Gilderoy Lockhart, with his dazzling smile and a collection of best-selling books, seemed like the perfect hero to many in the wizarding world. Introduced in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Lockhart quickly charmed students and staff alike with tales of his supposed heroic deeds. But as Harry Potter and his friends soon discovered, Lockhart’s impressive facade was nothing more than a web of lies…
Lockhart’s early life- and Hogwarts as a student
The image above was created by Microsoft Copilot. I thought it was a neat picture of what Lockhart could’ve looked like before the age of 11.
Gilderoy was born on the 26th January 1964 to a witch mother and a muggle father. He has two older twin sisters, both of whom are Squibs. Due to the fact his older sisters were Squibs, he became his mother’s favorite. This could be the start of his development of Histrionic Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which will be explained in part 2.
On the 1st September 1975, he began Hogwarts as a first year. He was four years younger than notable wizards and witches including: Lily Potter (Evans), James Potter, Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, and Sirius Black. He was in fact, very close to being a hatstall, but the sorting hat ended up putting him in Ravenclaw. The hat did contemplate on putting him in Slytherin, though.
Due to his inflated ego and sense of self, he expected to be very famous and greeted, like what happened to Harry Potter. However, the reality to that was he was pretty much like anyone else. While he was very smart, he wasn’t a hard worker. Teachers at Hogwarts thought if he could work harder, he could be able to make something out of himself.
One of the things that makes me think he’s both HPD and NPD is he has grandiose delusions such as:
- Being able to successfully create the Philosopher’s stone
- Be captain of England’s Quiddich team to world cup glory
- Become the youngest British Minister of Magic
He also was so attention seeking during his school years that he ended up:
- carving his signature in twenty foot long letters into the Quidditch pitch
- creating a spell that shot a hologram of his own face into the sky in imitation of the Dark Mark
- sending himself eight-hundred Valentines, causing breakfast to be cancelled due to the number of droppings and feathers in the porridge
In fact, even though he’s a character, frauds like him are also known to be notorious lolcows as well.
Source:
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Gilderoy_Lockhart
Sorry this is short; I just like to touch on the character frauds. There’s many of them out there in television and literature; I honestly can name quite a few, and Lockhart is one of them. I’ll add to part 2 tomorrow!
– Kansey Picciotto