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Has anyone ever thought about why Harry Potter's patronus was a stag? Like really thought about it?
Cause it came to me at two in the morning, and now I'm gonna make this everyone else's problem.
So, a patronus is a spell that takes your happiest memory and brings out a shield of some kind, sometimes just mist, but Harry's patronus is powerful enough to take on the shape of an animal, and it's a stag. This spell is literally a personification of safety, it's a shield. So, why would Harry's shield, the thing that stands between him and the crushing emptiness of a dementor, take on that form?
Well, let's go back to when Harry first met a dementor: he fainted, obviously, but that encounter threw him so far into his worst experience that he could hear his mother screaming. The more he encountered dementors, the clearer the memory became, and the more he heard.
Why is this important, you ask? Well, the first VOICE he heard, and this is when he was a year old, was his mother's; he heard Lily begging for his life, begging to exchange her life for his, but a little further down the rabbit hole and he heard James's voice, heard him telling Lily to take Harry and run, that he'd hold off Voldemort, and then he charged off to give them time to escape.
In Harry's darkest moment in his life is also the first time he was really protected. His dad was the shield between him and the greatest evil he could imagine, and still is. Harry's patronus is a stag, is Prongs, because that's his greatest standard, greatest conception, of protection and being protected.