He was a villain whose villainous plot was to create a fake villain named Voldemort for him to defeat.
The reason I think this is odd is because, in canon, Voldemort was a name change, not a new person. So instead of Tom Riddle getting together with his Slug Club friends and saying “hey, maybe we should run this country, and by the way I never liked my old name,” Voldemort is some external actor that managed to get the loyalty of a bunch of Britain’s nobility.
Really? In canon I thought Voldemort = Riddle was a pretty well-kept secret. But as per Eliezer’s comment elsewhere in the thread, it looks like Riddle’s hero persona wasn’t called “Tom Riddle,” he impersonated (possessed?) a descendent of some more respectable house to create that identity.
That could be- I haven’t read the books since the last one came out. This is what I’m seeing on the HPWiki:
Having embraced the Dark Arts he encountered in his travels, the former Tom Riddle, now known exclusively as Lord Voldemort, raised an enormous army comprised of followers he recruited both at school and afterwards,
That suggests to me that the early Death Eaters grew up with him as Tom Riddle, and it was just a name change. If the “Voldemort = Riddle” thing is poorly known, it’s probably because no one has reason to know that his name was Riddle (like, for example, most people have heard of Stalin but haven’t heard of Dzhugashvili).
The reason I think this is odd is because, in canon, Voldemort was a name change, not a new person. So instead of Tom Riddle getting together with his Slug Club friends and saying “hey, maybe we should run this country, and by the way I never liked my old name,” Voldemort is some external actor that managed to get the loyalty of a bunch of Britain’s nobility.
Really? In canon I thought Voldemort = Riddle was a pretty well-kept secret. But as per Eliezer’s comment elsewhere in the thread, it looks like Riddle’s hero persona wasn’t called “Tom Riddle,” he impersonated (possessed?) a descendent of some more respectable house to create that identity.
That could be- I haven’t read the books since the last one came out. This is what I’m seeing on the HPWiki:
That suggests to me that the early Death Eaters grew up with him as Tom Riddle, and it was just a name change. If the “Voldemort = Riddle” thing is poorly known, it’s probably because no one has reason to know that his name was Riddle (like, for example, most people have heard of Stalin but haven’t heard of Dzhugashvili).