#adhd refuses to let me work on long sustained projects | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dat-physics-gal · 1 year

Text

A leap of faith and Physics (part 2)

Now that we knew how to find the crystals, the scientific community was tense. Itching to do something with them.

One paper had just unveiled a method of propulsion using the tachyon background and directed linear resonance chirping. The tachyon background, as it turned out, is self organizing. Unlike the tardionic world we were used to, entropy actually decreases over there. There is a natural tachyon base frequency, one so high that they travel really slowly. That's also weird about tachyons, how the more energy they have, the slower they move. But we knew that part beforehand.

Anyway, the paper outlined how to use a subharmonic of that base frequency, that could slowly be chirped in one direction to one harmonic lower, which would generate physical thrust on the tardium crystal used for chirping. Only problem was that once the frequency arrived at the new subharmonic, the tachyons decayed into their base frequency, completely stopping the propulsion. This stopping effect, though detrimental to the experimental setup in terms of having broken it multiple times, begged the question though: Since it stopped, momentum isn't conserved, despite motion happening.

Just half a year later, some madlad had designed an actual engine based on that concept, that should in theory exceed the speed of light. To be fair, the tardium crystals did that, for a couple attoseconds. Unfortunately for the rest of the prototype, normal matter doesn't appreciate being moved at superluminal speeds, and therefore broke apart when the craft approached the light barrier.

Despite that setback, people kept on theorizing and engineering. Then, two years later, Star Trek came to the rescue again. A research group posited that they could make a 'structural integrity field' by sprinkling microscopic tardium crystals into the steel and ceramic of the hull, and engineering a tachyon field that would keep them at a constant distance relative to the drive crystals. Ten months later, and a tiny prototype did what we thought to be impossible: For 24 milliseconds, it traveled at about 1.000000001c, and it came out of this experience unharmed. However, the sharp drop from superluminal to low subluminal speeds did de-tune the structural integrity field. Unless we got someone to board the vessel and re-tune it after every drop from superluminal, this wasn't going to work out. Especially because the chirp would not last all that long.

Now that the principle was proven, though, the engineers and mining crews took over. While the former slaved over engine and hull designs, the latter set up multiple extra bases along the asteroid belt, undulation mining all the tardium crystals they could get their metaphorical hands on. They were tiny, but since we needed most of them for the integrity field anyway, that wasn't a problem. What was harder was finding good, sufficiently large drive crystals.

Meanwhile, the engineers had settled on a design that was, for some reason, a flying saucer. They explained that they needed three or more engines to run at the same time all the time, to be able to adjust course. And also have more than that so some could be stopped, reset, and be ready to chirp again before the active ones were done. Therefore, at six points radially along the saucer, there were 2cm sized drive crystals which would propel the craft. They would be working on three cycles, while one pair was resetting, the other two pairs would be actively propelling the vessel. This way, continuous propulsion could be achieved. And the integrity field would not need to be re-tuned every couple milliseconds.

For low subluminal speeds, the engines didn't actually require the integrity field to be active. This had the advantage, that the vessel could be contacted. Because as prototyping quickly revealed, as soon as the integrity field was up, communications were all blocked in their entirety.

But, well, after 5 more years of prototyping and biological compatibility testing, the first starship was deemed spaceworthy and safe for humans to be on the inside of. Turned out that as long as the hull integrity field was up, the inside of the craft needed no further cautions, and you could float around in it like normal. The field itself didn't even extend much further inside beyond the outer hull. Though, when the field was down, you would experience the g-forces of the drive, which sounds bad, but actually made for some handy way to produce artificial gravity during the ascent from the surface. Once the field was up, the magnetic boots of the uniforms anchored you to the floor. Or you could grab onto two handles and anchor yourself that way.

We would love to have made a bigger ship than we did, but unfortunately, the Enterprise (because of course they named it that) was limited by the amount of available large tardium crystals for the drive. So we deemed its first mission to be getting some more. Trade for them, get permission to mine them, whatever, we just needed some larger ones.

As for now, the enterprise had just one deck in the wider saucer, but 3 in the middle, which was bulbed out for no discernible reason i could find, other than to make it look like a proper UFO. And maybe to house the living quarters for the crew of 45 brave explorers. And also to transport back more tardium in the cargo hold, located smack dab in the middle of the ship.

We sent a request for the isocoordinates of the closest civilization to us over vibromessage, and after receiving them, we gave the go ahead.

We however forgot to take into account that due to the message blocking of the structural field, we could no longer send our friends in the Andromeda galaxy any messages. Nor could we check in with the Enterprise, as it would be in the tachyon slipstream continuously, so as not to need to re-tune the integrity field as often. Because that takes a while each time.

So for 30 long years after the sendoff, we didn't know anything. We didn't waste that time, but with so much of our supply of crystals built into that ship, we needed a while to even start on other experiments. And the first thing we did was to upgrade the control network for the dyson collectors. I say first thing, as if we finished that project quickly, when in reality it took us 2 of those 3 decades. The last decade was pretty calm. Humanity had endured so much excitement, that the new generation now pushed to refocus on our culture. So, now that the collectors were precise enough, we finally began to enact our long awaited plan to terraform Mars. But that would take about a century in total, so it wasn't like there was much daily excitement to be had about that.

Then, thirty years and 5 months after launch, at 0:1 PFJ, we received a vibromessage from Andromeda. Enterprise had made it.

Quickly thereafter, the prime administrator called me, demanding to be connected to the tachyon network at once, now that comms were open once more.

I didn't really watch the negotiations that followed, but to make a long story short, our wayward crew was allowed to mine asteroids in the system of the aliens for tardium, so long as the aliens got a 40/60 cut. They themselves admitted to being unable to mine them by themselves, so they gave us the lion's share.

For the domestic scientists, this meant the reserves of tardium were opened more to experiments, as more was on the way soon-ish.

This resulted in the discovery of how the tachyons decayed into their base frequency, or vacuum state, if you will. We knew that in tardium, the tachyons directly couple with the phonons, which are the vibrational excitation modes. However, in vacuum, when coupling with themselves in order to decay into a higher frequency, the excitation was mitigated by an elongation of the surrounding spacetime in turn. We had finally found the explaination for the expansion of the universe: Whenever tardium gets excited and tachyons of non-base frequencies are sent out, their decay mode stretches the universe. Or, well, it stretches spacetime, with isospace being left unaffected. Our drive tech basically anchors the vessel to isospace anyway, so even if the universe keeps expanding, we can still visit everyone we want with the first drive we made. But... negative spacial curvature was something we wanted to achieve for centuries. And now, we were able to!

With this discovery, the engineers went back to work to try to make this into a method of propulsion as well. This necessitated a name for our first, working engine, which we decided to call the slipstream drive. This was fairly intuitive of a name, as the vessel would couple to isospace instead of regular spacetime, where it would be carried by the pressure of the tachyon field on one side, while the chirpers destructively interfered with it on the other side. Thus essentially creating a slipstream pocket in the front, into which the tachyon pressure would continuously push the vessel.

Speaking of names, the newly conceived drive was uncreatively christened the warp drive. To be fair, it was pretty much exactly what a warp drive in pop-culture had been. Except, turns out, it didn't work that easily. The warp prototypes at the moment had small drive crystals. And so, their warp fields collapsed fairly rapidly, due to unwanted resonance we couldn't shunt away. No prototype even managed to break the warp 1 barrier yet, though they did achieve fairly decent sublight speeds. And, interestingly, they could still be communicated with via tachyon message. This was due to the fact that they worked on the opposite principle of comm-arrays. Where communications needed to stay stable over vast distances, the warp drive needed the tachyons to rapidly decay into the ground state in order to achieve propulsion. Anyway, as exciting as the warp drives were, in terms of actual propulsion, they weren't all that revolutionary.

