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[fuckrowling]

24! And for character, Flitwick or Griphook!

24. What's your favourite thing about [character]?

Listen. Every time an author is like 'you must hate x character or love y character' then I'm all 'well now im not doing it' about it. JKR wants us to hate Griphook so bad which already makes me not want to out of spite.

And like her reasons are so flimsy too. Oh nooo. The Goblins aren't subservient to wizards. Oh no. Griphook has some feelings of hostility towards wizards due to the centuries of oppression and violence his people have suffered at wizarding hands. Oh no Griphook assumes wizards will double cross him (which indeed the Golden Trio is fully intending to do so he's right). Oh no. Griphook took the swords which they were planning not to give him to make sure the deal got held up despite the fact that it was important for defeating Voldemort...which Griphook didn't know bc no one told him...and also it turns out there are other ways of destroying Horcruxes anyway so the sword isn't even that important. Let's all hate him. Yeah not flying.

He feels flawed and complex and real and very interesting as a character. And honestly I would've loved to see more exploration of him and of Goblin society. (Btw it is INSANE to me that JKR didn't have the Order or else the Golden Trio in book 7 think of making an alliance with the goblins and offering them actual rights/independence. Like no wonder from their POV there's not much difference between Voldemort and the good guys.)

Imagine how cool it would've been if he was in the story for longer and the Trio actually managed to slowly win him over and actually earn his trust and then later he served as a go-between for them with whatever form of leadership Goblins have and they negotiated a treaty. Imagine if Ron and to a lesser extent the others were also changed and learned to question some of what they were taught about Goblins and unlearn some prejudices and build a new and more equal society.

So yeah. Sorry JK. My man Griphook is an awesome dude who was not afraid to call wizards out to their faces and who is a 3 dimensional character despite all your best efforts. I'm here for it.

Send me a character or fandom

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[fuckrowling]

14-year old witnesses classmates murder and return of parent’s murderer, gets ridiculed by government and media, tortured by teacher and ostracized by classmates, all the while having dark lord in head — remains sane

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When (and why) did the Marauders fandom decide that Sirius Black, the man who endured the imprisonment in Azkaban with such stoicism that the Minister of Magic himself remarked on it, is a drama queen whining over the slightest inconvenience?

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It's actually kinda wild how Dumbledore, despite knowing firsthand from what happened to his sister, the potential harm that can come to magical children exposed to muggles who don't understand them, completely dismisses Tom almost immediately, doesn't really show any concern for his wellbeing, shows no alarm over the implications Riddle's immediate assumption that he is going to be forcibly taken off to an asylum, and doesn't bother to investigate his treatment at the orphanage beyond taking Mrs. Cole's word for everything. (Not to mention the situation he left Harry in.)

[fuckrowling]

💚 💖 💀

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

what does everyone else get wrong about your favourite character?

that lord voldemort is legitimately emotionally intelligent.

i encounter a lot in fics the idea that voldemort doesn't have any idea how to understand or relate to other people's emotions - that he can't, for example, understand why one his minions is upset by a hard work day or a rude comment, since he considers both of those things to be unimportant if they occur in his own life - and that any interpersonal skills which he possesses are performative, a chameleonic mirroring of other people's emotional responses which he has no real knowledge of the deeper meaning of.

a lot of this is due - of course - to the idea that voldemort is a "sociopath" and/or "psychopath" [both of which are controversial terms]. and he's a great candidate for the pop-culture versions of these labels - which tend to present the person in question's "empathy deficit" as connected to a complete lack of understanding of how other people feel and a concomitant failure to appreciate or anticipate the emotional responses their actions will cause.

but, in many cases, the "empathy deficit" associated with antisocial personality disorder [the clinical umbrella term under which both "sociopathy" and "psychopathy" fall] isn't so much an inability to understand how other people feel... as it is an ability to understand this profoundly, use it for personal gain, and simply not care if this approach causes the other person harm.

