The Harry Potter series is rightfully beloved by millions of children and adults who grew up reading or watching these movies. Back then we had no care other than to be sucked into this beautiful and appropriately magical world with endless possibilities.

However, any ardent Harry Potter fan worth their salt has to have run into a large number of plot holes as they read the series repeatedly. It is unfortunate, then, that many of these plot holes are quite large that identifying them will make you realize just how absurd many matters of the Harry Potter world are and how they would never be possible if logical thinking were to be applied.

In all honesty, these mistakes are flat out dumb but J.K Rowling can be given a free pass here owing to the vast world she has created, which means it must have been crazy to keep track of all things at all times. But if you consider yourself to be a real Potterhead and you haven’t seen these plot holes before, then get ready to have your perfect world tarnished because you can never ‘unsee’ these problems again.

For the most part they are quite hilarious and if you have a good sense of humor you can share a laugh with your fellow Potter fans and search for more flaws in the series. What is guaranteed, though, is that these plot holes are just too striking to overlook.

So without further ado, Here are 25 Plot Holes in the Harry Potter Series We Just Can’t Ignore.

25 I Wonder

Seriously, didn’t anyone think of this the first time they read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? Ollivander charges Harry seven galleons for his wand, the wand, keep in mind, which is said to be meant for him, the wand that is extremely crucial to the entire story line, and has a connection to Voldemort and Dumbledore. And it cost only seven galleons!

In fact, every wand seems to cost that much, and they are supposed to stay with the witch and wizard for a lifetime. So what kind of business is he running? The most money he makes is once a year when a handful of children show up for their first, and probably only, wands and then go off to Hogwarts while Ollivander probably sits in his shop all alone with little to no business for another year. No wonder he seemed rather off. Curious, right?

24 Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?

Did it ever cross your mind that Hogwarts children are probably the dumbest graduates ever? They are taught none of the skills that are required to survive in the real world. No doubt they wouldn’t even be able to point out Britain on the map because they don’t study Geography. The only classes that seem to be useful are Muggle Studies and History of Magic, but these are shunned by students in general. So how are these people supposed to learn how to do Math? Are they capable of division or multiplication?

Classes generally consist of learning spells such as turning teacups into rats, but how is that useful in any way? Hogwarts is simply sealing these kids up for seven years without giving them anything useful for the rest of their lives. Yikes!

23 Worst Daughter Ever

Hermione is the best at a large number of things, but she’s the worst daughter ever. In every book starting from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hermione is shown to be staying the Weasleys before Harry shows up, and as Harry usually shows up barely within a month of school ending, Hermione had to have been there a few weeks prior. Considering she never goes home for the holidays while at Hogwarts, this means Hermione hardly ever sees her parents.

So we’re meant to believe her parents let their only daughter stay away from them for basically seven years of her growing life! The poor old couple only have her at home around two weeks a year before she ditches them for her friends. And then she places a memory charm on them so they forget her. Maybe she didn’t need to do that, considering they never saw her anyway.

22 Bring Me Food

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows establishes that food can’t be produced by magical means, but can be summoned. This explains why the trio is wrought with starvation in their time in the woods. But magic can still make finding food easily, if they just clunked their noggins together a bit.

The Accio spell is used quit a lot to summon all kinds of objects, so wouldn’t it have made finding food a whole lot simple if any one of them had cast that spell to gather nourishment? They could use Accio to capture a prey in the woods or summon vegetables from nearby farms. But this never strikes them, and the trio spends many days starving. Come on, Hermione, we expected more smarts from you.

21 Simple Solution

The entire Triwizard tournament was used as a ruse to deliver Harry to Voldemort. It took a whole year of meticulous planning to make it so, and it is finally executed upon Harry touching the cup which had been turned into a portkey. But we’re not so quick to pat Voldemort in the back for a job well done.

Considering the impostor Moody was around Harry the whole year, he had multiple opportunities to turn any old thing into a portkey and trick Harry into touching it. Making a portkey is extremely easy, as the spell is seen numerous times. Then why go through all that effort when the impostor Moody could have summoned Harry under any false pretenses and transported him to Voldemort? Would’ve saved a lot of time, and honestly would’ve been much more discreet as Harry would’ve basically vanished from everyone’s point of view.

20 Eye See You

The Deathly Hallows aren’t really all that powerful, considering there are many ways once can go around them. For instance, take the Invisibility Cloak, which can be seen through Mad Eye Moody’s eye. This was exploited by Dolores Umbridge after Moody’s death. Umbridge was probably the only smart person here, as nobody else ever had the good sense to employ such an effective security measure.

