Harry’s Unpopularity: A Conspiracy Theory
I’m as much alone
as a schoolgirl crazy about geometry
Forūgh Farrokhzād, “I Feel Sorry for the Garden”
“While the magical container is still intact, the bit of soul inside it can flit in and out of someone if they get too close to the object. I don’t mean holding it for too long…. I mean close emotionally…. You’re in trouble if you get too fond of or dependent on the Horcrux.”
(Hermione regurgitating Dumbledore’s books, DH p. 103)
And in Harrycrux’s early life, no one did get too fond of or dependent on him. What a fortunate coincidence.
Part One: Evidence that other people’s reactions to Harry are a) unnatural and b) skewed in ways that serve Dumbledore’s purposes
I was one of the unpopular kids at my grade (infant) school: a perpetual victim of both verbal taunting and physical bullying. Yet when I compare my experience to Harry Potter’s fictional one, I find his isolation incredible. If we are to believe canon, Harry in the Muggle world never once had a friend, was always picked last for every team, and never had a teacher or other adult express an interest in him - except those weirdly dressed people who occasionally bowed to him in shops.
I, in contrast, always had some friends-usually (not always) among other people low on the totem pole. Often we were friends only behind the backs of the bullies or when more popular people weren’t around to court instead. I didn’t expect most of these friends to risk standing up for me when I was at the center of a ring of bullies, and I never had the courage to break through the ring to stand with any of them when it was her turn as victim, but we still played together when it was safe/expedient, sympathized when the bullies left, went to each other’s houses and hung out…. Even the popular kids would include me if they needed to make up the numbers for a game. And while I might have been invariably picked last for sports, when there was a spelling bee the captains always picked me first (as a practical matter of wanting to win) regardless of whether my enemies might taunt, “Oh, you LIKE her.” Finally, I always had adult neighbors, uninterested in children’s status-games, who would talk to me over the garden fence and feed me cookies and sympathy, and later the occasional teacher who encouraged me outside of class.
Eternally-scorned Harry, aside from looking weird because of wearing Dudley’s cast-offs, is the sort of kid who ought to have been appreciated by other boys. He’s athletic, he’s scrappy, and he smarts off to Dudley’s gang and to teachers-what’s not to like? Yet none of Dudley’s other victims ever approached him to make common cause? No one ever picked such a great sprinter for their football team? Not one neighbor or teacher or fellow victim, however annoyed by Petunia’s gossiping or Dudley’s bullying, ever surreptitiously offered the mistreated kid support or encouragement?
According to canon, no. Never. Not even once. Or, at least, Harry never identified such an overture as friendly if made (a possible reading, given his reaction to Draco).
Now look what happens when Harry enters the Wizarding World. He’s instantly mobbed as a celebrity in Diagon Alley. His first day at school, other students double back in corridors to catch a glimpse of him. And we know that some of his fellow Gryffindors appreciate his cheekiness to, say, Snape, when it’s not losing them too many points….
But how does that translate to friendships in the first books? Not at all. At first Harry is friends only with Ron; later, with Ron & Hermione. Harry doesn’t hang out with his fellow Quidditch teammates after practice. We don’t see him talking with people in the common room. Colin might be Harry’s fanboy in CoS, but who seems to like Harry?
When Harry’s staying at the Leaky Cauldron in PoA, he watches and listens to other people, but he never talks to anyone except the occasional shopkeeper such as Florean Fortescue, who keeps Famous Harry Potter semi-permanently installed in front of his shop with free ice cream and help with his homework. Good advertising, huh? Harry notices many Hogwarts students, but only to watch for Ron and Hermione among them; there’s no mention of him approaching/being approached by acquaintances. Even when Harry runs into Seamus and Dean ogling the Firebolt in Quality Quidditch Supplies, there’s no indication that he took advantage of the chance encounter to hang out with Gryffindor boys his own age for the rest of the afternoon. And it’s explicitly stated that Harry did not stop even to chat when he saw Neville with his gran.
Notice that in GoF when Harry and Ron are estranged, Ron hangs out instead with other Gryff boys-who easily open their ranks to include him. We don’t ever see Harry do the same.
