what happened that first year after tom's hogwarts graduation?
tom had the ambition and drive to do more, but he wound up tolling away at a dead-end job.
he likely kept in touch with his housemates who supported his ideas, but they don't have to work for what they have, they don't have to work to survive like tom does.
as children who come from generational wealth, they would always see him as lesser for being poor. that power imbalance doesn't go away just because they think he's clever. he was their leader, slytherin's heir, but he was also their classmate, and at the end of the day, only human.
the others have more to lose than tom does. it was fun and games to talk of torturing muggleborns and making plans to rule the world, but outside of the bubble of hogwarts, those fantasies remain just that: fantasies.
i wouldn't be surprised if their plans to take over the world fell apart much in the way that rebellious teenage plans often do.
tom held court in hogwarts for so long, as a model student, as a leader, as head boy. outside in the 'real' world, he reverts to having none of that control or power. he is returned into obscurity and poverty.
he becomes obsessed with finding slytherin's locket, likely clinging to the idea that this one item that will give his life meaning again. just as he found the chamber, he will find the locket, and everything will be right again.
all those long, long years spent working in a shop, and he's still just a boy desperately searching for something to justify his status as someone special, someone worthy.
when he returns fully to society as lord voldemort, it is definitely a return with a vengeance. he does not call upon his old school friends who abandoned his dreams in favour of the status quo; he seeks out their children instead.
these younger hopefuls are easier to radicalize. they have never met tom riddle. they haven't seen him at his worst, kicked out of a muggle orphanage with nowhere to go, slaving away in a shop to earn a living. they only know lord voldemort, immortal and all-powerful.
whether its romantic or platonic, prongsfoot is SUPERIOR to any marauder pairing and i cannot be convinced otherwise and it is my mission to convince others
i feel like i’ll keep coming on here every few months to bemoan the fact that the fandom decided to create an entirely new character in regulus and made him a love interest for james when. sirius was right there. right. there. the best friends to lovers thing was there. the deep bond was there. all of it was there. but we let it go!!!
teenage girl tom riddle and his dear diary phase remains underrated, misinterpreted, and underexplored methinks.
picture him having a massive meltdown—ink bleeding, lines spiky and jagged digging into parchment, cockney rhyming slang and profanities spilling out—over regular child prodigy stuff like his dim-witted classmates incapable of keeping up with his thoughts and ideas; and the gall of them paying him peanuts for tutoring. as if they knew the pangs of starvation, the mingy misers! bc he deserves better, he’s so much better, he expected more adulation and respect. or the elves refusing to make his favourite earl grey every day of the term, how dare they deprive him of this luxury! to make matters worse, his shoe buckles snapped after too many reparos, and he simply can’t afford to spend the sickles he’s saved up on new buckles—they’re reserved for his all-important pomade! he’s left his tatterdemallion days behind him, blast it! somehow, but it’s all dumbledore’s fault; he just knows it.
beautiful lover’s spit inspired commission i had done by @FREAKS4H on twitter! they’re just so perfect i had to share it on here >w<;; trueship4life!!!!!
Now wait a minute, who are you talking about because the Tom Riddle I am familiar with, doesn't have a single nonchalant bone in his body. He's the least nonchalant person ever. What even is nonchalance? Have you ever seen him give a monologue? He doesn't stop once he starts omg. He's all theatrics. He needs to be the most important person in the room. He needs to be the center of all attention. He needs to have all eyes on him. He's not unfeeling. He has never been. He feels so much, that he doesnt know what to do with all of it. There's so much resentment and anger inside of him that it burns. And he's curious. So incredibly curious. If something piques his interest, best believe he's going to know make himself know everything about it. He gets obsessed. He keeps going until there's nothing left. He loses himself in his obsessions. The reason of his demise was that he took his obsession too far. That's how hungry, ambitious and chalant he was.
Don't ever tell me that Tom Marvolo Riddle— I am Lord Voldemort— is nonchalant.
Since you have read many drarry, can you rec fic/s that are the most true to character/in character for both H&D. I am fine with OOC but I am really curious about how this pair would play out if both were extremely in character.
Thank you in advance!
I think it's difficult to say what's truly 'in character' for them, post-canon, as ultimately there is a lot left up to reader interpretation on the paths the characters (particularly draco) will take. But, of course, I have my own opinions on the versions of the characters that read the truest to me. The ability to logically follow what we know of the character in canon through to the writer's interpretation is what I value most. This is going to be more of a rant than a reclist so apologies in advance. I've put it under the cut for length reasons.
My preferred Harry is one who, while at times blunt, impatient, judgemental and unkind, is ultimately a good person. Good is subjective, I suppose, but by this I mean Harry has a very strong sense of justice, fairness and morality which is fundamental to him, not formed by any outside system. Lord Hadrian joining the Death Eaters to get vengeance against Dumbledore for stealing his magic/money/invisibility cloak/etc. is something that I cannot get on board with. While revenge is mentioned a number of times in the series, I really don't see it as being a primary motivator for Harry. At the end of the day, it's extremely black and white: Voldemort wants to (and has) hurt innocent people, including the people Harry loves. Harry would never turn a blind eye to that, even if he was wronged by the 'light' side.
Harry has a great capacity for forgiveness, but that doesn't make him a people pleaser or doormat. Quite the opposite. If anything he has issues with binary morality (to note, he matures on this through DH), being a judgy fucker, obstinance and arrogance. By the end of the series, he understands why Draco does what he did and pities him for his difficult position, but that doesn't mean he likes him. I'm not convinced by a Harry that was secretly always in love with Draco (even if it can be entertaining to read) nor one who becomes Draco's biggest defender without Draco showing more growth than he does within the series.
