I love embarrassed Harry cause he spent his entire life with the Dursleys repressing every want & emotion and always on the defensive, so even when he’s in a safe / supportive environment vulnerability feels like being skinned alive
(Obviously this post deals with sensitive topics, please be careful.)
Okay, I realize most fans would automatically say that Harry James Potter was definitely not suicidal. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, though, and some things in canon have stuck with me. To be clear, he was obviously never shown to be at the point of orchestrating his own death (with the exception of giving himself up in Deathly Hallows, which of course was an entirely different category of this), but I think there’s evidence that points to him dealing with passive suicidal ideation on more than one occasion:
“Let’s go,” called Hermione from halfway up the stone steps. “This isn’t right, Harry, come on, let’s go….”
She sounded scared, much more scared than she had in the room where the brains swam, yet Harry thought the archway had a kind of beauty about it, old though it was. The gently rippling veil intrigued him; he felt a very strong inclination to climb up on the dais and walk through it.
“Harry, let’s go, okay?” said Hermione more forcefully.
“Okay,” he said, but he did not move.
- OotP, The Department of Mysteries
This particular bit where he feels an urge to walk through the veil illustrates something compelling and incredibly sad about his character. He doesn’t know what the veil is yet, only that he feels a strong pull towards it. There’s something JKR said once about Harry that’s always stuck in my mind:
“I wanted there to be a debate there, so of my three main characters – when they come into the room which examines death at the Ministry of Magic – Hermione, the ultimate sceptic and a hyper-rational person, hears nothing behind the veil and is scared of it. Ron is just uneasy…Harry’s drawn to it, and therein lies Harry’s slightly reckless, almost morbid streak, because Harry does have a hint of that dangerous adolescent trait which is the attraction to death.”
He’s lost his parents, his entire family, and therefore has a closer, more complicated relationship with death than most of his friends (except for Luna, who has also lost a parent and could hear voices beyond the veil just like Harry, though she did not appear to want to walk through it like he did).
“Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human —”
“THEN — I — DON’T — WANT — TO — BE — HUMAN!” Harry roared, and he seized one of the delicate silver instruments from the spindle-legged table beside him and flung it across the room. It shattered into a hundred tiny pieces against the wall. Several of the pictures let out yells of anger and fright, and the portrait of Armando Dippet said, “Really!”
“I DON’T CARE!” Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANYMORE —”
- OotP, The Lost Prophecy
We’ve all seen this horrifically heart-wrenching scene quoted a billion times by now, but if you just stop and take it in? What Harry is actually saying? He’s a fifteen-year-old kid and he’s reached his limit. He can’t regulate his emotions at all at this point, and he’s literally begging for someone to end his suffering. LIKE? What the fuck.
I also want to add the fact that in the sixth book when Snape killed Dumbledore and Harry he was disarmed, he literally begged Snape to finish him off.
Also in the last book, after he saw the bodies lying in the great hall he immediately ran to dumbledore’s office and wished that he could rip out his heart and everything that was screaming inside him. He even said that nothing he will see in snape’s memories could be worse than his own thoughts.
And the worst thing actually happened in the fifth book after Harry taunted Bellatrix and Voldemort came. Voldemort literally raised his wand at him, ready to kill him and Harry didn’t even lift his own wand to stop at all and just let him strike him. If it wasn’t for Dumbledore putting a statue in front of Harry, he would have been killed willingly.
Harry might not be actively suicidal but he showed some sign where he wished that someone could just finish him off.
JK Rowling: I’m less interested in the sexual side – though I believe there is a sexual dimension to this relationship – than I am in the sense of the emotions they felt for each other, which ultimately is the most fascinating thing about all human relationships
There had been a previous occasion when Harry, expecting to be caned by Professor McGonagall, had instead been appointed by her to the Gryffindor Quidditch team. He sank into a chair opposite her and helped himself to a Ginger Newt, feeling just as confused and wrong-footed as he had done on that occasion. / Harry Potter and The Order of Phoenix
Harry is six years old and very good at things that don't have names. Pre-Hogwarts. Harry POV.
The crack under the cupboard door let in a strip of light in the mornings.
Harry had spent a long time thinking about that strip of light. It moved across the floor as the morning went on — slowly, the way things moved when you were watching them, the way the minute hand on the kitchen clock never seemed to move until suddenly it had. By the time it reached the far wall, Aunt Petunia would be calling for Dudley to come down for breakfast, and Harry would lie still and count to twenty before opening the cupboard door, because it was better to be already at the sink washing up than to be seen coming out.
He was good at that. At timing.
He was good at a lot of things that didn't have names.
Breakfast at number four was a loud thing. Dudley ate with both elbows on the table and the television going and his trainers squeaking against the chair legs, and Uncle Vernon read the paper with the particular rustling of a man who wanted everyone to know he was reading the paper. Aunt Petunia moved between the counter and the table in her dressing gown, refilling things, smoothing things, saying yes, Diddy-kins in the voice she reserved only for Dudley.
