Curate, connect, and discover
Galatea Merrythought was the dark arts professor during Tom Riddle’s school years, retiring when he graduated.
In this fic, Merrythought becomes Riddle’s mentor and was the one to introduce him to the many creatures (vampires, werewolves, giants, etc) who would’ve made up Voldemort’s ranks. Instilling in him a sense of adventure and treasure hunting that gave him the knowledge to find the lost Diadem in the first place.
Merrythought takes him on wild adventures that are only possible because she has an illegal time turner.
Tom accidentally becomes friends and fellow adventurers with Muggleborn Hufflepuffs Nobby Leach and Margot Doope, and Ravenclaw underclassman Myrtle Warren.
Nobby being a blunt, angry little gremlin who says what he thinks no matter what others may say about him. He has no patience for his bloodpurity spouting Pureblood classmates and will throwdown for his fellow Puffs anytime, anywhere. Despite his rude, brash personality, his fellow Muggleborns still find him a compelling leader. Now, Tom and Leach together...they’re practically unstoppable.
Margot is a cold, logical upperclassman who would likely fit in with the Ravenclaw’s if not for her dedication to her work. She refuses to believe magic and muggle technological advances can’t be combined and experiments with both. They often explode in her face, but she refuses to give up.
Myrtle is always popping up where you least expect her, and annoying the hell out of Tom. She’s far sharper than her boy-crazy tendencies would have you believe, but she usually arrives at the wrong conclusion and still somehow manages to be right. (Much to Tom’s frustration.)
Basically the Muggleborn friend squad you never knew you wanted. This time with an extra helping of the ignored and overlooked Hogwarts Houses, aka the not-Gryffindors. :D
A group of friends working together to figure out wixen culture, their identities, and their place in the world.
Also they’re all LGBT+ of some kind. You’re Welcome.
TL:DR
Tom Riddle Hogwarts AU where he gets a supportive professor and muggleborn friends who go on wacky adventures together and figure out how to be human.
And yes Tom is still messed up, but so are they. It’s not gonna be all sun shine and roses. See my other tom riddle posts for reference. I’ll likely be addressing most if not all of them.
I probably will now, eventually, Nobby Leach is such a blank slate that I don't feel any pressure with keeping him canon.
But Tom Riddle? Now that little shit is frustrating to keep in character. I have so many headcanons for him it's difficult to adhere them to canon. Btw definitely gonna post a new thread about those in a bit. You guys got me on a roll.
The poison-dragonpox headcanon with Abraxas is also one of my favorites. I would absolutely write that.
Its supremely unfair how under utilized Nobby Leach is in fanfic.
He's a blank slate! The 1st Muggleborn British Minister of Magic but we know very little about him personally or even the circumstances of his election.
Voldemort rose to power in the late 60s-early 70s. Leach was minister sometime between 1962-68. And Leach was supposedly threatened from returning to his position or possibly assassinated.
Do you think poor, working-class, assumed Mudblood of Slytherin Tom Riddle didn't see these shady dealings and go "Okay so taking the legal route to power won't work."
If having power was Tom's only goal then he absolutely would've taken a quicker route to it. But instead Nobby Leach's failure just proved the system was too broken to fix from the inside.
(Quick disclaimer, I think Riddle only used the blood-purity thing to get an in with the purebloods who were running the country. There are better posts that expand on this idea in detail so I'm not going to get into it too much here. Okay? Okay.)
We know so little about Leach that he could conceivably have gone to Hogwarts at the same time as Tom Riddle. Did they know eachother? That's up to you, but if they went to school together then they definitely knew OF eachother.
So here you have Nobby Leach who hit the ground running after graduation, who clawed his way to being the FIRST muggleborn Minister of Magic in a government made up of bloodpurists, and then he just...resigned? Fuck that. That doesn't fit at all.
And anyone with half a brain would've picked up on that. Tom Riddle could not have missed how uncharacteristic this would be if he knew Leach, or heck just noticed the sheer will and patience it takes to become THE Muggleborn Minister of Magic.
