Devastating Harry Potter Fan Theory That Explains Neville's Memory Issues
The clumsiest Gryffindor student has always had severe memory issues, but according to this theory, it isn’t his fault. The real reason is way darker than you imagined.
Throughout the Harry Potter series, the Boy Who Lived had many friends and acquaintances, but few of them were as close to him as his core Dumbledore’s Army members. Apart from Ron and Hermione, their numbers included Ginny, Luna, and Neville — and among them all, the latter had the most brutal and tragic backstory.
Neville Longbottom was mostly famous for being incredibly clumsy and forgetting everything. Apart from that, he was brave and loyal, shy and naive, and ultimately just a fantastic person; however, in the public eye, just like in that of most Hogwarts students and professors, Neville was forever the useless third wheel.
We always thought the way Neville was treated by everyone wasn’t fair in the slightest — and now we have an interesting (and dark) theory to back it up.
Neville’s largely associated with his own memory issues: he was the only boy with a Remembrall in the entire castle until he forgot where he put the magic reminder. But the poor kid was not to blame for this as he was but a victim of his horrible past.
As we learn in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Neville’s parents were tortured to insanity by Bellatrix Lestrange, Voldemort’s most loyal Death Eater. The torture dramatically affected their brains, virtually destroying their memories, personalities, and mental abilities, and in the end, they became nothing but empty vessels without identities.
What if we told you that Neville was a victim of the same treatment?
According to this dark theory, Neville, who was a little boy back then, was either tortured alongside his parents or witnessed their demise. In the first case, his memory was damaged by the Cruciatus curse; in the second case, it happened after someone else — perhaps, his grandma — tried to protect him from the horrors he’d witnessed by erasing his memories.
Either way, it wasn’t Neville’s fault that his memory was lacking: it was the result of the tragedy that haunted him his entire life. The poor kid was but a victim of torture or memory manipulation, and he didn’t deserve to be bullied for it.
Even if he had those memory issues without such a grim justification, he still didn’t deserve to be bullied.
Source: Reddit