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Vinelle: Hi, and welcome to the newest episode of Rink Heresy. Today we are going to talk about Tom Riddle, more specifically, Voldemort's body after he was resurrected and no longer looked very pretty. This episode's a fun girl's despair. Muffin: I don't know. People get this is a side note and not the topic of this episode, but there is large debate, especially in certain niches of the fandom, of whether you're being wrong by not considering his emaciated snake body to be beautiful. Vinelle: Perhaps the larger debate in these same small and near corners is how sexy is he? Is he really hot? Muffin: Is he a hot, emaciated snake man? Or is he an ugly, emaciated snake man? Vinelle: Those who are. If you are debating it, then the answer is going to be yes. Muffin: Anyway, we're taking a break from murder mysteries to talk about this. Vinelle: Specifically. What we're talking about is our theory that the body we see after his resurrection in Goblet of Fire is in fact not his body, but a homunculus, as you say, an artificial just puppet that he is possessing in place of his own body, seeing as the previous one was kind of destroyed. Muffin: This is very spicy, by the way. Vinelle: Yeah, the official story is that tarmidal huffed, the dark gods too much and he slowly turned into the skeleton we see, complete with the nose is receding, receding, receding. Muffin: You got a report coming. And there's no nose. Yeah, if anyone else remembers those PowerPoint slides, they'd scare you not to do methamphetamine. That's Tom Riddle's dark lord body. Yeah, don't do dark arts, kids. Vinelle: Oh, he wound up being in the curriculum for defense against the dark arts after all. Muffin: The PowerPoint slide. And this will happen to you, right. So, as we always do, let's talk about what happened in canon. So we start out with Tom, and he's a wraith. That's how we begin the series in philosopher's stone. He's in the back of Coral's head. He is not in his own body. He is this immortal Wraith thing. We lose track of him for two years, where he hangs out in Albania for a bit, then comes back. And then in Harry's fourth year in goblet of fire, he resurrects himself in the graveyard, and it looks bald and snaky. And we also know this was not his first choice. His first choice was the philosopher's stone. He had everything he needed to do this graveyard ritual, and he didn't choose to do it for another two years after the philosopher's stone debacle happened. Vinelle: Yeah. He was more willing to break into Hogwarts under Dumbledore's nose while stuck to the back of curl's head with just embarrassed sort of facial features sort of sticking out like he had eyes in a mouth. And that was his life for a year and that was his preferred plan, instead of just going for the know. Muffin: Now that you mention it, I'm trying to imagine enacting any plan. But the caveat is you must be stuck to the back of Quirrell's head and smothered in garlic at all times. Vinelle: Because you smell very bad. Muffin: You smell very bad. Yeah. Anyway, point being, he was not having a good time. Vinelle: That is his preferred plan over plan b, which is what we see him resort to in goblet of fire. We are in dire straits here. He is scraping the bottom of barrel and I would like to see what his plan C would have been. Muffin: Just how much lower can we get. Vinelle: If that had not worked? Muffin: Yeah. What was plan C anyway? In Dumbledore's interview in canon, he shows Harry a memory in which Tom looks waxy and weird. He's still human at this point, but he's kind of gross looking and it's as if he's starting whatever metamorphosis will happen to him later. And that was in the 1950s, is when that memory is supposed to be set. But hold that thought. We always have thoughts on those memories. And then we also have Tom's flashback to Godrick's Hollow and Deathly Hallows, which we will also talk about in which we do not see him because it's from his point of view. But he mentions there is a kid there who says, nice mask, Mr. Which implies that he looks the way he does. And that's what we have from the books. Vinelle: Now, I'm going to do a bit of the inseparable sort of nerding you get when someone who has no medical education just starts talking about body parts and anatomy. But I'm going to do it. Muffin: You're going to do it anyway. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but let me dust off this armchair here and sit in it. Vinelle: I am, in fact, sitting in an. Muffin: Armchair, sadly, someone who knows far more about biology than we do. And I'm sure we're going to say something very stupid. Vinelle: Yeah, but the thing is, we have already posted on Tumblr and they didn't correct us. Muffin: True. Vinelle: We tend to get like little subtle notes on discord, like, hey, you sounded really stupid. Yeah, you said something really, when we don't get those. Yeah. Muffin: And biology is already always dangerous because it's neither of our fields. So I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but we're going to do it anyway. Vinelle: Yeah. So first off, just a disclaimer. When we argue that this sort of seems like it could be a homunculus and not a real human body. The thing is, you can't really argue that it's not what the progressive effect of dark arts would look like on a human being in the Harry Potter universe, because we know nothing about the dark arts in the harap Potter universe. They're completely unexplained. They are just very nebulous. Oh, this person is a dark wizard. And we never see any examples. So, like, for instance, fiend fire is one of the few things we see. You will notice that fan fiction recycles it endlessly because it's kind of what we've. Yeah, very. JKR was very clearly not interested in that. It's just we never get a definition. What are the dark arts? What exactly means. Does it mean when a person calls himself a dark lord? So when it said a terminal dublin dark gods, and that's why he looks like that, you can't really argue against it because