Tom was a loser in both worlds only by becoming a cult leader could he gain power.
as much as i love to dunk on tom for being a loser, this isn't true.
if tom truly had no upward mobility in the wizarding world, then it wouldn't have been so surprising to everyone that he went to work at borgin's. he could have gone a more legitimate route, but he chose not to. the closest he ever got to legitimacy was when he asked for the DADA position.
harry's story parallels tom's for a reason. both of them abandon the muggle world in favour of magical, which is the purpose of a fantasy story! the power tom does or doesn't have in the muggle world doesn't matter, the basis of the series is that the magical world is superior for everyone, including harry.
the main intention of comparing harry to tom is to contrast their choices. harry chooses love, chooses to embrace death, etc. the implication is tom could have had everything that harry has, but only if he'd chosen that path too.
the real problem is that the power that tom wants -- absolute, totalitarian -- it isn't power that polite society grants. a cult wasn't the only way for tom to gain power, but it was, however, the only way for him to seize power the way he wanted, with the goals that he had.
the part that actually makes him a loser (affectionate) is that none of this was ever going to satisfy him. all this endless greed for power is exactly that -- endless. he will never find true fulfilment in this path. he will never be truly happy. the void inside of him that demands constant reassurance of his self image via exertion of control over others is destined for misery. left unchecked, he would ruin himself, find himself ultimately alone, surrounded by broken toys that only repeat what he's told them to say.
Tom has the mindset of a Muggle dictator... Tom Riddle was shaped by the poverty and hunger of Muggle life... In book 7, he uses Muggle methods to destroy Muggles.Dumbledore couldn't figure out Riddle for so long because Riddle was shaped by the trauma of rejection.
i had written out a lot and then tumblr mobile ate my draft so i'm a bit peeved. i also i spent so long on this one i had so many tangents... i cut down my response a little, and will save some for another post on another day.
first of all, i'm not sure what you're referring to with "Muggle methods to destroy Muggles". you'd have to cite some examples for me to understand your meaning better.
now it's important to point out that the books never deeply explore the impact of 1920s-1940s muggle or magical history on present day canon. we don't have canon content or context to comment on much.
sometimes fanon likes to portray young tom as a frightened boy hiding in a bomb shelter, plotting to murder his way into never dying because war is terrifying... here i will note that gellert grindelwald isn't even given any narrative importance until book 7 despite being initially mentioned in book 1. even canon history doesn't mean much in canon.
but we can decide to explore the possibility of it...
most of tom's childhood experience is heavily connected to his relationship with dumbledore, both through dumbledore's direct influence, and the fact that his story is told exclusively by dumbledore to harry.
in book 6's recounting of tom's past, one could argue that dumbledore is either deliberately omitting or subconsciously dismissing the influence of major historical events due to his complicated personal connection to that period of time. regardless, it's biased.
dumbledore regrets his past, and so his view of tom is partially shaped by his own trauma. his life post-grindelwald has been spent desperately avoiding power, mostly as a form of penance for his past transgressions.
for someone who claims love to be the most powerful, enduring force, dumbledore is heavily estranged from it. he spends his childhood trying to distance himself from his father's reputation and the shameful secret of his sister.
"You know how my poor father sought revenge, and paid the price, died in Azkaban. You know how my mother gave up her own life to care for Ariana."
to dumbledore, the threads of duty and sacrifice are entwined with love. he protects harry just his parents protected his sister, often by making decisions on harry's behalf and enduring whatever cost to ensure that harry remains as sheltered as possible.
