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[saintsenara]

Voldemort/Wormtail

thank you very for the ask, anon!

and... flopping, i fear. since it's always really striking in canon that voldemort fucking hates wormtail.

obviously he thinks wormtail's stupid, lazy, and interpersonally annoying - but the thing which always stands out to me is that voldemort specifically hates him because he completely agrees with sirius' assessment that wormtail only wanted to ride the coattails of the biggest bully in the playground. he constantly berates wormtail for being insubstantial in his loyalty - with the fascinating implication that he judges him for wavering in his loyalty to the potters just as much as he judges him for wavering in his loyalty towards him. even though wormtail's betrayal of james and lily was exactly what he wanted to happen.

[after all, i know the doylist reason voldemort calls him "wormtail" is because it helps the reader keep track of who he is... but the watsonian explanation is that voldemort likes taunting him for his cowardice by using the nickname he was given by the school friends he betrayed...]

and we all know - by which i mean, i am committed to believing - that this is because voldemort cannot believe that wormtail would dare to turn against the true messy-haired hottie he simps for: james potter.

but don’t worry. wormtail is getting some god-tier hate sex out of snape.

[saintsenara]

okay, I'm super curious about your thoughts on when and how snape becomes a potions master. some people say he was still working on his mastery when he became a professor but i like to think he got it in early 1980 and he apprenticed with a potions master he was recommended to through his ~connections~ (cough malfoy cough).

although the idea of him teaching and grieving and also attempting to not fail at the one thing he knows he's good at does have its own angsty appeal

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

although i regret to say that i'm going to start the answer to it by being very pedantic...

the idea that masteries are something which exist in the wizarding world is complete fanon.

they have emerged as a trope due to a reading of the phrase "potions master" which does make perfect sense outside of the cultural context in which the books were written - by which i mean that it makes readers unfamiliar with the culturally-specific meaning of this bit of language think of masters degrees or other high-level qualifications - but which is nonetheless incorrect within context.

"master" [and the feminine equivalent, "mistress"] is just an alternative term in british english for "teacher". it doesn't imply anything about a level of qualification. "potions master" and "potions teacher" are synonyms.

the term is archaic - british people nowadays would exclusively say "teacher" - and it's very class-specific, in that it would have particularly been used to describe teachers in elite schools, whether fee-paying private schools or grammar schools [state schools which are academically selective].

as a result, it turns up in lots of the children's literature written before c.1980 - especially in boarding-school stories like malory towers and the worst witch which are explicit influences on the harry potter series. it's used in the text - especially in the earlier books - as part of worldbuilding which generally seeks to make the wizarding world feel whimsical by virtue of being very old-fashioned, which things like the fact that the most advanced technology wizards use is the radio and the steam train also hammer home.

that snape is the only teacher referred to as a master is connected to these genre conventions. because snape is so important to the full arc of the story, he's the teacher we spend the most time in the classroom with throughout the six books in which harry's at school. and he's therefore the teacher who - in the first few books - best fits a children's literature archetype which we would expect to find in any twentieth-century school story [with a magical setting or not] - the hated schoolmaster who is horrible to the child-protagonist and who every child reading can't wait to see get their comeuppance.

so snape is a potions master because he teaches potions. nothing more than that.

but that doesn't mean that it's not worth thinking about his training...

clearly, higher education of the type most of us are familiar with doesn't exist in wizarding britain - nor, i suspect, in wizarding europe more broadly.

and this makes perfect sense - not only because the magical population is so small but because the divergence of the magical and muggle worlds in 1689 takes place well before universities and university-level education look like anything a modern student might recognise. a seventeenth-century university education was still broadly generalist and aimed at trainee clergy, and careers which we would nowadays expect to require a degree - such as law, finance, medicine, science, and engineering - were generally taught by apprenticeship.

this is clearly how things continue to function in the wizarding world of the 1990s, since we know from order of the phoenix that healers are taught by apprenticeship [and, indeed, that hogwarts graduates all go straight into the workforce after they leave school].

