Subtitle: Everything I’ve Learned So Far.

Don't skip out on the bullying batman statement. Danny deserves to spook some bats

dp x dc prompt #58

danny and a couple rogues, maybe his friends from amity, or just by himself starts up a haunted house in gotham. the reviews are stellar and you can hear the screams from across town.

everything goes smoothly until the joker tries to escape through his building.

the bats get spooked, danny bullies batman, and the joker comes out at the end babbling nonsense about the ghost king trying to eat his soul.

Tom Riddle & His Name

Alright this one’s going to get disturbing very quickly. WARNING: Pureblood inbreeding shenanigans. 

This isn’t going to be another post explaining why Tom hated his name because it’s a muggle name or because it’s common. I think that’s part of it, but I haven’t seen anyway address this angle:

Tom hated his name because of his mother. 

Alright, so at some point someone in Hogwarts likely tried to slip Tom a love potion. Let’s say, in his Seventh year. It doesn’t work, Dumbledore finds out and mentions this one study about how those conceived under a love potion are immune to its effects...and also incapable of love. (I think that last part is bs but that’s a different post). 

In his last year at Hogwarts, Tom is already aware that his mother was a witch and his father was the muggle. He’s already pinned the blame on his father for leaving, and placed his mother into the role of victim. He saw his father as having the power, and his mother as being weak. His father, the strong Slytherin-like Muggle who conned the weak witch Merope into sleeping with him. 

But this changes things. 

All of a sudden his mother is the one in the role of the abuser, and his father in the role of victim. It’s his Slytherin, Pureblood Mother who forced his oblivious Muggle Father into marrying her. 

She kidnapped and raped Tom’s father, and then when he escaped, and Tom was born, she named her son after her victim. 

And what were her first, and last, words for her son? She hoped, “that her son would turn out to look like his father.” 

Alright here’s where shit gets real.

What were the Gaunt’s known for again? Rampant and extreme inbreeding and incest. Cousins marrying cousins, sisters marrying brothers, etc. 

So mothers marrying sons? I do not find that hard to believe for this family.

When you replace “father” with “victim” the ickiness really shines through. So here’s Merope giving her child the name of her victim (and her father, who abused her, now those implications I like even less, if that’s possible) and the first thing she does is express a wish that he’ll look like her victim. What the Fuck.

So here’s the very real possibility that Merope could be thinking about grooming her small child into becoming her replacement Tom Riddle 2.0 husband, or at the very least a Tom Riddle that was dependent on her, had no other choice but to love her, and could not run away because there was nowhere to run. 

Tom probably pieced this together, promptly threw up, and very aggressively doubled down on his new chosen name.  

 TL:DR

canon Merope Gaunt would not have been a good mother, no matter what Dumbledore believed, and Tom dodged a bullet on that front. 

Heimerdinger had to 'die' in the other dimension because if he came back with Ekko he would've derailed the entire arc with one sentence.

Heimerdinger, to Jayce: My boy...I'm afraid we have to go put my former assistant out of his misery. For the greater good.

Jayce [was about to go kill Viktor]: He's my partner. And I'm afraid I can't let you do that.

Heimerdinger: That's not up to you, my boy, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry it had to come to this.

Jayce: me too.

And then Heimerdinger gets the Salo special.

---

Basically, like what happens when parents tell their kids to clean their room RIGHT when they're about to do it themselves, Jayce loses all motivation to kill Viktor when Heimerdinger says it's the only option.

Homewrecker Alastor AU where Lucifer thinks Alastor is involved with his wife, Lilith thinks he's involved with her husband, and both of them are terrified by the hold he has over Charlie. Meanwhile Charlie thinks she has 3 parents now 🥰

Jason Todd, Son of Sally Jackson

Jason Todd is Sally Jackson’s Biological Child.

Jason has already become Red Hood but hasn’t revealed his identity to Bruce and the Batfam yet. Sally hasn’t married Gabriel Ugliano yet. Percy is 6 years old.

After reuniting, Sally & Jason bond over their violent sense of justice/self-defense and Sally learns combat from Jason to protect both her sons with deadly force.

