1. Stripping Someone To Their Underwear, While Choking Them And Assaulting Them Beforehand, In Public,

Omg yes

I may or may not have spent a lot of time scrolling through your incredible blog yesterday 🫣

You are incredibly talented and I’ve loved reading your hot (intellectual) takes😍🤓

I know you’ve mentioned you’re not a fan of Dramione, what are your thoughts on Lucius/Hermione?

I was a skeptic until I read ABitofWits writing which is *chefs kiss*

thank you very much for the asks, anons!

perversely, i am compelled to back this because lucius is so transparently a wife guy.

the problem i have with many of hermione's non-ron pairings is that they tend to assume that what she's looking for is a man who's smooth and sophisticated and ambitious [which is why ron is usually - in such stories - turned into a boor with sawdust rattling around in his head] and which turn her into someone who's similarly polished and perfect in turn.

whereas what she clearly wants is to be able to be herself [annoying] around a man who uncomplicatedly adores her.

she and narcissa are very different people - obviously - but since lucius is arthur weasley's narrative mirror and ron is very like his father [aka: a stone cold legend who is devoted to his missus and clearly fucks like a champ] we can assume that he has many of the same traits which canonically attract hermione to ron.

[and narcissa's clearly not only spiralling in half-blood prince because she's worried about her son but because she's suffering withdrawal symptoms...]

hermione's having the time of her life, lucius is prepared to throw hands if anyone dares to point out that his new girlfriend is a nightmare at parties because she simply has to have the last word all the time, and draco is sitting on his bed staring into the middle distance and wishing - for the first time in years - that voldemort was alive.

hot!

These two are both nerds, yes, but in all other aspects they are incompatible.

THE AUDIENCE CLAMOURS FOR YOUR VOLMIONE TAKE!!!!!!!!! In all seriousness the curiously is piqued tenfold by the fact that you go hard to bat for the other two voldemort/golden trio ships

i've definitely been putting this one off, anon, but it's hermione's birthday, and since the requests have kept coming...

maybe i have to grit my teeth and get through it.

i am, like my good pal @yorickofyore, broadly a tomione/volmione disliker - which is a spoiler for what follows. there are - obviously - huge numbers of people who are not, and they may sit happily in their ecosystem while i flop around photosynthesising in mine.

and the reason why i don't like tomione/volmione is right there in the last three screenshots: it relies - like several other hermione pairings, snamione and sirimione chief among them - on a portrayal of hermione's intellectual expression which bears absolutely no relation to how this is written in canon.

across all seven books in the series, hermione's intellect primarily manifests itself in a sincerely impressive ability to retain and repeat information [very usually verbatim from the source she got it from]. she is able to use this ability to retain information to understand the theoretical components of magic in a way neither harry nor ron ever manage, and she is then able to apply this retention - that is, to repeat the information she has acquired - of knowledge to the performance of magic which is [often considerably] ahead of her expected level both in terms of the hogwarts curriculum and in terms of what would be seen as the median ability of an adult witch or wizard.

but hermione is never shown - at any point in canon - to be a particularly radical, creative, or experimental thinker.

she places an enormous amount of intellectual trust in disciplinary authority - not only in the respect she has for following textbooks and teachers to the letter [hence why she won't attempt any of the modifications in the half-blood prince's textbook, she thinks it's offensive that they contradict the "official" peer-reviewed and sanctioned instructions] but also in her agreement with the gatekeeping imposed by the state and/or its authorities on academic inquiry.

[hence her disliking the invented spells in the half-blood prince's textbook because they're not ministry approved, or her easing her discomfort at having read the books from which voldemort learned to make a horcrux by insisting - undoubtedly correctly - that dumbledore wanted her to do it and she therefore has the permission of an intellectual authority].

she's immediately mistrustful of anything she can't find [something she regards as] an empirical source for - which is why harry's mental connection with voldemort frightens her so much, or why she thinks that harry's lost his mind when he begins to insist the deathly hallows are real and important, or, most famously, why she thinks divination is bullshit.

she's never shown to be able to synthesise her knowledge [she never answers questions in class in her own words, she always goes massively over word limits], or to use it in ways which are considerably removed from its typical application.

