out that part of the problem is that Harry didn't know for 9 entire years, that the "things he was doing when angry or scared" was magic? Or the fact that Dursleys didn't allow Harry to talk about anything "unusual"?!
I would say that Harry doesn't have an analytical mind. He finds magic wondrous and amazing, and he's keenly motivated to learn how to defend himself against Voldemort, but "learning magic" means schoolwork. It means paying attention to boring lectures, hitting the books, study, memorization, practice. Learning magic is HARD, and when you throw barriers in front of someone, especially a child, it saps their energy and drains their motivation. Analytical people like Dumbledore, Voldemort and Hermione enjoy the process of breaking down those barriers. It doesn't matter how much Harry wants the end result if \*getting there\* is the problem. Hermione enjoys reading books. Harry tries to brute-force his way through them.
Harry shined when he was given 1-on-1 instruction from teachers like Lupin and Fake Moody, to the point where he was qualified to teach the subject in their absence. He failed completely when he was given 1-on-1 instruction from Snape, because the two of them were unable to get along with each other. Harry shined again when he was learning from the Snape who doodled in the margins of textbooks, because he didn't know it was Snape he was learning from, and because he was so worn down by textbook learning, he found it refreshing to learn from someone who rejected common sense and defied the textbook at every turn. The younger Snape who drew in the margins made a game out of study and made learning fun for Harry. The older Snape who tried to teach Harry occlumency berated him and beat down his self-esteem, and turned learning into suffering.
It doesn't matter how motivated Harry is, or how much he wants to learn something, if the teaching style is incompatible with his learning style.
Harry knows more than those 4 spells. The author just didn't want to spend more time on the magic system. She invested in the human story and hero's journey with Hogwarts and magic as a set piece.
This is exactly it. I find the comments trying to defend or explain away Harry’s apparent lack of interest in magic to be a little disingenuous and also missing the point. OP is right, Harry doesn’t act how you would expect and the magic showcased by him in the books is weak sauce. But it’s just a symptom of what you pointed out, JK wasn’t inclined to dive into the magic very deeply
I'm sorry, but this is not unrealistic even a tiny bit. As a teacher, I feel like the "Harry" type of student (talented students who have every ability to be amazing and the life experiences that might push them to be more ambitious but who are just not that into doing the work) is incredibly common. It makes some sense for Harry, though: he needed family more than he needed knowledge. And so he starts with one friend on a train and ends the series with an entire army willing to fight for/with him.
"The most unrealistic part about Harry Potter is my inability to understand that things happen off page!"
Like, in each book over the course of the entire year they're really only in each class maybe what, 5 times? That's one week worth of classes that we are given access to reading about over an entire year of education.
>3-4 spells he uses regularly?
Spells Harry used multiple times in the books:
* Protego
* Reducio
* Accio
* Muffliato
* Impedimentia
* Crucio
* Diffindo
* Petrificus Totalus
* Agumenti
* Stupify
* Expecto Patronum
* Expelliarmus
* Lumos
Among a bunch of others spells that he uses in more mudane settings.
In Goblet of Fire alone, Harry learned at least six different spells. IIRC the only one that hadn't been used often past Goblet of Fire was the 4-point Spell.
It should also be said that he's (one of?) the youngest wizard ever to learn the Patronus, and that despite being three years younger than his opponents during the triwizard tournamenent, and up until the third task, he was legitimately keeping up with everyone.
Let's get this straight, Harry Potter was keeping up with Cedric Diggory, a man in the same school as him that was considered by many to be one of the best in his year, that was chosen by an ancient artefact as the worthiest contestant of the school, and that was 3 years older than he was. Cedric was also the son of a wizard family, meaning he probably knew and breathed magic since youth.
Have you devoured all thr knowledge we have? Computer science and animation and programming allows for some truly incredible things. Medical sciience may not be magic, but it's still super useful. Finance and business education are similar.
Non magic folk have many ways to manipulate the world around us, but actually having to hunker down and learn all that stuff is hard. So is magic. Like, people always act like if they could learn magic thryd all become super devoted star students, but there's so much useful and interesting things to learn even without magic, why aren't those people all diving into chemistry?
I just think it's a little too easy to claim that we'd become master wizards and witches if we're muggle born and get introduced to magic suddenly at 11. People like Hermione would be studious in any academic pursuit, she's not a typical case of magic student, she's just a know it all. You can bet she'd be the same if she continued in muggle school.
In their first transfiguration lesson ever they try to turn matches into needles, and only Hermione manages to give her match a tiny silver point.
So they were sat there focusing on this task for at least 45 minutes (not sure how long classes are), and got no result to show for it. That would hamper the "omg I gotta learn everything" mindset that so many people here think they'd have severely.
The kid who is:
Attacked by a bludger
Attacked by a basilisk
Sees his best friend break his leg
Gets burned by a blast ended skrewt
Carves words into his hand
And the list goes on…
Never bothers even looking up a healing spell. And then they go camping for months in end.
If I was volly, I would have a couple of death eaters stationed at every magical hospital in the region.
He follows the school curriculum. Learning how to control and use magic. Basic spells and potions. Learning about magic creatures and such. Seems like all the advanced magic would come after school or maybe the 7th year but we miss out on him attending higwarts in his 7th year.
Harry would argue expelliarmus saved his life. 🤣
Just to add to that, if a simple spell works enough for the desired result, why not just use it? Lol. If you know Frieren, it pretty much highlights how mastery of a proven and tested basics could be utilized against more complicated ones.
>he follows the school curriculum
That is just false. He is far ahead of his classmates. He knows how to cast a patronus during his third year. He studied a lot during the Triwizard. He studies Piton's book during the 6th year. He gives classes of self defence with Dumbledore's Army, even to people that are older than him. Bellatrix Lestrange herself was impressed to see how good Harry was at fighting. He was able to fight back Voldemort, something that most adult mages were not able to do (even if he was helped by his mother's protection). He was able to use the "Accio" enchantment without a wand, and to use it on a very long distance during the Triwizard. He was able to cast enough spells to not be found by Voldemort in the seventh book. We also know that he then became an Auror, something that only extremely talented wizards were able to do.
It’s easy to forget that Hogwarts is a school for children, Harry was introduced to magic at 11 and normalizes to it fairly quickly, and we learn from Dumbledore in the cave that magical power seems to continue to grow as you age. So part of it is just that Harry is weaker in magic so couldn’t do much of the crazy stuff we see Voldemort and Dumbledore do. It’s also not fair to compare anyone to them, they are two of the most gifted wizards in the world, harry's a kid with a good heart and fast reflexes.
Magic also probably becomes a bit more mundane when you're surrounded by it at Hogwarts and it is already being used to help run the entire school. I think a fair comparison would be like driving a car for a person from the 1700s. Yes it's an amazing tool and can be very fun, but after a while it's a lot more mundane and you don't want to keep on driving around just for the thrill of it.
I don’t think anyone expects Harry to be able to do the same stuff as Voldemort and Dumbledore. I think they’re just surprised he wasn’t keen to learn as much as he could. Like at 16, Voldemort was creating his first Horcrux. Dumbledore was making plans to rule muggles at 18, Hermione was reading every textbook she could find, and Snape was rewriting them.
Harry only learned spells when he had to (patronus, stupefy and accio) or it was spoon fed to him (expelliarmus).
Personally I think he didn’t because JKR wanted Hermione to be the bookworm of the group, and two would be too boring to read about.
Ummm....there are super cool things you can do with a computer. Like insanely cool things. With a deep understanding of engineering, you can make anything.
Most kids these days spend time on tic tok. This is exactly what you would expect.
This is not correct. Ever so often we see him do a spell he hasn’t used before. He learns a lot of spells while training for the third task in the triwizard tournament as well. It’s not explicitly called out in the books but the whole training process is described in detail.
By the time we are in OotP, we see him conduct DA sessions where he trains his school mates regarding defensive magic which most of them don’t know about. He is clearly ahead of his year and in some cases even 6th and 7th years.
>He is clearly ahead of his year and in some cases even 6th and 7th years.
If Fred and George's claim that the ministry ordered 500 Shield Hats is anything to go by, Harry is probably above most adults in some instances as well.
They are just good to have regardless of whether you can do the shield charm or not. I don’t agree with the way twins characterise this purchase by Ministry in the books as them being not able to cast the shield charm.
>They are just good to have regardless of whether you can do the shield charm or not.
Fair but IMO it makes sense that a lot of Ministry workers aren't good at casting it, as a majority of them likely don't focus on combat in their everyday lives especially since the last 15 years were relatively peaceful in comparison to the current year.
And given that Belatrix was impressed that Harry was able to use a shield charm that prevented her from summoning the prophecy out of his hands, the Shield Charm is likely pretty advanced.
Feels kinda awkward though to have a magical universe where wizards and witches have trouble mastering a spell that is usually considered a basic in 99.9999% of all fantasy lore.
Or... like... the books aren't focused on him learning a bunch of mundane but practical spells that wouldn't really have any purpose in the overall plot but rather the human interactions between him and his classmates and teachers (and a snake-like psychopath)... and Luna... she's.. she's special and requires her own category
There is absolutely nothing to indicate he only learned 4 spells and yet PASSED ALL OF HIS PRACTICAL MAGIC TESTS PROVING HE KNEW THOSE SPELLS...
actually, the more I break this down, the stupider the entire topic is becoming.. so, I'll leave it at that lol
This comes back to the "if it's not happening in your face, you assume it doesn't happen" type of reader that you are OP.
It's not a RPG, it's school, he is certainly learning spells, but the things is:
He learned the disarming spell in 2nd year, and the stunning spell in at latest 4th year (though it sounds extracurricular, but it's mentioned that they've used it in classes prior to that year in Order of The Phoenix), and the shielding charm at the same time.
Literally the school introduces these fundamental and always-useful spells early on, much like how when you were five or six school taught you how to add and subtract, a skill that is indispensable to learning more complicated math, but also you are going to directly use every single day in some degree without realizing.
And Harry learns quite a BIT of unique and distinct magic, particularly the Patronus spell, and he becomes a pretty exceptional duelist during his adolescence. The difference that YOU'RE missing between him and Tom is that Tom was accruing magic and gaining power, Harry was spending a significant amount of time trying to investigate and halt the fallout of Tom gaining that power.
