Fanfic / Seventh Horcrux

"Voldemort is like the old person who doesn't understand computers at all, but knows that sometimes viruses cause them problems, so if something goes wrong with his computer he assumes it has a virus. Except the computers are people and the virus is love."

— SolipsistSerpen on this story's Voldemort

October 31st was an ordinary day for Voldemort, sitting on his throne chastising his minions' various vices until he was informed about the location of a family that had thrice defied him (he knew; after all, he keeps a list of such things). Months after attempting to dispatch a child of the prophecy he didn't know the entirety of, he finds himself remembering his life as Voldemort, now inhabiting the body of an infant.

Upon reflection, he decides to go back to his one true goal from before the drunken bender that accidentally cemented him as the Dark Lord: to become the DADA teacher. And thus begins the seven years at Hogwarts of Lord Vol— sorry, Harry Potter.

Seventh Horcrux by Emerald Ashes (Spacebattles thread) is a fanfic that takes itself seriously enough that it can be confused on whether it's a parody or a retread of canon.

---

This story provides examples of:

• 0% Approval Rating: Towards the end of the story, Voldemort's paranoid purges of half his inner circle and the other half turning out to be spies has resulted in this. Even Slytherin House no longer supports him, owing to him having killed most of their parents. Though the reforms of magical creature rights are nice.
• Achievements in Ignorance / Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Voldemort created the Dark Mark while on an epic bender after he was denied the chance to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. He had to spend six months recreating it after he sobered up.
• Adaptational Heroism: It's established early on that Voldemort actually disliked his time as a Dark Lord, does not buy into pureblood rhetoric, lacks a fair bit of his original counterpart's sadism and cruelty, and shows a surprisingly dynamic soft side. He maintains his extreme selfishness and disregard for human life, though, and it's unclear just how much of this is him and how much is Harry's remaining consciousness.
• Adaptation Personality Change:
  • Voldemort. He'd actually been getting tired of ruling his Death Eaters (because they were getting really annoying) and was losing interest in ruling Britain by Halloween 1981 (he just saw them as a bunch of sheep).
  • Ginny is shown to have enjoyed her time with Tom Riddle, and picked up many of his tendencies - which causes her to fall in love with Harry, just like in canon.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Ginny, due to not having ever rejected Tom Riddle, ends up becoming essentially her generation's equivalent to Bellatrix, desperately fangirling over Harry's blatant evil and doing everything she can to get his attention.
  • Hermione has this played for comedy, where Harry perceives her as a terrifying dark lord in the making despite not being any more evil than in canon. Most of Hermione's wicked feats are direct references to things she did in canon; it's just that Harry is willing to call her out on them.
• Adaptational Wimp: Umbridge, in an odd way—she isn't really more or less skilled than in canon, but she ends up going up against a much more tenacious, brutal, and skilled opponent, and as a result fails to really flex her sadism or her privileges as she did in Order of the Phoenix. As a result, she ends up being a lot more pathetic.
• Addictive Magic: Turns out Harry is addicted to the Imperius due to casting it on himself so often.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Harry believes that much of the reason Hermione tends to do incredibly illegal things despite being the most law-abiding of the group is that Hermione thinks all rules are equally important—that is to say, she considers "don't cheat on your test" to be as serious as "don't kidnap and try to murder somebody." Consequently, she's very difficult to push into doing anything "against the rules", but once you have pushed her to do that, she has no restraints on what she'll do next.
• Ambiguous Situation: Whether or not Dumbledore knows Harry's true nature is never made quite clear. He seems to at least hint many times that he thinks something is off about Harry, but he also rarely takes action against him.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: When discussing the different types of people in different Houses, Harry notes that the third type of Slytherin is people raised by Muggles who had no idea about blood purity and just liked snakes, and who end up being forced to climb to the top but never making any real friends in the process. Ginny adds not long after that the third type of Gryffindor is people who are secretly evil but hide among the Gryffindors because it's the last thing anyone would expect.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Dumbledore died, Death Eaters took over the Ministry of Magic, and Snape is the new headmaster at Hogwarts.