[that is, they are capable of cognitive empathy - the ability to recognise and understand emotions in others, read social cues, and predict and influence others' emotional responses to their behaviour. this isn't a dangerous, abnormal, or disordered trait - it's what people who describe themselves as having "good intuition" or "good gut instincts" are talking about - but it can become so when it combines with other aspects of a person's personality to make them manipulative, exploitative, and entirely self-centred.]

and this - rather than an "empathy deficit" caused by an inability to understand human emotions - is what we see in the canonical voldemort. he is extraordinarily good at correctly identifying, dissecting, and influencing other people's emotions, and a failure to take this ability seriously often causes problems for the heroes of the series.

[dumbledore - for example - is caught out when the potion guarding the locket reveals that voldemort sincerely understands the power of love, grief, and guilt. his entry into the cave is hubristic - he dismisses voldemort's initial safeguards as crude, unimpressive, and not frightening, he then discovers that the final safeguard is extremely impressive indeed...]

the canonical voldemort is also someone whose own emotional performance isn't entirely fake, or entirely drawn from mirroring those around him. i talk a lot about how the fandom overlooks the fact that he's very, very funny - and how he's also [for narrative reasons, since the text needs him to deliver information to harry that neither snape nor dumbledore can if they're to maintain their cover until the end of deathly hallows] often found telling the truth in ways which render him considerably more authentic in conversation than many other characters in the story.

that his charm is performative [he's the centre of attention at the slug club, he's dull and subordinate when he goes to see hepzibah smith] is another example of him using his emotional intelligence to exploit other people for his own gain - and the fact that he's able to modify his affect so easily [and that, even when not performing, he doesn't have a reduced or shallow affect - he's someone who registers his genuine emotions very clearly on his face] is connected to his ability to understand, predict, and influence emotional expression.

and i do think that voldemort is more interesting - and his crimes much more difficult either to excuse or to dismiss as a monstrosity someone like us could never be capable of - when he's treated as something other than the caricature of the pop-culture psychopath, pretty and outwardly charming, with nothing beneath the surface.

and recognising that he understands other people very well - and still doesn't care about them in the slightest - is one way of doing this.

what is your biggest unpopular opinion about the series?

that - while its morality is individualist and its politics are neoliberal and both of these things are incredibly tedious - its central thesis, that redemption is possible, forgiveness is achievable, and love and mercy are triumphant, is a legitimately good one, and the vast majority of fandom arguments about which characters "deserve" to be liked become irrelevant when these basic, human principles are taken into account.

if you had to choose one major character to die, who would you pick?

i think arthur weasley should have died in order of the phoenix - not only because it makes my best girl nagini look like a flop that he doesn't, but because i think it would be really interesting to bring the experience of a grief to which harry is peripheral forward in the series.

in canon, this is the purpose served by fred's death - and it comes as part of the arc that harry undergoes in the last third of deathly hallows, in which he begins to get over his earlier belief that he's central to everything about resisting voldemort. but i think something really interesting could be done with forcing him towards this realisation earlier.

[fuckrowling]

Lord Voldemort <- break his ass down, please. (Love you blog, btw! 💖)

How I feel about this character

One of the characters of all time. I find Tom Riddle to be an absolutely fascinating character who is so fun to explore. I think he came out a lot more 3 dimensional than JKR perhaps intended (I say this because a lot of the backstory we get on him makes him a lot more nuanced than the narrative seems to acknowledge) which I absolutely love. His complexity, intelligence, creativity, self sufficiency, determination even in the face of impossible odds, ruthlessness, penchant for drama, and the tremendous amount of adversity he has to overcome provide a lot of richness that is fun to analyze and read about. I mean, without him we wouldn't have the story.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Alphard Black. Yes, I wouldn't have called it either not too long ago but now this ship now lives rent free in my head. (If you want to read about why you can look at this post here). All hail the dysfunctional, hilarious, and emotionally compelling mess that is Alphalord - which I ship both in serious incarnations and also for the crack humor potential; truly the versatile ship of all time that gives me way too many feels but also is very fun to make crack humor posts about. Also, although it's not my OTP, I think there's also a lot of interesting potential - all of varying degrees of darkness - to explore pairing him with Regulus as well.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

I talked here about how fascinating I find Voldemort's relationship with Snape. He does genuinely seem to like and respect him - to the point that he is actually willing to do favors for him and expresses regret about killing him. Though also...on the flip side, he doesn't like him enough to not murder him (although interestingly from an in-universe perspective we could even read him using Nagini to kill him as him not being able to use the killing curse against Snape due to feeling conflicted). I really like the idea though of him destroying everyone who he feels even somewhat close to.