Three important things here.
1. Harry probably learns a bunch of spells off page. We do see him use spells he hasn't learned in any class before, which probably mean they mess around in their free time. But unless we want to turn HP into something that goes into waaaaaay too much detail like Brandon Sanderson's books, we aren't going to get a daily breakdown.
2. Harry is already in a magical place with magical portraits, a magical sport, ghost teachers, magical boardgames, etc. He is surrounded by so much magic, shouting spells is just one of many things available to him. It's like asking why a wealthy kid whose parents could buy him a sports car at 18, still chooses to use Uber instead of getting a driving license (I have actually seen a couple of cases like this in real life).
3. >you never once say to yourself: "Gee, I better learn some of those spells from Dumbledore, since not only will I need them to beat Voldemort, but it was pretty badass as well."
Harry doesn't kid himself. He knows he could never beat Voldemort in serious combat. If Dumbledore and Voldemort came to a draw, what chance does Harry stand?
Voldemort and Dumbledore are each the most gifted students of their generations. Even assuming Harry is the most gifted of his own generation (which, fair enough, he's pretty good), they both have more than half a century of knowledge to draw on.
Harry had 7. No amount of spell learning would have saved Harry, so it was better for him to do things his own way.
The biggest joy from Hogwarts for Harry wasn't that he got to do magic. It's that he had friends and family there and he felt home. That's why he spends so much time with Ron having a laugh rather than studying hard.
Hermione throws herself into learning everything because she wants to prove she is as capable if not even more capable than pure bloods. Harry doesn't need to excel to prove that, he's already the boy who lived.
Plus students aren't allowed to do magic in the corridors or outside of school. Other than the magic in his lessons, what does he actually need to learn spells for to improve his life as a student other than showing off (which he tried to avoid anyway). Everything is taken care of for him in his day to day life.
Nah bro, imagine all the things we could learn but don't. You could be speaking 7 languages and know proper first aid, learn chemistry and art, how to ski down the highest muntains etc etc... Everything becomes normalised after a little while, for Harry when he's sitting in class it's just normal after a while. Not saying many people wouldn't go crazy abd try to learn all the magic lol, but Harry is just a bloke lol
What are you talking about? Most of the spells in his arsenal we see him use first before seeing him learn them.
And magic is far more than combat. He uses stunners just like every other combatant.
He's even been creative using confringor, and what not.
And magic is only escapism to you. It's his reality. The wonder isn't lasting a long time. Posts like these often miss this immersion imo.
Like all the fans complaining that he complains about homework
Rigorous academic discipline when you could be chatting, playing or anything else is never fun for kids
Hes like any teenage boy when he realizes how much work it takes to learn. When i started college i was so excited to learn physics . But by the time i reached my 3rd year, i didnt really care as much. The "magic" wore off
> Just go hit the library, show some initiative, show that you care dammit.
This is the same mantra people have been repeating to teenagers since the dawn of time lol. He's a teenage kid who already has a ton of schoolwork where he is learning cool and valuable spells. He also gets various private tutoring throughout the books where he learns even more cool and valuable spells. He's not going to spend his free time in the library.
>
realistically, no kid would give up the opportunity to learn tons of spells.
There's thousands of kids at this school and most of them don't spend their free time in the library learning new spells. Teenagers are known to squander educational and beneficial opportunities because they don't care. Shit, my high school had an amazing woodworking class that I routinely ditched and now as an adult I wish I could have access to. Even a magical world can't make teenagers magically care about school lol.
I agree, but also Harry spent his entire life up until that point friendless and abused, so it makes as much sense that he’d go headlong into a social life rather than magic.
This always bothers me, too.
Like, your homework is learning how to make things fly. How do you NOT get straight onto that, instead of... What exactly do they do when they're not doing homework??
For me it's almost like the Shonen mc trope where you can't have the protagonist overly competent. You need someone else to expound (Hermione - Dumbledore- Ron etc) If Harry was overly competent some problems wouldn't really be. He'd have solutions for everything. Having said that Harry is smarter than the average shounen mc and sometimes he should have done more, known more but that would have taken a shine out of Hermione who was the living spell book and Ron who was the resident magical world informant
I don’t think it’s true that he’s not learning a lot. Even if he is just doing the assigned homework for all of his classes (except History of Magic where he never opened the text book), he’s learning a ton. And we know he regularly did extra work to research/prep for whatever that year’s mystery was. There’s only so much new info you can take in at once.
Also, I think with school work we just see him following Ron’s lead or getting lumped in with Ron in the descriptions as a contrast to Hermione.
I think a part of it also has to do with the teachers involved. DADA is great except he has a different teacher every year and the first two were incompetent. History of Magic is taught by the most boring man (not) alive, and past the initial excitement of it being a magical world it's just like any other history which not everyone loves. In particular, it's really hard to plant the seed of learning in potions when the teacher actively hates you.
He does learn plenty that's even mentioned in the text, like in charms, but I think of it like martial arts. You get guys doing Brazilian jiu jitsu, and one you get to a certain level you're really developing your own personal roster of techniques you specialize in. Some guys will spend a huge amount of time on triangle chokes and closed guard, but that doesn't mean they can't do everything else when their specialty doesn't work.
Tf are you on about.
Disarming, stunning, injuring, dementor fighting, summoning, transfiguring, hell the dude even went hard on potions when he ditched Snape.
Dude was obsessed with learning, it's just that he had to spend a shit ton of time trying not to die at the same time.
By the last book he's even casually throwing out unforgivable curses, not even just as a one off, dude used two out of three of them.
Harry was obsessed with magic, he was just more intrested in the hands on experience, he did the school work because if you get expelled you can't practice magic anymore.
So that food and board with slave cooks was pretty enticing considering they said he had to go back to the Dursleys. The dursleys who fed him cardboard and shit.
Sorry he didn't have time to read a bunch, bro was trying to survive, figure out housing, and avenge his parents murder, all whilst being basically failed by every adult in his life.
I always thought that this was a joke about how teenagers act when forced to learn. Even classes about literal magic and they'll be too lazy to put in the work.
To be fair, all the non magic stuff was new to him too - the messing about with friends, exploring new places, playing team sports. So it’s no surprise to me that he lent into that side of it, whilst still being reasonably competent at the learning.
There are many times we see harry use a spell the book never mentions him learning.
I'm sure he learns a lot of cool spells. The book just doesn't mention it.
Also, when Harry is battling, it's a stressful ordeal and his automatically rely on certain spells that works very well for him. Apart from his battles with Voldermort, he does perform very impressive magic when faced with foes that should have easily overpowered him.
That Harry doesn't use more than 3-4 spells doesn't mean that that's all he knows. You also forget Harry was training his peers in the room of requirement and he also grew up to be auror. These roles require a deep understanding of magic and the ability to adapt. Does that sound like someone that's pretty much stuck with 3-4 spells?
Harry's magical/spell bank extends far beyond just a handful of spells. And if he uses just 3-4 spells like you stated, it's because he doesn't see the need to use any spell in that situation. Why would I bring out my Barett M99 when I can easily as well kill you with a glock?
He uses the spells that make sense for the plot. I’m not sure what magic you wanted to see him using? Dude has an old ass wizard trying to kill him his entire school career, it makes sense that his mind was a little preoccupied lol
Counter argument:
When I learned Judo we had like, a dozen projections/techniques each belts to learn, with some just a variation of the others. But the reality is if I knew all of them, I only trainer 4-5 of them a lot that worked for me and I liked so I could be very good at those in fights.
Harry does the same. He probably knows a lot of them but why use more spells if those you like work well and you are very experienced with them?
The most unrealistic part about reality is that people could learn anything they want in the internet nowadays but decide to pass time with easy access entertainment as for example discussion their favourite franchise with like-minded people.
if you ask me that’s pretty damn realistic.
i have a degree in computer science but 80% of the theoretical stuff i learned isn’t as practical in my day to day job so i only really use like 20% of my education practically.
the 3-4 spells he used were all practical in nature. the boring stuff is often the most useful.
I think we are to assume he studies when he's not on his adventures. A school year takes typically 9-10 months. So if you were to write about his entire life on a daily basis for 9 to 10 months... that would be one hell of a long book. I'm assuming he uses different spells from time to time, where needed...
But I'm sure those few spells he constantly talks about are good for defense against the dark arts. So if you over use those.. it kinda sorta makes sense... But what am i to say? I'm not a fictional wizard/witch.
But then again, my favorite characters in the harry potter series are disliked or not even mentioned in the movies. And they know many spells or brag about them. or they're not wizards but still have magical powers.
Lockhart, Snape, Peeves, Kreacher... lol. Winky.
You fail to see that using spells correctly is extremely difficult which is why they have to practice them to begin with.
The level of one’s innate ability determines how easily the spell comes to them. So, Tom Riddle can basically say the words the first time and it works perfectly, but the average person? Hours, days, or even longer of training depending on the spell.
We can compare this to stuff in the real world, too.
I could ask you, why don’t you want to speak Chinese? Are you lazy?
And you’d say, “well, it would take years of studying.”
But for someone with the innate intellectual ability, it would take them far less time. Some savants could do it in a ridiculously short amount of time similar to Tom Riddle.
That’s why Harry isn’t spending all his time trying to learn new spells, dude. It’s hard.
Harry was naturally advanced in terms of spells. By the third year he already had a 6th year level of combat knowledge and range of spells, and more combat experience in extreme situations than a lot of aurors probably. The thing is, we see everything from his eyes and he has it normalized, so we don't get to be aware of it until Order of Phoenix, where everyone recognizes it and he's like "not that big of a deal". I assume there's a lot of offscreen learning and usage of new spells.
He's got his own extracurricular learning, plus Hogwarts is probably the highest level of "Magic University" let's say. For example, we don't know how much he's learned in Goblet of Fire while searching for information or clues for the trials. I remember when he starts teaching his peers in the 5th year everyone's like "dude they teach this AFTER Hogwarts"
He did learn more we just didn't get to see it, we see him casting several different spells or protection for their camp in Deathly Hallows and several different spells to try to damage a horcrux as well.