• Bad Boss: Aside from his Cloudcuckoolander tendencies, Voldemort ends up being a bigger threat to his followers than the Ministry or the Order combined. Most of Slytherin House turns against him because he murdered half their parents as collateral damage when he came back initially, and pretty much the only people he hasn't killed towards the end are his most faithful allies—Snape, Sirius, and Hagrid.
• Being Evil Sucks: Parodied. Voldemort's one true love has always been teaching, but declaring oneself the Dark Lord Voldemort and killing people makes it really hard to get a job around children. He would know, as he's tried.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Harry and Voldemort suffer from this. The biggest example is probably claiming Ron was mauled by Lupin as a werewolf—initially, Harry deliberately throws this in to liven up the telling, but it doesn't take long before even he thinks Ron is actually a werewolf.
• Black Comedy Rape: Attempted rape, anyway— there is a running gag of Bellatrix Lestrange attempting to sneak love potion into Voldemort's food.
• Brick Joke: After torching Quirrell's body, Dumbledore runs into Harry. Harry promptly tries to lie his way out of the situation by claiming Quirrell mysteriously burst into flames, and Dumbledore tells him it was his mother's love. Harry replies with "My mother's love is fire?" Later, when Barty Crouch Jr. tries to kill him during fourth year, Harry kills him by setting him on fire. Then, when Dumbledore and Snape arrive, he feeds them this line.
  "Oh, Professors, I’m so glad you’re here. Moody’s a Death Eater and tried to kill me, but, thankfully, I killed him first…with love."
  • Later, Dumbledore remarks that love is wonderful, and Harry replies, "Yes, it burns things. I recall."
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • When Harry (Voldemort) arrives at the Dursleys, they start treating him like they did Harry. The problem is, in a matter of months, he remembers that he's the Dark Lord Voldemort, and begins terrorizing them with wandless magic.
  • Umbridge spends Harry's fifth year trying to torment him in a similar fashion to the original book, but her efforts completely fail due to Harry subverting her torture methods.
• But Not Too Evil: Despite his attitude, for the most part, the worst things Harry does are act mean, dabble in Dark magic, and kill or injure people who were going to kill him. He's clearly dismissive towards ideas of blood purity, he lacks the usual sadism, and he never kills someone truly innocent. Luna herself points out that for all his posturing, he rarely follows up on his evil schemes, and theorizes that this is because he's both Voldemort and Harry (something which Harry dismisses completely). Even the author suggested that Harry isn't as evil as he likes to say he is.
• The Chew Toy: Ronald Weasley. Funnily, the author points out that he's probably broadly happier and better-adjusted than canon due to more properly understanding his place in the world—Ron's resentment of Harry was in part that Harry always stayed the Humble Hero despite having everything Ron ever wanted, but this Harry is not a Humble Hero.
• Cloudcuckoolander: As the story goes on it's clear that Harry (and by extension, Voldemort) is just plain insane. His incomprehensible way of thinking and misinformation about several things leads to several misinterpretations of people's actions and reputations. For one thing, Harry never figures out that Gilderoy Lockhart was a fraud and instead views his poor teaching skills as radical (and, thus, effective) techniques that force students to take initiative in their defense studies. This causes him to see Lockhart as the biggest threat to him finally having the DADA position, and setting an Acromantula on the man, which promptly kills him.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Hermione expresses worry that she might be turning into the next Dark Lord, Harry points out that Voldemort probably won't like that, so they'll have to kill him anyways.
• Contrasting Sequel Protagonist: Outright stated by the author that if Seventh Horcrux is the story of an insane boy taking the world by storm, Rose Weasley is a story about the Only Sane Man.
• Cool Teacher: Harry becomes this in the epilogue.
  "P-professor! I didn't see you there."
  "Of course not. I was invisible. I'm always invisible. And watching you."
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: On the same day that Dumbledore claims Voldemort was resurrected, a good number of the parents of pureblood Slytherin students are found to have died of a mysterious epidemic of the rarely-lethal dragon pox.
