Why JK Rowling Failed At Writing Voldemort

J.K. Rowling did a lot of bad writing, and she did a lot of that writing badly because of the same reasons she's now become a bigot. Now, I'm not saying that her writing is bad just because her politics are abhorrent. I don't think you have to have good politics to produce good writing. I don't think you have to be a comprehensively good person to be a good artist. And if I find out that someone did or said or thought something that I disagree with, I don't suddenly think that they can't produce or have produced good writing. I would go so far as to say that there are some good or great writers who, like Knud Hampson, Mishima, John Schwarzwalder, good or great writers who I think that the greatness of some of their writing comes from the same places as the terribleness of their garbage politics. J.K. Rowling is not one of these people, though. She's kind of the opposite. Her bad politics come from the same place as her bad writing. Specifically, for the purpose of this video, her inability to write Voldemort has the same origin as her current bigotry. Voldemort's problem is a problem of scope. J.K. Rowling treats the two main parts of his character, his fear of death and his anti-muggle racism, she treats them almost like separate hobbies of his. Tuesday, I play pickup basketball. Thursday, I play softball. Saturday is for the immortality project. Sunday is for subjugating most of the humans who live on earth. They're given separate backstories. Voldemort's mom died in childbirth, so he's afraid of death. Voldemort's dad was a deadbeat dad, and he was a muggle, so he hates muggles. It's also straightforward, and it's just like overexplained. To define is to limit, and limitations can be good for a character. They can make a character more precise, but when things are left unexplained, they can have a lot more scope. It's a mistake that a lot of writers make where they think that every main part of a character has to have some source in the text. It's like a narrative correlative. Take in True Detective. Matthew McConaughey's character, he couldn't just be a guy who made faces and half-read Nietzsche. He had to be a guy who made faces and half-read Nietzsche because he ran his daughter over in his car when he was drunk. But once you have that revelation, it becomes too specific. He loses some of his peculiarity. On the other hand, for a counterexample, look at Iago. Throughout the play, throughout Othello, he gives three different genealogies for why he hates Othello, but all of them contradict to the point where you realize, yeah, we don't actually know why he hates Othello. Thus, his hatred can be so much bigger because it's not proportionate to some particular slight in their shared history. Or look at the Joker from Dark Knight. I think he also gives three explanations for how he got his scars, and the explanations run against each other. They contradict to the point where they're explanations that unexplain. They're explanations that just serve to mystify things. Mystified, the Joker can represent the idea of chaos, but Baltimore is too thoroughly explained, thus becomes too well-defined and too limited. The end of his story, the end of the series, is a letdown because it's just two guys having a fight in the dining hall. The whole battle of Hogwarts, it's like a few dozen Death Eaters versus the good guys that we've already met. It's less of a battle, it's more of just like a skirmish. Baltimore only represents Tom Riddle Jr., but a Baltimore who is successfully written, a Baltimore who is a successful character, wouldn't really need a backstory. It's not like the fear of death and racism are such unique flaws that we just need to see their provenance. The fear of death, it springs from human consciousness, the cursed blessing of human consciousness and language, which helps us to hold ideas into form. Ideas like death, which because we have a concept of death, we can become neurotic about it. We build cities and civilizations to defend ourselves against death, but then the irony that the things that we build against death just become shaped to it. The things that we do to ward off death take on the aspect of death and give us the aspect of death. Think of the wasteland, the hordes of black-clad people walking to work. You know, I had not thought death had undone so many. The city built as a bulwark against death becomes an unreal city. It becomes a necropolis, and our civilization is directed by the dead hands of dead capital. We fear death, so we yearn for permanence, but life doesn't yield a permanence. Life is sumptuous and unsettled. It's friscalating and always shimmering. It's dwindling and seething all at once. Life is never finished, complete. The time that is finished, complete, settled, that's death. Attempts at permanence require us to stop the movement of things, to halt the intermingling, to freeze the coming together of things, as the poem says. We transfer our energies into inanimate objects. We try to escape from death. We only escape from life. This is just