What if Voldemort Had an Assistant?

So why don’t bad guys ever seem to win in the movies? Well, there’s a pretty good explanation for it, and it’s not really because they don’t have an assistant, but as this clip shows it couldn’t help. If Voldemort had had an assistant it still might not have helped since ego is a big part of being a villain and as you can guess, this is what ends up undoing a lot of them. Even the Joker, who is madness personified, didn’t get away from that particular foible since he just had to play with Batman and prove his point that deep down, people are simply too bound by their base and chaotic nature to pretend that they’re any better. That seems to be the curse of the average villain, their ego gets in the way and they don’t seem to realize it until it’s too late. Tom Chapman of Digital Spy does remind us that there have been more than a few movies where the bad guy wins for reasons that are maddening to those that don’t think such a thing should happen, but do anyway. With Voldemort though, arrogance and an inability to see past his own ego was kind of the major downfall.

Think if he had an assistant though, someone that would stand up to him and actually make sense for once. Of course his suggestions get a little dark, like trying to convince Voldemort to just shoot Harry when he was a baby…yeah, kind of hard to picture that one, or take him out in various conventional ways that would make more sense. As a child Voldemort had such great potential, and as he continued to grow his power only got stronger and more dangerous to those around him. But the moment he was taken out by his own curse he was destroyed and rendered just about obsolete. Think about that, once he was killed and came back he wasn’t nearly as powerful as he’d been, even when he finally had a form of his own. Somehow Harry and the others kept dodging, evading, and simply outfoxing him over and over again. He had plenty of dark wizards ready to leap to attention when he spoke, but despite being able to best Harry in a duel he still didn’t step forward and do anything, proving to be the kind of person that fought from the back instead of the front. Even with the Elder Wand he didn’t manage to do much apart from blasting the shield around the school and harming himself and the wand in the process.

Then there’s the problem with the horcruxes. Tekkai Wallace from Medium does a great job in politely ripping apart the mythology behind the horcruxes but also proving my point that they were kind of an issue in a story for a wizard that was supposed to be overly intelligent and all-powerful. If a digital assistant can see the issue there then it’s easy to see that the rest of us can as well. And we go back to the EGO of Voldemort as being his biggest downfall since he just HAD to pick out very distinct and well-known objects to serve as his horcruxes and house a piece of his soul as a backup in case, y’know, the unthinkable happened and he lost. But wait, he was an all-powerful wizard, defeat was almost never on his mind, and yet deep in the dark recesses of that same supposedly vast intellect, it must have been seen as a possibility. One could successfully argue that despite being lauded as the big bad and the main enemy in the Harry Potter stories, Voldemort was kind of a letdown since to be honest, even before he was destroyed he seemed more like a bully with a great deal of power, not nearly the evil force that he’d been made out to be.

He didn’t really do much other than outright kill and in some cases torture his enemies until he was ready to kill them. You kind of expect a truly evil individual to do some of the most messed-up things imaginable like staking a person’s head to a wall or flaying pieces of skin from their body while they’re still alive. In a world filled with magic there are likely a lot of worse punishments than the promise of death or even the kiss of a Dementor, and yet Voldemort didn’t really get into that. It was almost as though he didn’t have the taste for real evil and was just bound up by the whole pureblood/muggle thing and failed to notice that he’s the ‘diet Coke of evil’ as Dr. Evil would say. Plus, when you really get into it, Voldemort was a mudblood as well. Sigh, if any villain could have used an assistant it would have been this guy.