Sk1fanfiction - The One And Only Keyboard Gremlin

history of magic meme // one villian [ 1 / 1 ] → lord voldemort ––– –– greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies.

All I did was try my best, this the kind of thanks I get? Unrelentlessly upset; they say these are the golden years, but I wish I could disappear. Ego crush so severe. GOD, it’s brutal out here!

ꪻꫝ᥅ꫀꫀ ᥴꪖꪀ ᛕꫀꫀρ ꪖ ᦓꫀᥴ᥅ꫀꪻ

Second year starts on Saturday (August 28) at AO3|FFN!

And Lord Voldemort returns... very... much... alive

Quirrell really messed us up, didn't he?

No. Not Quirrell. Voldemort.

Two months ago, Lord Voldemort succeeded in stealing the Philosopher's Stone. Harry Potter lost control of his Obscurial form, and Ron Weasley's pet rat, Scabbers, went missing. Tee, the amnesiac student trapped inside Ruby Potter's diary, claims that he can help, and maybe, just maybe, she believes him. But maybe he's cursed for a reason. Maybe he's condemned to be awake and imprisoned for all eternity in penance for some horrible crime. Maybe he's evil. Meanwhile, Harry's worried about the monster threatening to ‘rip... kill...” everything in sight, but only he can hear it. Just like how only he can see the shadows threatening to tear him apart and only he can understand the snakes who assure him that there will be blood this time; by the time Voldemort gets to him, he might be dead already.

Please please ask away, honestly less than 50% of my original ideas make the cut so I have a LOT to talk about, especially about RFMD since Part 1 is finished.

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i've been thinking (oh no) and the Bellamort dynamic is actually more interesting than canon wants you to believe / sexuality, womanhood, and Christian allegory in the HP verse

I don't feel like getting yelled at on Tumblr today so here's a caveat that I hope is obvious. I'm not telling you what to ship/not to ship or whether your ship is canonically/morally right or wrong. I'm just doing an analysis of the dynamic between two characters who are underdeveloped in canon.

Bellatrix, I think, often gets done dirty in fanon when she's not the main character -- either she's just that crazy woman/dumb fangirl in love with Snake-Face (TM), her only dialogue is "Crucio!" or she's a hurt woobie who is only Voldemort's most loyal Death Eater because her parents either Imperiused or abused her.

Which all falls into the filing number: Society is Afraid of Women (Even Fictional Ones) that are Competently Evil, or at the Very Least, Do Bad Things from Time-to-Time.

But canon actually does Bellatrix pretty dirty, too.

For instance, in the Battle of Hogwarts (I have to admit that even the first time I read it at like 9 or something, the bits after Harry's resurrection feel very contrived), Bellatrix Lestrange, whom we are told several times is amongst the most dangerous and competent of Voldemort's followers, loses to... MOLLY WEASLEY?

Look, I know that this is supposed to be a big 'love triumphs over evil moment' and showing that a mother's love trumps romantic love, or at least obsessive romantic love, because we all know love and obsession are not on the same sliding scale /s.

But this directly contradicts events that just happened, and this is one of the points where JKR's penchant for Christian allegory made the plot worse. What makes this really annoying in my opinion, is that Nymphadora Tonks just lost to Bellatrix.

You know, Tonks the Auror, Tonks the implied to be very skilled, may I add, Auror? Lost to Bellatrix where Molly, who uses her wand for cleaning and cooking spells succeeded?

Now, I'm not trying to say that being a housewife is bad, I'm just trying to say that the in-canon reason Remus and Tonks, both skilled duelists, are supposed to have lost to Dolohov and Bellatrix is because they were not practising while Tonks was pregnant. That gives us an idea of just how powerful Bellatrix is -- if you're not an Auror in top shape, you won't just lose, you'll die. She's the last Death Eater left standing, for crying out loud!

So, it makes no sense that Molly killed Bellatrix. Escape or Stun, maybe, but kill? Not plausible.

Moving on, Voldemort screams when Molly kills Bellatrix, and then sends a curse at Molly, probably not a Killing Curse, because... sigh... Harry blocked it with a Shield Charm, and Harry then kills Voldemort about two pages later after spouting off some wandlore that you'd think Tom "I was in the library the other night" Riddle would know back and front. I could go on a whole rant about how Voldemort vs Harry would make more sense if Harry was implied to be on a similar power level as kid!Riddle or kid!Dumbledore, rather than just above average, but I will resist this time.

