#lowkeyhpnet

The truth is that Merope, his mother, kidnapped a boy she had an obsession with, she magic-drugged him, and she raped him for months on end. No wonder that when he woke up, kidnapped and used by a woman who was now pregnant of him (but he had no memory of any encounter), he ran away and went back home. That’s...absolutely, 100% understandable. Who would do literally anything else, really?

But Tom Riddle never knew. All he knew was that his Muggle father seduced his  mother, and when he found out she was a which he ran away - despite the fact that she was pregnant with Tom, and never once thought about the child again. In his view - and Voldemort explicitly says this multiple times in the books - his father hated magic and used his mother, who was in love with him. 

In Chamber of Secrets, the memory of Riddle tells Harry that he changed his name because he couldn’t bear having his Muggle father’s name. When he comes back, in Goblet of Fire, Voldemort ties up Harry to his father’s tomb (you see how much of a relevance the whole thing has for him) and tells Harry that Tom Riddle Senior abandoned his mother just because he found out she was a witch. “He didn’t really like magic, my father” he says, bitterly. And while reading I thought....damn...he doesn’t know. In The Half Blood Prince, we  get to know that when young Riddle finds out that it was his mother the magical one, and not his father, he was shocked. How could she, with all her powers, allow this? How could she die? How could she not find a way to survive? The only possible answer was, because she was in love. She didn’t live because she didn’t want to, because she died of heartbreak.

So, the loveless boy concluded, being in love must make you weak. He never knew, because he never tried, but he learned from his mother’s story: loving makes you weak. 

Except it doesn't. No, Tom, loving doesn’t make you weak, kidnapping and raping someone does. Loving doesn’t make you weak, using other people does. But he couldn’t possibly come to this conclusion, because nobody ever told him, Dumbledore never told him. And why didn’t he? Because Dumbledore’s whole view on this story was itself wrong: when he tells Harry the story, Merope is the poor madwoman, the poor, abandoned woman. Except she is not, despite being a woman, despite being mad, despite being abandoned, the victim - she is the perpetrator. 

I wonder what child Riddle would have done with this information. (especially considering that the whole “love makes you weak, let’s just use other people” is what defeated him in the end)