Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | Part One of Three
Well, here we are.
Seven books. Hundreds of characters. Thousands of pages. And somehow, after all these years, I've made my way back to the end of Harry Potter.
Except this time, I'm not quite the same person who started the journey.
And apparently, I have a lot more to say about Deathly Hallows than I anticipated.
So, rather than write one enormous article that would require its own table of contents and possibly a bathroom break, I'm splitting my final reflections into three parts.
And I want to start with something that has always bothered me.
Hedwig Deserved Better
I'm just going to say it.
Hedwig's death in the book sucks.
Not because I think she should have survived. I understand that Deathly Hallows is a story about war, sacrifice, and the end of childhood. Characters we've grown to love aren't necessarily going to make it.
But Hedwig's death feels almost like a logistical decision.
Harry is leaving Privet Drive for the last time. He's about to spend the better part of a year on the run, moving between hiding places, searching for Horcruxes, and generally having a pretty miserable time.
And somewhere along the way, it feels like somebody realized that keeping track of a snowy owl for the rest of the book was going to be inconvenient.
So Hedwig dies.
In her cage.
And that's it.
Now, I don't often say this, but I actually think the movie handled this moment better.
In the film, Hedwig dies defending Harry during the escape from Privet Drive. She gets one final act of loyalty and courage, and her death feels like a meaningful sacrifice rather than an unfortunate bit of housekeeping.
For once, the movie improved on the book.
But even with my frustration over how it happens, I recognize what Hedwig's death represents.
She was Harry's first real connection to the magical world. A gift from Hagrid. A companion who was there through his lonely summers with the Dursleys and his adventures at Hogwarts.
And now, as Harry leaves his childhood home for the last time, she's gone.
It's a painful reminder that the world Harry is entering isn't going to make room for all the things he loved about the world he's leaving behind.
And that brings me to something much bigger that stood out during this reread.
Evil Doesn't Need to Build Something New
One of the most disturbing things about Deathly Hallows isn't the Death Eaters, the Dark Arts, or even Voldemort himself.
It's the Ministry of Magic.
Think about what the Ministry was supposed to represent.
A government established to maintain order, protect the wizarding community, and enforce laws that allow magical society to function.
Now, we already know the Ministry has some serious problems.
In Order of the Phoenix, we watched Cornelius Fudge and his administration use the institution's authority to suppress the truth about Voldemort's return.
They discredited Harry. They attacked Dumbledore. They interfered with Hogwarts. They used the machinery of government to protect their own positions rather than acknowledge a threat to the people they were supposed to serve.
And that was before Voldemort took control.
By Deathly Hallows, the Ministry has effectively been captured by the very people it should have been protecting the wizarding world against.
But here's what I find so unsettling about that.
Voldemort doesn't need to create an entirely new government. He just takes over the one that's already there.
The offices are still there.
The departments are still there.
The paperwork, the hearings, the employees, the laws, and the authority structures are all still there.
Only now, they're being used to persecute Muggle-born witches and wizards.
The Muggle-Born Registration Commission is particularly horrifying because it takes something as ordinary as government bureaucracy and turns it into an instrument of cruelty.
People are summoned to hearings, interrogated about their identities, and treated as criminals simply because of who they are.
And the whole thing operates under the appearance of official government business.
That's what makes it frightening.
The evil isn't hiding in a dark castle somewhere.
It's sitting behind a desk, stamping paperwork.
Dolores Umbridge: A Woman Who Loves Power
And speaking of desks and paperwork, guess who's back?
Dolores. Freaking. Umbridge.
I genuinely don't know how Rowling managed to create a character who can make me more uncomfortable than the actual Dark Lord, but here we are.
And what makes Umbridge so fascinating to me as an adult is that I don't think she particularly cares who's running the show.
She cares about power.
She cares about authority.
She cares about being in a position where she can tell other people what to do and punish them when they don't comply.
In Order of the Phoenix, she was perfectly happy serving under Fudge while tormenting children at Hogwarts.
Now, under a Ministry controlled by Voldemort, she's helping persecute Muggle-born witches and wizards.
Different leadership. Same Dolores Umbridge.
And I think that's an important distinction.
Not everyone who enables evil necessarily believes in some grand ideological vision.
Sometimes they're simply people who enjoy having power over others.
And when the center of power moves, they move with it.
Umbridge doesn't need to be a Death Eater to become an enthusiastic participant in Voldemort's system.
She just needs the system to give her permission to do the things she already wants to do.
And that's what makes people like Umbridge so dangerous.
They don't necessarily need to be convinced to do terrible things.
They just need someone in authority to tell them it's allowed.
The Institutions We Trust
I think this is one of those themes that becomes much more unsettling as you get older.
As a kid, I mostly understood the Ministry as a collection of incompetent adults who kept getting in Harry's way.
And honestly, that interpretation wasn't entirely wrong.
But as an adult, I see something more disturbing.
We create institutions because we need them.
We need laws, governments, schools, and organizations to help people live and work together.
Ideally, we build these systems to protect people, establish fairness, and provide some sense of stability.
But those systems don't automatically remain good simply because they were created for good reasons.
They're only as trustworthy as the people operating them, and the principles those people are willing to defend.
And once an institution becomes more concerned with preserving its own authority than fulfilling its original purpose, it becomes vulnerable to the very people it was meant to protect us from.
That's what we watch happen to the Ministry across these books.
First, it uses its authority to suppress an uncomfortable truth.
Then, it becomes a tool for the people who benefit from that truth being suppressed.
And eventually, the institution that was supposed to protect the wizarding world becomes one of the greatest threats to the people living in it.
The truly frightening part is how little of the machinery actually has to change.
Reading the Same Book as a Different Person
When I first read Deathly Hallows, I was excited to see Harry finally confront Voldemort.
I wanted the Horcruxes destroyed, the Death Eaters defeated, and the good guys to win.
And I still want all of those things.
But reading the book now, I'm much more interested in how the wizarding world allowed things to get so bad in the first place.
How easily people accepted what they were told.
How quickly institutions abandoned the people they were supposed to protect.
And how willingly people like Umbridge embraced a system that gave them more power.
I used to think of evil in stories as something that arrived from the outside.
A dark wizard. A monster. An invading army.
Something you could identify, confront, and defeat.
But Deathly Hallows reminds me that evil doesn't always need to force its way into the world.
Sometimes we build the doors, hand it the keys, and tell ourselves the building is still doing what it was designed to do.
And that's a much more frightening thought than anything lurking in the Forbidden Forest.
This is Part One of my three-part finale to Reading the Same Book as a Different Person.
In Part Two, I'm looking at something that Voldemort never truly understood: the power of trusting other people. Seven Horcruxes, seven different people who destroy them, and one unlikely Gryffindor who proves that being the Chosen One isn't the only way to become a hero.
