Curate, connect, and discover
I have, in fact, read the entire thing more than once and it was the inspiration for my current nobby leach crisis. ðŸ˜
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.