Harry's innate abilities (Was: End of Harry Potter Series)

[Grey Wolf]

No: HPFGUIDX 45030

GulPlum wrote:
> Harry in the books (at least to date) is very largely 
> an accidental hero, and he does not relish being thought of as 
> anything but ordinary. He has no special abilities; in fact, he is 
> average or below-average in just about every respect, and we are 
> constantly reminded of this fact (he's small, studying doesn't come 
> easily to him, etc) and in fact the only thing at which he has proven 
> to be unnaturally adept is at summoning a Patronus, i.e. his father.

Catlady has already touched this in her multi-themed post, but only 
briefly, so I'm going to elaborate. This exposition of Harry's 
character abilities is, IMO, totally wrong. Harry is shown to be a 
prodigy from almost the very begining. 

In PS, he half-heartedly confesses to Hagrid that he wouldn't be a very 
good wizard, and Hagrid promptly corrects him (I should re-read the 
books... I can't remember where that happens). In the same book, we 
discover that Harry has innate flying abilities: whilst almost everyone 
has troubles dominating the broom, he flies perfectly from the very 
start. AND he's capable of catching the snitches (which requires nerves 
of steel as well as a very good vision and intuition). 

Book 2 doesn't discover anything else in this matter (except possibly 
his innate loyalty to Dumbledore and his link to Fawkes). 

Book 3, on the other hand, shows us that Harry is a very powerful 
wizard when he studies (which he doesn't normally do) by having him 
learn a protection spell that, by all acounts, is way too advanced for 
a 3rd year. Not only that, he manages to scare off not a couple of 
dementors with it, but 100 of the creatures. I don't think that very 
many wizards, even experienced, would have the *raw* power necessary to 
scare off 100 dementors. This raw power, and Harry's afinity with DADA 
is going to be very important later on (JKR said so in an interview: 
while everyone concentrates on Harry's Quidditch exploits, he's 
becoming a very proficient DADA).

But, most importantly, I think, are the revelations in book 4. Harry's 
quest for power continues: under the careful tutelage of Hermione, he 
learns any number of spells, some of which are even useful, for the 
last task. But more important than that, we discover that Harry has an 
innate resistance to the Imperius curse. Please note that Moody, by all 
acounts one of the most powerful Aurors, didn't manage to free himself 
in one whole year of enslavement. Crouch Sr took 6 or 7 months (and he 
was unsupervised). Crouch Jr took years. Harry manages in a matter of 
minutes. Even if conditions *were* subtly different, Harry was being 
placed under *supervised* Imperio and yet he manages to counter it from 
the very start (by refusing to jump, and although it doesn't totally 
work, no other Imperioed so far has been able to do that), and he 
quickly manages to resist it fully. If that is not innate powers, I 
don't know what it is.

In fact, Harry represents the sort of hero that many of us would, at 
one point or another, want to be (at least I, being quite 
Hermione-like, would like to be): the sort of hero that doesn't *have* 
to work hard to get his powers. The technical definition is a 
superhero: born with his powers, Harry only has to tap into them and, 
with little or no work, manages to use them more fully than most adult 
wizards will ever be able to. Thankfully, JKR hasn't made his powers as 
plentiful as Superman's, but the raw capabilities are there, and Harry 
learns to use them a little better in every book, and even if it looks 
like hard work to our poor Harry, a brief overview of the time he 
dedicates to the spells shows that he doesn't really need all that much 
time to lea<rn new spells (I'd say that a succesful Patronus would take 
years, or at least months, not simply a handful of sessions). 

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf, who after a half-month of forced retirement, suddenly feels 
the need to express his own views