Fridge / Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Warning: Marked and Unmarked spoilers ahead. Read at your own discretion.

Fridge Brilliance

• The morning after the deaths of James and Lily, the Dursleys don't notice an owl flying past the window. It just seems to be adding to the atmosphere of strangeness, but after Order of the Phoenix, it becomes apparent that this owl was most likely delivering a message to Mrs. Figg.
• Ronan the Centaur is angry at Firenze for saving Harry from Quirrell/Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest, as it goes against the stars' foretelling. Harry is destined to be killed by Voldemort in the forest six years later.
• Everyone assumes that Quirrell's stuttering and turban come from a bad encounter with a Vampire in Albania. He did indeed have a bad encounter, but with Voldemort. So it appears that this rumour was false, but Voldemort does make Quirrell drink (unicorn) blood on his behalf.
  • Quirrell tries to say his turban was a reward for ridding an African prince of a troublesome zombie. However, as Pottermore explains, zombies are mostly reported in the United States — so people have a reason to ask him how he did it. But! Zombies actually have been in African-related legends, so perhaps he did do his research?
• When asked what's going on, all the centaurs say is that Mars is particularly bright. Four books later, Firenze explains in a Divination Class that Mars signals war. The Centaurs were telling the wizards that a War was coming.
• Ronan also says "Always the innocent are the first victims." The first person to die in the second war was Cedric Diggory, a friendly, easygoing kid who'd never hurt anyone. It is also revealed by Word of God that Quirrell did not intend to serve Voldemort. He wanted to determine if Voldemort was alive (and if need be, defeat him). Unfortunately, he failed and was forcibly taken over against his will, essentially dying from the encounter. He would from then on be controlled by our Big Bad, becoming the first innocent victim of Voldemort's return to power.
  • The first person to die was actually Frank Bryce, another innocent - a fact that is emphasised in his back story.
• Ron's attempt to turn Scabbers yellow didn't just fail because it wasn't a very good spell, but because it specified a rat as its target, and Scabbers is an Animagus.
• Neville wins Gryffindor the House Cup for trying to stop the Trio, with Dumbledore commenting that while it takes courage to stand up to one's enemies, it takes a great deal more to stand up to one's friends. Later on in the last book, we find out that Dumbledore's greatest regret was not standing up to his friend Grindelwald, which caused the death of his younger sister and his eventual rise to power. He's not just trying to justify awarding the House Cup to Gryffindor — he's rewarding Neville for succeeding where he himself had failed.
  • He’s also rewarding him in the most public way possible, granting him the approval of his classmates and decreasing the chances that this rare strength of Neville’s will be stamped out by bullying and peer pressure. Now that’s thinking like a teacher!
• In the film, Oliver Wood shows Harry a Golden Snitch. When it flies out of his hand, Harry's eyes follow the Snitch, but Wood starts looking around. A Quidditch captain with such poor vision? Wood had just said it was 'damn near-impossible to see' and he is a Keeper, in charge of following the much larger Quaffle.
  • This also foreshadows (if unintentionally), Harry's tendency for surviving some of the more harrowing situations he does in the series, typically due to a detail his enemies weren't able to account for.
• When Hagrid arrives to accept Harry into Hogwarts, Harry asks him what happened to Voldemort. Hagrid's response: "Dunno if he had enough human left in him to die." That's exactly what happens: Voldemort didn't die because only a bare fraction of his soul was in his body at the time.
• Harry convinces Hermione and Ron to break school rules and save the Stone by telling them what would happen otherwise: "Haven't you heard what it was like when he was taking over? There won't be any Hogwarts to get expelled from! He'll either flatten it or turn it into a school for the Dark Arts!" The latter being what Voldemort tried to do in Deathly Hallows.
• During the Christmas holidays, Fred and George charm snowballs to bounce off the back of Quirrell's turban. At the end of the book, it is revealed that Voldemort's face is on the back of Quirrell's head, under his turban. So the snowballs were hitting Voldemort!