The theoretical development of better, more efficient slipstream drives on the other hand flourished. Once Enterprise got back, the engineers were confident that the next trip to Andromeda could be tackled in about a month or two, with the new engine design. Maybe three, if some unforeseen hazards appeared.

-------------------------------

The high council of Krg didn't really know how to react to the news of the Humans' arrival.

Nobody could wrap their minds around how they got here. Or really why. Well, they stated that they wanted to mine the asteroids in the star system for tardium, but why they came to the surface was beyond the council's understanding.

They had to wear thick, bulky suits, with gas containers for respiration, as Krg didn't have an atmosphere. To even get to our habitats, we had to open one of the pressure doors, which we normally use to get to the surface whenever we want to access the telescopes. It was such a strange feeling, letting something else then a Krgian crawl through our living spaces. Usually when that happened, the intruder was some kind of pest, which we quickly drove out.

The Humans had trouble with the steepness of some of our tunnels, but they still insisted they come down here. Our multitude of locomotive limbs allows our kind to easily traverse these tunnels, but that didn't mean the Humans didn't manage. When we thought it would be too steep for them to follow us, they unveiled a rope and pulley system, which they used to hoist themselves down along the wall. Ingenious!

Though i couldn't help but ask: "Are you sure you can get back up?"

The lead human, furthest down the rope turned its head, and replied: "Yeah, easily. The gravity here is so much lower compared to Earth, it will be a cakewalk. Ah, sorry, human expression, what i meant was it will be a simple matter. To be honest, i am more worried about the light."

Light? "Oh right, you Humans have sensory organs that require light." I had forgotten about that, but supposed it made sense for surface dwellers such as them.

"Yes, we can't see much down here with our measly flashlights."

"What is a flashlight?"

"A portable light source, which can be directed into a specific direction. But in tunnels like these, in the dark, i can see why your species has evolved vibrational senses first and foremost."

"You are familiar with them?"

The Human made noise that sounded as if it had trouble with respiration. "Yes. We have lots of life forms on Earth that have whiskers like yours. Not even all of which live in tunnels. Some live together with us."

This surprised me. "There is another intelligent species on your planet?"

"No." came the swift reply.

"Ah, a pet then. Or is it livestock?"

"No, cats are pets. Though jury's out on who's domesticated whom."

I wanted to ask for clarification, but we had arrived at my workstation.

"We are here," i announced to the humans, opening the hatch. "You may enter."

"Whoa. Is that? A tardium crystal?" The third Human in line extended their forelimb toward one of the array crystals. "It is gigantic!"

Appraising the crystal, it was only about one and a half body lengths of the Humans. "It is for a communications array, after all. Though it is not the largest single crystal we have," i informed them.

"If the boys back home saw that, they'd be foaming at the mouth, you know that?"

"Isn't mouth foaming a bad sign?" I wasn't sure about all the intricacies of Human biology, i was a communication officer after all, not a biologist.

"It would be, if that wasn't just an expression. Sorry, i keep forgetting that idioms require context that you don't have. May we use the array to send a message back home? Our vessel is only equipped with a short range communication grid."

Another human whispered something i think i wasn't supposed to hear, but could clearly: "ET phone home." It was said in English, which i was rusty in, so i didn't know what it meant. We had been conversing in basic so far.

Of course, i agreed to let them use it. They proceeded to turn their heads in many different positions, but didn't go to the controls.

"Is something wrong?" i asked.

"We have no idea how to work this thing."

Oh. I went over to the vibromotor-controls, and softly brushed the control crystal. Brushing the harmony for communication with Earth, the vibromotors undulated, configuring the array crystals into the correct alignment.

The Humans then initiated a small scale communication from their own limited range communicator, which i configured the array to pick up and amplify, then transmit toward Earth. On the side, i used internal communications to call the council of elders up here, who to my surprise agreed to come right away. Only two millirotations later, they crawled up the side entrances, their chitin softness dampening their approach to a respectably low volume.

At the same time, the communications array was picking up a response, from the leader of Earth.

"Shall we leave the leaders to their decision?" one of the Humans asked me.

"Probably." i responded. We made our way outside the cavern.

"Do you have a water reservoir here somewhere?" one of the Humans requested. "We need to refill our oxygen supply, but we have electrolyzers and hydrogen fusers in the ship. So if you could spare a couple tons of water, that would really help us."

I had no idea what half these words meant, but lead them to a communal pressure well. We use those to transport cargo from the lower levels, but we had more than enough liquid water to spare. A couple tons were nothing.

After a trip back to the surface, hauling some metallic objects down the tunnels, the humans went to work. Why they were using construction material was beyond me, but soon, a rythmic hum came from one of the devices.

"Fusion in 3. 2. 1. Fusing now," one of them announced, having connected a soft pipe from one device to the other.

"What exactly is it that you are doing?" i inquired.

"Electro-chemically splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen, then using the hydrogen for the fusion reactor, which in turn powers the electrolyzer."

"I have no idea what any of that means," i admitted.

The Humans turned their heads to one another for a moment, then back to me.

"We're using a machine, or two machines rather, to make breathable gas out of the water."

"Oh, so you breathe water vapor?"

"No. But we can make what we breathe out of water. We don't just vaporize it. I don't think i can properly explain chemistry or electrolysis right now. We don't have the time for that."

"Don't we have plenty, while the negotiations are underway?" i inquired.

"If you think they will take multiple cycles, then maybe. But i thought it would only be a few rotations, right?"

It takes multiple cycles to explain?

What?

Just what is up with these Humans?

...to be honest, i kind of wanted to find out for myself at this point. Maybe, just maybe, they would allow me to travel back to Earth with them. I didn't have a clutch of eggs to care for, nor a mate. Which hadn't exactly bothered me, but it did mean i had nothing holding me here. Except for the now obsolete thought that i couldn't go to any other civilization.

Hello, Author here. I am sorry to say this, but this is probably the last thing i write for this world. ADHD refuses to let me do such a sustained project. If any of you want to write something in this setting i created, though, be sure to run it by me to see if it fits the setting. Also, if anyone has a cool idea what to call this worldbuilding/setting/universe, feel free to send me an ask with a suggestion, i'll edit the tags so we can find stuff written in that setting later on.

#humans are space orcs #worldbuilding #i know a couple of you followed me for this story #but the thing is i'm now pretty much done with it #adhd refuses to let me work on long sustained projects #sorry

31 notes · View notes

saintsenara · 1 year

Note

your voldemort is 10/10 perfection. are there any characterizations, common interpretations, etc that you find implausible or just plain dislike? or that you really love and have drawn from? :)

thank you so much for this ask anon :)

i received a similar ask from @sarafina-sincerity, and so they are answered here together, as part of a flurry of asks about my main boy, lord voldemort, which form a neat triad.

this is part two of a three part meta on him:

1. what is interesting about voldemort's role in the series? [here] 2. how do i write voldemort in my own work, and why? 3. what does dumbledore get wrong about voldemort? [here]

so let's get into it...

how do i write voldemort, and why?

in we go under the cut:

influences on my voldemort

the author whose voldemort has had the greatest influence on mine is, without a doubt, eldritcher.

while i have no hope of replicating the majesty of their prose, i've never been able to shake their depiction of voldemort as someone profoundly lonely and deeply affected by grief - something most prominent in their transcendentally good almagest - and a reading of voldemort which i bring not only to my writing, but to my engagement with the canon text.

