I Put Off On Making This For So Long

If I understand it correctly, a person accidentally killing someone can be considered murder—i.e. having the same intent as murder for legal purposes—if harm was always intended by the action they took which resulted in another person’s death, or if death was a reasonably forseeable consequence of their intended harm. So say I deliberately wanted to injure someone by hitting them in the head with a cricket bat, and then they died because I hit them in the head with a cricket bat: I’d be liable for murder, because the malice behind my initial action is transferable to the crime of murder. I knew hitting them like that could kill them, even if I only meant to injure them. The intent to cause harm is not in doubt, and any argument about the extent of the harm intended is outweighed by the extent of the actual harm caused.

So while I tend to agree with you Riddle didn’t go into that bathroom knowing Myrtle Warren was hiding in there crying (I always felt that was an obvious callback to Hermione hiding in the bathroom crying in PS and almost getting killed when the boys accidentally locked the troll in there with her)—I think Myrtle was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, she startled Riddle in the act of releasing the basilisk, was looked at directly by the basilisk potentially because she startled it too, and she was dead before either of them could really register it was going to happen: because why else would it end up being textually significant which bathroom she died in, if the basilisk could have just been sent to kill her in any random bathroom—Riddle did still 100% go in there for the sole purpose of releasing a basilisk on students. Even if we could argue that his intent was only ever to petrify muggleborns and sow fear among the non-pureblood students, that is still an intent to cause harm, and somebody getting killed was still a reasonably forseeable consequence of letting loose a giant monster capable of killing people in multiple ways up to and including just by glancing in their direction. As much as I really don’t like to acknowledge authorial intent in this series anymore (as a trans-nb person), I do wonder if the idea—however nebulous—of transferred malice influenced the choice to make Myrtle’s death “count” when making a horcrux.

I do also think Riddle was blatantly toying with the potential of killing people at that point. He always knew there was a chance somebody could die. Maybe he wasn’t deliberately engineering situations where only petrification could occur but did start out by choosing moments where petrification was more likely, getting a bit more reckless each time until he eventually escalated to situations where death was more and more the most probable outcome. Myrtle just happened to be the first person he killed, and she just happened to be muggleborn: I don’t believe he planned the exact circumstances, and I think it tells us something damning about his character and his politics that it could just as easily have been a pureblood girl who walked out of that stall to confront/surprise him and died in Myrtle’s place. It was technically unplanned but Riddle had been flirting with murder-by-basilisk for far too long for her death not to be considered murder on a technicality. (I also can’t envision a version of him that wouldn’t want to take some possessive form of credit for having killed her… maybe that counts for something towards ripping off a chunk of your soul?)

By contrast Harry had no idea just touching Quirrell/Voldemort would hurt him, let alone kill him, and only used the fact that it did to his advantage out of self defence when Quirrell-mort were actively trying to kill him first. Methodically taking out the horcruxes one by one is potentially a more complicated moral proposition with regard to intent, since intent to harm the horcrux is definitely necessary; you can’t really destroy one by accident. But again I think Harry diegetically and the author non-diegetically would rationalise this as being a different (read: justified, morally right) kind of violence. If killing Quirrell was defence of himself in PS, then it was defence of another in CoS because he only “killed” (dematerialised) Diary-Riddle to save Ginny. The other horcruxes were only destroyed to make Voldemort mortal, and causing harm to them would not in and of itself kill Voldemort: and Harry stopped himself (and anybody else, since the terrible book version of their final confrontation occurred under the baffling choice of giving them a massive passive audience) short of taking any direct action to try to kill Voldemort after all the horcruxes were destroyed. I.e. if Voldemort died it would need to be at his own hand and therefore entirely his own “fault” from the author’s perspective.

Then again, Joanne’s morality for this series very much boils down to “there are no good or bad actions, only good or bad teams” so we’re likely putting more thought into this than she ever did. After all, by DH Harry is apparently a-okay with internally rationalising the idea that unforgivable curses are only unforgivable if it’s the bad guys using them.

#but I believe a lot of how hagrid's framing went down was less because of Tom being believable #(although l am now obsessed with the idea of Tom petrifying himself on purpose) #(tysm for that theory I love it) #but because Myrtle and Hagrid weren't purebloods #or well | *choose* to believe this is how/why because yeah as you pointed out we're putting a lot more thought into this) #I do think that it's probably even possible that there were people involved who realized that Hagrid's spider wasn't at fault #but they were okay with throwing a half giant kid under the bus if it meant that it LOOKED like the authorities had it under control #and then with poor Myrtle because she wasn't part of a prominent family or someone people 'cared' about #didn't have anyone to (not advocate but that's the closest word I can think of) advocate for her and make sure her real killer was found #and while Tom is smart this was actually less about how he's a genius #and more of an indication of the ways their society was failing that Voldemort was able to take advantage of

ABSOLUTELY and you should say it. My headcanon is a lot less about Riddle being smart enough to evade detection and a lot more about him being just dumb enough to panic in that moment.

