"Voldemorte is not a villain" discussion

Cafe Society
1

Re-reading the Harry Potter series (yes, spoilers below), I came to a startling conclusion: Voldemorte is not a villain. Oh, yes, he’s opposttion. He’s evil. He’s inhumanly evil. But he’s not a villain.

The reason I came to this idea was that I noticed that he was utterly, irredeemably evil. He was, in fact, not in the least bit human in any identifiable sense, possibly not even physically much anymore. I started thinking about this when I heard some magazine had named Voldemorte one of its top ten most iconic villains.

This is a problem for me.

In order to be a villain, I think a character has to be comprehensible. Voldemorte isn’t. Most of his actions, upon close inspection, are wholly pointless. He has no good qualities, not even slightly. He’s a filthy, cruel monster, and a coward to boot. (A powerful coward, who can usually dominate the scene, but a coward nonetheless, willing to run the minute the going gets tough.) He really doesn’t have any virtues. And I think a villain needs that. Voldemorte doesn’t really sound as though he ever had anything good about it to make a choice about. From age 10, he was already a heartless monster and he started murdering for kicks before he left school.

He may not need to be a tragic villain, but I think there has to be something which connects me to the villain. As it is, he seems much more like an animal than a man (and not even a snake). He kills and tortures simply because it’s easy and fun. The idea that there ever might be something wrong with it doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to him. Harry Potter eveidently hates him, but I can’t. Mostly, I don’t really think much of him at all, except as a vague nebulous force of evil. But The Devil does not a make a good villain: it’s too remote a concept.

Aside from that, I dislike Voldemorte as a character because he’s not very bright. All it would tale would be one sniper and bam Dumbledore’s down. Time it right and Harry goes down, too. Maybe takse out McGonagall or some other foes.

2

I opened this thread thinking you were going to be arguing that Voldemort is just misunderstood or that his actions have been grossly misinterpreted by Dumbledore & Co., sort of a “the victors write history” argument. Oh, well.

No, I think he’s a villain. He does have some attributes: he’s very smart, is an extremely talented wizard, and has a pretty good understanding of psychology and human nature (which he uses to manipulate and control others, naturally!) but he’s not totally lacking in “good qualities.” He just monstrously misapplies them.

3

You’re right. He’s hollow, nothing. Just a faceless foil. There’s nothing at all interesting about him. He’s a plot device.

Welcome to the world of reading shitty writers.

4

Eh. There are irredeemable psychopaths in the world, and Tom Riddle was one. Some stories benefit from villains who are misunderstood/traumatized/whatever rather than just plain evil, but I think it would be the wrong choice for Harry Potter.

5

Sorry. I don’t think anyone could do that, although admittedly there’s no particular reason he’d abe any worse as ruler of England’s Wizards than the completely inept and self-centered Ministry of Magic.

I think we’re talking at cross-purposes. I’m not talking about having some good qualities. I think a villain needs to have some virtue in some way. Even a heartless killer needs to have some love of comfort and good fun, a rapist needs to, say, like his mom and send her flowers every year. Something. Voldemorte has power, but he doesn’t have any virtue at all.

He doesn’t even have a virtue which is very good for a villain - the ability to ignore social convention and act according to his own lights. But he doesn’t even do that. He actually more or less follows every convention of the wizards, even though he probably ought not to for his own sake. He doesn’t even have any fortitude - he constantly sends out his own minions for him. He just runs away after having spent a few moments fighting Dumbledore. In fact, his biggest move in that fight was to leap inside Harry’s body to make Dumbledore try to kill them both. Which, of course, Harry had no defense against.

Heck, he’s not even very good at conquest and bringing order, and even the Evil Emperor (Star Wars) could do that. The EMperor is actuall;y a good counter-example, since while he is grotesquely evil, he displays considerable toughness in the series. He’s willing to risk his life in several spots, and while he won’t fight if he doesn’t gain from it, he doesn’t back down when it’s neccessary. He shows some real cojones in taking over the top spot in the Republic, even as he is a treacherous fiend.