Which leads me to my actual answer to this question since I already wrote about him and Snape in the Snape ask (linked in the previous paragraph) which is - Hagrid. In the book 2 flashback Tom and Hagrid are on a first name basis. And Tom clearly already knows that Hagrid has an Acromantula because when he gets the unexpected and unwelcome news that the school is going to be closed he immediately knows just where to go to find someone to blame. This suggests that he and Hagrid had a preexisting relationship where Riddle gained Hagrid's trust enough to learn things about him.

It's notable that they would have probably been the only 2 orphans at school (after Hagrid's father died.) I can imagine them running across each other during holidays when everyone is home. (They also both had a nonstandard accent - though Riddle has succeeded in mostly getting rid of his own accent by the time the memory takes place - that might have been looked down on by some of their privileged pureblood peers).

It's also not even clear if Tom intended for Hagrid to be expelled (though he certainly was willing to risk it in order to prevent the school from going and to avoid incurring any blame himself) given that he seemingly intends to kill the spider and say that it got loose by accident rather than as some sort of intentional plot. He also doesn't kill Hagrid when he has the chance in book 7. This is probably just for plot reasons so JKR can have him carry Harry's presumably dead body back to the school, but in-universe it's interesting. Maybe Tom thought he could still turn Hagrid into a useful servant (which I don't think would have gone well). Either way, the fact that they seemingly had a sort of friendship at one point is very interesting and lends an added layer to Hagrid's assertion in book 1 that Slytherins are bad and not to be trusted.

While Tom likely viewed Hagrid with a certain degree of disdain right from day one, it's up to interpretation whether he ever also felt any positive emotions about his relationship with Hagrid or if the friendship was purely a one-sided farce. I prefer the former because I think it adds more depth and complexity to the characters and relationships if Tom ended up having some feelings of genuine camaraderie with Hagrid but was still willing to sacrifice him to protect his own interests. It makes the moment even more interesting if he did not specifically intend for Hagrid to get expelled and thus ends up losing one of the few people who, unlike the majority of his housemates, doesn't look askance at his presumed lineage as a muggleborn and his utter poverty. And this also adds interest to his decision in the end of book 7 to capture Hagrid rather than kill him.

Though of course, neither Snape nor Hagrid hold a candle to the true Tom Riddle BROTP of all time - Tom& Nagini. I love the way he is generally very touch averse but likes to hold her and pet her like a very terrifying therapy animal.

My unpopular opinion about this character

There's a lot I've talked about before like the fact that I think Tom really did want the DADA job and I also think he's a lot more emotionally intelligent than he gets credit for and the people he seems to enjoy hurting most are actually monied purebloods and the person who behaved most unreasonably in the orphanage memory was actually not Tom.

So for this I'll go with the fact that I view Tom as a much more tragic character than the narrative seems to frame him as. It's weird that so many other characters who do bad things get framed as a tragedy not an inevitability - something that is closely linked with the idea that even for characters who have gone down the wrong path there can be redemption. We see this with Snape, with James Potter, with Regulus, with Dumbledore, arguably with Grindelwald whose last act is to lie about the Elder Wand, and sort of even with Peter Pettigrew.

In contrast, Dumbledore always acts as though it's a forgone conclusion that Tom was going to turn out evil and ignores the way wizarding society and even he himself failed to ever do anything meaningful to help Tom or try to guide him onto another path. That doesn't mean he might not have still become Lord Voldemort. But it's never treated as something that even might have been avoided. There is no discussion of what a loss it is that his talent and power and intelligence and creativity weren't used for good. But it is a loss.