And on the train at the beginning of OotP, when his two friends are both riding in the Prefect’s compartment, Harry has no one at all to sit with…
Except Ginny, the fangirl with whom he’d boarded the train, and Neville and Luna, both themselves lonely outsiders who have no better options.
Harry’s remarkably hard to get to know, isn’t he? Remarkably hard to get close to? The only people who seem to really like Harry for himself as of the beginning of OotP are Hagrid, the Weasleys, Hermione, and Sirius.
How sure are we, really, that this reflects some flaw in Harry?
Because, consider two final things.
First, it’s convenient for Dumbledore, isn’t it, that Harry grows up with no attachment to the Muggle world, neglected, so emotionally deprived he is ready to latch on to the first friendly faces he sees? By some odd coincidence, his only relatives hate and fear magic and transfer that attitude automatically to their new ward. And by yet another odd coincidence, Harry’s first friends are among Dumbledore’s staunchest supporters.
I’m disinclined to trust in coincidences that just happen to further the Twinkly One’s plans. In fact, that are integral to it. What would have happened to Dumbles’ plans had Harry been loved by the Dursleys and absorbed their attitude to magic, or had Harry’s first friend been a Malfoy rather than a Weasley?
Secondly, Hermione told us, on the authority of the books that she stole from Dumbledore, that it is dangerous to become “too fond of or emotionally dependent on” a Horcrux object. If someone makes the error of getting “close emotionally” to the Horcrux, the encased soul-fragment may be enabled to flit out and possess the fond fool.
Harry is a Horcrux, and I’ve previously suggested that Twinkles was perfectly cognizant of that fact when he parked that Horcrux with Lily’s Muggle relatives.
I had thought that it was shocking of Twinkles to subject poor Petunia (and her family, and all the Muggles in Harry’s neighborhood and school) to the risk of being possessed.
But maybe he didn’t.
Maybe Twinkles had taken precautions against that eventuality.
Petunia’s family and neighbors, and the kids at Harry’s school, were, after all, only at risk of possession if any of them became fond of the boy.
The WW has Love Potions. And their antidotes. Entrancing Enchantments. And, presumably, their counterspells. The Veela-glamour… and there must be spells to resist that, or the refs would have given the match to Bulgaria.
If attraction/interest, whether sexual or otherwise, can be artificially created or enhanced by magic, might it not also be artificially suppressed?
Is there an enchantment, or a potion, that inhibits attraction/affection/love from developing? Oh, maybe no spell could stop True Love any more than it could start it-but could one, perhaps, put people off initially? Leave them cold?
*
Now, supposing there were such a thing and Twinkles had used it on the Harrycrux, consider Harry’s introduction to the WW. Not only does Harry need to be recruited into a political camp, but also the degree of danger posed by the potentially-infectious Horcrux must eventually be evaluated. Harry is venerated as the Boy-Who-Lived-at some point someone’s going to be fond enough of the idea of Harry to be at risk, even if s/he doesn’t actually like the boy for himself.
So, it would be prudent to select a few companions for Harry whose subsequent reactions can be carefully monitored.
Give Harry, for the first time since he was a toddler, people who are not magically inhibited from liking him (or who he’s not inhibited from liking), let friendships develop, and watch how long it takes before the friends become possessed, and what the signs are.
Now, since part of the point is indoctrination, one would naturally choose Harry’s possible friends only from among people who strongly hold the correct beliefs-the dogmas of the headmaster’s infallibility and the inferiority of dirty Slytherins, for example.
But the other concern would be to pick innocuous vectors-individuals who, if they were to become possessed by Riddle, couldn’t give Tom significant strategic advantages. Ones with no substantial magical, intellectual, political, or social clout Tom could easily exploit. Who were, in the worst case, disposable.
For a decade, the only person in Harry’s neighborhood who had positive feelings for the boy was Dumbledore’s agent, the Squib Arabella Figg (though, mindful of her orders, Arabella never disclosed such feelings to Harry). Hmm, she’s never been possessed…. (I’m sure Twinkles was originally quite confident he’d be able immediately to detect Tom possessing someone.) Of course, she’s not actually around the boy that much. So one would continue the experiment cautiously.