After learning Jason’s identity as Red Hood and his reasoning behind becoming a Drug Lord, she becomes Jason’s business partner that co-leads his gang under the codename ‘Queen’.

Queen & Red Hood become extremely well-known protectors of children and abused single parents, opening many parent & children shelters funded by their gang.

Percy is the mob’s baby brother, ‘Guppy,’ because of growing up the son and brother of Gotham’s most successful crime lords. They always made sure he hid his identity with a hoodie and gas mask to disguise his voice with the bonus of protecting him from Scarecrow & Poison Ivy’s attacks.

After receiving Medusa’s head from Percy, Sally makes a new “statue” every month or so. She contacts abused single parents, kills them with the parent’s consent, and gives 3/4 of the money she makes to the parent. This “charity sculpting” is allegedly as a favor to her fellow “grieving” single parents. Weirdly enough, she still ends up killing Gabriel Ugliano, despite never marrying him.

Inspired by miagirl3’s “Avoiding the Secrets” on Ao3

DP X DC Prompt

Damian, who’s never seen danny before this moment: we’re twins.

Danny, choosing chaos: triplets, actually. I have an identical sister. 

Damian: what.

Bruce, listening in from a roof: Talia hid THREE children from me?!

Talia, on a different roof: Father stole one of my children?! >:(

OR ALTERNATIVELY

Danny: Quadruplets actually. You owe so much child support

Bruce: what-

Dani & Dan: pay up bitch

Enemies-to-lovers, but instead of featuring a villain redemption arc, the heroic one is getting progressively more corrupt, unhinged and fucked up, and the one who was originally the clear-cut villain out of the two is just like "well mark me down as scared and horny"

“I do not know how some people are brave enough to follow their own path in a world set out to destroy them” is such a raw line you’d think it was a pride thing but it’s actually lemony snicket talking about a guy that eats butterflies to hide them from the government

Hey, you once mentioned something about Tom Riddle being a little suicidal. Your new post reminded of that and I wonder why you think that. It’s the complete opposite of what the books want you to think.

Alright, it’s time, let’s do this.

My standard disclaimer whenever we venture into the dark pit that is my thoughts on Tom Riddle: I’m going to say a lot of controversial stuff that fandom generally doesn’t agree with, I will say so much of this shit that I simply do not have time to explain it all, I expect 99% of you to disagree with me and the other 1% to be so horrifyingly offended that I dare to contemplate a world in which Tom isn’t always an overly competent psychopath that they leave me notes telling me to take this trash out of their character tags.

We good? Alright.

So, when I say a little suicidal, I mean that he is suicidal.

Not on the level that he’s going to kill himself tomorrow, or even has plans to kill himself, but in that he makes very strange decisions for someone who desperately wants to live.

And yes, I realize I speak blasphemy given that Tom Riddle’s entire m.o. is supposed to be his crippling fear of death.

Oh man, this one’s going to be so long.

So, my reasoning comes down to a few things:

The location of the horcruxes and the nature of their protections.

The events of Deathly Hallows and Tom’s final actions in the novel

The nature of horcruxes and what it means to not only be able to create one but what it does to you (caveat that I am going to headcanon hard here and speak utter blasphemy)

So, let’s start in order this time, because I think the first two are actually far easier for me to explain.

The Location and Nature of the Horcrux Protections and the Trouble with Backdoors in Security

So, first, the horcruxes are all conveniently located in Great Britain. Not even just in Great Britain, all in places that Albus Dumbledore and later Harry Potter can track down with relative ease, all fairly close to each other.

Now, part of this is undoubtedly attributable to Tom’s overly romantic nature. 

Yes, Tom Riddle is a giant romantic, though not necessarily in the traditional sense everyone thinks of. The film “Patton” and its treatment of Patton comes to mind. Tom Riddle is a man enamored by a sense of greatness, of being remembered in this world rather than fading into oblivion, by the significance of places and times in history not only of the world but of himself. He creates an entire, grand, persona for himself because to live an ordinary life for him is to be worthy of nothing.