• Crack Pairing: invokedThough most of the actual pairings in the story are fairly canon-compliant (if anything, some of them make more sense than their canon treatments), Harry and Voldemort's inability to understand love leads to them assuming that any strong relationship that they don't understand fully is probably a love affair, while they miss blatantly obvious romantic tension. This leads to oddball pairings like Draco/Hermione, Fleur/Hermione, and Snape/Sirius being brought up.
• Crippling the Competition: After he breaks his Death Eaters out of Azkaban, Voldemort finds that spending over a decade there has done this to many of his minions.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Luna is the only one who figures out the truth about Harry's situation: in fact, she seemingly realizes something even Harry didn't. Naturally, when she asks him about it, he dismisses it completely.
• Curse Escape Clause: Required for truly powerful curses. So the curse on the Defense position has the escape clause of Dumbledore hiring someone as well-suited to the job as Voldemort had been. Quirrell obviously doesn't qualify, but Harrymort is legitimately concerned that Lockhart might.
• The Dark Arts: Played with. Most people take the term "Dark Magic" to mean this trope, but Harry, Ginny, and most likely Voldemort take it to mean magic kept secret within a family. Of course, as Harrymort points out, magic that fits this trope is a really good candidate for being kept a family secret. The Full Body-Bind is only harmless because everyone knows the countercurse now.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: Voldemort when attached to Quirrel.
• The Dark Side Will Make You Forget: Voldemort doesn't remember why he started making horcruxes. But Harry does: it was to survive Hogwarts long enough to graduate.
• Death of Personality: Essentially, what happens to Harry at the very start of the story. Voldemort's soul completely overwhelms his mind making him a copy of the original Voldemort. The only difference is Harrymort decides to use his new body as a chance to go after his dream again (being a teacher) so has no motivation to be evil.
  • Or so Harry believes. At one point, Luna floats the idea that Voldemort's soul merged with Harry's, making an entirely new person who is actually Lighter and Softer than the original Voldemort, but that Harry refuses to acknowledge the differences because his memories of being Voldemort are so central to his self-image. The author seems to be implying that she's right.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: Harry's by far the most powerful wizard of the Triwizard champions, but he insists on using such blatantly illegitimate or dishonorable strategies to complete the Tasks (for instance, openly attacking the other Champions or killing the dragon he was supposed to just steal an egg from) that he ends up having by far the worst scores.
• Double Tap: Harry asks Ron to invoke this trope.
  Harry: If he moves, I need you to stun him, and, if he doesn't move, then he's probably trying to trick you and you should stun him anyway.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Dumbledore manages to survive sixth year, only to die of Dragon Pox (it's actually the death curse from the Gaunts' ring).
• Draco in Leather Pants: invoked Parodied and lampshaded in the final non-epilogue chapter when Draco shows up wearing dragon hide pants. Also discussed in the omake/author musing collection, where the author figures this pattern exists partly because canon Draco is so unlikeable that writing him accurately looks too much like bashing.
• Dumb Is Good: Despite all the dissing Ron gets, it turns out he's the only one of the trio to be a true Gryffindor (if him being able to wield the sword is any indication).
• Easily Conquered World: The Ministry doesn't last any longer in Seventh Horcrux than in canon, despite Voldemort's inner circle having been badly depleted by his Cloudcuckoolander Bad Boss tendencies.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Where to begin?
  • After learning that Sirius is his right-hand man, Voldemort promptly welcomes him into his inner circle, even though he has no memory of Black ever holding the position. Voldemort also assumes that the reason Sirius lacks a Dark Mark is because he trusted him so much that such a test of loyalty was completely unnecessary. Not once does it ever occur to Voldemort that the reason why he doesn't remember Sirius being his right-hand man is because he wasn't his right-hand man, was somehow framed (most likely by one of his actual followers) and is now using this opportunity to spy on him.