nobody is here telling us that the dark gods don't do that. But we're still going to do this thought experiment. And to do that, I'll just start with the fact that he seems to have a normal skeleton and no cartilage. And I'm saying that because his nose isn't actually absent, he has the nostrils. It's just that it doesn't protrude from his face and his lips, they're just completely like. There's a mouth, but there's nothing else. His fingers come across as naturally long, but I think that could just be that the skin around them is. The tissue around them is sort of missing. So you're just looking at just phalanges with skin over. Actually. Muffin: Does he have ears? Vinelle: That's what I've been wondering about and I've been looking it up and there's no mention of any know, there's not. Muffin: Mention of ears, but there's no mention of ears either. And I'm starting. Vinelle: The thing is, Harry tends to mention everything about Voldemort's form. But on the other hand, why would he have ears, which take cartilage to form, but no nose, which also takes cartilage to form? Why would he have no lips? Where are these ears coming from. So I'm sort of biased towards no ears. Yeah. The skeleton, however, is proportional. His steps are completely human. He can walk. The steps are completely human in how they come across. We've all seen those videos of training a robot to walk and it's just stumbling or doing really weird steps. It's nothing like that. He's doing perfectly human gait. His height is within normal human range. The ratio is fine. It's just that everything else is just a budget person skipped out on everything else. And it sort of indicates that the bones he used, because you'd know that he used the bones of his father, that those worked according to the blueprint, perfectly. It's just that he doesn't have any other things going for him. There's that. And there's also something I find very interesting, which is his pupils. He has vertical pupils like a cat, but they never, ever dial it. They never move, no matter the light, no matter his emotion. He always has those slit like pupils. And I know Harrida brought that up because Harry is always talking about his red eyes. He never goes. And then Voldemort's eyes are black, like a cat watching a bird through the window. Muffin: Making. Vinelle: The point I'm trying to make here is that this body seems like just the barest humanoid sort of thing. Where he made, for instance, the pupils to look like, yeah, this is totally a legitimate human body. But the pupils aren't dilating. They're not even doing that. It sounds to me like a doll. Muffin: I was going to say it's functional. It's very highly functional, very efficient. But it has none of the bells and whistles. Vinelle: Exactly. It is literally just a body that enables him to walk across a room, hold a wand, talk, all of that. But he didn't do any of the aesthetics. Suffice to say nothing else, I really have my doubts about him ever. There's no mention of him ever needing to sleep, of waking up. Harry catches him at all hours of the day due to his connection in both order of the Phoenix and Daphne Hallows. And in Daphne Hallows, Tom isn't aware of it, but we never see him having taken a meal or a break or anything. He's just go, go all the time. Probably just has to stand in the sun or something to use the sunlight. Muffin: Yeah. And this was also something, is that he's super duper pale and he's consistently. There's no flushing, no sign of blood flow moving. So it's unclear if he has much blood flow in. Yeah, yeah. We know Harry's blood is in his veins and the blood wards are done now and Lily's protections are done. But it's unclear what it's doing in there or how much is in there. Vinelle: And then we have the circumstances under which this homunculus was made. He was not given access to his every resource, he did not have fancy labs. If he had any books, he might have wanted to read up on, notes, old notes from when he was perhaps planning back in the past, before he was vanquished. He did have those horcruxes. He knew that a time of emergency might come, he might have had something prepared, but he was unable to access any of his resources. He was just sitting in a Muggle house with Peter Pettigrew. And Peter Pettigrew has no education beyond Hogwarts as we know of. But I strongly doubt that. I feel it would have been mentioned if Peter Pettigrew was a healer or something. I feel that would have come off if he had a job. Point being, Tom is sitting there essentially improvising everything while himself severely disabled and not able to actually do any of this himself. The ritual he designs has to be something that an ordinary wizard with no particular experience in the dark gods has to be able to carry out. So it has to be simple, basic. And I'm sensing a lot of compromises in the design process here is what I'm saying. Muffin: Yeah, a lot of compromises. And we talked about this already, but we know it's not the first choice. He went after the philosopher's stone and he put in a lot of effort and a lot of risk to go after that stone. He plans this for months. He puts quirrell in there. He has to discover all the things he has Quirrell go through three headed dogs, drink unicorn blood. This is his second try trying to get the stone and he does not give up on it. It ends up being destroyed. And then again, this thing he does is a number of years later. What this implies is that if he had gotten the philosopher's stone, he probably would have gotten better results or the results he wanted. Vinelle: It's in fact his third attempt. First was in France, then in the green gods, and then he follows it to Hogwarts. He's not giving up on that stone, he's following it across all of Europe. And, yeah, so it's finally destroyed. And the thing is, when he's in Hogwarts and even in Lichehol cauldron, when he runs into Harry, the entire time he had access to his father's grave. He had, you know, that he could use to serve another flesh part of the ritual. And he had access to Harry. For almost