by Laura Nikolich. Last updated 22 October 2026.
To postulate similarities between the evil we encounter in dystopian post-war Hogwarts fanfictions, we first have to draw some parallels between the Wizarding World before Voldemort gains power, as imagined and written by the fanfictions discussed here.
Several aspects of this world appear strikingly familiar: a court system, a banking system, a school headmaster, and the general consensus that magic ought to be exercised responsibly and that Dark Magic should only be taught within the context of Defence Against the Dark Arts. While readers have repeatedly pointed out how unsafe Hogwarts is for its students and how frequently accidents occur, it is nevertheless generally understood that deliberately harming students is neither accepted nor intended.
This points to a basic moral framework. That framework becomes even more apparent in crossover fanfictions such as Crimson Rivers by bizarrestars (2022), which places the Marauders cast within the universe of The Hunger Games. Here, the moral logic, or rather the absence of one, in The Hunger Games becomes especially obvious. As classist as Rowling’s Wizarding World undoubtedly is, during the so-called Dumbledore years it nevertheless remains understood that Muggle-borns and half-bloods are not disposable, nor do they exist merely as entertainment.
As this article seeks to translate meaning from fanfiction into the real world, it is interesting to consider the parallel frequently drawn between Albus Dumbledore and Barack Obama, popular on TikTok. Both are often perceived as flawed leaders, yet neither is generally regarded as evil in the way Voldemort is.
Under Obama’s presidency, the United States deported historically high numbers of immigrants. Estimates suggest that approximately 1.6 million removals took place during his first term alone, leading scholars to describe the administration as one of the most aggressive in terms of immigration enforcement (Rosenblum and Meissner). Public discourse, however, frequently distinguishes Obama’s policies from those of later administrations by arguing that he “targeted criminals,” thereby expressing trust in his moral judgement rather than merely evaluating policy outcomes.
This illustrates a more general phenomenon: trust in moral judgement constitutes a form of fundamental belief in another person’s common sense and empathy.
An online discussion from 2024, for example, asked users which U.S. president they would trust to babysit their children. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama emerged as the overwhelming favourites, whereas a widely upvoted response concerning Donald Trump simply stated, “I wouldn’t let him watch my kids.” The same user jokingly added that photographs of Trump with children always seemed to depict everyone involved, including Trump himself, as miserable.
More recently, fandom communities have produced edits pairing Julia Wolf’s 2025 song In My Room with footage of Obama:
“Yeah, I want your things in my room
I miss you all of the time
I stalk myself on the internet
Just to see what you’ll find.
I want your things in my room.
I miss you all of the time.
You make it look
You make it look so easy
Leaving everything behind.”
The recasting of Obama as Dumbledore, one of the principal leaders of the Wizarding World, who we know was aware that Harry was being abused, given that Harry’s letters were addressed to him “under the stairs,” is particularly revealing. It demonstrates what I would argue is fanfiction’s instinctive moral perception. Readers generally do not associate Dumbledore with evil despite his many shortcomings. In part, this is because his actions, while often morally questionable, remain explicable. More importantly, however, Dumbledore consistently accepts the existence of other loci of power alongside himself, including the Minister for Magic and the Wizengamot.
Evil, to be recognised as such, therefore appears to lack precisely these characteristics. Its actions become less relatable, and its tolerance for the division of power correspondingly decreases.
The two fanfictions examined here are equals in life (partners in death) by reggieblk and Desolation by Johnny Botello. Both depict alternative universes in which Voldemort wins the Battle of Hogwarts. While the former imagines a Wizarding World that has descended into oligarchy, the latter presents one that has become a fully developed fascist dictatorship. Both are governed by Voldemort’s centralised regime, yet they imagine fundamentally different forms of authoritarianism.
In the former, Voldemort rules from Malfoy Manor through what is effectively an oligarchical elite consisting primarily of old pure-blood families and those who acquired political influence following the war. Authority is concentrated, yet it remains socially relational.