  • While Lockhart may seem foolish, Harry reasons that Dumbledore would never deliberately hire an incompetent wizard to teach classes. He then sees Lockhart's teaching methods, and lauds the man for his willingness to let his students learn on-the-job by unleashing a swarm of unrestrained pixies on them. Harry voraciously reads Lockhart's books and assumes from them that Lockhart is, in fact, one of the strongest wizards on the planet, based on the absurd feats of magic he accomplishes and his apparent mastery of the Multis Me spell to be in several places at once. In point of fact, Lockhart is a complete fraud, Dumbledore hired Lockhart as a means of exposing him, and the reason Lockhart can perform impossible magic in multiple places at once is a mixture of editing mistakes and him making things up.
  • Harry/Voldemort assumes that Dumbledore attended Durmstrang after uncovering the man's former friendship with Gellert Grindelwald, and thus can't fathom why Dumbledore cares about any of the Houses and their rivalries. In reality, Dumbledore attended and graduated from Hogwarts — he didn't meet Grindelwald until after the latter had been expelled from Durmstrang. Voldemort also assumes that Dumbledore killed Grindelwald to stave competition for domination of the magical world. Grindelwald is actually alive, imprisoned in Nurmengard, and Spared by the Adaptation since Voldemort never went searching for the Elder Wand (though that doesn't exactly change much in his regard).
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: A Running Gag is that the Death Eater policies are pure evil... except for their surprisingly progressive policy on the rights and standards of magical creatures, particularly werewolves.
• Even Evil Has Standards: It's a continual joke that Harry is shocked and often impressed by Hermione making (usually canonical) plans that seem to be eviler than anything he'd want to do.
  Hermione pouted. "So, that means we don't need to brew an illegal potion with stolen ingredients, knock out three of our classmates, tie them up in a closet, sneak into the Slytherin Common Room, and interrogate Malfoy?"
  I gaped at her. "Was that your plan?" I fear that Hermione may be the most evil of us all. That is concerning since I am a retired Dark Lord.
• Everyone Is Related: At multiple separate points, people mention they have a relative who died in a magical trunk when the spells on it failed, and how they had to bury him in it. Either this happens frequently, or the wizarding community is so interrelated that this one guy was just about everyone's cousin/uncle/grandfather/nephew.
  • It must be noted that the guy's funeral was massive.
• Everybody Knew Already: Well, not everybody, but Hermione figures out Harry has Voldemort's memories during fourth year.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Harry and Voldemort both suffer from this, as the page quote implies. They're so ignorant to the concept of love that they actually trained to vomit whenever feeling the sensation (as it usually meant Bellatrix slipped him something). As a result, both are utterly confounded on many an occasion by feeling human emotions or when other people display them.
• Fanon Discontinuity: invokedA few elements of Word of God were largely rejected by the writer. For instance, Umbridge was canonically a Slytherin, but she's noted to be a Hufflepuff in the story, as she seemed to better represent the idea of an evil Hufflepuff and it was more interesting than all the bad guys being Slytherins.
• Fearful Symmetry: Harry Potter vs. Voldemort.
• Flock of Wolves: By sixth year, Voldemort's inner circle is composed of Sirius Black, Severus Snape, Hagrid, Trelawney, and Lucius Malfoy. The only remaining Death Eaters in that circle that he hasn't killed are Malfoy and Fenrir Greyback, the latter of whom is corresponding with Ron about werewolf rights.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Harry, since he still has glasses (despite his best efforts).
• Gaslighting: Harry continually reinforces his false claim that Ron is a werewolf (whether because he actually believes it or because he's just that dedicated to messing with people), which eventually causes Ron to internalize the belief that he might actually be a werewolf, to the point that he starts acting out against perceived anti-werewolf prejudices and even corresponds with Fenrir Greyback over werewolf rights legislation.
• Gender Bender: Voldemort's first resort when Draco mentions part of a key being hidden in the girl's dormitory is to pull one of these. That, or just ask a girl. Whatever will help him learn a lesson.
• Glad I Thought of It / Sure, Let's Go with That: Harry and Voldemort may be amazing schemers, but they are terrible planners. Both of them try to cover up this shortcoming by allowing other people to draw conclusions or make predictions that cast them in favorable light and then claim that that was exactly what they intended.
