Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Chaos-Pand4 OP t1_j1xmzqe wrote

Reply to comment by Chaos-Pand4 in [WP] In an alternate timeline, the Sorting Hat attempts to prevent Tom Riddle’s fall by putting him into… by Chaos-Pand4

Meanwhile every victory of Slytherin is a proof that they are far superior than the half-bloods and muggle-borns.

Tom could have carried it further than others though. He was smart enough and angry enough and disillusioned enough by the life he had led thus far to carry it much, much further than any other Slytherin might.

That potential comes up in a person every now and then. Truth be told I have done this before. I have sensed the potential heir of Slytherin before… four times before to be exact.

No one likes to admit a contentious relationship with their progenitor, but Salazar was a Knob… I said what i said.

So I have squashed it before and I will squash it again. No one needs a basilisk stalking the halls of Hogwarts. No one needs another dark wizard raiding the restricted section of the library and attempting a return to the dark ages.

This story is getting long, so I’ll end it.

I sorted Tom into Hufflepuff. I sort MOST potential dark wizards into Hufflepuff. I haven’t had a dark wizard in all my years.

They go in angry, they go in wanting power, they go in convinced that they’re the best thing to hit the wizarding world since self-slicing bread.

Then they meet a rather jolly fellow Hufflepuff. Maybe a half-blood, maybe a muggle-born, maybe a pureblood who just doesn’t mesh with his family all that well.

“Slytherin is terrible!” That person tells them. “We always root against them in Quidditch, no matter who they play against.”

“Here, have some cake,” they say, “The house elves always treat us the best.”

“You can stay with me this summer if you like,” the natural-borne Hufflepuff says to the emotionally neglected, potential villain, “I can tell you don’t want to go back to that orphanage. My mom makes really great chicken curry!”

They’re eleven and they are above all, MALLEABLE.

Most of them turn out fine. Some of them turn out fat. A few of them remain jerks, but powerless jerks… because unlike Slytherin, a house for recruiting evil minions, Hufflepuff is not. Nor do the products of Slytherin find it easy to take a Hufflepuff seriously.

So yes. I made Tom Riddle a Hufflepuff. He currently works at Honeydukes. He isn’t as happy as he could be, but his friend Isidor Jenkins (who more or less adopted him in first year), takes him out for butter beer nightly.

“If I could work at Honeydukes I would DIE of happiness, Tom. You’re so lucky!” Isidor works for the Ministry, and it is boring.

“I should be more, I could be more!” Tom cries.

“You’ll run your own shop one day. Sure as rain. You make the best chocolate frogs anyone ever saw.”

“Chocolate frogs are stupid.” Tom cries.

“If you say so, Tom. You know candy better than anyone alive!”

Tom is slightly mollified. He DOES know candy better than anyone alive!

“Chocolate grasshoppers would be better.” He says, “grasshoppers can jump much farther respective to their body size than frogs. We would get much more jump per chocolate than with frogs.”

“Have you told your boss that?” Isidor asks.

“Yes.” Tom says. His boss said it was a really great idea too. It made him feel nice, to be acknowledged for his brilliance that way. He really was very smart.

“You really are very smart.” Isidor tells him. “You could have been a Ravenclaw for sure.

He could have been, Tom knows. Frankly he always felt that the sorting hat did rather badly misplace him. He wasn’t especially fond of chocolate, his excellence in enchanting it aside.

Is Tom as happy as he might have been, if I had placed him into Slytherin? Maybe not.

Maybe instead of inventing chocolate grasshoppers, he would have ruled the wizarding world (or some United Kingdom-sized portion thereof). Maybe he would have been less happy, and running a shop selling shrunken heads in knock-turn alley (again… I sort them when they are ELEVEN).

He hasn’t split his soul into eight or nine pieces either, though, so I will take the win.

I am the sorting hat of reality 4789, signing off.

68

Gaelhelemar t1_j1z4i25 wrote

Haha, this sounds exactly like a Sorting Hat monologue.