Desolation, by contrast, is remarkably meticulous in constructing the institutions of its fascist state:
“The State of War was basically a way of ‘protecting’ the magical world when something very terrible was happening. Since the Battle of Hogwarts, they had already been in a ‘State of Emergency’, which limited the right to freedom of movement and travel … What the State of War sought to do was to restrict freedom of assembly, freedom of labour, freedom of the press, the possibility of altering the right to property, the right to personal liberty, the right to privacy … taking some of the responsibility away from the Wizengamot … and passing it to both the Nobilium and the Electis.” (Botello)
One need not employ much imagination to draw parallels between this fictional legal structure and recent attempts by the Trump administration to invoke or expand emergency powers. These include the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March 2025 by arguing that the Venezuelan criminal organisation Tren de Aragua constituted an “invasion” of the United States, thereby authorising accelerated deportations. Likewise, Trump repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military personnel to American cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago in response to protests, despite substantial opposition from local governments. On 20 January 2025, a national emergency was also declared regarding the southern border, allowing military resources to be redirected under emergency authority (Vladeck).
Whether or not these situations are directly comparable is ultimately less important than the rhetorical logic they share. In both cases, exceptional circumstances are invoked to justify the concentration of executive power and the suspension or restriction of civil liberties.
What becomes particularly interesting, however, is not merely the political system imagined under Voldemort’s rule, but the aesthetic of evil that accompanies it. In order to gain a clearer understanding of this spectrum, I turn briefly to psychological terminology.
While psychological classifications rarely provide a stable foundation for literary or cultural analysis, they can nevertheless be useful in illuminating questions of relationality and dysfunction.
As most readers are probably aware, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is no longer recognised as an independent diagnostic category within the ICD-11. Instead, the World Health Organization adopts a dimensional model of personality disorders, allowing narcissistic traits to be specified within broader personality pathology (World Health Organization). The DSM-5-TR, however, continues to classify narcissistic pathology within Cluster B personality disorders, characterised by grandiosity, an excessive need for admiration, and diminished empathy (American Psychiatric Association).
Psychopathy, by contrast, is not recognised as a separate diagnosis in either the DSM-5-TR or the ICD-11. Instead, psychopathic traits are generally conceptualised through Antisocial Personality Disorder or through the ICD-11’s dimensional construct of dissociality, which evaluates personality pathology according to severity rather than discrete diagnostic categories (Hare).
To ask the question differently: would James Potter still be James Potter if nobody had seen him? Would Dumbledore remain Dumbledore if his authority were neither visible nor relational? And, perhaps more importantly, would Voldemort still be Voldemort?
Canon suggests that he would.
Throughout large portions of the Harry Potter series, Voldemort is physically absent while nevertheless continuing to organise people’s realities. His authority functions independently of his presence.
One of the two fanfictions consequently devotes considerable attention to Voldemort’s genesis. It embraces the familiar orphan trope, evil emerging from neglect and trauma, and repeatedly allows Voldemort to assume his youthful human form, facilitating intimacy and eventually sexual encounters with Harry. Later, Harry even comes to appreciate Voldemort’s monstrous appearance as well.
In Desolation, however, Voldemort’s human form is almost entirely absent. When Harry refers to him as “Tom,” it functions exclusively as mockery, as an attempt to strip the Dark Lord of the mythological status he has cultivated. In the contrasting narrative, “Tom” gradually becomes almost affectionate, functioning as a genuine term of endearment, highlighting his humanness (and ‘fuckability’ if you will).
Harry himself likewise differs profoundly between the two texts. In the more relational narrative, he remains soft, emotionally expressive, and deeply affectionate. Desolation, meanwhile, explicitly embraces the fandom trope of “BAMF Harry Potter”: aggressive, morally ambiguous, and exceptionally competent, yet still falling short of true evil.
Thus, while humanness is valued and even becomes a means through which Voldemort can be influenced in the oligarchical narrative, humanity itself becomes something Voldemort actively despises within the fascist one. Harry, in turn, must become correspondingly harder merely to survive the conversation. Faced with an evil that has abandoned relationality altogether, he is required to become “more badass” simply to remain visible within its world.
The role of fetish is particularly interesting because one of these texts is a so-called Tomarry fanfiction, that is, a Harry/Tom Riddle pairing, whereas Desolation remains a more conventional Drarry narrative in which Draco and Harry become each other’s romantic partners.