potions - since it's analogous to chemistry - is nonetheless understood in-world as an academic discipline. but this doesn't mean - within the post-school educational structures we can suppose the wizarding world has - that it's a discipline in which one needs specific formal training in order to acquire a right to teach or publish about it.

the seventeenth century was a period - especially in britain - marked by a great expansion of scientific enquiry. this was - by our contemporary understanding of academic science - amateur. scientists wouldn't have been expected to have doctorates, to work at universities, or even to have attended them, and their experiments were often self-funded by personal wealth or dependent on a patron. the circles [often international] in which they debated, demonstrated, and reviewed theories and inventions were social ones - the gatekeeping line was class [with the level of education - and, primarily, of literacy - that this implied], rather than level of education itself.

these social circles often had a certain level of official standing - by which i mean they became, during the period, the learned societies, the most famous of which is probably the royal society. membership [or fellowship] of the learned societies requires a demonstration of some sort of contribution to the discipline they relate to - which means that the vast majority of contemporary fellows of such societies are university-based academics. but this wouldn't have been the case in 1689.

and we know that the wizarding world has its own equivalent of learned societies, because slughorn mentions one in half-blood prince - the most extraordinary society of potioneers.

which is to say, snape is probably a member of this society. he may very well publish papers in academic journals connected to the subject [as dumbledore does in transfiguration today], and he undoubtedly has a reputation among the wizarding world's men- and women-of-letters. but he doesn't need to have any formal post-hogwarts qualification in order for him to have acquired this reputation.

so what do i think he's doing between 1978 and 1981?

well... he's a death eater.

my theory has always been that snape comes to voldemort's attention - via lucius malfoy - because of his potions skills. the dark lord's operation would have needed potions - poisons to bump off enemies, healing potions because wanted criminals can't just turn up at st mungo's, potions to trade on the black market [as aberforth dumbledore tells us the death eaters do during deathly hallows], and so on - and voldemort would want to keep the production of these potions in-house, rather than risk hiring a private brewer [even a shady one] who might change their mind and go to the aurors.

[this is also presumably what voldemort - undoubtedly at snape's request - tries to recruit lily to do.]

i have never believed that snape was taken on as a death eater in the expectation that he'd perform a combat role - there is a clear implication throughout the series that the only person he ever directly kills is dumbledore, and that he gets along badly with death eaters [such as bellatrix] who did take more violent roles in voldemort's terrorism.

so i presume that, when he leaves school, he ends up working as a personal brewer for voldemort - on a stipend presumably paid, at the dark lord's request, by either lucius or abraxas malfoy. i also presume that, outside of work voldemort specifically requests, he's given free reign to brew for other clients, study, experiment, and publish as he wishes.

and i further presume that if he trains with anyone, then that person is voldemort himself.

voldemort claims, in goblet of fire, to be interested in experimenting with potions. he appears to invent the potion made from nagini's venom which sustains his half-body prior to his resurrection - and i think the implication of the text is that he also invents the potion guarding the locket-horcrux. voldemort also evidently encourages snape's interest in the dark arts, and he also appears to have some influence over snape's comportment - the teen snape we see in order of the phoenix is extremely rough around the edges, in a way the adult snape, who both speaks and moves in canon very similarly to the adult voldemort, isn't.

voldemort taking such an interest in snape would - obviously - largely be a grooming tactic. snape clearly becomes a death eater because the organisation offers him a chance to belong and succeed which his class-background would ordinarily make impossible for him within wizarding society, and voldemort must therefore massively indulge his belief that he's never given the respect he deserves for his intellect. voldemort's obvious contempt for slughorn - who matters so little to him that he doesn't even bother to kill him - would, i imagine, also win snape round.

and by training snape in an academic rather than a combat sense, voldemort gains a valuable tool - someone he can place at hogwarts as a teacher to spy on dumbledore.

we can assume that voldemort was having dumbledore tailed throughout the first war - and, indeed, that this is what snape is doing when he overhears the prophecy - but that he couldn't watch him at all times because he didn't have a spy among the hogwarts faculty.

it is clearly voldemort who tells snape to apply for a teaching job in early 1980. he must also tell him to apply for the defence against the dark arts post [which we know snape canonically applied for first] - which means he must expect to be imminently victorious in the first war, since snape would only be able to stay in the position for a year...