• Grail in the Garbage: Harry and Ron receive the Gaunt ring and the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's will, but neither actually recognize them as anything more than keepsakes or a spare Horcrux. (Admittedly, the Elder Wand is indeed pretty useless, as its owner died of natural causes and it's therefore just a normal wand now.)
• Happily Ever After: For pretty much everyone. Snape ends up as headmaster. Voldemort becomes the Sorting Hat, which he's surprisingly content with. Harry is the immortal DADA teacher. Ginny marries Harry and teaches History. Sirius ends up as the Muggle Studies teacher. Ron and Hermione get married and essentially take over the Ministry. Even the Malfoys get off lighter than in canon.
• Heel Realization: Hermione has one after a talk with Harry and Ron over her decision to obliviate her parents.
  • Downplayed when the Imperius on Harry is removed. He notes that everything seems more colorful than before, and that he feels incredibly guilty for almost everything. However, he still seems incapable of understanding why he feels this way, only that he doesn't like it.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Harry.
• Heroic Willpower: Subverted. After Harry ignores an Imperius, it is revealed that he had already Imperio'd himself to do whatever he wants.
• Hidden Depths: Harry, as surprising as it may sound. He is opposed to love potions on principle, and gives a number of very good reasons for it. Not that it stops him from brewing Amortentia in class to try to win some liquid luck.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Information about the Room of Requirement and how to enter it are hidden in the one place hardly anyone ever looks: Hogwarts: A History.
• Hufflepuff House: Played with. A Running Gag started by Harry and later adopted by others is while a number of Hufflepuffs are useless, there are a number of Slytherin Hufflepuffs who are actually so cunning they got themselves sorted into the "useless" house to avoid suspicion. In the omakes, Scorpius worries that he's actually a Hufflepuff Hufflepuff, much to Rose's horror.
• Innocently Insensitive: This actually makes up the vast majority of Harry's jerk tendencies. While he can be a Troll, he generally avoids being outright vicious towards his "minions," he simply has an extremely loose grip on the whole empathy/feelings thing along with a nasty case of Brutal Honesty.
• In Spite of a Nail: It's practically played for comedy that, despite the massive changes in the story's world and characters, things still end up being broadly recognizable from a canon perspective and The Stations of the Canon are mostly kept intact. One of the largest is that Harry still ends up in Gryffindor—in canon, he actually was a "True Gryffindor"; here, he decided that trying to build an empire from Slytherin didn't work once, so why try again? Additionally, he still marries Ginny, despite (or perhaps because?) both of them are significantly different in personality.
• Invisibility Cloak: Harry wears his every chance he gets, to the point that it becomes a running gag.
• Irony: Harrymort views both Hermione and Dumbledore as being far more evil than he is. In Hermione's case he actually finds this worrying considering she's a child and he's a Retired Monster. In both cases it's mostly just his Evil Cannot Comprehend Good coming into play. Hopefully.
• Jerkass: Harry and Voldemort.
• "Just Joking" Justification: Harry does this a lot, and initially gets away with it fairly often. It eventually stops working.
• Karma Houdini: Harry ends up getting what he always wanted: a job at Hogwarts and immortality. Voldemort ends up being sealed into the Sorting Hat, which he doesn't mind much.
• Kill It with Fire: How Harry dispatches Barty Crouch Jr. He also torches Quirrell's body after killing him.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: It's stated that a lot of Voldemort's eccentricities come from this: he's too proud to ever ask questions, and he was raised by Muggles and lacks natural knowledge of the magical world, which leaves him to merely loudly act like he knows what he's talking about and bullshit his way through the rest. This is why he believes that, for instance, "Dark Magic" means "old family secret;" he doesn't ask people why they're so shocked and disgusted when he asks them about their Dark Magic, and assumes they're just offended about the invasion of privacy.
• Lack of Empathy: Harry, to ludicrous extremes.
  • Seems to be getting better as the Years progress, however.
• Laughably Evil: Voldemort and Harry.
• Lampshade Hanging: After Harry recruits Draco Malfoy, he ends up wearing dragon hide pants, prompting the following line from Hermione:
  "Is Malfoy wearing leather pants?"
