Horcruxes are Stupid and Bad

It’s long enough ago that I feel like need to express for anyone not alive or actualized at that time, the Harry Potter books were a big deal. The nation, the anglosphere, cared about them in a way we might never care for a book series again. The New York Times had to had to make a new ‘Children’s Bestseller’ list in 2000 because the first four Harry Potter novels were taking up the first four spaces and nothing could challenge them. That was before the first movie was even released in 2001. They ended up making up a third list, “Children’s Series Bestseller” list because Harry Potter was taking up spaces 1-7 on the regular children’s list.

The Goblet of Fire was the first midnight release of a book ever¹ and set a record for the fastest selling book of all time. Each successive book broke that record in turn, culminating with Deathly Hallows selling 11 million copies in the first 24 hours.

I was there in 2007, at a Walmart in Virginia lined up to purchase The Deathly Hallows on the strike of midnight. My roommate and I each bought a copy and I remember going home and laying on my thrifted sectional couch and reading it until I passed out, waking up and picking up where I left off until I finished it. Drunk on sleep deprivation I was happy. Satisfied even. Even if the epilogue was a little thin, I was relieved that it was finally finished.

But now it is 2024, soon to be 2025 and the years have not been kind to the Harry Potter franchise. While every potential nickel is being sucked out of the wizarding world, I am reminded of an interview that Gangnam Style artist Psy did on Jonathan Ross². Ross asked Psy if he is concerned about the song being overplayed and Psy responds:

Everybody asks me about you know, the success, about pressure and what’s [he] gonna do next? So I got that a lot these days and you know I cannot call this success because this is called phenomena which means I don’t do anything. People do it, right? So this was by people, not by me.

This is what Harry Potter was. It was phenomena. We all got swept up in it. I think a lot of people realize this already, between the Cursed Child, the awful Fantastic Beasts movies and the tattoo regret³ - most have accepted that the magic is gone and what’s left is just fumes that will be huffed by the desperate who don’t have an AO3 account. This is all justification for posting my grievances with the story and potentially ruining it just a little bit more for anyone with a glimmer of hope left that it was a good story with an unfortunately miserable author.

A horcrux is a very evil and dark magic that lets a wizard break off a little piece of their soul so that they can come back to life if they get killed. A very evil and dark wizard, Voldemort, made a bunch of them so that he couldn’t be killed.

Then he was killed.

So of course he went to one of his horcruxes, came back to life, and wrecked shit - right?

Nope. He somehow lived (a trick Palpatine would later steal) and attached himself to the back of a Hogwart’s professor’s head. His greatest enemy and the only man he ever feared, this professor’s boss, didn’t notice this at all. This wasn’t stupid though, you see the willy Voldemort had a plan. He somehow knew that Dumbledore would send his most unreliable and least trustworthy underling - the Hogwarts groundskeeper - to get the Philosopher’s Stone from the Magic Goblin Jew Bank, hide it behind several childish and ineffective traps for an arbitrary length of time before destroying it. All Voldemort had to do was ratatouille the professor he was riding around on to follow the 11 year old children while they disarmed the traps one by one and then snatch the stone at the last minute, allowing him to live forever - something he seems to have already figured out how to do several times over.

Or he could have walked right into the room of requirement and picked up the Diadem of Ravenclaw, a horcrux he placed there twenty-four years earlier.⁴

Or he could have went to Malfoy Manor and used the diary.

Or the cup.

Or the locket.

Or the ring.

So Voldemort is floating around in some undocumented ghost form having been defeated by an eleven year old. He’s not using any of his horcruxes though - that would be silly. In fact, he makes another horcrux while still un-resurrected. That’s right. Nagini was made into a horcrux while Voldemort was floating around not using any of his horcruxes.

That’s not even getting into the mathematical implications of soul division. It’s well described that making a horcrux means taking a part of your soul, but how much? Is it a flat percentage? Because if it’s 50%, then horcrux number two is only getting 25% of the original soul. That would mean his last-made horcrux, Nagini - would only contain less that 1% of his original soul.

I can’t believe these stupid books make me cry sometimes.