the prophecy, which snape hears c. january 1980, obviously derails this belief slightly... and snape famously does not get the defence against the dark arts job for the 1980-1981 academic year.

how do we know this? because he tells us in order of the phoenix that he's been teaching at hogwarts for fourteen years. he says this right at the beginning of the autumn term in 1995 - so he clearly means that he's been teaching for fourteen previous academic years and the 1995-1996 year is his fifteenth. so... he started teaching at hogwarts in the 1981-1982 academic year.

voldemort settles on harry as the child the prophecy refers to after harry is born [so, after 31st july 1980]. we don't know how quickly he does this and we don't know exactly when snape defects to the order.

but, clearly, at some point during the 1980-1981 academic year, dumbledore hires snape to begin teaching from september 1981 onwards. he presumably tells snape to tell voldemort that his change of heart was because he didn't think snape was qualified to teach defence against the dark arts but that he does think he's qualified to teach potions [pointing, perhaps, to publications snape got out under voldemort's tutelage], and that slughorn's announcement that he intends to retire means that there's a position available. he then undoubtedly also tells snape to convince voldemort of the same pretence they'll use throughout the second war - that he's a loyal death eater passing information on dumbledore's movements to his master.

which is to say... when lily dies, snape has been in his job for at most nine weeks.

just imagine how miserable that must have been!

[saintsenara]

not a completely unhinged ship, but thoughts on madam hooch/madam rosmerta?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

and i have to say... it's a hot ship! we love to see a classic high-octane butch-femme pairing - hooch is strutting around town in her immaculate tailoring buying her woman those glittery turquoise heels, rosemerta has a thing for leather quidditch gloves and how good hooch is at diy. and we also know that rosmerta has a canonically excellent rack - and, since hooch knows a nice set of bludgers when she sees one, you know she's going to appreciate it properly.

but the main reason why we have to back this pairing? it's staring us in the face in the canon text!

“We need to return to the castle at once,” said Dumbledore. “Rosmerta” - and though he staggered a little, he seemed wholly in command of the situation - “we need transport - brooms - ”   “I’ve got a couple behind the bar,” she said, looking very frightened. “Shall I run and fetch - ?”

rosmerta seems to live alone and to be the only person who works at the three broomsticks. why does she have brooms plural behind the bar? it's obvious - they keep being left there by the hogwarts flying teacher when she turns up for late-night shenanigans.

[saintsenara]

Wait, Snape/Luna?? I feel like this could be top tier?!

thank you very much for the ask, anon - i love the enthusiasm for snuna.

it's not a ship i back - as i've gone into more detail about here - but i'd be delighted to be convinced otherwise.

[saintsenara]

I love your Riddle/Gaunt post, its brilliant, just one tiny issue. The closest city to them would be York, they all live in Yorkshire. Liverpool was more a recent party weekend destination, in the 1900s it was the beach resort, but still a travel. York on the otherhand has been around since Roman times and likely before and its on their doorstep. If any gossip were likely to reach a city, it would definitely be York.

thank you for the comment, anon. i am - however - going to reserve the right to disagree with the idea that there is any issue here...

little hangleton is not proven to be in yorkshire - the only detail that we get about it in canon is that it is 200 miles north of little whinging. this may be 200 miles in a straight line, or it may be 200 miles in a looser sense [in the same way that i could describe my hometown as 200 miles north of dublin, when it's actually around 175 miles northwest, and not be understood as spatially illiterate in context]. the outskirts of liverpool are around 220 miles northwest of guildford, in surrey - and a scouser who was driving to visit the dursleys saying they were driving "200 miles south" would be understood as correct in informal conversation. locating little hangleton near to it is entirely justifiable on the scant information we receive in canon.

i also like this as a location for the village because "gaunt" is a name historically associated with lancashire, the county which borders the city of liverpool.

this doesn't mean that other people can't prefer to locate little hangleton in yorkshire [and to have gossip about the riddles' doings hit york] - but just that it isn't an unreasonable misinterpretation of canon to shift it across the country. england is pretty narrow, after all...

