I was reading this One-Shot the other day, "Doubting Thomas", where Luna essentially travels back in time, raises Tom as her son, and the boy ends up the leader of the anti-Purebloods. It ends before he can start his planned revolution, but it got me thinking: why don't more authors attempt to make Tom Riddle the leader of the "Squibs and Mudbloods and Blood Traitors"? If you threw in a few little Butterflies, it is quite easy to accomplish:

1. Either have Tom adopted by a loving family, or make Tom the victim at the orphanage and give him a serious hatred of bullies.

2. At Hogwarts, have the Slytherins look down on this Halfblood (or Mudblood, as they would consider him without a known Magical parent), and don't make them join him so easily and quickly.

3. Have Tom get a good, hard look on the discrimination non-Purebloods suffer from.

4. Have Tom fall under Dumbledore's wing and/or leave him seriously frustrated how he doesn't act as often as he should.

(5., if you want to). Have him drafted into WW2, and let him witness a Concentration Camp.

There. An decent Backstory, logical Butterflies, and Voldemort is left as a key figure of the Anti-Pureblood group. Whether that means he's a key Dumbledore ally or he goes further than him is a different Story.

If anyone knows a Story that has this kind of premise (ideally a good one, that doesn't rely on relentless Bashing of Dumbledore and/or the entire Wizarding World), please post links below.

 

I don't think these premises would work very well to be honest. The simple fact of the matter is, Tom Riddle doesn't care about others pain. He recognises it, maybe even basks in it at times, but he most certainly doesn't empathise with others pain. He's a sociopath.

He doesn't care if others are bullied, even if he himself was. Even if Tom was bullied, his use of magic would have quickly put an end to that. And given his hatred of weakness, I'd wager that he would feel nothing but hatred and even smugness/arrogance at seeing others persecuted while not being capable of standing up for themselves. Hatred because they're weak and therefore not worth his time, and arrogance because he was strong enough to end his own persecution.

Furthermore, the reasons I believe he wanted to rule the purebloods was both parts a sense of entitlement (descended from the forefather of pureblood ideology) and logic (purebloods were essentially the aristocrats of Magical Britain, meaning wealthy, connected, and politically powerful) with a dash of perverse revenge/desire (purebloods bowing to a halfblood).

Furthermore, I very much doubt a young Tom Riddle would fight and possibly die for muggles. Remember, he's a selfish, sociopathic monster, regardless of his age. What's in it for him? Plus, if the GB government tried to conscript him, he could just vanish into Magical Britain under the MoM's protection. I doubt they were throwing wizards into a muggle war.

Basically, imo at least, it makes sense that Voldemort went on to control and lead the pureblood faction.

 

Well, I like the idea. Other than the fact that it would take away the parallel to Hitler, i.e. advocating for a group that he didn't even belong to.

But how would seeing a concentration camp add to his enmity toward purebloods? Ignoring the fact that he would never join a muggle war since he's terrified of dying, there's three things that could happen with that scenario:

1. He realizes that people are all just human, no matter the race, and instead of advocating against purebloods, he advocates for equality. I think that's what you meant anyway. If so, the thread title doesn't really work. But it would also mean that he probably wouldn't be into violence a la coup d'état. That means he'd go the politician route. No followers, only constituents. Boring.

2. He's completely disgusted by muggles, and he becomes only for magic. This could mean that he'd still be okay with people hurting or killing muggles, which probably wouldn't fly with his muggle-born followers. If he's just for segregation from muggles, well, the HP world is already like that. And don't say kidnapping the muggle-borns from their muggle parents. That cliche has been used way too often. As though all the witches and wizards would suddenly want to adopt a load of muggle-borns, as if they were puppies. People don't even adopt all the puppies. That'd mean an orphanage. If he was bullied there, he wouldn't suddenly want to send all his future supporters to his personal hell (and why didn't he just rip their faces off? He has pretty good control over his magic. Why would he ever let himself be bullied?)

3. Nothing happens. He doesn't feel empathy.

TL;DR: You might as well change the protagonist to Harry Potter. Without all the hypocrisy and psychopathy, Tom Riddle is Harry Potter. Just, you know, smarter.

EDIT: ninja'd by LoyalFenian.

EDIT 2: Even though I don't like the premise, I felt bad not leaving anything. So I did a quick google search under 'fanfiction anti-pureblood tom riddle.' These were the first two stories that came up.

Here's a Boy-Who-Lived!Tom Riddle, Warrior's Heir. Here's another AU, Warping Circumstances. It said in one review that it was an anti-pureblood!Tom Riddle. I have no idea if these are good or not. Good luck.

 

You do understand what the point of a FanFiction is, right? It's to change already existing stories around to fit new scenarios.

And your entire premise relies on him always being a "selfish, sociopathic monster". Then get rid of that. Get him out of that orphanage and put him under the care of kind, caring, loving people.

Yes, you could argue that the resulting person wouldn't be Tom Riddle as we know him. But here's the thing: that's the bloody point! To make him a completely different person that could lead a pro-Muggle faction.