a year in school, he had access to Harry, and he doesn't use it. He could have used any enemy, for that matter, depending on how desperate he was, but he doesn't do it. He would rather have the philosopher's stone. And that brings me to the point of, okay, Tom's now been forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel, and he's come up with his homunculus. Hooray. He says very unenthusiastically, and I think the homunculus was meant to be temporary, because a core ingredient is Harry's blood, and he intends to kill Harry immediately afterwards, as in, he invites everybody, come here, look, I'm going to kill this kid right away. And after that, there's no need for this homunculus that is designed specifically to be able to kill Harry. If anything, it seems that the reason why he designed Homunculus the way he did was so it would be able to kill Harry. That's why he had the whole blood of the enemy part of the ritual. And to me, that's a very strong implication that after killing Harry, he would have gone on to create something better. And then it doesn't work out. Harry is still alive. And I'll get a bit further into Tom's determination to kill Harry later on, but from Tom's point of view, I think Harry was never like. He immediately tries to go about prophecy. That's what he does. After this, he tries to figure out, okay, how am I supposed to kill this kid? Because this kid is getting so lucky. I'm going to find out what this prophecy was all about so I can finally get him dead. But we're still looking at a very short time frame, Renee, a grown man. One more year is not a lot. And after that, it's two more years before deathly Hallows. Like it's ever. You're looking at one of those things where that project you were supposed to get it done with just overnight is. It's been three years, and I'm not done. Oh, my God. And if you had known from the get go that it was going to be so long, you might have gone about things differently. But Tom didn't know this, and he's already got Harry killing Homunculus. Why get a new one right away? I think he was going to wait for that until after Harry was dead. But for now, he's stuck and sort of just tapping his foot increasingly impatiently. I need to get over this. So he can get a new body already. Muffin: Yeah, and to expand a bit on why this homunculus is important for killing Harry, remember, it specifically thwarts those weird blood protections where if you touch Harry, you light on fire and who knows what else. Vinelle: Yeah, he kind of needs that Homunculus. It's either that or having just an unkillable enemy who already vanquished him once running amok. Muffin: Yeah. Whatever blood protections were put on Harry by his mother, they are terrifying. So he has to have this body to nullify those before he can do anything. So that is what we mean by he's in this specifically kill Harry body meat suit. Vinelle: God, you can argue this is in fact his plan C, because I'm sure there are better solutions out there. But he is the best one, most philosopher's stone. And then he found out that the protections around Harry are even more terrifying than he realized, and now he's just going to have to deal with that before he does anything else. And then he never gets any further. You can really feel his frustration here. Muffin: So I'm sure this is the point where people who have strongly objected to us, well, they probably don't even listen to this podcast anymore. And good for you. Yeah. Vinelle: So maybe just skip this entire part. Muffin: Maybe we should just skip this entire part. Anyway, we're going to do it anyway. I'm sure people have a lot of objections. And this is the first one. Everyone recognized him. What's up with that? So the Death Eaters immediately know who summoned them. They show no vocal surprise. They don't think this is. Well, they do think it's out of the ordinary, but nobody doesn't think it's Voldemort. They immediately know who it is. Trouble is, he summoned them via the dark mark, which is something only Voldemort can do. And he looks the part. Remember, he has been dead for 15 years. He gives this whole speech about how he's transcended the use of magic. It doesn't matter if he doesn't look like what he did. He's been dead. Vinelle: Yeah, you don't really doubt that. God, there's a perfect analogy coming to mind, and I can't put it in the words, but you put someone through a meat grinder and then you go. You're looking a bit like you were put through a meat grinder. What the hell? It's what you would expect. Leave the poor man alone. I would not look like a model either. Muffin: Point being, if he looks like this horrifying snake eldritch abomination. It honestly kind of fits for a man who's been dead for 15 years. This is the Tevia moment. Well, for a woman who's been dead for 15 years, she was looking very well. Vinelle: I think Tevia says 30 years, actually. Muffin: Oh, yeah, 30 years. For a woman who's been dead for 30 years, she was looking very well. Vinelle: You also have fudge. Immediately he takes one look at Voldemort and this is after Harry had a highly publicized interview where he described exactly what Voldemort looked like. You'll remember Rita Skewter asks about this. She wants the details on what's, you know, look like. And then fudge, like a month later, sees, oh, my God, a guy fitting that exact description running across the ministry. Muffin: Atrium fighting with Dumbledore and Harry Potter's on the floor. Vinelle: And then he picks up Belchick's lestrange and disappoints. Muffin: It's not surprising that even if that wasn't what he had looked like, even if Fudge had not known what he had looked like before his death, he's going to think that's Voldemort as it is. Vinelle: It seems Tom kept, he didn't exactly keep a low profile during the 70s but he kept himself very mysterious, by all accounts, while he was going around pueblos early on to recruit and make a name for himself. He is mysterious enough. And there's no known pictures of him, nothing that I think what he looked like is probably something