i'm also very struck by their depiction of voldemort as a creature of sensation - instead of the rather austere version we tend to find in fanfiction - particularly in their catullus 16 and their writing of tombraxas.

while i diverge from their portrayal of voldemort as lazy - i think he’s sustained by a current of nervous energy [and, indeed, that both he and harry have poorly-managed adhd, but that’s personal projection] - i find myself always writing voldemort as someone who likes being warm, loathes the outdoors, and is fond of expensive, sensory fabrics.

that voldemort is a creature of sensation also affects how i read many of his relationships. as i've pointed out in my prior writing about bellamort, he tolerates an enormous amount of physical closeness from bellatrix in canon, and i'm quite taken with the idea that he’s a surprisingly tactile person.

another influence i've found significant recently is @phantomato’s excellent series of meta on voldemort and gender identity, in particular because they have helped me work through a discomfort i've always had with this quote from half-blood prince:

He raised his glass as though toasting Voldemort, whose face remained expressionless. Nevertheless, Harry felt the atmosphere in the room change subtly: Dumbledore’s refusal to use Voldemort’s chosen name was a refusal to allow Voldemort to dictate the terms of the meeting, and Harry could tell that Voldemort took it as such.

voldemort and gender identity is something which i'd love to see explored more in the fandom. i'm as guilty as anyone of writing a cheerfully cisgender dark lord, and - in particular - of not engaging enough with the fact that the canonical voldemort considers tom his deadname. i find myself returning again and again to these meta each time i sit down to begin a new voldemort-centric wip, and i think that my own writing of voldemort has been nuanced considerably by them. certainly, voldemort’s gender plays a far bigger part in scylla and charybdis than in my previous long-fics

there are, of course, portrayals of voldemort which have influenced me to write in the opposite direction. i’m not going to mention, even obliquely, the names of these authors or their stories, but i am going to mention one version of voldemort which i loathe and which i never intend to replicate in my writing: the voldemort of the films.

as i said in the previous meta in this series, film!voldemort is the source of countless fanon which undermines the statement of the canonical seven-book series, above all the idea that voldemort is not terrifying, that he is completely deranged and incompetent, and that he doesn’t very nearly win.

character traits my voldemort always has

as i said in the previous meta in this series, i prefer a voldemort who isn’t a sociopath, largely because i think it’s quite lazy writing to have a villain whose evil is caused by just not getting human emotion [after all, there are plenty of people who find it difficult to parse other people’s emotions, and it doesn’t automatically make them bad]. it's considerably more challenging - as both a writer and a reader - to have to confront the idea that the villain has complicated and multifaceted motivations behind their actions, and that we're called as humans to accept that it’s possible to be simultaneously horrified by and sympathetic to people who cause harm. above all, i loathe the implication of the text that voldemort was born bad and was always irredeemable, not least because it completely undermines the series’ central thesis on the value of choice.

i accept, of course, that this isn't what the doylist text thinks. jkr has been very clear that she thinks voldemort is sociopathic and that he has no concept of humanity. fortunately, i take her opinion as infallible in very little [trans rights are human rights], and i much prefer a watsonian approach to the text which views dumbledore’s conviction of voldemort’s sociopathy as… just incorrect.

separate to this, i like a voldemort who is emotionally demonstrative. it seems to have become standard to write him as preternaturally controlled [maybe breaking down when under extreme pressure, but almost exclusively doing so in private], but the voldemort of canon is, and there’s no other word for it, feral. he's one of the male characters whose emotional range is described in the most detail, and he's also described as registering his emotions very obviously on his face. i’m always tickled by harry’s complaint in order of the phoenix that he picks up "lurches of annoyance or cheerfulness" via the scarcrux, and i love thinking about the little joys in voldemort’s day.

i also see him as someone who's often fretful and unmoored - indeed he basically says as much in goblet of fire:

"I will not pretend to you that I didn’t then fear that I might never regain my powers... Yes, that was perhaps my darkest hour... I could not hope that I would be sent another wizard to possess... and I had given up hope, now, that any of my Death Eaters cared what had become of me."

certainly, the canonical voldemort has a sense of purpose when focused on the wars which doesn’t seem to be a permanent presence in his everyday life, and he - like dumbledore - seems to spend a lot of time in stasis until pushed to change course, the clearest example of this being that he stays in customer service for ten years and would undoubtedly have continued at borgin and burkes if hepzibah smith had just kept her treasures in the safe...

this is not, of course, to say that voldemort is not ambitious - he absolutely is - but that, as with harry, that ambition is accompanied by a certain need for pressure. indeed, voldemort is one of the more adrenaline-chasing slytherins we meet in the series, and i'm convinced that this is the trigger for his often-expressed [and, let’s be real, pretty gryffindor-ish] view that courage and daring are valuable, seen most clearly in his simping for james potter dying "like a man, straight-backed and proud" and his determination to duel harry in the graveyard rather than just off him - as well as in his frequent statements that he loathes cowardice, his cruelty to minions [especially peter pettigrew and lucius malfoy] he regards as insufficiently daring, and his taunting of harry and dumbledore with the idea that they allow others to hide them or fight their battles for them.

that dumbledore fails to understand this about voldemort is addressed in the next meta in this series. so, too, is the fact that dumbledore fails to appreciate voldemort’s clearly quite profound sense of honour. this is seen most clearly in his relationship with pettigrew, whose inherent lack of honourable conduct - not only to him, but to the marauders - evidently disgusts him:

"Wormtail, I need somebody with brains, somebody whose loyalty has never wavered, and you, unfortunately, fulfill neither requirement."

"You returned to me, not out of loyalty, but out of fear of your old friends. You deserve this pain, Wormtail. You know that, don’t you?"

his canonical detestation of liars seems to be genuine - and he's actually very rarely shown lying in canon [although the implication that he lies frequently off-page is obvious].

i like the canonical description of voldemort as highly independent, self-motivated, and self-sufficient - although i think there's room for more nuance in whether he actually likes the death eaters than canon gives us.

i also like the fact that the canonical voldemort is incredibly pragmatic [even if this is undermined on several occasions by his flair for the dramatic] and i think that this aspect of his character is all too often overlooked by authors who want to make him inflexible and obsessive. voldemort openly admits to having changed his mind on several occasions in the books, or to have modified his approach on the basis of new information - that this information is often partial, or given to him falsely by snape, does not change this.

he seems - like ron and harry - to have good gut instincts, to be an excellent judge of character, and to be reasonably self-aware [although he uses this almost exclusively for nefarious ends]. i love the chameleon-like aspect of his charisma - the being-the-centre-of-attention at the slug club which morphs into him having negative charm in the hepzibah smith scene, as he sits offering her all the rope she needs to hang herself - and i love writing, especially in tomarry, the ways in which his customer service mask cracks.

now, the more controversial aspects of my characterisation of voldemort…

the canonical voldemort is very, very funny, and far too few fics engage with his [malicious] sense of humour. tomarry works as a ship entirely because they'd have a great time bickering with each other, and snapemort works because they're both comically petty and extremely dramatic.

i adore the magpieishness to voldemort’s character, not only in the idea that he likes shiny things, but also in that his love-language is gift-giving [he rewards his followers for acts of service, absolutely, but the language with which he describes this is always focused on the idea of gift-giving, and, especially, reciprocal gift-exchange]. i always write him as a collector not only of impressive magical objects but of things full stop, whether we’re doing the cheerful fluff of him filling grimmauld place with interestingly shaped rocks he finds on walks, or the more canon-compliant helping himself to trinkets he sees in his friends’ magnificent houses. i'm committed to the idea that he genuinely likes working in the antiques trade and i never write him going into teaching or politics - if i find myself in a situation where he has to get a job beyond being a terrorist, he stays at borgin and burkes.

