... err.

Ying and Yang. 🤣

People can ship who they want, I don't have to read it. TMR-Voldemort/Harry makes no sense to me, I can't see it working. Though, I'm sure there are people who legit ship this. Again, as long as I don't have to read about it, I don't really care. That's my feeling on all fandom ships, not just HP. I do not want to get into a ship war. They can be brutal.

Some writers want a challenge, seeing if they can make the pairing work and make sense. Others just like the crack of it. Some like both. You'll find pairings like this in every fandom. Do yourself a favour and just avoid them, if you don't like them.

Consider the following:

Voldemort is way older than Harry, making it pedophilia.

Voldemort literally murdered Harry's parents.

Voldemort is a murderer.

Harry is the one who has to destroy Voldemort.

Voldemort doesn't really love anyone.

Voldemort literally tried to kill Harry.

I have come to the conclusion that there are a few main reasons why people ship this.

No one on [fanfiction site] has yet managed to pair, say, Dolores Umbridge with the Giant Squid. I sense a challenge!

That said, Harry himself acknowledges that he and Riddle had some things in common, both being lonely, neglected orphans who found a home at Hogwarts. But that's hardly enough to found a romance on, especially given the facts you cite.

:/

This sort of thing turns some people on. I don't want to go into depth because this sort of thing doesn't interest me because it's out of character and not my cup of tea. But it's a taboo subject and that gives some people a bit of a thrill. Like how in the fifty shades series he treats her like a sex slave and she's up for it. It continues on and on through more and more systematic psychological and physical abuse where she is pretty much beaten for his enjoyment and manipulated into submission and people enjoy this type of thing, especially women. It's a popular book series.

In fandom, certain people like to put the villain and hero together in let's say that type of scenario. Where he or she dominates the hero or changes for the hero. Or both.

People will ship anyone with anyone. Even couples that would not work in canon or that have never even met. They will even ship people across different fandoms (Hermione Granger and Sherlock Holmes).

In the case of Voldemort/Harry, welcome to Foe Yay. When people spend so long being obsessed with one another and trying to kill each other, well, someone will see it as a case of 'the lady doth protest too much and assume that so much persistence covers desire. Nothing the creator will say can convince them, because fanfiction and shipping is about fantasy, not adherence to canon.

Of course, you don't have to enjoy the couple. But do yourself a favour. Just check the tags, and stay clear of stories/art/videos of the pairing. Getting into a ship war will only ruin your and other people's day.

People say they don't really Ship Harry/Tom, what they want is one of a few things, depending on the story. 1)Dark!Harry, and what's darker than falling in love with pure evil. 2)They want to make things more political/questionable, rather than one side be evil with few legitimate points, and the other being good, they make things messy, Voldemort has real points, and Harry sees them, him and Voldemort falling in love is just that on a more personal scale. Or 3) they want a redemption story, maybe not Ton being goody-goody, but him becoming better, and using Harry to do that.

All throughout the story, there's a parallel drawn between Harry and Tom/Voldemort with the lone difference between them being "they made different choices". However, to me, those two are as different as night and day. It's true they were both orphans, grew up in unhappy childhoods, entered an unknown world, and faced some level of bias and discrimination due to their blood, while both being magically talented in a way that stood above their peers, they both went about it differently.

Their characters are drastically different yet they're tied by similarities, destiny, and a Horcrux. To me, this is fascinating. I have always been interested in their interaction from the get-go (and not always in a romantic capacity, just in general). They are different enough to have made different choices that shaped their characters in different ways, they have enough similarities in their backgrounds to theoretically find some common ground.

First, there's this contrast in their characters:

They are foils of each other. This means their characters bounce off of each other in such a way that their most defining traits both stand out all the more. The calculating cruelty and darkness of Tom versus the impulsive righteousness and empathy of Harry.

Harry is someone with empathy, which is something Tom is said to lack. Despite all that he's experienced at Tom's hands, Harry empathizes with Tom throughout the story, even as he fights for his survival. Thematically, this is powerful. A victim able to forgive his abuser and leave behind the baggage forced upon him (Harry leaving behind the Horcrux) in order to move on with his own, happier life. In doing so, the victim becomes a victim no more.

Second, in terms of the story, it is also compelling, albeit for different reasons.

We see Tom and his past in the story and the narrative makes it clear who we are to root for. Rightfully so as Tom comes off as a narcissist or some sort of sociopath.

Here's the kicker of some of us fans: we like to dig deeper when writing stories and when we read the stories of others, and similarly inspired and the cycle goes on and on. Different fandoms have their lore and there's a certain lore you'll find in Harry Potter fandom, one that is persistently there regardless of pairing.

(Usually it's a dark or neutral Harry fix nowadays, but in the past, there were stories where Tom was redeemed or was a good guy as well.)

We find that while the narrative dictates that Tom is The Bad Guy and always has been, what we know about his background gives us a lot of pause. It doesn't excuse his actions, but he grew up in an orphanage that was emphasized as a cold and unloving environment. He was born without love and grew up without it. His first introduction to the Wizarding World was watching all his worldly possessions go up in flames. I don't think Dumbledore was necessarily wrong for it, but I do think it's a terrible introduction.

Then he was sorted into a house that discriminated against people like him, had to return to a world that did not understand him every year, and also return to London around the time of the bombings, because the wizards who run the school aren't affected by it and don't understand what it's like.

He was a part of one world that was at war, one of the worst wars in the history of modern humanity; a world full of insecurity and upheaval, which didn't care or understand a poor orphan with magical talents.