• The first time Harry feels pain in his scar is when he glances at Snape during the opening-day feast. What's Snape doing when Harry sees him? Talking face-to-face with Quirrell, which means that the back of Quirrell's head must've been turned towards Harry at the time. Harry was looking at Voldemort for the first time since his parents' murders, and didn't know it.
• In the film during the Quidditch match, when Hermione, Ron, and Hagrid realize Harry's broom has been jinxed, they scan the crowd with binoculars and Hermione notices Snape chanting. However, if you look carefully, you can see Quirrell just behind him... And he's also chanting. It's a subtle bit of Foreshadowing for those that haven't read the book that Quirrell was trying to kill Harry and Snape, who was desperate to make himself even with James Potter for saving his life, was trying to invoke a counter-curse to save Harry.
• Dumbledore explains to Harry at the end of the book that Harry's father and Snape "detested each other. Not unlike yourself and Mr. Malfoy." At the time, we, along with Harry, envision James as Harry's own righteous counterpart to Snape's Malfoy-like supremacist bullying. Book 5 reveals that James was the prejudiced, over-privileged brat picking on Snape, who was a neglected, ostracized loner.
  • Although he was also likely to know about each boy's proclivities and development as well. Snape was jealous of James's upbringing and popularity and had an obsession with the Dark Arts that made even Lily uncomfortable, and James's dislike of Snape probably had more to do with that (and the fact that he probably clocked Snape as a rival for Lily's affections early) than it did their difference in status. After all, most people outside of Snape spoke well of James as an ultimately good kid that just needed some maturing while that wasn't quite the case for Malfoy.
• Malfoy's comment about Hufflepuff wasn't just a shot at the House's unspectacular reputation; you'd think that Gryffindor, given its long-time rivalry with Slytherin, would be the House that Malfoy mentioned. But consider that Helga Hufflepuff was implied to be the founder that cared the least about blood status and was accepting of everyone — which is the opposite of Malfoy's elitist line of thinking.
• Hagrid first appears riding on Sirius Black's flying motorbike. Why did Sirius give him the motorbike? Probably because, as revealed in Prisoner of Azkaban, Sirius was planning on confronting Peter, and expected to end up either dead or in prison.
• At first, the protections guarding the Stone seem to be proven iffy if they were able to be beaten by three first-years. However, note the word three first years. Each challenge was difficult, but was also set for a specific skill set. The flying keys was designed for someone with athletic skills, the potions needed someone good at riddles, the troll needed someone who was good at defensive spells, and chess required someone who has a different perspective rather than just studying a lot. Even the Devil's Snare required knowledge or skills in Herbology. The individual tasks were not hard, but the chances of one person being extremely athletic, logical, good at strategy, well read, and good at defensive spells all at once is highly improbable. Even for three very different wizards, they got lucky with two of the tasks having already being taken care of them for them (the troll and Fluffy). No wonder it took Quirrell all year to figure out how to get past all of them on his own. Because of this multilayered protection, it almost dictated that (barring a wizard equal to the power and skill of Voldemort himself) it would have required a team of people to reach the Mirror of Erised — and more than likely, a team of people willing to sacrifice their chance at the Stone so one person could reach it. Even then, the stone produces instant riches and immortality. And on top of that still, Dumbledore's final protection was that only someone who wanted to find the stone (yes, find it and not use it) would be able to get it. This pretty much disqualifies almost everyone looking for the Stone.
  • Better yet, consider that Harry in particular saw his parents in the Mirror and Dumbledore knew that. It's quite possible that Dumbledore expected, or at least considered, that Harry would see his family instead of getting the Stone, thus leaving it safely beyond Voldemort's reach while Harry kept Quirrell and Voldemort from trying to get around the spell. Plus, Harry's still protected by The Power of Love, so it's not like Voldemort could've done anything to him anyway! In that light, it almost seems like Dumbledore wanted Harry to have a chance to engage Voldemort (or, if he did get the Stone out, get away with it, leaving Voldemort with little option but to either escape or risk further capture by chasing Harry out of the corridor) while there was no chance of him or anyone else getting hurt (since there was only enough in that last bottle for one person), and make doubly sure the Stone would be safe from getting stolen if/when Quirrell and Voldemort made it to the chamber, at least until he or another staff member arrived.