Tomarry pairings almost inevitably struggle with questions of sexuality because Voldemort, to quote fandom discourse rather directly, is widely considered “unfuckable.” Archive of Our Own discussions repeatedly return to precisely this question. Some readers argue that a successful Tomarry narrative must somehow render Voldemort’s inhuman body sexually plausible, even desirable, while others insist upon returning him to his youthful human form before intimacy becomes imaginable at all.
Generally speaking, however, Voldemort himself is rarely portrayed as particularly sexual. His followers, by contrast, frequently are. Death Eaters and other servants of the regime are often represented as sexually deviant, deriving pleasure from humiliation, torture, and coercion, whereas Voldemort himself appears almost entirely detached from sexuality. His violence rarely seems erotic in itself. Rather, sexuality functions as an instrument through which his followers perform loyalty and domination.
An execution scene from Desolation illustrates this dynamic particularly well:
“The old man began to tremble as the Lord walked towards him …
‘Please…’
The Dark Lord didn’t hear him, didn’t even look at him, as Maia smiled circling the old man on the dais.
[…]
‘Andrew Simonds,’ the Lord said, immovable. ‘For the crimes of treason…’
[…]
Maia laughed, pointing her wand at him.
And just like that, the man’s body folded in two.
Before Draco could process that the Order had failed to save him […]
He was already vomiting.” (Botello)
What is striking here is not merely the violence itself but Voldemort’s remarkable emotional distance from it. He neither appears to enjoy the execution nor derives visible satisfaction from it. Instead, the surrounding crowd reacts with laughter, anticipation, disgust, or excitement. Violence becomes spectacle.
The Dark Lord consequently appears less as a sadist than as the organiser of an environment in which cruelty itself becomes entertainment. If anything, he performs violence for the benefit, or perhaps the intimidation, of an inner circle whose members display characteristics that might be described as narcissistic or psychopathic. The emotional economy belongs less to Voldemort himself than to the social world he has created around him.
I have previously argued elsewhere that evil frequently appears as a symptom of repressed sexuality. While I still believe that this argument possesses explanatory value, I am increasingly convinced that the relationship is considerably more complicated than simple repression.
For example, it has repeatedly been observed that the use of location-based dating applications such as Grindr increases substantially during major conservative political gatherings. Whether or not such observations prove anything sociologically is ultimately beside the point. What matters is that sexuality and political identity remain deeply entangled.
Rather than understanding sexuality merely as something that is repressed, it may therefore be more productive to understand it as something that can be organised, redirected, and instrumentalised. Sexuality becomes one mechanism among many through which authoritarian systems generate loyalty, regulate desire, and maintain social control.
The cultural history of The Simpsons provides an unexpectedly revealing example. For decades the series has occupied an almost prophetic status within popular culture, frequently celebrated for apparently predicting future political events. More recently, however, discussions surrounding the release of court documents related to Jeffrey Epstein complicated public perceptions of several prominent cultural figures. Among those identified in publicly released flight records was Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. Groening has acknowledged travelling on Epstein’s aircraft while denying any knowledge of criminal conduct or participation in abuse. Regardless of the factual outcome, the episode illustrates how rapidly symbolic authority may become entangled with networks of power, sexuality, and exploitation.
The significance of this example lies less in assigning individual guilt than in demonstrating how cultural prestige frequently coexists with structures of social domination that only become visible retrospectively.
The contrast between the two fanfictions becomes particularly evident when one compares how intimacy itself functions within each narrative.
In the more relational narrative, Voldemort’s eruptions of rage can be interrupted by Harry’s emotional intervention. The scenes frequently oscillate between lethal threat and domestic comedy: Voldemort remains terrifying, and everyone around him is frightened, yet there is still access to him. Harry is capable of interrupting his rage, calming him, and temporarily redirecting his behaviour. Violence exists, but it remains socially negotiable.
This is precisely, what I will argue, disappears in Desolation: the collapse of relationality.
The contrast becomes even more pronounced in Desolation:
Here, evil has become abstract. It is untouchable, inaccessible, and entirely removed from ordinary social interaction. Nobody would imagine walking upstairs simply to whisper reassuringly into Voldemort’s ear.
This is evil that has escaped relationality altogether.