If someone can pull off having Harry Potter raised by Deadpool, I think this kind of story would fit in the realm of reason.

PS: I do get the points you're making, I really do. But this Thread was more about people showing me stories that had this premise.

 

I started typing a short reply, then this idea really hooked me so I started rambling, here goes.


If I wanted to put Voldemort on the other side of the issue, I'd have him find out just why his father abandoned him, paint his father as a victim enslaved by his pureblood mother, rather than a deadbeat who abandoned them.

The books seems to gloss over just how horrifying love potions are, it jokes about Molly using them, Fred and George sell them, the closest the books get to playing love potions straight is in HPB, and even then it's not the love potion that's the real problem they're just a setup for the poisoned drink.

The way I'd set a young Tom Riddle against the purebloods would be by making him identify with his father. Rather than arriving in Little Haggleton to find a man that abandoned him. I'd have him arrive to find only stories of a man who against all reason ran off with an inbred girl from a family of lunatics, only to come back a broken shell. You could keep him alive, but it'd probably be easier to have him die not long after leaving Merope, perhaps suicide. Matbe convey the stories through his grandparents and the townspeople, maybe have his father leave behind a journal of maddened ramblings as a muggle tries to deal with the reality of having been mentally enslaved.

It might be an idea to delay Toms discovery of his parsletongue to hold off on him discovering his connection to Slytherin and fixating on it. It wouldn't be that difficult to give the apparently muggleborn Tom Riddle reasons to dislike his Slytherin peers. Here he was, undoubtedly the most magically gifted among them, and yet he's supposedly the inferior one, simply because of his blood?

So the young orphan Tom Riddle tracks down his father, he arrives in Little Haggleton an angry young man, looking to take that anger out on the father who abandoned him. He finds only the grave of a charming, handsome young man whose life was ruined by an inbred near-squib.

Paint his father as someone for him to identify with, handsome, charming, intelligent. Obviously he can't share Toms gift for magic, but he can still be cast as talented and capable in his own right.

From there instead of his father becoming the focus of his hate, it's his mother. His inbred, near-squib of a mother, whose only claimed redeeming quality is the supposed purity of her blood.

Draw the parallels between himself and his peers and his parents. Just as he is obviously superior in every way to his pureblood housemates, so was his father handsome, charming, and talented superior to the inbred near squib Merope.

So where Voldemort hates his muggle father for abandoning his mother, our Tom hates his mother for enslaving his father. Where Voldemort clings to the value of his mothers pure and noble blood as proof of his superiority, Tom views her as the ultimate expression of pureblood inferiority. Just as the purebloods of Slytherin are all beneath him, here was Merope Gaunt.

Merope Gaunt the purest of the pure, carrying the blood of great Slytherin himself. Yet for all the purity of her blood, she was the worst of them all, no great feats of wandless magic from a young age, no hours spent in the library mastering magic above any of her peers. For all the superiority of her most noble blood, how grand must her achievements be.

Behold the Heiress of Slytherin, she who managed to rape a muggle.

---------- Post automerged at 15:17 ---------- Previous post was at 13:08 ----------

Okay, more rambling, this should automerge, right?


Getting Tom around to the anti-pureblood way of thinking was easy enough, but what is Voldemort without the Death Eaters? Voldemorts ideology wasn't just 'Voldemort is the best' certainly that was part of it, a part you'd likely die if you questioned, but there is the wider pureblood superiority/muggleborn inferiority to consider.

Merope certainly illustrates that pure blood isn't everything, but just as Voldemort didn't really like telling anyone about his father, I doubt our Tom would be too eager to tell anyone about his mother. Which leads me to a case to be made for muggleborn superiority, I still don't see our Tom as being too fond of muggles, but muggleborn?

To inherit ones magic from a parent is easy, indeed from what we know rare is the child that fails to inherit the gift of magic from their parents. Oh specific skills and raw talent might not pass from parent to child, but if there's magic in the blood it's generally there to stay.

Muggleborn though, are rare, they do not have it easy. There's no coasting by on a gift handed down from countless generations ago, to be muggleborn is to earn your power, to start at the very lowest and claim for yourself the power to master the world. Not muggleborn then, too undignified a name perhaps Worthy.

Who could possibly be more Worthy of power than those who, coming from nothing, claimed it for themselves.
Is Tom Riddle not proof of this? Held back, with no wand, with no spellbooks, without even someone to tell him that magic exists.

Alone, surrounded by muggles in an orphanage, Tom Riddle was Worthy of his power, while his peers of purer blood were still only dreaming of using the power they had been gifted on a silver platter Tom Riddle stood above them.

That which is not given, must be earned. Who is given less than the boy born alone in a muggle orphanage, and who has earned more than Tom Riddle, the greatest most Worthy wizard alive.

It also adds the nice parallel, where Voldemort had the great secret of his muggle heritage, so too does Tom Riddle have a dark secret. Far from having came from nothing, he is in fact the heir of Slytherin himself.

 

You gonna write that? Because I've got an itch to read it. That's one well thought out bunny.