  • One of the obstacles being a Herbology one takes on a new meaning when we learn that Herbology is Neville's best subject. Dumbledore may have suspected Neville would prove braver than he seemed, and set things up so that if Neville wound up joining Harry, Hermione, and Ron in their attempt, there would be at least one obstacle Neville would excel at, making him an integral part just like the keys were tailored to Harry's strength, the chess game to Ron's, and the logic puzzle to Hermione's. Dumbledore was ready to help boost Neville's self-esteem and show how valuable he was from year one!
  • Best of all - even if the protections were as simple as they seem, the end result is that the seeker ends up in the last room with no way back, as the potion that allows them to pass through the fire guarding the final door contains barely a mouthful of potion. This essentially traps whoever is after the Stone in that room with the Mirror of Erised, which won't give it to them unless they only want to have it, but not use it. Thus, whoever came looking for the Stone would likely be trapped in that room, too distracted by trying to figure out the mirror to try and find an alternative means of escape, until Dumbledore himself turned up to deal with them.
• The protections also provide a sort of retroactive foreshadowing on the villain. Quirrell tells Harry that "there is no good and evil — there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." This clearly points to a personal philosophy of 'power and nothing else.' All but one of the traps do not test sheer magical strength — the Devil's Snare required knowledge of Herbology and the ability to keep one's head in a crisis, the keys required skill at flying and teamwork, the chess set required strategical knowledge and willingness to make sacrifices, and the potion room is explicitly stated to be a test of logic instead of magic. Meanwhile, the troll is the exception, as it is the only test that appears to be a contest of sheer strength (so much so that Harry and company were lucky they didn't have to fight it). And even then, a sufficiently skilled wizard could make do without raw power; after all, earlier in the book, an eleven-year-old knocked one out with an incredibly simple spell.
• When Harry confronts Quirrell in the Mirror's chamber, Quirrell has the remaining fragment of Voldemort physically bonded to the back of his head. In book 7, we find out that Harry also has a torn-off fragment of Voldemort attached to him, mystically bonded to his soul as demonstrated by the scar on the front of his head. A Mirror chamber, indeed!
• On his first night at Hogwarts, Harry has a nightmare of Professor Quirrell's turban wrapping around his head in place of the Sorting Hat and trying to force him to join Slytherin. "The more he resisted, the tighter and heavier it got." While this highlights Harry's subconscious fear and doubt about his Sorting, it also gains significance after we learn that Voldemort was inside Quirrell's turban all along, forcing him to do terrible things. What's more, that Voldemort had left "a piece of himself" in Harry when he got his scar, the Sorting Hat mainly considered Harry for Slytherin on account of said piece (as revealed in the second book), and that said piece was actually a Horcrux (a piece of Voldemort's soul). It's possible that something deep in Harry's subconscious sensed this, particularly the Horcrux part of his mind, and manifested itself in a symbolic and vaguely prophetic dream. Harry's development regarding his relationship to Voldemort and House Slytherin was foreshadowed on his first night.
• Snape's initial speech in his introductory Potions class is chock full of Foreshadowing. Each of his phrases can be taken to represent a particular potion that plays an important role in the main narrative:
  • "Bewitch the Mind" - Amortentia (Love Potion), which is later implied to have been the potion under which Voldemort himself was conceived.
  • "Ensnare the Senses" - Wolfsbane Potion, which is used on Lupin in Book 3 and allows him to keep his human mental state while in his bodily werewolf form.