Harry and his pals are even able to rob Gringotts due to being under the Invisibility cloak. You’d think Wizards would have gotten wiser over this and started using devices such as Mooody’s eye to prevent anyone robbing them using an invisibility cloak. It doesn’t seem like the eye was created by Moody himself, as he never displayed any genius level of intellect that would indicate he had the ability to invent it.

19 Dude, Where's My Entertainment?

The Quidditch tournament in Hogwarts was specifically cancelled to make room for the Triwizard tournament, but honestly, what a total waste that was. Who did the tournament benefit in any way? At least in Quidditch you get to have multiple matches where many people can partake and the crowd can actually witness it.

The Triwizard tournament has to be the most boring competition ever. Except for the First Task, which at least provided some spectacle for viewers, the other tasks had nothing for fans who just had to stare at the lake for over an hour in the second task or stare at hedges for several painstaking hours in the third. The champions themselves had a torrid time trying to figure out puzzles and evade fatal situations, so what was the fun in any of this?

18 Anybody Watching?

J.K Rowling clearly never paid much attention to the numbers when crafting the Wizarding world because the population just doesn’t add up. She claims Hogwarts has over a thousand students but we never see that many.

In the same vein, Quidditch has this issue, as it is supposed to be a sport watched by thousands of people. But considering that there aren't that many people in Britain, especially magical folk, their matches must be in empty stadiums. The Quidditch league has nine teams but there’s no way these matches must have high viewership as children are at Hogwarts the whole year and adults are at their jobs. There are no televisions or internet facilities for wizards, so Quidditch matches must be like a deserted town with no one to cheer on.

17 I'm Bored

Maybe this generation has become far too reliant on technology. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but there’s no denying technology has done a lot good for us as far as recreational time is concerned. The Harry Potter universe wizards have no such option, and their free time is spent just lying around waving their wands and conjuring silly spells for entertainment.

In a scene from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, this can be noticed when Ron, Ginny, and Harry are sitting around eating cakes and looking utterly bored as they have nothing to pass the time. What makes this absurd is that they do have access to all the cool technology, seeing as they live in the (90s) modern world. But wizards are so backwards they’d rather bore themselves to no end.

16 A Binding Contract

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the concept of the Unbreakable Vow is introduced which involves two people entering a binding contract, failure of which to follow through with would mean the cessation of life to the one who breaks the vow. There was a neat explanation provided here but none in the matter of The Goblet of Fire.

In said book, Harry is unwillingly entered in the Triwizard tournament, when the Boy Who Lived attempts to get out of the situation he is flatly denied with the reasoning given that he had entered a ‘binding’ magical contract’. However, it is never explained what that is. Surely it can’t be serious, considering he was only 14 years old and the tournament was meant to be for the sake of entertainment!

15 Easy Escape

Mad Eye Moody and Hedwig lost their lives in the beginning of Deathly Hallows when Harry is transported from Privet Drive to the Burrow. While their sacrifices were noble, they were entirely unneeded. The Invisibility Cloak Harry possesses is used at the climax to sneak into Hogwarts when it is swarming by Voldemort’s followers, which establishes that it can be used to conceal one from advanced wizards.

So couldn’t they have just put Harry in car with the cloak on and driven him over to the Burrow? That would’ve been the easiest thing to do, and no Voldemort followers would have suspected a random muggle car would house their target. He would’ve been completely invisible. A little bit of planning, and all the heartbreak and effort could’ve been avoided.

14 A Messy Situation

The Marauder’s Map brings in a case full of plot holes that are probably best unanswered, but that doesn’t stop these from being any less striking. One of these is the question of Remus Lupin’s loyalties.

Lupin makes it plainly clear in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that he had no clue of Sirius Black’s innocence prior to finding out about Peter Pettigrew’s survival, which he came to know due to the map itself. What is also made clear is that all the Marauders had the map memorized, and Sirius used the many hidden passages to enter Hogwarts. Then why didn’t Lupin think of this possibility and inform Dumbledore, seeing as he had thought Sirius to be the bad guy at this point? After Sirius’s attack on the Fat Lady, Lupin should have definitely figured out how he had gotten it.

13 Weren't You The Same Age As Me?

We’re going to be hitting Back to the Future logic with this one. The Time Turner is a cool device, but it was more or less a Deus Ex Machina in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in order to rescue Sirius and Buckbeak.

If you think about it a bit, the Time Turner is a device with dire consequences. It doesn't make sense to give this to a child. One of these said consequences is the effect it has on the wearer. Hermione was visibly teetering on edge of her sanity, having to turn back time over and again throughout the year, and this brings up a problem. If she did dial back and live through several hours a day, shouldn’t she have aged quite considerably? This means Hermione is a lot older than the rest of her classmates!

