Dude. How the fuck are you arguing with me on this? What I'm saying is canon, it's what actually happened.

 

I've been thinking apart from Immortality, what was truly Voldemort's end game or ambition to be more specific. Was he just using the death eaters as a way to get power? I mean does he truly believe in what the Death eaters stand for or are they and the message of the group itself merely pawns to a much larger scheme?

Also, what happened to the rest of the Potters? Uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, were they somehow all wiped out or something? Is Harry more or less the last surviving Potter, because try as I might I honestly cant remember any mention of other Potters in the whole series.

 

Pretty sure Dumbledore specifically refers to the Dursleys as the only family Harry has in Chapter 1 of PS. So yeah, from that I'd think they're all dead.

 

There's never any mention of any other Potters so it's assumed that James was an only child who's parents died, it's quite a common theme in marauder era fics.

My personal take on Voldemort's ambitions is that he first and foremost wanted power for himself, he wanted to be the biggest bully in the playground, so to speak. Secondly he wanted the superiority of magic; the whole Magic is Might idea. I never thought that he cared about blood, as in pure-blood vs half-blood vs muggleborn, but he did care about wizards vs muggles.

I think his overall endgame would have been an entirely magical society with him as the supreme ruler.

 

It's relatively clear that the Death Eaters are just a means to an end for Voldemort; the end being the domination of the wizarding world. From the many HBP flashbacks, one can assume that he does indeed believe that muggles are scum (which most likely stems from his experience at the orphanage / opinion of his father), but he also believes that he alone is special, that he is better than everyone, muggle and wizard alike. The Death Eaters aren't his allies... they're his servants; to be used and manipulated as he saw fit.

 

Don't find it odd that a well established family like the Potters(or at least its implied) just stops at James Potter, no other form of extended Family, or are the Potters not as prominent as we are led to believe? Oh and how do you think they got their hands on one of the Hallows?

I agree with you on Voldemort, which raises another Question why do men of high intelligence like say Lucius Malfoy(not sure if Fanfiction hasn't somehow colored my perception of him) allow themselves to follow someone who is clearly slef serving as Voldemort and is clearly manipulating them, for all intents and purposes the Malfoys and the Blacks and so on seem like they would have been better off without joining him?

Also does it speak highly of Lucius that despite the bad reputation he must have surely garnered from being a suspected death eater, he still somehow made sure his family was prominent and respected?

 

There are several canon examples of old pure-blood families dying out. The Blacks only have one male left, who dies meaning the name itself dies out. So it's not that unlikely that the Potters are in a similar position. I imagine that there are some freakily distant relatives, but none that are really close enough to count, and they probably don't have the name Potter. They got their hands on the hallow by passing it down through the generations from Ignotus Peverell, incidentally another family that has died out.

I think that Lucius followed Voldemort for the same reason that Voldemort himself did what he did; namely power and lots of it. Before Voldemort the Malfoys were just a very wealthy family, which did give them a certain power but it certainly wasn't absolute, as some fanfics seem to say. But imagine if Voldemort had succeeded, Lucius as his right hand man would have been the second most powerful person in Britain, and, as an arrogant motherfucker, that's something he wanted.

I think it speaks highly of his bank balance but that's about it. His family was prominent because he bought his way to prominence. They were respected out of fear for his political power, which he bought.

 

Discussions of Lucius' motivations and psyche exist purely as fanon. We know next to nothing about his intrinsic character apart from his being a prideful and bigoted pureblood who isn't afraid to throw around his wealth to get what he wants.

 

We could take Draco as an example of Lucius's beliefs and views...possibly his intelligence as well. He's really not all that impressive, if you ask me. He is more of a pretentious bastard than anything else, or that is how Lucius has developed in my mind. It's not all that surprising that one pretentious bastard would follow another.

