deathtocapslock | Building a Better Voldemort

Last December,

charlottehywd asked if there was a list of things that would make Voldemort a more effective villain. I figured there's no better place to compile one!

Some initial ideas to kick things off:

He could have Apparated into the Potters' house right past the anti-Apparition wards which would stop any normal wizard.

He could have actually killed Arthur with Nagini.

He could have arrested one or more Weasleys in DH and released stories about how they were being subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" on suspicion of blood treason in the Daily Prophet to lure Harry out. (Hey, dangling a loved one as bait worked on the kid before, why not give it another shot? It's not like it'll cost Voldemort much even if it doesn't work.)

He could have Imperiused someone close to Harry - Ron, Hermione, Lupin, Molly - making it hard for Harry to know whom to trust.

He could have turned someone close to Harry to his side by other means, either coercion or brilliant manipulation.

He could have unleashed the Inferi instead of leaving them boxed up in the garage.

We could have seen more of the damage the Dementors caused after they went AWOL after the DE breakout from Azkaban.

I'd love to hear more ideas!

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: The Riddle House

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

madderbrad.livejournal.com

He could have simply ignored Harry Potter. And gotten on with the job of taking over the wizarding world. Harry wouldn't have been able to stop him.

He could have persevered with the *proven* attack of book #5 - mental intrusion - and continued sending Harry visions. The boy wouldn't have known what to do. Indeed, the exact 'dangling a loved one as (vision) bait' trick might work again! (Instead the author had Voldemort cease using this attack, *proven successful* in book #5, in the subsequent novel ... and then two books later had Voldemort become a mental midget, actually pushing his *secrets* to his arch enemy. Because otherwise ... Voldemort would have won! And we couldn't have that. Or Harry shaping up as someone with actual prowess or skills in defeating a dark lord. So instead the dark lord voluntarily decides not to press on with a *successful* attack strategy. And then - 'master of mental magics' that he is (that's a quote from the books, isn't it?) - he suddenly, unknowingly, transmits his every plan to Harry. Just when it's convenient to the author for him to do so. Pfah. Pathetic villain. Pathetic author of pathetic villain.)

He could have instructed his followers that it was open season on Harry Potter - "just bring me his body". Or that the Chosen One was to be captured on sight, if not killed. But no. Instead, we have Snape, at the end of book 6, easily defeat Harry in a duel - the boy couldn't even *engage*, he wasn't in the same league as Snape - but Snape tells all of the other Death Eaters that the fallen Potter is to be left alone, 'we are to leave him!'. When they could have either (a) AK'ed the boy right then and there, or (b) stunned him and carried him away. Absolutely *nothing* stopping them from doing this as they *run past the 'wandless and defenceless' 'hero'*. Except for Rowling's desperate need to keep her protagonist alive ... and being unable to come up with any decent reason. Other than making Voldemort a pathetic villain, issuing pathetic orders to his henchmen.

He could have ignored Harry's long melodramatic cliched boring monologue in the final battle and just AK'ed the boy then and there.

Or, when Harry tells him that he is *not* the Master of the Elder Wand - in that very same monologue - Riddle could have simply Summoned another wand, and used that wand to kill the Boy Who Told His Enemy How To Win. But no. Rowling's writing, at this stage, was so embarrassingly artificial, she was so desperate just to get Harry over the finish line and the series ended, she just went ahead and wrote the most embarrassing series closer known to man:

Harry: Voldemort, If you use your wand against me you'll DIE!

Voldemort: *uses Elder Wand against Harry*

Voldemort: *dies*

Edited Date: 2012-09-09 03:15 am (UTC)

From:

aasaylva.livejournal.com

Amen. What I really really still don't get is why. I understand Rowling getting used to the nice life of the well-to-do - for someone as desperate for public attention as she seems to be it's of course much nicer to give yet another interview, let yourself be congratulated on revolutionizing children's litereature etc. than sitting alone in front of an empty sheet of paper, trying to come up with a decent plot or believable characterization. I get that and I would have expected the easy badfic-way out: suddenly conferring superpowers to Harry, him channelling dead Dumbledore or whatever and show him to actually (and VERY miraculously) be better than Voldemort. Let the better wizard win and lo and behold that turned out to be Harry - just like in a thousand US movies about some underdogs sports team suddenly winning the championship because - um - the script says so.
So why, if she was bored with her own story and just wanted it to be over, didn't she do exactly that? Instead of inventing idiotic plot contrivances that STILL did nothing to help Harry win the war which STILL required Voldemort and his ilk to be semi-retarded to say the least. It's bad enough if your hero can't win the war without luck helping out at every corner, but still dumbing down your villain as well?

