"Luke, I am your father..." HP version
Dec. 20th, 2008 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marbleglove
Tom Riddle being Harry's father is somewhat ridiculous because he looks too much like James Potter. But then I had a thought. Maybe, Tom Riddle isn't Harry's father but Voldemort is. <I cackle evil-y.> No, wait, it can make sense:
I don't think it's ever mentioned if the body's of the Potters were ever recovered and given Sirius' situation, we know wizards are prone to jumping to conclusions. So imagine any bodies found were completely unidentifiable. Maybe Lily could be identified next to the body of a man. Why not? Now, consider the scene in Godric's Hollow right before everything goes down:
I can't remember if there are random death eaters milling around in the background but they don't really matter at this point. The main players are:
1. Harry Potter (infant), grows up to look like James Potter
2. Lily Potter nee Evans, later confirmed dead by Harry's dementor inspired memories
3. Tom Riddle aka Voldemort, still handsome at that point, comes back as weird snake/man after a decade as a shade, more than a little crazy due to family inbreeding
4. James Potter, handsome young man, put out of commission off stage somehow, has blood as pure as the driven snow and assumably even more inbred than Tom Riddle.
Now, consider the last two characters, both handsome, both inbred. And one of them comes back, but as a shade and then a snake-creature, looking nothing like the handsome man he once was.
So what if Lily successfully manages to kill Voldemort by putting up a shield around Harry using her own death? James is so traumatized by what was done to him off-stage and the death of his wife and the betrayal of his friends, that he goes completely insane, not helped by the fact that he's a shade. Curse damage, says I, can do things like that.
Thus, James Potter becomes Voldemort.
He could also be pissed off at Harry because from everything we've seen of James, he was a bit of a prat a la Draco Malfoy and Lily clearly chose Harry's safety over James'.
If you need to the blood ties back to Slytherin, that's also pretty easily managed. It's been a thousand years since the founders, right? So let's call it a generation every 30 years on average. So that's about 33 generations away from the founders. So, raise 2 to the power of 33 and you get the number of people alive in the founders time who are eventually related to Harry Potter. And if James is Pure, then half of those (2 to the power of 32) have to be wizarding. That's a lot, especially for a small wizarding community. He's probably related in one way or another to all of the founders.
And the possibilities expand, the more I think of it. So there are these horcruxes but we don't have a particularly good explanation of how exactly they work: just that if you kill someone and/or crack your soul, you can scatter bits and pieces hither and yon which tie you to life. Tom Riddle made oodles but all it takes is one to work. And James Potter was in a fight and more than a bit disturbed, so say he made a horcrux that one night in Godric's Hollow and that's the one in Harry.
Puts a whole new twist on the final scene in Deathly Hollows doesn't it?
I don't think it's ever mentioned if the body's of the Potters were ever recovered and given Sirius' situation, we know wizards are prone to jumping to conclusions. So imagine any bodies found were completely unidentifiable. Maybe Lily could be identified next to the body of a man. Why not? Now, consider the scene in Godric's Hollow right before everything goes down:
I can't remember if there are random death eaters milling around in the background but they don't really matter at this point. The main players are:
1. Harry Potter (infant), grows up to look like James Potter
2. Lily Potter nee Evans, later confirmed dead by Harry's dementor inspired memories
3. Tom Riddle aka Voldemort, still handsome at that point, comes back as weird snake/man after a decade as a shade, more than a little crazy due to family inbreeding
4. James Potter, handsome young man, put out of commission off stage somehow, has blood as pure as the driven snow and assumably even more inbred than Tom Riddle.
Now, consider the last two characters, both handsome, both inbred. And one of them comes back, but as a shade and then a snake-creature, looking nothing like the handsome man he once was.
So what if Lily successfully manages to kill Voldemort by putting up a shield around Harry using her own death? James is so traumatized by what was done to him off-stage and the death of his wife and the betrayal of his friends, that he goes completely insane, not helped by the fact that he's a shade. Curse damage, says I, can do things like that.
Thus, James Potter becomes Voldemort.
He could also be pissed off at Harry because from everything we've seen of James, he was a bit of a prat a la Draco Malfoy and Lily clearly chose Harry's safety over James'.
If you need to the blood ties back to Slytherin, that's also pretty easily managed. It's been a thousand years since the founders, right? So let's call it a generation every 30 years on average. So that's about 33 generations away from the founders. So, raise 2 to the power of 33 and you get the number of people alive in the founders time who are eventually related to Harry Potter. And if James is Pure, then half of those (2 to the power of 32) have to be wizarding. That's a lot, especially for a small wizarding community. He's probably related in one way or another to all of the founders.
And the possibilities expand, the more I think of it. So there are these horcruxes but we don't have a particularly good explanation of how exactly they work: just that if you kill someone and/or crack your soul, you can scatter bits and pieces hither and yon which tie you to life. Tom Riddle made oodles but all it takes is one to work. And James Potter was in a fight and more than a bit disturbed, so say he made a horcrux that one night in Godric's Hollow and that's the one in Harry.
Puts a whole new twist on the final scene in Deathly Hollows doesn't it?
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*Waves hand like First Year!Hermione*
Date: 2008-12-21 05:38 am (UTC)That, by necessity, would infuse some non-pureblood blood into his veins, right?
You're totally right in regards to everyone being related to everyone within the Wizarding community. And hell, the squibs that marry into Muggle Society probably account for half of the "spontaneous" first-generation muggle-borns.
ETA: You're totally right that it could be a viable interpretation of events, though ^_~ Especially if James then ran around trying to gather pieces of Voldemort's power into himself by using the Horcruxes...
Re: *Waves hand like First Year!Hermione*
Date: 2008-12-21 01:35 pm (UTC)Logic currently says yes, instinct says nothing is quite that simple.
Of course, the Riddle family appeared to be high-class enough that they might have been inbred too, although not quite as drastically. (Either way, I always felt pretty bad for the Riddle family. They got screwed literally and figuratively in a variety of ways.)
As a side note on inbreeding and the Malfoys: inbreeding is apparently quite useful for a family line as long as you have lots of kids and kill off all the ones showing traits you don't like. What you can eventually select for is someone with all the recessives (among other things, very pale hair and eyes), but then must be extremely careful not to marry anyone with dominant traits (ex. dark hair) because any kid would most likely take after that parent. So maybe Lucius is such a pisser because of all the girls he dated, his family only let him marry Narcissa, and then he had to kill six of his seven kids.
Although, now that I think on it, red-heads are pretty recessive too. I wonder what the Weasley and Prewitt family trees look like?
Re: *Waves hand like First Year!Hermione*
Date: 2008-12-22 12:33 pm (UTC)In short, your chances of combating the effects of inbreeding are higher if it's the mother who's the "new" blood. Although you're right in that problematic traits don't just vanish in a generation, but I think the quick-fix explanation/assumption is more that the statistical chances of manifestation drop dramatically, and will continue to do so with successive generations so long as a healthy breeding program is adopted.
It's really hard to say with the Riddles, b/c while the upper classes of Britain had been inbreeding for generations, there were a whole swath of "new money" families which emerged in the Victorian era. It would actually explain why they were *so* status conscious - because it was new status, and they were looked down on by the "old money" upper classes.
That is a fascinating thought on the Malfoys, and could explain a lot (and frankly, killing off the undesirables? Not that much of a stretch). Draco's the son of his father's older-age just because he had 6 older siblings who died before their 3rd birthdays and thus never made it into the public eye. Talk about family issues, that's something I'd *love* to poke at in a fic...