On Horcrux-making and losing one’s looks

[sunnyskywalker]

We know that Tom’s appearance deteriorated during the same time period he was making Horcruxes. Dumbledore and Harry seem to believe this is cause and effect: you split your soul, and your face gets melty-looking.

Are they correct, though?

In the graveyard, Voldemort brags that his followers knew some of the measures he’d taken to make himself deathless. Bellatrix and Lucius may have some idea about the objects their master gave them to guard, but not necessarily. Regulus had to discover the secret, after all—and did say he discovered it, not learned it from Voldemort and used it against him. So Voldemort didn’t tell him that the locket was a Horcrux. If even the Horcrux guardians don’t know about them, the rest of the Death Eaters must not know either. (Regulus almost certainly had no idea there was more than one, or he wouldn’t have taunted Voldemort about being “mortal once more” once the locket was destroyed.)

So. What were these other measures Voldemort took to preserve his life, which he told his followers about?

And, more pertinently, what did they do to Tom’s complexion?

It’s hard to see why ripping out a piece of one’s soul would affect one’s skin or facial structure. How would that work? When you rip off a piece of soul, it might be your soul-nose, the loss of which is then reflected in your face? Or is it more of a leeching out of some of your soul-stuff, so that your soul looks a bit runny, which then makes your flesh, blood, and bones a bit runny as well? Does making Horcruxes put you at risk for osteoporosis? (And does having an extra soul-bit shoved into you, as Harry did, also change one’s appearance, besides the scar entry wound? Did Harry’s nose grow after the Voldiebit died?) And a big gaping soul-wound also… turns your eyes glowing red?

It’s rather hard to credit. Though admittedly not inconceivable in the Potterverse. But Dumbledore and his Muggle-raised mother grew up in an era where Muggle doctors and scientists thought that personality traits were reflected in the shape of one’s skull and other such physical characteristics. Not to mention, wizarding society may retain ideas derived from the 17th century, when ideas like character traits being passed through breast milk and “like cures like” (e.g., red stones help with blood diseases because they share redness) were taken seriously by major figures such as Boyle. The idea that the state of the soul would be reflected in the state of the body wouldn’t be out there for wizards. Add that to the generally sketchy information about Horcruxes, and the lack of recorded instances of anyone making more than one, and maybe the conclusion seemed like a natural leap to Dumbledore.

But he might have been wrong. I don’t recall Hermione reading that Horcrux-making caused disfigurement in her purloined handbooks. Nor did Slughorn warn Tom about it. We’ve never seen any other cases to compare Tom’s progression to. Well, maybe it’s only really noticeable after you make more than one, which allegedly no one else has ever done…

But it seems just as likely, or more so, that those unspecified other measures were what really ruined Tom’s looks. He was only looking pale and gaunt at Hephzibah’s – nothing there that can’t be attributed to living on wizard Top Ramen due to a low salary at the shop or simply not taking the time to eat properly. The red eyes and melted-wax look only appeared after he’d been associating with “the worst of our kind” and doing something that his followers might reasonably believe would make him unkillable. (Dermus adamantius? No, seriously, what were those other measures? Yes, yes, probably Rowling forgot she’d ever mentioned any other measures, or originally intended the DEs to know about the Horcruxes and changed her mind. Let’s pretend there’s a coherent backstory for old times’ sake.)

For that matter, maybe only the melted wax stage was due to whatever special measures he took and after that, most changes were deliberate cosmetic alterations to suit his sense of drama.

Maybe he just liked having a much smaller nose.

Or literally cut it off to spite his face.

Stranger things have happened in the Potterverse.

Comments

[chantaldormand]

On the one hand, we don't see Dementor's victims suddenly becoming melty. They are just empty... nobody is home.
On the other hand Voldemort loves traditional magic- stuff that could easily fit in Grimm Brother's fairy tales.

Hmm so maybe it isn't reversed The Picture of Dorian Grey but a side effect of some other spells. Didn't Tom dabble in necromancy? I can easily see overconfident Voldemort trying out a spell he created and getting backlash straight into the face.

Or maybe there is more to what Remus said about Dementors. If losing soul means losing magic then the soul is source of magic. And while investing money into different businesses might be a good idea, it seems to me that Rowling's wizards have pre-set power level and can't get stronger magically. Since Voldemort deliberately was cutting away pieces of soul, he might be much weaker in his 50's than he was as a teenager.
So how are you going to control a group of rowdy dark wizards and stop them from realising your true power level? By scaring the shit out of them, obviously. /s
Though if Horcruxes have an impact on Voldemort's sanity then this plan might sound great to him.

