Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Seen It!

Cafe Society
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Voldemort’s primary goals are gaining power and becoming immortal. Killing Harry is important to him because he believes Harry has the power to someday defeat him, but Harry’s death is not his most pressing concern and it’s not going to give him that much satisfaction in and of itself.

For the first four books in the series Voldemort’s top priority is getting himself back into corporeal form. Later he wants to get rid of old enemies and take over Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic. Although he tries and fails to kill Harry several times during the series, he doesn’t get wrapped up in this and proceeds (mostly successfully) with his other plans. Of course his failure to kill Harry means he is ultimately doomed, but if he’d been doing nothing but plotting against Harry for seven books then he wouldn’t have gotten as far as he did.

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What’s interesting to me is: Voldemort appears at least 1.5 dimensional, he has a history, he has motives, yeah, he’s psychotic and has some issues, but he’s deep enough to keep interesting through the books without being the diluted badass.

That said, I can’t believe he’d get such a huge following, being as evil and callous as he is with his minions.

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Yeah, what’s his philosophy? Is it just the pureblood thing? I’d think you could create a pretty effective xenophobic political program around that without all the murder and evil.

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Valdemort wasn’t a pureblood himself. Clearly he follows the Slytherin philosophy of no muggles allowed in the club and he started his Horcrux collection by killing his muggle father. He’s a one dimensional character who is stuck on evil so it’s hard to explain why anybody would follow him. The only benefit to being a follower is that if you don’t screw up he won’t kill you so he’s not offering much of a retirement plan.

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He had already gained immortality with horcruxes when he tried to kill Harry Potter. While he certainly had to struggle getting into corporeal form it was his continued attacks of Harry that put him there. Had he not attacked Harry he would have been way ahead of the game. By accidentally putting a piece of himself in Harry (and killing his family) he created a nemesis with some of his own power as well as a reason for vengeance.

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I wonder if this is meant as a parallel to Hitler (Godwinized my own thread!) who promoted the pure-blood blond, blue-eyed Aryan race while being a dark-haired, dark-eyed Austrian.

The appeal was power, none of this hiding from the Muggles nonsense, just use them for your own amusement as they did during the Quidditch World Cup.

I agree that his treatment of his minions actually made him less believable.

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I had the exact same thought about the parallel to Hitler and according tothis interview so did the author:

Interviewer:** Voldemort’s a half-blood too.**

J.K. Rowlings:** Like Hitler! See! I think it’s the case that the biggest bully takes their own defects and they put them on someone else, and they try to destroy them. And that’s what he – Voldemort – does. That was very conscious – I wanted to create a villain where you could understand the workings of his mind, not just have a 2-D baddie, dressed up in black, and I wanted to explore that and see where that came from. Harry in Book Four is starting to come to terms with what makes a person turn that way. Because they took wrong choices and he Voldemort took wrong choices from an early age.
**

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Cool, thanks for that.

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I think she said something once about touring the Holocaust Museum in Washington after she had already written a lot of the half-blood stuff and was amazed at how much the Nazis tried to define their own “blood” issues.

Anybody know what I’m talking about? :stuck_out_tongue:

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No cite, but I’ve heard her say she adapted the Nazi Jewish bloodline standards (the Mischling degrees and the like) for the post-Death Eater takeover of the Potter world.

As for the appeal of Voldemort, I think in the dozen or so years between his apparent death he was probably romanticized a bit by his former followers, plus he was even crazier when he came back. There’s any number of dictators you can point to and say “Why the bleep would anybody have ever followed him to begin with?” as they became increasingly mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Rowling has also said that nobody had ever created as many horcruxes as Voldemort and that each time he split his soul (not just the murder but the process of making a horcrux) he became more demented and unstable. (She plans to tell the “how to make a horcrux” part in the Harry Potter Encyclopedia.)

While he wasn’t a dictator, King Henry VIII was once adored in England and envied by other kingdoms but descended into something little short of a serial killer who delegated responsibility well- his never ending pile of victims included not just 2 wives and numerous relatives but many people (Wolsey, More, Cromwell, Howard, etc.) who had been his most trusted and able aids.