the human condition. It doesn't need a narrative pin. It doesn't need a biographical basis for Voldemort. Narrating it makes it too small and too specific. It's just this one incident in his life. Voldemort's fear of death is his own. It's no larger or smaller than that. It can't stand for the idea of death obsession. In Voldemort's racism, racism doesn't need, and often doesn't have, some kind of tragic backstory. In fact, it can be an unsurprising outcome of the general neurosis, the fear of death. We fear death. We yearn for permanence. The way for a society to have a sense of permanence is for it to be held in a shape. We want it stable. We want it calm. We want it settled. Every person needs to be folded into their place and held in and supported by the people around them. We need everyone to be labeled so that we know where to put them. Race isn't the only organizing principle for a stratified society like that. There are versions of capitalism that are multicultural. I think that's what a lot of times what people mean when they say neoliberalism is just multicultural capitalism, which isn't to say that neoliberalism and multicultural capitalism are perfectly anti-racist, but at least they're not consciously overtly based on race. But race is a really convenient organizing principle, especially as death obsession restricts a person's capability for human intimacy. It freezes the coming together of things and stops the intermingling. It reduces a person down to the affects of anger and hatred. It's all about social isolation. Racism is like a species of the genus racism and isolation. This brings up another issue with how death obsession and racism could go really well together. They could have cohered into something much bigger and more frightening. Instead of the hyper-individuated traits of a single traumatized bad guy, they could have been instantiations of a darkness that's a universal temptation of all humanity. And then you'd have a critique of power that was way more thorough than anything in Harry Potter. To keep society settled, to keep the origami structure from coming undone, you need to have people who will follow your orders. You need to multiply out your individual personal power by whatever multiplier of the people who will do what you tell them to do. And then there's power. Power so that I can make things happen. Look at the etymology of the ability to make things happen. And that's how you get the dual meaning of prestige as a status, but also its magical usage. The prestige. Prestidigitation. Power. The ability to make things happen. Maybe this is my shot at permanence. If I can make things happen, maybe I can keep the sand castle from falling apart. There's a reason that we keep making statues to the powerful. You know, marble monuments. Mount Rushmore is dynamited out of the surface of the earth. There's an intuitive connection between power and permanence. As a side note, I'm kind of dancing around like a Marcusean critique of fantasy as a genre. You know, dreams of magical ability are like a power fantasy that is a vision of domination and control. But that is way out of purview of what I'm doing here. However, if you want to see that critique of the fantasy novel, you can read my forthcoming fantasy novel. Okay, end of side note. Death and racism could have, in this hypothetical alternative version of Voldemort that I'm imagining, they could have come together into a need for power. Power over nature. Power over death. Power over other people. But the Voldemort in the book is like curiously blasé about power. He takes over the ministry of magic and then goes to spend months preparing for a duel against a 17-year-old. Power is always like an afterthought to Voldemort. It's like this weird methodological individualism where even evil can't imagine itself becoming systematic. But power would have been a primary concern for a more cohesive version of Voldemort. Neurosis about death, anti-muggle hate, and power could have come flushed together, compounding each other, deepening and darkening each other. And then the story and its ending would have been a lot more satisfying, but they would have had to be a lot more satisfying for a lot of both practical and narrative reasons. Practically, if Voldemort was more concerned with power, he would have been able to marshal more than just a couple dozen of his associates. I almost said friends, but like associates for the final battle. If he had taken power more seriously, there's a version where he marshals the entire like ministry of magic to that battle. And then the, you know, good guys have to be correspondingly like a way more, way bigger force. That version of the story would have been like an actual full battle of Hogwarts, not just a fight at the local wizard high school. And narratively, a Voldemort who's like stood for more than just himself, who stood for like death and hate and power. A Voldemort who represented the catastrophe of our consciousness of our own deaths and the failure to fly, to flee from death that becomes in reality, a flight from