12 I Hate My Job

The Wizarding World is so tightly knit that everyone knows each other. You see two characters who haven’t had any interaction before, yet are aware of the other’s identities. What contributes to this is the fact that almost everyone works at the same place. The Ministry of Magic seems to be the employer of the majority, and by the end of the series all of the Golden Trio is employed there.

But this can’t be a productive measure, as this creates a monopoly. It should lead to a scarcity of jobs as not everyone can be accommodated. Besides, wouldn’t this also mean the government has total control of the people? You’d have thought by some point people would’ve gotten smarter and attempted to take a stand and shoot for their freedom. But no, either you comply or you’re jobless.

11 How Do You Know?

There are a lot of spells that are given a free reign, which shouldn’t be the case. Many of the spells or potions that are seemingly harmless, such as Levicorpsa, which dangles a person by the ankle for an indefinite amount of time, or the love potion, which basically has the drinker in another person’s control, are seen as part of gags. However, these are seriously dangerous and should be banned.

On that point, there are three spells that are ‘unforgivable.’ Using them is supposed to be a one-way ticket to Azkaban, and yet Mad Eye Moody uses them in broad daylight in front of a bunch of teenagers. Over the course of the later books, even Harry uses these spells willingly. So the question is: How does the Ministry track people who cast these spells? Surely there must be a taboo on them so as to catch the guilty party.

10 Five Points For Dumb Luck

Harry only ever beat Voldemort because of a technicality. When it comes to sheer skill, he never had anything on the dark lord. In the end, it came down to pure luck and coincidence for him to survive, and this luck has a large gaping hole that doesn’t make sense.

The Elder Wand switches its loyalties to Harry by the time Voldemort tries to take him out, as the wand refuses to harm its master it backfires on Voldemort himself. But it doesn’t make sense how Harry is the wand’s true owner, as when he snatched Malfoy’s wand at the manor he never beat him for it. All he did was wriggle the wand out of the coward’s hands. Doesn’t a wizard have to outright beat the previous owner to become the master? Also, Malfoy was never in possession of the Elder Wand, so why did any other wand count?

9 All That Waiting

Remember the times before the internet where you had to wait for news or any updates from people? Actually, remember the time when cellphones weren’t the norm and you had to contend with calling on a payphone or from home? Yes, well, Harry Potter wizards don’t even know how arduous that process was, because they’re hundreds of years behind that!

Wizards have to contend with sending letters to one another for correspondence, and that too using owls. This means that at the very least for one message to be returned it has to take a few days. During Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Percy was said to be in a long distance relationship and would spend all his time in his room exchanging letters with his girlfriend. But if owls take so long to take messages from one person to another, then what the heck was Percy doing while he waited for his reply?

8 Flat Out Denial

The reason Aunt Petunia hated the magical world so much was not because of a fear of the unknown, but due to resentment at being rejected by it. She even wrote to Dumbledore imploring upon her acceptance in Hogwarts but when that was turned down she decided to brand magic itself as stuff of freaks.

It seems she must have dug that notion deep in, as when it is Harry’s turn to return from Hogwarts from the summer Aunt Petunia is also terrified he might start casting spells on the family. This is despite the fact that she must have known wizards can’t use magic outside of school. Being Lily’s sister, she should have seen her refraining from her magical abilities back when they were kids. Otherwise, that’s some pretty powerful denial!

7 Nothing's Changed

To be honest, people in the Wizarding World should never feel too sad for someone’s passing. Most of the wizards who have lived long enough end up with a portrait that is basically a sentient picture version of themselves.

When Dumbledore passes away in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, everyone is in mourning as if they’ll never see him again, but this is absolutely not true. His portrait is put up instantly, which more or less means he’s back. It’s not like anyone wanted to physically interact with him, like giving him a hug or something. They always only talked to him, so how did his passing change anything when they had his portrait for the same purposes now? When you think of it that way, Harry was sad for no reason. He just needed a visit to Hogwarts.

6 What A Loser

The whole book of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets showcased the ineptitude of the Defense Against The Dark Arts professor, Gilderoy Lockhart. Right from the get go he is established as a cartoonish character who is all talk and in the ensuing events he is seen to be incapable of performing most spells.

Harry and Ron have no respect for Lockhart and make jabs at his expense whenever they are exasperated by his antics. However, in the climax when the Hogwarts teachers berate Lockhart for his false claims that he knew where the Chamber of Secrets location was, the duo took it to heart and attempted to help him. Where did this come from? At no point did it indicate that Lockhart genuinely knew the Chamber’s locations. So why did Harry and Ron suddenly drop their distaste for him?