Harry Potter and the Skittering Spouse

One way to take it would be that Dumbledore is a civilian.
He's had experience in fights before, but no real professional training, and the Wizarding World isn't really big on professional armies in the first place.

The Order is basically a neighborhood watch group fighting off a terrorist organization.
They've been moderately successful in being an obstacle, but they aren't actually thinking "we are an army out to destroy the enemy" they're thinking "we need to stop these people... on our lunch break because we have jobs."
Professionals have trouble dealing with terrorists, amateurs are completely lost.

This is further aggravated by the fact that Dumbledore doesn't have any peers because he doesn't trust anyone. (Gellert really messed him up)
So he keeps everyone in the dark, which makes people think they can't use their initiative because it might interfere with Dumbledore's plan. (He doesn't have a plan.)

Honestly usurping his control of the Order might be the nicest thing you could do to Dumbledore.

The other side is that even if Taylor comes up with a brilliant plan to slaughter all the Death Eaters, can the Order actually execute it?
It would be really easy for her to overestimate them based on their abilities on paper and forget that most of them aren't hardened killers.
 
Hey genuine question should I make each perspective shift it's own chapter? I had an ff. Net reviewer awhile back comment on something else that I should only have one character per story written in first person to avoid confusion… and while no, because I've spent a decade writing in first person learning to write comfortably in third won't happen overnight. Uhhh the update I'm working on is like 9k words and counting, with three perspective switches or is it two because the first one isn't a switch…. anyway because I've been bouncing between them trying to smooth out any rough edges I'm starting to see what they meant because once or twice I've had to stop and think to remember the POV. So yeah would that make for a smoother reading experience?

The way I see it, there are three paths you could take:
- Limit a chapter to a single POV
- Use a header to explicitly state which POV we're currently reading
- Use breaks between different POVs without explicitly stating which one it is. I mean, in most cases context should be enough to make it apparent.

I personally prefer the third option in case of multi POVs in a single chapter, because if done properly it allows the story to flow without any unnecessary interruptions.
 
Honestly the big reason for switching perspectives started out as a way to highlight the differences in their mentalities and as a way very clearly show their thoughts as they dealt with their new married life. It was very distinct at the beginning

Now though after two months in close proximity and at least addressing their biggest issue together the thoughts are becoming less distinct. Harry is more calculating and ready to act. Taylor has learned some patience and is practicing restraint because there are small children in the combat zone to think of.

This suggest to me that you might want to reevaluate how and when you're switching POV, to better reflect where you are in the story and the way things have changed.

With that said, I feel like there should still be some pretty large differences between Harry and Taylor's POVs, even if they've started to adopt some of each others world views. Harry has never had to make piece with the fact that his decisions got a little girl kidnapped and tortured or that his closet friends are villains. He's never woken up in the morning with the understanding that in order to get through the day he needs every civilian, and most uniformed personnel, in the tri-state area to be, personally, terrified of him. There should also be some pretty large differences in how they understand the world based on their drastically different personal histories and the capabilities and problems they're used to dealing with. A few months together doesn't really change the fact that Taylor is used to coordinating and fighting teams of parahumans, while Harry is used to working with a small group of wizards against either individuals or magical creatures and objects.

There should also be something of a fundamental difference between their POVs. Harry's is bog standard human while Taylors is, increasingly, not that. I don't see it get played with very often in fanfics, but every human, who isn't Taylor, sees the world from a single perspective, that's centered on a single body, that exists in a single location at a time. By contrast, Taylor sees the world from literally millions of perspectives, at all times, distributed over a several block radius, all with different sensory capabilities and independent movement. And she's not just hopping between different perspectives, like switching to different CCTV feeds. She is always experiencing all of them, with her actual body only existing as one amongst many. That makes her far closer to an eldritch abomination or a deity—omnipresence is kind-of a big thing—than even most other parahumans. Exposure to the wizarding world is only going to make that worse, as she gains access to more and more perspective with senses that are comparable to a human's.

And yeah I had to stop and think a few times this update, though that's mostly down to the shear wall of dialogue. There is so much dialogue. Like yes there are character thoughts but it's Harry and Taylor talking, them talking to Ron and Hermione, Harry talking to the DA, Dumbledore Harry and Taylor getting into a verbal spar for moral superiority and who has the best leadership skills.