13

HopingToWriteWell77 t1_j1zo4z0 wrote

Tom Riddle Sr. was under the effects of a love potion when Tom Marvolo Riddle was conceived. It is canon knowledge that when one parent is under the influence of a love potion at the time a child is conceived, that child will be unable to feel love of any kind. Tom Marvolo Riddle was born without any ability to love, or feel compassion for, any living thing.

7

Gaelhelemar t1_j1zxif9 wrote

Well that’s sucky worldbuilding there. Tom didn’t become evil on his own, he was destined to be evil. I don’t like that one bit.

12

HopingToWriteWell77 t1_j228dgb wrote

Well, he did enjoy torturing the other kids at the orphanage, didn't he? "I can make them hurt, if I want to." He got another boy's rabbit to hang itself from the rafters, and a couple of younger kids were so traumatized by him that they were, according to the orphanage head Mrs. Cole, "never quite the same after."

1

Gaelhelemar t1_j22duz1 wrote

Yeah, that's upbringing, not because he was literally souless.

1

HopingToWriteWell77 t1_j24inq9 wrote

Harry had a horrible upbringing, too, but did he torture other kids for fun? No, he just learned how to run really fast and avoid being punched.

However, if you look at Tom Riddle - who was well cared for, if not given as much love and attention as a child should have since there were so many of them at the orphanage - what do we see? We see a kid who collects harmonicas and other odds and ends from his victims when he is ELEVEN. At eleven years old, Harry was looking forward to not having to go to the same school as his cousin. Tom was a clever, sneaky liar who assumed Dumbledore was a doctor sent by Mrs. Cole to look at him, possibly take him away to a madhouse, and then promptly told Dumbledore that Mrs. Cole was the mad one who didn't like him and that he never touched any of the other kids or anyone's pets, and that she'd made it all up. He was a manipulative, clever, and downright disturbed child.

1

Chaos-Pand4 OP t1_j200p0t wrote

That doesn’t really change the fact that putting him in slytherin gives him access to all of the tools, associates, and philosophy that he needs in order to become a Dark Lord.

I don’t necessarily state that he loves being a candy maker… just that he likes having his ego stroked about it.

There are lots of psychopaths out there who DON’T become serial killers too.

9

HopingToWriteWell77 t1_j22adg0 wrote

It was Tom that was the problem, not the house he was in.

I agree, given the right circumstances, he might have turned out all right, but from the moment he was born he was doomed. As a child, he actively hurt the other children at the orphanage, to the point where two of them were never quite the same afterwards and everyone else was afraid of him. He kept trophies, too - at age eleven!

But he still could have been saved at Hogwarts - if the wizarding community had realized his home life was poor, and had a system in place for orphaned or unwanted magical children, and he'd been taken in by a family like the Weasleys. He could have been taught proper right and wrong, and perhaps he could have been saved.

Tom hunted for his father everywhere in that school for years, assuming that he was the magical one because he believed that had his mother been magical, she could have saved herself. He only looked for Marvolo once he'd been unable to find any Tom Riddle in any records, finding Marvolo Gaunt and his son Morfin. When he was fifteen, he went to see if Morfin was worth knowing, found a filthy, hairy wreck, and was told he looked like a Muggle down in the village that his mother had once run off with. At fifteen/sixteen, he killed his father and paternal grandparents, framed his uncle, and took his uncle's family ring as a trophy. He assumed, and was never told otherwise, that his father had only left his mother because he found out she was a witch - he did not know about the love potion.

He was obsessed with power at age eleven. That stayed throughout his life. He assumed, at age eleven, that dying made his mother weak and non-magical. He kept trophies of his victims, at age eleven. No matter where he was placed, he would likely have turned out evil, because he would have had classes with the Slytherins and been exposed to their ideologies.

Although, yes, he may have become a candy maker.

1

Chaos-Pand4 OP t1_j22bjdo wrote

Yeah but there’s Voldemort evil and there’s Umbridge evil. I think he would always be a shit person, but without the tools to spin it into anything, he might just be middle-management levels of evil.

2