but while this aspect of the question is entirely open for personal interpretation, there is a part of what you've said which is completely factually wrong.

in 1900, liverpool - owing to its position as a port city on the atlantic - was one of the most important cities not only in the united kingdom but in the british empire - in the nineteenth century 40% of the entire world's trade passed through liverpool. it was a major industrial centre, was enormously diverse in terms of population [it has the oldest chinatown in europe], and was - prior to the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 - pretty much as rich as london.

you have confused it - i suspect - with blackpool, a seaside resort slightly further up the lancashire coast.

york, in contrast, was in 1900 [and remains] an average-to-large provincial city - populous and economically active in comparison to many places, but dwarfed by a city like liverpool. and its long history is irrelevant to this late victorian context - lots of places in england have been around since [pre-]roman times, and while some [chester, york] have evolved into cities, others [cirencester, dorchester] are small towns.

i hope this helps.

[saintsenara]

How have I never drawn Kingsley??? (And I’m sorry I keep giving beards to people who probably don’t have them lol)

[saintsenara]

Very important question: Based on his canonical age and class background, is Tom Riddle Sr. a Drones Club member?

My unhinged ship: Since Luna is extremely Madeline Basset-coded, and best shipped with older men, Luna/Grindlewald (the best analog I could think of for Roderick Spode, whom she marries in the TV adaptation).

(Whereas Neville is definitely Gussie Fink-Nottle-coded).

i cackled.

yes. tom sr. is one hundo a drones club member. the assembled members call him "croaker" - after the avian specimen in that famous riddle, "why is a raven like a writing desk?"

he and bertie wooster were clearly at eton together and had a minor rivalry which continued at oxford when tom [oriel] beat bertie [magdalen] to the lowest pass-mark in the year. bertie regards tom as a bit weak in the top storey, and is very much of the opinion that if he had a jeeves of his own he'd never have got into all that gaunt mess. he is correct in this assessment.

and i am unavoidably compelled to back the idea of gellert grindelwald/luna lovegood - and, all the more importantly, to back the idea of grindelwald as a secret entrepreneur in the realm of ladies' undergarments. the entire plot of the code of the woosters - with, i think, ron in the bertie "suspected of stealing a cow-creamer" wooster role and neville, as you say, in the gussie "my word, have you seen grindelwald eating asparagus?" fink-nottle role - would slap when transported to the harry potter universe.

i beg someone to write it.

[saintsenara]

What do you think about Bellatrix/Lupin?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

and... flopping, i fear.

lupin's canonical vibe is really giving "massive self-loathing in the streets, humiliation kink in the sheets". this is unfortunate for bella, because while she's got a thing for men who are killing machines - and she thought lupin would be a suitable prospect on the grounds that he turns into a rampaging wolf once a month [ok, and? so do i, he's not special!] - she has no interest in brandishing the whip and telling remus he's a monster who should never be allowed to live in normal society and who should be paraded around on a lead in public so everyone knows what a mess he is. she's the one who wants to be on her knees with her hands tied behind her back getting a thorough telling-off for being foolish enough to get sent to azkaban - but remus can't quite project the authority she's looking for in a dom.

and he refuses to put in the red contacts.

[saintsenara]

So I found your blog a while back and I last night I finally found the time to browse through pretty much all your HP meta and ship takes (i slept way later than I should've yesterday, thanks to you ^^) and I'm astonished at how you manage to weave in well founded analysis even into your answers to even the most deranged ship-asks

That being said, I scrolled through a lot of your blog and I couldn't find your opinion on grindeldore as a ship. Since i really like your takes on ol dumbles (even though I don't agree with all of them. For example I don't think his whimsical traits are entirely a lie. I think they are a part of him he over-exaggerates as a coping mechanism and a comfort to himself and others) I was wondering how you think this relationship-dynamic worked, how it shaped him and how large a role it played in his later life

(This is not a reaction to the ask game obviously, since the ship has no gone rather mainstream. I sometimes miss its days of obscurity before the fb movies but that's another ask)

thank you very much for the ask, anon - and especially for the very kind message at the start.