Even Draco whose worldview remains deeply shaped by pure-blood ideology ultimately joins the Order of the Phoenix because the reality confronting him exceeds even his own authoritarian imagination (Think of “old school republicans turning on trump or working class members leaving MAGA). His prejudice can accommodate hierarchy, elitism, and political violence. What it cannot accommodate is the entirely joyless, affectless, and almost asexual form of domination that Voldemort ultimately embodies (!).
The comparison may remind some readers of those rare moments in political life when individuals or institutions that have themselves endorsed violence nevertheless recoil from particular acts as having gone “too far.” Such moments are striking precisely because condemnation emerges not from ideological opponents but from actors who would otherwise appear broadly sympathetic. The shock derives from the collapse of an expected moral threshold.
Within Desolation, Draco’s desertion therefore functions as a particularly significant narrative signal. If even Draco Malfoy abandons Voldemort, something has fundamentally changed. Throughout the novel, one of Draco’s principal motivations becomes avenging the death of his mother, whom he holds Voldemort responsible for killing.
The absent mother consequently reappears as a recurring marker of humanity.
One might even argue that maternal absence repeatedly functions as a narrative reminder of empathy itself. In losing his mother, Draco rediscovers precisely those emotional capacities that fascist ideology had attempted to suppress.
This recurring association between motherhood and humanity brings me to my final point: the representation of right-wing women.
The question of why women actively participate in, defend, or sustain political systems that simultaneously restrict their own rights remains an important one. While Harry Potter canon gives us Dolores Umbridge and contemporary fandom has frequently recast Umbridge through comparisons with figures such as Karoline Leavitt, both canon and fanon remain comparatively reluctant to imagine female fascists with the same psychological depth afforded to male characters.
It may however not be accidental that Draco’s mother is called Narcissa.
Across both canon and fanfiction, women frequently remain loyal to husbands, fathers, or sons throughout processes of political radicalisation and continue supporting them after Voldemort’s victory. Rather than functioning primarily as ideological leaders, they often become mediators, protectors, or emotional stabilisers within authoritarian households.
Andrea Dworkin offers one possible explanation for this phenomenon:
Dworkin’s argument does not portray submission as natural femininity. Rather, she understands it as a rational survival strategy within patriarchal systems that already deny women genuine autonomy.
This framework may also illuminate contemporary political imagery.
Recent representations of Melania Trump, for example, rarely resemble the idealised “trad wife.” Instead, they frequently emphasise luxury, fashion, professionalism, and entrepreneurial success, presenting an image of sophisticated independence. Yet the underlying promise remains remarkably similar: that obedience, loyalty, and proximity to male power will ultimately provide security, status, and success. I would actually argue that Melania, in a way, has missed the aesthetic needle and gave us a girl boss poster to her violently unsuccessful documentary, when honestly, this type of fascism doesn’t call for ANY female representation. Or: Desolation-Voldemort doesn’t even have a girlfriend! There may be a breeding farm somewhere, sure, but neither your sourdough NOR your power suit are gonna grant you any sort of access within systems that systematically deny women precisely that.
Only the necessary of keeping up the facade declines the more the public display of state violence becomes acceptable.
In a perverted way, we should be glad there’s still trad wife and girl boss propaganda, because there still seems to be the need to convince women (rather than just incarcerate, rape and kill them directly).
The fantasy of the woman who can privately soften the violent man remains central to many contemporary fantasies surrounding “trad wives,” Christian influencers, and oligarchic femininity. The fantasy is not one of political equality but of emotional influence: the belief that private intimacy can soften public violence.
I would argue, however, that this is not how dictatorships function. Actually neither of them, but certainly not the Desolation-kind.
The widespread discomfort generated by digitally manipulated images depicting authoritarian leaders in affectionate or romantic situations reflects precisely this contradiction. Such images falsely suggest relationality where none exists. They imply emotional accessibility within systems that are fundamentally organised around distance, hierarchy, and fear.
In this sense, they perform an ideological function. They encourage the belief that the dictator remains persuadable, redeemable, perhaps even capable of listening.
It is precisely this fantasy that Desolation refuses.
What I hope to have demonstrated is this: not only does the Harry Potter canon with its already existing racist, elitist, and hierarchical structures, while nevertheless remaining morally contained allow us to draw meaningful parallels to the contemporary world, but the corpus of post-war Hogwarts fanfiction offers an especially revealing image of our current political moment.