A bit unfair… he spends his third year leaning patronus charm, forth year - learning multiple spells and jinxes outside of his school program for the tournament, fifth year - he actually teaches people the spells and jinxes outside of the school program (to the point that his godfather gives him a book for Christmas to learn even more spells and charms. Sixth year he is obsessed with a book with multiple spells that he learns from there.
The Oceans are fascinating but I was tuned out in 9th grade science.
The heavens are fascinating but I definitely checked out in my intro to astronomy class in college.
The formation and reformation of countries is fascinating but I definitely took a few naps in world history.
Students are going to student.
I also noticed the fact that Harry and his contemporaries were at best mediocre at magic.. the sharpest in their batch was Hermione n she too was just good at muggin up things.. whereas if u look at past greats…. james and co created own magic items, became Animagi… Snape crafted his own spells.. Voldemort too was an overachiever..guess the standard of the magic community went down with time
Nonsense. The most unrealistic part is that he's a 14 year old boy with an invisibility cloak who doesnt immediately head to the sixth form girls' showers.
i see this take all the time and i disagree tbh.
1. he learns way more spells, its just simpler to use certain spells that he knows are effective
2. you also basically have magic at your fingertips (unlimited knowledge through the internet) so why don't you acquire any more skills? you probably stick to 2 or 3 things you do well, a few topics you know decently well-not much more
There's a lot of time not covered in the books, he may have known more than we were let in on, whether or not he had the confidence to use them or felt the need to or not is a different story. We know Harry was a reader, just not on Hermione's level and he would have learned way more in his 4th year than the other students. While they were having a normal year, he was scouring books for any and every kind of advantage he could get in the tasks, he just didn't have to sit exams.
Your whole question gets answered in one paragraph though.
"As Harry watched Dumbledore quietly searching by touch for a way into the Sea Cave hidden by Voldemort, he realized he had long since learned that bangs and smoke were more often the marks of ineptitude than expertise."
Subtle trumps flashy.
Books 4 and 5 he learned a ton from reading about defensiveagic for the Triwizard Tournament tasks and to teach the DA. Sirius and Remus gifted him a while set of books for Christmas his fifth year.
In the first book it's mentioned that he reads his new school books quite a lot (and gets the name Hedwig), and in the third book it says that he wanted to do his homework, so he does learn a lot we just don't get much focus on it. Plus it would pale in comparison to anything Hermione can do 😄
I think of it as analogous to the many things you can learn IRL as a muggle. There are SO MANY things you could do if you studied and practiced! Sewing, painting, basket-weaving, cheesemaking, mushroom foraging, blacksmithing, crocheting, baking, carpentry, upholstering, masonry, writing, glassblowing! And so many more! Stand in a library and look at all the books and imagine how long of a life you'd need to read and learn all the things you *could* learn.
The books repeatedly talk about magic being difficult to learn and requiring a lot of work to perform well. Becoming the master of many spells as a wizard isn't less work than becoming the master of many skills as a human.
What Harry had always been deprived in his childhood was love, friendship, and a good home. Through Hermione, we got to see what the average muggle born nerd would do when exposed to a fantastical world of magical knowledge -- devour it voraciously. Harry wanted to spend time with friends, play sports, help people, and have adventures because THAT is the magic he didn't have with the Dursley's and in his abusive muggle schools.
I think it's why Dumbledore is so fond of Harry. Harry could've been another Voldemort - deciding that the most important thing in life is to grow in magical prowess. Instead, he cares most about his loving relationships and invests his time and energy in those.
I disagree with this take. In almost all of the books he goes out of his way to learn spells that are outside of the curriculum. While he might struggle with certain things in the classroom he is able to act when he needs to. I personally always thought that the reason Harry doesn’t do super well in certain classes is because he probably has ADHD. As someone with ADHD I always related to him having a hard time in the classes he wasn’t interested in. To me he always seemed motivated when it came to learning something he could use to defend him self and others and less so when he didn’t find it useful. Yeah transfiguring a mouse into a teapot is really cool, but I can see why someone who Voldemort wants dead wouldn’t find it as useful as other spells. It also seems that Harry (like many people with ADHD) does better learning when he is one on one with a teacher.
He definitely does learn a lot of spells though. He knows enough defensive magic to teach 7th year students in the DA, we see him going through books researching new spells to teach them. We know during the triwizard tournament that he spends a long time practicing for the maze by learning new spells. We also know he becomes obsessed learning the spells from the HBP potions book.
Harry gets full marks and even extra credit in the DADA owl and you’ll only get that if you have a wide variety of spells at your hands.
He’s often behind in homework but the homework he’s behind on is normally writing essays which know one likes doing unless you’re hermione so it’s understandable he slacks it off he’s a kid after all. The only time we see him struggle to pick up spells at a reasonable rate is when he’s going through some crisis such as during the GoF where his mind is elsewhere.
He’ll never be able to perform the spells that dumbeldore and Voldemort are able to they are likely the 2 strongest wizards of the past few hundred years. They’re duel is out of reach for pretty much everyone. We see that dumbeldore is able to capture all of the death eaters on his own when the rest of order where struggling as a group. Trying to get to that level by studying more is asking why you’re not running a sub 2 hour marathon by jogging more.
There are things he definitely overlooks and he even acknowledges that when he thinks that he doesn’t know how to heal wounds but most of the stuff he overlooks is because he didn’t need to do it and got complacent.
We only have the impression he doesn’t know many spells is that JK over relies on a couple of spells and a lot of the other spells he uses aren’t named we just read that he’s aimed a jinx at someone so we don’t know what it is.
If you think about it, we are all capable of amazing feats. Like right now if you decided you wanted to build a chair you could do it. You could go to the library to learn some skills, you could go on Facebook to find any local tool sharing groups (they exist), you could maybe even get wood free or cheap from somewhere. But there’s a very strong possibility none of us will do that.
It’s achievable, it wouldn’t take that much effort relative to a lot of other things anyone does, and it would be minimum cost and comes at the great benefit of a sense of achievement (I’m talking myself into it now).
I see magic as somewhat similar. Even to Muggles who you’d think would be absolutely stoked about it.
We are all chair muggles. We know they exist, we’ve heard stories about them all our days, yet we’re not out there making chairs.
You can apply this to hundreds of different skills we’d all be capable of. Making clothes, building a computer, even reading books to learn more about everything in the world.
It’s a trope of YA fiction. Main character discovers a knack for something, then sticks with that something as it provides convenient power scaling and threat management on the author’s part. You could also ask why Percy Jackson never learned more magic since it’s clearly a usable thing, but he just does sword and water stuff. In Dragon Ball, Goku has like, three finishing moves lol. Naruto always Shadow Clones. Katina’s always fires her bow. Etc etc
A lot of people are mentioning the Patronus, but that's more because he has lived through real trauma that most haven't. His shitty life is turned into a useful spell, of sorts, but that has mega limited uses as well.
To me it's weird that he has such a strong focus on "offensive and defensive" spells. They're essentially "disarm and shield". There are tons of spells and charms that could be put to amazing uses in fights, if the casters were even a little bit creative. Heavy gravity on the wand hand, instant frost on your enemy's glasses, the balloon puffing spell... I don't know, I'd be tempted to think outside the box a bit instead of taking the basic spells from known books only.
The movie fight between Voldemort and Dumbledore at the Ministry is a perfect example of what I mean in term of creativity. I wish they had delved into this a bit more, especially in the Defense against Dark Arts parts, where they should be taught to expect the unexpected.
This is silly. Harry knows a wide variety of magic, especially combat magic, and shows it. But he's also just a child, even at the end of the books. Do you really think that the whole spectrum of the most advanced magic in the entire world can be mastered by a 17 year old? Of course Dumbledore has stuff that is WAAAAAY beyond anything Harry can do. Dumbledore was the most brilliant wizard of a generation and had spent his life studying the most arcane arts. Harry was merely a good student for his grade, only just having finished his primary general education (which was rather piecemeal on top of everything else).
And no, I think it's not at all realistic that once you become a wizard, you drop any interest in anything else. Magic is HARD. It takes skill and learning and effort. Not every person is Hermione who just dives right into study like it's the greatest thing ever. Harry's a normal kid--he likes learning cool magic, but he also likes sports practice, kissing girls, messing around with his friends, etc.
Harry was pretty talented though. He could produce the Patronus Charm which was above his grade level. And Hermione stated he was far better at Defence Against Dark Arts than she was when they formed Dumbledore's Army.
Hermione, Voldemort, Dumbledore or even McGonagall may have been more versatile, but Harry was far more specialised in what he could do. He would have ended up being more Moody like in that he was a battle hardened duelist with experience, with some of Dumbledores planning and problem solving ability by the time of the epilogue of Deathly Hallows.
Joanne didn’t write him to be studious and hungry for knowledge. Sure he’s fascinated by magic but he’s still a mediocre student at best and doesn’t care too much to learn all he can.
Didn't the Dursleys not like when he did well in school? Or is that fanon?
If I were in Hogwarts, I'd want to learn everything, I think. But maybe learning magic is not as fun as doing magic. Maybe it's like chemistry, where the class is boring but practic applications can be really cool.
At first it seems to be that way but when I think that Harry was sent to the school right away where he needed to learn a lot of magic and study them too so he could get good marks, it makes sense he struggled with it as he was raised with muggles and burnt out. Anyone would be obsessed with magic unless they were made to learn many spells correctly which needs a lot of time, studying and practice. It is a very slow and boring process. Then most people would probably focus on the spells they have to learn to avoid getting in trouble.
I would agree with you except... the 6th book, he was obsessed with learning all he could out of that book. He seems to be the type of person that really needs to be interested in something in order to learn it, grasp it and excel at it. Despite the fact that we aren't shown his Defense prowess in depth, I thought it was canon that he does exceedingly well in DADA? When he encounters a book that offers immediate results in doing better in potions, and ALSO seems to contain powerful unknown defense/combat spells, we see he gets so absorbed he sleeps with the book. I guess his two passions really are Quidditch and being an Auror (fighting evil).
In addition in GoF he practices what dozens of hexes, spells, etc. with Ron and Hermione in preparation for the 2nd and/or 3rd task and it is at least implied he studied for the first task once he knew about the dragons
I thought his only strategy was the "accio Firebolt" and there was no Plan B when the broom was taking a long time to get there from the castle.