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Was his following really all that large? It was my impression that there weren’t huge numbers of Death Eaters, they were more a modest-sized terrorist group. (Wikipedia lists about 30 named Death Eaters in the series, although there were presumably more than that in total.) Voldemort never wins an election or anything, he has the Minister of Magic assassinated and installs a new minister as his puppet. In the book the new Minister of Magic is under the Imperious curse, although in the movie he seemed to be a Death Eater voluntarily cooperating. Anyway, once the new regime is in place then many wizards are willing to keep their heads down and go along with things, but they aren’t really followers of Voldemort.

Aside from being a powerful wizard we know that as a young man Voldemort was good-looking and capable of acting charming, and his message about the inferiority of Muggles and the importance of “blood purity” played on long-standing prejudices within the wizard community. That seems like enough to attract an initial following. Few of the Death Eaters were especially devoted to Voldemort as an individual. (Bellatrix is a notable exception, but she’s also psycho.) Most seem to have been genuine blood-purity fanatics, after power for themselves, into violence for its own sake, or afraid enough of Voldemort that they’d rather be with him than against him.

I’d also like to echo Sampiro’s point about Voldemort likely becoming crazier and more brutal as he created the horcruxes, and even worse after his return at the end of Goblet of Fire. Since his return from apparent death meant he was more powerful than most of them had believed, the Death Eaters were probably willing to put up with a lot rather than provoke him.

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Everything you say is true except there is not development of the character. He has already established most of his horcruxes prior to the beginning of the series. We don’t see the transition to crazy except for a backward glimpse of “normal” Tom Riddle as he was when he created the 2nd Horcrux at school.

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Some of it is the prophecy, which is why Voldemort went after Harry in the first place, and thus got in the fix he was in. But the main motivation after returning was the whole “Harry is the chosen one” aspect. Harry was famous for having survived Voldemort, and essentially vanquished him - at least for a while. Thus killing Harry was an important symbolic point - by killing Harry, he establishes that he truly is the master, and that even “the boy who lived” is really powerless, so everybody else had better not even try to defy him.
The fact that Harry was instrumental in mucking with his plans several times while trying to return was additional incentive, but the prime driver was killing Harry as proof that he really was the champion.

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I’ve only read about four and a half pages in this thread, so if I’m being repetitive…eh, you can just skip this post.

As for the movie, I really liked it. It was dark and depressing, and I went home feeling a bit down, but I expected that. And I imagine the next film is going to be the exact opposite. I was a bit surprised at the brief sensuality between the fake Harry and Hermione, but it definitely shows that the movies have grown, so to speak. The kids were awesome, and I actually really liked the dancing scene. Pointless, yes, but I thought it was cute.

I was also a bit surprised at the torture scene with Belltrix and Hermione. In the book she simply used the Cruciatus curse, which is all she would really need, but after some reflection I’ve decided I like the movie’s version better. It shows that while Bellatrix could have used the Cruciatus curse, the fact that she didn’t is very telling, in that it shows that she’s that much more sadistic than most Death Eaters. Dumbledore even said something in the sixth book about “dear Bellatrix, who likes to play with her food before she eats it” (this is a paraphrase, as I don’t have the book in front of me right now). The scene in the movie fits that description perfectly.

I was a bit disappointed that Ron didn’t explain the Taboo bit–that the mention of Voldemort’s name will automatically call the Snatchers–because when I read it in the book it absolutely blew my mind. We’ve been told that Voldemort is a very intelligent, talented, capable wizard, but I think small details like that really show it. It also shows, I think, how evil he really is. He not only finds a way to separate Harry from everyone else (because he knows Harry’s one of the few who actually says the name), he also mocks Harry’s (and by extension Dumbledore’s) bravery. He wants to keep the wizarding world in a constant state of fear, and creating such an intense fear of his name alone is, in my opinion, sheer, terrifying genius.

A couple posters have mentioned the contemptible treatment of muggles even by the best of the wizarding world. I think those posters are presenting it as a flaw in the writing, but if they are, I have to say I disagree. I think it’s brilliant. It’s a great cultural tidbit because it’s so imperialistic. I think that the real-life Europe probably had this very same attitude towards the indigenous populations of the countries they colonized. So in that sense, one could argue that this plot device shows that muggle culture and wizarding culture are that much more connected to each other–and neither group even realizes it. Now, whether or not JK Rowling did this intentionally, I have no idea. But it definitely shows that whatever wizards might think, they’re more connected to muggles than they know.