#writer headcanons

[cookiedoughmeagain]

Matt McGuinnes, DVD Commentary for episode 4.01 - Fallout. “That thing you see in the background there by the way is a popsicle-stick lamp, which we’ve all imagined that Nathan built for his dad the Chief.”

[katsitting]

Will you share some head canons you have of Tom and Hermione? (As individuals and as a couple, or Volmione, your choice)

Okay. I don’t know where to begin with this. I’ll do my best to help you make sense of my own thought process. 

I will also preface by saying that this is my own personal characterizations and headcanons for them. This is not an invitation for you to agree or disagree with me (though feel free to ignore this if it doesn’t jive with you).

Tom Riddle: I think this his has been discussed before, but I will start by stating that I don’t think he was born without the capacity to love based on the circumstances of his birth (love potion). I think that’s bullshit and creates a two-dimensional villain that does not make a reader struggle. It’s easy to hate him, and that’s not necessarily what I am now trying to achieve when I write him (at least, it’s become my new direction with his character). 

I think this is a nature vs nurture phenomenon. The circumstances surrounding his development lent to his fixation with death and with mastering it. I think, genuinely, that death is a metaphor for his loss of control over his person. Death is what led to his being left in an orphanage, after all. The ability to not own things for himself as well as to have a private space for himself, too, may have exacerbated his desire for control and stability. 

It is speculated that given the conditions of an orphanage in Britain around the 1930s to1940s, it may have also provided a ripe environment to divide himself from the people surrounding him. Whether this be physical abuse or negligence, it is still debated. Either way, however, I think either form of abuse adds to his desire for more. When you have nothing, you covet everything. To get a taste of grandeur is to whet the appetite for more.

And Tom covets. He covets everything.

The muggles? I think in a way that his hatred was born of his envy for them. Even with how special he thought himself to be, the muggles still had something that he didn’t: a place to belong. The children of the orphanage? They stuck together. Tom didn’t, whether by his own choice or through alienation from others. So to some degree, at some point, he did crave others--to be understood and belong. 

But with the continued perversion of that through his own upbringing and his illusions of grandeur and victimhood, he began to hate it. He simultaneously wanted and loathed these bonds. And I think, that adds a layer to his continued disdain for muggles, aside from his decision to other them and treat them like the scum beneath his shoes.

(Also, I don’t think Tom is unfeeling at all. I think he has such a vast capacity for emotion that it is almost suffocating. He is good at hiding and repressing it, but it is there. It festers inside him, boiling over until it erupts into fits of rage and other displays of violence.)

Hermione Granger: She is the third member of the trio, but we don’t know much about her character outside of Harry Potter. We know she’s brave, logical, brash, temperamental, and ruthless. We know she is thirsty for knowledge and that she wishes to use that knowledge to reach a practical end (as opposed to theoretical). 

But I think that her intelligence doesn’t extend only to the logical realm, but to the emotional. I think she has a solid grasp of emotions and how they affect one’s ability to rationalize. The fact that she does not think with her emotions does not mean that she is not capable of understanding it. 

She cries several times throughout the series, in fact, so to strip her of this particular source of humanity detracts from her character. She is strong because she is well rounded. She doesn’t disdain emotions as Tom does nor rejects these kinds of bonds, but she does set them aside where necessary. 

Also, just because this is my own personal take, and anyone is free to disagree with me, I think that a point her and Tom have in common is in the desire to belong. She thirsts for knowledge, but she spends her time trying to show off just how much she knows because she wasn’t born into the wizarding world. She is an outsider even if she has magic and she feels it. When she is being made fun of for answering questions in class or when she tries to help others, but otherwise just makes others feel inferior, she in her 11-year-old mind, is trying to bridge the chasm between her background and theirs in the only way she knows how. 

She probably didn’t do well with muggle children with her likely accidental bouts of magic, either. So it would only make sense that she latch on to the first chance she has at forming heartfelt relationships with magical children. 

[katsitting]

roast your characters for us >:)

Okay, let me just begin and end with the crown jewel Tom Riddle. I can’t roast the rest because after I am done with Tom, I will be all roasted out. It is long. Feel free to skip past this if you’re not willing to read me kicking him down.

(I swear to you all that I love Tom, but I am also incredibly hard on his depiction in the books in general.)

You’re telling me at 15-16 he couldn’t defeat a Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets? You’re telling me that your narcissism and ego is so large that you dedicated an entire 2 pages to monologuing about your skills and abilities instead of just defeating your sworn enemy with an Avada Kedavra?

He takes the “I do it for the drama” to a whole new level, because that, my friend, is drama. He would sooner be bested by a 12-year-old than take the path with the least melodrama available. 

Let’s fast forward to the Goblet of Fire. What in the hell was he thinking? I know, I know, he wasn’t thinking at all. Between splicing his soul to pieces and existing as a shade for about a decade, you too would go insane, but see, here’s the thing. I don’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt, I’ll show you why later. For now, back to the entire plot in the Goblet of Fire.

Instead of, you know, taking the path of least resistance by taking the blood from someone else that he esteems to be his enemy to reanimate, no. He has to set up where it is Harry, in a tournament, provides him with this key ingredient. If he feared the love protection Lily put on Harry, then hell, with how rough Quidditch is, he could have had someone steal a bit of blood unwillingly given from Harry after getting slugged by a bludger or something. 

Voldemort could have done without the entire plan. But you know, his taste for drama started young. I suspect he did this all so that he could have that dramatic entrance in the graveyard. No other reason.

Okay, I am going to end with my favorite one, because I think it was silly. First, why would he if he was above the work of a typical death eater, did he have to personally go to the Potter’s house? Why did he not send someone to off the Longbottoms? If he was truly concerned with the prophecy being what it was, why did he not kill two burns with one stone and also set his sights on the war he was fighting and winning? 

For someone that is esteemed to be both a prodigy and guile, he lacked every single one of the qualities necessary to fall into these categories. He was impulsive as a youth and as his snake-self. He acted with his emotions as opposed to his mind, which, is disappointing. He did it all for the pleasure of creating an intricate and dramatic entrance/exit/reveal as opposed to what made sense.

Harry Potter was certainly lucky. 

Lucky that LV could make these mistakes over and over again.

[morrigan24601]

I am inexplicably super nervous about this now...I was confident about it a few hours ago, but I’m nervous now. Posting jitters, I guess. 

Anyway, Happy (late) New Year!

Fun fact: I really, REALLY wanted Erik to sing “Nessun Dorma” in this chapter, but it would have been horrendously anachronistic considering that Turandot was written in the 1920s. So instead, the song he sings at the end of the chapter, while alluded to, is left highly ambiguous and isn’t named, nor does it include any lyrics. (I can neither confirm nor deny that Turandot was in fact somehow written a few decades earlier in my personal headcanon for this fic, but...um...yeah. Ahem.)