i view voldemort as someone whose great longing is to be perceived and understood. both the child we meet in dumbledore’s memories and the adult who rises in the graveyard share a tendency to reveal far too much about themselves when they're given the opportunity, and i always write voldemort - especially the voldemort of one year in every ten - as never mastering a habit of letting things slip when he gets excited. tomarry again works because harry is happy to do this perceiving.

i also - and this is definitely the controversial one - view him as someone capable of great and stalwart faithfulness, whose ability to express this aspect of his character is constrained by the trust issues caused by his childhood trauma. he's extraordinarily devoted to both snape and bellatrix throughout the canon series - obviously, this is because he thinks his read on them as loyal servants is right, but i don’t think we necessarily have to see this as a negative, most of us trust and like people because we think their motivations are trustworthy and likeable, and most of us maintain at least some relationships which have a degree of transactionality to them, but are no less sincere for that.

whether he's someone who loves is another question. i vary it by story, although i always frame his rejection of love as a deliberate choice, rather than - as the text does - something innate.

my voldemort always has several much more frivolous traits which i like to put into stories entirely to amuse myself…

i notice a tendency for voldemort to be written as pretty culturally sophisticated, and i think this is generally correct. certainly, the way that class functions in britain is that toleration within a class which is not one’s own can be achieved through simply knowing the right references, and i absolutely believe that voldemort is someone who learned what books to say he’d read and which knife to use at dinner with dizzying speed when he arrived at hogwarts.

however, one thing i can never get on board with is the idea that he’s a good cook. i prefer my voldemort to have a touch of the ration book to him - and for his plebeian tastes in food to confuse and annoy the posher death eaters. i like him refusing to eat at fancy dinner parties, before sneaking into the kitchens for a stack of toast and margarine, and being a connoisseur of all the finest bits of british cuisine - a fry up, beans on toast, a good roast dinner, potatoes in any form, kippers and kedgeree, fish and chips, mysterious pies, and tea with everything. this is not to say, of course, that i think he’s into bland food [the only mischaracterisation of the brits i, as an irishwoman, am prepared to go into bat against]. this is a man who loves a curry, without a doubt, and i am incredibly fond of the idea that he develops a serious taste for many of the world’s most delicious cuisines on his travels.

i also always write him with an incredibly sweet tooth - he takes his tea with milk and six sugars, hermione is dismayed. i do this entirely because i think it’s funny.

[fans of the asenora cinematic universe will have noticed a repeated motif that voldemort loves marzipan. this is because i love marzipan, and everyone else i know thinks that this is a great moral failing equivalent to being a mass-murderer.]

i like a voldemort who has some muggle skills. i write him as being able to drive, use a telephone, fire a gun [another eldritcher influence], take the tube, and correctly handle muggle money - to the shock of many of the death eaters. i prefer him to be absolutely terrible at anything which could be termed muggle manual labour, though - the man cannot do diy, garden, lift heavy objects without magic, play any sport, or swim - although i imagine him as extremely fastidious and perfectly happy to be put to work on household chores. i have him keep a diary into adulthood.

i also like him to have some appreciation of muggle culture, very much despite himself. again, this is because i think the fact that he's exactly the right age for the fashions of his youth to have been distinctly un-voldemort-ish - think tiki cocktails, p.g. wodehouse, golden age detective fiction, film musicals, swing music, and the lindy hop - is hilarious. this manifests across my works in the idea that he's incredibly fond of fred astaire - the only muggle he's prepared to accept has some sort of residual magical talent. the only reason i write this is because my late grandfather, a man whose only personality trait otherwise was "fenian", was born in the same year as lord v and absolutely adored old fred, and i will get teary-eyed listening to cheek-to-cheek for the rest of my life as a result.

voldemort’s physical appearance

the narrative importance of the young voldemort’s appearance is often overlooked, i think.

it's a comment on his broader purpose within the series - he wants to be perceived as striking and special, and his unusual physical attractiveness as a young man and horrifying eldritch features as an adult contribute to that, while harry, the modest, everyman hero, is neither obviously beautiful nor obviously ugly [and the series, more generally, treats those who are very poorly].

voldemort’s attractiveness - as with snape’s ugliness - is also an inversion of one of the series-as-children’s-literature’s main characterisation choices: that good people are nice, kind, and good-looking, and bad people are ugly, rude, or unpleasant. i also always love the little nod to the picture of dorian gray in the way the sin voldemort inflicts upon his soul changes his face.

however, beyond being told that voldemort is hot-then-not, the text also gives us some hints at voldemort’s appearance and mannerisms which i would like to see more in fanfic, especially the fact that he's described in quite a few feminine-coded ways - his voice is high; he usually speaks softly; he moves in a way which suggests elegance [he’s always described as "gliding" in canon]; and, by his late twenties, he has hair long enough for harry to comment on it [particularly interesting, since this comment comes in the course of voldemort’s most feminine-coded action in the series - the murder, in a domestic context using poison, the classic "woman’s weapon", of hepzibah smith, and the framing of her servant, hokey, for the crime]; the text refers to him as "finely-carved", which can be read as meaning that he has quite delicate features; the repeated emphasis on how pale he is - even pre-horcruxes - makes us think of the consumptive, effeminate artist of victorian literature who never leaves the house; and the text’s constant highlighting of how thin he is - and, especially, his long, elegant fingers - again calls to mind effeminate stereotypes who lack proper male brawn. voldemort’s only uncomplicatedly masculine characteristic in canon is that he's very tall.

this is to say, i much prefer a voldemort - whether he looks as he does aged sixteen or aged sixty - who doesn’t look stereotypically masculine. the text refers to him as "handsome", of course, but i choose to believe that this is just harry’s own binary understanding of how men should talk about men, and that the more appropriate word for voldemort is "beautiful". i've discussed some references for how I picture him here.

even when writing him as cisgender, i always find myself leaning towards him being quite camp, and there being an effete edge to his otherwise sinister vibe. i go back and forth on whether i imagine him as vain - the tom riddle of bookbinding spends hours each morning on his elaborately-pomaded hair, the one of scylla and charybdis keeps wearing cologne even as his face his whittled away by dark magic, but the canonical voldemort of the second war clearly isn’t doing either of those things…

i'm also interested in the idea that voldemort is physically quite fragile. i write him as having been quite a sickly child, and i think this provides an interesting jumping-off point into thinking about why he's so obsessed with magic. i like the idea that he wasn’t top dog at all at the orphanage, because he was easy to physically subdue, until he learned to use his magic to protect himself, and i like to imagine that he always knows that, should dumbledore or harry decide to throw away their wands and just deck him, he is absolutely losing that fight.

of his individual physical features, i am completely wedded to the idea that voldemort has his mother’s eyes.

voldemort’s childhood

i love an au as much as the next girl, but only very rarely one which alters voldemort’s childhood and expects him to turn out largely unchanged.

indeed, i don’t think there’s any way to write a voldemort which nods to canon if he’s not an orphan, not raised in an institution, and not poor - he can have some similarities with his canon version [i’m always struck by the comment in goblet of fire that nobody likes the riddles, and i always write tom sr. as being the source of many of voldemort’s less pleasant traits and mannerisms] but voldemort’s purpose within the series depends on his relationship to his class-background, and especially:

that he's the most "aristocratic" wizard we meet in canon - he's the only person in the seven book series to be directly descended from one of hogwarts’ founders, and the only one [horcrux!harry doesn’t count] to possess a unique magical talent connected to his lineage - but is unable to reap the benefits of this in the wizarding world because he has a muggle name and a muggle face [it’s notable in canon that pureblood families all tend to look very alike within their family units - think the weasleys, the malfoys, the blacks, and the longbottoms - that voldemort doesn’t look like a gaunt confers him benefits in that he’s hot, but it undermines the "immediately being identifiable as one of slytherin’s descendants" vibe which he might otherwise have].