Harry ate his toast standing at the counter.
It wasn't a rule, exactly. No one had told him to stand. It was just that the table had four chairs and there were four of them, and three of the chairs were already occupied, and the fourth was where Uncle Vernon put his briefcase in the mornings, and somewhere along the way Harry had understood that the counter was where he went.
He was good at understanding things that no one said out loud.
The toast was slightly burnt on one side. He ate that side first because it was better to get it over with, and because if he left it Aunt Petunia would press her lips together in the way that meant he was being ungrateful, and he didn't want her to press her lips together. It was not a comfortable thing to be on the receiving end of.
Dudley said something and Uncle Vernon laughed — a short bark of a laugh, the paper lowering briefly so he could look at his son with the expression Harry had catalogued as proud. He'd looked it up once in the dictionary Dudley had thrown at him, which had seemed like a useful book to keep. Proud: feeling deep pleasure or satisfaction as a result of one's own achievements. He wasn't sure that was quite right for the expression, because it was also the face Uncle Vernon made when Dudley broke something and found it funny, but it seemed as close as he was going to get.
He ate his toast. He watched the strip of light move across the kitchen floor, which was easier than watching the table.
After breakfast there was washing up, and after washing up there was whatever Aunt Petunia needed done, and after that there was the garden if it was warm enough or the cupboard if it wasn't. Today it was warm enough. Harry sat on the back step with his knees up and watched next door's cat pick its way along the top of the fence with the composed expression of something that owned everything it surveyed.
He liked the cat. The cat didn't look at him any particular way.
Most things looked at him in particular ways. The neighbours looked at him with the slightly uncertain look of people who had been told something about him without being told quite what, so they'd filled the gap with something unflattering. The kids at school looked at him with the cheerful contempt of people following Dudley's lead, because Dudley set the lead on most things and Harry was the sort of thing you followed the lead on. Teachers looked at him with the resigned look of someone waiting for the next incident, which wasn't fair because the incidents were never exactly his fault, but there was no good way to explain that without sounding like he was making excuses.
He didn't make excuses. It didn't help.
The cat sat at the end of the fence and cleaned its paw and ignored him entirely, which was the best he usually hoped for.
He thought about the thing that had happened yesterday, which he'd been trying not to think about. He'd been in the kitchen reaching for the cereal — the good cereal, Dudley's cereal, but Dudley wasn't in the kitchen and Harry was very hungry and it had seemed worth the risk — and his hand had been inches away from the shelf and then the box had moved. Just slid, smooth and quiet, about three inches to the left. Away from him.
He'd stood there for a moment. Then he'd closed the cupboard and eaten toast instead.
It wasn't the first time something like that had happened. Things moved, sometimes, or broke, or a light flickered when he was in the room for no reason the adults could find. Uncle Vernon's face when it happened was the face Harry liked least, the one that was very still and very careful and promised something worse later. So Harry had learned to be careful. To keep his hands still. To want things quietly, from a distance, without reaching.
He was very good at wanting things from a distance.
Next door's cat found something interesting on the fence post and crouched over it with professional focus. Harry watched it and didn't think about the cereal box and didn't think about the way Dudley had laughed at breakfast with his father laughing back and didn't think about the strip of light on the cupboard floor that moved and moved and never quite reached him before it disappeared.
He was good at not thinking about things.
He was, he thought, good at quite a lot.
He just hadn't worked out yet what any of it was for.
My head canon is that even though the bodies of loved ones might be a common fear for people who had fought in the war, Harry’s boggart would remain a dementor even as an adult.
Lupin suggested that Harry’s fear of the dementors was basically a manifestation of the fact that Harry’s greatest fear was fear (and by extension, the consequences of that fear).
There are so many parts of Harry’s life/past that are absolutely horrific. Big stuff like growing up unloved and feeling partially responsible for Sirius’s death, and comparatively minor stuff like essentially killing Quirrell at age 11 and enduring constant shifts in public opinion.
And Harry tries really hard to move past those parts of his life and push forward.
The way I see it, his fear of dementors represents a fear that he will succumb to depression and despair. He’s going along perfectly well in PA, and then the dementors come into the compartment and he’s suddenly utterly incapacitated. And most of his memories of dementor encounters involve him struggling to fend off dementors (read: his own unhappy memories) in order to save other people. It was Ron/Hermione/Sirius in PA, Dudley in OP, and D.A. members during the battle in DH.
Basically his fear is not that a loved one will die. He’s kind of transcended that fear. Not that he wouldn’t be devastated, but he would stoically carry on.
His worst fear is that he’ll be in a situation where other people (including people like Ginny and his kids) are at risk, and he will be too bogged down by his own past to save those people.
TL;DR: Harry’s greatest fear is that the fear/grief of his past will destroy his future.
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