Hey, you once mentioned something about Tom Riddle being a little suicidal. Your new post reminded of that and I wonder why you think that. It’s the complete opposite of what the books want you to think.
My standard disclaimer whenever we venture into the dark pit that is my thoughts on Tom Riddle: I’m going to say a lot of controversial stuff that fandom generally doesn’t agree with, I will say so much of this shit that I simply do not have time to explain it all, I expect 99% of you to disagree with me and the other 1% to be so horrifyingly offended that I dare to contemplate a world in which Tom isn’t always an overly competent psychopath that they leave me notes telling me to take this trash out of their character tags.
We good? Alright.
So, when I say a little suicidal, I mean that he is suicidal.
Not on the level that he’s going to kill himself tomorrow, or even has plans to kill himself, but in that he makes very strange decisions for someone who desperately wants to live.
And yes, I realize I speak blasphemy given that Tom Riddle’s entire m.o. is supposed to be his crippling fear of death.
Oh man, this one’s going to be so long.
So, my reasoning comes down to a few things:
The location of the horcruxes and the nature of their protections.
The events of Deathly Hallows and Tom’s final actions in the novel
The nature of horcruxes and what it means to not only be able to create one but what it does to you (caveat that I am going to headcanon hard here and speak utter blasphemy)
So, let’s start in order this time, because I think the first two are actually far easier for me to explain.
The Location and Nature of the Horcrux Protections and the Trouble with Backdoors in Security
So, first, the horcruxes are all conveniently located in Great Britain. Not even just in Great Britain, all in places that Albus Dumbledore and later Harry Potter can track down with relative ease, all fairly close to each other.
Now, part of this is undoubtedly attributable to Tom’s overly romantic nature.
Yes, Tom Riddle is a giant romantic, though not necessarily in the traditional sense everyone thinks of. The film “Patton” and its treatment of Patton comes to mind. Tom Riddle is a man enamored by a sense of greatness, of being remembered in this world rather than fading into oblivion, by the significance of places and times in history not only of the world but of himself. He creates an entire, grand, persona for himself because to live an ordinary life for him is to be worthy of nothing.
So, given that, of course Tom places the horcruxes in sentimental locations that have personal meaning to him.
However, it also makes them perilously easy to find and collect.
By itself, this wouldn’t spark my notice.
The ability to destroy horcruxes are not easy to come by. There’s only one basilisk and it’s by chance/Lucius fucking up that Harry gains access to the necessary basilisk venom. Using Fyendfire is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and just as likely to blow up you and the next three towns over as it is to destroy a horcrux. And if there are other means of destroying a horcrux they’re just as hard to come by or just as dangerous.
It’s not quite throwing it into the fires of Mt. Doom from which it was forged but it’s pretty damn close.
So, really, without JKR’s convenient Deus Ex Machina giving both him and Dumbledore the means to actually destroy these things, Tom Riddle’s horcruxes are pretty damn safe no matter where we put them. As we see from the locket, which Regulus manages to collect but Kreacher cannot destroy even after several decades.
However, what does spark my notice, is that the horcruxes can be collected by someone other than Tom Riddle when it appears as if they were never intended to be. What do I mean by this?
From what we see, there’s no benefit to Tom if the original horcruxes are found by anyone. He doesn’t seek them out to restore his original body, they’re just anchor points that should be hidden at all costs. So, he’ll never need a Death Eater to go collect them for him should he be indisposed (indeed, to do so would require a tremendous amount of trust in people he has very little trust in).
So, why hide them in such a way that others can access them? There are canon based options which would have prevented anyone else from reaching them. Given the existence of age lines, I imagine Tom Riddle could make some arbitrary barrier keyed only to himself. There are mokeskin pouches, such as the one Harry is given in the seventh book, which we know can only be accessed by whoever they’re keyed to. There’s the Fidelius Charm which, true requires a secret keeper which Tom would be very meh on, but options exist.
Tom Riddle could wipe the locations of his horcruxes off the face of the map. He chooses not to. Which leads me to believe that, at least on some unconscious level, he wants the horcruxes to be found.
Then we have the protections.
Specifically, I’m thinking of the locket here.
Yes, the protections are very formidable, but they’re also goddamn weird.
Rather than make the horcrux simply inaccessible, kill all those intruding, instead the intruder has to go through a very “Saw” like puzzle in which they drown themselves in despair until they finally get the locket, at which point they likely suicide by zombie.
More, there’s no hint that there’s any other way to retrieve the locket.
Backdoors in security are a very bad idea. What they do is weaken the security as a whole and, if you can take a short cut is, it means that someone who is clever enough and motivated enough can to. Dumbledore is both clever and motivated enough, and I imagine if there was a way to get the horcrux that involved not doing this ridiculous task he would have done it.