So, given that, of course Tom places the horcruxes in sentimental locations that have personal meaning to him.

However, it also makes them perilously easy to find and collect.

By itself, this wouldn’t spark my notice.

The ability to destroy horcruxes are not easy to come by. There’s only one basilisk and it’s by chance/Lucius fucking up that Harry gains access to the necessary basilisk venom. Using Fyendfire is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and just as likely to blow up you and the next three towns over as it is to destroy a horcrux. And if there are other means of destroying a horcrux they’re just as hard to come by or just as dangerous.

It’s not quite throwing it into the fires of Mt. Doom from which it was forged but it’s pretty damn close.

So, really, without JKR’s convenient Deus Ex Machina giving both him and Dumbledore the means to actually destroy these things, Tom Riddle’s horcruxes are pretty damn safe no matter where we put them. As we see from the locket, which Regulus manages to collect but Kreacher cannot destroy even after several decades.

However, what does spark my notice, is that the horcruxes can be collected by someone other than Tom Riddle when it appears as if they were never intended to be. What do I mean by this?

From what we see, there’s no benefit to Tom if the original horcruxes are found by anyone. He doesn’t seek them out to restore his original body, they’re just anchor points that should be hidden at all costs. So, he’ll never need a Death Eater to go collect them for him should he be indisposed (indeed, to do so would require a tremendous amount of trust in people he has very little trust in). 

So, why hide them in such a way that others can access them? There are canon based options which would have prevented anyone else from reaching them. Given the existence of age lines, I imagine Tom Riddle could make some arbitrary barrier keyed only to himself. There are mokeskin pouches, such as the one Harry is given in the seventh book, which we know can only be accessed by whoever they’re keyed to. There’s the Fidelius Charm which, true requires a secret keeper which Tom would be very meh on, but options exist.

Tom Riddle could wipe the locations of his horcruxes off the face of the map. He chooses not to. Which leads me to believe that, at least on some unconscious level, he wants the horcruxes to be found.

Then we have the protections.

Specifically, I’m thinking of the locket here.

Yes, the protections are very formidable, but they’re also goddamn weird. 

Rather than make the horcrux simply inaccessible, kill all those intruding, instead the intruder has to go through a very “Saw” like puzzle in which they drown themselves in despair until they finally get the locket, at which point they likely suicide by zombie.

More, there’s no hint that there’s any other way to retrieve the locket. 

Backdoors in security are a very bad idea. What they do is weaken the security as a whole and, if you can take a short cut is, it means that someone who is clever enough and motivated enough can to. Dumbledore is both clever and motivated enough, and I imagine if there was a way to get the horcrux that involved not doing this ridiculous task he would have done it.

More, we’d be back to the land of Tom making sure only he can access the horcrux by requiring a password, keying it to his magical signature, or something so that no one else could get it.

Which means, that’s right, if Tom wants to get the locket he’s drinking the goddamn despair juice just like the rest of us.

What kind of a person would do any of this?

I’ve gone over this before, but I don’t think Tom Riddle’s crazy. Rather, in this case, I think he’s driven by an unbelievable amount of nihilist rage and is also quite depressed.

Tom goes to collect his horcrux, “Ah, it’s time to remember what a miserable life I’ve led and the sheer awfulness of my own existence. Good, I was starting to feel a little too happy. Let’s see if I get eaten by my undead, vengeful, victims today.” 

The Events of Deathly Hallows and Tom Riddle’s Death

I think Tom Riddle’s final death in the books was suicide.

Tom takes over the Wizarding World, finally, and it’s as miserable as ever.

He’s trapped in this sham, barely functional, probably very painful body. His Death Eaters are completely out of control and for all that he wanted society to burn it’s now burning and no one’s even learned anything from this. Children in Hogwarts are being routinely tortured and have now staged a rebellion in which he’s having to slaughter them (I have reasons to believe that this is not what Tom Riddle wanted, at all, but that’s best saved for another post), and then he learns his horcruxes have all been destroyed without him even noticing.