that he's the most aristocratic muggle we meet in canon - he's the only person in the seven book series to have a member of the landed gentry in his immediate family - but is unable to reap the benefits of this in the muggle world because his father doesn’t acknowledge his existence and he's raised as working-class.

that neither of these two halves of his class background can ever intersect, and he's a half-blood character whose sense of belonging in either world is tenuous [snape is another; harry - who has a pureblood name and resembles his pureblood father - is much less so]. voldemort’s dislike of the common and ordinary, the fact that he's absolutely shameless about money, the fact he takes a muggle title for his wizarding alias etc. can all be read as attempts to seek meaning in a world in which he's otherwise pretty liminal. whether he actually supports the class system is discussed below…

all of which is to say, i never write a voldemort whose childhood circumstances alter from canon.

and there are no two ways about it: voldemort’s childhood is spectacularly grim, and the trauma it causes [while different from the trauma fanon often ascribes to it - above all, and i’ll die on this hill, the fact that he doesn’t give a fuck about dumbledore setting his wardrobe on fire] drives far more of voldemort’s actions than the watsonian narrative seems aware of - it is, for example, clearly the trigger for his hoarding, for his lack of trust in authority [which is exactly the same as harry’s, but treated very differently by the books], for his obsession with being the best, and for his tendency to show off. the adult voldemort loathes reminders of childhood neglect - especially babies crying - and, while dumbledore mocks him for this, his ignorance of fairytales is a neat way of saying that he didn’t have a real or carefree childhood. i'm flexible on the headcanon of him suffering specific physical or sexual abuse in the orphanage [i always wonder if his canonical fear of doctors is meant to imply something along those lines], although frankly i think the childhood we see in canon is miserable enough.

the most significant bit of voldemort’s childhood trauma, though, is his grief over the death of his mother [and, it’s worth noting, his grief over the presumed death of his father - whom he doesn’t know for certain is alive until morfin tells him]. i’ll go into this - and especially dumbledore’s spectacular mishandling of it - in more detail in the third meta in this series, but i want to emphasise two important merope-related things which the narrative highlights: that voldemort murders both his father and hepzibah smith to avenge her, and that the locket is the only horcrux for which he constructs an elaborate defence in a place meaningful to him from childhood. i expand on this in my writing with the headcanon that voldemort believes he killed his mother and that, therefore, his destiny to be a killer was set from birth; that he doesn’t know her actual name; and that he believes he looks like her and is devastated to discover this isn’t the case. i'm certain that he gets his conviction that tom riddle sr. abandoned his mother due to magic from his father directly, and that his implication in goblet of fire that he thinks he was a wanted baby until his mother revealed her powers is a deliberate, self-comforting misinterpretation of tom sr. not being able to fully articulate what happened to him at merope’s hands beyond "she was a witch".

i have two worldbuilding headcanons when it comes to voldemort’s childhood. the implication of canon is that the orphanage is in vauxhall in south london, but i always locate it on dorset street in spitalfields - this is the site of one of jack the ripper’s most brutal murders, and i like the idea of the long shadow of that horror hanging around the place. naturally, i see him having a cockney accent he goes to great lengths to disguise as an adult.

i also always write the orphanage as a catholic institution and voldemort raised - although he has no genuine conviction [which doesn’t mean he escapes lots of catholic-y quirks] - in the church. this really can’t be justified by canon - the orphanage appears to be state run, which would mean it was church of england, if anything - but i do it because, as someone from ireland, the appalling history of the laundries is the first thing which comes to mind when thinking about poor pregnant merope staggering into an institution to give birth and promptly dying.

voldemort’s school years

as i’ve said above, i don’t think you can write a good voldemort if his childhood poverty isn’t acknowledged. however, where i might deviate from other authors is that i don’t think his isolation in the muggle world [clearly the rest of the orphans go out of their way to avoid spending any time with him] continued once he was at hogwarts.

it seems to have become standard fanon that voldemort was bullied in slytherin over his secondhand possessions and either the assumption that he was muggleborn or the knowledge that he was half-blood. i understand this - particularly because i’m a snapemort defender, and its parallel with snape’s canonical experience at school is nice - but i think that it fails to note two key things about voldemort’s character:

firstly, as said above, class in britain depends as much on performance as background. while snape clearly remains identifiably working-class into his late teens at least, voldemort is chameleon-like enough to ape his roommates’ accents, mannerisms, and references immediately, and to pass as someone from a wizarding background with comparative ease. the fact that he has shabby possessions wouldn’t count against his ability to claim that he was a pureblood or half-blood - after all, we see plenty of poor purebloods in canon, and it doesn’t stop their blood status from giving them a social cachet - if he was able to give the impression of passing as someone who wasn’t raised as a muggle.

secondly, voldemort is shameless, a show-off, and - crucially - has proof of his claim to be from, to borrow slughorn’s phrase, "good wizarding stock". i'm sure that dumbledore is inadvertently right when he speculates in half-blood prince that voldemort discovers slytherin was a parselmouth almost immediately, and uses this to establish among his fellows the fact that they’re related. voldemort implies in chamber of secrets that he learned of this connection early in his first year, since he claims to have spent five full years planning to open the chamber - although dumbledore’s implication in half-blood prince is that, initially at least, he believes his father is the descendant. all of which is to say, it is clear that voldemort could undercut any negative rumours about his heritage - and any bullying which might result - very easily and very quickly after arriving at hogwarts.

indeed, i always write voldemort as - while perhaps not being popular - having a group of "dedicated friends" [dumbledore’s term - voldemort himself refers to them as "intimate friends"] whose affection for him is genuine. i think it’s impossible to write the knights of walpurgis/the original death eaters as not really liking him - voldemort’s very charismatic, yes, but it takes more than charisma for people to agree to become terrorists under your command, and one of the things it takes is genuine sympathy and admiration for you and your aims - not least because the fact that voldemort’s shamelessness about money must mean that he happily freeloads off them would still require their assent at first [he might be able to squat at malfoy manor in the second war on the basis of nothing more than being terrifying, but that isn’t going to cut it at eleven].

more controversially, i am of the opinion that he genuinely likes them - as noted above, voldemort tends to tell the truth in his canon appearances, and while this is a narrative necessity [it often falls to him to provide exposition harry and the reader otherwise don’t have, especially because both dumbledore and snape need to keep information to themselves] i like the reading that his claim in the job interview scene in half-blood prince that dumbledore is "mistaken" to dispute that he considers the earliest death eaters friends is sincere.

and also i just like the idea of them having normal teenage fun while at school. as well as all the crime.

intellectually, while it’s clear that voldemort’s canonical favourite subject is defence against the dark arts, as a snapemort girly i always love writing him as an extremely good experimental potioneer - which he does imply of himself in goblet of fire. like everyone else, he hates history of magic, and he's definitely not someone who particularly enjoys subjects like herbology or care of magical creatures - all of which sound a bit too much like hard work in the outdoors. his least favourite part of being at hogwarts is, of course, quidditch, and i'm absolutely on board with the idea that he learns unaided flight because riding a broom is the one thing he’s not good at.

what do i think is going on with voldemort between 1945 and 1970?

as i’ve said, i think that working at borgin and burkes suits voldemort - and it’s my preferred non-dark-lord career for him. i love lots of fics which show him being a good teacher [especially this] or which examine how he trains his minions, but i just don’t see him doing well at the job within the confines of hogwarts. there’s a certain rejection of the ivory tower baked into voldemort’s character - not least in the fact that all the "pushing the boundaries of magic" stuff requires a rejection of academic gatekeeping around systems of knowledge - and i can’t imagine him happily settling into an existence for the hogwarts teachers which is pretty removed from the realities of everyday life.