my opinion on grindeldore is coloured by the fact that i've never seen any of the fantastic beasts films - and that i've also gone out of my way to forget anything i've ever accidentally learned about any of them. i just don't find the idea of them interesting in the slightest.

but i love the little flashes of grindeldore we get in the seven-book canon - the image of the owls flying back and forth at all hours of the night because they can’t bear not to be talking to each other has a good claim to be the most romantic thing which happens in the series - and i also love the way that grindelwald becomes another example of a narrative tool the series uses to great effect with many other main characters besides dumbledore: the figure, only ever fragmentarily known [both by the reader and by the character who loved them], who causes such immense grief that it dictates the entire course of that character's life.

grindelwald plays the role in dumbledore's narrative arc that james plays in harry's - he considers grindelwald perfect, wonderful, brilliant... until he can't pretend this is the case anymore, just as harry hero-worships his father until he is confronted by the proof that he was a bully. but while harry then begins to understand james with more nuance, dumbledore retreats - hides himself from grindelwald until he's literally forced to duel him, and then hides grindelwald away and never sees him again.

grindelwald is dumbledore's lily - his grief over losing him [and, specifically, his grief over losing the imagined version of him, when who he really was could no longer be ignored - which is exactly how snape thinks of lily] drives him towards a life which encapsulates what the series understands as "love": the willingness to steadfastly endure and suffer and sacrifice in silence.

and he's also dumbledore's merope - the person who didn't even try to stay alive be better for him, who irreparably ripped his chance at a happy family apart, and who abandoned him when things got hard - and, just as voldemort's entire life becomes about creating a place for himself in the world which soothes that grief, so too does dumbledore's. his public persona becomes unwaveringly noble for exactly the same reason that voldemort's becomes unassailably villainous - so that the fragility of the grieving man beneath the mask is never known.

these parallels are why i back the concepts of snumbledore and riddledore [and the triad - snumblemort] so utterly [i am not quite brave enough for harrydore, i fear], and so they certainly mean that i should find grindeldore compelling...

but i find - i think - that i like grindelwald better as a background character whose ghost haunts dumbledore's later relationships - romantic or otherwise. his shadow looming over the two dumbledore brothers, and the way that the memory of him rears up when the eleven-year-old tom riddle calls himself "special", and the way that dumbledore still loathes himself so strongly - a century later - for being taken in by his smile that he spits "you disgust me" at snape are canon moments which always stand out for me, and i love how these can be expanded in fanfiction - what happens when voldemort and/or snape find out about grindeldore obsesses me, for example.

and i am similarly interested in how dumbledore can't be written as a fully-rounded character unless the impact of his relationship with grindelwald [and how this drives his public performance of careful eccentricity, causes his obvious ivory-tower-ishness, and informs his thinking on love and desire and so on] is taken into account.

but i just am less interested in grindeldore as the central relationship in a piece [although there are definitely exceptions to this rule] - and i think being so stubborn about fantastic beasts is probably why. grindelwald works so well in the books as a shadow that i end up finding that more compelling than seeing him as a main character [which i also feel about james - i really like the ghost of unrequited prongfoot, which is canon, haunting sirius in his adult life, but i care about it less as the main ship of a fic], but i'm sure that i would feel otherwise if i ever bothered to get into how he's written for the films, where he serves such a different narrative purpose that he gets more substance.

and i should also say that i don't find that grindeldore interests me to write myself because i think that filling grindelwald out into a main character on the basis of book-canon detail alone would mean confronting just how explicit an analogy for hitler he is in the text [my impression is that fantastic beasts changes this a lot], which is something i don't really have the energy for.

[although - since it's always worth reiterating this - the grindeldore girlies are perfectly entitled to ship the pairing in any way they like, and to write the characters and their motivations in any way they choose, without getting any grief about it. this is fiction.]

but who knows - maybe i'll change my mind the more grindeldore crosses my path. stranger things have happened.

because there is a little idea which continues to needle at me... that dumbledore's loathing of horcruxes, even in the 1940s, is because grindelwald had made one. and that this is why, when he meets harry at king's cross, he is so determined to believe that the rumours of his repentance were true...