From:

madderbrad.livejournal.com

Whenever I think about HP I'm undecided as to the prime reason why Rowling's last couple of books were so bad; either:

a. She's incompetent, a bad writer, who didn't see all of the bad writing, the plot holes, etc; or

b. She did see the errors, but just didn't care.

Or maybe a mixture of both.

Rowling strikes me as someone who's good on the 'storytelling', 'writing skills' side of things but lacks much aptitude in 'logic'. The 'oh, maths!' stuff isn't her strong suit. So I do think there's a lot of things she didn't see ... or didn't want to see.

And - given her huge success and personal power by the end - she didn't *have* to see. There was no real editor forcing her to recognise and fix the mistakes.

I also think she *was* sick and tired of the whole thing by the end. Some of the problems she *did* see - at least afterward. For example, she was quite defensive about her beloved Harry/Ginny pairing, coming out three separate times to bleat that they were 'soul mates', etc. Yet she deliberately kept any 'soul mate' evidence out of the last book. Because - at the time - she was sick and tired of it all?

I would have expected the easy badfic-way out: suddenly conferring superpowers to Harry, him channelling dead Dumbledore or whatever ...

So why, if she was bored with her own story and just wanted it to be over, didn't she do exactly that? Instead of inventing idiotic plot contrivances ...

I think Rowling really really REALLY wanted Harry's success to be seen as the victory of an 'everyman' ... well, 'everywizard'. :-) Maybe she saw the "sudden hidden ability" thing as a cop-out, as bad as what she did end up writing, the dei ex machina popping up all over the place to get Harry over the hurdles. And she was too close to her Harry to realise that it's more satisfying to have a hero who acts heroic, with heroic abilities (albeit their being granted artificially) than have a passive barely adequate 'hero' win without any real redeeming or attractive qualities at all.

I dunno. I think Rowling was very much a 'wave your hands and look at the big picture and don't worry about the (oh maths!) (logical) details' writer. And, sadly, by the end of the series there was no-one who could force her to acknowledge that a good series, good writing, needs the logic and solid plot elements too.

From:

sunnyskywalker

Oh, I like the "keep sending visions" idea a lot. Possessing Harry hurt, but sending visions was no problem, so why quit? Especially if Voldemort managed to fine-tune it and send Harry waking visions just slightly off from what was actually happening, so Harry started getting reality and Voldievisions mixed up. That could be horrifying.

Also, forget wands - isn't one of Voldemort's scariest powers the amount of wandless magic he can control? Once he found out the Elder Wand was no go, he could have possessed a nearby animal or human to kill Harry for him. Death by thestral!

From:

madderbrad.livejournal.com

Yes, the visions were a proven weapon. They *worked*. But Rowling only whipped them up as one of her one-book wonders, to prop up the 880+ pages of book #5, and didn't have a clue how to keep them in her series. Since she was apparently determined to keep Harry pegged down as a barely adequate 'everyman' wizard, and not someone who might, say, actually be determined to learn Occlumancy.

So she just waved her hands and had the most powerful dark lord known just ... stop ... the successful mental attacks.

And then - this is what makes her writing so horrid, in this case - she needed to reverse the whole thing in the last book! To let the readers know what Voldemort was up to (without leaving her precious "only from Harry's perspective" mode) and also to help Harry (because otherwise he wouldn't have had a clue).

So we have the most powerful dark lord known, a master of mental magic, someone who (a) knew full well how to invade Harry's mind, and (b) - if book #6 was to be believed - was very afraid of sending mental visions to Harry ...

... do just that.

Pfah. Such HORRIBLE writing.

isn't one of Voldemort's scariest powers the amount of wandless magic he can control?

I'm not with you on that one. There was a bit of wandless magic back in book #1 - because Rowling hadn't worked out the basic details of her world - but after that I didn't pick up much of an impression of 'wandless' magic from anyone. She even nailed down Apparition, in HBP, as requiring a wand (a lot of pre-HBP fanfics have teleportation without a wand, since it wasn't shown as needing one in books 1-5).

But I think Riddle could have just snatched a wand from anyone and used it instead of the deus ex machina wand.