Harry’s first, and initially only, friends in the Wizarding World were a wandless half-giant and the youngest, disregarded son of a family of Twinkle’s most credulous followers.
And when it seemed, after several months, that the Riddle soul fragment had not tried to flit out and possess either of those two alternate hosts, one might perhaps fling it the additional bait of the year’s most talented Muggleborn. Whose parents could never raise a stink within the WW, should their daughter be tragically lost.
When the soul-fragment didn’t rise even to that, one might eventually start to consider the possibility that a soul-fragment created by accident and tied to a living soul rather than an inanimate object, unlike more conventional Horcruxes, might be unable to flit out at will and possess those “close” to its container.
Unfortunately, after allowing the Weasley family unrestricted exposure to the Harrycrux over the summer, it seemed that one of them did become possessed by Riddle… once Twinkles had verified that Harry himself had no knowledge of the opening of the Chamber nor any suspicious bouts of amnesia.
Oops.
What a relief then, to discover that it was Diary!Tom, not the Harrycrux, which had possessed little Ginny. And proof, surely, (or at least a strong indication) that the soul-fragment attached to Harry is incapable of flitting, since Ginny, who’s clearly susceptible and has a crush on Harry, was not subsequently possessed by the Harrycrux.
If one were considering Harry’s good at all, at that point one might lift the curse entirely and allow Harry to interact with others on his own merits.
But this is Twinkles.
There’s a shift in people’s reactions to Harry, and/or in Harry’s reactions to other people, but it happens in book 5, not in book 3 where the Twinkly One must presumably finally have decided that Riddle’s soul in the Harrycrux was not likely to “flit” out and possess people fond of Harry.
In book 5, Harry is placed by Hermione as the teacher/leader of the D.A.-and most of its members choose ultimately to trust Harry above the Ministry. At the end of that book, for the first time ever we see adults registering the Dursleys’ mistreatment of Harry and taking steps to protect the boy. On the Hogwarts Express in book 6, we see students who aren’t Weasleys or outcasts courting Harry openly, which had never happened before. (Unless we count Cho in book 5, but she might have been motivated by wanting to ask about Cedric and his death.) Being The Chosen One translates into having a fanclub among the other students, as being The Boy Who Lived had not in book one. (The hype about Harry was similar; the reactions of the students were not.) Also in book 6, Harry is Quidditch captain, and as such followed by his team. And in both books 5 & 6 we see Harry, reciprocally, registering the existence of students that he literally had never noticed before, though they were in his year or his house.
It’s as though Harry had suddenly entered a larger world, where there were more people actually interacting with him.
And in book 7, of course, Harry’s the inspiration for the revolution against Voldemort’s regime: ‘Potterwatch’, Neville’s calling forth the entire D.A. and trying to place it at Harry’s disposal (which doesn’t work; Neville has instead to dispose his varied forces in the defense of Hogwarts while Harry does his secretive thing).
I repeat: if Twinkles had cast a spell to make Harry generally unlikable or unapproachable, there’s no evidence for its having been lifted immediately after CoS, when Twinkles concluded the Harrycrux wasn’t possessing people who liked Harry. In PoA and GoF, Harry maintains only his existing friendships (Hermione, Hagrid, and the Weasleys). Even when he’s a Triwizard contestant-Cedric, after Harry had told him about the first task, made the other Hufflepuffs back off from openly harassing Harry, but it is clear that only the Gryffs accept him as their (Hogwarts’ alternate) champion. No one outside his house applauds him for the second or third tasks. Even Harry’s “date” to the Yule Ball in GoF accepts him partly as a favor, partly because he’s a “champion” and will give her prominence-she clearly doesn’t “like” him.
So if Twinkles had cast a curse on a baby to make it unapproachable, he lifted it only sometime in Book 5, when he realized it was deleterious to his own purposes. Not when he’d (somewhere between the ends of book 2 and book 3) decided the Harrycrux was harmless to others, but when he found that making Harry Potter incapable of normal relationships with most people also made Harry equally incapable of inspiring trust in people who weren’t under Dumble’s sole control. Which fact worked against Dumble’s own political interests once Harry was the sole witness attesting to Voldemort’s corporeal return, when too many people had stopped blindly accepting Twinkle’s assertions.