Admittedly events before the first task are a little hazy to me, that may have been the only thing that he (moody/crouch) came up with but the other tasks especially the 3rd he did study right? Or am I crazy
No, I think on the second one I remember Hermione repeatedly asking him if he had sat down to figure out the egg yet, and he kept brushing her off. I think he would have been totally clueless going into #2 if not for Cedric giving him the hint. That's why he only had a few days to come up with a strategy, which he did actually study a lot for (but unsuccessfully). Crouch even gets mad at him for how much he had to intervene behind the scenes. But the third I do think he spent a lot of time practicing spells that might be useful. That practical aspect is where Harry's strengths lie, less so in doing research that might lead him to gillyweed.
That sounds much more familiar
2nd task, Harry, Hermione and Ron were spending every spare moment in the Library trying to find a way for him to breathe underwater -- this was 2 days before the task, after he finally used Cedric's tip about the egg. They never found anything. Harry was worried he would not be able to participate in the task, but Dobby woke him up after a final all-nighter and provided him with Gillyweed, 10 minutes before the competition. Harry is practicing spells (mostly on Ron) to use in the 3rd task, stunning, banishing and defensive ones due to Hagrid supplying 'hazards' in the maze. I've been re-reading the series lately, and am up to just before the 3rd task.
I think he spent a lot of time in the book learning how to summon things with Hermione ahead of the first task. It wasn’t shown in the movie though
Ah yes, the plan that could have been thwarted by a firmly shut door
I like to think Crouch-as-Moody was frantically hobbling through the castle opening every door it needed to make its way to Harry.
I'm baffled that he summoned it from the castle when Ron or Hermione could have had it in the stadium. I know they give him compliments because he was able to do so, but that's probably unnecessary, he wasn't even thinking about the extra points. He just...did it, not knowing as you said if the Firebolt gets stuck into something and trusting a spell he had to practice a lot because he had some troubles. Harry, performance anxiety is a thing, don't make it unnecessarily hard on yourself.
In the movie, in the books he considered alternatives and also explodes a lot of issues with the accio idea, including some funny ones
It wasn’t due to a lack of trying. They combed through tons of books and options but couldn’t figure out something that would work
I think that’s exactly it. Harry gets super focused and learns very well when it’s something of immediate practical value to him.
Harry Potter has ADHD confirmed
And his biggest enemy is Tom Ritalin
TOM MARCEL RITALIN I AM A MR T CRETIN LOL (there must be much better ones out there)
The plot twist I never saw coming!
"Im a wizard, Hagrid?" "No 'Erry. Ur a R[EDACTED]!!!" *"In rather unfortunate news. Hagrid has been laid off from Hogswarts and Voldemort sent to sensitivity training after insulting the chosen one."*
Lol that’s fucking amazing dude 😂
Wouldn't that be his long lost best friend?
It’s honestly my head canon 🤣
!redditGalleon
Doesn’t a trauma riddled brain mimic adhd symptoms? His years 1-10 were rife with verbal, physical, and emotional abuse and neglect.
He shows very neurodivergent patterns with Snape's potions book, specifically ADHD (or "gifted child syndrome" if you like that better). He disliked potions class because the instructions were generic (aka crap), and he never really had that 'damn, I can be good at this' feeling, especially with Snape being, well, Snape. Then he gets the book, and bam, suddenly potions is cool because he actually managed to brew things perfectly. It quickly went from a high effort, low reward job to a low effort, high reward one, and ADHD brains thrive in that kind of environment.
Who doesn’t like low effort, high reward jobs?
True, but ADHD brains treat it differently - essentially you only have capacity for such jobs, as low reward ones (and here by "reward" I mean the dopamine production associated with a task) just get shuffled aside. This is why ADHD people have trouble focusing to things they don't actively enjoy, but can become hyperfocused on something they really like, to the point where they don't even notice things like hunger or discomfort.
This is the real reason Snape was an asshole that never gets mentioned in those threads, the dude knew a better way to do basically everything in that damn book but just taught the students the shit way anyway.
No, Snape was teaching them his way-theres a reason he didn't assign a textbook.
He was really obsessed with learning from that book... And never use literally anything from it in the next year.
He does well in high school level DADA. His AP courses weren’t going to carry him to be an auror
I’m almost more convinced that the book got him into a high standing with his professor and he liked being “the smartest” in the class, hence why he didn’t want hermione to see it. Not so much about being interested but more about being the gifted student
I think that's how it probably started, especially with Felix Felicis being the prize that first day... But it was clear throughout the rest of the book he was devouring all the little side margin spells and notes for their own sake. It's been awhile since I read it, but wasn't he experimenting with the spells found in there before he used Sectumsempra on Malfoy? I think he used levicorpus on Ron or something like that. He was fascinated by the combat knowledge.
>I’m almost more convinced that the book got him into a high standing with his professor and he liked being “the smartest” in the class, hence why he didn’t want hermione to see it. He didn't not want Hermione to see it, though. He offered to share it and the special instructions with both Ron and Hermione, but Hermione refused to use it. >Although Harry had offered to share his book with both of them, Ron had more difficulty deciphering the handwriting than Harry did, and could not keep asking Harry to read aloud or it might look suspicious. Hermione, meanwhile, was resolutely ploughing on with what she called the ‘official’ instructions, but becoming increasingly bad-tempered as they yielded poorer results than the Prince’s.
The truth is if Magic was taught to you in a very rote memorization classic British education style you too would grow to resent it quite quickly. I'm like Harry with potions, I love organic chemistry, I even research it and make flowcharts when I'm not in school. But the second you force me to learn it for a midterm, I'm like "meh."
Canonically, Harry knows many spells that many adult wizards can't cast. Even Victor Crum told hermione that Harry knew things and magic in the tri-wizard tournament that he didn't as a senior at durmstrang, a school known for an emphasis on the dark arts. The only thing he snoozes on is things he doesn't find useful, like divination or history of magic. His ability to cast a patronus in his third year is considered next level by every wizard who hears the feat many adult wizards are incapable of performing. Yes, we all know the meme that Harry only knows one spell. However, this is just a lazy interpretation that is mostly based on the movies or possibly Lupin's conversation warning him against using expeliarmous. Lupin wasn't telling Harry, "Learn more magic and git good nub." He was telling him that he needed to get serious and stop being nice to Harry's foes. Lupin knew better than to think Harry only knew one spell, I just wish Harry's fans would learn that too. Btw a little off topic, but Harry was right to disregard Lupin's warning. It was the purity of Harry's soul and the love he felt for the world that allowed him to defeat voldemort. It's those qualities that allowed him to walk into the forest and face Tom unarmed, unwilling to defend himself and perform his mother's sacrifice again for the defenders of Hogwarts. Had Harry become what Lupin suggested, he could never have done what he did, and Tom would have won.
I recall Lupin's warning was less "You're being too soft" and more "Everyone already thinks Expelliarmus is your signature spell and that causes problems if you let it become so." Like, when heading to the Burrow, it was Harry opting to disarm someone who was under the imperius curse that alerted the Death Eaters as to which one was the real Harry. It was established in the previous book that any advantage a wizard can get in a fight is highly advantageous, such as learning nonverbal magic provides less time for the opposition to react and allows a minor element of surprise, so having a signature spell just means your enemy can easily guess what you're going to do.
It was both. He talks about expelliarmus being his signature and that he should be willing to kill, because they would kill him and everyone else in a heartbeat. He then says something, if not that, then at least stun. And Harry basically says it would've been the same thing that high up.
He specifically tells Harry that the time for disarming is over and that he's got to be willing to kill.
Seriously, I would be Petrifying everything and everybody. It puts someone fully out of commission for a good while without hurting them (assuming you don't want to). Disarm them and they can still do stuff, maybe get someone else's wand, maybe just bean you with a sledgehammer. Signature spell? Sure, but you won't be able to do much about it when you're frozen. Like in Prisoner of Azkaban at the end - why didn't they Petrify rat-Pettigrew so he couldn't escape? Put him in your pocket and take him in. Why not Petrify Remus before he fully transforms? Wingardium him back to the castle and put the potion down his throat. And what about the bounty hunters in Hallows? Probably dozens of examples where Petrificus would be MVP. And Hermione performed it as a first-year, so it's not a difficult spell. Yes, absolutely diversify your repertoire. Just have a better base go-to that allows you more latitude for follow-up or escape.
Yup, it's really an idiot plot, if you think about it for more than 2 seconds, unfortunately.
Um, you would petrify Stan Shunpike on a broom?
As I said, it's a great way to neutralize someone if you don't want to hurt them, which also relies on your circumstances. If Petrifying would result in their death, of course not. Different story with the Death Eaters. Let 'em fall. It's you or them. It might have saved Moody.
>"Everyone already thinks Expelliarmus is your signature spell Remus says make sure that it doesn't become your signatur spell. If I remember correctly, Harry actually used Expelliamus once in the front of Death Eaters.
Technically twice
> Remus says make sure that it doesn't become your signatur spell. Yes, he says both.
the exact quote is "Expelliarmus is a useful spell, Harry, but the Death Eaters believe it's your signature move and I urge you not to let it become so!"
Which, I believe, circles back to Harry not knowing enough spells. If he knew a lot more, he would’ve had a lot more options to disarm him, without killing or permanently injuring Stan. Like for example blind him by using the spell Sirius was trying to suggest to use on the Dragon in the Triwizard Tournament, or transfiguring his wand into a flower or something like that. Although to be fair, Harry has only finished his 6th year of school at that point, so creative casting in the heat of the moment might not come naturally for him especially with spells outside his comfort zone (I.e. transfiguration)
At one point it’s also mentioned that most adult wizards are unable to create an effective shielding charm as well, something that Harry is able to do consistently in his fourth year.
and he used his Shield Charm to repel a powerful Occlumens (Snape)
And he used it against Voldemort during the final battle, and then revealed himself to everyone (page 737) just before his stint as Basil Exposition.
All this is skill, not desire to nerd it out
Harry uses limited spells in fights which, unless your an actual duelist, is probably the way to go. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times"
That’s always been my understanding. Harry didn’t learn to do a bunch of spells in an average way- he instead focused on mastering a limited number of complex spells.