[saintsenara]

I’ve somehow never read Unfogging the Future, saw ‘huh, didn’t see that in the tea leaves’ and well…I know what I’m committing my wild Friday evening to now.

based.

[saintsenara]

have you ever read Unfogging the Future by Naidhe? it’s tom riddle/lavender brown (time travelling divination girlie of all time) and it feels genre adjacent to your Bookbinding to me!! things i didn’t know i shipped until i did + the power of one persistant teenage girl to show tom riddle the appeal of a different path

of course i have, anon!

unfogging the future is a masterpiece - and if anyone reading this hasn't read it, you desperately need to give it a go. for the serious point that it's a genuine hoot, and for the even more serious point that it's both interesting and important to see the canon view that love has to be sacrificial, that only great suffering can change things, and that girlies who like to get eyelash extensions and have a bit of a giggle aren't worthy of admiration smashed into pieces.

plus, we all know that tmr would be susceptible to the collision between the hun aesthetic and the mob-wife look that lavender so perfectly encapsulates - a man who is prepared to go on an enormous hiking trip just to get his hands on a shiny tiara likes maximalism.

as he should.

[saintsenara]

Thoughts on Ted Tonks/Severus Snape?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

and i have decided to come out as very much in favour of a nice bit of sned.

entirely on the basis that we get a little hint in canon - by which i mean this is one of the 2.5 things we know about ted - that he and snape might have a shared appreciation for a good scheme.

ted sends arthur sirius' motorbike after the seven potters chase, behind molly's [and, potentially, andromeda's] back, and he's delighted to be told of the [what griphook presumes to be] fake sword of gryffindor switcheroo - both of which suggest that he's got a bit of the same fondness for schadenfreude which snape has in spades.

ted is also obviously brave, principled, resilient, and aware of what a nightmare bellatrix is, which i can also see appealing... and i remain committed to a belief that snape would probably very much enjoy finding himself in the hands of a lover who could snap him like a twig and then cuddle him afterwards.

ted - canonically possessed of a chill vibe and one hell of a dad bod - fits that to a tee. and it's hot.

[saintsenara]

In your answer about Bellatrix and Harry you said that Harry would pick her as a fuck if he was playing Fuck Marry Kill about the Black Sisters. So what is he doing for the other two?

great question, anon.

he's marrying andromeda and killing narcissa.

sorry to her, but she should have smiled more!

[saintsenara]

9 fandom folks to get to know better

thank you very much for the tag, @cealesti - and i'm sorry it's taken me a very long time to get around to answering...

three ships you like: i am still freezing to death alone on snapemort hill, but at least i can occasionally venture down for cups of tea with tomarrymort and riddledore nation.

first ship ever: as someone who has always been committed to the sinister/buff paradigm, it was elrohir/námo mandos.

last song you heard: ride on time by black box which occupies a prime position on my running playlist.

currently reading: i'm on a jeeves and wooster kick at the mo, using an old fave as a palette-cleanser after having read the cass report.

currently watching: the new series of taskmaster and the old series of sex and the city.

currently consuming: peach and raspberry squash from a wine glass. she's fancy.

currently craving: less rain and more beach.

i'm pretty sure that everyone did this when it was initially going around, so please consider this a blanket tag!

[saintsenara]

just read the hagrid is a death eater theory and i have officially converted

i am genuinely thrilled for you, @pixiedustandpetrichor - it's always a great day when someone else becomes convinced of hagrid's profound evil.

read the theory here:

[saintsenara]

Quick warm up before a commission. It's been a minute since I last drew him :)

[saintsenara]

wait how bougie was Tom Riddle Sr.? How nice would his Manor have been? Was he like an actually Lord with a title and stuff?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

in half-blood prince, dumbledore refers to tom riddle sr. as "the squire's son" - which allows us to state with certainty that he was a minor aristocrat.

however, the word minor is important here.

there are - historically - two levels of aristocracy in britain. the first are the peers of the realm - which refers to families which hold one or more of the titles of duke, marquess, earl, or viscount. these are the elite of the elite - these gradations of nobility were created in the middle ages as a way of distinguishing those who held the titles from other noblemen, usually because of a close relationship [often one of blood or marriage or both] to the king.

the titles are hereditary by male primogeniture, and the holders - while this is no longer the case - used to have political power [such as the right to sit in the house of lords], simply by virtue of their birth.

