if he'd grown up in an orphanage, like Tom, I think he'd actually have gotten more care and attention, and come out less of an arse than he is in the books.
Yeah, people seem to forget that Tom grew up in an ORPHANAGE run by a stern old woman, not a CONCENTRATION CAMP. He may not have gotten a lot of attention, and the other kids may have been afraid of him and bullied him, but Harry spent ten years of his life being treated like a roach the Dursleys wished would just crawl into a corner and die. Mrs. Cole didn't refuse to feed Riddle, or lock him in a closet for days on end, or watch indulgently while other kids beat the crap out of him. Even Snape had it worse than Tom. Tom never had a family, but at least he never had to suffer through having a family that hated him. I'm surprised Harry's concepts of family and safety weren't MORE damaged by that. Of course, in children's literature, orphanages are usually dens of absolute evil ... but JKR didn't even write Tom's orphanage like that. Nurture can't completely explain Voldemort, because his environment just wasn't that bad.
And, yeah, Harry definitely should have been more damaged by his childhood. There's a really interesting essay about that in The Psychology of Harry Potter, and it ended with the author predicting that Harry would be doomed to a life of loneliness and restlessness because he wouldn't be able to really trust or stay with someone. He wouldn't be able to, say, get married and have kids because he can't stop himself from trying to push everyone away. That's psychologically sound, but Harry was magically saved from that fate because he needed a happy ending.
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Yeah, people seem to forget that Tom grew up in an ORPHANAGE run by a stern old woman, not a CONCENTRATION CAMP. He may not have gotten a lot of attention, and the other kids may have been afraid of him and bullied him, but Harry spent ten years of his life being treated like a roach the Dursleys wished would just crawl into a corner and die. Mrs. Cole didn't refuse to feed Riddle, or lock him in a closet for days on end, or watch indulgently while other kids beat the crap out of him. Even Snape had it worse than Tom. Tom never had a family, but at least he never had to suffer through having a family that hated him. I'm surprised Harry's concepts of family and safety weren't MORE damaged by that. Of course, in children's literature, orphanages are usually dens of absolute evil ... but JKR didn't even write Tom's orphanage like that. Nurture can't completely explain Voldemort, because his environment just wasn't that bad.
And, yeah, Harry definitely should have been more damaged by his childhood. There's a really interesting essay about that in The Psychology of Harry Potter, and it ended with the author predicting that Harry would be doomed to a life of loneliness and restlessness because he wouldn't be able to really trust or stay with someone. He wouldn't be able to, say, get married and have kids because he can't stop himself from trying to push everyone away. That's psychologically sound, but Harry was magically saved from that fate because he needed a happy ending.
Victoria/Gryffindor