Because of course he would get away with it either way. Of course Myrtle’s family do not have the capacity to meaningfully take the magical world to task over the death of their daughter (and honestly, I have more headcanons here about exactly how terrible they are about handling muggle families in situations where muggleborn kids never come home from the magic world, because the Ministry is… much too comfortable causing nonconsensual brain damage to muggles just to avoid responsibility or inquiry). Of course nobody would really question his portrayal of Hagrid as violent and dangerous and potentially criminal without evidence, because their prejudice doesn’t allow them to consider for a moment that Hagrid could actually be the vulnerable one in this situation (and here, again, I have more headcanons… because these boys knew each other. Hagrid knew and trusted Riddle way too well for this to just be a passing acquiantance). But also—and this is the lynchpin for me—what passes for a justice system in the magical world is rather clearly not operating to a muggle evidentiary standard. But Riddle is.

Because try as he might to excise this part of himself (don’t get me started on bifurcation of self with regards to This Fucking Guy), as much as he wants to “prune” it and deny it, Riddle is an immigrant to this world. He thinks the authorities will need evidence to pin this on Hagrid. Because so does Harry when he first finds out, having been raised in the muggle world, which is why he immediately sets about trying to dismantle the case against Hagrid by proving it must have been somebody else. So does Hermione, a muggleborn, who immediately sets about tearing to shreds the nonsense suggestion that an acromantula could have done this by figuring out what manner of creature actually could (with the help of another muggleborn student. These kids know about innocent until proven guilty and it is so so so important to me that they are the ones we see fighting back). We are expected to think there must have been evidence against Hagrid! even if it’s a child’s concept of evidence in a book about twelve year olds, because we live in a world where even in cases where arrests and convictions are frequently fuelled by biases and hatred, some form of evidence (be it circumstantial, manipulated, planted, or fabricated) is still necessary to proceed. Surely you can’t just get locked up for murder when there’s no proof! We haven’t yet learnt about how Sirius went down without even getting a trial; we haven’t seen the kangaroo court Fudge manages to pull together against Harry in OotP. Other than maybe his richer and purer friends telling him what their families might be able to get away with, which Riddle could assign to class privilege, we have no reason to believe Riddle knows any better than us just how low the burden of proof against Hagrid will be.

Riddle’s young here. He’s grappling for power, not comfortable in it. He’s sixteen and testing the limits of what he can get away with, too afraid of losing his place in this world that has taken him in and made him feel so special and important to really risk going as far as he could and probably wants to go, either too much a child or too much a coward yet to seize this moment as confidently as an adult Voldemort would be able to. And importantly, while we know Riddle is a halfblood, and we know Riddle knows it because he’s the one who reveals it to us, I genuinely think very few other characters in this world would know. And that creates a slightly more layered situation wherein Hagrid isn’t the only one whose word could arbitrarily be disbelieved or dismissed, and Myrtle isn’t the only person whose life is of little consequence to those in power. Riddle is coming from a potentially worse position than Myrtle: he’s poor, he’s an orphan, he’s muggle-raised if not potentially muggleborn, and the only thing he’s really got going for him to back up his accusation is that he’s a good student who managed to make prefect (both things which give him far more means and opportunity to be committing these crimes than a lot of the student body: the curfew and access exemptions for prefects alone should by all rights place them under greater suspicion if this world were capable of any reasonable investigation), and that Hagrid is keeping an unrelated animal incapable of attacking people in the manner people are being attacked locked inside a box somewhere in the castle. The most he should be able to hope for in the muggle world is that Hagrid gets charged with some kind of illegal pet trade: except for the fact that Riddle is placed in a higher position comparative to Hagrid by the likes of the Ministry, based on the even worse caste-like system applied to people of mixed magical species ancestry.

I like to think a confused and panicked and terrified Riddle had five minutes to come to terms with the sudden reality that he had finally murdered someone, figure out what to do about it, and settle on very nearly shitting himself while turning his back on the giant venomous snake he had to trust would obey him completely, conjure something like a ball of water so he could look at the reflection of the basilisk’s eyes as it disappeared back down the closing passageway (knowing a bit of water spilled on the bathroom floor would go completely undetected afterwards), and then lie there petrified and helpless waiting to be revived, because he made a mistake. I like to think of him being revived, finding out the Governors were debating whether to close the school—because on the one hand a girl is dead, but on the other hand the killer seems to have gotten spooked because the attacks have stopped—and scrambling to point the finger at Hagrid as an “eyewitness” quickly enough to clean up the mess he created, to save the home he put in jeopardy. Partly I want to see actual character progression beyond Voldemort was always an evil genius and Albus Dumbledore could Just Tell he was even at age 11 and instead get a glimpse of him (clumsily) learning how to use the levers of power available to him. Partly I just want this boy to experience a consequence, any consequence, for what he did.

