Secrets of the last Harry Potter book

My exposure to Harry Potter is limited to the 5 films to date — I just saw Order of the Phoenix an hour ago — plus maybe 20 pages of reading, but I’m going to lay in my predictions for the Big Reveal in book #7 right now. These may be completely off base, but they are based on standard story cycle tropes — lots of mythology and comics and soap operas in my past.

Here are things we know:

• Voldemort couldn’t kill Harry when he was an infant.  Or at least couldn’t bring himself to kill Harry.

• In all the scenes we see of Harry’s parents’ deaths, it is only his mother we see being killed.  We don't see Harry’s father actually bite it.

• There are any number of wise and powerful people always looking after Harry.  And always seeming to keep secrets from him.  If they’ve known stuff and kept it from him thus far, they probably still do.

• Per the flashback with Snape in movie #5, Harry’s father had a bit of a mean streak in him.

What always happens to a group like the Order of the Phoenix?  (Or like Harry's group of student wizards and witches?)  Why, they get taken down by a traitor in their midst.  Ergo, I predict that Voldemort is Harry’s father, who succumbed to the Dark Side and became the student of Darth Sidious.

Well, maybe not quite that last bit.  But it captures the gist.

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Updated on December 16, 2009