[the protean charm on the da coins, for example - the magic she's using is sophisticated, and is being applied in a way which wouldn't necessarily be classroom-sanctioned, since she's using it to defy umbridge, but the evidence of canon is that it's not magic which is being used in a way which is removed from the spell's original purpose. terry boot is impressed because he's looking at a flawless execution of newt-level magic by a sixteen-year-old, rather than because hermione is using that magic in an unusual way. the same is true of the polyjuice potion - it's impressive because she brews it flawlessly aged thirteen.]

this is a very logical, rational, and scientific approach to learning - and one which the series, which tends to take a dim view of anything which deviates too far from the status quo, views extremely positively - and it is intelligence. i know some people think that when i say this about hermione i'm saying that she isn't clever - or that i'm saying she's less clever than the characters [all of whom are male] that the series permits to be "brilliant" - but that's not the case. hermione is clearly extremely clever - and her logical, empirical, careful approach comes in clutch for the trio throughout the series, right from philosopher's stone. her intellectual expression just isn't the only way intelligence can manifest itself - and it isn't an intellectual expression which will automatically mesh with another very clever person's approach.

which is to say... lord voldemort, both as a teen and an adult, is - intellectually - the complete opposite of hermione.

he is someone - as he tells us - who thinks of magic as a creative force he has every right to shape as he sees fit, something whose boundaries he has the inherent right to smash through. he rejects disciplinary authority [his loathing of dumbledore - as an adult, at least - is because he thinks that dumbledore is a petty-minded gatekeeper who attempts to repress the dark arts - magic, snape tells us, which is inherently ever-changing, unfixed, mutating - because he's afraid of them and their refusal to be neatly contained in disciplinary boxes; his appeal to slughorn's authority is purely a manipulation technique]. he is an adaptor and inventor, and he uses magic in ways which radically deviate from its intended purpose.

and so the common "teen tom riddle and hermione are at school together" trope that they'd both get off on being academic rivals is, in my view, impossible to justify while keeping either of them remotely canon-coherent. she's going to think he's a cunt. he's going to think she's irrelevant.

indeed, i genuinely think the most likely scenario if the two are at school together is that the teen voldemort wouldn't be able to pick hermione out of a line-up - not least because she has very little to offer him when it comes to his plans for world domination.

when it comes to those he's "nice" to, the teenage tom riddle targets the socially prominent, rich, and influential, whom he can use parasitically to his own ends.

he's happy, undoubtedly, to have minions who are less useful to him from a social-advancement perspective, but who come in handy as pawns in his schemes - as dumbledore puts it, "the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish gravitating toward a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty" - but this is the only thing he sees them as. hermione has a capacity for cruelty he would undoubtedly see potential in [even if he would probably be wary of her "run and tell teacher" vibe], but as someone who does his bidding only, rather than anyone for whom he's willing to fake [or, indeed, to actually feel] any degree of mutual affection.

and i do think this - in and of itself - is interesting. hermione is someone - as i've said elsewhere - who has a tendency towards blind loyalty, which often causes her to accept people she likes and/or respects treating her cruelly [something we see in canon particularly in how she reacts to snape's behaviour towards her]. she's also someone who is incredibly deferential to authority, fairly naive, convinced she's always right, convinced she's not irrational, superstitious, or emotionally-driven, and capable of pretty egregious cruelty in pursuit of being rational and correct.

or, in other words, she's very easy for a flesh-and-blood voldemort to manipulate.

[she's not at risk from a horcrux because she's possessed of the empirical fact that they can't hurt you if you don't let them get emotionally close to you, which impacts how she behaves around the locket.]

on the rare occasions when i've enjoyed fics with this pairing, then, they've tended to be ones which actually acknowledge this - and which have hermione completely destroyed by a voldemort [usually in adult form] who has never cared one iota about her, all because she was convinced she'd be far too clever to fall for his tricks.