Because of this. -> #I mean a poor girl gets murdered and then not even two generations later everyone's like?? forgotten she's existed?? #they just know her as a bathroom ghost and aren't even sad that there was a student murdered on hogwart's grounds???

If I understand it correctly, a person accidentally killing someone can be considered murder—i.e. having the same intent as murder for legal purposes—if harm was always intended by the action they took which resulted in another person’s death, or if death was a reasonably forseeable consequence of their intended harm. So say I deliberately wanted to injure someone by hitting them in the head with a cricket bat, and then they died because I hit them in the head with a cricket bat: I’d be liable for murder, because the malice behind my initial action is transferable to the crime of murder. I knew hitting them like that could kill them, even if I only meant to injure them. The intent to cause harm is not in doubt, and any argument about the extent of the harm intended is outweighed by the extent of the actual harm caused.

So while I tend to agree with you Riddle didn’t go into that bathroom knowing Myrtle Warren was hiding in there crying (I always felt that was an obvious callback to Hermione hiding in the bathroom crying in PS and almost getting killed when the boys accidentally locked the troll in there with her)—I think Myrtle was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, she startled Riddle in the act of releasing the basilisk, was looked at directly by the basilisk potentially because she startled it too, and she was dead before either of them could really register it was going to happen: because why else would it end up being textually significant which bathroom she died in, if the basilisk could have just been sent to kill her in any random bathroom—Riddle did still 100% go in there for the sole purpose of releasing a basilisk on students. Even if we could argue that his intent was only ever to petrify muggleborns and sow fear among the non-pureblood students, that is still an intent to cause harm, and somebody getting killed was still a reasonably forseeable consequence of letting loose a giant monster capable of killing people in multiple ways up to and including just by glancing in their direction. As much as I really don’t like to acknowledge authorial intent in this series anymore (as a trans-nb person), I do wonder if the idea—however nebulous—of transferred malice influenced the choice to make Myrtle’s death “count” when making a horcrux.

I do also think Riddle was blatantly toying with the potential of killing people at that point. He always knew there was a chance somebody could die. Maybe he wasn’t deliberately engineering situations where only petrification could occur but did start out by choosing moments where petrification was more likely, getting a bit more reckless each time until he eventually escalated to situations where death was more and more the most probable outcome. Myrtle just happened to be the first person he killed, and she just happened to be muggleborn: I don’t believe he planned the exact circumstances, and I think it tells us something damning about his character and his politics that it could just as easily have been a pureblood girl who walked out of that stall to confront/surprise him and died in Myrtle’s place. It was technically unplanned but Riddle had been flirting with murder-by-basilisk for far too long for her death not to be considered murder on a technicality. (I also can’t envision a version of him that wouldn’t want to take some possessive form of credit for having killed her… maybe that counts for something towards ripping off a chunk of your soul?)

By contrast Harry had no idea just touching Quirrell/Voldemort would hurt him, let alone kill him, and only used the fact that it did to his advantage out of self defence when Quirrell-mort were actively trying to kill him first. Methodically taking out the horcruxes one by one is potentially a more complicated moral proposition with regard to intent, since intent to harm the horcrux is definitely necessary; you can’t really destroy one by accident. But again I think Harry diegetically and the author non-diegetically would rationalise this as being a different (read: justified, morally right) kind of violence. If killing Quirrell was defence of himself in PS, then it was defence of another in CoS because he only “killed” (dematerialised) Diary-Riddle to save Ginny. The other horcruxes were only destroyed to make Voldemort mortal, and causing harm to them would not in and of itself kill Voldemort: and Harry stopped himself (and anybody else, since the terrible book version of their final confrontation occurred under the baffling choice of giving them a massive passive audience) short of taking any direct action to try to kill Voldemort after all the horcruxes were destroyed. I.e. if Voldemort died it would need to be at his own hand and therefore entirely his own “fault” from the author’s perspective.

Then again, Joanne’s morality for this series very much boils down to “there are no good or bad actions, only good or bad teams” so we’re likely putting more thought into this than she ever did. After all, by DH Harry is apparently a-okay with internally rationalising the idea that unforgivable curses are only unforgivable if it’s the bad guys using them.

But hanging around her means hanging around Snape too

Which means that now, Sirius hates Snape even more, cause he’d already quickly gained a crush on this new mysterious transfer student

I know the gray of the tags and when there’s a lot of them makes the tags hard to read, so I’m just gonna include a screenshot focused on them so y’all can see them so no one’s trying to respond to things that aren’t actually being said