[this is why they're called "peers" - it refers to them historically being close in status to royalty, and therefore expected to serve as royal advisors.]

there is another class of peer - a baronet - whose title is similarly hereditary, but whose position doesn't come historically with the right to sit in the lords or advise the king by virtue of birth. [baronets may - of course - have been members of parliament, or royal advisors selected at the king's discretion, but this would be separate from their title. a duke, in contrast, could historically expect to request a meeting with the king simply because he was a duke.]

while some families have historically been ennobled at the king's discretion, access to any of these titles is pretty much restricted to the small group of families who've held them for centuries.

but below the peers of the realm, there is a second, more minor class of aristocracy, the landed gentry - of which a village squire is a textbook example.

historically, what is meant by "landed" is an ability to live off of the rental income of one's country holdings, which would be leased to tenant farmers. that is, they are landlords in the original sense of the term - lords of the land. this is what tom sr. tells us his family does in half-blood prince:

“It’s not ours,” said a young man’s voice. “Everything on the other side of the valley belongs to us, but that cottage belongs to an old tramp called Gaunt, and his children. The son’s quite mad, you should hear some of the stories they tell in the village - ”

what is also meant by "landed" is that the family in question is of the upper-classes, but that they are still "commoners" - which in this context doesn't imply a value judgement, but which is a socio-legal term which simply indicates that they don't hold an aristocratic title such as duke, earl etc.

[and gentry families certainly aren't common in terms of financial standing... the most famous member of this class in literature? fitzwilliam darcy, whose ten thousand a year is something like thirteen million quid in today's money...]

gentry families might be very old - they might have received their lands from the king in the middle ages as a reward for knightly service, and it's interesting to imagine generations of gaunts and riddles brought up alongside each other in little hangleton - or they might be comparatively newer - tom sr.'s great-grandfather [feasibly born c.1810] could have been a self-made victorian industrialist who bought the lands from the original holder and established himself as gentry.

by 1900, it was becoming much harder for the gentry to live on rental income alone, and many would also have had jobs. these would have been elite, and very frequently were in politics, the civil service, the military, or the law. tom sr's father - whom the films call thomas, so let's go with that - might, for example, have served as a high-ranking officer in the army [including during the first world war], be the local magistrate, or be the local member of parliament.

in terms of titles, thomas riddle would almost undoubtedly be sir thomas - and this is how it would be correct to address him. but this title would be a courtesy, and it wouldn't be hereditary unless the riddles were also baronets [which it's entirely plausible that they were].

which is to say, tom sr. would not have a title while his father was alive - although he would have the right to be referred to formally in writing as mr thomas riddle esq. [esquire]. the correct form of verbal address for anyone other than friends and family would be to call him mr riddle, although the riddles' servants would probably refer to him as mister tom.

tom jr. would not have a title while his father or grandfather was alive. if the riddles were baronets, he would technically inherit the title after he kills the rest of the male line... but given that tom sr. never acknowledged him and his existence was presumably unknown to the riddles' lawyers this wouldn't be something which happened in reality. the estate's executors clearly took control of the riddles' property, the land was portioned off and sold, and the house became a standalone property for sale.

the riddle house - which is a name used informally for it in little hangleton, it would have a different "proper" name - is described in canon in ways which show that it's a typical manor house, which means it would look something like this:

these houses are obviously very impressive, but they're tiny in size in comparison to the magnificent stately homes - places like blenheim palace, chatsworth, burghley house, holkham hall - lived in by the titled aristocracy. the riddles would entertain - for example - by giving house parties, dinner parties, hunting parties, etc., but they wouldn't have a ballroom or a dining hall capable of seating hundreds.