On that note, there might've been some sort of Muggleborn movement happening in the background following Grindelwald's defeat. After all it takes more than one person to achieve this kind of victory.
So Tom Riddle watches (or is apart of 👀) a fast-paced, determined movement place the FIRST Muggleborn Minister of Magic and then watches as this victory silently tumbles down into forgotten history.
Meanwhile Tom builds the Death Eaters who also work outside the system via raids and murder despite the fact that they all work inside of it already. Theres already lots to unpack with THAT decision but moving on... Once the Ministry finally gets its shit together and arrests the (clearly labeled with Dark Marks) perpetrators, throwing them in wizard prison eventually reaching the point where they would be thrown in without a trial (Sirius Black), the Pureblood lawmakers all of a sudden realize "oh fuck, this is getting real."
And now what do they have to do to avoid suspicion in this very Red Scare-esque era of spying and tattling on eachother (it worked for Karkaroff) to avoid wizard prison? Play nice with the Muggleborns.
TL;DR
Nobby Leach: went the legitimate route to making change by working WITHIN the system. He rose fast and fell silently.
Tom Riddle: went the shady route to power by working OUTSIDE the system, painstakingly working for decades to build a support base, and falling in notoriety.
There needs to be more fics with them as foils to eachother. And if it has to be me, I warn you it will take YEARS to finish.
I have, in fact, read the entire thing more than once and it was the inspiration for my current nobby leach crisis. 😭
And I do love the idea of LeachxRiddle but I didn't want to come off too strong in the first post.
I loved Retired Prometheus but Leach's character just fell a little short for me. It absolutely worked for the fic as a whole since he wasn't the main character, but it's just made me want to see him more fleshed out in other fics.
This man had the balls to run as minister for magic and be the first muggleborn to win. That speaks of ambition and cunning, and I very much want to see more of that.
Nobby Leach and Tom Riddle together? Now that is a power couple in the making. They're goals could arguably be the same, but the different methods they use to go about accomplishing them are very much opposites.
Also I don't know about you but I love the idea that Leach's personality is the exact opposite of what would you expect from the token muggleborn character. You know the muggleborn who's soft-spoken, quiet in their convictions, and polite no matter what slurs they're called.
Give me a Leach who spits in Purebloods faces, goes to muggleborn protests with a megaphone, and displays his outrage for their sub-humane treatment blatantly.
Give me a Leach who should not have won the election because he wasn't a tolerable, charismatic, token minority but did anyway.
Its supremely unfair how under utilized Nobby Leach is in fanfic.
He's a blank slate! The 1st Muggleborn British Minister of Magic but we know very little about him personally or even the circumstances of his election.
Voldemort rose to power in the late 60s-early 70s. Leach was minister sometime between 1962-68. And Leach was supposedly threatened from returning to his position or possibly assassinated.
Do you think poor, working-class, assumed Mudblood of Slytherin Tom Riddle didn't see these shady dealings and go "Okay so taking the legal route to power won't work."
If having power was Tom's only goal then he absolutely would've taken a quicker route to it. But instead Nobby Leach's failure just proved the system was too broken to fix from the inside.
(Quick disclaimer, I think Riddle only used the blood-purity thing to get an in with the purebloods who were running the country. There are better posts that expand on this idea in detail so I'm not going to get into it too much here. Okay? Okay.)
We know so little about Leach that he could conceivably have gone to Hogwarts at the same time as Tom Riddle. Did they know eachother? That's up to you, but if they went to school together then they definitely knew OF eachother.
So here you have Nobby Leach who hit the ground running after graduation, who clawed his way to being the FIRST muggleborn Minister of Magic in a government made up of bloodpurists, and then he just...resigned? Fuck that. That doesn't fit at all.
And anyone with half a brain would've picked up on that. Tom Riddle could not have missed how uncharacteristic this would be if he knew Leach, or heck just noticed the sheer will and patience it takes to become THE Muggleborn Minister of Magic.
On that note, there might've been some sort of Muggleborn movement happening in the background following Grindelwald's defeat. After all it takes more than one person to achieve this kind of victory.