The fanfictions examined here suggest that different forms of evil are imagined differently. Evil situated on what might broadly be described as a narcissistic spectrum remains, to some extent, relational. It can still be portrayed as emotionally intelligible. It remains capable of recognising affection, responding to intimacy, and acknowledging interpersonal bonds, even when these are profoundly distorted. Consequently, it can still be negotiated with, manipulated, or temporarily redirected.
Psychopathic evil, by contrast, is imagined very differently.
Within Desolation, evil no longer functions through charisma, admiration, or even fear alone. Instead, it operates through radical emotional absence. It cannot be reasoned with, convinced, seduced, or emotionally redirected because relationality itself has disappeared. What remains is not simply cruelty, but an almost complete evacuation of ordinary human reciprocity.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Voldemort himself is frequently absent throughout large portions of Rowling’s original novels. His influence operates independently of physical presence. Likewise, in Desolation, the reader rarely encounters Voldemort directly. Instead, one encounters institutions, followers, bureaucracies, spectacles of violence, and the psychological traces left behind by his rule.
The Voldemort-esque vortexes of evil therefore remain largely invisible. What becomes visible instead are the more narcissistically inclined intermediaries, so your Death Eaters, administrators, collaborators, and scattered fetishised traces of power through which authoritarian systems become socially legible.
Between the clinically pathological and the narcissistically enthralled, however, exists a third group that deserves equal attention: the ordinary individuals who simply become frightened.
Perhaps this explains why the figure of BAMF Harry Potter appears so frequently throughout dystopian post-war fanfiction. Such narratives repeatedly imagine resistance not as the certainty of victory but as the willingness to confront evil despite the likelihood of defeat. Courage, in these texts, is defined less by the acceptance of one’s own vulnerability. It’s a non-heroic form of courage, too, where the hero refuses the narrative because the narrative has been abandoned by the sheer magnitude of evil anyways.
Ultimately, then, post-war Voldemort fanfiction does considerably more than simply extend Rowling’s fictional universe. It becomes a cultural laboratory through which readers collectively imagine the psychological structures of authoritarianism, the emotional logic of fascism, and the limits of empathy under conditions of extreme political violence.
If evil on the narcissistic spectrum remains socially relational, then evil on the psychopathic spectrum represents something qualitatively different: a form of power that no longer seeks recognition from others because it has ceased to recognise others as subjects at all.
It is this distinction, I would argue, that the post-war Hogwarts corpus allows us to think through, and honestly weigh our options here, with remarkable clarity.
I would argue that the eternal impotent claim ‘to hear out both sides’ or that ‘all protest has to be non-violent,’ assumes the type of narcissistic, relational evil, where you’re still romantically imagining this potential of Daddy’s approval and him softening out of love (or fear of consequence) if you just remained calm and brought forth the right “arguments”.
Looking at current politics I’d say, you’re trying to fuck Desolation-Voldemort, thinking he’s a relational Voldemort; you can’t try to be someone’s wife who has no concept of relationality. Instead, and believe you me I don’t love this either, you’ll have to become a badass motherfucker, or BAMF, as the community would refer to you.
Works Cited
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed., text rev., American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2022.
Botello, Johnny. Desolation. Archive of Our Own, Archive of Our Own, https://archiveofourown.org/. Accessed 26 June 2026.
bizarrestars. Crimson Rivers. Archive of Our Own, Archive of Our Own, https://archiveofourown.org/. Accessed 26 June 2026.
Dworkin, Andrea. Right-Wing Women. Perigee Books, 1983.
Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Guilford Press, 1999.
Rosenblum, Marc R., and Doris Meissner. The Deportation Dilemma: Reconciling Tough and Humane Enforcement. Migration Policy Institute, 2014.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury, 2007.
reggieblk. equals in life (partners in death). Archive of Our Own, Archive of Our Own, https://archiveofourown.org/. Accessed 26 June 2026.
Vladeck, Stephen I. The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. Basic Books, 2023.
Wolf, Julia. “In My Room.” Pressure, 2025.
World Health Organization. ICD-11 Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Requirements for Mental, Behavioural and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. World Health Organization, 2024.