Or perhaps he ran into very bad MLM products :P

[sunnyskywalker]

Barty Jr. going all Melty-Nazi like in Raiders of the Lost Ark after the Dementor sucked his soul would have been very dramatic, but I guess even Rowling couldn't bring herself to go that over the top ;-)

Some kind of experimental spell with unanticipated side effects seems like a strong possibility.

That is a good question about soul-splitting and magical power. Can the divided pieces keep in some kind of mystical contact to keep one's power level consistent? It doesn't seem like they're closely connected, if at all--book!Voldemort doesn't know when a Horcrux is destroyed. Can a soul-piece channel the same amount of magic as before, because it isn't a strictly physical process? Or has Voldemort's magic gotten progressively weaker? And if so, did he realize what was happening, or did it muddle his perceptions too?

And if that's a weakened Voldemort, what kind of magic was he capable of before he started chopping off bits of his soul?

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

And if that's a weakened Voldemort, what kind of magic was he capable of before he started chopping off bits of his soul?

He does hold his own against Dumbledore at the Ministry.

[flyingskull.livejournal.com]

Well, I used it in a parody because nobody in the Potterverse (by which I mean JKR) never thinks things through - or maybe just never thinks, but if Riddle became meltier and meltier after horcruxing - and I'll never stop laughing at that one - and his body got reduced to component atoms after being Harryed, then logically one can think that ripping pieces of yourself makes you into a self-controlled zombie, or a revenant inhabiting its own corpse.

Following that hypothesis the zombie/revenant could control the decay of the body by magic; but what happens to magic after one has ripped off pieces of the self? Keeping the corpse functional enough to look odd but normalish would take, not power as such I don't think, but focus; the more time passes, the harder is to keep all the details correct.

This would ensure the complete disintegration of the body after the clearly described explosion caused by the collision between furnace-burning mother love and cold green. Green! The colour of absolute eeeevil! Destroy all green things! Death to vegetables!

Ooops, sorry, got carried away.

This would also explain how this supposedly puissant wizard who could terrify everyone is so appalingly incapable of coherent thought and is reduced to using only two spells at the end (right, let's pretend that the protagonist of this epic is capable of many more). Revenants are only for pain, death and destruction, not for brains firing on all neurons after all. :D

[sunnyskywalker]

Aha, at last an explanation for why Voldemort disintegrated! Dying distracted him too much to hold his body together! That makes more sense than anything we got in the books... Which isn't hard, sadly, since there was no explanation for that at all in the books.

He also mentioned having to mentally hold himself together while in Vapormort form. Hm...

[flyingskull.livejournal.com]

Sorry for replying so late.

But... Hey! See? I wasn't so far off, then. :D

I forgot to tell you how much I admire your brilliant efforts to make sense of the senseless. I'm not much good at Watsonian reading, being by nature and nurture a Doylist to the core, but I enjoy Watsonian comments so so much! Thank you.

[sunnyskywalker]

Thank you! I love analyzing from a Doylist perspective too, but something about trying to wrangle this series into making sense is appealing to me. (It also helps for writing fic. There are so many things that just can't be glossed over. Well, not by anyone except Rowling and her editors, I guess...)

Don't worry about timing! I spend my workdays at a computer and sometimes end up with headaches or too much wrist and arm pain to then spend more time on the computer for non-work reasons, so I'm never going to pressure to get online and start typing. I know how many good reasons there are people might need to not do that!

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

It's the Gilbert and Sullivan school of magic.
"When in crime one is fully employed / Your expression gets warped and destroyed: / It's a penalty none can avoid. / I once was a nice-looking youth." --Sir Despard Murgatroyd, Baronet of Ruddigore.

[sunnyskywalker]

Someone really ought to perform that mash-up!

Body parts?

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Clever and funny as always! Please correct me if I'm wrong; I don't own the books any more and can't easily double-check. But--

Don't the boys find Voldemort's eyes in the locket? Doesn't Ron have to stab the eyes to kill the horcrux?

What I therefore assumed was that, whatever other evil thing he'd done, Voldemort would also have to give up one of his body parts and implant a fraction of his soul in it whenever he made a horcrux. I think that's what Rowling meant to imply. That implication, is, of course, weakened by her inconsistency. We don't see Voldy's nose in the cup, his left ear in the tiara, and so on!

Re: Body parts?

[oryx_leucoryx]

Well, we only see the tiara after it was destroyed so who knows? The same goes for the ring. The active Horcruxes we saw are: Harry, the diary, Nagini, the locket, the cup.

Hmm, if Tom left an eye in the locket, how come he had both eyes after his re-embodiment, but not his nose?

Re: Body parts?