So Tom Riddle watches (or is apart of 👀) a fast-paced, determined movement place the FIRST Muggleborn Minister of Magic and then watches as this victory silently tumbles down into forgotten history.
Meanwhile Tom builds the Death Eaters who also work outside the system via raids and murder despite the fact that they all work inside of it already. Theres already lots to unpack with THAT decision but moving on... Once the Ministry finally gets its shit together and arrests the (clearly labeled with Dark Marks) perpetrators, throwing them in wizard prison eventually reaching the point where they would be thrown in without a trial (Sirius Black), the Pureblood lawmakers all of a sudden realize "oh fuck, this is getting real."
And now what do they have to do to avoid suspicion in this very Red Scare-esque era of spying and tattling on eachother (it worked for Karkaroff) to avoid wizard prison? Play nice with the Muggleborns.
TL;DR
Nobby Leach: went the legitimate route to making change by working WITHIN the system. He rose fast and fell silently.
Tom Riddle: went the shady route to power by working OUTSIDE the system, painstakingly working for decades to build a support base, and falling in notoriety.
There needs to be more fics with them as foils to eachother. And if it has to be me, I warn you it will take YEARS to finish.
Not to mention, you have the narrative struggle of being pulled in two different directions.
Tom Riddle, as a half blood in Slytherin, is pulled between these two extremes of the wizarding world. Abraxas being the elitist pureblood rhetoric of protecting the status quo and Leach representing the muggleborn movement for equality.
If you want to draw an even bigger connection between Leach's fall and Voldemort's rise, you could say that Tom wanted to believe that things could change. He wanted to believe Leach could do it. And when it didn't happen...well it's time for Riddle to take the reins and force the purebloods to change it themselves.
Riddle: You want to uphold the status quo? Well I'm gonna hold it up SO HIGH you'll beg for me to stop.
And they did.
I mean when you look at Voldemort's ranks it really shows just how much he's likely changed the concept of blood purity.
I mean, would post-Grindelwald purebloods be willing to work with werewolves, vampires, giants, etc? I doubt it. And then you have the half bloods who joined.
Would those post-Grindelwald wizards turn against eachother and actively torture and kill other purebloods (ex. The Longbottoms) from their already limited gene pool? I very much doubt that.
Voldemort limited the concept of blood purity to be against muggleborns and anyone who disagrees with Voldemort. And you can even argue that he would welcome muggleborns since he canonically attempted to get Lily Evan's on his side.
Riddle over here sneakily making the Death Eaters more tolerant by upholding the status quo he defined and placing all of his supporters on an equal level when it came to receiving his approval and being in danger of wizard jail.
So I suppose Riddle found a middle ground after all.
Its supremely unfair how under utilized Nobby Leach is in fanfic.
He's a blank slate! The 1st Muggleborn British Minister of Magic but we know very little about him personally or even the circumstances of his election.
Voldemort rose to power in the late 60s-early 70s. Leach was minister sometime between 1962-68. And Leach was supposedly threatened from returning to his position or possibly assassinated.
Do you think poor, working-class, assumed Mudblood of Slytherin Tom Riddle didn't see these shady dealings and go "Okay so taking the legal route to power won't work."
If having power was Tom's only goal then he absolutely would've taken a quicker route to it. But instead Nobby Leach's failure just proved the system was too broken to fix from the inside.
(Quick disclaimer, I think Riddle only used the blood-purity thing to get an in with the purebloods who were running the country. There are better posts that expand on this idea in detail so I'm not going to get into it too much here. Okay? Okay.)
We know so little about Leach that he could conceivably have gone to Hogwarts at the same time as Tom Riddle. Did they know eachother? That's up to you, but if they went to school together then they definitely knew OF eachother.
So here you have Nobby Leach who hit the ground running after graduation, who clawed his way to being the FIRST muggleborn Minister of Magic in a government made up of bloodpurists, and then he just...resigned? Fuck that. That doesn't fit at all.
And anyone with half a brain would've picked up on that. Tom Riddle could not have missed how uncharacteristic this would be if he knew Leach, or heck just noticed the sheer will and patience it takes to become THE Muggleborn Minister of Magic.