"Do you see, Harry? Do you see the flaw in my brilliant plan now? I had fallen in to the trap I had foreseen, that I had told myself I could avoid, that I must avoid. [...] I cared about you too much," said Dumbledore simply. "I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act."
dumbledore holds harry at arm's length while simultaneously claiming to care deeply for him. he believes that this is in harry's best interests, just as he believed in leaving harry with the dursleys. harry nearly dies as a result of dumbledore's decision, but that is not the only consequence of the battle at the ministry.
sirius' death is an interesting parallel to what happened to ariana. they were both trapped, they both died after trying to intervene in a dangerous situation. like aberforth, harry is left to mourn and move on, but unlike aberforth, harry receives an apology -- dumbledore admits culpability in the tragedy.
it is implied that aberforth never knew the painful depth of his brother's guilt and regret until harry tells him about the events of the horcrux cave. dumbledore chose to let aberforth hate him and blame him rather than reconcile, and this, too, is a misguided form of protection.
now with this context, we fast forward to when dumbledore visits wool's. tom is giving red flags galore, but he is also clearly just... a troubled child.
"I returned to Hogwarts intending to keep an eye upon him, something I should have done in any case, given that he was alone and friendless, but which, already, I felt I ought to do for others' sake as much as his."
dumbledore cites tom's cruelty as a factor in his mistrust, but let us not forget that dumbledore was "alone"*, "friendless"*, and much older than eleven years old when he sided with grindelwald on the subjugation of muggles.
(*true to how dumbledore felt at the time, having been denied his opportunity to travel abroad. much like tom, his talents are being "wasted" post-graduation...)
"I had proven, as a very young man, that power was my weakness and temptation. I was safer at Hogwarts. I think I was a good teacher."
dumbledore thinks highly of his own self-awareness, which makes it all the more interesting when tom returns to britain and requests the DADA position... only to be denied.
it can be assumed that by that time, tom has done far worse things than simply plan to take over the world, but nevertheless, dumbledore's treatment of tom seems rather hypocritical.
"By the end of his first year, [Dumbledore] would never again be known as the son of a Muggle-hater, but as nothing more or less than the most brilliant student ever seen at the school."
sound familiar? i don't believe dumbledore sees grindelwald in tom. that would credit dumbledore with the ability to truly understand those around him.
as we've seen, it isn't only tom that he misunderstands:
there is aberforth. there is sirius. and harry, who was not trusted with the necessity of his own death until the penultimate moment, who in the end extends more empathy to voldemort than dumbledore ever managed.
a great deal of effort is spent on researching voldemort's pursuit of immortality and covering the timeline of his horcrux creation. of course, dumbledore is more than capable of the clever detective work required to piece voldemort's checkered past together.
yet is it not telling that he never expands more on what is arguably the very foundation of tom riddle's character by posing the basic question: why does voldemort fear death so much?
(this is the question that fanon often attempts to answer with the inclusion of world war ii, which sometimes -- sorry! -- feels like a cheap cop out lol. it's not that we aren't allowed to have cheap cop outs in fanfiction, but if we're discussing a true interpretation of his canon character, i would rather explore the depth of that, and not reduce his fears to a product of his environment being "war scary". but my beef with fanon being shallow is another fight for another day...)
much in the way voldemort dismisses love, dumbledore dismisses this fear of death. for dumbledore, i believe death truly was a relief. through self-sacrifice, dumbledore seeks and achieves the absolution he so desperately craves. as his parents gave their lives for his sister, dumbledore gives his life for the greater good.
a common thread between harry and tom is that they are both orphans, but dumbledore is also orphaned after graduation.
"I resented it, Harry. I was gifted, I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory. Do not misunderstand me. I loved them... but I was selfish... So that, when my mother died, and I was left the responsibility of a damaged sister and a wayward brother, I returned to my village in anger and bitterness."
all this to say, dumbledore's perspective is heavily filtered through this self-righteous belief system built on sacrifice, through his high regard of his own cleverness, through his conviction of love as the ultimate saviour.
dumbledore loved his family, and that love is what saved him. it is his grief that pulls him away from grindelwald. it is his guilt that pushes him to dedicate his life to education instead of politics. dumbledore punishes himself over and over for his past. he believes this suffering is what proves his remorse, proves his love. we hear this belief echoed whenever james and lily are brought up around harry.
tom has no experience with family or love. he lives in an orphanage. he has no one to care for or protect but himself, and nothing we see in his past suggests that he ever had the cause or opportunity to connect with anyone else in that way -- certainly not when he meets dumbledore for the first time!
no loving family stands in the way of tom riddle becoming voldemort.
this is why dumbledore fails to truly see tom. he sees someone who lacks both care and capacity for meaningful emotion, someone who would enslave muggles and muggleborns without a shred of remorse.
when dumbledore sees tom, he sees that someone as a version of himself. he sees voldemort.
