Harry Potter vs. Anime Round 2: Orochimaru vs. Voldemort

*ding ding ding* Ladies and gents and other esteemed persons, do we have a show for you tonight! In this corner, the reigning champion, protagonist of the fastest-selling book in history, Harry F***ing Pot-teeeeeer and his world of wizards, magic, and blood purity wars.

Our challenger: young, scrappy, one of the most popular ninjas in the world… say hello to Uzumaki Naruto and his universe of ninjas, jutsu, and inter-clan battles.

That’s right.

It’s another Kids’ Anime vs. Western MG Fantasy DEATHMAAAATCH!!!

(spoilers for the HP series and Naruto up to Shippuden)

This time, instead of comparing rivals, we’re going straight for the jugular: big, bad antagonists.

Potter’s entry is obvious: Lord Voldemort, aka Wizard Hitler But a Generation Later, is willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to his desire for eternal, total power. He believes non-magical Muggles are inferior to wizards and that pureblood wizards are the most superior kind of wizard. Or, at least, all his followers believe that. It’s… a little unclear whether he actually has a consistent ideology or just wants to do whatever he wants and live forever.

Naruto brings Orochimaru to the table. Orochimaru is a good foil to Voldy, thanks to plenty of similarities. Both men:

– Have unnaturally pale skin and freaky evil eyes
– Have an uncanny affinity with large snakes
– Are obsessed with living forever
– Find a way to live forever that requires killing other people
– Pursue and learn forbidden techniques in order to increase their power
– Were admired for their natural talent during their education but never quite trusted by their best teacher
– Return after growing stronger to cause the death of said teacher
– Command scary, loyal minions despite the obvious fact that they would throw all said minions to the wolves the second it seemed advantageous to them
– Rely on a smart man good at potions/chemistry and also at disguising his true loyalties

But Orochimaru scares me in a way that Voldemort never achieves. No, I’m not expecting either of them to pop out from behind my shower curtain. But Orochimaru makes me scared for the protagonists. Voldemort… doesn’t. Here’s why.

Naruto goes out of its way to establish Orochimaru as a legitimate threat. When we first meet him, he easily defeats Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura. He brushes off their best moves. His power is so evident that Sasuke, the most skilled of the three, wants to retreat. Orochimaru takes out Sasuke with a move we’ve never seen before.

When he finally does leave them alone–choosing to quit the fight because he’s got other stuff to do–his lowly minions run through character after character from the protagonists’ gang. They only stop Orochimaru’s peons because the move that knocked out Sasuke gave him perma-creepy evil superpowers.

Need I go on? There’s more. The adult ninja also all freak out over Orochimaru. The protagonists’ exam master learns dude’s in town and immediately sounds the alarm for the most powerful ninja in their village. Naruto’s teacher, the most dangerous guy we’ve met so far, goes weak-kneed after he confronts Orochimaru and gets away with just a verbal argument: in his voiceover, he chastises himself for foolhardy words that could have got him killed.

Orochimaru survives the attack of the most skilled Leaf Village ninja using the most dangerous techniques he knows. Even when he is so badly wounded that he can’t use jutsu–the ninja magic that most characters rely on–and in devastating pain, it takes two of the warriors considered his equals to vanquish him… temporarily.

Compare Voldemort. We see Voldemort kill Muggles: they can barely fight back, but it does establish his cruelty. We hear him order his Death Eaters to kill various characters we care about. Again: cruel. Later on in the story, we understand how his magical defenses, set up painstakingly, make him so difficult to kill.

But we don’t see anyone try really hard to kill or stop Voldemort but fail. There is no moment where someone hurls an Avada Kedavra at the Dark Lord only to find it’s totally ineffective. Harry runs away from the newly reborn Voldemort, but Harry’s only a kid, and despite being a kid, he still finds that he has an unexpected wand-pairing advantage that brings out ghosts to help him escape.

We don’t see adult witches and wizards fight Voldy. We don’t really see Voldy fight, period. This is pretty consistent in the Harry Potter series: we’re often told the bad guys will win and have won in the past, but we never actually see them do it in “real” (story) time.

Which, in fairness, could be Rowling’s consistent choice to deliberately draw our attention to the character differences between the heroes and the villains. Voldemort, arguably, is meant to be terrifying more because of what he is–a selfish, racist, cruel megalomaniac–rather than what he (personally) does. His real-world analogue (yes, subtext, we understand it’s Hitler) wasn’t a super-powerful warrior. He was an average mortal human being who was still tough to kill because of institutional rather than physical/magical personal power.

But unlike the real world, the Potterverse isn’t clear about the political environment that gave Voldemort this power. YMMV, but to me, it reads more like everyone is just kind of incompetent. We don’t get to understand why Voldemort’s brand of magical racism appealed to his followers in the first place–what history led to this cultural moment. Instead, we’re meant to assume that the bad characters in this story are racist because they’re bad people. Which, sure, fine, fiction, but what proximate causes made joining some random guy seem like a good idea? Why are they racist instead of, I dunno, serial killers or embezzling CEOs or playing-both-sides war profiteers?

Because the story doesn’t focus on these details or show us how, exactly, Voldemort’s power is more dangerous than other wizards’, he feels less uniquely dangerous than Orochimaru. He doesn’t feel like the most capable or powerful magic user the audience has met–let’s face it, the only time we see him at the height of his power, he’s getting vanquished by a literal baby.

Orochimaru is no less symbolic than Voldemort: Naruto’s story is in part about how the strength of Leaf Village is its citizens’ love for each other, their home, and its history. Because of this love, they are willing to die to protect the village and its people–just like the virtuous Harry Potter characters are willing to die to protect the people they love.

Furthermore, Orochimaru doesn’t understand this love. He has no attachment to his home, except hatred for the love they stand for, which he sees as what the foolish and weak substitute for the pursuit of power. Neither Voldemort nor Orochimaru values friendship or other people; neither Voldemort nor Orochimaru is capable of understanding why anyone might care about another person if that person can’t help them become more powerful. They both represent a me-first, power-hungry mindset that dismisses anyone in the way of their goals.

And both of them are defeated (at least temporarily) by this power they don’t understand: Voldemort doesn’t get how Harry’s love for others and his mother’s love for him have made him stronger than Voldemort’s own killing curses (and death itself). Orochimaru’s plans are foiled by the Leaf Village ninjas’ heroic sacrifices and extreme effort fueled by their love for their community. At his attack, old rivals work together without thinking about it. Later, Naruto convinces a powerful prodigal ninja to return to Leaf Village by reminding her of that communal bond.

So I don’t think Orochimaru loses any thematic relevance by demonstrating his power in the story’s “real” time. If anything, his obvious superlative competence strengthens the symbolism: the characters who represent love and compassion can act on those motivations without messing up the plot because Orochimaru is strong enough to stop whatever they try to do. No “why doesn’t anyone just shoot Voldemort, like, with a gun?” for Orochimaru. Naruto and gang are trying as hard as they can to stop their foe without running into any plot walls–they can express their ideology in every action to the extreme.

In fact, for me, the closest Voldemort and the Death Eaters come to Orochimaru’s levels of threat is in Bellatrix Lestrange, not Voldy himself. Bellatrix has tortured people into insanity–people we know and see onscreen. We’re told that the power of her torturing curse comes from her own warped sadism, so it’s obvious that none of the good guys can muster the evil to match it. The text tells us less about how powerful she is or isn’t, which is actually a good thing: it lets her actions (and the inaction/fear of the heroes) speak for itself. We don’t see her defeated until the moment of her climactic fight.

So, for me, the winner for this cage match is clear: Orochimaru, by a mile.