• Love Dodecahedron: Played for laughs in the sixth year, where Ginny breaks out a chart of all the current relationships going on. In short: Lavender has been in relationships with Ron and Parvati, and is currently with Dean, who is on the rebound from his own relationship with Ginny, Parvati may have a crush on Padma, Padma has a crush on Ron, Ron and Hermione are in the Cannot Spit It Out phase, Hermione, along with Crabbe, Goyle, Tracy, and Daphne (the latter four are dating each other) are all stalking Draco, and nobody likes Neville but he has a crush on Ginny, who used to be with Dean but is mostly consumed by their crush on Harry, who isn't interested in anyone.
• Made of Indestructium: Harry's invisibility cloak, being one of the Three Deathly Hallows, doesn't wear down like a normal invisibility cloak. Harry doesn't know this, and, believing it to be part of one of Dumbledore's schemes, begins trying to wear it out immediately, to no effect.
• Magic Feather: Harry uses a ritual to break the key to the Room of Requirement into seven pieces that need to be obtained by Draco through passing various tests and learning lessons. The ritual is designed such that the key does not actually work, and Draco must realize the true power was inside him all along. (According to Harry, this makes the ritual stronger.)
• Magic Knight: Neville becomes this after Harry pushes him to learn how to fight with a sword.
• Magic Mirror: The Mirror of Erised, as in canon, shows you your heart's desire. In the epilogue Harry looks into and all he sees is his own reflection.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In an odd playing of the "Luna is a Seer" idea, it's kept fairly ambiguous as to whether Luna is supernaturally wise and knowledgeable in some way or just a weirdo.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Most of Harrymort's "minions" (friends) are this. Considering he's "retired", he doesn't mind so much.
• The Mole: Due to not being able to remember who all his allies were after a near death experience and thirteen years as a wraith, Voldemort accidentally picks up several of them, including Rubeus Hagrid, Sirius Black, and Sybill Trelawney.
• More than Mind Control: Harry acts the way he does because he's under the Imperius. Harry is under the Imperius because he cast it on himself. After Hermione makes him remove it, he exhibits behavior similar to a drug addict going through withdrawal.
• Mundane Solution: Harry spends weeks trying to circumvent the age line around the Goblet of Fire, through methods like levitating pieces of paper in, using winds to blow them in, experimenting whether the Goblet detects your physical age or your mental age, or even using advanced ancient rune rituals to teleport the paper in. However, it turns out the age line does not protect against simply crumpling the paper into a little ball and tossing it in.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Hermione, after Harry and Ron confront her about her decision to Obliviate her parents.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Ginny told Luna how to say her name in Parseltongue, but due to a snake language not having a word for "moon", the name is just the words for "climbing egg."
• Mythology Gag:
  • "Honestly, who were they expecting? A Hufflepuff?"
  • Dumbledore said in the first book the happiest man in the world would see himself as he was if he looked into the Mirror of Erised. [In the epilogue Harry sees just that.
• Never My Fault: Both Harry and Voldemort are almost completely unable to admit that they're wrong, to the point that they'll go to great lengths to pretend they already knew things people tell them.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Throughout fourth year, Crouch's attempts to get Harry into the final round of the Triwizard Tournament turn out to be entirely unneeded—Harry does basically everything Crouch was trying to get him to do, while openly rejecting his plans as perceived murder attempts. In fact, Harry's attempts to avoid Crouch's advice or efforts largely make things worse for himself.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: It's a bit of a gag in the story that despite the protagonist being a Nominal Hero, the actual events end up going broadly better than in canon. Most good characters who died in canon survive here, a number of other characters have better fates or end up redeemed, Slytherin House is more or less ended, far more Death Eaters are killed (mostly by Voldemort himself), and Voldemort's plans seem to have done a lot less damage on the whole.
• No Kill like Overkill: Ron's stunner.
  Hermione: "Ron? What type of spell was that?"
  Ron: "A stunner."
  Hermione: "Oh. You, um, you might want to put a little less energy into it next time."
  Harry: "Or…you could not do that."
  • Comes in again in the final, non-epilogue chapter. Harry give Ron the duty of making sure Voldemort won't wake up before the ritual is finished, and Ron starts stunning him every few seconds.