There’s so little left of him, he has accomplished nothing, and there’s Harry Potter back from the dead yet again, gloating at him that love conquers all and Tom Riddle will never understand.

And Harry’s right, Tom Riddle will never understand, the world is meaningless and flat to him now and he finally understand that there’s no point to it. I think Tom Riddle decides he’s done. He’s just done.

He enters in a duel with Harry Potter knowing the weird nature of their wands. Now, it can be assumed he used the Elder Wand, but we know they get locked in Priori Incatatum , and that makes no damn sense with the Elder Wand (well, wandlore in general is silly, but I’m working with what JKR gave me here). So I choose to take JKR at her somewhat established canon and say that, no matter what Harry thought, Voldemort was using his original wand.

He throws out the killing curse, despite having now witnessed Harry resurrecting twice to this thing, and within two seconds it rebounds and kills him.

Voldemort’s death is a lot like this scene from the recent, terrible, 2020 live action Mulan (10/10 do not recommend).  Now, we’re supposed to think that this scene is the witch saving Mulan’s life and thus showing her hope for the next generation. In actuality, the witch literally flies into an arrow she could have easily deflected from Mulan’s path. It’s a suicide that Mulan is too stupid to notice.

Tom chooses suicide in the most ridiculous, flamboyant, and easily written off manner one can and no one even notices. Instead Harry crows that he has personally defeated Voldemort, with the power of love no less, HUZZAH!

And the castle parties.

The Nature of Horcruxes

I almost don’t want to include this because it’s so... well, I’m really drifting far from canon and fandom now.

However, with horcruxes, there’s always an overriding question of why Tom is able to make so many when we don’t see anyone else with these things around (especially as it’s clear that murder doesn’t simply happen for those that now have horcruxes).

Usually, you have fic authors just sort of shrug and go, “Well, he’s that evil, I guess.” Sometimes you have them go, “No one else is crazy enough to keep going, and that’s why Voldemort’s cuckoo bananas.” 

One very good explanation I’ve seen is that it’s because most people, when they murder, feel remorse immediately. The soul split happens, but they’re haunted by the murder for the rest of their life, and thus the horcrux isn’t made. Voldemort, feeling nothing when he kills anyone, is thus able to make them even for when he’s only indirectly associated with the death in question.

However, to me that never really jived philosophically.

Mostly, I simply cannot imagine that tearing apart your very soul is an act of indifference. Here’s how I see it: to do something like that to yourself, you must care, you must care beyond all imagine and human endurance. Your soul literally cannot abide it and saws itself in half, purging what you cannot stand about yourself the most. 

The remorse part is, yes, remorse for the act and the victim but more to the point it is the ability to forgive and reaccept the worst part of yourself. That part of yourself that you purged and destroyed, which is nearly impossible to do and might very well destroy the fabric of who you are). 

In other words, while creating a horcrux is an abominable act of hatred, it is also one of profound self-hatred.

Tom Riddle loathes himself so much that he is able to do this over and over and over again. 

As Tom Riddle goes on he makes himself into less and less and less of himself until he probably doesn’t even know who he is anymore. He just knows, whatever is left of him, he loathes that too. 

And then, of course, he gives up, runs into the nearest flying arrow, and dies.

TL;DR: Tom Riddle’s is a miserable existence that ended in a miserable if unintentionally hilarious manner

So as a follow-up to my post about Marceline's super tragic and angsty prequel to the Elements Arc hidden in the episode ‘Ketchup’ yesterday, here’s a fun little ‘What-If?’ idea I’ve been thinking about for a while that could branch off from it:

If Marceline really did go all ‘feral, angry vampire girlfriend warpath’ on Patience both for what she did to Bonnie and also to find a way to help Bonnie, what if Marcy went a little… further?

So that when Finn, Jake and BMO later return to what was once the Candy Kingdom in Skyhooks, we see that Marceline, even ‘Marshmaline the Campfire Queen’, is conspicuously absent.

