Why the metamorphoses? (was Voldemort Will Win)

[linlou43]

No: HPFGUIDX 79035

Aesha wrote:

> Maus came up with a very interesting theory, and it seems to me 
highly plausible. As I was reading it, he mentioned the Big 
Character Flaw about Voldemort that's been drilled constantly into 
our heads: That he cannot feel love. If this is true... then why 
does he care? I mean, why did he become the Dark Lord? I thought it 
was in defiance of his muggle father; to pay him back for leaving 
his mother, a witch and descendant of Salazar Slytherin. Did he at 
one time love, feel pain, and that's what started him on this path? 
And through time, human emotion ceased to exist within him? > 

   Me:

    IMHO, that is *exactly* the point. He once could feel love... 
and pain. Dumbledore told us that Tom Riddle went through many 
terrible transformations during the years between when he left 
school and when he resurfaced as Lord V, so many in fact that he was 
almost unrecognizable.(COS) I've never thought that those 
transformations were only physical. Hagrid opines in SS: *Don't know 
that there was enough human left in him to die.*. IMO, Riddle spent 
the missing years not only gaining power but attempting to reach his 
goal of immortality. I can see him sacrificing his humanity in that 
quest. I still think Riddle is buried away in there somewhere though-
screaming in protest against that which is Lord V. I really think 
that Tom could still feel true emotion if only Voldemort was somehow 
taken out of the equation. Think of it as no longer being under the 
influence of a drug. Some drugs make the taker feel invinsible-even 
seem to imbue the user with super human strangth for a time.(No, 
that's not from personal experiance.) Once the drug is eradicated 
from the user's system, however. Their real self returns.

-linlou,who really hopes Tom Riddle can yet be saved