  • This is actually Harry's basic approach to most problems. One of the best examples is during the Triwizard Tournament. He banishes the lake during the second task. The entire lake.
• Nominal Hero: Unlike his canon counterpart, this Harry repeatedly saves the day entirely by accident or for totally self-centered reasons.
• Noodle Incident: No one wants to wake Harry "after the last time".
  Harry: I don't know why you're still complaining about that. The scars weren't even permanent.
  • And again, later:
  Harry: "...and we all know what I did to the moving staircase."
  The denizens of Hogwarts simultaneously shivered, though the foreigners seemed rather perplexed.
  • There's also repeated mentions that Tom Riddle's third year was incredibly strange.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • Ordinarily, Legilimency is used to read minds while Occlumency is used to block it. Harry, however, also uses Legilimency to block Legilimency. How? He uses Legilimency on the other person, but harder. That way, they read his mind, but he's reading their mind at the time as well, so it doesn't do anything. He thinks this is genius. Hermione is baffled and disgusted.
  • Harry resists the Imperius curse effortlessly by the hilarious method of having already Imperiused himself to do whatever he wants.
• Obfuscating Disability: Like in canon, Professor Quirrell.
• Obvious Rule Patch: After Harry's actions in the first two Tasks (killing his dragon while invisible in the First Task, attacking fellow Champions and destroying the lake in the Second), much of the preamble to the Third is listing all the things (no using spells on the maze, no bringing in outside items or help, no attacking other Champions while outside the maze, killing is highly frowned on, no summoning the Cup).
• Obliviously Evil: Hermione. Whenever she starts breaking the rules, she tends to do horrible things to people without thinking about it. As Harry put it, "Hermione usually follows the rules because she doesn’t have a moral code."
• Only the Chosen May Wield: The Sword of Gryffindor, as ever—though the fic adds the note that while Harry and Hermione can't use it, Neville and Ron can. And ironically, so can Luna, despite not being a Gryffindor at all.
• Pet the Dog: One of Harry's first acts after his self-inflicted Imperius is removed is to return the wand he took from Neville. It turns out that the wand belonged to Neville's father, and he thanks Harry for giving it back.
  • Before that, he threatens to set Nagini on Hermione if he doesn't get his wand back from her to re-Imperio himself. She says he wouldn't, and he mutters that she's right, much to her shock.
• Reverse Psychology: Harry does everything in his power to make Slytherin win the House Cup every year by deliberately annoying Professor Snape so he will deduct more and more points from Gryffindor. Snape apparently caught on, because on the one occasion he actually wanted to reward Harry, he did so by granting points to Slytherin.
  • Snape then starts punishing Harry by granting points to Gryffindor. Harry then claims to his fellow Gryffindors that this was his plan all along.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • Hermione correctly guesses that Harry has Voldemort's memories, she's wrong in how he got them (through the scar link).
  • Harry tends to do this as well—correctly guessing people's actions, but completely fumbling on their motives. For instance, he believed that Moody was trying to kill him because Moody suggested he use a broomstick in the First Task. He was right that Moody was trying to kill him, but the broomstick was genuine advice; Moody didn't want him to die then.
  • When Ginny suggests that there are three types of Gryffindors—genuinely brave ones, prideful showoffs, and the secretly evil—Harry immediately tries to Change the Uncomfortable Subject and denies himself being anything like the last one. The author suggested that Harry was actually right; he's closer to the second type than the third, and Ginny was talking about herself (and possibly Hermione).
• Retired Monster: Harry. Sort of.
• Running Gag: Several.
  • Harry and his invisibility cloak.
  • Hufflepuffs being useless.
  • Harry mistaking Hermione's empathy as an act.
  • Hermione being evil.
  • Ron and Snape being accused of being werewolves.
  • Harry completely misinterpreting the situation due to a lack of empathy.
  • The cousin who died in a magically expanded trunk when its spells failed.
  • Ron's "lycanthropy".
  • Harry trying, and failing, to brew Felix Felicis.