  • "Bottle Fame, Brew Glory, even stopper Death" - The Elixir of Life, which can only be made with the help of the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone, can do all three of these things. It can turn any metal into pure gold, thus making the owner rich. Whoever is able to produce the elixir will be unique among wizards because of its rarity, and become functionally immortal from drinking it. Of course the Stone is the main focus of the book, but the Stone as a tool creates the elixir, which Voldemort intended to use to return to full power. Also, it's implied that the spellwork Snape used in Book 6 to buy Dumbledore more time after the curse of Marvolo Gaunt's ring started to kill him involved the use of a potion, thus slowing down Dumbledore's death and leaving him alive long enough for the chain of events that resulted in Harry obtaining the allegiance of the Elder Wand.
  • "Potter! What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?" Asphodel is a plant from the lily family that is also said to grow in the Elysian Fields; in the language of flowers, it means "my regrets follow you to the grave". Wormwood is associated with regret or bitterness. Snape's first words to Harry can be translated as, "I bitterly regret Lily's death." Confirmed by Pottermore.
• It seems questionable that Dumbledore would leave recently orphaned Harry at the Dursleys since they hate magic. However, if Harry was instead raised in the wizard world and knew that he was famous, he would most likely turn out just like Draco. Having him raised by the Dursleys and being mistreated by them makes him humble. This is confirmed near the end of Harry's fifth year, after Dumbledore explains to Harry about his decision to leave Harry at the Dursleys:
  "Five years ago, then, you arrived at Hogwarts, neither as happy nor as well nourished as I would have liked, perhaps, yet alive and healthy. You were not a pampered little prince, but as normal a boy as I could have hoped under the circumstances. Thus far, my plan was working well."
• Hermione being more worried about expulsion than death makes perfect sense when you consider both her status as a Muggle-born witch and the fate of those who don't quite fit in in the magical world. If sent back to the Muggle world, she will have magical powers that she'll have to spend the rest of her life concealing from all around her, all while not fully knowing how to control them. If she chooses to continue in the magical world, she'll be forever stigmatized for being expelled from Hogwarts. At least if she dies, she'll be beyond caring.
  • Also, it's pretty heavily implied her only friends are the ones she's made in the magical world.
  • On top of that, death is a pretty hard thing for most eleven-year-olds to conceive of and seriously worry about. Expulsion, on the other hand, is much more immediate.
• Hermione's panic when trapped in Devil's Snare ("ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?") is Played for Laughs… but as revealed in the next book, she's Muggleborn and probably didn't know she was a witch until she got her Hogwarts acceptance letter. It's one thing to acquire magical knowledge as quickly as she has, but it's another to have it immediately come to mind in a life-or-death crisis when you've spent most of your life not knowing about magic. Consider that Harry is seldom, if ever, seen actually casting spells outside of the classroom.
• The inscription on the Mirror of Erised ("Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi") is the sentence "I show not your face but your heart's desire" spelled backwards. In other words, it's mirrored.
• When the Trio and Neville encounter Fluffy for the first time, the dog doesn't immediately attack them, not because it was caught off-guard, but because Peeves was talking to Filch in a singsong (i.e. musical) voice!
  • Fluffy may also have been trained to only attack intruders going for the trapdoor, so that anyone who went through the door by accident (or who entered on a dare or whatever) wouldn't be torn apart.
• Why doesn't Hagrid get in trouble for using magic on Dudley? Aside from the fact that nobody would think he could do magic in the first place, his wand being broken, the second book shows that the Ministry of Magic can't tell who specifically used magic in a certain location. They probably thought it was Harry who accidentally used magic and let it go since he didn't know better yet.
  • Similarly, Hagrid mentions he is only supposed to use magic at Hogwarts. Technically, he's not supposed to use magic at all, but if he does it at Hogwarts/on the grounds, the Ministry will assume it's one of the teachers or students.
