Voldemort the evil overlord

[Charmian]

No: HPFGUIDX 10119

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Flourish <slytherinkeeper at y...> 
wrote:
> Amanda said:
> 
> > Not necessarily. Melodrama is not as predictable as
> > practicality, because
> > melodrama requires the ego to do grand, glorious,
> > weird things which make
> > sense only to the ego, and are viciously hard to
> > predict or guard against.
> 
> You know, you're right! Many things can be predictable
> - egomaniacs' ways of doing things, for instance, or
> (as you said) someone evil who only does necessary
> things - but melodrama is up to the imagination. Want
> to wear a crimson cape? Go ahead, you're an evil
> overlord ~_^. Want to kill off a train of mudbloods?
> Go ahead!

Hmmm. I'm going to be contrarian here and argue against evil 
overlordism in a general sense. I'd have to argue that being a 
flamboyant, cape-wearing, mwa-ha-ha-ha, pointless-bravadoing, 
irrational supervillain is overdone in fiction, and is indeed 
predictable. Why? 
http://minievil.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html. (warning, this 
thing is just toooooo entertaining.)
If Wormtail was really a good advisor, he'd mail this anonymously to 
Lord V, who does all the things that one shouldn't do right and left. 

Actually, I find Voldy sort of not the best villain he could be, 
because his motivation is a tad cliched (I mean, listen to the way he 
talks too), and he does so many foolish things. To the protagonists, 
all right, these may be unpredictable, but to the reader they are 
not. (Didn't you just see that, "let's duel, now, HP" coming?) But 
the Harry Potter books are about much more than the gigantic battle 
between the forces of good 'n evil, and JKR has introduced moral 
complexity in them in other ways. 

>From a reality perspective (but I don't read HP for this type of 
realism), this sort of fails too, because if the bad person is always 
doing stupid self-defeating things, how did s/he get so far without 
getting blasted in the first place? (See, why didn't V just blast 
Harry/have one of his subordinates kill him/etc.) I find the banally 
evil villain or well-planning Machiavellian villain far more 
threatening than the ranting megalomaniac, because we don't suppose 
that they will defeat themselves. It also makes the hero's 
achievement much greater, IMO, if we know that it didn't rest 
partially on the flaws of the villain. Plus, in real life, the nasty 
person usually isn't loony, just mean, self-centered, and 
unscrupulous, and succeeds sometimes. 

Charmian (being verbose today)