Ugly Old Villains

[phantomtomato]

A reflection on writing the snake

My first fandom was not, despite current appearances, Harry Potter.

Back in the day, wee little Tomato had their fanfiction beginnings in reading fic for Phantom of the Opera. It wasn’t a massive fandom by any means, but the early aughts saw a movie adaptation of the stage musical, which was also becoming the longest-running Broadway show around the same time, and, of course, there was the original novel to go back and read… and the Susan Kay ‘93 prequel reimagining, and all of those movie and TV adaptations, and… Point is, POTO is one of those fannish media properties that has been kept alive for over a century thanks to numerous engaging and memorable, if not always great, adaptations of the basic story. And it’s a tight cast of characters, which, combined with the fandom being only moderately-sized, meant that most fic was concentrated on the title character: Erik, the Phantom.

What you need to know about Erik, if you’re unfamiliar with the property, is that he is horrifically ugly. He has a congenital deformity—in the novel and many film adaptations, it’s his face and body, and in the musical it’s half of his face—which leave him with no nose, sickly skin, no hair, and a skeletal frame.

An astute reader will note at this point that this starts sounding like another character.

But the fantastic thing about POTO fandom is that fans love this ugly gremlin man. He’s bad, in the classical sense of being bad. He lies to the heroine, a girl (girl! in the novel she is still in her teens! he is over 50!) who he is teaching to become a great opera singer. He makes her think he is an angel sent by her dead father… it’s from 1911 and it’s classic horror, give it a break… and then he kidnaps her and threatens the life of her love interest if she won’t marry him. He commits some murders along the way, there’s a good bit of extortion in another subplot, he’s generally a no-good-very-bad guy, and then when Christine is so selfless as to agree to marry him so that no one else dies, he has a bit of a moral reckoning, lets them all go, and dies of a broken heart. (Also probably dysentery, he was a sickly old man living in the sewers.)

Again, the fandom adores him. POTO fans took a look at this dude and said, yeah, let’s write a shitton of romances about him. But what’s miraculous about POTO fandom, and so formative for me, is that Erik is almost never made more attractive. No matter how AU, Erik is heavily disfigured. Authors lovingly describe his snotty nose-hole, the webbing of blue veins under translucent facial skin, his waxy features and his awful 1880s rubber mask disguises and his gaunt frame on which you can count every rib. They mostly do not make him younger than 40, though Christine might be aged up to her 20s. They sometimes give him the dignity of a full head of hair. Sometimes. Sometimes the hairpiece gets a starring role as well.

And the result of all of this is some of the loveliest romance I’ve ever read.

When you take away the veneer of physical attractiveness, two characters have to find other grounds to come together. Erik and Christine have their shared passion for music, it’s true, but music is also the source of their conflict and the cause of Erik’s deception. In the hands of fic authors, Christine’s character becomes a vessel for showcasing a beautiful sort of human kindness, the ability we have to withhold or re-evaluate judgment about one another and to forge affection based on familiarity and mutual understanding. She’s not in these stories to be rewarded with the Hot Guy that she reforms through The Power Of Love, because she’s often leaving the Hot Guy in order to be with Erik. The qualities that make Erik such an unsuitable romantic protagonist become the things POTO fic celebrates in these narratives about how people deserve love for who they are, not despite it, and not in hopes that they’ll change to be something more suitable.

So, anyway, I’m writing snake-face Voldemort.

Oh, I’ve written ugly Voldemort before. I rag on the guy any time he passes 30 in my fics because, well, canon tells us that he was waxy and unattractive by his second job interview for Hogwarts. He’s not a handsome older gentleman, he’s something that’s gone slightly off in your fridge and you toss it, despite no obvious signs of mold, just to be safe. But that’s the thing about ugly, scarred, still-human first-war Voldemort, when I touch him: he’s within the realm of the non-monstrous. He is not an attractive man, but he registers as human.

Snakelike Voldy does not. Like Erik, his appearance is so monstrous that characters’ first thoughts, upon seeing him, are some unintelligible combination of syllables to convey disgust. His body is described in non-human terms (spiderlike fingers, snakelike nostrils). His appearance is a narrative shorthand for his lack of humanity.

Except that I always write a Voldemort with very human emotions, just as Erik is nearly always defined by his emotional depth. Despite appearances, monstrous villains feel things. And not only the monstrous emotions (possessiveness, fear, anger), but the tender ones (affection, nostalgia, grief) and the personable ones (amusement, consideration, generosity) as well. This is what compels me in a snakelike Voldemort romance: dealing with the ramifications of his resurrection, building a fond and loving relationship with a partner who sees him as a person. Not as a monster—and love to those with a monsterfucker kink, it’s just not my goal—and not as a charity case. It’s not a story about how magnanimous Voldemort’s love interest might be, taking on this burdensome task of loving an ugly, bad old man. I am reveling in the ugly, bad old man, and celebrating the people who love him.

So when I see the overwhelming choice to beautify second-war Voldemort, to make him once again young and handsome and human, I mourn for this fandom’s loss. Not because fic like that exists at all, but because fic like that is our current norm for one of those precious villains whose badness is sold to us through his ugliness. When I look at second-war Voldemort, I see an opportunity to write the sort of romance that begs the reader to consider something below the surface and to puzzle out how Voldemort and their selected love interest might have connected. I see an old man, someone defined by his age and the inevitable changes of life—made extreme by his particular choices, admittedly—and I want him to feel his age in the writing.

This is his end state, after a lifetime of sliding further and further away from the easy attractiveness of his youth. What does it mean for Voldemort to choose this? What does it feel like to contemplate his old face, his past name, the length of his history?

I detest the second war era, but I love snakelike Voldemort, and all of the potential that he represents, enough to try.