It’s not until OotP that we see people ever accepting Harry’s word when Dumbledore’s did not suffice.
*
Part Two: Speculations on the putative curse
Now, let’s try to design a single spell that would keep most people at a distance from Harry, that could ensure that his family and Muggle neighbors actively dislike the boy, and that could prevent even his fans from becoming friends with him. But whose effects could be modified for select individuals, so that Dumbledore could both control who influences the boy, and minimize/evaluate the risk of others being possessed by the Harrycrux.
Well. We’ll start by examining Harry’s actual interactions with others. Let’s see if we can trace a spell’s effects.
What we see most strongly in Harry’s interactions with other people is that they seem to react more to their ideas about Harry than to Harry himself.
Harry’s shunned by his family as a wizard and by other children in the Muggle world as a weirdo on Dudley’s authority. In the WW, Harry’s initially met with awed fawning. When he loses too many house points he’s ostracized by his housemates. When he’s thought to be Heir of Slytherin he’s feared by almost everyone. When he’s entered in the Triwizard he’s praised by Gryffs who are glad to have their house represented and spurned by those who regard him as a cheating show-off. At the beginning of Fifth Year, anyone who believes the Ministry/Prophet believes Harry to be a delusional attention-seeker.
Including people who’ve been living with Harry twenty-four/seven, ten months a year, for the last four years.
And apparently no one at all ever noticed until fifth year that that Harry was, at the least inflammatory reading of canon, neglected and verbally and emotionally abused by his guardians.
Let’s consider Dumbledore’s words to Snape about first-year Harry: “You see what you expect to see.”
That happens a lot with Harry, doesn’t it? Adult wizards babble that a toddler in nappies is the vanquisher of You-Know-Who. Diggle and his ilk gush about what an honor it is to shake the hand of a bewildered eleven-year-old. Gilderoy Lockhart lectures Harry about being too attached to his celebrity.
People look at a rather ordinary wizard/boy and see James Redux, or the Boy-Who-Lived, or the Heir of Slytherin, or the Triwizard Champion/Cheat, or Crazy Harry, or the Chosen One.
Petunia, of course, saw a freak, a malign wizard-changeling dumped upon decent normal folk.
A lot of magic in the Potterverse seems to consist of literalized metaphors. The curse of celebrity might be said to be that others see the celebrity’s reputation instead to the celebrity’s self.
In the Potterverse, there are beings which take the shape of one’s inmost fears (Boggarts) and an object that projects one’s desires for one (the Mirror of Erised).
Suppose Dumbledore cast a spell on Harry that made Harry project back his viewer’s expectations? That forced people to “see what they expect to see” when they look at Harry? Or, more subtly, that simply made it more difficult for one’s direct perceptions of Harry to override one’s preconceptions? (It’s hard enough, after all, for most of us to discard our expectations for reality when we’re not being hampered by a spell….)
With a normal person in a normal situation, such a spell would have pervasive, and profoundly negative, effects. Normally, when I meet someone unfamiliar there’s a dance between my immediate prejudices/impressions and the other person’s behavior. I keep updating as new data arrives, and sometimes I have to revise my first impressions. When I meet someone previously known by reputation, I must reconcile what I’ve heard with the other person’s demeanor, and apply my own judgment.
“She’s cold and proud? No, she’s really shy.”-to paraphrase Lizzie Bennett’s evaluation of Georgianna Darcy.
What if a spell inhibits my ability to integrate my direct perceptions of the spell-victim into my internal picture of hir? Whatever I start expecting off to see, I continue to see.
Can’t revise one’s first impressions? There goes the entire plot of Pride and Prejudice.
Mind, given such a spell initial expectations could still be modified over time by external influences and information. Just not directly by the spell-victim’s demeanor or words.
It’s obvious that the victim would be unable to become friends with anyone who started off violently prejudiced against hir. It’s less apparent that the victim of such a spell would also have a hard time becoming really close with people who start with a favorable opinion. Because, contrary to what Shakespeare wrote, an opinion that cannot “alter when it alteration finds” is not affection, but obsession. At a less elevated level, relationships couldn’t easily deepen. “Seems an okay person to hang out with” would remain “seems an okay person to hang out with” ad infinitum.