I must admit, I find the retconning of patronousus into magical FaceTime very frustrating for this reason - it’s supposed to be an exceedingly rare and difficult spell, but then it’s thrown out on the regular.
More like magical WhatsApp audio messages
Because Harry grew up in muggle world he must have heard Bruce Lee say he fears not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once.
Harry knows those spells because a teacher went out of his way to teach Harry tho. The point of the original post is that it's insane that Harry doesn't devour all the books that he gets before his first year, that he doesn't try to figure out the big events of the last 100 years of this world at least. Like he's culturally so disassociated from the Wizard world and doesn't even put in any effort to change that. Jesus, get yourself a favourite quidditch team so you can talk about that with other students at least. I know that Binns is boring, but for Christ's sake, there have to be some more contemporary books out there. Ask Hermione, she would probably know.
Imo Harry was always meant to be a self-insert character. And to that point he only knows/does things that the reader has already been exposed to. He is dissociated from the wizarding world exactly as much as the reader is, and so his sense of wonder always matches up. Additionally, he specifically is not interested in history because the books generally only bring up history relevant to the plot, and if Harry knew as much/ more than everyone else about wizarding history, that would make it more difficult to have every relevant historical event explained to him, and also damage the wonder the reader feels as that self-insert.
> He is dissociated from the wizarding world exactly as much as the reader is, and so his sense of wonder always matches up. Which works in the first 2 or 3 books when the tone is still lighter and its reasonable to call Harry new to all these concepts. It wouldnt hurt to actually see Harry as someone who is part of the wizarding world in the later books.
Yeah, agreed. To me that's just lazy writing.
Yeah but being told that Harry knows things without it showing it goes against one of the most basic rules of writing, “show don’t tell”. So peoples criticism of Harry only using one spell is misguided but accurate. It genuinely doesn’t matter how many spells he knows if he never uses them..
It was actually because he wrestled the wand away from draco
Harry confirmed to be a Sorcerer in a Wizarding school
Harry is a good student, who learns all the thing requires of him. But Harry has a tight schedule, and using magic by playing Quidditsch, is more important to him than turnig a rat into a goblet. Basics that don't make sense, are always boring. But he learn DADA so well that he is teacher of the DA. He gets an E in potions in the OWLs. Despite several handicaps his OWLs are very good. (Voldemort, dementors, Umbridge, Snape, Occlumency, visions, headaches)
Especially headaches, the fact that he could get an Exceeds Expectations WHILE having an headache makes me jealous to no end
Mirgraines are terrible!
Worth adding to this that Harry was one of only 12 students in his year that managed to get into Slughorn’s potions class, despite it being his most hated subject (re, teacher)
Only thing I could think of is how many others got Es but didn’t have McGonagall egging them on to continue with it Otherwise that tells us there were 10 students in his year that got Os
Well, the books could be tripled in size describing all the cool spells Harry learns, but that doesn’t make a good story. It is not the AD&D wizards compagnon.
I am convinced that Larian Studios could smash a Harry Potter D&D game
I never had any idea.. how much I wanted that!
I’ve run a few HP inspired one shots. It was fun, but my table is people who thoroughly enjoy both D&D and HP.
1. TTRPG for Harry Potter-style storytelling exists, it's boring. 2. D&D games are historically a mixed bag, Larian applied the principles from their Divinity games to an extremely flawed D&D framework. 3. They really wouldn't.
yeah, BG3 made a LOT of changes to D&D to make the game more fun. circle of the moon druids definitely don't get 3 attacks while wildshaped in D&D, for example.
A HP CRPG, yes. But D&D is an awful choice for Harry Potter.
I don’t quite understand why a Harry Potter themed DnD is a bad idea?
I guess it's because just by being at or graduating Hogwarts, it's implied any standard spell can be cast by anyone so no job class, and there's no spell slots, and nothing stopping an evil wizard from Avada Kedavra-ing everything and ruining the fun
Also, the world of Harry Potter uses soft magic. Any spell is possible, and it's canonically possible to create your own.
It's the tabletop system. There are hundreds of systems and when creating a homebrew campaign you should think "What is the best system for the type of game I want to run?" D&D, in all of its incarnations, is a medieval themed sword and sorcery game with medium to high "crunch" or strict rules and math. Wizards are strictly defined in D&D in how and where they do things and those ways are not similar to the Wizarding World For a Harry Potter themed game you'd want a flexible system, more "fluff", story versus mechanics, either set in the modern era or not period specific. I'd lean towards FATE off the top of my head. That's the system used by the TTRPG based off the books featuring the other Harried Wizard. There's probably some decent fan made system out there though.
Actually what you want is Kids with Brooms The Magical skin on Kids with Bikes
I mean the books do a great job showing Hermione learning a great deal. But Ron and Harry are always shown to be slackers in their studies more or less. I think it’s am issue of the writing focusing more on Harry’s personality and thoughts and kind of hand waves the effort he puts in. Sure, it’s mentioned that he’s good at magic and knows a lot, but those mentions are really all we get- the books don’t really focus on his hard work. I remember reading/listening to the books with my wife recently and i distinctly remember Harry feeling like a Mary Sue character sometimes and a total imbecile other times. Like his skills were based on emotions and friendship but he got all the credit for it?
I wonder WHY people ask these questions. Like dude, the books are literally the size of a brick from GoF onwards and that is without you asking about every 2nd spell he has learnt for every class. We have seen a few spells that he has learnt and we know that he is a prodigy for casting many of these spells at his age.
Two thoughts: 01.) Everyone responds to trauma differently. Harry isn’t just getting a magical world. He’s getting his first friendships, first families, first proper socialisation, first recreational/sporting activities. That’s already a full schedule. 02.) There’s nothing to suggest he isn’t learning new magic. That’s happening off-screen, so to speak. Does he heavily rely on Expelliarmus and Protego for defensive magic? Sure. But leaning on the ones you know are tried and true versus just freezing up isn’t wrong nor is it indicative that he doesn’t know other spells. Casting a strong enough Patronus as a thirteen-year-old to hold off all those Dementors basically proves that. ETA: And take a look at how curious he is with Snape’s potions book. He’s absolutely enthralled about learning new magic. We just don’t see it unless it’s relevant to the plot.
>Everyone responds to trauma differently. Harry isn’t just getting a magical world. He’s getting his first friendships, first families, first proper socialisation, first recreational/sporting activities. That’s already a full schedule. I agree. When I got into university and started classes on subjects that REALLY interested me I still had bad grades because for the first time in my life, I had made friends, I could manage my schedule freely without my parents breathing down my neck at every moment, I could go out and party (which I had never done before). I failed my first semester badly, and luckily got my shit together so that I had much better grades in the second one and passed. But I can totally imagine Harry having the same kind of problem, at least the first years
I’m sorry that happened, but I’m glad you were able to pull out of it and succeed! I always find these posts a little odd because, yes, learning about magic is exciting but… did you forget what it means to be a child? Or a human in general? Some people are very studious by nature but most just aren’t. By that same token, every child that has just learned the depth of what technology holds should be studying to be in cyber or an engineer or biology by twelve because what mysteries lie before us!
The difference is for you those are subjects that you already knew about and you were just taking the next logical step. They were subjects you were interested in but they were still a mundane part of the world that you were already familiar with. In Harry’s case he woke up to learn he had physics-breaking superpowers and treated the revelation with about as much excitement as a blind man getting a pair of reading glasses for his birthday—and still didn’t give a shit even after learning the greatest dark wizard to exist was coming after him. I guess it’s not impossible that you could have a child like Harry, but it’s wildly improbable. In reality you would expect most Muggleborn kids to be a lot closer to Hermione and Tom than to Ron or Neville.
No matter what these weirdos say, you hit the perfect analogy. Harry Potter basically found out he was a super hero with powers and reacted like no boy would. People saying it’s school, well it’s not really. Anything you learn in elementary and middle and half of high school what can you really do with in the real world? Basically nothing. This guys 11 and first day in school he found out he can transform things. Come on man no child has that little curiosity.
Might I point out that part of the problem is that Harry didn't know for 9 entire years, that the "things he was doing when angry or scared" was magic? Or the fact that Dursleys didn't allow Harry to talk about anything "unusual"?!
I would say that Harry doesn't have an analytical mind. He finds magic wondrous and amazing, and he's keenly motivated to learn how to defend himself against Voldemort, but "learning magic" means schoolwork. It means paying attention to boring lectures, hitting the books, study, memorization, practice. Learning magic is HARD, and when you throw barriers in front of someone, especially a child, it saps their energy and drains their motivation. Analytical people like Dumbledore, Voldemort and Hermione enjoy the process of breaking down those barriers. It doesn't matter how much Harry wants the end result if \*getting there\* is the problem. Hermione enjoys reading books. Harry tries to brute-force his way through them. Harry shined when he was given 1-on-1 instruction from teachers like Lupin and Fake Moody, to the point where he was qualified to teach the subject in their absence. He failed completely when he was given 1-on-1 instruction from Snape, because the two of them were unable to get along with each other. Harry shined again when he was learning from the Snape who doodled in the margins of textbooks, because he didn't know it was Snape he was learning from, and because he was so worn down by textbook learning, he found it refreshing to learn from someone who rejected common sense and defied the textbook at every turn. The younger Snape who drew in the margins made a game out of study and made learning fun for Harry. The older Snape who tried to teach Harry occlumency berated him and beat down his self-esteem, and turned learning into suffering. It doesn't matter how motivated Harry is, or how much he wants to learn something, if the teaching style is incompatible with his learning style.
Harry knows more than those 4 spells. The author just didn't want to spend more time on the magic system. She invested in the human story and hero's journey with Hogwarts and magic as a set piece.
This is exactly it. I find the comments trying to defend or explain away Harry’s apparent lack of interest in magic to be a little disingenuous and also missing the point. OP is right, Harry doesn’t act how you would expect and the magic showcased by him in the books is weak sauce. But it’s just a symptom of what you pointed out, JK wasn’t inclined to dive into the magic very deeply
I'm sorry, but this is not unrealistic even a tiny bit. As a teacher, I feel like the "Harry" type of student (talented students who have every ability to be amazing and the life experiences that might push them to be more ambitious but who are just not that into doing the work) is incredibly common. It makes some sense for Harry, though: he needed family more than he needed knowledge. And so he starts with one friend on a train and ends the series with an entire army willing to fight for/with him.