that's been hypothesized a lot of. They say he looks like the kraken running around the wizarding bars, I'm sure. Muffin: Yeah. Given his reputation and the fact that he was Tom Marvolo Riddle is not a very well known fact to the wizarding population, it seems. Yeah, nobody really knew what he looked like. Vinelle: So moving on to Harry's memories, and by Harry's memories, we here mean the flashback in definitely Hannah's mentioned earlier. I will just say straight away that it's a very strange flashback. The context of this flashback is that Harry has a very upsetting time. After, I would argue Nagini had an even more upsetting time in the surprise comedic highlight of several Chapters of Deathly Hallows. I can't resist going on a small tangent. So imagine you are nagini. You have been given a mission. Muffin: You are a snake. Vinelle: You are a snake. It is December in Britain. It is cold. There's snow everywhere. You have been given this mission to watch Godjik's hello for Harry Potter, should he show up and, oh, my God, you see a witch and a wizard watching the potter grave. So you hurry on to the Potter memorial where they died and you see that same witch and wizard are standing there, anthropologists, granted, dressed as muggles. But you slip into your baffilda suit and this is where it gets beautiful because not only did you have to race across the snow and you are a snake, you now have to lure them into a decrepit old woman's house without talking that you can't speak. You can't have this come across as strange. And you have to do things like hold keys, put them in a lock with fingers. All this to say that Baffilda is a very clumsy woman who fumbles a lot and Harry and Hermione are their beautiful people. They think, oh, no, we must help the old lady with things like light candles all across the room. She's lighting a lot of candles. It's like she wants it to be very warm in here. While they're going around trying to look at Mafila's house and see if they can get her to talk, McGinnis just frantically lighting every single candle in reach. Poor snake is cold and not supposed to be in this kind of temperature. She eventually gets Harry upstairs and there she summons Tom and she tries to restrain Harry and things just turn into a chaos. And Tom arrives just a second too late. And he's just reminded that, God **** it, this is the exact same place I was fortunate before. I hate this ******* village so much. And Harry, who was mildly injured, he then descends into a weird sort of fever dream. Know I'm Tom and Tom is me and I'm a snake and I'm not a vanilla snake because I'm Tom and it is 1981 and I am on my way to kill my parents and I am so evil that I'm going to think a lot about how, and I quote, this is an actual part from the flashback as narrated. How stupid ever and how trusting, thinking that their safety lie in friends, that weapons could be discarded even for moments. And what I'm trying to get across here is that it very much reads like Harry and Tom are having some sort of joint fever dream here. It might even arguably be, just know this is sacrilege. Muffin: But it feels a lot like it's just Harry because it's very weirdly performative. Tom walks through the street. The Muggle children are unaware. Say, nice mask, Mr. He sneers at them. He sneers at the house. He thinks how useless friends are. And then he kills James. Vinelle: He sees a toddler and he thinks about the orphanage because he was a sad toddler. Yeah, it feels performative. The thing is, Harry knows the broad strokes. He knows what happened to his family. We hear James and Lily say exactly what Harry remembers them hearing this is what human memory does. We reconstruct things without being aware that we have done so. We fill in the blanks. We imagine that we have remembered things we haven't actually remembered. Filling in the blanks will also mean that Harry will remember things such as how Woodmore looks the way he expects him to. The entire memory comes across very unreliable. Even if Tom is also part of the recollecting here. Because again, this seems like we found out in this chapter what happens if Tom and Harry share a bong. Muffin: No, but we did. That's what we learned from that chapter, isn't it? Vinelle: It is. It might have been just Harry. It might be Tom left and then Harry got really stoned on his own. But it could be they were in it together. Either way, Tom was blown apart on a molecular level that night. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to trust his memory of events at all either. Muffin: Yeah, that's a good point. Did his brain fully reconstruct all the memories when he homunculified himself? Vinelle: Honestly. But we get into that a bit further below after we have this bullet pointed. But there is the argument of did he come back? Muffin: Right. Anyway, yeah, we're not at that bullet point yet. Vinelle: Not yet. Muffin: So what about Dumbledore? Well, we had a whole episode on Dumbledore and those memories. So this will just be the highlights. And if you want to argue with us on that, there's a whole episode to do it and then choose to disagree with us because people don't like this one. Anyway, the highlights are, remember, Dumbledore has an agenda. He has to convince Harry that Voldemort is so evil that Harry as a person must kill himself to destroy the Horcrux and that there is no other option. He must consent to death. So this is not the first memory that Harry was shown. And Harry had previously gotten really weird about the memory of Hespaba Smith where Tom was really hot. We don't have the books right in front of us, but trust us, he spends a lot of it staring at Tom's face and just looking at Hespaba staring at Tom's face and then staring at Tom's face again. And Dumbledore did notice and did comment on it slightly. Vinelle: Yeah, this point even gets upset. Not quite upset, but he's the going headstone and greedily staring at his beautiful face. But he is not even looking at her. Are no. Harry is what happens sometimes when straight people try to write characters