Now add in that the victim in this case is famous.
“He’s simply divine, the hero who vanquished the Dark Lord” would remain that. Not Harry, a real boy with real gifts and failings. An absolute inability to register the other party’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities would be as crippling to true intimacy as an inability to recognize virtues.
And if someone were in a position to influence many people’s initial impressions, that person could control Harry’s social life and everyone’s ongoing perceptions of the boy. Or so such a person might think.
In canon, people do change their minds about Harry. They just don’t usually do so as a result of Harry himself. They change their minds in response to rumor, or to Rita Skeeter’s latest post, or to Dumbledore’s vouching for him (until Dumbledore loses his influence). They even change in response to their thoughts about what Harry’s actions mean. But not in response to Harry’s own words or demeanor.
Consider Ernie and the Hufflepuffs in CoS. They suspected Harry because of the Parselmouth incident. And no matter how much Harry pleaded he was rescuing not attacking Justin, they never listened, did they?
But later, Ernie decided that it didn’t make sense that the Mudblood-attacking Heir of Slytherin might really be that half-blood whose own best friend was the most recent victim. IOW, Ernie didn’t believe Harry and his vehement claims of innocence; he believed his own internal calculations.
Or consider Ron in GoF. Almost everyone believed that Harry entered his own name for the Triwizard Tournament, and Ron believed it right along with everyone else. Until the sight of the dragon finally rubbed it in that HARRY COULD DIE in this contest. But Ron never believed Harry’s protestations …. Hermione believed that Harry hadn’t entered, of course, but she, like Ernie the year before, might have applied her own logic to the question and come up in Harry’s favor.
*
Let’s contemplate how such a spell might have influenced Harry’s early life and character development.
Consider Petunia, terrified and resentful of the Wizard World which had first stolen and then murdered her only sister, saddled with a wizard changeling. Nothing the toddler could do would ever win her over. Not the most engaging grin or lisp, not the triumphant mastery of light switches, not sleeping angelically curled up, thumb in mouth. Nothing Harry could do would work to soften the Dursleys’ responses to him. Their responses had all been pre-set with the information that Harry was one of those terrifying, dangerous freaks.
Eventually (hope springs eternal, but Harry, whatever his other problems, isn’t actually stupid) Harry would give up. He’d have learned, to the bone, that his actions can never significantly influence other people’s feelings for him. He can escape overt punishment by not asking questions and not doing or saying anything “freaky,” but he can never alter anyone’s opinion of him.
Not, perhaps, the most helpful life-lesson to have been taught.
And his subsequent experiences would reinforce this. Little Whinging is not a large enough community that many people meet the Dursleys’ unfortunate ward without knowing who he is-and having already having been told what to think about him.
Imagine Harry entering his second year of school. His new teacher has heard all about the Dursleys’ nephew: a focus of trouble, some of it… unsettling. He’s not stupid per se, but he’s not a good student. He’s disliked and picked on by the other students. His guardians, Petunia and Vernon Dursley (well-respected, if sometimes overbearing) say their ward is a liar and mischief-maker….
Being conscientious, the new teacher tries to discard all this baggage and engage with the little boy without preconceptions.
Only the rumors were all correct, every one. The Dursleys’ nephew is exactly what everyone said.
Now imagine the children of Little Whinging. Dudley and his gang terrorize the playgrounds… not unchallenged. But every time one of Dudley’s enemies thinks about approaching Dudley’s cousin Harry to recruit him into one of the anti-Dudley alliances, s/he remembers: that kid is a weirdo! We don’t want him.
Nothing that Harry could do would win him entry into the elite ranks of the Dudley-Defiers (or the cowed ranks of the Dudley-Scuttlers-Away-From) of Little Whinging.
Nothing.
Give it up, boy.
And he rather did, didn’t he?
Look again at Draco’s interactions with Harry in Madam Malkin’s. Draco’s expectations on meeting an unfamiliar wizard boy might well have been, “If I brag he’ll admire me.” And Draco has never before met a non-Pureblood, or even seriously contemplated their existence and the ramifications thereof. As Duj pointed out, Harry never noticed in this scene that Draco was trying desperately to engage Harry’s interest; but similarly Draco never registered (until possibly at the end) that he was alienating, rather than winning over, Harry.