Harry is rich. Riddlle couldn't have become Minister with the last name Riddle... He killed the Riddles because of the humiliation of their last name in an orphanage. At school, only his status as the heir of Slytherin saved him from bullying. He understood that there was no place in the Ministry for a poor orphan with a Muggle name and surname. Bellatrix called half-bloods dirty, and Tom grew up in 1940, and a Muggle orphanage is the end of his career. He clearly hated meropeit deep down that she abandoned him, living in such poverty, worse than Gaunt.Harry with the right last name and millions... he didn't have to prove anything. He married a pureblood and went into the Ministry's system. Of course, Tom wanted to destroy a system where he was nobody.
first of all, based on your response it feels like you aren't very open to changing your mind. so good luck with that. you also make assumptions that i won't spend time on disproving because they're exactly that -- assumptions. come back with statements of fact and we'll talk.
second of all, tom believes himself to be superior because of his pureblood heritage. he's not interested in destroying the system because they don't like his muggle lineage, he also doesn't like his muggle heritage...
think: the ministry is kinder to muggleborns and muggle relations than his own regime ends up being!
(there was a muggleborn minister for magic when tom was in his thirties. if he had chosen that career instead of Dark Lord, he could have been actively working towards that goal. hp wiki actually cites minister leach as (possibly) having been ousted by abraxas malfoy which, lmao. you can imagine tom getting rid of his competition.)
voldemort's government is notably forgiving those with magical blood, even if they're halfbloods, and punishing those with muggle relations and associations the most. sure, he'll maim and slaughter whoever stands in his way, but those with magical blood can be forgiven their shameful muggle and muggleborn relatives for the low low price of abandoning them to die instead... projecting much?
"If you continue to resist me, you will all die, one by one. I do not wish this to happen. Every drop of magical blood spilled is a loss and a waste."
voldemort touts pureblood ideals -- but at the end of the day, his rhetoric is closer to grindelwald's spiel, just redressed for a modern generation: magic is might, lord voldemort's magic most of all.
third of all, tom doesn't hate his mother. she is his connection to his pureblood lineage. she is the reason he has magic and is "special". that isn't to say her absence hasn't affected him, but it's not true to say he hated her.
tom hates his father the most. he blames his father for abandoning him and his mother. (from how he words things, he doesn't even blame merope for naming him, which is extremely funny to me.)
"You see that house upon the hillside, Potter? My father lived there. My mother, a witch who lived here in this village, fell in love with him. But he abandoned her when she told him what she was... He didn’t like magic, my father...
"He left her and returned to his Muggle parents before I was even born, Potter, and she died giving birth to me, leaving me to be raised in a Muggle orphanage... but I vowed to find him... I revenged myself upon him, that fool who gave me his name... Tom Riddle."
tom has not forgiven his father! he wants all the muggle scum gone! two of his favourite death eaters have major daddy issues because it is one of the things he relates to 💖
fourth of all, as i already said before, tom was far from being nobody. everyone had high expectations for him after hogwarts. he squandered his talents and reaped the consequences.
**All of the Spoilers for the movie, 'eXistenZ', (1999)**
If Tom's, 'meat dagger', is a reference to David Cronenberg's film, 'eXistenZ', (1999), with its meat gun, then we may be able to speculate on Tom's character arc if we compare it to those who wielded the meat gun.