of the opposite sex and then they unintentionally write very gay characters. Muffin: Oh, I was just going to remark that Hespa Baguette's ***** treatment and it's just really funny. Vinelle: It's extremely funny. Muffin: It's so funny. But anyways, we know memories can be faked. Dumbledore has told us this much in that book and granted the slughorn one was obvious, but he implies with the ones he argues. Tom faked that. Sometimes it's not obvious, sometimes it can be very subtle. But what we get is we get Tom's face looking weirdly sickly and distorted and waxy and looking like CGI. Vinelle: And the thing is, Tom is coming in there for a job interview and he might be a very pleasant old man if you are Harry Potter. But he doesn't hold back. He is quite brutal, not just to Tom, but to people he doesn't like or even to people he likes in general. Calls it as it is. And Tom comes in here saying I want to teach the children. And Dumbledore doesn't say dude, you have obviously been huffing the dog ods. He doesn't say anything about Tom's appearance and Tom himself acts like it would be a completely reasonable and normal thing for him to be hired. Muffin: And we notice he's dressed nice for the interview. We get description of his clothes. It sounds very nice and wizardy. No comment is made on the man's appearance as we just discussed. And again, Dumbledore would have brought this up. And this is the first time Dumbledore has seen him in over ten years. So it's feeling like it's kind of faked because Harry found the last memories a little too hot and we got to make it clear that dark arts make you ugly and this man must die. Vinelle: Even if Tom was just being a troll and just walking in there seeing if Dumbledore would say anything, and then Dumbledore was too stubborn to say anything, you would expect some surprise or just interest. If he hadn't been warned that Tom looked like very different, you would expect surprise. If he had been warned, you would still expect some sort of interest. Instead, Dumbledore is completely just normal. There's no indication that Tom's appearance is in any way attracting attention. Muffin: Which leads us to our last argument, bullet point that we sort of discussed before. Maybe it is just an effect of the dark hearts. And even if he doesn't look like that in the we go on past there, we still have a good number of years before we hit 1981. Maybe the dark arts caught up to him. Trouble is, no one else has this problem. The Death eaters all look like perfectly normal people even when exiting Azkaban. They look terrible, they look emaciated, but they look normal. Bellatrix has a nose. Vinelle: Yeah. The closest you get is that one of the daffitas is mentioned as having twisted features. But that is not a dark arts exclusive description. That's just some people are uncle. It happens. Muffin: Unfortunately it happens. And I mean by that logic, Draco has pinched features as early as book one and he wasn't doing anything. Vinelle: Muffin, come on. He's a malfoy. Obviously he was doing tons of dark magic. Muffin: Obviously gross child. Vinelle: No one ever mentions it, but he's got no nose anymore. They're just too polite to mention it. And then you can't really see GI an actor, so it's canon, but it's between the lines. You just have to imagine it no, better. Muffin: It's in the stage directions along with everything else. Vinelle: We owe you guys a cursed child episode. We do several child episodes. We just had to reread it because we want to reread it. Muffin: I want to reread it. What I will say now is I have never seen a beautiful play put as much nonsense into the stage directions as that play did. Vinelle: There is one where it just says, it's a spartacus moment where they all stand up and bravely say, I will also go back in time. And then to make sure you know that it's a touching moment, we're told in parentheses that it's a spartacus moment. All right. Muffin: No, we must get back on track. Vinelle: We've already had one big digression. The Hawkruxes are supposedly the explanation. Tom split his soul so many times it broke his face. His face is also split now, except your soul is not your body. Even in Harry Potter, the souls seem to be treated a bit differently than they are in other franchises. And also in religion, they are very clearly separate from your physical body. And when he made the diary, he was completely unchanged. He went to school the next day and nobody noticed a thing. We have heretical thoughts here, too, on the timeline of the Hawkruxes we don't think he made. If you listen to the previous episode, you will know that we don't think he killed his father. Ergo, ring not Hawkrux, but apparently you can get away with splitting his soul in half and stuffing one half of it in the diary and literally be fine. No one will ever know. Your appearance does not change at all. And if we are not being heretics, then you can make two awkruxes and still continue going to school without anybody noticing the change from one day to another. If you want to be full heretics. Muffin: Then this is our podcast. Get out. It doesn't seem to hold water and I was also going to bring up that I don't know if this is an episode or not, but Hermione's explanation of what a Horcrux is and why it's different than just being a normal mortal is the most beautiful thing in the world. Vinelle: Agreed? Yeah. She explains to Ron how he would die but his soul would be fine if she ran a sword through him. And then a while later, a few chapters later they run a sword through the Horcrux and it dies. And I'm just left a bit unclear on what Hermione thinks is the difference here. Your physical container that you were in died soul no longer in it. How is this different when it's a hawkrocks? Muffin: I don't know, but it was a beautiful moment. I highly recommend everyone reread that passage and just think about it for a little bit. Vinelle: There are a lot of passages in the phallos that are beautiful. Muffin: Just let it simmer. Anyway, we've devils advocated a lot on this one, but