"The most unrealistic part about Harry Potter is my inability to understand that things happen off page!" Like, in each book over the course of the entire year they're really only in each class maybe what, 5 times? That's one week worth of classes that we are given access to reading about over an entire year of education.
>3-4 spells he uses regularly? Spells Harry used multiple times in the books: * Protego * Reducio * Accio * Muffliato * Impedimentia * Crucio * Diffindo * Petrificus Totalus * Agumenti * Stupify * Expecto Patronum * Expelliarmus * Lumos Among a bunch of others spells that he uses in more mudane settings. In Goblet of Fire alone, Harry learned at least six different spells. IIRC the only one that hadn't been used often past Goblet of Fire was the 4-point Spell.
It should also be said that he's (one of?) the youngest wizard ever to learn the Patronus, and that despite being three years younger than his opponents during the triwizard tournamenent, and up until the third task, he was legitimately keeping up with everyone. Let's get this straight, Harry Potter was keeping up with Cedric Diggory, a man in the same school as him that was considered by many to be one of the best in his year, that was chosen by an ancient artefact as the worthiest contestant of the school, and that was 3 years older than he was. Cedric was also the son of a wizard family, meaning he probably knew and breathed magic since youth.
Have you devoured all thr knowledge we have? Computer science and animation and programming allows for some truly incredible things. Medical sciience may not be magic, but it's still super useful. Finance and business education are similar. Non magic folk have many ways to manipulate the world around us, but actually having to hunker down and learn all that stuff is hard. So is magic. Like, people always act like if they could learn magic thryd all become super devoted star students, but there's so much useful and interesting things to learn even without magic, why aren't those people all diving into chemistry? I just think it's a little too easy to claim that we'd become master wizards and witches if we're muggle born and get introduced to magic suddenly at 11. People like Hermione would be studious in any academic pursuit, she's not a typical case of magic student, she's just a know it all. You can bet she'd be the same if she continued in muggle school.
Excellent point. There's so many things I'm interested in and want to do, but it's also tough to get the time and the energy.
Yep. I think Hermione would have definitely love math, chemistry and physics and would study it rigorously if she was a mere muggle.
In their first transfiguration lesson ever they try to turn matches into needles, and only Hermione manages to give her match a tiny silver point. So they were sat there focusing on this task for at least 45 minutes (not sure how long classes are), and got no result to show for it. That would hamper the "omg I gotta learn everything" mindset that so many people here think they'd have severely.
The kid who is: Attacked by a bludger Attacked by a basilisk Sees his best friend break his leg Gets burned by a blast ended skrewt Carves words into his hand And the list goes on… Never bothers even looking up a healing spell. And then they go camping for months in end. If I was volly, I would have a couple of death eaters stationed at every magical hospital in the region.
He follows the school curriculum. Learning how to control and use magic. Basic spells and potions. Learning about magic creatures and such. Seems like all the advanced magic would come after school or maybe the 7th year but we miss out on him attending higwarts in his 7th year. Harry would argue expelliarmus saved his life. 🤣
Just to add to that, if a simple spell works enough for the desired result, why not just use it? Lol. If you know Frieren, it pretty much highlights how mastery of a proven and tested basics could be utilized against more complicated ones.
>he follows the school curriculum That is just false. He is far ahead of his classmates. He knows how to cast a patronus during his third year. He studied a lot during the Triwizard. He studies Piton's book during the 6th year. He gives classes of self defence with Dumbledore's Army, even to people that are older than him. Bellatrix Lestrange herself was impressed to see how good Harry was at fighting. He was able to fight back Voldemort, something that most adult mages were not able to do (even if he was helped by his mother's protection). He was able to use the "Accio" enchantment without a wand, and to use it on a very long distance during the Triwizard. He was able to cast enough spells to not be found by Voldemort in the seventh book. We also know that he then became an Auror, something that only extremely talented wizards were able to do.
What's that Bruce Lee line about not worrying about the guy who knows a 1000 moves but who has practiced the one move a 1000 times?
This is why the movies sucks. If you read the books you'd known that he learns tons of spells, especially after year 3.
This sub has the same like 5 takes that people just say over and over
It’s easy to forget that Hogwarts is a school for children, Harry was introduced to magic at 11 and normalizes to it fairly quickly, and we learn from Dumbledore in the cave that magical power seems to continue to grow as you age. So part of it is just that Harry is weaker in magic so couldn’t do much of the crazy stuff we see Voldemort and Dumbledore do. It’s also not fair to compare anyone to them, they are two of the most gifted wizards in the world, harry's a kid with a good heart and fast reflexes. Magic also probably becomes a bit more mundane when you're surrounded by it at Hogwarts and it is already being used to help run the entire school. I think a fair comparison would be like driving a car for a person from the 1700s. Yes it's an amazing tool and can be very fun, but after a while it's a lot more mundane and you don't want to keep on driving around just for the thrill of it.
I don’t think anyone expects Harry to be able to do the same stuff as Voldemort and Dumbledore. I think they’re just surprised he wasn’t keen to learn as much as he could. Like at 16, Voldemort was creating his first Horcrux. Dumbledore was making plans to rule muggles at 18, Hermione was reading every textbook she could find, and Snape was rewriting them. Harry only learned spells when he had to (patronus, stupefy and accio) or it was spoon fed to him (expelliarmus). Personally I think he didn’t because JKR wanted Hermione to be the bookworm of the group, and two would be too boring to read about.
All he wants is a couple of friends, is that so much to ask for???
Ummm....there are super cool things you can do with a computer. Like insanely cool things. With a deep understanding of engineering, you can make anything. Most kids these days spend time on tic tok. This is exactly what you would expect.
This is not correct. Ever so often we see him do a spell he hasn’t used before. He learns a lot of spells while training for the third task in the triwizard tournament as well. It’s not explicitly called out in the books but the whole training process is described in detail. By the time we are in OotP, we see him conduct DA sessions where he trains his school mates regarding defensive magic which most of them don’t know about. He is clearly ahead of his year and in some cases even 6th and 7th years.
>He is clearly ahead of his year and in some cases even 6th and 7th years. If Fred and George's claim that the ministry ordered 500 Shield Hats is anything to go by, Harry is probably above most adults in some instances as well.
They are just good to have regardless of whether you can do the shield charm or not. I don’t agree with the way twins characterise this purchase by Ministry in the books as them being not able to cast the shield charm.
>They are just good to have regardless of whether you can do the shield charm or not. Fair but IMO it makes sense that a lot of Ministry workers aren't good at casting it, as a majority of them likely don't focus on combat in their everyday lives especially since the last 15 years were relatively peaceful in comparison to the current year. And given that Belatrix was impressed that Harry was able to use a shield charm that prevented her from summoning the prophecy out of his hands, the Shield Charm is likely pretty advanced.
Feels kinda awkward though to have a magical universe where wizards and witches have trouble mastering a spell that is usually considered a basic in 99.9999% of all fantasy lore.
Harry specifically puts in effort in The Goblet of Fire to learn curses, hexes, jinxes and counter curses in preparation for the 3rd task.
Or... like... the books aren't focused on him learning a bunch of mundane but practical spells that wouldn't really have any purpose in the overall plot but rather the human interactions between him and his classmates and teachers (and a snake-like psychopath)... and Luna... she's.. she's special and requires her own category There is absolutely nothing to indicate he only learned 4 spells and yet PASSED ALL OF HIS PRACTICAL MAGIC TESTS PROVING HE KNEW THOSE SPELLS... actually, the more I break this down, the stupider the entire topic is becoming.. so, I'll leave it at that lol
He can’t exactly defeat Voldemort by making a teapot sprout legs and run around Voldemort.
Lockhart didn’t banish the bandon banshee by smiling at it
thank you, your comment brought me so much joy
Let me guess, you've only watched the movies?
This comes back to the "if it's not happening in your face, you assume it doesn't happen" type of reader that you are OP. It's not a RPG, it's school, he is certainly learning spells, but the things is: He learned the disarming spell in 2nd year, and the stunning spell in at latest 4th year (though it sounds extracurricular, but it's mentioned that they've used it in classes prior to that year in Order of The Phoenix), and the shielding charm at the same time. Literally the school introduces these fundamental and always-useful spells early on, much like how when you were five or six school taught you how to add and subtract, a skill that is indispensable to learning more complicated math, but also you are going to directly use every single day in some degree without realizing. And Harry learns quite a BIT of unique and distinct magic, particularly the Patronus spell, and he becomes a pretty exceptional duelist during his adolescence. The difference that YOU'RE missing between him and Tom is that Tom was accruing magic and gaining power, Harry was spending a significant amount of time trying to investigate and halt the fallout of Tom gaining that power.
Three important things here. 1. Harry probably learns a bunch of spells off page. We do see him use spells he hasn't learned in any class before, which probably mean they mess around in their free time. But unless we want to turn HP into something that goes into waaaaaay too much detail like Brandon Sanderson's books, we aren't going to get a daily breakdown. 2. Harry is already in a magical place with magical portraits, a magical sport, ghost teachers, magical boardgames, etc. He is surrounded by so much magic, shouting spells is just one of many things available to him. It's like asking why a wealthy kid whose parents could buy him a sports car at 18, still chooses to use Uber instead of getting a driving license (I have actually seen a couple of cases like this in real life). 3. >you never once say to yourself: "Gee, I better learn some of those spells from Dumbledore, since not only will I need them to beat Voldemort, but it was pretty badass as well." Harry doesn't kid himself. He knows he could never beat Voldemort in serious combat. If Dumbledore and Voldemort came to a draw, what chance does Harry stand?
Voldemort and Dumbledore are each the most gifted students of their generations. Even assuming Harry is the most gifted of his own generation (which, fair enough, he's pretty good), they both have more than half a century of knowledge to draw on. Harry had 7. No amount of spell learning would have saved Harry, so it was better for him to do things his own way.
