Lament of the Mind

thedoctor-hasmysoul:

night-vale-secretpolice:

night-vale-secretpolice:

When I used to think about Voldemort’s horcruxes I imagined a soul divided in equal portions residing in the different horcruxes and Voldemort himself. I realised that this can’t be true in The Half-Blood Prince Slughorn describes making a horcrux as splitting ones soul in two. This means that when Riddle made his Diary into a horcrux he split his soul in half and physically removed one half from his body and placed it in the diary. This means that he only had half of his soul left when he made his next horcrux, Marvolo’s ring. This half would have been split in half leaving only a quarter in Voldemort’s body. This goes on and on the amount of soul remaining in Voldemort halving each time he makes a horcrux until he had only 1/128 or 0.78125% left in his body.  As shown in the graph above.  So next time you wonder why Voldemort could have done some of things he did, remember how little human he had left in him. I don’t know about you but I think that this is crazy.

Come on guys, I didn’t do maths for 14 notes

So are you telling me that Harry had more Voldemort than Voldemort had Voldemort? 

This isn’t…exactly, right. Even if the order of the Horcrux creation is correct here (Diary is correct, Ring I believe is as well, locket and cup I don’t think we had solid timing on [though I actually the locket was much later, just prior to Regulus’s death, which would’ve been in the first Order’s time or so?], Diadem was certainly created the day he came to Hogwarts to ask Dumbledore for a job which I believe would put it prior to the locket, possibly prior to the cup? [but we know so little about that one’s creation], and then of course Harry and Nagini’s placement are correct), we’re not taking the biggest thing about horcrux creation into account - your soul isn’t split when you create the horcrux, it’s split when you commit the prerequisite murders.

Examining this from that viewpoint - The diary is almost certainly correct. It contains between ½ and 1/3 of Voldemort’s soul, leaning toward ½ (I know he had committed at least one murder by that point, I think the jury’s out if there had been any others but pretty sure we’re solid on the ½). The ring certainly has an additional murder after that - ½ of ½, so ¼, we’re still good. After that it gets very, very fuzzy. We know between the ring creation and the diadem, Voldemort had done a lot of rather fucked-up stuff, so much so that Dumbledore was hesitant to even let him near the castle, let alone have a job. We don’t know how many murders he had committed (or how many of those he committed were intended to be used as reagents for the horcruxes! We have to remember, dark magic like that is based around intent), so there’s no telling exactly what portion of his soul was put into the diadem, locket, and cup. It’s possible they trickle down as even splits, or it’s possible they all contain exactly equal portions of it!

Those splits matter for the next part - Harry. Harry was the unintentional one. Because of the prophecy, Lilly Potter’s protection, and the sheer rage and emotion Voldemort put into Lilly and James’s killings (and who the hell knows which of the three was actually responsible), in trying to kill Harry Voldemort instead imparted part of his shattered soul onto Harry. It is possible that the killing of Lilly and James counted as a Horcrux-prerequisite killing; or it is possible that his soul was simply so shattered at this point that those killings made the split inevitable. Regardless, we know that Nagini’s creation was intentional and final - certainly an extra (intentional) split, and whatever remained of Voldemort’s shattered soul stayed in him after that.

Tl;dr of all this: Pie chart is possibly wrong after the second piece. Harry almost certainly had more of Voldemort’s soul than Voldemort did. Voldy was sick, twisted, and desperate.