[sunnyskywalker]

The inconsistency is maddening! They did see "dark and handsome" eyes in the locket, but he still has his physical eyes as well--they're just red and slit-pupiled now. Did he have to donate his eye color to make the locket? And a third of his pupils? Why on earth would it work like that? And what would cause the "melted wax" skin--did he donate his complexion? Why would those just affect the appearance of various bits, but another takes his actual nose, as you ask? Or did he donate actual pigment to the locket, and a subdermal layer of his skin to another Horcrux...?

Hm. The only other Horcrux we got a really good look at was the diary, I think. That one kind of has Tom's full appearance in the Pensieve-like memory function, but that might not "count," since it shows other people too, and it didn't rip bits off them. The main thing we see in the diary is... Tom's mind behind the "chat" function.

Maybe that's an argument for his having implanted the memories while in school but having created the diary as a Horcrux well afterward. Say, around 1979, when he started acting a lot more erratically and dramatically. Maybe he literally lost (part of) his mind.

Re: Body parts?

[sunnyskywalker]

Glad you enjoyed it :-)

Hm. We don't actually see Barty Jr. after he loses his entire soul, I think--McGonagall just reports it. Does he "fade" in any noticeable way, I wonder?

This raises another question: if the soul and body are so tightly linked that ripping off a chunk of soul also diminishes part of the body, does it work the other way around? When Moody lost an eye and a leg and part of his nose, did he also lose little wisps of soul? Talk about unfortunate implications...

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

It all works according to the Laws of Melodrama, in which the name and the appearance of a character reflect his moral status. JKR really does follow the Gilbert and Sullivan rules of magic. Their opera Ruddigore, which I quote in my comment above, is a parody of an old time-melodrama. The hero, innocent farmer Robin Oakapple, and his faithful servant Old Adam Goodheart, are by a typical Gilbertian contrivance suddenly forced to become evil at the end of Act One. Act Two begins with them bemoaning their fate.

Robin: My face is the index to my mind, / All venom and spleen and gall! / Or, properly speaking, it soon will be reeking / With venom and spleen and gall.

Old Adam: My name from Adam Goodheart, you'll find, / I've changed to Gideon Crawle, / For a bad bart's steward whose heart is too hard / Is always Gideon Crawle.

Both: How providential when you find / The face an index to the mind, / And evil men compelled to call / Themselves by names like Gideon Crawle.

We all should have known from the start that Harry Potter was never going to become friends with a schoolboy rival named Dragon Bad-Faith, no matter how many dangerous monsters they faced together.

[sunnyskywalker]

You're making a really, really great case for that mash-up ;-) If any out-of-work theater people want to take this on, I'm sure they would find donors!

Some poking around revealed something that makes sense within the Potterverse but also sounds like Rowling looking for a way to defend some of the too-on-the-nose names: Naming Seers. They only appear on Pottermore/Wizarding World/whatever she's calling it these days. Traditionally, wizarding parents might go to a Naming Seer, who predicted the child's future and suggested a fitting name. It's falling out of fashion, possibly because a lot of parents were unhappy with the predictions and now want to let kids "find their own ways."

So that could explain a few names, like Libatius Borage and Pomona Sprout, especially if Naming Seers also helped pick family names once upon a time. (One wonders what the first Malfoy thought upon being told that his family was doomed to be minor villains for the next thousand-odd years and here's the name to match. And why he would agree to use it. Maybe no Seers were involved, and it was originally an in-joke that unfortunately went public and stuck?)

But it does raise questions. Like, did the Lupins consult a Naming Seer and learn their son was doomed to become a werewolf? If so, why on earth would they name him something so revealing instead of trying to give him the least wolfy name possible? Did Lyall preemptively hate werewolves because he knew one was probably going to bite his son, and that's why he said they were evil, thus inspiring Greyback to bite little Remus in the first place? (Oops.)

It's a valiant attempt to make the Potterverse operating by the Laws of Melodrama make sense retroactively. I guess. But it only barely papers over a few cracks and leaves other gaping chasms.

[tygershark.livejournal.com]

The other measures Voldy took to gain immortality taking a toll on his looks seem to make the most sense to me. Maybe it was a failed attempt to turn into an animagus. Or maybe he drank some bad polyjuice, like Hermoine's half-cat transformation. He had to have already wrecked his looks before 1981 because his followers recognized him in the graveyard.

[sunnyskywalker]

If he was deliberately trying a partial transformation to gain only certain features of the target species as an experiment... you know, that might work!

But it would be hilarious if his experiment only partly succeeded and ruined his looks in the process. I mean, it makes for a great disguise, but he might have had other plans for that which didn't make him look the way he turned out.

[oryx_leucoryx]

In the wizarding world he became the poster child for 'be careful or you'd get stuck that way'.

[sunnyskywalker]

*dies laughing* Please let someone make an actual poster of this.