[my rec: enigma by devdevlin.]

and this is the main way my view of tomione/volmione deviates from my view of tomarrymort or ronmort - i don't think there's any circumstance where it can ever work as something mutual, whereas the entire point of tomarrymort is that the relationship is something voldemort perceives as equal, and ronmort sees the dark lord running headfirst into ron's ability to disarm and confuse him by possessing a crumb of emotional intelligence. i don't think voldemort would hate hermione - or even be particularly irritated by her - but nor do i think he'd find anything about her interesting enough to make him want to keep her around for any longer than she was useful.

but - like so many hermione pairings - the default in tomione/volmione tends to be "omg, hermione is so hot, brilliant, and fascinating that [insert man here] becomes completely obsessed with her". whether the story leads to voldemort becoming a better person or hermione going over to the dark side, the way the pairing is written always assumes that hermione is someone voldemort would consider [often very quickly] important to him [even in circumstances where she is a prisoner]. only very rarely do fics ever explore the much more canon-justifiable - and, in my view, much more interesting - idea that voldemort is somebody hermione could and would consider important, while he wouldn't give a single fuck about her.

[neither of them give a shit about dead rabbits though. it's the only thing they have in common.]

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

"I love a man who acts like a woman and is prettier than me" "Lol date a woman then" STFUUUUUUU

Tired of it

Just thought to myself "can't women have a bad time in fiction without rape being involved" which really shows you how much you're in the fucking trenches if you are both a horror fan and women fan

If you are a real-life pedophile, necrophile, or zoophile, you are not welcome in the proship community. Get out and create your own.

i actually never ever want AO3 to be censored bc nothing is more fun than reading the tags on a fic and going “huh. didn’t know there was a market for that.”

Wow so many interesting points I've never considered 😍

Hi, do you have an analysis for why you prefer bottom Tom? Most fics have him as a top, but I'm very interested in your perspective ma'am.

well, the short answer is because i want to and because i can.

the longer answer is that i just don't find any of the arguments for why voldemort would never bottom under any circumstances to be as convincing and definitive as their proponents claim them to be.

my issue - to be clear - isn't with people having a preference for reading or writing about him being a top. it's with the fact that him only being a top - and not only that, but him being repulsed or humiliated by the idea of bottoming - is typically presented as such an objective fact that preferring to read or write about him being a bottom provokes responses which range from the simply annoying - "this is out of character!" [any fic in which he consensually shags his prophesied child-enemy is out of character, be serious] - to the genuinely troubling - "it's disgusting! voldemort is a real man and real men don't want anything up their arses!".

obviously - let's be real - a lot of the arguments about why bottom!voldemort is impossible are just typical "slash fandom reinvents gender roles" shit - they essentially boil down to "omg no harry would bottom because he's the girl".

but others do come with more weight behind them. and two of these are:

that the gender norms voldemort was raised with would inculcate in him a big lump of internalised homophobia which would make him see bottoming as feminine, and - in seeing it as feminine - see it as weak, humiliating, dependent, and incompatible with his understanding of control and power. that voldemort would be horrified by the idea of being penetrated, because he would see it as something which polluted or profaned the body he considers to be sacred.

i do think it's possible to argue both of these points robustly, using actual readings of the text rather than just vibes. i've just never found any of these readings compelling.

and the reason why all comes down to this:

"I knew I was different," he whispered to his own quivering fingers. "I knew I was special. Always, I knew there was something." [HBP 13]

he's talking about something specific - how he's always known that he's a wizard - here, of course. but we can also take this statement and use it to think more generally about how he views being perceived as deviant, strange, or wrong by the norms of the society in which he lives.

by which i mean... he's somebody who believes that being different makes him special and that people who try to punish or shame him for his difference are idiots who simply haven't yet worked out that he's superior to them in literally everything he does. he's not someone who perceives being different in a self-flagellating way - he doesn't think there's something wrong with him, he doesn't think that his difference makes him a pathetic or unimpressive person. and he's also not somebody who views being criticised or punished for his difference as something which causes him sorrow or anxiety. it causes him rage - because it inconveniences him [it creates obstacles he has to overcome, although he entirely believes he can overcome them] and because it doesn't recognise his self-conception as the protagonist of reality:

Riddle's reaction to this was most surprising. He leapt from the bed and backed away from Dumbledore, looking furious. "You can't kid me! The asylum, that's where you're from, isn't it? 'Professor,' yes, of course - well, I'm not going, see? That old cat's the one who should be in the asylum. I never did anything to little Amy Benson or Dennis Bishop, and you can ask them, they'll tell you!"   "I am not from the asylum," said Dumbledore patiently. "I am a teacher and, if you will sit down calmly, I shall tell you about Hogwarts. Of course, if you would rather not come to the school, nobody will force you -" "I'd like to see them try," sneered Riddle. "Hogwarts," Dumbledore went on, as though he had not heard Riddle's last words, "is a school for people with special abilities -"   "I'm not mad!" [HBP 13]

you can entertain a very dark reading of this scene - in fact, i have - but it's also possible to entertain a liberating one, and see the child voldemort as someone who has always been proud of his difference and prepared to defend that pride in the face of censure, and who is absolutely delighted to be given the language to define and describe his difference and to be given access to a community of people who are similarly - in his words - special.

all of which is to say... the standard interpretation in fandom seems to be that a queer voldemort would fall somewhere on a spectrum from indifferent to his sexuality to actively ashamed of it.

but i think it's much, much more plausible that he'd actually be proud of it, and for his statement - "i knew i was different... i knew i was special" - to be used as the starting point for how we might imagine him realising that he's queer.

and this is why the "he'd have so much internalised homophobia he'd never bottom" argument always falls flat for me - it rests on an assumption that queer men having to grow past a childhood/teenage fear that there's something wrong with them is the default position. it overlooks the fact that there are many ways for somebody to come to understand their own sexuality.

and that two of those ways are "defiantly" and "spitefully". aka the lord voldemort special.

something which always stands out to me about the canonical voldemort, both when he's a good-looking teenager/young man and a monstrous, serpentine adult, is that - even with all the phallic symbolism which surrounds him [enormous snakes and ultra-powerful wands and so on] - the text presents him as somebody who comes across as fairly effeminate:

he's typically described - as we can see from this excellent analysis from @said-snape-softly - as speaking "softly" or "quietly". when he isn't, he's often "shrill", "shrieking", "screeching", or "screaming".

he has a hair-trigger temper and he's extremely emotionally volatile.

he's typically described as moving in ways which have similarly feminine connotations - he "drifts" and "glides". while the primary doylist reason for this is clearly so the reader associates him with snakes, ghosts, and dementors, it ends up giving him a quality of movement which is fey, rather than powerful and purposeful. indeed, we only ever see him do one thing which requires physical, as well as magical, prowess - duelling. but, like fencing - which is its real-world equivalent - good duellists aren't people who are physically strong or imposing, they're people who are cunning and nimble [and the other men the text emphasises are good at it are snape, flitwick, and harry - with harry's quick reflexes being explicitly given as a reason why [i.e. GoF 34] ]. his ability to fly is a demonstration of his magical power alone, since it allows him to circumvent the need to use a broom, which does appear to require physical strength [hence why the only main characters who aren't fond of using brooms are either women or fat, cowardly little boys like neville...]

building on this, he's often described in ways which make him sound quite physically fragile - he's very thin, he's very pale, he's always cold, every time his heartbeat is described it seems to be irregular and so on.

his reputation in his teens and young adulthood is as a "polite [and] quiet" goody-two-shoes who "showed no sign of outward arrogance or aggression at all" [HBP 17]. i think that point about aggression is really important - it builds on what mrs cole tells dumbledore about it being "very hard to catch him" bullying other orphans [HBP 13]. he's not dudley - or james and sirius - using his physical talents to subdue and control people. he's sneakier... more insidious... indeed, in chamber of secrets, ron explicitly compares him to percy - somebody else the text presents as fairly effete - in order to complain about him "squealing" - aka, running to tell a teacher, like a girl, instead of settling things like a man - on hagrid [CoS 14].