It's not inevitable that Tom turned out the way he did. It's not inevitable that he lived a life where he never knew what it was to be loved. It's not inevitable that the first person to ever offer him mercy is Harry Potter and by that point it's far too late and he doesn't even understand what Harry's trying to do. It's not inevitable that because the wizarding world has no concept of social services he grew up in a muggle orphanage without any knowledge of who or what he was, hated and feared by all, and in turn learning to hate and fear them in return. It's not inevitable that Dumbledore immediately gave him up as a lost cause and he never had an adult in his life who could provide support and guidance and a sense of safety. It's not inevitable that upon arriving at Hogwarts he got sorted into a House with people like Walburga Black who would have called him mudblood and hated him for his poverty almost as much as his bloodline, breeding further anger and resentment. And it's not inevitable that he made the choices that he did to kill and to maim. It's SAD. He could have done and been so much more.

I mean, to be clear, from a reader perspective all of this makes Tom an interesting and fun character. It's not bad from a storytelling perspective that these things happened. But nonetheless, it's a tragedy. And I think that gets very little play in the narrative. Yes, Harry tells Tom to try for remorse, but it's framed by the story more as an instance of Harry being ridiculously decent. When Dumbledore discourages Harry from feeling pity for the horrifying state Tom will find himself in the afterlife, there's nothing in the narrative framing that suggests the readers are meant to view Dumbledore's callousness as awful.

From an in-universe perspective we can talk about the strange bias Dumbledore had towards Tom from the moment he met him, but from an out of universe perspective it's more about the author's bias. Yes Dumbledore is meant to be flawed and imperfect, but we readers are not meant to think his treatment of Tom is an example of that imperfection. We're supposed to think it's just fine that upon learning that Tom has lived lonely and miserable existence where he is constant mortal fear of being declared mad and forcibly locked up, Dumbledore's first act is to use magic to frighten and to punish. Partly this is just because that scene is a flashback about the villain of the series and JKR kind of forgot that from an in-universe POV he wasn't the villain of the series yet.

But also maybe it says something more profound - because in the end of the story the narrative declares "all is well" and yet none of the factors that led to Tom Riddle's rise have actually changed. As Harry is sending his children off to school 19 years later in the accursed epilogue, nothing has actually. It's fine to have a story that doesn't have a happy ending. But the narrative frames the ending as a black and white "everything's fixed now and they all lived happily ever after" sort of ending and...no. And this stems, I think, from the failure to engage with the elements that make the main antagonist a great tragedy rather than a cartoonish inevitability. This all makes the story much more interesting, but I'm not sure JKR is fully aware of what she wrote.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

I wish we saw more of him in book 7. The opening scene at the Manor in Deathly Hallows is really tense and gripping and interesting...and a lot of the wedding planning and camping stuff in my opinion...is not. More scenes of the Death Eaters and Voldemort (delivered via Harry's visions) could have been very interesting. Furthermore, Harry could have actively explored Tom's mind and/or widened the connection to try to figure out where the Horcruxes were. This would have added drama, made Harry's connection to him more central to the plot, and allowed us to see more high stakes and interesting scenes.

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Tom Marvolo Riddle

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Harry most times that he sees a Veela: lol why is everyone acting so weird?

Harry when he sees Cedric: Omg he's so handsome and good looking and attractive.

Harry when he sees young Sirius: How is he this fit without even trying?

Harry when he sees Tom Riddle: Damn. Credit where credit it due. An 11 has entered the room.

Harry when he sees Draco: That soft, gleaming, sleek blond hair tho. Those glittering, pale grey eyes tho. I hate him. But like. I can see.

JK Rowling: I have written a heterosexual protagonist.

Me: Have you tho?

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I keep drawing skulls

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It’s a no… or is it?

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the sun

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golden girl 🌞

ref

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The Snape Family - 1970

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Redraw of a Harry that I did last year

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Back with a long haired Harry cause he’s pretty

[fuckrowling]

Hey, first of all I’d like to thank you for all the lovely words and condolences. I’m feeling quite okay right now. I am still sad of course, but my thoughts are with my friend’s husband and sister, who suffer most.

I can’t believe it myself, but I actually finished my newest Sirius painting in August! (very last day, but still 😅 Grumpy SIrius in Grimmauld place 🤭 It has been a long time since I painted a more detailed background. It was a great experience, but very exhausting. I also made some bad perspective mistakes. Please ignore them 😅 I really put much effort into it, but in the end I still messed it up.