When I talk about virtue, I think a villain needs to have some qualities beside just power (in whatever form you talk about it). The virtue might be high ideals, a kindness to some group or person, loyalty, the willingness to keep going when the going gets tough. It can even be a certain sense of style and self-referential humor.

6

Those aren’t “good” qualities, though. They’re just things he’s good at. A good quality, as the OP is using the term would, would be something humanizing about him, something that would make you like or respect the villain despite his evil. Darth Vader, in the end, loved his son enough to turn on his master. Khan, in Star Trek II, wanted revenge for his dead wife, killed during their exile. Saruman was once the chief of the Istari and head of the White Council, before he was corrupted by Sauron. Hell, even Hitler was kind to small animals.

Totally irredeemable psychopaths don’t make good villains. They can make good plot devices, but they fail to engage me on an emotional level, becauss there’s nothing human about them. Hating a psychopath is like hating a rabid dog, or a hurricane. It’s dangerous and destructive, sure, but you can’t really say that it’s that way because of a moral choice, so much as a basic defect in it nature.

7

Right. You can hate a human villain, but you can’t hate an inhuman monster.

The trouble with inhuman monsters is that there’s no particular reason for what they do. Voldemort supposedly wants to take over the Wizards. But…why? What does he get out of it? He’s simply a being of pure hate, why would he enjoy being king of the world?

8

Yep. That’s what I’m thinking. In the first book, you could sort of despise him, but I can’t really hate him. He’s like a rabid tiger: he mostly kills and tortures out of instinct, though sometimes because of a very specific gain he can get.

I don’t expect every villain to be a tortured soul. But I just don’t really fit Voldemort into the category of villain, nor do I really care if he’s defeated. It’s just a task somebody has to do, like shoveling manure. But I don’t particularly care about doing it or care how it gets done, just as long as it does.

This is actually something which has bothered me in the specific. Why does Voldemorte want power over other wizards? He’s never once shown the slightest interest in actually ruling or making any such decisions. He has no particular thing he wants to do differently, other than favor a slightly different (and more violent) group of rulers. Moreover, if he’s trying to cheat death, he’s going about it in a terrible fashion, making himself a huge target for everyone to want to take down.

9

Here’s my take on it. Voldemort acts out of self hatred. He is a half-blood who believes as Slytherin did that only pure bloods should exist in the wizard world. It is an inherently self-destructive path in that he is what he hates.

10

Voldemort is motivated by a pathological fear of death, which stems from his perception of his mother’s death as personal weakness. I thought that was made pretty clear in Book 6.

I don’t think he wants to take over the Ministry of Magic in order to govern. He wants to take over the Ministry of Magic in order to a) eliminate the Auror Corps that has been the most effective oppostion to him, and b) discover the secrets in the Department of Mysteries, especially if any relate to immortality, and to put said department’s resources to work for him. The day-to-day Percy Weasley type stuff he doesn’t care about at all.

11

Well, to be fair, it’s obvious no one other than Percy cares about the day-to-day Percy Weasley type stuff either.

12

Not even his boss seems to really care. Poor Weatherby.

13

Was this strictly necessary?

14

I’ve only read through the books once (unlike many Dopers, I’m sure). But don’t we get a lot of backstory on Volde? And doesn’t that earlier Volde show a more human side?

As the previous poster mentions, we’re shown that his pathological behavior stems at least partly from his dead mother and also from feeling like an outcast due to being abbandoned by his father.

Indeed I though one of the more obvious themes in the books is “there but for the grace of God goes Harry Potter…”, that is that young Volde is very similar to young Harry (Orphans, bad pre-wizard homelife, both the focus of Hogwarts during their stay there, etc.), and indeed they could’ve easily turned out similarly except for the influence of Harry’s friends and the example of his parents.

Snape, not Volde, is by far the best villian in the book, though, at least if we judge villians by having complex and somewhat sympathetic characters as the OP suggests.

15

I disagree. CS Lewis’s book Perelandra has Satan as a very effective villain.