when he's a young man, living alone for the first time, the text thinks it's very important to tell us that he has "slightly longer hair" than he does at school [HBP 20]. "slightly" is obviously the operative word here - i don't think he's strutting into hepzibah smith's house in a twenty-four inch lace-front - but we can certainly imagine him with the sort of greaser or pompadour haircut which was understood in the 1950s as being a bit counter-cultural...

of the five horcruxes which are objects - rather than harry and nagini [who is, of course, female] - three [cup, diadem, locket] originally belonged to a woman and are acquired from a woman, two [cup, locket] are acquired by killing a woman using a stereotypically female murder method [poison], two are connected to voldemort's rage at his mother being disparaged [locket - he's furious to hear hepzibah say that merope must have stolen it, ring - he attacks morfin immediately after morfin calls his mother a "slut"]. and all five of these horcruxes also depend on women to introduce them into the narrative in a way that facilitates their destruction: the diary is given to ginny; dumbledore puts on the ring in order to speak to his sister; the locket is associated both with walburga's grief [it's literally moved from the cave - voldemort's grave for his mother - to the house which is walburga's own tomb!] and with umbridge's performance of femininity; the cup is given to bellatrix [and the text is very clear that both she and voldemort understand it as having only been given to her, rather than to her and rodolphus] and is then destroyed - albeit off-stage - by hermione; and harry is given the tools to acquire the diadem by cho, luna, and mcgonagall, although he has to overcome the obstacles of alecto carrow and helena ravenclaw to get hold of it. harry - of course - also only becomes a horcrux because of a woman - lily's - sacrifice.

his favourite death eaters are a woman and a very feminine-coded man. but - more interestingly - what the text finds unimpressive isn't that he likes bellatrix and snape... it's that he leaves a lot of his dirty work to male minions who are characterised by their brutish strength - people like greyback, hagrid [who he makes carry harry up to hogwarts], rowle, gibbon, amycus carrow and so on. there's the heavy implication in the text that voldemort's preference for leaving the violence to others - as i'm always pointing out, his canonical kill count is really low; most of the murders in the series are done by other death eaters acting on his orders - is something we should see as weak.

the text associates him with this effeminacy - i think it's really important to note, given who jkr is - as a criticism. it's something - much like the text's presentation of him as aromantic, and the fact that the degradation of his looks via the creation of the horcruxes makes him look sexless/eunuch-like - being used to underscore his villainy. he's feminine-coded in a toxic way.

but let's take this in another direction [and let's also return to the actual question you asked me...] and read him as someone who has always had to deal with being perceived as queer by other people, and having that perception be associated with negative assumptions.

he's very easy to imagine as a child/teenager who's the target of ridicule from his fellow orphans/fellow students [for not being sporty, for liking to sit in the library for hours on end coming up with anagrams of his own name, for the way he walks and speaks] which hinges on the idea that his failure to conform to the expected conventions of "proper" masculinity mean that he's not a proper man... and that if he's not a proper man then... he's not straight.

but then we have to come back to the "i knew i was special" point, don't we?

voldemort's belief in his own superiority can - in my view - be used to read him as somebody who would embrace being camp or effeminate or whatever term we want to use, in order both to express his contempt for people who criticise him ["think i'm a messed up little deviant, do you, mrs cole? well, you don't know the half of it!"] and who conform to social norms he thinks are reprehensible ["oh, do purebloods frown upon bottoming, abraxas? well - guess what - so do muggles. do you agree with what muggles think?"] and to humiliate, subjugate, and control them ["you think i'm a faggot, do you...? well, you're right... i'm a faggot who's defeated you in battle and now i'm about to kill you... still feel like a man?"].

while - obviously - appearance/gender presentation has nothing to do with preferred sexual roles - the manliest men on earth can be bottoms! being femme doesn't prevent you topping! - i really do think that voldemort is someone who can be written entirely canon-coherently as thinking that the homophobic perception of bottoming as weak, powerless, or humiliating is complete nonsense, and who would actively flaunt his rejection of this perception as a way to mock people who subscribe to it.

after all, we see him do something similar in canon when it comes to his blood-status and social class. the death eaters - lots of whom are posh pureblood men who conceive of themselves as the most important people in the universe - are made to kneel at the feet of and kiss the robes of and be branded like cattle by and be at the beck and call of someone who's neither pureblood nor posh. there are - as lupin tells us - no wizarding princes... and yet the closest things the wizarding world has to an aristocracy are rolling around on the ground debasing themselves and calling a half-blood orphan "my lord".

voldemort does this to humiliate them. but he also does this to amuse himself - à la logan roy making men who've displeased him play "boar on the floor".

