Harry Potter plotholes/ goofs that really annoy you

[Aproductofmyera80s]

I absolutely love Harry Potter, I watch it twice a year, would watch it more if I had the time. One plothole that gets me every time, so Fred and George had the marauders map all that time and didn’t notice that Ron’s rat was Peter pettigrew?
every time I watch it, it grinds my gears.
any one else notice anything?

The way they have adopted some modern day muggle items but not others. Why do they still use quills, inks and scrolls instead of a biro and paper?!

Huh? My grandmother, mother and 2 cousins are all redheads and 3 out of the 4 have blue eyes.

Most of the wizards are employed in the Ministry whose main aim is to hide the existence of magic. So muggles find out all the time, they just have their memories wiped. It's like the MiB if half the aliens on Earth were employed by the agency.

This ^ I enjoyed the films - but there were things not included and things were changed too sometimes. The books explained so much more in many areas

Nothing pertinent to add but just wanted to say I'm really enjoying this thread!

@Whothefuckdoesthat Filch confiscated it from James and Sirius. At that point it didn't show a map it was doing it's insulting thing - does it to Snape in book 3.
So he would have known it was magical but not what it was capable of.

Fred and George probably just messed about with it until they found out how it worked or were given instructions (from the map) as to how it worked.

The marauders were clever enough to write the map. They were also clever enough to manage to conceal the maps power from those it chose to. Snape could only use it at the end of book 3 because Lupin left it open and in map form

The muggleborns must think all the wizard born students are really uneducated.

They're home schooled for primary school - I'm not saying being home schooled leads to poor education, but they're being home schooled by their magic parents who never received any English or maths lessons after the age of 11. No biology (potions is a bit like chemistry I suppose, and I guess you can disregard physics when you have magic that defies it), geography, PE, music, nothing.

It wouldn't work nowadays - the muggleborns would be (rightly!) unimpressed by the lack of internet.

I think JKR’s retconning the whole way through the series. She started off with a very simple, quite trad children’s book, which by the time she was writing the later novels had become a global phenomenon with obsessive adult fans pointing out plot holes and inconsistencies, and asking questions about them directly to her on fan sites. Which she then ‘answered’ in later novels.

So the middle and later novels are much longer AND far darker and more adult, but also need to stay to an extent within the same semi-cosy fictional world, so as well as inconsistencies, date ranges that don’t work and implausibilities like the wizarding world remaining hidden from muggles etc, there are also things like Dumbledore being a daffy old man with a joke name AND a supremely powerful wizard, and very trad school story elements like lessons and pranks and quidditch running alongside mass murders and a Hitlerish blood cult.

I think its biggest single problem, other than the unwieldy worldbuilding fans elicited, is the traditional child/YA novel necessity to get the good adults out of the way or rendered helpless, otherwise the parents/police/teachers would sort everything out so there’s no risk or adventure for the kids. In HP, set mostly in a school with the world’s most powerful wizard as Head, and with lots of other good teachers and parents/parent figures (the Weasleys, Lupin, McGonagle, other order members etc etc) JKR has to go to an awful lot of trouble to make them unable to help much, get them offstage etc. And sometimes that doesn’t work well.

What happened to Harry's grandparents?

@Vermeer that was pretty much my impression when I read the first (I was in my thirties when they came out) - that it was a traditional English boarding school story, the sort being written at least since the 1920s, with magic added to the mix. Mum had lots of those in the Girls' Own and Boys' Own type of books she had passed down from her siblings.

Trying not to create a spoiler, I have a minor niggle, not really a plot hole, from The Cursed Child. How did the boys manage to get the blanket from the baby's pram in full view of the mother? I can think of several possible ways, but I don't remember it being shown on the stage and I'd like to know.

Dead, presumably....

It's so weird tho, wizards live to like 150, but have kids in their 20s, you'd easily have 4-5 generations in your family alive at any given point!

Might Harry's grandparents have died in the First Wizarding War? I don't remember any reference to them.

This is what happens when adults get into children's books and films.

I do wonder what may have been had it just been a little kids book, without global inspection!

Another classic example is Star Wars, started off as just a kids film originally, but now is this huge behemoth full of plot holes and inconsistencies etc that adults obsess over.

The important thing to understand firstly, is that the resurrection stone could not bring someone back from the dead. What it did do was allow shadows of someone to come back. From Deathly Hallows ''They were neither ghosts nor truly flesh, he could see that..........Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts......