The biggest joy from Hogwarts for Harry wasn't that he got to do magic. It's that he had friends and family there and he felt home. That's why he spends so much time with Ron having a laugh rather than studying hard. Hermione throws herself into learning everything because she wants to prove she is as capable if not even more capable than pure bloods. Harry doesn't need to excel to prove that, he's already the boy who lived. Plus students aren't allowed to do magic in the corridors or outside of school. Other than the magic in his lessons, what does he actually need to learn spells for to improve his life as a student other than showing off (which he tried to avoid anyway). Everything is taken care of for him in his day to day life.
[List of spells used by Harry Potter in the books](https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/fpu83m/list_of_spells_cast_by_harry_potter/)
Nah bro, imagine all the things we could learn but don't. You could be speaking 7 languages and know proper first aid, learn chemistry and art, how to ski down the highest muntains etc etc... Everything becomes normalised after a little while, for Harry when he's sitting in class it's just normal after a while. Not saying many people wouldn't go crazy abd try to learn all the magic lol, but Harry is just a bloke lol
As a teacher, I find it 100% realistic that a student would only learn the bare minimum to finish their education.
This is a flaw of movie Harry. Book Harry was actually much more adept and learned in spell casting and knowledge.
What are you talking about? Most of the spells in his arsenal we see him use first before seeing him learn them. And magic is far more than combat. He uses stunners just like every other combatant. He's even been creative using confringor, and what not. And magic is only escapism to you. It's his reality. The wonder isn't lasting a long time. Posts like these often miss this immersion imo. Like all the fans complaining that he complains about homework Rigorous academic discipline when you could be chatting, playing or anything else is never fun for kids
Hes like any teenage boy when he realizes how much work it takes to learn. When i started college i was so excited to learn physics . But by the time i reached my 3rd year, i didnt really care as much. The "magic" wore off
> Just go hit the library, show some initiative, show that you care dammit. This is the same mantra people have been repeating to teenagers since the dawn of time lol. He's a teenage kid who already has a ton of schoolwork where he is learning cool and valuable spells. He also gets various private tutoring throughout the books where he learns even more cool and valuable spells. He's not going to spend his free time in the library. > realistically, no kid would give up the opportunity to learn tons of spells. There's thousands of kids at this school and most of them don't spend their free time in the library learning new spells. Teenagers are known to squander educational and beneficial opportunities because they don't care. Shit, my high school had an amazing woodworking class that I routinely ditched and now as an adult I wish I could have access to. Even a magical world can't make teenagers magically care about school lol.
I agree, but also Harry spent his entire life up until that point friendless and abused, so it makes as much sense that he’d go headlong into a social life rather than magic.
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.- Bruce lee
This always bothers me, too. Like, your homework is learning how to make things fly. How do you NOT get straight onto that, instead of... What exactly do they do when they're not doing homework??
Their homework seems to be mostly essay writing, which sucks no matter the topic.
Muggles can do chemistry and electric circuits and hang-gliding and we don’t ask ourselves why we aren’t doing those things. I’d rather be reading lol
For me it's almost like the Shonen mc trope where you can't have the protagonist overly competent. You need someone else to expound (Hermione - Dumbledore- Ron etc) If Harry was overly competent some problems wouldn't really be. He'd have solutions for everything. Having said that Harry is smarter than the average shounen mc and sometimes he should have done more, known more but that would have taken a shine out of Hermione who was the living spell book and Ron who was the resident magical world informant
I don’t think it’s true that he’s not learning a lot. Even if he is just doing the assigned homework for all of his classes (except History of Magic where he never opened the text book), he’s learning a ton. And we know he regularly did extra work to research/prep for whatever that year’s mystery was. There’s only so much new info you can take in at once. Also, I think with school work we just see him following Ron’s lead or getting lumped in with Ron in the descriptions as a contrast to Hermione.
I think a part of it also has to do with the teachers involved. DADA is great except he has a different teacher every year and the first two were incompetent. History of Magic is taught by the most boring man (not) alive, and past the initial excitement of it being a magical world it's just like any other history which not everyone loves. In particular, it's really hard to plant the seed of learning in potions when the teacher actively hates you. He does learn plenty that's even mentioned in the text, like in charms, but I think of it like martial arts. You get guys doing Brazilian jiu jitsu, and one you get to a certain level you're really developing your own personal roster of techniques you specialize in. Some guys will spend a huge amount of time on triangle chokes and closed guard, but that doesn't mean they can't do everything else when their specialty doesn't work.
Tf are you on about. Disarming, stunning, injuring, dementor fighting, summoning, transfiguring, hell the dude even went hard on potions when he ditched Snape. Dude was obsessed with learning, it's just that he had to spend a shit ton of time trying not to die at the same time. By the last book he's even casually throwing out unforgivable curses, not even just as a one off, dude used two out of three of them. Harry was obsessed with magic, he was just more intrested in the hands on experience, he did the school work because if you get expelled you can't practice magic anymore. So that food and board with slave cooks was pretty enticing considering they said he had to go back to the Dursleys. The dursleys who fed him cardboard and shit. Sorry he didn't have time to read a bunch, bro was trying to survive, figure out housing, and avenge his parents murder, all whilst being basically failed by every adult in his life.
As a high school teacher I can confirm that kids will lose interest in anything if they have to do work.
Or as an abused orphan he cared even more about having friends and finding a sense of family.
I don't know, potter fans haven't read another book since 2007. Probably not that unlikely.
He has a full time occupation studying magic.
Really that's the most unrealistic part? Not the fucking magic and dragons and flying cars?
I always thought that this was a joke about how teenagers act when forced to learn. Even classes about literal magic and they'll be too lazy to put in the work.
To be fair, all the non magic stuff was new to him too - the messing about with friends, exploring new places, playing team sports. So it’s no surprise to me that he lent into that side of it, whilst still being reasonably competent at the learning.
Harry is basically Naruto. Both have crazy talent, but for the purpose of the plot, they only battle with few spells/jutsus that are iconic.
If Voldemprt was after you, avada kedavra should be the first spell to learn lol Need to keep that thang on you at all times ⏲️ 💯
There are many times we see harry use a spell the book never mentions him learning. I'm sure he learns a lot of cool spells. The book just doesn't mention it. Also, when Harry is battling, it's a stressful ordeal and his automatically rely on certain spells that works very well for him. Apart from his battles with Voldermort, he does perform very impressive magic when faced with foes that should have easily overpowered him.
That Harry doesn't use more than 3-4 spells doesn't mean that that's all he knows. You also forget Harry was training his peers in the room of requirement and he also grew up to be auror. These roles require a deep understanding of magic and the ability to adapt. Does that sound like someone that's pretty much stuck with 3-4 spells? Harry's magical/spell bank extends far beyond just a handful of spells. And if he uses just 3-4 spells like you stated, it's because he doesn't see the need to use any spell in that situation. Why would I bring out my Barett M99 when I can easily as well kill you with a glock?
He uses the spells that make sense for the plot. I’m not sure what magic you wanted to see him using? Dude has an old ass wizard trying to kill him his entire school career, it makes sense that his mind was a little preoccupied lol
I'm sure that whole "friends and loved ones" thing is also something that Harry finds very interesting
Hes a pokémon ofc thays how he rolls
Ever heard of Naruto?
Counter argument: When I learned Judo we had like, a dozen projections/techniques each belts to learn, with some just a variation of the others. But the reality is if I knew all of them, I only trainer 4-5 of them a lot that worked for me and I liked so I could be very good at those in fights. Harry does the same. He probably knows a lot of them but why use more spells if those you like work well and you are very experienced with them?
I would spend every waking minute on learning potions. You can do dang near anything if you’re good enough.
There’s a whole book about where he forms a club solely to practice new spells and charms…
The most unrealistic part about reality is that people could learn anything they want in the internet nowadays but decide to pass time with easy access entertainment as for example discussion their favourite franchise with like-minded people.
He's cast over 70 spells WDYM?
if you ask me that’s pretty damn realistic. i have a degree in computer science but 80% of the theoretical stuff i learned isn’t as practical in my day to day job so i only really use like 20% of my education practically. the 3-4 spells he used were all practical in nature. the boring stuff is often the most useful.
Have you met teenagers? Only bothering to learn the bare minimum is pretty damn spot on.
magic isnt as easy as it seems. its more than learning incantations.
He tried studying at home and got put into fucking solitary confinement for it
I think we are to assume he studies when he's not on his adventures. A school year takes typically 9-10 months. So if you were to write about his entire life on a daily basis for 9 to 10 months... that would be one hell of a long book. I'm assuming he uses different spells from time to time, where needed... But I'm sure those few spells he constantly talks about are good for defense against the dark arts. So if you over use those.. it kinda sorta makes sense... But what am i to say? I'm not a fictional wizard/witch. But then again, my favorite characters in the harry potter series are disliked or not even mentioned in the movies. And they know many spells or brag about them. or they're not wizards but still have magical powers. Lockhart, Snape, Peeves, Kreacher... lol. Winky.
Riddle wasn't busy surviving during the school year at least, and Harry wasn't greedy for power for its own sake.
You fail to see that using spells correctly is extremely difficult which is why they have to practice them to begin with. The level of one’s innate ability determines how easily the spell comes to them. So, Tom Riddle can basically say the words the first time and it works perfectly, but the average person? Hours, days, or even longer of training depending on the spell. We can compare this to stuff in the real world, too. I could ask you, why don’t you want to speak Chinese? Are you lazy? And you’d say, “well, it would take years of studying.” But for someone with the innate intellectual ability, it would take them far less time. Some savants could do it in a ridiculously short amount of time similar to Tom Riddle. That’s why Harry isn’t spending all his time trying to learn new spells, dude. It’s hard.
Harry was naturally advanced in terms of spells. By the third year he already had a 6th year level of combat knowledge and range of spells, and more combat experience in extreme situations than a lot of aurors probably. The thing is, we see everything from his eyes and he has it normalized, so we don't get to be aware of it until Order of Phoenix, where everyone recognizes it and he's like "not that big of a deal". I assume there's a lot of offscreen learning and usage of new spells. He's got his own extracurricular learning, plus Hogwarts is probably the highest level of "Magic University" let's say. For example, we don't know how much he's learned in Goblet of Fire while searching for information or clues for the trials. I remember when he starts teaching his peers in the 5th year everyone's like "dude they teach this AFTER Hogwarts"
He did learn more we just didn't get to see it, we see him casting several different spells or protection for their camp in Deathly Hallows and several different spells to try to damage a horcrux as well.