life. A Voldemort who stood for a concomitant racism, you know, supplying yourself with a hateful ideology of racial hierarchy to give structure and durability to your world. A Voldemort who showed that the need for power is often a need for power over power, over other things and other people. Such a bigger Voldemort couldn't have been defeated by just killing one man. Such a Voldemort would have, to defeat him, would have required, to like really defeat him for good, would have required society coming together and like discovering a politics that was based in life and not death. Discovering a way of being that was based in vitalism and not morbidity. It would be a changed world, changed utterly, but J.K. Rowling was not the person to write that story and J.K. Rowling was not the person to write that story for the same reasons that she would eventually become a bigot. Hate is a ruinous condition but it can have undramatic origin. J.K. Rowling has this form of like frozen progressivism that's weirdly widespread. It's like a politics of positions that were ahead of their time in 1998 but no later and like never updated. It's like a statue that's built leaning forward but it's stuck in place. Let's let in gay people and minorities but like that's it. The game of musical chairs ends in 1998. J.K. Rowling is an eternal Blairite, like the British equivalent of like an eternal Clintonite, the eternal lib. She feels herself to be a progressive person because she's advocating or she advocated for letting in the kind of people who were kept out when she was having her formative political experiences. The eternal lib advocated for the inclusion of gay people and minorities into the social structure but they didn't think about changing the social structure. They didn't think that it could be changed and so it's not even a question for them. J.K. Rowling herself has said in interviews that the wizards in her books have all the same classism and racism as humans in our world do because that's just human nature. Even if we give people wands, they'll still have this concrete human nature. This idea that there's an unchanging human nature is an irreactionary sentiment. It's also really unhistorical and uninformed by anthropology and also weirdly denies or ignores human evolution. How would there be a set human nature if humans are evolving? When in our evolution did that click into place and how would it be concrete if humans are constantly changing? J.K. Rowling believes in a set human nature so society can't change that much at any time. You can give people magical abilities and they'll still come up with basically the same economy that we have. We shouldn't try to change society too much. We shouldn't push for more real egalitarianism. Human nature is set in place. Society is too. You can't keep folding and unfolding the origami or else it'll lose its spendiness. It'll lose its shape and so we can't keep just incorporating new groups into society. Trans people happened to not get a chair in 1998 and unfortunately we can't include them now. The frozen progressive, the eternal lib, they could have a trans friend. They could appreciate them as an individual and sympathize with their pain and wish the best for them. But we hit a threshold and I think it was a 2014 cover of Time magazine said that was the trans tipping point year. You hit a threshold where we have to start including trans people en masse as a group. We can't do that. It'll unsettle things too much. It'll change basic things like how we go to the bathroom and our language. It puts everything in flux. We're experimenting with new words and now we have to learn new ways to identify people. This is how it starts. This is the pretty mundane first steps on a path towards hateful bigotry. Hatred doesn't always start in hatred. It doesn't start with something hateful, say a father abandoning his son. It can start just like that with a kind of pseudo-progressive politics of the status quo. For JK Rowling, the next steps are very well documented, many of them by her. You start doing a lot of internet research and then you get negatively polarized when people critique your opinions and then there's a lot of doubling down and all of this with the background of the gradual but intensifying emulsification of all of our brains by the internet. But there's one thing I want to add to that sequence. There's one other thing that I think is going on. We usually assume, just by default, that you hate someone and therefore you harm them. But I think it can go the other way too, where you're harsh to someone so you have to back solve the reasons that they deserve to be treated harshly. In life, you might snap at someone in the spur of the moment, but instead of taking a breath after the fact and realizing, oh I shouldn't have done that, I should apologize and correct myself, you'll come up with reasons why they might deserve it. I don't think that JK Rowling sees herself either consciously or unconsciously as being in the wrong or doing undue harm to people. But she knows that she's being harsh and