In the HP books, we have Horcruxes as a Voldemort's choice to achieve immortality and that's fine - it gives plot for entire Deadly Hallows, but in your typical fiction I find it boring to read (or write) about them again. Scenes where Harry plays a game of search and destroy mostly feel like a filler to me, and something you must do to come to the part where Harry can duel Voldemort freely, and where Voldemort would be much more cautious and so.

We know that Voldemort is obsessed with immortality so it is impossible to avoid him achieving it somehow, and then you have to include a new piece of magic or some other reasoning of his continual survival.

What I'm trying to ask is what would be the best way to avoid them completely. Some ideas would be Deadly Hallows, a short explanation about some extraordinary feat of magic Voldie pulled off, him bounding his soul to the earth in a different matter.

Voldemort I would like to see would be immortal until the moment in Godric's Hollow because if he's mortal after his revival in the 4th year, it would give me much more to work towards a more calculating, wary and cautious Voldemort.

What, in your opinion, is the best way to do so?

 

I would think the best way to do it is to have Slughorn refuse to tell Riddle about the basic functionality of horcruxes, causing him to seek out other ways of securing his immortality.

 

He found out how genies and souls anchor are related, or maybe it wasn't ambitious or grand enough, worthy for Lord Voldemort.

 

If you wanted to write in an explanation for why he doesn't use horcruxes you could add some extreme side effects from using even one horcrux and say that he either chose a different route because of those (Slughorn saying "I remember the look of disgust on his face when I mentioned...") or he did one without knowing the side effects and then came up with a way to undo the horcrux and reabsorb the piece of his soul in order to undo the damage.

If you're a further distance from canon, I don't think there's anything wrong with simply not including Voldemort's immortality. As you say, it makes him a more interesting antagonist if he has to worry about lucky spells getting through his defences.

 

Unicorn blood, potentially. It can already save people from the brink of death, and with some modification, could probably make an immortality potion. I don’t think Voldemort would be too worried about the consequences. There’s some room to play around because we never got a clear answer on what “living a half-life” means in canon.

 

I think something like living your life unable to experience joy or pleasure would fit thematically and be an interesting curse to write in. There's only so long that ambition can sustain you if you're not actually enjoying what you achieve.

 

So unicorn blood causes depression then.

 

Massive spoiler for as yet unwritten parts of Hallowed, but the likelihood of me ever actually writing it is very low indeed:

Spoiler

Voldemort's eventual aim there was to use the Hallows to summon and bind Death itself.

 

the go-to in the olden days was some sort of ancient egyptian or atlantian ritual

 

I t would be very simple to just change the number of horcruxes. Harry destroys the diary in COS, so you could avoid including the ring and simply have Slughorn tell Tom that making multiple horcruxes is impossible, or present the horcruxes as a failed experiment, with the diary being an abandoned contingency, which doesn't seem to far from canon, given that Voldemort had altered it to be a weapon to use against Hogwarts rather then just hiding it away.

 

I remember reading a fic which had Voldemort using some weird Greco-Roman mythical plot device to become immortal, although the way it was written suggested that the author is more familiar with Percy Jackson than actual mythology.

 

Honestly, the best way to avoid Horcruxes, in my opinion, is to simply ignore them entirely and have everything else play out the same. There's no need for the Horcruxes to exist at all in the first place; "Voldemort is obsessed with making himself immortal, but there's no such magic to do so" isn't exactly a terrible thing. If anything, it gives him a useful motivation to pursue that isn't "twirl mustache and cackle malevolently" and creates room for a significantly more interesting conflict than canon saw.

The only real trick is "how did he survive Godric's Hollow?", and that's easily explained as "a spell backfiring is weird and the backfired killing curse only mostly killed him". There's no real need for Voldemort to be immortal there.

 

And here I thought about using Dementors somehow

 

It's been a while since I read canon, was Riddle not fascinated with ancient relics? If you want a way for him to survive the killing curse on Harry as a toddler but be mortal after GoF maybe just have him having found an artifact in his travels that protects him from death once, then breaks.

How it does that can be whatever.

 

I'm pretty sure Rowling asked that same exact question before just deciding to create the Hallows and Horcruxes in order to have a few Magical Macguffins fill space in the story and give Harry a viable reason for winning and having his Jesus moment. You can always not have Voldemort survive but have Harry accidentally bring him back because of some unrelated Magical thingy that happens.

Or have him use a phylactery that is only good for one use? Or perhaps in the same way Lily called upon Ancient Magic with love, Voldemort was filled with so much hate that he survived off that?

 

Heh, years and years ago when God of War III has first come out I planned out a GOW/HP crossover. It was going to be set when Harry was 25ish. I specifically made it a point to reveal that the Diary and the Ring were just cursed objects that LV had planted to wreak havoc on anyone attempting to find out about his past.

Rather, LV was going to try and summon and consume the soul of Ares (think Darkhallow), which would in turn give him the invulnerability, immorality, augmented power, etc etc. Harry was going to be bestowed the soul of Kratos by Athena and Pandora in a cosmic balancing act.

 

You can alway go the other way. And have Voldemort be dead all along.

There are other immortal things in HP from Ghosts to portraits to poltergeist.

None of them are human.

The diary even fits in to the whole echo of the person being held in the world of the living through some magic.

Have LV proper be the same thing. An echo a remnant. Curse on the entire wizarding world.

Of course than you have the problem of Voldemort being the eternal enemy and the plot of a story never being able to progress past him. So no change from the current situation whatsoever.

 

Voldemort being defeated doesn't need him to be dead. Have Harry find out that he is a Horcrux and devise some way to trap Voldemort permanently, or have the threat of Voldemort's return be something Harry is worried about and actively trying to counteract.

A story I'd love to read would be Harry, aged 30 or so, working independently to prevent Voldemort's revival based on a note that Malfoy or someone passed him one day warning him of it. The goal isnt then beating him in magical combat, it's just figuring out who is helping him, what he's going to try to do and how to counteract it, with the end goal not being killing Voldemort permanently, just delaying him for as long as possible so that Harry can have longer to prepare.