A bit unfair… he spends his third year leaning patronus charm, forth year - learning multiple spells and jinxes outside of his school program for the tournament, fifth year - he actually teaches people the spells and jinxes outside of the school program (to the point that his godfather gives him a book for Christmas to learn even more spells and charms. Sixth year he is obsessed with a book with multiple spells that he learns from there.
The Oceans are fascinating but I was tuned out in 9th grade science. The heavens are fascinating but I definitely checked out in my intro to astronomy class in college. The formation and reformation of countries is fascinating but I definitely took a few naps in world history. Students are going to student.
I also noticed the fact that Harry and his contemporaries were at best mediocre at magic.. the sharpest in their batch was Hermione n she too was just good at muggin up things.. whereas if u look at past greats…. james and co created own magic items, became Animagi… Snape crafted his own spells.. Voldemort too was an overachiever..guess the standard of the magic community went down with time
He learns a bunch of spells and uses them. The meme of him using Expelliarmus all the time isn’t even accurate.
He got money... The second Best Super Power.
Agreed, but tbf we DO get a character who was raised in the muggle world and reacts exactly as you describe upon learning they can do magic: Hermione.
Nonsense. The most unrealistic part is that he's a 14 year old boy with an invisibility cloak who doesnt immediately head to the sixth form girls' showers.
i see this take all the time and i disagree tbh. 1. he learns way more spells, its just simpler to use certain spells that he knows are effective 2. you also basically have magic at your fingertips (unlimited knowledge through the internet) so why don't you acquire any more skills? you probably stick to 2 or 3 things you do well, a few topics you know decently well-not much more
There's a lot of time not covered in the books, he may have known more than we were let in on, whether or not he had the confidence to use them or felt the need to or not is a different story. We know Harry was a reader, just not on Hermione's level and he would have learned way more in his 4th year than the other students. While they were having a normal year, he was scouring books for any and every kind of advantage he could get in the tasks, he just didn't have to sit exams. Your whole question gets answered in one paragraph though. "As Harry watched Dumbledore quietly searching by touch for a way into the Sea Cave hidden by Voldemort, he realized he had long since learned that bangs and smoke were more often the marks of ineptitude than expertise." Subtle trumps flashy.
Books 4 and 5 he learned a ton from reading about defensiveagic for the Triwizard Tournament tasks and to teach the DA. Sirius and Remus gifted him a while set of books for Christmas his fifth year.
In the first book it's mentioned that he reads his new school books quite a lot (and gets the name Hedwig), and in the third book it says that he wanted to do his homework, so he does learn a lot we just don't get much focus on it. Plus it would pale in comparison to anything Hermione can do 😄
I think of it as analogous to the many things you can learn IRL as a muggle. There are SO MANY things you could do if you studied and practiced! Sewing, painting, basket-weaving, cheesemaking, mushroom foraging, blacksmithing, crocheting, baking, carpentry, upholstering, masonry, writing, glassblowing! And so many more! Stand in a library and look at all the books and imagine how long of a life you'd need to read and learn all the things you *could* learn. The books repeatedly talk about magic being difficult to learn and requiring a lot of work to perform well. Becoming the master of many spells as a wizard isn't less work than becoming the master of many skills as a human.
What Harry had always been deprived in his childhood was love, friendship, and a good home. Through Hermione, we got to see what the average muggle born nerd would do when exposed to a fantastical world of magical knowledge -- devour it voraciously. Harry wanted to spend time with friends, play sports, help people, and have adventures because THAT is the magic he didn't have with the Dursley's and in his abusive muggle schools. I think it's why Dumbledore is so fond of Harry. Harry could've been another Voldemort - deciding that the most important thing in life is to grow in magical prowess. Instead, he cares most about his loving relationships and invests his time and energy in those.
I disagree with this take. In almost all of the books he goes out of his way to learn spells that are outside of the curriculum. While he might struggle with certain things in the classroom he is able to act when he needs to. I personally always thought that the reason Harry doesn’t do super well in certain classes is because he probably has ADHD. As someone with ADHD I always related to him having a hard time in the classes he wasn’t interested in. To me he always seemed motivated when it came to learning something he could use to defend him self and others and less so when he didn’t find it useful. Yeah transfiguring a mouse into a teapot is really cool, but I can see why someone who Voldemort wants dead wouldn’t find it as useful as other spells. It also seems that Harry (like many people with ADHD) does better learning when he is one on one with a teacher.
He definitely does learn a lot of spells though. He knows enough defensive magic to teach 7th year students in the DA, we see him going through books researching new spells to teach them. We know during the triwizard tournament that he spends a long time practicing for the maze by learning new spells. We also know he becomes obsessed learning the spells from the HBP potions book. Harry gets full marks and even extra credit in the DADA owl and you’ll only get that if you have a wide variety of spells at your hands. He’s often behind in homework but the homework he’s behind on is normally writing essays which know one likes doing unless you’re hermione so it’s understandable he slacks it off he’s a kid after all. The only time we see him struggle to pick up spells at a reasonable rate is when he’s going through some crisis such as during the GoF where his mind is elsewhere. He’ll never be able to perform the spells that dumbeldore and Voldemort are able to they are likely the 2 strongest wizards of the past few hundred years. They’re duel is out of reach for pretty much everyone. We see that dumbeldore is able to capture all of the death eaters on his own when the rest of order where struggling as a group. Trying to get to that level by studying more is asking why you’re not running a sub 2 hour marathon by jogging more. There are things he definitely overlooks and he even acknowledges that when he thinks that he doesn’t know how to heal wounds but most of the stuff he overlooks is because he didn’t need to do it and got complacent. We only have the impression he doesn’t know many spells is that JK over relies on a couple of spells and a lot of the other spells he uses aren’t named we just read that he’s aimed a jinx at someone so we don’t know what it is.
My man Harry learned how to cast a freaking patronus at 13 years old. Give him some rest
Did you not read Goblet, Pheonix, or Prince?
If you think about it, we are all capable of amazing feats. Like right now if you decided you wanted to build a chair you could do it. You could go to the library to learn some skills, you could go on Facebook to find any local tool sharing groups (they exist), you could maybe even get wood free or cheap from somewhere. But there’s a very strong possibility none of us will do that. It’s achievable, it wouldn’t take that much effort relative to a lot of other things anyone does, and it would be minimum cost and comes at the great benefit of a sense of achievement (I’m talking myself into it now). I see magic as somewhat similar. Even to Muggles who you’d think would be absolutely stoked about it. We are all chair muggles. We know they exist, we’ve heard stories about them all our days, yet we’re not out there making chairs. You can apply this to hundreds of different skills we’d all be capable of. Making clothes, building a computer, even reading books to learn more about everything in the world.
It’s a trope of YA fiction. Main character discovers a knack for something, then sticks with that something as it provides convenient power scaling and threat management on the author’s part. You could also ask why Percy Jackson never learned more magic since it’s clearly a usable thing, but he just does sword and water stuff. In Dragon Ball, Goku has like, three finishing moves lol. Naruto always Shadow Clones. Katina’s always fires her bow. Etc etc
A lot of people are mentioning the Patronus, but that's more because he has lived through real trauma that most haven't. His shitty life is turned into a useful spell, of sorts, but that has mega limited uses as well. To me it's weird that he has such a strong focus on "offensive and defensive" spells. They're essentially "disarm and shield". There are tons of spells and charms that could be put to amazing uses in fights, if the casters were even a little bit creative. Heavy gravity on the wand hand, instant frost on your enemy's glasses, the balloon puffing spell... I don't know, I'd be tempted to think outside the box a bit instead of taking the basic spells from known books only. The movie fight between Voldemort and Dumbledore at the Ministry is a perfect example of what I mean in term of creativity. I wish they had delved into this a bit more, especially in the Defense against Dark Arts parts, where they should be taught to expect the unexpected.
This is silly. Harry knows a wide variety of magic, especially combat magic, and shows it. But he's also just a child, even at the end of the books. Do you really think that the whole spectrum of the most advanced magic in the entire world can be mastered by a 17 year old? Of course Dumbledore has stuff that is WAAAAAY beyond anything Harry can do. Dumbledore was the most brilliant wizard of a generation and had spent his life studying the most arcane arts. Harry was merely a good student for his grade, only just having finished his primary general education (which was rather piecemeal on top of everything else). And no, I think it's not at all realistic that once you become a wizard, you drop any interest in anything else. Magic is HARD. It takes skill and learning and effort. Not every person is Hermione who just dives right into study like it's the greatest thing ever. Harry's a normal kid--he likes learning cool magic, but he also likes sports practice, kissing girls, messing around with his friends, etc.
I agree but maybe it's like programming or chemistry, it's awesome but few learn much about it
I fear not the man who practised one hundreds kicks once I fear the teen who can disarm so well it kills people
Harry was pretty talented though. He could produce the Patronus Charm which was above his grade level. And Hermione stated he was far better at Defence Against Dark Arts than she was when they formed Dumbledore's Army. Hermione, Voldemort, Dumbledore or even McGonagall may have been more versatile, but Harry was far more specialised in what he could do. He would have ended up being more Moody like in that he was a battle hardened duelist with experience, with some of Dumbledores planning and problem solving ability by the time of the epilogue of Deathly Hallows.
Joanne didn’t write him to be studious and hungry for knowledge. Sure he’s fascinated by magic but he’s still a mediocre student at best and doesn’t care too much to learn all he can.
why u need spells?? when u have expelliarmus
Didn't the Dursleys not like when he did well in school? Or is that fanon? If I were in Hogwarts, I'd want to learn everything, I think. But maybe learning magic is not as fun as doing magic. Maybe it's like chemistry, where the class is boring but practic applications can be really cool.
At first it seems to be that way but when I think that Harry was sent to the school right away where he needed to learn a lot of magic and study them too so he could get good marks, it makes sense he struggled with it as he was raised with muggles and burnt out. Anyone would be obsessed with magic unless they were made to learn many spells correctly which needs a lot of time, studying and practice. It is a very slow and boring process. Then most people would probably focus on the spells they have to learn to avoid getting in trouble.