[wormtail being forced to care for him when he's in his half-form at the start of goblet of fire, for example. he's not humiliated in the slightest by his dependence on wormtail... wormtail is humiliated by it, and voldemort finds it hilarious.]

and so i think we can plausibly imagine him also deeply enjoying making his straight, married, "i would die before i let anything near my arse", "i'm not getting changed for quidditch with so-and-so there, he's queer", "i'd disown my son if i found out he let other men fuck him" death eaters grovel for the favour of someone who loves getting railed...

this deeply aligns with how voldemort understands things like power and control - and it's why the argument that he'd only top because he would regard it as the only way of being powerful and controlling never hits for me.

because this also rests on an assumption - that the bottom always understands themselves as the passive partner. i do think the fandom is broadly getting better at recognising that bottoms and submissives are different things [although the bar was on the floor...], but i think there's still a tendency to default to the idea that the two people involved in sex are an active partner and a passive partner, and that the passive partner is - for want of a better term - the receptacle.

the language used around bottoming reinforces this assumption. its voice is passive - the bottom is penetrated, is bred, is fucked, is taken - its verbs are passive too - the top does, the bottom receives.

but the thing is... this is just semantics. and it's a semantic argument directly rooted in misogyny, and the homophobia which stems from and connects to it.

and - since it's just semantics - we can change the language we use at any time to completely reconfigure the assumed power dynamic.

the bottom grants access. the bottom consumes. the bottom takes. the bottom absorbs. the bottom uses. the bottom captures. the bottom detains. the bottom grips. the bottom devours. the bottom permits. the bottom destroys.

the top is the person who's passive - who receives permission, who is granted access, who is consumed, who is absorbed, who is captured. the top is the person having their life-force leached from them. they're just a toy, just a piece of meat. they literally don't matter.

and the text already uses this sort of language - the language of consumption and capture and permission to cross thresholds and so on - to talk about voldemort's attitude to power, magic, and the body.

he drains the blood of unicorns; he uses up the life-force of the people and animals he possesses; he grows stronger by consuming ginny's secrets; he is restored to his body by taking from his father, wormtail, and harry; he takes the money dumbledore offers without feeling the need to thank him or regard it as a gift; he offers up gifts to people he wants to use for his own gain; he "doesn't march up to people's houses and bang on their front doors" [OotP 6]; he hoards and conceals precious things; his soul is kept safe by being encased by the horcruxes; his locket is guarded by something which has to be drunk, which destroys anyone who assumes they can simply take it without his permission; he "would be glad to see anything miss hepzibah shows me" [HBP 20] and then seizes her secrets and uses them to bring about her doom; his descent from slytherin is proven by his control of the threshold of the chamber of secrets; he places himself and his talents at dumbledore's disposal, "i am yours to command" [HBP 20]; he controls snakes and they do his bidding; he drains the ministry of its secrets; he controls the dementors, who devour joy; augustus rookwoord "has lord voldemort's gratitude... i shall need all the information you can give me" [OotP 26]; he is the greatest legilimens - that is to say, he is excellent at pulling other people's secrets into his own mind and using them as he wishes - the world has ever seen; he has seen ron's heart and it is his; his followers live to serve him...

his followers are called death eaters, not death fuckers.

and so it's inarguable, really, that he'd have a legion of service tops under his command...

She was born between 1st September 1972 and 31st August 1973 (probably 1973), which means she had just ended her education when Harry became a 1st year. So he never saw her at all. They missed each other by a year. 

Every time someone says that Tonks was at school with Harry in canon an angel loses their wings

I'd like to think Voldemort has an oedipus complex.