so you justify and you over-justify. In 2020, she's talking about how she sympathizes with the trans experience, but by 2024, she's coming up with weird conspiracy theories about how women boxers are trans men who are just getting an excuse to beat women. There's that thing where she denied that trans people were a victim of the holocaust. You justify and you over-justify because you have to imagine that trans people are more dangerous than they actually are. You have to imagine that they have suffered less than they have. It can be like a vortex. You harm someone so you have to come up with reasons to dislike them. Now you dislike them so you're more willing to harm them in the future. Now that you're all the time, you have to hate them. Now you will do even worse things to them. Now you become a committed bigot against them and you find yourself funding court cases to keep them out of restrooms. This hate vortex combined with her very staid politics and all the internet culture talks, that's how she became a bigot. Not through some traumatic incident in her past. J.K. Rowling couldn't see that. She couldn't see that she's become a bigoted member of a hate movement. Just as Voldemort needed a traumatic moment to explain his anti-muggle racism, J.K. Rowling knows that her gender-critical genealogy didn't start with anything dramatic. How could it be a thing of hatred as something so portentous as a bigoted movement against people? J.K. Rowling thinks that the shape of our society is set in place and the power relationships that keep that shape together are set too. She doesn't have a critique of power either in the real world or in her Harry Potter books. She doesn't critique power in Harry Potter because she doesn't question it in the real world. She'll question who has power but not the idea of a person having power over another person. She isn't going to question the underlying structures. That would be unsettling and unsettling things is exactly what we don't want to do. We want to keep things in place so you'll stay with the same frozen politics for 28 years. No questioning things. No changing your mind on things. Like that time when she was talking about trans people not being victims of the holocaust, she kept being shown facts that showed that she was wrong but she would just recursively change the argument that she wishes she had been making. She would never admit to being wrong. Being wrong would mean that you have to correct yourself and correction is a kind of movement and movement puts everything in flux. One of the reasons J.K. Rowling failed at writing Voldemort is because she doesn't question things and thus she can't complicate how she thinks about them. She's unable to complicate her thinking about hate which is why Voldemort's anti-Muggle hatred is so shallow and so straightforward. A bad thing happens to Voldemort as a kid so he hates the people that he associates with it. We can't question things. We can't change things. We can't unsettle things. It comes from a deep fondness for the status quo, for castles and boarding school novels and returning every autumn to the cozily shabby common room of Gryffindor dormitories. It's a need for permanence and bundling yourself in the status quo leads to a kind of intellectual death, a cessation of movement. For J.K. Rowling, the need for things to be settled in place is why her politics are stuck in 1998. It's also why Harry Potter was deeply disappointing. At the end of the story everything just reverts back to the way they used to be. Her sense of human possibilities is fixed. Her sense of how it should feel to live in our society is fixed. This world is fixed for her so the Harry Potter world was fixed too. J.K. Rowling was happy to let Voldemort just be a lone madman, a lone villain. She wasn't pushed to expand him, to figure out how to mystify him. She was perfectly happy over explaining him because she didn't have any grander intentions for him. He didn't need to be bigger. His threat didn't need to be bigger. His story didn't need to be any bigger. She doesn't think about changing the world so she was happy to write a story where all you have to do is beat one bad guy. You don't have to change the world. Her aversion to change in life and politics, in her writing, it becomes an aversion to story itself. An aversion to change comes from the same place as an aversion to life. It's a yearning for permanence. One step back comes from the fear of death. If you follow back far enough it just goes back to death anxiety just as it does for Voldemort. I'll go further than I promised in my intro. J.K. Rowling isn't just unable to write Voldemort because of the same things that make her a bad person. J.K. Rowling is unable to write Voldemort because in some very meaningful ways she kind of is Voldemort. Okay that's the video. I'll put a short reading list in the comments. I wasn't exactly like reading anything specific while I was writing this but I could imagine people might want related reading at least. Recommended the video, comment, subscribe. Thanks for watching!