Now, a lot of people take Voldemort's reaction as canon evidence that Voldemort loves Bellatrix. I think... considering Voldemort is known to have an extremely obsessive personality, and holds grudges like no one's business... he reacted pretty well considering he's just lost his last Death Eater. He gets over it immediately.

Like, I know JKR would never allow her Lucifer allegory to have emotional depth but, come on, if he loves Bellatrix let him like... cradle her dead body à la Snape, or make Molly die slowly and painfully.

Voldemort has a short list of trusted, named-in-canon followers in his inner circle: Barty Crouch Jr., Peter Pettigrew, Severus Snape, and Bellatrix Lestrange. Bellatrix is the last one to die, the last of his trusted followers, and the last of his Death Eaters, and Voldemort realises that this means that he's losing, so he screams in frustration and shoots a curse at Molly. Simple as that. Throughout the series, his feelings towards her seem to be on the level of 'my employee of the month/the year' consistently.

Yes, Voldemort never punishes her, but it's because of how she feels about him, not how he feels about her. He knows that she's in love with him and will be forever, she led the group that tortured the Longbottoms after he disappeared, and she proudly declared that she was a Death Eater and went to Azkaban. He'd be stupid not to keep someone that devoted around, or to let her get captured and thus unable to serve him (as we see when he helps her escape the Department of Mysteries). Now, it's hard to say how much that goes the other way; how much Voldemort's paranoia allows him to trust Bellatrix or confide in her, because unfortunately, we've never seen them interact alone.

From this interview:

Darchey: Did voldemort ever love a girl

J.K. Rowling: No, he loved only power, and himself. He valued people whom he could use to advance his own objectives.

*There's almost a condescension to JKR's answer, like of course Voldemort would never love a girl (or a boy, for that matter), because he's a villain, silly Darchey!

But, although JKR would never allow her Lucifer allegory to love (healthy, unhealthy, obsessive, manipulative or otherwise), a Tom Riddle who opened his heart to love as a villain is actually an interesting concept (see here and here, where I posit that 'Voldemort loves himself' contradicts his canon behaviour). Do we get a more Anakin/Vader-like villain whose compassion, paranoia and attachment issues are a deadly mix? Would he still have made Horcruxes? Would he be a more effective villain? After all, if love was originally the power the Dark Lord knows not, would knowing it make Voldemort un-defeatable?

But enough about Voldemort, and more about Bellatrix.

Ironically for a series where there's such an emphasis on the main villain's acquired inability to comprehend love, so much so that a significant portion and maybe even a majority of the fandom believe it's innate, the most villainous woman in Harry Potter is defined by her ability to love. She even tells Narcissa, who is freaking out about Draco's assassination mission, that if she had kids, she'd "be glad to give them up to the service of the Dark Lord."

"She sat beside her sister, as unlike her in looks, with her dark hair and heavily lidded eyes, as she was in bearing and demeanour; where Narcissa sat rigid and impassive, Bellatrix leaned toward Voldemort, for mere words could not demonstrate her longing for closeness."

Where the allegory runs away with the plot, again and again:

And Bellatrix, was, as I think is clear-- you know, I doubt that people will be particularly shocked to hear, 'cause I'm sure they've deduced, that Bellatrix is madly, romantically in love with Voldemort. This is-- you know, that's the obsession of her life. And I believe that Helena Bonham Carter had to be asked to tone it down after she-- (laughs) The producer called me and said, you know, give me some background on Bellatrix so we can tell Helena about it. And I said, well of course, it's a sexual attraction. She's madly in love with this man, and obsessed by him. (laughs) Apparently, they had to ask her to bring it down because she was being a bit too sexy.

My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] … Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that’s how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair… [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, “Dumbledore’s gay!” [laughter] If I’d known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!

I can't for the life of me remember the source, but Dumbledore and Grindelwald are supposed to have had a sexual relationship during the summer of 1899. The only other pair that explicitly portrays sexual attraction one way or other is... drum roll please... Bellatrix and Voldemort. If we go with Cursed Child as canon, which I personally don't, there's Delphini as evidence.

The take-away from this, obviously, is that romantic love is bad, obsessive love is really bad, sexual love or attraction is really, really bad, and only morally questionable people like Dumbledore, Grindelwald, and Bellatrix experience the latter two. Love/attraction of all forms, platonic, familial, romantic, sexual, you name it, is off limits to Voldemort, because he's not human, he's supposed to be literally Satan, that awful kid who got mad because someone set his wardrobe on fire.