• Harry's initial fear that (Oliver) Wood was a cane McGonagall was going to use on him isn't that farfetched given that, first off, the Dursleys were not above physically threatening him. Second, not long before this, Dudley (having been accepted to Smeltings) acquired an actual cane/stick, with which he was allowed and occasionally encouraged to whack Harry. As sad as it is, poor Harry's assumption that he was about to get caned came from years of experience.
• When Quirrell attacks Harry, he tries to grab him with his bare hands, instead of casting a spell on him. At first, this might seem like he Forgot About His Powers, but remember, the last time an evil wizard tried to cast a curse on Harry, the spell rebounded. To avoid a rebound, Quirrell might have thought that killing Harry through a more mundane method like strangling him would be safer than using the killing curse. Ironically, Voldemort probably would have been better off strangling Harry in the seventh book.
• Vernon taking the family to a hut on an island: There's an old superstition (that shows up in some fantasy series as well) that magical beings can't cross water. It's possible that he'd heard this superstition somewhere, and was trying to use it! Unfortunately for him, that's not a problem for witches and wizards in this 'verse.
• The punishment of sending kids out into the Forbidden Forest seems very harsh at first. However, not only are the students safe with Hagrid, but teenagers being teenagers, no doubt every year there are one or two idiots who dare each other to go out into the Forest at night. If you've actually been out there at night, you definitely would not want to go back without Hagrid's protection.

Fridge Horror

• When Harry visits the zoo with Dudley and frees the boa constrictor, the snake informs Harry, "Brazil, here I come… Thanksss, amigo." However, according to herpetologist Mark O'Shea in his book, "Boas and Pythons of the World" (2007), boas are being overhunted and targeted as prey by many Brazilians. On the mainland, large-scale harvesting of skins, meat, and body parts, combined with active persecution and habitat loss, has had a disastrous effect on the once-common species. O'Shea writes, "I have seen boa constrictor heads in jars, racks of dried boa tails, and live neonates in sacks for sale in Amerindian markets of Belém, Brazil." Had the boa constrictor made it to its species' natural habitat in Brazil, chances are good that it could have gotten killed there. Harry freeing the boa constrictor, though it initially seems like an (unintentional) act of kindness, likely sent the snake to its death.
  • Thankfully mitigated by the fact that the snake's chances of actually getting to Brazil from the UK are negligible and it was most likely recaptured.
• Hagrid gives Dudley a pig's tail. Later in the series, we see how seriously the Ministry takes magic cast on Muggles — and this is a muggle child, no matter what a jerk he and his parents are. Also note that when Hagrid was angered by Vernon, his immediate response was to turn and attack Mr. Dursley's son.
  • Hagrid mentions that he'd actually meant to turn Dudley into a pig rather than give him a pig's tail. Word of God states that any human transformed into an animal would lose their memories, intelligence, and personality, essentially becoming an animal in spirit as well as body, unless they were an Animagus, and Hagrid intended to do this to an eleven-year-old child for something his father said. Though considering Hagrid was expelled in his third year and never got to learn more about magic, he may have been unaware about the full effects of animal transfiguration.
    • Although considering how bubbly Hagrid usually is, there's a good chance that he was joking. The spell wore off anyways.
    • Wore off? No, the Dursleys had to have it surgically removed! Dudley got to spend his first days in a brand new school with a healing surgical incision on his butt, probably making it uncomfortable to sit or run and possibly getting him teased (which may count as well-deserved, considering what he did to Harry).
• In the film, we see flashbacks to Lily Potter's murder by Voldemort, using the Killing Curse. We know from the later installments that the Killing Curse inflicts no pain on its victim, instead killing them without leaving any signs of a cause for the death. So why is Lily screaming when struck by the curse? She's screaming in anguish at the reality that her only son is about to be murdered, and there is nothing she can do to save him.
• Hermione's line "We could have been killed, or worse, expelled" seems funny at first, but given how anxious Hermione is about her marks in Half-Blood Prince, Hogwarts probably meant everything to the girl.
