Don Arnold/WireImage / Reddit
Most Harry Potter fans spend their time thinking and talking about the characters, the storyline, that one friend they have that they just know is a Hufflepuff, etc. Others, though, prefer to take their Harry Potter talks in another direction. Those fans are into talking about the psychology, the anthropology, the politics... what the Harry Potter universe could mean. That's where one Reddit user came into play when they asked:
What are some of the more horrifying implications of the Harry Potter universe? Be warned, the answers went dark almost immediately and are not for the faint-of-heart or children.
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1. Soul-crushing... literally.
They have confirmed, empirical evidence for the existence of souls
The general public is perfectly OK with the destruction of the soul as a form of punishment
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2. Maybe Muggles Were Slaughtered As Cattle?
Avada Kedavra = Abra Kadabra
The only spell that exists for the one purpose of killing, is also the spell that's deeply ingrained in Muggle culture. Which means that the Killing Curse was used enough around Muggles that its butchered pronunciation is used as a general "magic" sounding phrase.
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3. Ohhh That's Creepy McGross
Two words.
Polyjuice prostitutes.
You know that girl you've got a crush on? Just find a single hair and some polyjuice potion and voila! Have a prostitute drink some polyjuice for an hour of fun with anyone. And you know there is a black market for that shit. Lockhart probably sells a few clippings a day for a thousand galleons a pop
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5. Nope, We Didn't Want To Think About That.
The sheer number of times poor Peter Pettigrew had to watch young Ron wank.
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6. Well That Killed Our Buzz
That their world is dying.
Think about it. All of the great magicians are dead and ancient. Time Turners? Nobody knows how to make those anymore. A powerful magic who's methods have been lost to time. The Deathly Hallows, three items that turn well known laws of even magical physics on their heads, cannot be recreated using modern means. The three brothers were probably intelligent and powerful to create them, yet modern wizards find the idea so outlandish they consider them a fairy tale. There are even old magics, like the The Arch in the ministry, that nobody even knows what they are anymore. What purpose they may have served.
The pure blood lines are crumbling, falling back on old money and old blood to prop up their nobility. The segregation and racism deepen the gulfs and serve only to ensure that their world sinks deeper into disrepair. Wars flicker off and on, magic guarded jealously, and even among magical people there are those born without the spark. Squibs.
Certainly there are powerful wizards. Dumbledore was put forward as an example of such. But bear in mind that he also used the Elder Wand and still was no match for Voldemort. The creator of the Sorcerer's Stone, Nicolas Flemel, opted to let the secret of its creation die with him. And maybe it's that mentality of wizards, to jealously guard their secrets, that have led to a world that is slowly dying around them.
Edit: In addition they are stagnant. They don't know how to grow. As a society they don't know how to advance. For the most obvious example let's look at Snape and Potions.
Snape was a school child, around Harry's age, yet he was a prodigy. He made vast and sweeping improvements to the art of potions and tried his hand at inventing spells. He was a remarkable young person who was revolutionizing the way that Potions are made and the methods used. He was improving on methods that could have conceiveably been in place for hundred of years.
Fast forward all those years. Snape is now Potions Master at the top school in the world. He has political clout and is close with Dumbledore. It has been decades since he was a child and he has likely turned the art of Potion Making into something unrecognizable from what it was only a short few decades previous. Surely the children are learning the Snape Method right?
Wrong.
The children are still learning the same old methods from the same old textbooks. And Snape is forced to teach those same old inferior methods because that's the way it's done.
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7. Would Accio O-Zone Layer Work?
Magic is a clean, renewable source of energy. We could end pollution, oil dependence, etc.
But screw us muggles. Wizards are too busy playing broom ball to end global warming.
- Gnujack
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8. Molly Weasley The Secret Savage
Molly Weasley is unique among the protagonist characters in that she dueled to kill, not to capture or incapacitate.
Sure, fred's death and ginny's near miss probably pushed her over the edge, but that distinction is important to make.
Molly Weasley may look at all cheerful and plump, but she will f*cking end you.
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9. Well this just became a YA novel
Its something that is not talked about or even heavily implied since is a childrens series BUT my god underage sex must have run rampart there I mean teenagers jailed in close proximity 24 hours a day with the opposite sex, all those wonderful empty classrooms laying around?, and the wonderful sense of discovery to know what is behind the robe? Man that was some crazy *rgy going on in the boys room after the Quidditch games and the house cup!
- Pinipf
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10. Poor Weasleys
How does their economy work? Why are the Weasleys "poor" if they could theoretically just make things appear out of thin air or change into other things?
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11. Ending Drought Could Be Easy
That Aquamenti creates water out of nothing.
Think of all the people dying of thirst in the world are only dying because a wizard can't be bothered to create some water.