Harry used the resurrection stone to call Lily, James, Sirius and Lupin to help him keep his courage and resolve strong, to find Voldemort and let V kill him. Their 'shadows' acted like a Patronus to Harry as he walked to find Voldemort. When he found Voldemort ''The Resurrection slipped from between his numb fingers'' and his parents, Sirius and Lupin vanished. That was the only thing that the Resurrection stone did for him. He had already accepted he was going to die before he opened the snitch and found the Resurrection stone

He didn't die when Voldemort 'killed' him because Harry and Voldemort are connected by an enchantment - that is the protection of Lily's blood in both of them ( it's complicated). It also transpired that Harry had a part of Voldemort's soul inside him ( The Horcrux). So while Voldemort was alive he tethered Harry to life too, because of Lily's blood protection in both of them. And Voldemort couldn't die while he still had Horcruxes. But when Voldemort did try to kill Harry, all he killed was his own Horcrux inside Harry.

Once the snake was killed, it was a straight fight between Harry and Voldemort - and the elder wand refused to kill his master (Harry) and Voldemort died and the 'blood protection' enchantment was broken.

@JellyBabiesSaveLives as an economist, I love that! Top creative accountancy!!

The whole of book 4 is absolutely ridiculous.

Yeah, in 1998 I wrote a Usenet post saying exactly that . Complete with scholarship kid and Shooting The Winning Goal!

I agree with all of these and it’s really made me want to read the books again for the millionth time.

The one that gets me is when was the plumbing system installed in Hogwarts in order to link up to the Chamber of Secrets via the sink in Myrtle's toilets? Harry speaks to the serpent on the tap to access the chamber. There were already rumours about the Chamber's existance when Tom Riddle started at the school. Were wizards surprisingly advanced on sanitation and the plumbing built in at construction? Did Tom Riddle do a retrofit? He went in there and murdered Myrtle (creating the diary horcrux) but I can't imagine him hanging around in there too much before her ghost rendered the toilets unpopular.

Arthur Weasley isn't the most clued up about plumbers (regurgitating toilet hexs being used to trick muggles). Given that he's eccentric enough to collect plugs, you'd think he'd know more than average on utilities.

But then the staff entrance to the Ministry is via what appears to be a public toilet.

Is it me or is wizard plumbing a bit inconsistant?
(Clearly not JKR's primary thought when writing in a cafe all those years ago )

Quite sexist really, I bet it is the women sacrificing their careers to home school. What about the single parents who need to work?

Also, lots of plots for things don't work if they had been written after the 90's. Harry I have this magic mirror where we can speak only to each other. Yeah well muggle here has a different device that can speak to anyone in the world take photos, set alarms, be used to purchase things, check the news and weather etc. For one, Buffy would have to do a lot less running across Sunnydale if her friends had mobiles.

Separately, surely we can assume that muggle parents with magic offspring are just spelled into agreeing with everything and forgot anything inconvenient. It is magic after all.

Yes you’d think at some point they’d look and say ‘Why is some bloke called Peter Pettigrew in bed with our little brother?!’ and investigate!

Why Harry's parents needed a third party to be secret keeper when in later books a house inhabitant can be secret keeper 🤷‍♀️

Why anyone in the wizarding world wears broken or battered clothes etc. when itens can be repaired by magic 🤷‍♀️

Why veritaserum or occlumency isn't used my the ministry to find out who is guilty or not

No, they win a lottery, i.e cash galleons, and CHOOSE to spend it on a big family trip to Egypt. While at the same time Ron still has a second-hand, malfunctioning WAND. As a wizard. In a magic school. Wands are hugely linked to magical ability as per the 7th book where there's a whole section about how other people's wands don't work as well. It's like sending a child to algebra lessons with an abacus when all his peers have hi-spec calculators. Then he has the shitty embarrassing robes as well. And the hand-me-down pet.

The Weasleys are terrible with money and pretty shit parents, tbh, to Ron and the twins in particular. It's like they gave up after the first few kids until they finally got a girl.

Mine is kind of explained in the books as Voldemort's grandiosity but seriously, why make ALL the Hallows important and highly identifiable magical objects. He could have had 6 important ones and then one just a random pebble he'd chucked into the sea - nobody would ever find it!