My all time favourite Harry is Maya's (Drop Dead Gorgeous, Coda to an Epilogue, If You've a Ready Mind), but her works are sadly deleted so no links here.
My other favourite Harry is lettered's, Away Childish Things being quite a revelation for me in my understanding of Harry as a character. This exchange between Harry and Dudley particularly stood out to me:
I also really enjoy bixgirl1's Harry, with Balance, Imperfect and You and Me being my favourites of hers.
FYI I half wrote this reply more than a year ago and I'm afraid I can no longer give recs off the top of my head because I haven't read HP in ages. So I'll have to just leave it here with Harry character recs, sorry!
i'll be honest, lads, the next chapter is pretty much just ginny weasley getting whacked with the whump stick over and over again.
She watched as Harry left the antechamber and stomped straight past Mum - who looked fucking wrecked, sitting barely three feet away from where they’d laid out Fred - ignoring the fact that she’d moved when he went by, like she wanted to ask him a question.
She felt a prickle of good, honest rage - how dare he be so rude? - which was quickly repressed, as the appeasing voice which had been her constant companion since her wedding day (since their very first kiss) slithered out of its hole to make excuses.
Harry didn’t mean to ignore Mum. He was just someone who lived in his own head - who wasn’t always great at noticing the world around him. Especially when he had a task (an obsession) to focus on. Especially when he had a task which was making him unhappy or angry.
And he did look angry. And not the righteous, back-chatting, “told Umbridge to swivel on it” angry which she’d always found sexy. No, Ginny could tell from the set of his jaw that this was the cold, sullen anger which was usually associated with the hazy space between the two of them disagreeing about something and Harry mysteriously getting what he’d wanted from the start.
Now, chided the appeasing voice, that’s a very unfair thing to say, isn’t it?
And it was. It wasn’t Harry’s fault that she’d always given in - that she’d always hated the idea of refusing him anything, in case it reminded him of his aunt and uncle, and the childhood he refused to speak about, and the way they’d never let him matter.
She’d sworn to do whatever she could to make him happy the moment she saw him, pushing a trolly through the rush of King’s Cross, with baggy clothes and nervous eyes. That was going to be her life’s work, she decided. She was never going to deviate from it, or change her mind about it, or give up on it.
Which was stupid, wasn’t it? Since it had forced her to approach everything she did with a ten-year-old’s view of the world, in which all problems were easily fixed, and anything broken was easily mended, and sadness was fleeting, and devoting your life to making a boy happy - even when that boy was barely conscious of your existence - could only make you happy in return.
A worldview which was long dead by her twelfth birthday.
And yet one she’d tried to keep alive ever since, all the same, sustained by another one of her childhood foibles: that she’d always been terrible at losing. So terrible, in fact, that for as long as she could remember, her go-to response to any type of loss had been to pretend that it hadn’t happened with such ferocity that she sometimes forgot that it had.
Two uncles who were slaughtered six weeks after she was born? Irrelevant. Their deaths - Mum’s indescribable grief - hadn’t cast a shadow over her childhood. Bill and Charlie running off to Egypt and Romania, just when she needed them to guide her? Who cares! Percy telling her to leave him alone when she was trying to get him to save her? A minor blip. Being dumped by the boy she’d loved for six years so he could choose his two loyal lieutenants over her? Just a standard Friday! The revelation that her best friend in the whole wide world had only been nice to her so that he could murder her - so that he could rise from the dead and steal her husband? She’d be grand!
She’d be absolutely fine - don’t worry about me, Harry, I’m always fine - and she’d ignore the acid gnawing its way through her bloodstream and she’d think about all the sacrifices she could make - all the ways she could try to accommodate Harry’s shiny new life - just so that Harry would be able to keep smiling the soppy smile - the one which felt like someone had blasted her heart with the Cruciatus Curse - which had been on his face at Grimmauld Place, while he confirmed all her suspicions and she clutched a mug of tea and tried not to implode.
That’s a very unkind thing to think.
Yep. And it was majestically hypocritical too, wasn’t it? Because she should be fucking delighted that her most fervent wish had come true. Harry was happy. What did it matter that the person who’d managed to coax a joyful expression she’d never seen before out of him was her mortal enemy?
(Who she still hoped - even though she didn’t know why - hadn’t been the person to trigger Harry’s current state of rage. If Harry had to be upset - if he had to be ice cold and spoiling for a fight - let it be Kingsley’s fault, rather than his.)
What did it matter that now she didn’t have a chance of ever moving beyond the feeling - the one she’d had ever since he smiled kindly at her when he didn’t have to, after she’d stumbled into the kitchen to find that he’d been delivered to the Burrow overnight (courtesy of a rescue mission nobody had even considered inviting her on) - that she owed Harry a debt which was still yet to be paid? It wasn’t like she was going to confront that, was it? It wasn’t like she was going to acknowledge that it had been a ridiculous premise from which to convince herself that she and Harry were in love.
It wasn’t like she was going to actually let herself remember looking in the bathroom mirror on her first day as a wife and feeling such a sense of panic that she’d nearly ripped the sink from the wall, as she’d stared at herself - at the eighteen-year-old face of a newly-married woman - and realised that, finally, the task she was striving towards was completed. She was Mrs Potter. She would never be the person she was before she was Mrs Potter again.
And Mr Potter - dozing, untroubled, in the honeymoon suite - wouldn’t have any such feeling of the past being severed from the present by the giving and receiving of rings. Because surviving long enough to be the man she could marry hadn’t been part of his mission at all, had it? She had simply plodded along at the margins of his journey, a peripheral character in a very different story, with very different protagonists.
The story of him going to the Chamber to face Tom, instead of to rescue her.