(For those who have been ostracized by others due to their differences, for those who fought back and were labelled as problem children - this is something that rings terribly true. While Tom was definitely a bully, it's enough for us to wonder if it's nature versus nurture at work. This is high praise for the author, as it's a sign that she wrote an interesting and complex character.)

He was part of another world with people like him, only they're not are they? They're not as brilliant as him yet his muggle father would always label him as an outsider, as less worthy and less deserving of his talents. Not only that, but it's a world that is so insulated from the War that he can use the exact same tactics as Hitler right around the time of the war and right after it ended...and for it to become wildly successful.

In a way, Tom was also a victim of his circumstance. A defining trait of his character was that Tom never knew love and so he could not understand it. That's something Harry understood within the books. Tom is an example of somebody who continued to perpetuate the abuse cycle. For whatever reason, he could not leave it.

It's also a deep enough topic to explore...with a lot of grey areas to write speculative fanfiction on.

Does it excuse his actions? Of course not! I'm against excusing people's actions due to their bad past. Canonically, ran from death, and symbolically, he ran from the responsibility for his actions. In the end, both caught up to him.

Third, there's also the way Harry and Tom interact.

The Diary Horcrux of Tom Riddle watched twelve-year-old Harry hungrily when they met and this is emphasized many times. It is not because of lust or any kind of romantic or sexual notion (quite frankly, I find that idea disturbing due to their differences in age).

It is because Tom is a greedy, power-hungry bastard. A greedy bastard who likes challenges. He not only wants to know how Harry defeated him, but he's also interested in Harry as a potential equal. He is disappointed when he finds that there's nothing special about Harry after all. We can speculate that perhaps he wished for an equal, but that would only be speculation.

What we do know is that finding no use for him, Tom decides to off the poor child. He then monologues the entire time, convinced of his utter brilliance, in the way a stereotypical villain and/or teenage boy with delusions of grandeur (and 8th-grade syndrome) would.

Harry then sasses him, kills his giant, murderous pet snake in self-defence, kills him without remorse also in self defense, and then saves Ginny. I am fond of how in the movie, Harry stares down Tom before stabbing the fang through. I thought it was a defining moment in the story.

Beyond the interest in their interaction and literary parallels between them, I also enjoy how easily you can twist things into a humorous romance story or a more serious yet touching one. This is because of the contrasts in their characters.

As a teen, Tom Riddle is the kind of melodramatic one who is easy to make fun of. He monologues and cackles his way through, gloating about his brilliance and talking to himself when he thinks about things (i.e. babbling to himself when Harry doesn't die from the basilisk fang and he's trying to figure out why).

Harry is the kind of person who sasses his teachers, regularly gets into trouble (running a Ford Angelica into the Whomping Willow), and ends up teaching a clandestine defence class that becomes a vigilante group, that becomes a miniature army.

It is hilarious and makes for an interesting story.

Then there are the latter half of the books when Tom is noseless and Harry has to die at his hand if he wants any hope of survival.

We see Voldemort's pitiful baby Horcrux and how Harry rightfully leaves him behind to face his own consequences. Then we see Harry, with his understanding of what Tom has experienced, give Tom an opportunity to change. All the way up until the end, Harry is trying to save his soul.

Tom does not understand this. He can't or maybe he won't. He dies and his defeat is sad yet triumphant.

As readers of a children's book, we all knew how the story would end. Voldemort would die and Harry would win. Yet this victory is bittersweet.

I think like Harry, some of us wanted to give Tom his own happy ending.

It's such a pity that for most people, this involves giving Tom what he wants and dragging poor Harry down with him, instead of giving him a proper redemption. I did read a good one though, involving Harry receiving a stranger gift from the Weasley Twins. It was touching and well done.

As I've outlined before, there's a lot of symbols and themes involved in their relationship. There is also one regarding Tom's possible redemption. From how a beast can turn into a man, through love. Of repentance, redemption, and change. We want to believe that nobody is too far gone.

We want to believe that people can change.

That's my reason anyway. There are other reasons too.

It is an annoyingly common theme in romance for a hot bad boy turning into a hot good boy through the power of love. It's a staple in romance and even if we know it won't happen in real life (and likely would never want it to), we can still enjoy it through the safety of being on the other side of the phone screen.

Fanfiction at its modern day core is self-indulgent. There are few characters within the fandom that are the "hot possessive bad boys with lots of power" that are popular with certain audiences. Tom stands at the front of the pack.

This hot gorgeous brilliant powerful charismatic genius boy is just misunderstood and he needs the power of my- I mean Harry's love to save him!

As the main character, Harry is often the default reader stand-in, which is why he's been paired up with nearly everyone pairable.

I have always seen the Dark Harry in a Tom/Harry or a Voldemort/Harry fic as not only due to the influence of several talented writers during the pairing boom, but also because it used to be considered difficult to write a believable romance with these two.

That's Fandom for you, write a good idea and everybody either takes it as canon (see Noble Heir Harry) or copies (see the nonstop string of Self Insert fics as actual OC are no longer cool).

It's also hard to write a believable Tom that isn't a callous shithead or one that Harry would like and not ignore. It's even harder to write a believable redemption fic.

I haven't written any fics with this pairing, mind you, I've just read a few and they're actually really good. I like seeing how writers write them or tackle it. Most of all, I enjoy seeing how challenging it can be if you want to be serious and you want Tom to believably fall in love and Harry to believably put up with his shit.

Rating: 5/10