  • The moving staircase and the Perks girl.
  • Fawkes' surveillance and repeated attacks against Harry or Dumbledore.
  • Harry and Voldemort treating Dumbledore's lemon drops like poisoning attempts.
  • The Death Eaters's surprisingly progressive policy towards the rights of magical creatures.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The only way to avoid the fatal curse on the Defense position is to be more worthy of it than its caster, Voldemort. When Lockhart comes along, Harrymort, unlike every Harry Potter fan who's read Book 2, believes every word he says about his prowess and is terrified that the curse won't affect him, so he kills him.
• Skewed Priorities: Hermione.
  Hermione "Voldemort has control over Hogwarts. He hates Muggleborns and he despises you, and I’m your Muggleborn best friend. There’s absolutely no way we can return to Hogwarts. How are we supposed to prepare for our NEWTs?"
  Harry "Really? That’s your problem with this? I assumed you were talking about the murder."
• Spared by the Adaptation: Sirius, Snape, Dobby, Fred, Mad-Eye, Lupin, Cedric, Tonks, Colin, Grindelwald, Nagini, the basilisk, and even Voldemort after a fashion. About the only good guy to perish in both canon and this story is Dumbledore, and even he dies by succumbing to the Ring's curse rather than being killed by Snape.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: One of the funniest elements of the conflict between Harry and Voldemort is the fact that, for obvious reasons, they both operate on exactly the same wavelength and will independently reach the same conclusions when given the same limited information.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: A Running Gag is that whenever Harry meets with Dumbledore, he claims that whoever told Dumbledore about his troublemaking activity was lying, at which Dumbledore points out that he never mentioned those activities and the meeting is for other reasons, at which Harry, relieved, denies having mentioned anything.
• Take That!:
  • One against the popular Fanon involving magical cores.
  • The Running Gag of Harry living inside a trunk and going through trouble as a result is a gentle poke at the many stories involving such trunks.
  • There's a lot of jokes on canon plot points, such as Hermione's occasional moments of baffling cruelty (i.e. kidnapping other students, brainwashing her parents, building magical traps into the DA contract) being treated as signs of the growing evil inside of her, or Half-Blood Prince being given the tagline "Harry Potter Vs. Love" and featuring an entire segment where Ginny goes over a growing Love Dodecahedron.
  • The common fanon idea of Draco in Leather Pants is the source of a lot of the joke with Draco's character, where he is more or less portrayed as a spineless, shallow, spoiled twit, and it's a running gag that he was born to be an evil minion.
• The Talk: Parodied when Harry gives Hermione The Dark Lord Talk.
• The Unfettered: Harrymort and presumably Voldemort made themselves into this though a self-Imperius designed to render them immune to being Imperiused by others. Unfortunately, poor wording resulted in the effect being the removal of any and all of their inhibitions or impulse control. As of "Year Seven, Part Two," Harry has had his removed and changes in his personality are slowly appearing.
• Throne Made of X: Lord Voldemort squats in Malfoy Manor, where he sits on a throne made out of the wailing portraits of Malfoy ancestors.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Harry has glowing red eyes. This isn't mentioned for several chapters.
• Villain Has a Point: Harry outing Lupin for being a werewolf is called out by Dumbledore (quite rightly) as a pretty dickish thing to do on the best of days. However, Harry justly points out that Lupin did endanger students by not taking his wolfsbane potion.
• Voodoo Shark: Parodied. Draco shows up near the end of the story wearing dragon hide pants and no shirt. Why dragon hide? To protect him from the fire. Why isn't he wearing a shirt? Because it burned away in the fire, of course! This supposed fire is never explained or brought up again, of course.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: Voldemort made his first stand against the Ministry of Magic and the wizarding world in general while drunk after being denied the DADA position, and it took him six months to recreate the Dark Mark after that. He even coined his name while drunk.
  "In my drunken haze, I'd killed six Ministry workers and declared myself the Dark Lord Voldemort (I never would have picked that name had I been sober).
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Harry and Hermione have this relationship a lot—Harry sees her as a Dark Lord in the making, and Hermione denies every second of it.

---