I've read yesterday the transcript of JKR's podcast and while it's mostly full of crap, there were a few clarifications on Horcruxes working and other things such as why Harry was a Horcrux in the first place.

Looks like the fragmented piece of Voldemort's soul (when he tried to kill Harry) reached for the nearest living being (or soul) to cling to it - or merge, if you prefer.

As the soul is somewhat 'indestructible'; you can fragment it but even if it's in different places the soul is still kinda whole. After all, Voldemort wasn't any less alive when he split his soul, or when most of the Horcruxes where destroyed.

So, can I assume that if you destroy the receptacle of the soul (for example, the diary or Slytherin's locket), the soul would either go back to Voldemort's body, or more likely cling to the nearest living being when the receptacle is destroyed? And let's not forget that Harry has a piece of Voldemort in him... it's even more likely the soul fragment free of its receptacle will cling to Harry as he's in a way Voldemort.

Beside, that'd make a great idea for a Dark!Harry fanfiction... the more Horcruxes he destroy, the more he becomes Voldemort.

Edit: I'm not sure, but I think I should have posted this in the subcategory 'Canon discussion'. Can somebody move the thread in its rightfull place?

 

Lol, there's already a challenge in the challenges section that Amerision made that is exactly this idea.

MS took him up on it. His fic What Lies Beneath is the answer to Amerision's challenge.

 

I always figured that Harry wasn't supposed to be a horcrux - I thought that Riddle probably brought an intended horcrux-recipient object, and when the AK went haywire, the spell misfired. It never occurred to me that the soul itself went looking for a body. If anything, I'd have assumed that you couldn't put a soul in a souled creature. Or, at least, that it would take an entirely different ritual than one intended for an artifact. In fact, wouldn't Harry have had a chance to resist the spirit ...er... possession? He was an infant - maybe his own soul was too weak to block the invader (the language doesn't bend itself well to the concept of destroying or damaging a soul.)

I wondered if there was an incredibly valuable object found (covered with blood) in the nursery.

 

JKR said that Harry wasn't a horcrux - he was an almost-horcrux.

 

I just woke up, so don't flame me if this is stupid, ok? Would an exorcism work to remove the soul from a Horcrux or from Harry? Something I never really understood - Riddle was just a free-floating spirit when it possessed Quirrel, right? So if we treat Quirrel like a horcrux (trap Riddle in the body and then destroy Quirrel,) won't that destroy one of the soul pieces?

WAS there an incredibly valuable artifact found at the scene of the Potters' murders?

Who actually investigated the Potters' murders anyway? How did *everyone* (including eleven-year-old boys) know about Harry's scar and what it looked like? JKR implied that Harry landed on the Dursley's doorstep the evening of November 1. Did Dumbledore even take him to St. Mungo's to be checked out?

 

Something I've been wondering: how on earth could you turn a living creature into a Horcrux?

Voldemort mentioned in PS that the animals he possessed didn't last long; wouldn't the same thing happen with Nagini/Harry?

 

Presumably while Nagini is a Horcrux, the other Horcruxes act as a Horcrux to Nagini too, so Nagini can only die if all the other Horcruxes are gone...which is what happened in canon.

 

Possession and Horcres -(It's a made up latin word so I don't know the plural form.) are mostly unknown to us but here is how I think about it.

A horcrux is made specifically for a soul piece and a ritual must be used to prepare the container. The container is only a container. It is not a host and does not interact with the piece of soul and therefore needs not be alive.

A possesion is different in that the host and the spirit interact. The host must be living, but it needs not be wiling to take in the spirit. If the host is willing it will survive in a commensalistic relationship where the spirit uses the host but the host is not harmed. If the host is not willing then the relationship will be parasitic and the host will eventually die.

Sorry if I was a bit to wordy, but trying to explain the way I think about it is tricky as I have never tried to put it to words before.

 

What about Harry and Tom's connection?

 

Harry was probably just a Horcrux container, the pain in his scar was, according to Rowling's interview, caused by the soul piece attempting to rejoin the primal soul. That's what I got from this all, anyway.

 

Wait I thought Nagini only swallowed a Horcrux and was not one herself. The magic within the Horcrux then changed her to the snake she is.

Horcrux is a huge plot hole IMO. For instance given what was said above about the soul fragment.

If the soul fragment in the Horcrux seeks the nearest living being then does that mean Dumbledore had part of Riddle in him too? And how would the existing soul react to this intrusion?

For that matter Voldermort is himself only a soul fragment i.e. a living Horcrux. So by looking at what was said so far, when he died one of two things must have happened.

1. The fragment enters baby Harry and become a scar (JKR's version)
2. The fragment seeks out the remaining horcruxs.

In either case how did Voldermort end up a sprite wondering the woods of Romania and not get trapped in an object?

I would sometimes wondered if the soul fragments could be turned into rune weapons, but thats idle musing on my part.

 

You guys are missing something important: Harry was not a Horcrux. Ordinary Horcruxes do not attach themselves to the nearest piece of soul when they lose their container. Ordinary Horcruxes are destroyed when their container is destroyed.

Harry is different because he was not a Horcrux. Voldemort had not gone through the complex process to prepare Harry as a container. He ended up acting as a Horcrux, but did not possess all the features of one, because the HarryHorcrux occurred by accident.

The only thing that the "soul fragment attaching itself to nearest piece of soul" applies to is the piece of soul left in Voldemort's body, which is so unstable that when he lost his body a piece of his soul also got ripped off and attached itself to Harry.

 

WAS Riddle's soul fragment the reason Harry was a parselmouth? That was AD's theory...

 

It was, JKR has stated he cannot speak it after DH.

 

Well, that bitch. She took away the ONLY thing that made Harry interesting and different from every high school boy in the British Isles...

 

Second that. Parseltongue was the coolest ability Harry possessed, JKR seems to go out of her way in order to defang Harry

 

Parseltongue was the coolest he possessed? Guys, that ability was LAME. The ability to speak to snakes? Where's the use in that? At all? Apart from being a plot device to open the CoS.

You may have forgotten that Harry was a wizard. I'd probably say that that was what separated him from "every high school boy in the British Isles..."

Not that he was a very good wizard, but he was above average, and the amount of magic he could do was still pretty cool for someone without any magic at all. Plus, books 1-3 (and in some respects 4) it looked like he was going to end up as a powerful wizard. It was only when JKR changed the direction of the series as a result of her fame (turning it into a moral tale rather than a self-empowering one) that Harry began his journey to mediocrity.

 

And yet douchebags like Ron and Dumbledore can learn to speak it with a few easy to use 'Hooked On Parseltongue' scrolls.

What a fucking ripoff.