This works as another explanation for Draco and Harry’s rather serious miscommunication, eh?
We commented on deathtocapslock in one of the PoA discussions that Harry didn’t even try to hint to the Hufflepuffs why he’d decided Draco was not the Heir of Slytherin. He just said, “No,” and didn’t make the slightest effort to persuade Ernie and Hannah. But really, why should he? If he knows, to his core, that everyone will believe whatever they’ve decided to believe, and nothing Harry says can make any difference, there’s no point in arguing to persuade someone.
*
Finally, consider the discrepancy between Harry’s reception at the Leaky Cauldron and his social isolation aboard the Hogwarts Express and once he got to school. He’s literally mobbed at the first; he’s approached only by Draco and Ron on the other (though students were, we are told, gossiping about what compartment he’s in). And people point Harry out in the corridors of Hogwarts his first week or two, but no one ever approaches him or tries to befriend him. Can we explain this? Are we to believe his elders venerate him while his peers do not?
Well, surely there was an article in the Daily Prophet on 8/1/91 about the Boy-Who-Lived ‘s first visit to Diagon Alley, and surely Rita and her distinguished colleagues would have wanted to interview the boy’s escort when they could not gain access to the boy himself. (And just how had Dumbles kept the press away, hm?) But failing both Harry and Hagrid, wouldn’t they make do with the headmaster’s statement about what his Keeper of the Keys told the headmaster about the boy? Suppose Dumbledore explained that the boy had been overwhelmed, and not positively, by his reception? That the Boy-Who Lived had been too polite to say anything directly to his fans, but that he’d really disliked being approached like that? He’d felt like a zoo exhibit. Harry Potter would much prefer it if other people left him alone and let him take the initiative in getting to know them….
Afterwards (among Prophet readers) only people who were simultaneously full of themselves, insensitive to others’ feelings, and not yet socially experienced enough to calculate that leaving the Boy-Who-Lived alone was the better way to win his initial favor would seek Harry out, either on the train or in his first weeks at Hogwarts. You know, people like eleven-year-old Draco. (Ron, and maybe the twins, could be accounted for by Dumbledore taking a side trip to the Weasleys to modify their impressions. Hermione and Neville intruded on Harry’s compartment apparently without knowing who he was at first.)
Everyone nice would respect Harry’s supposed feelings; everyone insecure would be afraid to presume; everyone calculating would think it prudent to let Harry make the first overtures.
And when Harry never did make any overtures-when he never did take the initiative to make friends with other students-those other students would conclude, not that Harry was shy or inexperienced at making friends, but that he didn’t want them.
On further consideration, it’s even possible that Hermione’s friendship was not the result of Dumbledore’s machinations-though her friendship is convenient enough to Dumbledore’s purposes for the thought of his manipulation not to be given up without a struggle.
There’s one other type of person, after all, who might be willing to try to befriend Harry once at Hogwarts. S/he would have to fulfill several requirements. One, s/he would have to enter Hogwarts entirely unaware of Harry’s supposed desire to be left alone, therefore not in touch with any subscribers to the Prophet. Hir knowledge of famous Harry Potter, if any, would come from books, not current WW gossip. Two, s/he would have to be socially isolated enough hirself-friendless-not to be told about it by the other children after s/he got to Hogwarts. And three, s/he’d have to be thrown in Harry’s way. Well, well. Any Gryffindor Muggleborns we know of in Harry’s first year who might meet these criteria?
*
To summarize: we know that Dumbledore had not one, but several, reasons to want Harry to be utterly friendless in the Muggle world and to make only carefully-selected (by Albus) friends in the WW. We know that Harry was, in fact, friendless in the Muggle World, and that his circle of friends in the WW was at first extremely restricted, and always included only Dumbledore supporters. We know that both spells and potions can manipulate emotions. And I’ve suggested a possible enchantment that might have accounted for the specific reactions we see to Harry over time.
QNED, of course. But I think the evidence is suggestive.