[they would probably also own a property - probably a flat or small house - in london.]

they would have servants, but not colossal numbers - they would undoubtedly have a butler but not footmen, and the upstairs maids would report to the butler since they probably wouldn't have a housekeeper. they canonically have a cook, who probably had one or two kitchen maids assisting, and they canonically have a gardener - frank bryce - who probably doesn't have any assistants. they may, depending on the size of the estate, have a gamekeeper. sir thomas undoubtedly had a secretary and a chauffeur, and his wife might have a lady's maid. tom sr. would have had a nanny and then been educated until at least the age of eight by a governess, but would then have attended a prep school [either day or boarding] until the age of thirteen, and then gone to a boarding school, from which he likely went on [on the basis of social class rather than talent] to oxford or cambridge.

the family would have enormous social influence locally. most people - and also businesses - in little hangleton would be their tenants, and they would also probably have a say over the appointment of the local clergyman [an important figure in the community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], since the parish church is likely to have been something called a "living" - the thing which turns up again and again in jane austen - which means that the church and its parsonage technically belongs to the landowner, but is granted to the vicar as a freehold while he's in post.

gossip about the riddles' doings would also be the main source of local interest - the servants were dining out for months on tom sr.'s elopement and return.

so they're something resembling celebrities - but they're local celebrities. nobody in london - and even nobody in cities we can imagine are nearer to little hangleton, such as liverpool - would particularly know or care who they were. tom sr. might have made it into the london gossip columns if he was part of a particularly scandalous "set" [a group of friends] who socialised in the capital, but these mentions would have been fleeting - and the press would have been much more concerned by the doings of members of his set who were genuinely titled or who were legitimately famous.

[this is the reason why mrs cole doesn't recognise the name. if merope had said her son was to be named cecil beaton after his father, she may well have been prompted to hunt him down...]

so tom sr. is elite - but he's elite in a way which is extremely culturally-specific, and which is [just like the portrayal of aristocracy in the wizarding world - the blacks, for example, are far less aristocratic than the riddles in terms of canonical vibe] often exaggerated into the sort of pseudo-royal grand aristocracy which the british period-drama-industrial-complex makes such a big deal of.

and tom jr.'s character is affected by this in a series of extremely interesting ways.

by which i mean that, in terms of blood, he's probably the most aristocratic character in the series - the absence of grand aristocracy in the wizarding world would mean that [were he raised by his father] he would come from a social background which was equivalent [even as it was divided from them by virtue of being muggle] to any of his fellow slytherins, and would help him easily blend into their society because the manners, genre of socio-cultural reference points [he would recognise, for example, that quidditch heavily resembles both rugby and polo], accent and way of speaking etc. that he would possess would be broadly indistinguishable from those of his pureblood peers.

[this is why justin finch-fletchley and draco malfoy speak in essentially the same way.]

but he would then be given the enormous boost in cachet - one which would genuinely elevate him above the rest of his cohort - of his maternal line.

and we see in canon that this does bestow some privilege on him among his peers while he's in school:

Tom Riddle merely smiled as the others laughed again. Harry noticed that he was by no means the eldest of the group of boys, but that they all seemed to look to him as their leader. “I don’t know that politics would suit me, sir,” he said when the laughter had died away. “I don’t have the right kind of background, for one thing.” A couple of the boys around him smirked at each other. Harry was sure they were enjoying a private joke, undoubtedly about what they knew, or suspected, regarding their gang leader’s famous ancestor.

where he's let down socially is that people like slughorn - to whom he can't reveal his slytherin ancestry and hope to maintain cover for his wrongdoing - don't think he's come from anywhere particularly special. this is because he has a muggle father - absolutely - but it's even more that he has a muggle father who, since he left him to be raised in an orphanage, was presumably working-class.

what the young voldemort lacks is any socio-cultural familiarity with the muggle class performance which the class performance of the wizarding world parallels. abraxas malfoy boasting about how important his father is would be something a tom jr. raised by the riddles could match - "oh yes, my father gives to all sorts of causes too. in fact, he was invited to buckingham palace because of it." - establishing himself as an equal in terms of class and social influence even if he isn't an equal in blood.

what actually happens in canon is that the orphaned tom - with his uncouth manners and his working-class accent - has no hope of gaining any sort of social equality with his posh peers.

so he becomes determined to outrank - and humiliate and control - them.