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Harry Potter fans debate whether or not the Chamber of Secrets’ basilisk venom should have destroyed one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes much earlier.
A debate online is raging about whether a moment in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets would have resulted in the early destruction of one of Voldermort’s Horcruxes. Horcruxes, as revealed later in the novels, are objects imbued with pieces of the dark wizard’s soul, so he can never truly die as long as they remain intact. The third act of Chamber of Secrets sees Harry pierce the diary of Tom Riddle (which was Voldemort’s name as a boy) with a basilisk fang, thus destroying what he would later learn was one of the Horcruxes. However, the final book reveals that Harry himself is a Horcrux as well, leading some to believe that an earlier scene of a basilisk fang piercing him would have destroyed that second Horcrux as well.
A Reddit user named ThailurCorp posted a meme in a thread for fans of the Harry Potter franchise that featured a young man lying awake and asking himself “If basilisk venom can destroy a horcrux… and Harry was the last horcrux… why didn’t the basilisk destroy the horcrux in Harry when it bit him in Chamber of Secrets?” The user threw the question out to the community at large and received a wealth of responses. Most flatly shut down the question, positing that the venom didn’t kill Harry, which is what it would have taken to destroy the Horcrux inside him. Some even went so far as to mock how many times this exact question has been posed. Check out the post and select responses below:
Why Harry Being Bitten By The Basilisk Is NOT A Horcrux Plot Hole
As sassy as some of the answers in the Reddit thread ended up being, they are indeed canonically correct. Basilisk venom may have destroyed the Horcrux in Tom Riddle’s diary, but there is a big difference between an inanimate object and a human being. Harry Potter was wounded by the venom and would have died if Dumbledore’s phoenix Fawkes hadn’t shed healing tears upon him, but the fact that he was healed also prevented the Horcrux inside him from being destroyed.
Essentially, the destruction of the Horcrux wasn’t due directly to the basilisk venom being present, but rather how it interacted with and countermanded the magic that brought Tom Riddle’s memory to life. The magic that turned Harry himself into a Horcrux also operates at a slightly different level than that which made the diary. Harry was an unintentional Horcrux, created when Voldemort attempted to use the Avada Kedavra curse against him and was deflected by the shield created by Mrs. Potter’s sacrifice and her love for her son, accidentally destroying his physical form and blasting the last remaining piece of his soul into his future nemesis.
All of this ties into the prophecy delivered by the Divination teacher Professor Trelawny, which states that “neither can live while the other survives.” While Harry would eventually come back to life when the piece of the Horcrux is expelled from him, he did need to legitimately die in order for the prophecy to be fulfilled. This certainly did not occur during the events of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, regardless of the basilisk venom and the injurious intervention from the House Elf Dobby earlier in the story.
Source: Reddit
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