16

I suppose I can see the argument that Voldemort isn’t actually a “villain”, in the sense that the OP is talking about. But I’m not sure it hurts the series, since there are plenty of other characters who can fill the “villain” role quite adequately. Bellatrix is motivated, above all, by her intense loyalty to Voldemort. It’s a misplaced loyalty, of course, but loyalty is a virtue. Umbridge is driven by a desire for order. The Dementors don’t destroy just for the heck of it, they do so because they hunger, and that’s what sustains them. The Dursleys are jealous of magic, and Draco seeks approval from his peers. And then there’s Snape, whom I don’t think anyone has really been able to figure out, yet.

I think that Rowling recognizes, even, that Voldemort is lacking as a villain. Remember when Lupin’s class is confronting the Boggart, and Harry is considering what it is he fears the most? The thought of Voldemort crosses his mind, but no, he’s seen Voldemort, and knows just how pathetic he is. He doesn’t particularly hate Voldemort, certainly not in the same way he hates Bellatrix or Snape, so much as just seeing him as an evil which must be destroyed.

17

Errr… not really. He was a cruel child who tormented his fellows and intimidated them with his magical powers. He was already a burgeoning sociopath, with no known empathy, friendships, or respect. he didnt have magic powers and hadn’t cut his soul up, but he behaved no differently.

Actually, there really wasn’t anything which suggested Riddle had a bad childhood. It wasn’t fantastic, but he seemed to lack nothing and had rather experienced caregivers. Voldemorte does seem to have gotten his particular obsessions from his family history, but ihs sociopathy was already present in childhood.

Yup. Villains don’t have to be complex (Ming the Merciless, anyone?), but there does need to be something sympathetic or personal about them. Snape, regardless of arguments over whether he is or is not a traitor to Dumbledore, apparently does care about Slytherin house. He goes to great lengths to advance it’s interests simply because he likes it, even though it doesn’t benefit him.

True. But it as specifically intended as a nigh-unstoppable creature of evil, greater than man, and incomprehensible. Voldemorte, well, isn’t. He’s quite clearly comprehensible, just rather dull. Unfortuntely, most out-and-out villains are. Hitler and Stalin are actually pretty banal people.

The Terminator or The Xenomorph are good examples of monsters which are not villains. But Voldemort isn’t like them. He’s not particularly implacable or even all that more powerful than his opponents (he may be more powerful, but not on another order of magnitude). He’s actually rather vulnerable in person. In short, he could be a very good Monster is he were shown to be more dangerous than presently so.

18

Not to mention “Paradise Lost”.

Not strictly, but it kind of serves as the answer.

We’re talking about the villain in what is really just an adventure book, a page-turner. He doesn’t have to be comprehensible, or sympathetic. You just need a sinister thing. He just pops up when he needs to, like the enemy at the end of a level of Mario Brothers.

Not to get too artsy here, but there are villains with unclear motivations who are interesting to discuss. . .e.g. Iago in Othello. But it seems odd to bring it up in the context of a book that is designed to just be a page-turner. he’s just there to serve the story, not be a thing unto himself.

Whether he’s technically a “villain” or not is really just dependent on your definition of “villain”. The OP’s definition seems to hinge on the fact that he has to be “comprehensible”. I’m not sure why this is. But, Voldemort, like Harry’s relatives, like the Weasley’s, like the blond family is just a cardboard cutout, a thing to give Harry something to do, something to interact with.

19

So what would you say about Darth Vader if A New Hope was the only Star Wars?

20

That’s a good comparison. Darth Vader in Star Wars is about all Voldemort has even been. Only, he’s had 6 chances to progress.

Darth Vader’s story ends up becoming everyone’s story. How the action unfolds, the character’s motivations, most things depend on their relationship to Vader. He ends up being more interesting than Luke or Han, and because of that, their stories become more compelling.

I haven’t read the latest HP book. Maybe that gets explored a little more. I always wanted more on their relationship. I wanted a little more temptation for Harry to go snakey, but nothing has seemed to get deeper since the first book. They just always square off in some new way.

Couldn’t Voldemort have been a lover of Harry’s mother? Couldn’t he have been a good guy who was slighted by some old headmaster? Couldn’t he have lost his own parents somehow? (maybe some of this has happened and I’ve missed it.)

I don’t know. . .I’m not a writer, but there just seems to be nothing there. He’s always just the big dark menace, and that’s it.