Building a Better Voldemort

[sunnyskywalker]

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!

Comments

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

All of these are brilliant! I especially like the "just ignore Harry" ploy; it's a lot more sensible than anything Voldemort did in the books. I'd add, Voldemort is supposed to be seductive, in the "glamour of evil and false promises" sense. We never saw that - never saw him being genuinely persuasive. He's just an over-the-top, melodramatic, cackling villain. It's impossible to see why any reasonably intelligent, ambitious youngster like Sev or Regulus would join up. I would have loved to see Voldemort - perhaps through a trusted proxy like Remus- making a serious, partly-successful bid for Harry's allegiance. That would have made things so much more interesting! It would also have made some sense of the constant Severus/Harry comparisons, which were just wasted in the end.

[aasaylva.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. But you see, we can't have that. If nobody wore the label "loves Harry = will hate the Death Eaters = good = can do anything they like without needing to pay for it" and "bad = will hate Harry = will follow Voldemort = can do anything they like without being redeemed" - how would we know who to root for? And according to what exactly would anyone decide which side they are on? In the books, it's certainly not behaviour or philosophical standpoints, is it. It's more a sympathy-thing.
Meaning the author would have had to come up with something like a coherent political/ ethical standpoint instead of easy "labelism". In fact, I've been entertaining a suspicion for some time now. To me it seems as if she tried to get around having to know much by just inventing an alternate universe where everything is just as she needs it to be. She hadn't grasped the fact that it's not easier but more difficult to invent a whole new world and make it work for anyone with a functioning brain.

[sunnyskywalker]

Voldemort had some good material to work with by DH, too, what with Harry having so much more information on how many mistakes and manipulations Dumbledore had on his hands, and that Harry's dad wasn't such a great moral arbiter either. Is Harry really sure they're the good guys? He wouldn't even have to get Harry on his side necessarily, so long as he could separate Harry from his allies (well, turns out Harry did that for him, but who could have guessed...) and lure him into doing something that would end up helping Voldemort.

Though he could have tried the angle that he was just using the purebloods, didn't Harry see? Soon he would start the next phase of his plan, kidnapping Muggleborn children in infancy as identified by the Hogwarts Quill (kindly making sure the parents and other Muggles wouldn't remember the child) and placing them in wizarding homes... and, when necessary, modifying pureblood families' memories to make them think it was their own child. Wouldn't that be sweet poetic justice on the purebloods, doting on the very children they purported to hate? And wouldn't it be so much easier for the children, no longer condemned to suffer as Harry did with the Dursleys or little Tom in the orphanage? Or for Harry's bright friend Hermione - wouldn't it have been so much easier for her to start off in the wizarding world where she would be appreciated properly, and easier for her parents, who wouldn't have such very large holes in their memories now?

Harry still might not have gone for it, if he still had a few braincells and scraps of ethics, but heroes are supposed to face temptation, aren't they?