we have one last one and this is one I see come up a lot. Maybe Tom wanted to look like a snake man because he hated Tom senior so much and his face was so muggled that he had to change. Vinelle: The first and immediate argument here is that there are no other body modifications. He doesn't grow a beard after finding out his father's muggle. He doesn't change his hair, doesn't change his hair color, doesn't in any way try to modify his appearance. And he's a wizard. He can do a lot if he wants to look different and he doesn't. But according to this theory, he would be so resentful of his face that he just decided there's no in between. I shall turn into a snake. I'm sorry, but now you're just applying the explanation after the fact instead of what do people who usually don't like their appearances do about it anyway? Muffin: Even taking that into account, like even if we believe Dumbledore's weird memory, this is 1957. He still looks like himself. He just looks sweaty and waxy. It's still him. He has changed nothing and that's decades later. Vinelle: Then you have the advantages that come with being attractive. Tom was trying to launch a political terrorist campaign and he wanted his acolytes to worship him as a God. And that tends to be much easier when you are good looking. Like, of course you can do the I am literally a God. You can tell because I look very inhuman. But now you are only going to get the very extreme weirdos. You get the Baltrixes and the bartemiuses. You don't get the Lucius Malfoys. And it's one thing if he just wants to be running around blowing things up, but he also did very much want people who could infiltrate things. See, the entire thing about the first wizarding war was that he had recruited people from all over the wizarding society. Nobody knew who was on his side. It's because he had broad appeal and you kind of don't want to look like a heroin addict if you're trying to accomplish that. You want to look like a charismatic, promising leader. In the second war, they don't really have a choice anymore. Those who already were recruited by him and were already mocked and he has established by now he is Lord Voldemort. And it's been ten years. The people who are young now, and he does tend to go for recruiting young people. Stenchon Pike. I will die on the pile. I will die on the hill. I know my english idioms. I will die on the hill. That's. Stenchon pike was a daffita, early 20s, low income. We see him fighting alongside daffitis. The one argument against it is Harry saying no. You see, I shared a special night with him when I was 13. No, at the night bus can't be a deaf eater. This is a miscarriage of justice. I refuse to believe Stan could possibly be a deaf eater. In the darkest of night, I could tell while we were all flying around in various aircrafts from a distance that his eyes were sort of clouded. That's how easy it is for me to see that he was imperialist. You must understand me. Stan is innocent. Muffin: Imperialist Stan Chunpike, the night busman? Vinelle: Yeah. Which is a much more credible explanation than he was radicalized. But to get back to my point, Tom has become. I'm not going to draw, like, comparisons to modern know, the people you're told not to follow because they're bad. But then that makes you all the more interested in following them. It's sort of what Tom is doing to recruit in the second world War. World War wizarding war. Point being, he doesn't need his looks anymore. Muffin: By that point, I also have to say we probably do owe you an episode on Stan. Vinelle: Stan? Muffin: Stan the man at Scritchmore. And that whole debacle at some point, because that is a story. Vinelle: We did sort of give you the clips notes version just now. Muffin: We did. Vinelle: It's worth an entire episode because I love talking about Stan and I love Stan. Muffin: I love Stan and I love Scridgemore's very beautiful political career and ignoble death that we then entirely forget about. Vinelle: Scrimmager was too good for us all. Muffin: He was. He was. Anyway, so there's one last possible explanation of why Tom would do this. Could be he wanted a disguise to keep his Tom Riddle identity secret. We know most people did not know it was Tom Riddle. Most had no idea who Tom Riddle was. But if he wanted to do that, he could change his hair color, he could fake a silly accent. He didn't have to turn his face into a snake. Vinelle: And also, it seems to be a bit of an open secret in certain circles. His staff eaters know Horace slughorn. He knew God knows how. Dumbledore mentions there are a few people out there. And it seems to me that the point isn't so much keeping who Tom Riddle became secret so much as bad things will happen to you if you. Muffin: Tell God in disguise. Vinelle: Yeah, because what the hell are you going to do? You're going to try and give Lord Voldemort problems? You're going to choose to die for that? That's your choice here. Muffin: That is the hill we die on. Vinelle: I wasn't going to talk about hills again after my pile. Yeah. Yeah. Muffin: Well, that hill is what we die on. At Stan Shunpike at the death theater. Vinelle: Yeah, that hill. Yeah. I've got my medieval armor and everything I'm planted. Can't remove me from this hill. So now we finally get to our, I want to say it, grand finale, which is the question of when Tom resurrects in 1995, does he actually get back to full power? Because we see him do a few things. We see him go toe to toe with Dumbledore. And I'm very impressed with Tom during that duel because Dumbledore has the older wand, which makes it literally impossible for him to lose, and yet he's unable to win. They're just at its sort of standstill. Annette, I'm sorry, does not speak well of Dumbledore, but it does speak very well of Tom. And we also hear about how he's able to work very powerful magic. And you see how when it's him who has the elder wand, people can't tell the difference. Even though it doesn't obey him, it's not working for him. And his deaf eaters still can't tell that something is amiss. So