Mugglenet.com's Harry Potter Should Have Died - Emerson Spartz [73]
And even though Harry has to shift between the Deathly Hallows and the Horcruxes in DH, it’s obvious that Voldemort will only be truly dead once every single Horcrux is shattered. Harry destroys Tom Riddle’s diary in CoS, while Dumbledore shatters the Peverell ring in HBP. Harry must track down Helga Hufflepuff ’s cup, Salazar Slytherin’s locket, and Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. The final three Horcruxes are inside living beings: Nagini the snake, Harry, and Voldemort himself. Harry is the eighth Horcrux.
Yes, it’s a quest and a treasure hunt, but the best part of the Horcrux plotline is the moral weight of it. It’s about a murderer ripping apart his own soul to become immortal, and diminishing his human side instead, as Dumbledore explains in HBP. Voldemort, with his snaky face and red eyes, just isn’t human anymore, either in looks or emotions. Harry has to come to terms with his mind’s connection to a vicious killer in DH, and then learn to use the visions he sees through his own Horcrux for good instead of evil. The plotline is also about the way people’s souls can be painfully repaired through remorse, as if being alive is one big fix-it project and only good works can put someone back together again. It’s a traditionally Christian view of redemption through good works, but also a universal view of human transformation.
Verdict
In a long epic story like Harry Potter, the plotlines are intricate, profound, and sweeping. Can we really know whether someone is good or evil just by looking at them, as with Severus Snape? And what does evil do to the human soul, especially when murder is involved? Verdict: Trying to figure out whose side Snape was really on kept us on our toes throughout the whole series. It’s gotta be the best plotline.
Does the Secret-Keeper information revealed in Deathly Hallows contradict the previous rules about Secret-Keepers?
Yes!
Secret-Keepers are made when a Fidelius Charm is placed on someone or something to make it/them invisible to all but the chosen Secret-Keeper. The facts about the Fidelius Charm, however, become much more complicated in DH, thanks to new information that seems to contradict earlier books. Readers thought they understood how the charm worked from Professor Flitwick who says in PoA:
[The Fidelius Charm is] an immensely complex spell involving the magical concealment of a secret inside a single, living soul. The information is hidden inside the chosen person, or Secret-Keeper, and is henceforth impossible to find—unless, of course, the Secret-Keeper chooses to divulge it. [PoA, p. 205]
A few years later, the author answered a fan question on her official site about “What happens when a Secret-Keeper dies?”
When a Secret-Keeper dies, their secret dies with them, or, to put it another way, the status of their secret will remain as it was at the moment of their death. Everybody in whom they confided will continue to know the hidden information, but nobody else. [JKR-OS]
And all of that made sense. Peter Pettigrew was the Potters’ Secret-Keeper and when he told Voldemort their location, he could go there, enter the house, and kill the family (he failed to kill Harry, of course). That’s the reason Sirius wanted to kill Peter after the death of James and Lily, since he knew that only Peter could be the traitor. Sirius knew where the Potters were in Godric’s Hollow, but he couldn’t tell anyone, since he wasn’t the Secret-Keeper.
And again, in OotP, Dumbledore was the Secret-Keeper for Grimmauld Place, and the only way Harry could see the address of the house was when