  • Her willingness to repeatedly flirt with expulsion anyway, pretty much any time her friends or cause requires it, explains why the Sorting Hat put her in Gryffindor instead of Ravenclaw. It takes a lot of “daring, nerve, and chivalry” to be that willing to throw away an education you value that highly.
• The fact that three 11-year-olds and a 12-year-old (Hermione's birthday is mid-September) were sent into the Forbidden Forest to find a unicorn that had been badly hurt for being out after curfew. Hagrid even says that a werewolf wouldn't be able to do it. And as we learn in the next book, there's an entire colony of acromantulas in the forest! Oh, and Hagrid even tells them that "Yeh've done wrong an' now yeh've got ter pay fer it.'" when Harry and Hermione (and Ron in the movie) are in trouble for helping him! What the Hell, Hero? doesn't even begin to cover it!
  • A bit of Fridge Brilliance plays in however, when you realise that Aragog holds Hagrid in high esteem, so, as long as they are with Hagrid, Aragog's colony probably wouldn't attack them, as well as the fact that the Acromantula nest is said to be very, very, deep in the forest, and they are searching for unicorns, which in myth are very smart, so doubtful a wounded one would flee directly to their nest. And given that it's wounded, it probably wouldn't be able to make it very deep into the forest before collapsing. In any case, Hagrid would keep the kids safe no matter what.
  • Also, Hagrid said that in front of Filch, chances are he was just trying to be nice to someone who probably outranks him (both in employment status and as a pure human being instead of a half-human half-giant in a world of Fantastic Racism).

• During the Quidditch scene, Hermione sets Snape’s cloak on fire because she sees him muttering a spell and thinks he’s jinxing Harry’s broom. It’s revealed that it was actually Quirrel who was jinxing it, and Snape was muttering the counter-curse. The real reason the broom went back to normal was because The commotion from the burning cloak also broke Quirrel’s concentration. Now what would have happened if Quirrel had been sitting somewhere else?
  • The book has Hermione knocking Quirrel over halfway across her run around the Quidditch stands to get to Snape, breaking his eye contact, so that's probably what would have happened.
• Poor Harry loses his parents, is sent to the Dursleys and left there overnight. He wakes up to his aunt's scream the next morning. For some time, he probably was asking for his parents, unable to understand why he was with these strange people in a strange house, being bullied by Dudley and raised by Vernon and Petunia who ignored him.
  • Somewhat dampered by his age—Harry was only fifteen months old when his parents died, after all, and depending on how quickly he developed he might not have been talking yet. Sure he would cry a lot, but at that age memories don't really stick—equally depressing is the thought that Harry would have to accept his life as-is from such an early age, it's all he'd ever known.

Fridge Logic

• After Hagrid bumbershot Dudley with the failed Transfiguration spell, how did he not land in hot water?
  • Probably the same way nobody pulled up Harry for making the glass vanish at the zoo. It's entirely possible plenty of young wizards and witches, before even knowing what they are, could cause such things to happen. Plus Hagrid was kicked out with only about 2 years worth of schooling, and he wasn't especially bright to begin with, meaning anything he did on purpose is probably something any wizard could do by accident. So basically, the Ministry of Magic could have fairly assumed it was Harry's fault, but decided it was an innocent mistake hardly worth investigating.
  • It's been confirmed from Word of God that any magical outbursts that occur before a student's first year at Hogwarts is basically ignored by the Ministry, since they have not yet learned how to control their magic, and have not received the letter students get at the end of the year reminding them not to use magic over the holiday. Especially for Muggleborns and those like Harry raised by Muggles, the Ministry recognized they literally would not know they aren't supposed to use magic outside of school. Also the second book shows that when Dobby used magic in Harry's home Harry was blamed for it, the Ministry can detect magic being used in an area but not necessarily who used it they just made an educated guess based on what registered magic users are living in the area. So they would not have known if it was Hagrid or Harry that used the magic on Dudley.

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