 

No, not at all, they are very different characters. Draco is an easily manipulated, weak minded, coward. Maybe coward is the wrong word but he wasn't a strong character. He joined Voldemort's cause, not because he believed in it, but because it was the easiest thing for him to do. Lucius however joined before Voldemort had power, and showed enough ability and competence to be one of Voldemort's trusted servants. While not exactly an admirable achievement, it does show a certain strength of ambition and belief that Draco lacked.

 

While what you say may be true, I still think that Lucius's wallet had more to do with him gaining a top spot in Voldemort's ranks than his abilities did. IMO, Lucius was a bit full of himself. Harry and five other underage wizards were able to thwart Lucius and his team of Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries. Then after, Lucius was nothing more than a doormat for Voldemort to wipe his feet on.

Yes, Lucius wanted power and had ambition - I don't doubt that - however, I do doubt his overall capabilities and do wonder exactly how successful he would have been in the Death Eaters, if he didn't have such a large wallet.

I'm not a Snape fan, but I do think it say something about Lucius's abilities that Snape, a half-blood with no real wealth, was able to eventually usurp him and had gained Voldemort's favor from the very start for his abilities alone. I'd be more fearful of meeting Snape in a dark alley than I would Lucius.

 

So I was writing this big old tl;dr about how Voldemort never did anything that targeted muggleborns specifically, but instead targeted muggles as he believed in magic, but didn't care about where that magic came from. When I remembered that all of CoS was about targeting muggleborns, and I literally headdesked. So yeah I was wrong on that one.

 

I always thought that those sort of policies didn't come from Voldemort specifically. At the time he didn't really care about what the ministry was doing as long as they followed his goals. He was off searching for some sort of key to killing Harry. So I think that the idea of stealing magic came from the Pureblood supremacists like Umbridge, but not from Voldemort himself. And the people running the campaign never actully believed in it, they just used it as propoganda against the muggleborns. Playing on the fears of the old pureblood conservatives, who might never have actively supported Voldemort, but agreed with his aims.

Maybe a young Grindelwald but not Dumbledore. He wanted to use magic to rule because he thought it was for the muggles own good. Voldemort wanted to rule over muggles because he actively hated them. Dumbledore wouldn't oppress the muggles, Voldemort would.

 

Hmmm...

You're right. If Dumbledore was correct Voldemort had been making Horcruxes from the 1940s to 1981. He did take nearly 40 years to find 5 sacrifices as important to him as Myrtle.

Of course this makes him a fucking retard, but then I'm expecting too much of canon.

 

I've always thought that the things Voldemort does - even when they appear to have complex, philosophical motives - actually boil down to some very simple desires on his part.

Voldemort preaches and acts in favor of pure-blood wizardry, but we know from canon that he doesn't actually care about any other wizard, whether pure-blood or mudblood. Lord Voldemort only cares about Lord Voldemort. In Voldemort's eyes, you are either a wizard who can be used, a wizard who should be destroyed, or an animal (Muggle, non-human being, etc.) viewed as little more than an infestation.

So how do we reconcile the philosophy (which is rooted in culture, and thus inherently concerned with the lives of others) with Voldemort's extremely psychopathic, self-centered nature? The key, IMO, is realizing that however interested Voldemort seems in the people and societies him, it's actually about him, first and foremost.

Voldemort hates impure blood not for any logical reason, but because he himself is descended from a Muggle, and he happens to view that part as weak. So he first rejected any association with his weak Muggle blood. When he gained the power to influence the world around him, he attacked those who reflected the hated part of himself - the muggle-borns and their ilk - just as he tried to purge himself of those things.

So, back to the original question: What does Voldemort want? It boils down to just four things. In order of importance:

1. Immortality. Voldemort hates and fears death more than any other thing.
2. Impure blood, Muggle-lovers, and perhaps Muggles themselves - those avatars of the parts of Voldemort that he wants to reject - crushed into powder. Shoved out of sight. Shoved out of mind.
3. Any remaining enemies (or potential enemies) to have the same fate as the people in goal #2. Ditto for the non-human magical beings.
4. All of the remainder are only relevant insofar as they continue to serve him.