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

[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?

[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.