Not to say Tom doesn't commit unconscionable atrocities as an adult, but to give kid!Riddle a family history of mental health issues, put him in the perfect environment for behavioural issues, and then say "Look! This kid has mental health and behavioural issues, so he must be practically born evil!" is how to almost give your villain nuance, but still fail horribly.

Actually, notice how all the people with moderate to severe mental health issues (Bellatrix, Voldemort, and anyone else described as 'mad' like the Gaunts, for example) are evil. It's like, consciously or not, someone's trying to push the agenda that people with moderate to severe mental issues are evil. Or vice versa. Sirius is good, so Sirius doesn't end up with PTSD or such from Azkaban. Harry is good, so Harry doesn't have mental health issues from living with his abusive guardians or, watching most of his mentors/father figures die, or being a child solider.

Yeesh.

Basically, sexuality in Harry Potter is quite often associated with the villainous, immature, and/or morally depraved. Any romance happens behind the scenes (see Hinny and Remadora). Note, once Dumbledore gets over his Dark Lord phase, he never loves anyone romantically again.

You'd think considering all the teenage hormones and whatnot in the latter books, there'd be more 'longing for closeness' and 'dumb decisions because in love' going on amongst the main characters. But, because the Harry Potter books are a Christian allegory, where only pure, sacrificial love counts for anything, good, moral people don't experience sexual attraction or romantic love in any overwhelming fashion. No one else pines quite the way Bellatrix does. Dare I say, she’s the only character who lusts, and that’s almost treated as part of her villainy.

Especially not Harry (the Jesus allegory who dies to save the wizarding world from its sins, and is resurrected, not even trying to be subtle here), who likes Ginny (Basically One of the Guys and only here to be Harry's love interest) because she plays sports, doesn't get 'weepy' and has nice skin, their relationship in sixth year is distilled in like one kiss and a few throwaway paragraphs of 'oh, Harry was so happy now he and Ginny are an item' and then they broke up and Harry thought of her before he died for five minutes. Even Lavender gets mocked for being a mildly clingy and immature girlfriend, and is punished via plot by being savaged by Greyback. All of the canon romances sit somewhere on the scale of lukewarm, and you can find much more believable Hinny, Romione, Remadora, etc, at your local fanfiction archive.

So, since Dumbledore/Grindelwald is a 'blink and you'll miss it' kind of deal, Bellatrix's unabashed love for and attraction towards Voldemort is pretty much a one of a kind in canon. It’s the only romance depicted in a romantic style. Looking at Bellatrix's character through the framework of Harry Potter, where women and girls are depicted solely through a Madonna-whore complex (which according to Tuch on Freud, comes from misogyny, but anyway), where Lily is a Madonna, Molly is a Doting Mother and also firmly a Madonna, Hermione is a Good Girl, Fleur, Lavender, and even Cho at times are on Thin Fucking Ice for Tempting Men, acting Too Girly, and Being Pretty, and even Merope the R*pist and Abuser is a woobie to be pitied who 'loved' her husband and died of a broken heart when he 'left' her, and Tom Senior, her victim, is the bad guy for not being attracted to her, Bellatrix, for being not even the object but the subject of sexual attraction, is firmly in Whore territory (full-on Jezebel, probably). When Molly kills her, it's because the sexual and malevolent Whore is being punished by the virtuous and maternal Madonna.

Frustratingly, Bellatrix's feelings towards Voldemort aren't really treated as legitimate in a world where love is literally a powerful type of magic. Whereas a mother's love saves Harry twice in one night (Lily's blood protection and Narcissa's lie), Bellatrix's death and ultimate sacrifice for Voldemort is useless. He dies almost immediately after.

Which is one hand, kind of shitty? Like, she died for nothing? It was all for nothing?

“When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.” - Horace Slughorn

Which is all well and good, but when was that power ever shown? I can't remember where I saw it on here, but someone suggested Bellatrix doing a sacrificial protection thing on Voldemort, and that's honestly a brilliant idea.

But maybe not. Maybe it's the futile things that make life worth living.

Final answer: JKR was too cowardly to give the main villain and his implied love interest the character and emotional depth that a subplot like two-sided Bellamort would have given them.