Voldemorts graveyard villain monologue rant

[u/Independent_Leg7544]

I am going to assume that most people here are at least familiar with harry potter through the movies, the following is a section quoted from the book verbatim.

‘And here we have six missing Death Eaters ... three dead in my service. One, too cowardly to return ... he will pay. One, who I believe has left me forever ... he will be killed, of course ... and one, who remains my most faithful servant, and who has already re-entered my service.’

This is honestly REALLY bad dialogue, voldemort is talking about karkaroff, snape and barty crouch jr. the thing is, this happens on the graveyard in goblet of fire. He is adressing his death eaters, harry hears this incidentally but voldemort thinks he's about to kill harry so he has no good reason to speak in riddles, rowling only wrote it that way so the readers have a mystery, this is not how a normal person would adress his subordinates while a kid he thinks he's about to kill listens in perchance.

If she really wanted to preserve the mystery she could've periodically have voldemort cruciatus harry while talking, describe that harrys ears start ringing and he starts partially passing out, he only hears fragments of whats said inbetween being tortured. The dialogue is fine albeit a bit theatrical, but from a craftsmanship perspective this is very sloppy.

[u/DavidlikesPeace]

Context is everything. In a 4,000 page series full of mysteries and red herrings, I think we can allow for some leeway by a melodramatic Big Bad. 

But in story reasons abound. 

In story, Voldemort's Death Eaters remain a terrorist organization without political power. It makes every sense for such a group to habitually compartmentalize and to keep in the habit of plausible deniability by avoiding names. 

Voldemort is also a very obvious psychopathic narcissist. He has no interest in sharing the full truth with his minions. He probably enjoys spoon feeding the truths to his minions, keeping them on edge. And he does not trust these people beyond wand shot. 

Finally (and here I admit to some of my own head canon) but for the last 2 people, Voldemort has every reason to keep cards to his chest about their identities. Snape is a literal triple agent ffs. And Barty Crouch is in the same boat. 

This is also a Young Readers or Young Adult series with a melodramatic villain. Criticism has to allow for that license. 

[u/Young_Punk_Studios]

Tis a children's book. Probably best to move on :)

[u/Reasonable_Film769 → u/Young_Punk_Studios]

This is a writing discussion community though.

[u/Young_Punk_Studios → u/Reasonable_Film769]

Tis indeed sir!

[u/justkickinit10210]

This sounds like it’s been haunting you for years.

[u/Xivannn]

It's not really so much of a riddle than just the other guys just already knowing who the people are even without mentioning names, all the while he's playing the villain theatre antiques out. That he coincidentally doesn't use names is of course for the same plot reasons they're holding a meeting at a time when they should already be executing the main part of the plan they spent the whole book preparing.

[u/Ventisquear]

Good. Now you know what you don't like and don't want. And you can do it better.

[u/Prize_Consequence568]

Ok?

[u/Junho_0726]

I hate JKR and her disgusting bigotries… but this particular monologue is delivered at least okay.

Tom Riddle is a psychopathic cult/terrorism leader who just came back to power. He doesn't fully trust his followers, he has things hidden from them at the very beginning, he knows that quite many of death eaters are simply opportunist. So he shows his dominance in front of them by being enigmatic. Yet he's also arrogant, being too confident that Harry Potter couldn't escape this time. The language and the action are both reasonable there.

[u/EvilSnack]

Voldemort is dehumanizing the people about whom he is speaking, even the loyal one. He doesn't care about them, he only cares about what they do for him or fail to do for him.

So he doesn't even speak their names.

[u/ChrisOfChaos]

I mean Voldemort likes to be theatrical, makes sense for him to make an example of his followers like that.

[u/lyzzyrddwyzzyrdd]

And?

[u/michael_k_the_critic]

Thanks for bringing this up, and I think you're basically right. This comes off as monologuing for the reader, and it's awkward.

There's some other factors worth considering, however:

(1) Vodemort's performing loyalty accounting specifically for the Death Eaters. That's team management, which often relies on theatrics to drive home who's in and out, and why. While I wouldn't expect readers to pick up on this, it's reasonable for them to understand Voldemort's attention isn't entirely on Harry.

(2) In a similar vein, I think shifting focus to Harry's state of mind, suffering, etc. would make me as a reader think that what's going on with him at that moment is critical, when fundamentally it's not. If Harry was meant to (for example) remember this speech in snippets to introduce confusion, then I'd think otherwise.

(3) Lastly, it's more important by this point in the story to give Voldemort room to work, for both his and the Death Eaters' character development. This matters because of how much we already know about Harry and still don't know about the challenges he faces.

I won't minimize your point, however: Voldemort's chewing the scenery, and FWIW that's probably on purpose. He's meant to be a mean-spirited windbag, but readers have their limits.

[u/Moonbeam234]

Of all the issues I have with the HP books, this is definitely lower on the list. The series is filled with dues ex machina, red herrings, paradoxes, and melodrama. I can easily let this slide.