From:

sunnyskywalker

I was thinking of little Tom's stories from the orphanage - he could apparently Imperius or possess animals at that age, possibly levitate them (depending on just how that rabbit got up to the rafters), and do something to get two kids down a cliffside and terrify them into insanity. All his animal possession during his vapor years in Albania might be either another wandless skill or an extension of previously-demonstrated abilities, depending on whether he was possessing or Imperiusing the animals in the orphanage. It seems like he knew how to use a lot of power wandlessly and with decent precision at a young age. Maybe he got out of practice once he got a wand... but if he were really the terrifying dark lord with unprecedented power, Voldemort's ability to do seriously scary stuff even if you somehow got his wand away from him would have been one of the things that had people so freaked out. And it would have mattered when he found himself in the position of not having an entirely usable wand.

From:

madderbrad.livejournal.com

Ah, I see. And yes, given what you've said, I can discern (now) how truly 'terrifiying' Rowling could have made Voldemort, had she capitalised on this 'seriously scary stuff' he apparently did when he was a child. Good point.

(I think part of my not seeing this point is due to how much of book #6 just didn't 'stick' with me, how ineffectual it was. Making the here-and-now Riddle a 'seriously scary' dark lord would have worked much better than - *yawn* - examining a couple of five-minute sixty-year-old memories.)

I dare say you've thought more about it than Rowling. I guess the whole issue of 'accidental magic' was something that she never explored or tried to integrate into her world, let alone Riddle's propensity for 'deliberate' wandless magic.

From:

sunnyskywalker

It was definitely one of her use-and-forget set dressing elements, but it's there, and it really should have mattered. (Along with all eleventy thousand other things we've mentioned here over the years...) The only reason I noticed is probably because I was so desperate for something to cling to in HBP besides the burning question of who is inviting whom to the party and "omg but does s/he like-like me?". Ancient mental video clips which never amount to anything look pretty good by comparison!

From:

aikaterini.livejournal.com

Same here. My favorite parts of HBP were Draco and Tom. Draco's subplot was the only thing moving the story forward and Tom's background, as disappointing as it would later be in terms of what JKR had tried to accomplish, was initially interesting and a welcome distraction from the tiresome soap opera of Lavender/Ron/Hermione/Cormac.

From:

condwiramurs.livejournal.com

Thirded. Also, I so, so wish we got more of the story from Snape's POV, or at least the unnamed-narrator. After all we got the Spinner's End chapter - she could have broken away from the Harry-POV more often and shown us more of what was happening behind the scenes.... But of course that would have required actual complex plotting ability and giving us more plausible antagonists instead of cardboard, can't have that, can we. Bitter, me?

From:

madderbrad.livejournal.com

she could have broken away from the Harry-POV more often and shown us more of what was happening behind the scenes....

... and removed one of the horrible flaws of DH. But this is something that Rowling just seemed incapable of doing. She made a huge sacrifice in the quality and *believability* of her story when she decided to stick with Harry's perspective throughut the bulk of DH. Forced to have the magically powerful dark lord suddenly - unknowingly?! - transmit every secret to his arch enemy, just so we readers stayed in the loop. Who could believe in such colossal stupidity from a supposedly deadly foe? That the dark lord who'd deliberately sent mental visions to Harry one year earlier was suddenly sending them again ... but from his real-life actions ... and unknowingly? Yeah, right. But Rowling went ahead and wrote such dreck anyway. Because she was determined to stick with her 'only through Harry' viewpoint? Or because she would otherwise been forced to work out another way - a realistic way - for her 'hero' to work out what was happening? Through his own efforts? And she wasn't capable of the 'actual complex plotting ability'? I'm not bitter, I'm condemning. :-)

Gah. What a horrible book DH is.

From:

condwiramurs.livejournal.com

My mind is *still* trying reflexively to erase the memory of the dreck that was DH. And then something brings it up and I go "oh fuck, yeah, she did actually write that, dammit." And the little glimmers of light like the SE chapter or the bits that worked (at first....) just make it hurt worse.

And WORD on how it made Voldemort become such a brainless caricature. The story's no good if there isn't a proper villain!!

From:

sunnyskywalker

It's ridiculous. And completely unnecessary even if she did insist on Voldie-vision, since she could have had Harry actively try to peek into Voldemort's mind somehow. He doesn't know what their connection is, but he knows there is one, so why not give it a shot, right? Especially if he's out of ideas? Or have it at least be the unexpected result of something he did on purpose, not possibly a side-effect of his wand literally acting on its own because Harry is dumber than a stick of wood. It still would have been ridiculous, but slightly less so.