Harry James Potter

Families

Married

• Spouse: Ginevra Molly Weasley

Parents

• Family: Married
  • Father: James Potter
  • Mother: Lily J Evans

Analysis

Effects of abuse

See the Dursleys for some discussion on just how much and in what ways Harry is abused. That he is abused to at least some extent is pretty much undeniable. The only real question is how does he survive it? How much of his personality is in fact reflective of, to be brutally honest, damage, how much is innate, how much is resilience, how much is residual from the first year when he was loved? Some of it, how much is impossible to estimate, will be hard to explain with those answers. Some of his personality will need some sort of hand-wavy answer of "the story requires it for his character to work" (or in other words, this is a made up character who is simply not realistic). Any attempt to make it less impossible essentially requires something along the lines of his mother's sacrifice not just magically protected him from Tom, but also magically protected him from the worst of the effects of his upbringing.

Don't Touch Me by ivybelle explores as a one-shot from when Harry and Ginny are dating the idea that perhaps Harry is simply really really good at hiding his reactions.¹

Slytherin?

The sorting is increasingly a sore point for me. A huge body of fan fiction authors want to put Harry in Slytherin. I know why - they are listening to the Sorting Hat:

“Hmm,” said a small voice in his ear. “Difficult. Very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind either. There’s talent, oh my goodness, yes and a nice thirst to prove yourself, now that’s interesting. . . . So where shall I put you?”

Harry gripped the edges of the stool and thought, Not Slytherin, not Slytherin.

“Not Slytherin, eh?” said the small voice. “Are you sure? You could be great, you know, it’s all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that no? Well, if you’re sure better be GRYFFINDOR!”²

However, are cunning or ambition really defining traits for Harry? He might have liked his scar in the first chapters, but do not let the movies fool you, that does not last long. Even in that first Leaky Cauldron scene the books describe a very different Harry, one who is overwhelmed, not pleased by his fame. Once at Hogwarts, Harry finds the attention annoying pretty much right from the start, and will spend the next 7 years hating his fame. This dislike of attention will grow so strong that Harry will have trouble accepting praise not only for being the Boy Who Lived (understandable, he does not remember doing anything to earn that) but even for his skills on a broom, the fight with the basilisk, and the Tri-Wizard Tournament. He keeps switching between being annoyed when he's babied (by Mrs. Weasley or other adults), and crediting everything to luck precisely because he does not seek fame.

This does not mesh well with the ambition that Slytherin is known for to me. Indeed, Harry's loyalty to his friends, his willingness to forgive them with very little in the way of a real apology, and readiness to risk everything for them speaks more strongly of Hufflepuff than any of his actual actions do of Slytherin.

Originally I thought that Rowling tried too hard to force the parallel between Harry and Riddle, playing up that Harry could have been in Slytherin but for his choices. A different theory was presented in an interview.³ The Sorting Hat accidentally attempted to sort Riddle and not Harry in attempting the placement in Slytherin. The Sorting Hat was not intended to sort a person with a bit of someone else's soul in them. This confused the hat, and as a result it wasn't sure which person's traits to sort based on. The hat, not being truly alive, is not really able to reconsider or learn, so it stands by its opinions. It will do so until/unless it were to be placed on Harry's head after the bit of Riddle's soul is removed.

In short, perhaps the boy that Harry could have been - abused as he was in reality - should have shown more Slytherin tendencies, but the actual Harry that we see in the books would make a really really poor Slytherin, a fairly good Hufflepuff, and an uncertain Ravenclaw (depending on how much he would have been willing to use that "not a bad mind" mentioned above away from Ron's influence).

Relationships

See my overview on Shipping. The problem is that the series is, with very very few exceptions, third-person limited with a Harry point of view, and skips around to show mostly only "significant" (ie the kind that history books pivot on) moments in his life. We do not see the bulk of his daily interactions with anyone. We never see him attending the Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw Quidditch game for example. Similarly it is not uncommon for the books to jump over weeks and even occasionally (especially in the earlier books) months where nothing significant happens.

This is a problem because it is in these non-significant times that Harry would be growing in relationship with all the rest of his classmates, year mates, and housemates. He would be at meals with them, in the library working on assignments around them, in the common room hanging out. They are living in close proximity for ten months of each year, it is really interesting that despite this, at the formational meeting for the DA, Harry is apparently unsure of Susan's name, despite the fact that she has been in his herbology class for four years (not counting the bit of fifth year) at that point.⁴ I had 280 people in my high school class, and by the end of senior year, I probably had a few that I did not immediately recognise by name, even though many I knew nothing else about them, but most of them I knew at least that much. It is crazy to think that, with only forty people in his class, Harry did not learn at least their last names and faces (since the professors mostly use last names).

I almost put this in the section about affects of abuse, because I think it does partly come down to that, but more, I think it is partly a reaction to the way Harry is treated after he starts at Hogwarts. He is not really a person to most of his fellow students. He is "The Boy Who Lived" and they go out of their way to see him in the halls while making no effort to disguise the fact that they are talking about him incessantly.⁵ Even if this persisted only a short time, it made a profound impression on Harry, who does come from an abusive background where attention is associated with pain. He is not used to it, nor comfortable being the focus of it. This I think, is why he so profoundly self-isolates that he doesn't even learn the names of his classmates. He is not really a classmate to them, and so they in turn do not settle into distinct individuals in his mind either.

Appearance

On a truly trivial note, the scene from Snape's memory showing the confrontation after the OWL tests shows that James purposefully messed up his hair.⁶ Harry's hair is unfix-ably messy. Unfortunately, we know that while James did mess up his hair, it was also unfix-ably untidy.⁷ The most likely explanation of this is that it is purely genetic, but lots of authors have had fun speculating a magical origin for this hair. I read one idea that I found really amusing, that Harry's hair was a prank that James played on Lily.⁸ As I said, the book 1 evidence probably contradicts the theory, but it is a great one.

At the beginning of book 5, we read that Harry "was a skinny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who had the pinched, slightly unhealthy look of someone who has grown a lot in a short space of time."⁹ Since at the end of book four we know that James Potter was still taller than Harry,¹⁰ either this growth spurt happened after the graveyard scene (despite Harry's poor diet at Privet Drive), or it was insufficient to make him taller than his father. Either way, Harry observed that he is roughly the same height his father was at age 15/16 by the end of that year.¹¹ So either the effects of his childhood malnutrition have been healed, or Mrs. Rowling (possibly unconsciously) chose to utterly ignore the high probability of such effects.¹² Either way, we still have no clear indication of exactly how tall this is. We know only a few things definitively:

• that by the beginning of book seven, Harry is taller than Hermione and Mundungus, and shorter than Ron, Fred and George.¹³
• James Potter is described as tall by Riddle.¹⁴

See my further comments on growth.

While some authors highly object to Harry looking so very like James, I have seen families where one or more children take very strongly after one of the two parents. Thus, this does not bother me. What does is the repeated emphasis on him having Lily's eyes, yet he has James' vision. That, to me, does require explanation. Fortunately for the over analytical reader, there are reasonable, if unconfirmed, explanations available. Harry's need for glasses is probably either an effect of from his scar, or an effect from living in the cupboard. Since both are speculation, we do not know which.