#seriously though you want to piss some people off then add tom/lily to your story

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

I think people who complain on your Tom Riddle/Lily Evans might not understand just what kind of Tom Riddle you wrote. He is very human or, otherwise, inhuman in a very human way. I've read a lot of fics with Tom Riddle, including a lot of shipping fics, and lots of time the relationships are somewhat unhealthy - and dramatized, and somehow special and fated. But (in October) Lily and Tom aren't star crossed lovers. It just happened, like things do in life. Or am I completely wrong about this.

I mean, to be perfectly fair, I am the odd one here.

JKR intended Voldemort to be a Palpatine style villain. Someone who is pure, unadulturated, evil inside and out. There’s to be no humanity in him, nothing good, and he was that way from his very sordid birth.

I think most people try to stay in line with that or at least some version of that. I see a lot of Tom Riddle being a sociopath or else a psychopath, or else he’s just mad. He’s often noted by authors of being incapable of real love, and he ends up in these toxic, abusive, BDSM relationships with the character of your choice. The fic may end with the relationship trying to convince us it’s love, that Tom Riddle has redeemed himself in some way, but the toxicity is part of it.

And a lot of people really like this character archetype. They like the sexy, dangerous, horrifying male romantic lead who whisper’s in his innocent lover’s ear, “Darling, I will never let you go. I have seen your heart and it is mine!” 

I throw all that out the window and I think it leaves a lot of people out of sorts.

I get a couple of common complaints. Not from everyone, but now and then, one that does come up is I write a very human Tom Riddle. He’s generally very messed up, has a very shitty life, but he’s more than capable of strong romantic love. To me, his great failing is falling into nihilist despair and giving up completely on the world and mankind. 

But yes, Tomarry especially, people like the starcrossed, fated, lovers aspect. They like Tom not understanding what love is and being this dark, obsessive, lead. They like the unhealthy toxic relationships and...

Well, I don’t, at all. I don’t think I could write a standard Tomarry story if I tried. Well, I did try, it was called “October” and look how that turned out. (Seriously, in the planning stages I went “I should try my hand at a slash fic” and this is what we get.)

But anyways, so right off the bat I’m breaking a lot of assumptions of Harry Potter fandom regarding Tom Riddle and romantic relationships with him. That sends a lot of people scurrying out the door.

The other is that the pairing itself is apparently so mind bending it actually makes people feel sick. First, it’s one of those things where it feels like two completely random characters I shoved together. I get that, completely, I look insane. More than that though, there’s just something about this pairing that reads a lot like me swearing in church.

There’s just some things you don’t do.

I don’t know what the others are but I can tell you that one of them is Tom/Lily.

Granted, I think a lot of it was because I introduced it in a primarily Tom/Harry fic in which Harry has now dumped Tom’s ass for twenty chapters and several decades, which made people very very very upset but that’s not all of it.

I often make decisions that greatly upset my readers (I really don’t know why you all stick around so long). I kill off beloved characters, I have bad guys win, I have my protagonists make mind numbingly stupid decisions, I have plot twists no one agrees with, I have the main pairing fall apart into a mess and hook up the lead character with somebody else. For nearly every fic I’ve written there is at least one chapter where I’m told what a moron I am, that my story is stupid, and that obviously x, y, and z should have happened and I as an author am just lazy/angst wanking/insert your derogatory term of the day here.

To this day I have never received the same kind of vitriol and hatred that I did over Tom/Lily. Really nasty terms were bandied about, I received some impressive insults towards me about how Ao3 was a better place specifically because me and my dirty ilk weren’t there (the joke being I infested Ao3 eventually like a plague), and I was certain I had lost every single reader (and somewhat surprised to find I somehow hadn’t).

Tom/Lily, on some fundamental level, just seems to disturb people. I think part of it is they picture a Tom Riddle very different to mine. Part of it though is that seeing Tom/Lily is like seeing the antichrist, you just know that thing is pure evil and must die when you lay eyes upon it.

Which is, of course, why I am a heretic.