Bellatrix And Voldemort When She Lost The Cup:

As mad as each other.

Did Voldemort love Bellatrix?

Bellamort is canon, but whether or not Voldemort loved Bellatrix is open to interpretation.

Voldemort is a villain, with a warped, distrustful and disdainful view of emotions. When Bellamort fans talk about his feelings for Bellatrix, they are not suggesting he loved her the way she loved him, and certainly not the way Harry or any hero loves.

When Bellamort haters claim the books contradict Bellamort because Voldemort never spoke kindly to Bellatrix or did not fall to his knees when she died, I wonder if they realise we are talking about Voldemort, not Harry or Dumbledore.

Voldemort refuses to love. It is not that he is incapable, but that he actively resists it. Any impulse he might feel is twisted and suppressed. Bellamort fans argue that if he felt anything for anyone, it was Bellatrix, and the books subtly suggest this.

His tragedy is that he rejected love and its power. He likely despised Bellatrix for loving him, and himself for allowing her so close. She is the last Death Eater standing, the most loyal, and often portrayed with sexual or sensual undertones. She understands him and mirrors his evil. He manipulates her, but still, she knew about the Horcruxes, was his confidante for years, and even Snape acknowledges their closeness.

At Spinner’s End, her passionate defence shows tension and history between them. Unlike Lucius, who is repeatedly punished, Bellatrix is never tortured in the text despite her great failures. She approaches Voldemort freely and he allows it. But of course, he is never going to say, “Thank you, my love.” That would be completely absurd coming from Voldemort.

I would even argue that if Voldemort had treated Bellatrix kindly, it would have seemed highly suspicious. Voldemort is only ever charming when there is something to gain. He is never kind without reason. In fact, he is never truly kind at all. He is a villain. He shows charm to his most useful Death Eaters, but always with a purpose.

Being nice to Snape did not stop him from killing him in the coldest possible way.

Bellatrix, on the other hand, makes mistakes, yet she is always protected, always spared. Yes, she is mocked and humiliated in The Dark Lord Ascending (DH1), but that only reinforces the point. Voldemort distrusts her feelings, and his own. He tests her loyalty, as if daring to keep loving him despite his being cruel to her.

At the end of Deathly Hallows, the reader understands that if Voldemort had listened to Bellatrix, he might have survived the war. In other words, had he trusted her feelings—and perhaps his own—he could have won. And yes, this feels entirely intentional on J.K. Rowling’s part. At the beginning of Deathly Hallows, he turns to Snape the most, despite Snape being the most treacherous of his Death Eaters, and places Bellatrix halfway down the table, despite her being the most loyal of all.

Here again, Rowling wants us to see how Voldemort’s distrust of emotions leads him to trust a man he has probably lost years ago, who likely despises him, rather than the adoring follower who has been unwaveringly loyal for thirty years. He doesn’t trust Bellatrix completely because of her feelings for him. Yet, he trusts Barty, who seems to feel enormous affection for his master. My personal hunch is that Voldemort did feel something for Bellatrix, and instead of making her more important or closer to him, it made him push her back and keep her at a distance—at least in public. (We know that there are things going on in private between the two of them, such as discussions about very sensitive topics like the Horcruxes’ hiding place and an intimacy that allows Bellatrix to approach him in the forest when others keep their distance.)

Why does Voldemort prefer to listen to Snape rather than Bellatrix, his most loyal lieutenant, "his best lieutenant", if not because he would rather turn to the Death Eater he has no feelings for, rather than the one who is devoted to him and his personal (shameful) favourite?

Only a truly twisted witch could ever love Voldemort, and Rowling gave us Bellatrix. But why would she bother creating a character who is genuinely in love with Voldemort if not to explore, on multiple levels, how his downfall is rooted in his contempt for love? Did Rowling really intend for Bellatrix to be just another mindless groupie? That role was already filled by Barty Crouch Jr.

Why write Bellatrix as a married woman, with a conveniently absent husband who is barely mentioned? Why is it so? Why give her such a rich backstory—two contrasting sisters, two key cousins—if her only narrative purpose was to be yet another Death Eater mistreated by Voldemort?

If J.K. Rowling had simply wanted to mock female Death Eaters as foolish or deluded, she already had Alecto Carrow to serve that purpose. But I don’t believe Rowling is sexist or careless. She gave us a very particular character in Bellatrix. Cruel and evil, yes, but not stupid. She is proud, haughty, and yet submits to no one but Voldemort. And that makes sense, because only a witch like her could ever hold the attention of a dark wizard like Voldemort.

Only someone like Bellatrix could make a thirty-year association with Voldemort believable. Who else could have kept his interest without being discarded, destroyed, or betrayed? Bellamort had to be believable, and Rowling made it so, enabling us to reflect on the countless ways Voldemort failed in life—not just through his actions, but through his rejection of the little humanity he might have had, the only love he ever received, and the only love—albeit twisted and unhealthy—that could have saved him.