I won't get into the fact that the wizard could then become a de-facto ruler of said nation by controlling the water source for the country afterward.
- Ellistan
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12. It's Not That He Couldn't...
I've thought about this a lot....I mean c'mon I'm pretty sure there was a lamp in that flashback, babies aren't hard to murder
I've decided it was the principal of the matter. He could have just murdered the shit out of him (I mean he was a baby, what could he do poop on The Dark Lord? Drool a bit?) But what kind of crap could be spread if it was found out that the Dark Lord, the most powerful wizard in history, didn't trust his own magic enough to do the job. It would have been too muggle, and not enough dark evil wizard if he had just punted him across the yard and screamed "AND THE FIELD GOAL IS GOOD"
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13. Like An Evil Cage Match?
Its implied in some comments that wizards are a dying breed.
Those who use horcruxes are utilizing dark magic and don't die until their horcrux(es) are destroyed.
When all wizards (and potentially humans) die out, nobody is left except those with horcruxes. Ultimate evil showdown.
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15. Is The Human Government Holding Wizards Hostage For Weapon Use?
There is some serious conspiracy shit going on in the Harry Potter universe. How does a society, outnumbered outnumbered by a margin of 1000 to 1 not know ANYTHING about the society they are hiding in? Wizards don't know how muggles dress, they don't know anything about muggle weapons or muggle technology in general. How is it that only 2, underpaid, overworked men compose the entire ministry's concern with muggles? The ministry, as far as I can tell has the primary duties of A) Keeping wizarding society secret and B) Keeping the wizards from getting too bored (seriously, who makes a teenager have to fight a dragon with a magically binding contract? They seriously couldn't have written in a "Contestants can bow out whenever they feel like clause?")
The currency system seems designed from the ground up to be absolutely confusing, and it isn't at all compatible with muggle money, which for some reason no wizard understands despite it being significantly more simple. Compounding on that, the whole banking system is run by one race of tiny, greedy, hateful monsters who everyone hates. It all just smacks of a system designed to keep wizards happy, complacent and ignorant to me, which is why one charismatic psychotic was able to do as much as he did.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Everyone in the wizard community seems to assume that everyone, muggle born to full blood wizard, will be loyal to the wizard community and its never really answered "why?" And I have absolutely no good answer for this. I've yet to hear one. The muggles, at least at high levels are aware of the wizarding community. I cannot believe, for a single moment, that the government wouldn't immediately start trying to gather as much information as possible on wizards from the moment they learned of them. I would even say that they would recruit wizards, most likely muggle born, but a big enough payoff would get some wizard in their pocket.
The only logical conclusion I can find is that the Government has, at a minimum, spies in the Ministry, and possibly a number of wizards actively on its payroll doing work for the Government. So now that the government has its agents its starts learning all about wizards. The government becomes worried about one spell in particular. Death is easy for muggles. Guns, chemicals, nukes, weaponized pathogens. The avada kedavra curse is considered rather quaint. A very efficient and human way of doing things. The cruciatus curse is more horrifying but torture is pretty old school. No one needs magic for that either. But the imperius? That curse is a fucking game changer. Holy shit. On low level scale it can be used to make people do any number of horrible things. But say a prime minister is controlled? All of a sudden, someone can, from a huge distance invisibly get that person to fire nukes at whoever they like? That is not the sort of serious existential threat a country's leader just leaves lying around.
The more I think about that curse the more horrifying it becomes. Imperiused people aren't puppets. They are magically enhanced slaves. They retain all their knowledge and can act perfectly normal, and gain physical skills they don't normally have(see Neville Longbottom doing acrobatics in book 3). It also works on animals. An army of bears anyone? And then you we have the fact that imperiused people can imperius in turn. Even if there were evidence that there was a limit to how many people a single person could control simultaneously, it could be gotten around by just performing a giant pyramid scheme of mind control. Resistance is a joke btw. Harry's DADA class had what? 30 students? Harry was the only one who showed any native resistance and he was expecting it. 1/30 isn't particularly comforting.
I personally am under the impression the the government was WMDs pointed at every major wizard population center in the country, in addition to there existing a number of damn loyal wizards working exclusively for the government. If Voldemort had ever truly started working against muggles instead of being distracted by other wizards, I would bet solid money that hogwarts would have been leveled by WMD or at least the surrounding countryside would have been bathed in enough radiation to make the school glow. Gas attacks on the ministry and Diagon ally to kill as many wizards as possible. And thanks to wizards nsa like levels of tracking, undoubtedly hunting down and killing of any wizard who could be found.
Whatever. This is some serious rambling and will get buried anyway. I'm going to post cause I did write it all out and it seems like a waste to delete.
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H/T: Reddit