Then later, when Finn, Jake and Ice King are traveling through the new, desolate Ice Kingdom, they start hearing a soulful, sorrowful tune echoing through the otherwise silent wastes. A song sung by a very familiar voice…

And when the trio finally get inside the new Ice Palace, they find not Patience St. Pim, but rather Marceline the Ice Queen.

Basically, what if in her rage at Patience and desperation to find some way of helping Bonnie, Marcy actually devoured Patience’s soul, and thus inadvertently became the NEW Ice Elemental herself?

Now funny enough, I feel like this change wouldn’t actually have much of an effect on the Elements Arc itself. For one, I highly doubt that Marceline would be in any condition/willingness to actually help Finn and Jake. Remember that the effects of Ice Elemental contamination induce overwhelming ennui and depression.

So if that got dumped onto Marceline of all people? In the midst of her losing Bonnie to her own elemental corruption? Yeah, at this point I think our girl isn’t going to have the will to do more than stay cooped up in her new ice tower singing angsty, gay love songs for her lost candy girlfriend/soulmate with her new ice-fox backup choir. Now of course they would certainly be THE ANGSTIEST and GAYEST love songs you ever did hear, but still.

Like the big danger for Finn and Jake isn’t that Marceline tries to keep them there or is otherwise antagonistic, it’s that her music is so sorrowful/angsty it actually carries the depression-inducing elemental contamination that threatens to sap people’s will to go on and making them think of lost loves. Which could lead to some interesting character-moments for Finn: Like Marceline’s song first dredge up his old feelings for Bubblegum and Flame Princess, but Finn is actually able to push through the depression and yearnings because he’s moved on from those feelings and can recognize that the relationships they represented have either ended (Flame Princess) or never existed in the first place (Bubblegum). And when the songs make him think of Huntress Wizard, Finn is able to push through because he has a far more casual relationship with HW and doesn’t have the kind of deep yearnings for her that would easily paralyze him with depression.

Of course the most interesting part of this new version of Winter Light would be the potential meeting and conversation between this new Ice Marceline and Ice King/Simon. From Marceline potentially musing on how she now knows how Simon feels, to Ice King possibly having a weird, distorted heart-to-heart with Marceline where we see just a glimpse of Simon.

Following this, I don’t see this change having much of an effect on the rest of the arc, with perhaps one small but still noteworthy addition: When Finn, Jake and IK flee the new Ice Kingdom, Finn calls out to Marceline something to the effect of if she does miss PB so much, she should go see her. Then later during Hero Heart when Princess Bubblegum candifies Phoebe and the rest of her flame army, Marceline actually DOES show up in a dramatic and very impressive display of power, possibly with her own ice army. Finn at first thinks she’s here to help, but it turns out Marcy isn’t here to fight, but simply to see Bonnie. And when her followers also start getting transformed by PB, Marceline simply accepts the candification herself to become Marshmaline. Simply because now she CAN be with Bonnie.

You know, all to really dial up the ‘All is Lost’ vibe of that episode.

Now this means that Skyhooks II and the end of the arc play out the same as they did originally, with Finn and Ice King managing to hit the LSP-shaped elemental-reset button and undo everyone’s elemental corruption. I mean, maybe Bonnie and Marcy have a Big Damn Kiss a season early after they get de-candied, but I think it’s easy to imagine they probably already had a BDK off-screen in the original XD

Of course I think we can all agree that the real interesting angle to this change is the potential of Marceline being the new Ice Elemental on rest of the series. Admittedly, it is a bit hard to imagine the existing plot-points for the rest of the series being affected much by Marceline now having some ice powers. Aside from her Dark Cloud kaiju form she breaks out in Come Along With Me now likely being a Dark BLIZZARD form.

Instead, the really interesting potential of this change comes in how this might affect Marcy’s dynamic with Simon and how she might go about adapting to her new abilities. I think we can all agree it would be fun to see Marcy and Bonnie trying to figure out their new elemental powers together. Though consider this: If Bonnie was visited by the spirit/past-incarnation-memories of Chatsberry, what if Marceline ends up being visited by the spirt of Urgance Evergreen? You know, the being who made the Ice Crown?

Really makes you think where something like that could lead…