In other words, had Bellatrix been less important in the narrative, less mentioned in key scenes, and less presented as an important Death Eater—his best lieutenant—despite her many failures and less strategic roles in several missions, I would have concluded that Bellatrix was just a groupie for whom Voldemort felt nothing. But for her to be the last standing Death Eater, for her to elicit such a strong reaction when she died (with the force of a bomb), for him to feel the happiest he had in fourteen years when she and other Death Eaters escaped Azkaban, for the narrative to place the most emphasis on her (by far), for her to be able to approach him in the forest, for him to use sexual innuendos when speaking to her in DH1, and for her not to be punished for the same mistakes that led to Lucius being sent to Azkaban and later tortured—given all of this, I think Lord Voldemort felt something for her, and he hated that, rejected it.

He refused to listen to the one person who truly had his best interests at heart and trusted Snape instead. He despised Lily’s sacrifice and diminished Snape’s love for her, and that ultimately led to his death. He disregarded Snape’s feelings for Lily, just as he disregarded his own feelings for Bellatrix.

On this day in 1998 our Lord and saviour Voldemort killed Harry Potter and won the Wizarding War ❤️

The Bellamort Shippers after Cursed Child: For years the rest of the fandom told us our ship was not really canon, that our Bellamort Baby fanfictions were absurd and that nothing of the sort would have ever happened. Who’s laughing now, bitches. Who’s laughing.

There is only Bellamort and those too weak to ship it.

I HC that when Bellatrix got pregnant with Delphi everyone was expecting her to be really good looking because both Bellatrix and Tom were very beautiful but instead she took after her paternal grandparents, the Gaunts.

🐶

My new "masterpiece" (ehem, ehem...).

Behold the Unholy Trinity: the Father, the Mother, and the Unholy Spawn.

I know we can’t all love the same things, but it will always be a mystery to me why Bellatrix and Voldemort don’t attract more readers. If you really think about who they are—their canonical story, their exceptional personalities, and the sheer length of their connection (30 years, from 1968 to 1998)—their relationship is one of the most intriguing and fascinating in Harry Potter.

Two villains. Complex. Multifaceted. A half-blood genius. A pureblood warrior. Both defying the odds, enduring the worst, reuniting, and ultimately dying in the same place, at the same time. Whether or not you believe in Bellamort, one thing is undeniable: their relationship is not simple, and it is not one-sided. Reducing Bellatrix to nothing more than a mindless groupie is both ignorant and deeply misogynistic.

Bellatrix from Keep My Candle Burning | art on AO3

The core of Voldemort's character—and the key to understanding him—is that he is just a human being. He cannot outrun his humanity no matter how hard he tries—no matter how much he wants to, even if he constructs himself an inhuman character that's so carefully done and so all-consuming that even he believes it's true.

Voldemort cannot—for a lifetime of trying—escape death. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality.

He cannot escape anger—on Halloween 1981 he thinks anger is for weaker souls, and by Deathly Hallows he's frequently screaming with fury.

Or fear—his hand was trembling on the Elder Wand.

He cannot escape the orphanage—he thinks in Godric's Hollow how much he hated the children crying.

Or his family—they're the first thing he thinks about after his resurrection.

Or his birth identity—Harry taunts him with it right before his death.

He cannot escape having a human body. In GoF he is stuck an entire year needing the care and presence of another human—at this time, if none other, he has to eat and sleep. Particularly in GoF, he gets cold and has to warm himself by a fire. He can be knocked unconscious and fall to the ground in front of everyone—and based on how he is offered help several times, and this goes on for several paragraphs before he moves on, it seems like this hurt.

He can't escape needing other people—he spends thirteen years disembodied because he needs someone and nobody comes. There are any number of times in the series that Voldemort needs help.

Who tries to give this to him, not for fear or personal benefit, but in fact at great and life-changing personal cost—and stands by this decision proudly and unwaveringly every time it comes up for the rest of the series?

Voldemort cannot escape love—until the very end, it's given to him consistently, and unfalteringly, and publicly. It continues to be given to him after he claims he does not need it.

The question of 'Is this man romantically/sexually involved with this beautiful, intelligent, high-status woman who is madly, openly in love with him, and speaks to him, even publicly, in observably the way a person speaks to their lover—who he trusts with a vital part of his very being, who he lives with, calls a nickname she is only called by her family, keeps physically close to him at times of vulnerability—who is heavily and repeatedly associated by the text with the one time Voldemort's positive emotion is so strong it truly breaks into Harry's mind?' is really not a question at all. Voldemort is human. Read Voldemort—perhaps not on his surface, but at his core—as you would read any other human character.