[incidentally, if you’re writing a muggle au, an excellent basis for voldemort-at-university would be something like engleby - a working-class kid yeeted into an elite academic institution which hates him and which he hates in return. with deadly consequences.]

so he becomes a shop assistant and is, as dumbledore tells us, extremely good at his job. so good, in fact, that he stays at borgin and burkes for a decade and seems to commit only the most minor crimes while he’s there.

and this seems quite strange, for someone who - aged sixteen - tells harry that his plans for world domination were well established before he had even left school, particularly because most of the knights of walpurgis/death eaters must settle down into family life over the course of voldemort having a 9-5 [we don’t canonically know that abraxas malfoy is one, of course - although i consider it more feasible that he's given the diary than the explanation we get in canon - but lucius malfoy is born while voldemort is still in england; my belief is that the lestrange mentioned in half-blood prince is rodolphus and rabastan’s father, and so they’re also born in the late 1940s or 1950s]. it would undoubtedly have made more sense for him to have struck immediately after school, before his followers got tied up in the messy obligations of adult life.

i’ve seen some very fun explanations of what causes voldemort to stay in his job for so long [especially this], but - as i said above - i think the main reason is that he’s someone who gets held in stasis quite easily, until a push comes along which causes him to dramatically alter his course.

and that push is hepzibah smith, and the opportunity she gives him to avenge his mother, take back his birthright, and continue in his quest to conquer death [which is, of course, evidence - contrary to the spree-killing voldemort of the films - that he is methodical in his violence, more on which below].

after which he toddles off to the continent. the implication of canon seems to be that he spends most of this time in albania - and why that country seems to have such a chokehold on the magical world, i don’t know [i presume jkr just thought it sounded suitably far-flung] - looking for ravenclaw’s diadem and performing ever darker feats of magic, but i like to think that he also travels widely across eurasia.

that he seems to spend much of his travels in communist europe [he must, for example, meet karkaroff - and perhaps dolohov - in one of europe’s socialist republics] is something the series doesn’t address, since it’s irrelevant to the canonical narrative, but it’s something that i think is incredibly interesting to explore in fanfiction. my headcanon is that voldemort must be able to speak some level of russian, as well as albanian [and also that, like any teen edgelord in the 1940s, he has a certain appreciation for the aesthetics - and maybe the iron state control - of communism].

as an aside here, something else i see a lot in fics is the idea that voldemort is incredibly traumatised by the second world war - and this could very well be the case. however, i think it’s worth just being clear about the timeline of some events which are often taken to have triggered this trauma:

voldemort is at school during the blitz - and therefore never touched by it - and he's also at school during the main waves of evacuations. it's possible that he returns following his second year to find the orphanage has been emptied, but evacuations weren't permanent and children were often sent away only temporarily - it's equally feasible that the orphans are back in july and august 1940 and then evacuated again when the blitz begins in september.

he's similarly at school during other major bombing campaigns in 1942 and 1944. during the bombing campaigns of summer 1944, he may very well be in london - although dumbledore’s implication in half-blood prince is that he leaves the orphanage permanently in 1943, and he could be staying with a pureblood friend instead.

voldemort doesn’t have anyone in london he’s likely to be worried about, and i imagine that he watches the muggle war with professional disdain for how distinctly unmagical it all is.

i do, however, think he’s probably quite concerned by the atomic bomb - dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki when he’s 19 - and its potential to wipe out muggles and wizards alike unless muggles are brought under magical control. i think one political belief he can be easily written as holding is that wizards [stuck thinking of muggles as they were in the age of cannon and musket] underestimate the depths of, as he sees it, muggle stupidity, brutality, and covetousness and are unprepared for what might happen if these are turned against them.

by the time he returns to england - which appears to be in 1965 or 1966 - he has made at least four horcruxes [the diary, the ring, the cup, and the diadem - my reading of canon is that he turns the locket into a horcrux shortly before he places it in the cave, as dumbledore tells us in half-blood prince that he tends not to carry them around with him once he makes them, much as i love the image of him always wearing the ring, which would also be much more sensible…].

we are told in philosopher’s stone that the first war begins in earnest in 1970, so there are four or five years which need to be accounted for. the reason for this is almost certainly that jkr can’t count, but i am committed to the belief that voldemort’s request to come back to hogwarts in half-blood-prince is completely genuine and that he has factored a few years of teaching into his plans. dumbledore’s reaction to this is discussed in the next meta in this series.

his main reason for coming back, though, seems to be to begin the campaign of political infiltration he will dedicate his forces to for the next thirty years. according to jkr’s list of ministers, voldemort returns to britain during the tenure of the only muggleborn minister in history [prior to hermione, if you accept that idea], who is forced out of office two years later when abraxas malfoy poisons him and is then replaced by a minister who also supports social causes [above all the squibs' rights riots - one of jkr’s recent heavy-handed analogies for real civil rights movements across the world in the 1960s] which don't align with the pureblood population’s views. halfway through this minister’s tenure, voldemort moves to open terror.

the wizarding world is evidently not a democracy - no matter jkr’s insistence in the linked articles above that it is - but it's implied in canon that multiple candidates are considered for the position of minister, and that the wizengamot [which canonically isn't a council of aristocrats, although if an author wants to have it mirror the house of lords, with hereditary seats alongside appointed ones, i can deal with it] serves as a sort of council of electors. my preferred outline of events is that voldemort’s aim in the later sixties is to trigger the election of a puppet minister [maybe even himself, although i prefer to view him as someone without any genuine ambition for political office - he’s more of a constitutional monarch] who would bring in the programme of sweeping changes to the world he desires.

obviously, he doesn’t get that…

voldemort and the first war

working out how to write the first war is complicated - the form the war took, the death toll, who was targeted, and what the political justification was are hugely inconsistent in canon. fanon doesn’t stand a chance…

let’s try anyway.

if you follow this blog, you may have noticed that i keep using the term "sectarian terrorism" when describing voldemort's operation.

you may also have noticed that i have referred to myself as irish.

i am, to be more specific, northern irish - i come from derry, i’m from a catholic background, and i was born well before the signing of the good friday agreement. in other words, i grew up with the troubles right on my doorstep - i've experienced discrimination in the place i live for having an obviously irish and catholic name, i live in a community which could probably be described as segregated, and i still conceal my religious background in certain areas of my everyday life. i've met a number of people who spent the seventies and eighties as - by any reasonable definition - terrorists.

all of which is to say, when i first read the first six books of the series, and saw the description of voldemort and his organisation as having had a reign of terror in the 1970s, seeming to operate mainly in terms of highly-organised political assassinations with occasional attacks upon civilians, seeming to issue pre-warnings for atrocities [he tells fudge that he’s going to attack the bridge he brings down in the first chapter of half-blood prince in advance], not being allowed to use his real name on the airwaves, the fact that so many of the death eaters have not only anglo-norman but hiberno-norman names, and the fact that voldemort is clearly regarded by the wizarding world at large as "a bastard, but he’s our bastard"... well, i know who i thought he was supposed to be a pastiche of.

and i maintain this was intentional, even if jkr [who is an english protestant living in mainland britain, which would naturally have influenced her own perception of the troubles] later pivoted to drawing on the nazis to write the death eaters - a much better analogy if we’re thinking of them as unambiguous, genocidal villains, since the causes of the troubles are incredibly complex and multifaceted and the good old protestant-coded brits of the ministry and the order of the phoenix would absolutely not be seen as the uncritical heroes of the piece if she kept to the death-eaters-are-the-ira analogy.

