If Harry Potter's Glasses Worked, He Could Have Saved Most People Who Died

Summary:

• Harry Potter had seen the Vanishing Cabinets four times before Malfoy snuck the Death Eaters using them and had Dumbledore killed.
• When Harry and the Weasleys were cleaning up Grimmauld Place, they found the Slytherin’s Locket. The hunt for it would later turn out a disaster.
• The hunt for the Ravenclaw’s Diadem, which Harry had already seen in the Room of Requirement, led to the brutal and devastating Battle of Hogwarts.

Many of the most plot-essential artifacts in Harry Potter had been either referenced or blatantly revealed long before they became relevant to the story, and The Boy Who Lived somehow interacted with most of them. Unfortunately, he rarely ever paid attention to them; otherwise, several tragedies could have been completely avoided.

Harry Saw Vanishing Cabinets Four Times (!)

In the finale of The Half-Blood Prince, Draco Malfoy uses the Vanishing Cabinet to sneak a bunch of Death Eaters into Hogwarts. This leads to Albus Dumbledore’s untimely death, Bill Weasley’s injuries by Fenrir Greyback, and many students having severe PTSD after the assault. The attack has disastrous consequences.

Before the attack, Harry Potter came across the Vanishing Cabinet a whopping four times across his years at Hogwarts. In The Chamber of Secrets, he first hides in one of the two cabinets in Borgin & Burkes, and then, when Harry’s caught by Filch, Peeves and Nearly Headless Nick drop the second cabinet to save him.

In The Order of the Phoenix, the Weasley twins brag about trapping Montague in the broken Vanishing Cabinet in Hogwarts. Finally, Harry passes that very same cabinet in the Room of Requirement in The Half-Blood Prince as he rushes to hide the notorious book that taught him the Sectumsempra spell (we’ll get back to it later).

As you can see, Harry had multiple opportunities to put two and two together after he began suspecting that Malfoy was a Death Eater tasked with killing Dumbledore.

Harry Had Slytherin’s Locket in His Hands

Albus Dumbledore correctly deduced that Slytherin’s Locket was one of the artifacts Lord Voldemort chose for his Horcruxes. Unfortunately, the hunt for the Locket became one of the catalysts for the Headmaster’s death and one of the reasons why the Golden Trio’s Horcrux Hunt took so long as they tried to locate it once again.

Meanwhile, the real Slytherin’s Locket was already well-known to Harry, Ron, and Hermione. In The Order of the Phoenix, during the big clean-up at Grimmauld Place, they came across a weird locket no one could open. Later, Kreacher would steal it.

Unfortunately, it was neither when he talked about the Locket with Dumbledore nor during the Horcrux Hunt — until Kreacher’s story, of course — that Harry connected the dots and associated the locket from Grimmauld Place which he and his friends spent ages trying to pry open with the artifact Dumbledore told him about.

Harry Had Ravenclaw’s Diadem, Too

The Lost Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw was yet another artifact that once belonged to a Hogwarts Founder and was used by Lord Voldemort to create a Horcrux. It was one of the last few Horcruxes the Trio had to destroy, but Harry only got around to it during the Battle of Hogwarts that cost many lives of good and innocent people.

As we promised, we return to The Half-Blood Prince — namely, the scene where Harry hid the Potions book in the Room of Requirement. Hoping to retrieve the book later, The Boy Who Lived marked the spot where he put it with an “old tiara” on a wig on a bust. He never realized that said “old tiara” was the Ravenclaw’s Diadem.

The Diadem was the entire reason Harry came to Hogwarts, and if he knew where to look sooner, the disastrous battle could have been entirely avoided. But to be fair, the Ravenclaw’s Diadem was the most mysterious item out of the three, and barely anyone knew its story, so we’ll definitely give The Boy Who Lived a pass on this one.