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

[chantaldormand]

On the one hand, we don't see Dementor's victims suddenly becoming melty. They are just empty... nobody is home

[sunnyskywalker]

Barty Jr. going all Melty-Nazi like in Raiders of the Lost Ark after the Dementor sucked his soul would have been very dramatic, but I guess even Rowling couldn't bring herself to go that over the top ;-)

Some kind of experimental spell with unanticipated side effects seems like a strong possibility.

That is a good question about soul-splitting and magical power. Can the divided pieces keep in some kind of mystical contact to keep one's power level consistent? It doesn't seem like they're closely connected, if at all--book!Voldemort doesn't know when a Horcrux is destroyed. Can a soul-piece channel the same amount of magic as before, because it isn't a strictly physical process? Or has Voldemort's magic gotten progressively weaker? And if so, did he realize what was happening, or did it muddle his perceptions too?

And if that's a weakened Voldemort, what kind of magic was he capable of before he started chopping off bits of his soul?

[nx74defiant]

And if that's a weakened Voldemort, what kind of magic was he capable of before he started chopping off bits of his soul?

He does hold his own against Dumbledore at the Ministry.

[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

[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!

[jana_ch]

It's the Gilbert and Sullivan school of magic.
"When in crime one is fully employed / Your expression gets warped and destroyed: / It's a penalty none can avoid. / I once was a nice-looking youth." --Sir Despard Murgatroyd, Baronet of Ruddigore.

[sunnyskywalker]

Someone really ought to perform that mash-up!

Body parts?

[mary_j_59]

Clever and funny as always! Please correct me if I'm wrong; I don't own the books any more and can't easily double-check. But--

Don't the boys find Voldemort's eyes in the locket? Doesn't Ron have to stab the eyes to kill the horcrux?

What I therefore assumed was that, whatever other evil thing he'd done, Voldemort would also have to give up one of his body parts and implant a fraction of his soul in it whenever he made a horcrux. I think that's what Rowling meant to imply. That implication, is, of course, weakened by her inconsistency. We don't see Voldy's nose in the cup, his left ear in the tiara, and so on!

Re: Body parts?

[oryx_leucoryx]

Well, we only see the tiara after it was destroyed so who knows? The same goes for the ring. The active Horcruxes we saw are: Harry, the diary, Nagini, the locket, the cup.

Hmm, if Tom left an eye in the locket, how come he had both eyes after his re-embodiment, but not his nose?

Re: Body parts?

[sunnyskywalker]

The inconsistency is maddening! They did see "dark and handsome" eyes in the locket, but he still has his physical eyes as well--they're just red and slit-pupiled now. Did he have to donate his eye color to make the locket? And a third of his pupils? Why on earth would it work like that? And what would cause the "melted wax" skin--did he donate his complexion? Why would those just affect the appearance of various bits, but another takes his actual nose, as you ask? Or did he donate actual pigment to the locket, and a subdermal layer of his skin to another Horcrux...?

Hm. The only other Horcrux we got a really good look at was the diary, I think. That one kind of has Tom's full appearance in the Pensieve-like memory function, but that might not "count," since it shows other people too, and it didn't rip bits off them. The main thing we see in the diary is... Tom's mind behind the "chat" function.

Maybe that's an argument for his having implanted the memories while in school but having created the diary as a Horcrux well afterward.

Re: Body parts?

[sunnyskywalker]

Glad you enjoyed it :-)

Hm. We don't actually see Barty Jr. after he loses his entire soul, I think--McGonagall just reports it. Does he "fade" in any noticeable way, I wonder?

This raises another question: if the soul and body are so tightly linked that ripping off a chunk of soul also diminishes part of the body, does it work the other way around? When Moody lost an eye and a leg and part of his nose, did he also lose little wisps of soul? Talk about unfortunate implications...

[jana_ch]

It all works according to the Laws of Melodrama, in which the name and the appearance of a character reflect his moral status. JKR really does follow the Gilbert and Sullivan rules of magic. Their opera Ruddigore, which I quote in my comment above, is a parody of an old time-melodrama. The hero, innocent farmer Robin Oakapple, and his faithful servant Old Adam Goodheart, are by a typical Gilbertian contrivance suddenly forced to become evil at the end of Act One. Act Two begins with them bemoaning their fate.

Robin: My face is the index to my mind, / All venom and spleen and gall! / Or, properly speaking, it soon will be reeking / With venom and spleen and gall.

Old Adam: My name from Adam Goodheart, you'll find, / I've changed to Gideon Crawle, / For a bad bart's steward whose heart is too hard / Is always Gideon Crawle.

Both: How providential when you find / The face an index to the mind, / And evil men compelled to call / Themselves by names like Gideon Crawle

[sunnyskywalker]

You're making a really, really great case for that mash-up ;-) If any out-of-work theater people want to take this on, I'm sure they would find donors