he has to say, no, it's not the wand. That's amazing, it's me. Believe me, the wand's doing nothing. But all that being said, all of his powerful magic is sort of off screen. What we see on screen is that he does the killing curse, of course, and various shield spells. He does do magic on screen, but. Muffin: Not really, it's not that interesting. And there will be things like the wards that the order put up around the tonkses stops him from going after Harry. He just goes home. Vinelle: And he is very keen on getting that elder wand. The moment he hears about it, does not let up on getting that wand. Muffin: And there is the explanation there of, okay, he figured out his wand, he can't fight harry with it because of twin core, you know, on the other hand, he could have borrowed someone else's wand and Harry's not that great of a duelist. He would have been fine. He goes after super Wand and then discovers superwand sucks because he didn't own it. Vinelle: To be clear, he did borrow Luja's, Malfoy's wand and that didn't work. Yeah. This is the sort of thing where I'm not sure that getting a bigger wand is necessarily the solution here, but Tom decides to get an elder wand nonetheless. It seems to me that he might have been hoping to get rid of several problems with this one. Then we just have little oddities. And to be sure, we don't know how powerful he was before all this happened, but we do know that during the battle of Hogwarts, he stays back. He doesn't walk in and end the battle himself in a day. He doesn't do anything. He just sits in the forbidden forest by himself. And then when he does get involved in a fighting, he is embroiled with slughorn, Shacklebolt and McConagall. At once, Slughorn being well, JKR goes out of her way to explain just how obese the man is and how you really get the sense that this woman thinks fat people are funny. Muffin: She really wants us to know he's fat. Vinelle: The man does not sound very fit, but he is still keeping up with Tom and so is a woman who is in her shacklebolt. Actually is an aura who is presumably in his best age. But the other two. How's Tom? What are you doing here? He doesn't enter into the Ministry of magic on his own. He only does so when he has to go. And also, notably when Harry's alone, there's no mention of him wanting to try and fight the auras once they arrive. He seems to really be avoiding confrontation. And the only spells we see him use within this sort of frequency to severely harm people is, again and again, the killing curse. And all that the killing curse requires to work is the intent to kill. You don't actually need to be all that powerful. Anybody can do it. All his deputies know how to do it. And that sort of puts me to Tom being stuck in this catch 22 where this weak body, he needs it because he has to get rid of Harry. Because if he doesn't get rid of Harry, then he has this enemy he really can't kill, who means he will never have a complete victory. But he also can't. He also can't get rid of it. There's also, if he was at his full power, if Harry was a problem, but not a big one, then he could just destroy anyone who dared to question him. One teenager might not be all that much harm. It sort of comes across as trying to pick his battles and then hide the fact that he's picking his battles. I think, frankly, he comes across as being both sane and intelligent, capable of planning. It's just that he is in these ridiculous situations where he's literally trying to fight someone the author of his universe does not want him to win against. So of course he's always going to lose, no matter how elaborate he makes his plans. And I can't really blame him for that. And it fills me in a sort of mood. I'm just reminded of the second diehard movie where. No, but the terrorists have come up with this brilliant, really thought out plan to bust out south american dictator. Everything is super planned out. They have state of the art equipment. Everything is working out. And then Bruce Willis just walks along. And I love both Bruce Willis and John McClain to death, but only of the first movie. In this movie, he just wins because God wants him to. And it makes me feel upset on behalf of the terrorists. They deserve their victory, God **** it. And it's the same thing here with Tom, because there's just no joy in his defeat. When it's not a defeat, it's just God saying, okay, Tom, time for you to be defeated. And then plucking him up from the chessboard and shoving him aside. And he can sit and cry and say, I did all the wheels right. I swear to God I helped. Muffin: Checkmate. Vinelle: But it doesn't matter because he's getting picked off the chessboard anyway. Muffin: Yeah. It makes me wonder why we suffered through a last book and he could have just been tossed into the shadow realm. Vinelle: Yeah. Frankly. Makes me wonder, why not just kill Tom at the end of the first book because Jakeyard clearly doesn't like the character. And then we continue with Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts the. Muffin: And you know, you can even keep in most of the stupid mysteries. Like the serious thing had nothing to do with the tournament. Vinelle: You can have the ministry turns against tyre for no particular reason because he's the specialist little boy. You can have the chamber of secrets have been opened. What a mystery. Oh, they must kill this one last memory of Tom Riddle. Muffin: Wait, is this an episode? Did we not actually need Voldemort in the Harry Potter series at all? Vinelle: I would argue we need him for the sake of JKR's vanity. She really, really wants this. She wants someone to preach about. But she hates writing him so much whenever he is on screen, you know that the author is suffering. I have, myself, written characters I hate writing. And you can always sort of tell. Muffin: You can tell because they show up and then they disappear for a while and they just feel soulless. Vinelle: And you can also tell because in Deathly Hallows the actual ending to an actual chapter that was published in bookstores