On that note, there might've been some sort of Muggleborn movement happening in the background following Grindelwald's defeat. After all it takes more than one person to achieve this kind of victory.
So Tom Riddle watches (or is apart of 👀) a fast-paced, determined movement place the FIRST Muggleborn Minister of Magic and then watches as this victory silently tumbles down into forgotten history.
Meanwhile Tom builds the Death Eaters who also work outside the system via raids and murder despite the fact that they all work inside of it already. Theres already lots to unpack with THAT decision but moving on... Once the Ministry finally gets its shit together and arrests the (clearly labeled with Dark Marks) perpetrators, throwing them in wizard prison eventually reaching the point where they would be thrown in without a trial (Sirius Black), the Pureblood lawmakers all of a sudden realize "oh fuck, this is getting real."
And now what do they have to do to avoid suspicion in this very Red Scare-esque era of spying and tattling on eachother (it worked for Karkaroff) to avoid wizard prison? Play nice with the Muggleborns.
TL;DR
Nobby Leach: went the legitimate route to making change by working WITHIN the system. He rose fast and fell silently.
Tom Riddle: went the shady route to power by working OUTSIDE the system, painstakingly working for decades to build a support base, and falling in notoriety.
There needs to be more fics with them as foils to eachother. And if it has to be me, I warn you it will take YEARS to finish.
You've read my mind. I had a completely different post in the works about the Malfoy-Riddle-Leach connection.
It's really fascinating how these 3 characters connect in canon and in fanon.
Because they represent the three main "blood statuses" even if Riddle's is assumed to be muggleborn.
Abraxas Malfoy was able to efficiently get rid if Leach with little effort and loss of power on his side. Going by the official site, people knew he was involved but they couldn't do a damn thing to prove it.
If purebloods were capable of this then what the hell were the Death Eaters in the ministry doing?!
Voldemort took away their security in power, because by the time of his first downfall purebloods were being arrested without trial, or solid evidence, in droves. If Abraxas Malfoy had done what he did to Leach during the Voldemort era he would not have gotten the same leniency he flourished in post-Grindelwald.
TL;DR
Pre-Voldemort
Ministry of Magic: We know it was you.
Purebloods: Oh it was absolutely me.
Post-Voldemort
Purebloods: Bloodpurity? Don't know her.
Ministry of Magic: jail
Purebloods: well if isn't the consequences of my own actions.
Its supremely unfair how under utilized Nobby Leach is in fanfic.
He's a blank slate! The 1st Muggleborn British Minister of Magic but we know very little about him personally or even the circumstances of his election.
Voldemort rose to power in the late 60s-early 70s. Leach was minister sometime between 1962-68. And Leach was supposedly threatened from returning to his position or possibly assassinated.
Do you think poor, working-class, assumed Mudblood of Slytherin Tom Riddle didn't see these shady dealings and go "Okay so taking the legal route to power won't work."
If having power was Tom's only goal then he absolutely would've taken a quicker route to it. But instead Nobby Leach's failure just proved the system was too broken to fix from the inside.
(Quick disclaimer, I think Riddle only used the blood-purity thing to get an in with the purebloods who were running the country. There are better posts that expand on this idea in detail so I'm not going to get into it too much here. Okay? Okay.)
We know so little about Leach that he could conceivably have gone to Hogwarts at the same time as Tom Riddle. Did they know eachother? That's up to you, but if they went to school together then they definitely knew OF eachother.
So here you have Nobby Leach who hit the ground running after graduation, who clawed his way to being the FIRST muggleborn Minister of Magic in a government made up of bloodpurists, and then he just...resigned? Fuck that. That doesn't fit at all.
And anyone with half a brain would've picked up on that. Tom Riddle could not have missed how uncharacteristic this would be if he knew Leach, or heck just noticed the sheer will and patience it takes to become THE Muggleborn Minister of Magic.
On that note, there might've been some sort of Muggleborn movement happening in the background following Grindelwald's defeat. After all it takes more than one person to achieve this kind of victory.
