Strong ties and where to find them: or, why Neville and Bellatrix might be more important than Harry and Tom

In recent years, analysts began to extensively draw on social network analysis to analyze dark networks (i.e., covert and illegal networks). In this article, we draw on network methods to explore the effect of tie strength on two “dark networks” found in the Harry Potter novels—Dumbledore’s Army and Voldemort’s Death Eaters. We are not the first to draw on social network analysis to analyze a narrative. Network approaches are increasingly being used to analyze narratives and other texts. They can help identify key actors and events, highlight semantic structures, and uncover underlying meanings and mental models. Our analysis finds that several secondary characters play roles as important, or almost as important, as Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. Moreover, our comparison of the topographical structure of the two networks suggests that if the fictional world of Harry Potter remotely mirrors reality, Dumbledore’s Army is built to withstand stress and uncertainty, while the Death Eaters is not, suggesting that J. K. Rowling has an intuitive understanding of a key difference between networks built on trust and those built on fear. The former live to fight another day; the latter do not.