More, we’d be back to the land of Tom making sure only he can access the horcrux by requiring a password, keying it to his magical signature, or something so that no one else could get it.
Which means, that’s right, if Tom wants to get the locket he’s drinking the goddamn despair juice just like the rest of us.
What kind of a person would do any of this?
I’ve gone over this before, but I don’t think Tom Riddle’s crazy. Rather, in this case, I think he’s driven by an unbelievable amount of nihilist rage and is also quite depressed.
Tom goes to collect his horcrux, “Ah, it’s time to remember what a miserable life I’ve led and the sheer awfulness of my own existence. Good, I was starting to feel a little too happy. Let’s see if I get eaten by my undead, vengeful, victims today.”
The Events of Deathly Hallows and Tom Riddle’s Death
I think Tom Riddle’s final death in the books was suicide.
Tom takes over the Wizarding World, finally, and it’s as miserable as ever.
He’s trapped in this sham, barely functional, probably very painful body. His Death Eaters are completely out of control and for all that he wanted society to burn it’s now burning and no one’s even learned anything from this. Children in Hogwarts are being routinely tortured and have now staged a rebellion in which he’s having to slaughter them (I have reasons to believe that this is not what Tom Riddle wanted, at all, but that’s best saved for another post), and then he learns his horcruxes have all been destroyed without him even noticing.
There’s so little left of him, he has accomplished nothing, and there’s Harry Potter back from the dead yet again, gloating at him that love conquers all and Tom Riddle will never understand.
And Harry’s right, Tom Riddle will never understand, the world is meaningless and flat to him now and he finally understand that there’s no point to it. I think Tom Riddle decides he’s done. He’s just done.
He enters in a duel with Harry Potter knowing the weird nature of their wands. Now, it can be assumed he used the Elder Wand, but we know they get locked in Priori Incatatum , and that makes no damn sense with the Elder Wand (well, wandlore in general is silly, but I’m working with what JKR gave me here). So I choose to take JKR at her somewhat established canon and say that, no matter what Harry thought, Voldemort was using his original wand.
He throws out the killing curse, despite having now witnessed Harry resurrecting twice to this thing, and within two seconds it rebounds and kills him.
Voldemort’s death is a lot like this scene from the recent, terrible, 2020 live action Mulan (10/10 do not recommend). Now, we’re supposed to think that this scene is the witch saving Mulan’s life and thus showing her hope for the next generation. In actuality, the witch literally flies into an arrow she could have easily deflected from Mulan’s path. It’s a suicide that Mulan is too stupid to notice.
Tom chooses suicide in the most ridiculous, flamboyant, and easily written off manner one can and no one even notices. Instead Harry crows that he has personally defeated Voldemort, with the power of love no less, HUZZAH!
And the castle parties.
The Nature of Horcruxes
I almost don’t want to include this because it’s so… well, I’m really drifting far from canon and fandom now.
However, with horcruxes, there’s always an overriding question of why Tom is able to make so many when we don’t see anyone else with these things around (especially as it’s clear that murder doesn’t simply happen for those that now have horcruxes).
Usually, you have fic authors just sort of shrug and go, “Well, he’s that evil, I guess.” Sometimes you have them go, “No one else is crazy enough to keep going, and that’s why Voldemort’s cuckoo bananas.”
One very good explanation I’ve seen is that it’s because most people, when they murder, feel remorse immediately. The soul split happens, but they’re haunted by the murder for the rest of their life, and thus the horcrux isn’t made. Voldemort, feeling nothing when he kills anyone, is thus able to make them even for when he’s only indirectly associated with the death in question.
However, to me that never really jived philosophically.
Mostly, I simply cannot imagine that tearing apart your very soul is an act of indifference. Here’s how I see it: to do something like that to yourself, you must care, you must care beyond all imagine and human endurance. Your soul literally cannot abide it and saws itself in half, purging what you cannot stand about yourself the most.
The remorse part is, yes, remorse for the act and the victim but more to the point it is the ability to forgive and reaccept the worst part of yourself. That part of yourself that you purged and destroyed, which is nearly impossible to do and might very well destroy the fabric of who you are).
In other words, while creating a horcrux is an abominable act of hatred, it is also one of profound self-hatred.
Tom Riddle loathes himself so much that he is able to do this over and over and over again.
As Tom Riddle goes on he makes himself into less and less and less of himself until he probably doesn’t even know who he is anymore. He just knows, whatever is left of him, he loathes that too.
And then, of course, he gives up, runs into the nearest flying arrow, and dies.
TL;DR: Tom Riddle’s is a miserable existence that ended in a miserable if unintentionally hilarious manner
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