all over the world is the sentence. And then Waltmore vanished. And that's how he exits the stage. And we don't see him again for several chapters. Muffin: He just goes away. Guess he went home. Vinelle: I wish I was making this up. But we have a book club where I read definitely Hallows chapter by chapter. And I remember just reading that sentence telling the others, the chapter's over, guys. That was it. And just bewilderment, the outrage. Muffin: That line haunts me. And then Voldemort vanished. No, I think it was. And then Voldemort suddenly vanished. Vinelle: I'll look it up right now. Muffin: It's something horrible. But while she's looking it up. In conclusion, Tom's post 1995 body was a homunculus and not reflective of his pre 1981 body. Vinelle: End argument. Muffin: We are not admitting any counterarguments at this point. Vinelle: I found it. So it's not actually the. It's in the last paragraph. But we then get a description of Harry seeing Hagrid's bread eagle on the ground below him. And it's just the exact description of how Harry falls to the ground, because for reference, this is during the seven Potters battle where Harry and Tom are looking at each other and then Harry flies through the barrier and Tom crashes into it. And so from Harry's point of view, Tom just vanishes. Muffin: Wait, did he. Wily Coyote? Was there a tunnel? How do we know? JKR doesn't like him and he crashes into it? Vinelle: Okay, I'll read aloud. Harry felt Voldemort before he saw him. Looking sideways, he stared into the red eyes and was sure they would be the last thing he ever saw. Voldemort preparing to curse him once more. And then Voldemort vanished. Muffin: The end. Everybody pack up. Vinelle: To Harry's credit, he is also very surprised by this. The next chapter is him just being he cannot understand where Voldemort had gone. Muffin: Yeah, I can't either, Harry. It's amazing. Vinelle: Voldemort waking up in the tonktist dumpster. He also doesn't know where he is. Muffin: What was he doing before this? His head kind of hurts. Vinelle: Oh, does it? Is the amongst capable of feeling pain or does he know? Sort of flop around like a doll. Muffin: Walk it off, go home, tell himself, you know what? I'm getting a better wand. I'm out for the novel. Vinelle: And then he leaves Britain. He doesn't even just leave from the. Muffin: Tongues, he just leaves the country. This is another tangent, but there are a number of things I have seen read, and there's not too many of them, where a character actively tries to leave the story. They're in deathly hollows. Voldemort's one of them. The only other one that tops him is love never dies. Raoul, who spends the entire play drinking in a pub and then leaves. Vinelle: We get a very dramatic moment where Raoul just sort of steps on the stage, looks sad, and then he leaves. And this time he's leaving for real. Comes back briefly to see that his wife's been shot. And then he leaves again. Muffin: And then he leaves again. No man has tried to leave a story harder than Rao Deschani. Vinelle: Even Tom's not beating that. And we do get wonderful descriptions of the german countryside. I'm glad he had a nice time. Muffin: Yeah, I'm glad he had a nice european vacation. But anyway, yeah. Point being, post resurrection body is a hungamunculus. Sorry, guys, I don't see any arguments with this one. Vinelle: Me either. Obviously. I'm here with the muffin. Why, at that? We will eagerly await the hate in the inboxes. We don't get hate. We just get people pointing out very good counterarguments and sometimes less good counterarguments to our theories. Yeah, I don't think I've ever gotten hate, but we just like to exaggerate and be sardonic. And in case we don't see each other again. Muffin: No. Might have some patrons left, remember? Vinelle: Oh, ****. Yeah, I'll look it up right now. Muffin: They might exist. To those who have been supporting us on Patreon, thank you. Sorry for the lack of output and bonus materials. Vinelle: We actually do have upcoming muffins. Going to read a short story I wrote in. I think it's 10th grade. I was 15, and I really wanted to impress my english teacher. I actually did. Muffin: Wait, what? Vinelle: Oh, she loved it. Muffin: You know what? I'm happy for you, and I'm glad. This reminds me, I never wanted to be a teacher, but I don't think I ever should have become one. Vinelle: Yeah. Well. Oh, my God. Yeah. We have two patrons. Muffin: Wow. Thank you, guys. All right, let's flip the coin. It's 50 50 shot here. Vinelle: Yeah, it's Malum. Andrew Cantry and I kind of want both to get blown up by togrim because you are both fantastic people and we love you. Muffin: We love you. Vinelle: I hope they eagerly await the story where I had just discovered social inequalities and therefore decided that I was going to do representation in my short story. And that's why I made my narrator a bisexual black man. Muffin: Wow. Vinelle: The year was 2012, and I wanted to make the world a better place. Muffin: Your heart was in the right place. Vinelle: You know, he's not white because his skin matches the coffee. And I thought I was brilliant. I did not realize that others had, in fact, done this. Muffin: Too many others with poor results. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brazilian. Vinelle: I am an otter. It's a murder mystery. I anticipate nuffin roasting me as she roasted me with the au where Harry Potter is a deer series that's also on Patreon. We also have the time I flash mobbed Pope Francis told with a rendition of the song. And we must at some point now have muffin sharing embarrassing writing and such because it's starting to feel a little one sided here. Muffin: Well, I've never flash mobbed the pope. Vinelle: Yeah, it's one of those things I'm just keeping storage for when I have to do a two troops, one lie about myself kind of thing. Muffin: Anyway, now we're done with the episode. If you've kept with us through the. Vinelle: Chitchat, and in case you don't see each other again, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.