On Horcrux-making and losing one’s looks

[sunnyskywalker]

We know that Tom’s appearance deteriorated during the same time period he was making Horcruxes. Dumbledore and Harry seem to believe this is cause and effect: you split your soul, and your face gets melty-looking.

Are they correct, though?

Comments

[flyingskull]

Well, I used it in a parody because nobody in the Potterverse (by which I mean JKR) never thinks things through - or maybe just never thinks, but if Riddle became meltier and meltier after horcruxing - and I'll never stop laughing at that one - and his body got reduced to component atoms after being Harryed, then logically one can think that ripping pieces of yourself makes you into a self-controlled zombie, or a revenant inhabiting its own corpse.

Following that hypothesis the zombie/revenant could control the decay of the body by magic; but what happens to magic after one has ripped off pieces of the self? Keeping the corpse functional enough to look odd but normalish would take, not power as such I don't think, but focus; the more time passes, the harder is to keep all the details correct.

This would ensure the complete disintegration of the body after the clearly described explosion caused by the collision between furnace-burning mother love and cold green. Green! The colour of absolute eeeevil! Destroy all green things! Death to vegetables!

Ooops, sorry, got carried away.

This would also explain how this supposedly puissant wizard who could terrify everyone is so appalingly incapable of coherent thought and is reduced to using only two spells at the end (right, let's pretend that the protagonist of this epic is capable of many more). Revenants are only for pain, death and destruction, not for brains firing on all neurons after all. :D

[sunnyskywalker]

Aha, at last an explanation for why Voldemort disintegrated! Dying distracted him too much to hold his body together! That makes more sense than anything we got in the books... Which isn't hard, sadly, since there was no explanation for that at all in the books.

He also mentioned having to mentally hold himself together while in Vapormort form. Hm...

[flyingskull]

Sorry for replying so late.

But... Hey! See? I wasn't so far off, then. :D

I forgot to tell you how much I admire your brilliant efforts to make sense of the senseless. I'm not much good at Watsonian reading, being by nature and nurture a Doylist to the core, but I enjoy Watsonian comments so so much! Thank you.

[sunnyskywalker]

Thank you! I love analyzing from a Doylist perspective too, but something about trying to wrangle this series into making sense is appealing to me. (It also helps for writing fic. There are so many things that just can't be glossed over. Well, not by anyone except Rowling and her editors, I guess...)

Don't worry about timing! I spend my workdays at a computer and sometimes end up with headaches or too much wrist and arm pain to then spend more time on the computer for non-work reasons, so I'm never going to pressure to get online and start typing. I know how many good reasons there are people might need to not do that!