LIttle Tommy Riddle, was: Effect of circumstances

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, juli17 at a... wrote:

> I'm not saying Snape would become a cheerful Dumbledore clone!
> He probably would still be a bit of a loner, and have a snarky way
> about him. But perhaps that snarkiness would be merely dry humor
> rather than cruelty. And presumably he'd have a better self-image, 
> having been praised for his abilities and talents, thus easing his 
> driving thirst for overt acknowledgement and recognition, and  his
> intolerance for anything that diverts from his own perspective.

I'm thinking that his taste for cruelty is innate, and the difference
would be that he would feel motivated to partially suppress it for
ordinary politeness's sake rather than being fueled by constant rage
and hatred to use it to the max. I could be wrong, or your 'dry humor
rather than cruelty' could be the same as my 'less cruel'.

> (thinking Tom Riddle would have been a different person too, if he'd
> grown up in the Weasley family, for example)

I think Rowling did a good, if unintended, job of depicting little
Tommy Riddle as a child who was BORN a sociopath, i.e. with something
physical about his brain that made him unable to care about anyone but
himself.

Presumably it was his childhood sense that he had been abandoned and
was being mistreated that caused being feared and killing people to
become his goals, instead of something normal like collecting a harem
of beautiful lovers. That made more sense to me when I thought he had
been raised in some unpleasant Dickensian orphanage where discontented
staff members took out their bad moods on the children (e.g. by
beating them).

But the Pensieve in HBP showed that the orphanage where TMR was raised 
was a well-intended place, where the matron was warm-hearted altho'
alcoholic, children were allowed to have toys and even some pets (the
ill-fated bunny) of their own, and the annual outing was intended to
be fun for the children (a trip to the seaside) rather than scare them
straight (such as visiting a prison or a madhouse to see what dreadful
fate awaited them if they kept talking back to staff members). 

So it is less clear to me that having been brought up in a family
would have made a difference in how he turned out. As a baby, he
should have been picked up and cuddled and loved. The nursemaids would
have done so, except he was an off-putting strange child who never
cried and didn't like being cuddled. I think that could be off-putting
to a parent, too, especially a parent who's already busy with a flock
of other small children.