The first person to introduce the meat gun is a man who attempts to assassinate our protagonist. He wounds her but not fatally and then is killed,
The second, and I think more important, person is Ted Pikul, our protagonist Allegra Geller's new companion on her cross-country adventure,
Ted is a bumbling, adorable, 'PR nerd', who doesn't seem to know his way around a gun, a biosynthetic video game or much of anything else. He is humourously non-threatning. He turns out to be getting close to Allegra only to attempt to assassinate her, as well. He comes very close and is then defeated by Allegra, who had seen his betrayal coming since the time he found a meat gun in his Chinese food lunch and jokingly pointed it at her,
"Sorry",
At the very end he will betray her but she will be prepared, she's suspected him since his little, 'joke', at the restaurant,
So, what could this say about Tom? Well, if he's like Pikul, he will seem bumbling and harmless, amusing, until he seems threatening but it's a fake out. Then he really will turn out to be threatening and will die at the hands of one of our protagonists.
From ASiP, we are told by Sherlock that he's a, 'high functioning sociopath', and to do our research. But, even a cursory look at what that means and how Sherlock acts reveals that that's not true, at all. This comes soon after the very famous first stare down of Baker St,
So, what can it be code for, on the show?
Well, we can see that, for Sherlock, it means, 'I have no heart': he rejects sentiment. In ASiP, he says that boyfriends/girlfriends are, 'dull', and that women are, 'not his area'. So, we have a declaration about divorcing himself for the emotional aspect of life. Though, he won't say the same about, 'boyfriends', he pointedly says he's married to his work, thus implying that the whole thing's not his area, whatever his area would be.
In TGG, he says to Moriarty that, 'he's been informed that he doesn't have one', (a heart). Now, this in interesting because it makes us think about the fact that others have perceived him and told him that he has this quality.
Enter Molly Hooper. Molly is clearly in love with Sherlock. He is clearly not interested in her. Why? Because, after all, girlfriends are, 'not his area'.
Molly attempts to get over Sherlock by dating a man who greatly resembles him, Tom,
In TEH, after Sherlock and Molly solve crimes together and they discuss Tom and her engagement,
Now, this is a reference to Moriarty and Sherlock. But: Molly didn't dump Jim from IT because she knew he was the evil mastermind Moriarty, she dumped him because Sherlock told her that he was gay. So, Jim turned out to be gay, Sherlock turned out to be gay, let's hope that Tom is not gay.
Before the stag night, as Sherlock seeks her counsel,
"How's... Tom?" Three rainbows appear,
'Not a sociopath',
"Still..."
'And we're having quite a lot of sex'. Now, this is seemingly just a random, inappropriate remark from Molly but in relation to the code, 'he's still not gay' ---> we're having a lot of sex, seems to be how she knows that Tom is still not gay.
The word, 'still', is very significant here: he could still turn out to be a sociopath later but for now he doesn't seem to be.
Next thing we see of them as a couple is at the beginning of John's wedding reception, as Molly and Tom are photographed. She is showering affection on him and he appears to be attempting to stop her.
Tom is wearing a blue shirt and a blue tie. Blue in the bi pride flag stands for opposite sex attraction. We see men who are in the closet on Sherlock wear prominent blue clothes to send a strong signal that they're straight. For example, Sherlock's signature blue scarf. We see Molly seeming to pull on him forcefully to engineer this cheek-to-cheek pose while he smiles blandly. He is trying for her but it's starting to show that it's difficult for him.
She goes to kiss him, he pulls away,
Later he will theorise that the Bainbridge, 'killed himself', with a, 'meat dagger'. He knows that a meat dagger can kill you, though he's only even killed himself, that way. In this context we see why this is embarrassing for Molly. Her fiancé has just stood up and told everyone that he thinks about dudes when he masturbates,
Here we see that Tom and Molly are not together at one of them most romantic moments of the night. They don't genuinely share a romantic bond,
We continue to see their disconnect, here. She reaches out to him,
He'd rather spin in a circle. A clear dodge,
Molly looks at him in green light. We've just seen Sherlock in bathed in green light after realising that he has lost John to Mary.
Molly knows that this relationship is doomed.
By the beginning of HLV, we will see that Molly and Tom broke up.