So Tom Riddle watches (or is apart of 👀) a fast-paced, determined movement place the FIRST Muggleborn Minister of Magic and then watches as this victory silently tumbles down into forgotten history.
Meanwhile Tom builds the Death Eaters who also work outside the system via raids and murder despite the fact that they all work inside of it already. Theres already lots to unpack with THAT decision but moving on... Once the Ministry finally gets its shit together and arrests the (clearly labeled with Dark Marks) perpetrators, throwing them in wizard prison eventually reaching the point where they would be thrown in without a trial (Sirius Black), the Pureblood lawmakers all of a sudden realize "oh fuck, this is getting real."
And now what do they have to do to avoid suspicion in this very Red Scare-esque era of spying and tattling on eachother (it worked for Karkaroff) to avoid wizard prison? Play nice with the Muggleborns.
TL;DR
Nobby Leach: went the legitimate route to making change by working WITHIN the system. He rose fast and fell silently.
Tom Riddle: went the shady route to power by working OUTSIDE the system, painstakingly working for decades to build a support base, and falling in notoriety.
There needs to be more fics with them as foils to eachother. And if it has to be me, I warn you it will take YEARS to finish.
Its supremely unfair how under utilized Nobby Leach is in fanfic.
He's a blank slate! The 1st Muggleborn British Minister of Magic but we know very little about him personally or even the circumstances of his election.
Voldemort rose to power in the late 60s-early 70s. Leach was minister sometime between 1962-68. And Leach was supposedly threatened from returning to his position or possibly assassinated.
Do you think poor, working-class, assumed Mudblood of Slytherin Tom Riddle didn't see these shady dealings and go "Okay so taking the legal route to power won't work."
If having power was Tom's only goal then he absolutely would've taken a quicker route to it. But instead Nobby Leach's failure just proved the system was too broken to fix from the inside.
(Quick disclaimer, I think Riddle only used the blood-purity thing to get an in with the purebloods who were running the country. There are better posts that expand on this idea in detail so I'm not going to get into it too much here. Okay? Okay.)
We know so little about Leach that he could conceivably have gone to Hogwarts at the same time as Tom Riddle. Did they know eachother? That's up to you, but if they went to school together then they definitely knew OF eachother.
So here you have Nobby Leach who hit the ground running after graduation, who clawed his way to being the FIRST muggleborn Minister of Magic in a government made up of bloodpurists, and then he just...resigned? Fuck that. That doesn't fit at all.
And anyone with half a brain would've picked up on that. Tom Riddle could not have missed how uncharacteristic this would be if he knew Leach, or heck just noticed the sheer will and patience it takes to become THE Muggleborn Minister of Magic.
On that note, there might've been some sort of Muggleborn movement happening in the background following Grindelwald's defeat. After all it takes more than one person to achieve this kind of victory.
So Tom Riddle watches (or is apart of 👀) a fast-paced, determined movement place the FIRST Muggleborn Minister of Magic and then watches as this victory silently tumbles down into forgotten history.
Meanwhile Tom builds the Death Eaters who also work outside the system via raids and murder despite the fact that they all work inside of it already. Theres already lots to unpack with THAT decision but moving on... Once the Ministry finally gets its shit together and arrests the (clearly labeled with Dark Marks) perpetrators, throwing them in wizard prison eventually reaching the point where they would be thrown in without a trial (Sirius Black), the Pureblood lawmakers all of a sudden realize "oh fuck, this is getting real."
And now what do they have to do to avoid suspicion in this very Red Scare-esque era of spying and tattling on eachother (it worked for Karkaroff) to avoid wizard prison? Play nice with the Muggleborns.
TL;DR
Nobby Leach: went the legitimate route to making change by working WITHIN the system. He rose fast and fell silently.
Tom Riddle: went the shady route to power by working OUTSIDE the system, painstakingly working for decades to build a support base, and falling in notoriety.
There needs to be more fics with them as foils to eachother. And if it has to be me, I warn you it will take YEARS to finish.
The official website even says 'conspiracy theories abound' and if that isn't an invitation for fanfic writers I don't know what is.