[of course, she now claims the death eaters are like trans people - which is fucking abhorrent.]

the brutality of azkaban immediately brings to mind prisons like the maze and portlaoise; the death eater trials in the first war mirror operation demetrius; a year after the canonical quidditch world cup, there was a sectarian riot at an england-ireland football match; and - oh yeah - the fucking story ends with voldemort’s defeat in the same year as the gfa was signed. jkr does not have a light touch with historical analogy, after all.

which is to say, i think the voldemort of the first war is not a genocidaire dictator-in-waiting, but an anti-state terrorist whose goal is the weakening of the ministry and its institutions in pursuit of sectarian goals, specifically the removal of the muggle-aligned’s rights to intervene in the social and political affairs of the magic-aligned population, and their relegation to a secondary influence in public life. his views can probably be more accurately described as magic-supremacist rather than blood-supremacist - he’s not exactly a meritocrat, but he clearly does reject the patronage- and lineage-based structures which define wizarding society, and there's certainly a real suggestion in the way the teen snape is written that the death eaters provided one of the only avenues for talented people from non-pureblood backgrounds to escape the crush of the class system [as i’ve said elsewhere, i think this justifies snape’s evident belief that the death eaters would be interested in helping lily, which otherwise seems deranged].

voldemort clearly believes that a system of government which keeps itself in thrall to the statute of secrecy can’t achieve the full power of its magic [his views on non-human magical creatures - such as giants and werewolves - which often seem more progressive than the views expressed by the heroes of the series - come under this umbrella: he thinks that giants should have the chance to roam free and that it is anti-magic to constrain them].

he evidently believes that muggleborns can never fully appreciate this view and will always stand against it - although he's presumably willing to view as legitimately magical muggleborns who completely reject the world of their birth [snape cannot be the only muggle-raised death eater, and voldemort clearly likes him because of his commitment to leaving the muggle world behind him - and i'm sure that there are a couple of self-hating muggleborns somewhere in voldemort’s ranks] - and that a properly magic-supremacist order couldn’t exist until the muggle world [which he thinks inherently fears and hates magic, like his father, and will never let it achieve its true, free purpose] was subjugated and, therefore, couldn’t try to resist or appropriate magic for itself.

it is, of course, absolutely reasonable to not read the first war through this lens - i do so is because of the parallels to my own personal experience which stand out when reading the text. the first war can absolutely also be read as racist, or anti-semitic, or inspired by islamist and/or far-right terrorism. i just, as someone who has grown up under the shadow of sectarian discrimination and violence, see that as its best real-world parallel.

now, while it might be clear which way my sympathies lie in the real troubles... i'm certainly not saying that terrorism and discrimination is a good thing, nor that i think the canonical voldemort is a good or noble person, nor that i think the death eaters are right. i only bring this up because it's an explanation for why i think the war takes the form it takes in canon, and also because it introduces a complexity to voldemort’s motivations which is flattened by turning him into a one-dimensional villain bent on wiping out a minority group for fun.

which is to say, these are the things which appear most consistently in my writing of the first war:

voldemort’s operation seems to be divided into several distinct strands: ministry infiltration; the surveillance of other key figures [snape, for example, is clearly the detail assigned to dumbledore, even before he starts working at hogwarts; barty crouch jr. could be feasibly recruited as a teen to inform on his own father]; propaganda and recruitment both at home and abroad; political assassinations; and random attacks on civilians. presumably the death eaters are also conducting some sort of illicit business to finance themselves underneath this [in the second war, aberforth dumbledore complains about the trade in illegal potions going on in the hog’s head] and i tend to write voldemort as having a substantial money-laundering campaign going on in the background. i also tend to write him as having infiltrators within the muggle system - since the ministry has the same.

the vast majority of deaths associated with the war are clinical assassinations of political targets and/or their families or pro-ministry fighters killed in combat, the death eaters are tightly controlled and there are no dark revels [it’s worth emphasising that, canonically, voldemort isn't particularly impressed by the violence at the quidditch world cup, and i think it can be reasonably argued that quidditch hooliganism etc. was typically the result of groups of young death eaters getting drunk and going off message, rather than something which was ordered by the top brass]. when voldemort enters the fray himself he does so to attack high-profile figures connected to state institutions [in the first war, we hear of only one person murdered directly by voldemort before the potters - dorcas meadowes, who, despite her fanon persona, has never been stated to have been at school with the marauders, she may very well be a senior politician or auror targeted both for that and because she’s in the order. in the second war, prior to the outbreak of open combat after dumbledore’s death, the only person definitely assassinated by voldemort himself is amelia bones, who is killed because she's the head of the department of magical law enforcement].

there are, nonetheless, periodic attacks on both wizard and muggle civilians, which must have targeted pubs, shops, and other busy areas, and which are designed to keep the population afraid. voldemort is, nonetheless, clearly prepared to leave wizarding civilians - including muggleborns - who keep their heads down free from specific, targeted attacks.

the potters are targeted not only due to the prophecy, but because voldemort believes that their deaths - and the removal of harry as a potential figurehead for the resistance - will destroy the order’s morale to a sufficient extent that they and the ministry will come to the table. he acts similarly in canon, when he tries to use harry’s apparent death during the battle of hogwarts to force a surrender.

voldemort’s army of inferi are the apparent exception to this moderation in violence - although i think we can justify the idea that they're deaths he considers collateral [i.e. executed hostages, murdered family members of targets, deaths in attacks on civilians] rather than that he’s roaming the streets as a serial killer.

there is an escalation of violence against both civilian targets and political targets who are seen as sympathetic in the later 1970s - for example, in scylla and charybdis we find voldemort murdering the pre-teen daughter of a ministry official, to widespread outcry, when her father won’t do what he wants - and it is this which triggers the unease felt by people such as orion and walburga black about whether voldemort’s violence is justified.

i occasionally write the voldemort of the first war as a technocrat. whether the wizarding world is more advanced than the muggle one is a frequently debated point - obviously magic is infinitely more sophisticated than most technology, and the series clearly considers muggles to be behind wizards, but i think it’s interesting to explore the idea that the social advances of the muggle post-war era don’t touch the magical world. the population is so small, for example, that there's no wizarding baby boom, and there doesn’t seem to be any significant immigration in the magical world [so no wizarding windrush]. the changes in social mobility which muggles enjoyed in the 1950s onwards - such as the expansion of funded higher education places; changing attitudes to marriage, divorce, and family planning; changing attitudes to living apart from the family; the emergence of more spaces where young people living alone would interact; and the collapse of the domestic service industry and the emergence of affordable labour-saving devices - are clearly not part of the wizarding world. all of which is to say, magical society could be made even more advanced than the muggle, even as muggle technology improves, if only it had a leader willing to take the reins...

to reiterate, i'm not expecting the above to be an interpretation of the war and its causes which resonates with every reader and author, but it’s something which has spoken to me since childhood - and, indeed, was one of the things which really sucked me into being a harry potter fan as i walked home from school and got shouted at for being a taig. that it led me to having voldemort as my favourite character may not have been jkr’s intention, but there we are…

voldemort and the second war

after harry blasts him into non-existence [just because he tried to be nice to snape, smh] voldemort obviously slithers off to albania to live in a tree for fourteen years - with a little trip to britain on the back of quirrell’s head to break the monotony.

his return to his body in goblet of fire does several things - it completes the tonal shift of the books from children’s literature to something darker; it triggers the overtly folkloric narrative of the second half of the series and its focus on prophecies and horcruxes, through voldemort establishing a mystical connection between himself and harry through his use of harry’s blood in his resurrection ritual; and it begins the second war.

it also causes one of my least favourite bits of fanon - the idea that the post-resurrection voldemort is completely insane.

in my view this is mainly due to the films - ralph does a great job of running around that graveyard shrieking, i’ll give him that - and their omission of many of 90s!voldemort’s successes, which makes it look like all that happens in three years is the death eaters fucking up getting the prophecy, downing a bridge by swooping, and then - somehow - taking over the government. it's also, however, due to a fandom failure to pay attention to something dumbledore says in half-blood prince:

Without his Horcruxes, Voldemort will be a mortal man with a maimed and diminished soul. Never forget, though, that while his soul may be damaged beyond repair, his brain and his magical powers remain intact.

one of the common arguments in favour of insane!voldemort is that - seven horcruxes in - his mind has been totally destabilised by dark magic. but this misses the point of how the series understands the soul and, specifically, how it understands the soul as something which exists independently from the will. that is, the soul cannot influence the will - since, otherwise, nobody would do anything which damaged their souls, but wizards evidently have the free choice to do that - and, therefore, the status of one’s soul has nothing to do with one’s cognition.

the canonical voldemort of the second war is perfectly lucid in all his appearances, and behaviours which seem to have been triggered by his resurrection can be shown to just be personality traits he’s always possessed - for example, the pacing around monologuing he does after stepping out of the cauldron reflects a tendency shared by the eleven-year-old tom riddle to give away too much about himself when he’s excited [and you would be excited, if you’d just freed yourself of a year having to depend on wormtail]. he remains largely methodical in his use of violence, he doesn’t cackle wildly while planning his schemes [he laughs derisively when harry is literally about to kill him and that’s it], and he's emphasised by the text as being absolutely terrifying and having the upper hand throughout the period 1995-1998, with the order scrambling to keep up with him.

this is not to say that he comes back from the almost-dead unchanged...

it’s clear that the voldemort of the second war is more paranoid and secretive than before, that he's less willing to take advice [both bellatrix and yaxley’s resentment of the fact he listens to snape suggests that there was once an impression among the death eaters that voldemort was happy to solicit their opinions, which vanishes once he comes back], that he’s quicker to anger and treats the death eaters more poorly than before [indeed, i'm certain that the implication of canon is that the majority of the death eaters don’t have physical violence or public humiliation - like the malfoys experience - used regularly against them until the second war, and that this is what drives their obviously wavering loyalty to their leader], and that his obsessive focus on harry [and, in particular, on mystical phenomena which will help him kill harry] is met with some scepticism by the more revolutionarily-inclined of his followers.

he also seems to only attain his horrifying eldritch form after his resurrection, which must be a bit of a shock for the lads.

[the vision harry has in order of the phoenix of voldemort with augustus rookwood - in which rookwood is clearly thinking what the fuck is this the whole way through - is a particularly good illustration of this.]

in order of the phoenix and half-blood prince, nonetheless, the course of the second war follows that of the first - voldemort concentrates on espionage, ministry infiltration, politically-motivated assassinations, sporadic attacks on civilian targets, and a propaganda campaign [lucius malfoy is undoubtedly the source of the anti-harry and anti-dumbledore press of order of the phoenix; greyback spends half-blood prince recruiting werewolves].

things change in deathly hallows, after the death eaters execute one of history’s better coups - even lupin’s impressed - and take over the ministry.

at this point there’s no doubt about it: voldemort’s government is an analogy for the nazis, as jkr has widely stated. obviously we don’t have to take her word for it - the author is dead - but it cannot be ignored that voldemort’s ministry is nakedly racist and is perpetuating a genocide of muggleborns.

voldemort becomes, then, per jkr’s intention, an analogy for hitler - which requires the text to gloss over pretty inelegantly the fact that grindelwald [defeated by dumbledore in 1945, which any british child reading philospher’s stone, even in primary school, would know was the year the second world war ended in europe] was clearly the magical world’s hitler equivalent.

and, sure, the analogy functions perfectly well within the final book - voldemort is a transparently evil man, his views can certainly be read as mirroring racist and anti-semitic prejudice in our world, his ultimate aim can certainly be claimed as outright genocide even in the first war, and i think it's impossible to justify an argument that he doesn’t know what his death eaters are up to in the ministry [he’s a megalomaniac, everything happens at his command even if he isn’t sitting behind the minister’s desk].

but i think that it’s not inappropriate to suggest that this analogy requires quite a shift in voldemort’s canonical modus operandi from the previous six books. and, indeed, that this is why he spends much of deathly hallows being… kind of useless, wandering around central europe on his hunt for the elder wand, narratively removed from much of the horror being done in his name, reduced from the terrorist kingpin with a network of agents of the previous books to someone whose only concern is harry. i don’t think this is because jkr wished to spare him from the suggestion that he’s the person directing the genocide, i think she simply couldn’t fit the characterisation of him already established into that plotline, and so she just didn’t try.

which i have some sympathy with. i find writing the voldemort of deathly hallows the most difficult - and i generally don’t do it - for this reason. as i’ve said in the previous meta in this series, i find voldemort particularly interesting as a character for what he says about the wizarding world and its social structure - above all, how his existence and the ministry’s resistance to him demonstrates the genteel corruption of the wizarding world - and how that reflects corruption in british society and state institutions. the immediate familiarity to me as an irish [and, legally, british] reader of the way the previous books in the series reflect class and how institutions gatekeep and discriminate based on it, how poverty drives resentment and radicalisation, how one becomes othered in a sectarian conflict, and so on is less palpable in deathly hallows [which is not to say that experience is universal among readers, and i'm not claiming it is] and i find engaging sincerely with the fictional genocide of the last book less interesting than i find thinking about the way the text presents the first war [and, of course, less horrifying and confronting and worthy of my time than i find thinking about real genocides in our world].

how to square the circle of making the voldemort of deathly hallows feel more in character, while also not handwaving away the canonical events of the final book isn’t something i’ve managed to get a grip on yet. i suspect i’m not the only one.

and after?

what i am more confident of is saying that i hate the imagery of voldemort’s little baby soul in train station limbo - the only person in canon denied access to some sort of non-liminal afterlife [clearly heaven exists for wizards, but does hell?].

is it his own fault? absolutely [although i’m always raging at dumbledore stopping harry offering the soul-piece some comfort at king’s cross].

am i surprised that he doesn’t have a road to damascus moment in the final confrontation and collapse to the floor shaking and crying? not a bit.

do i think he could ever feel remorse for his actions? yes.

one of my least favourite fandom debates is whether x or y character is incapable of redemption [rip snape, it’s always you]. a principle i hold is that there is nobody on earth incapable of being redeemed - and i don’t mean redeemed in a religious sense or a heavenly context, i mean redeemed in their human actions and in their human form.

and redemption absolutely doesn’t mean getting away with it, and it doesn’t mean that remorse absolves you of having to experience punishment or work to undo the harm that you’ve done, and it doesn’t mean your victims being expected to forgive you. but it does have to be possible for all of us - even those who commit incomprehensible evil - because if not then it is possible for none.

so maybe voldemort sits in the nether zone and starts glueing his soul back together and eventually makes it to an afterlife where he can hang out with his mam. maybe he doesn’t, because remorse is a choice and we all have the option to keep being bad people.

but i’m a hopeless optimist.

[voldemort’s version of king’s cross is, of course, the orphanage.]

up next, what does dumbledore get wrong about voldemort?

#asks answered #asenora meta #tom riddle #lord voldemort

76 notes · View notes