Oh my flying fuck this dumbledore debate just will not end. I think Taylor and Harry are winning, that they have made their point and Dumbledore just deflects, denies, decries them and I'm right back where I started only Harry is getting angrier and Taylor is getting more and more coldly furious, and it just wont stop……

I have legitimately been working on this debate on my phone all week, a bit at a time, in the morning before work, while at work because fuck them they took away the Christmas shutdown, and after work before falling asleep just adding, removing, refining. Dumbledore is a pain in the ass to write and I'm trying not to make him a straw man, but it's so hard when his plans and actions are so dumb!

I'm sorry. I know how frustrating that must be, but I can't help but find the image of you sitting there, watching them bicker, like you're some helpless coworker helplessly watching his collegues fall into the same argument for the umpteenth time darkly amusing. To make up for my ammusement, here are four thoughts of varying viability.

To start with, you shouldn't feel overly bound to the exact parameters of Dumbledor's canon plans. A lot of Rowling's writing doesn't stand up to even light scrutiny, so embelishing or adjusting his plans to make them a little bit more sane can often lead to better outcomes than staying 100% faithful to what was written. This is espesially true here, where Taylor's presence should have given him some reasons to adjust what he was doing and, potentially, re-evauluate how he was looking at things, even if he's unwilling to admit it and ultimately doesn't agree with her on most points.

In a similar veign, there's a very human impulse to not admit want to admit we're wrong to people we don't like, espesially when they were instramental in proving us wrong. Doubly so when the person we'd be admiting it to has all the tact of an aluminum bat to the knee. I could very easily see a world where Taylor has caused Dumbledoor to seriously reevaluate what he was going to do and several of his longstanding beliefs. He may have even already changed some of his plans in response to what she's said. It's just that everything about her sets him off and they get into arguments about everything, so he's both unwilling and unable to admit that to her. (Note: This is not to say he agrees with her or that he'd make the changes she wants, which almost makes things worse.)

Beyond adjusting the characters or their plans, there's something to be said for cutting off scenes before they've fully concluded when they start to get tedious. Espesially if that tedium and endless repetition is part of what you're trying to convey. The readers don't get a satisfying conclusion, because there isn't a conclusion to be had. The characters only stopped arguing because they saw the sky getting bright again, but the rest of us called it a night hours ago, when the scene faded to black.

Finally, have you considered doing this from the perspective of a different order member; someone who's not part of the argument? Like I said at the start, there's something darkly amusing about picturing the scene with you watching as a frustrated third party. A large part of that is the way it highlights the inherent absurdity of what's going on and leaning into that can be a good way to center the frustration and pointlessness of these kinds of arguments, which is honestly more important than the merits of either side's points. After all, if the debate was being driven by facts or logic and either side had a clearly persuasive argument, the whole thing wouldn't be spiraling the way it is. Going with a third part might also give us some new insights into how the rest of the Order views Taylor and how she's causing things to change in ways that may not be visible to her. It also gives you an excuse to do fewer POV swaps and to cut things off when you're ready to, not when Taylor and Dumbledor are done fighting. (There's probably something to be made of how similar those two are, despite their very different moral outlooks in the present.)
 
Dumbledore is a pain in the ass to write and I'm trying not to make him a straw man, but it's so hard when his plans and actions are so dumb!

The thing to keep in mind about Dumbledore is that Dumbledore is not an idiot. No matter what bashing fics might imply, Dumbledore spent a lot of time and careful thought into his plans; and ultimately they worked. Dumbledore has been playing chessmaster and doing so successfully for longer than most people have been alive. It's tempting to make Dumbledore's plans be stupid, but that does a disservice to all of his successes and doesn't actually address why his failures were failures.

Dumbledore's greatest flaw is that he is so used to being in charge and being the only one who knows everything that he acts on his own initiative and expects everyone to agree with him. This is actually the same flaw Skitter has, as exemplified by the heroes' rebuttal to her plans at the Slaughterhouse 9 truce meeting.
 
It's entirely up to you, one reason I could think of to do one POV per chapter is as a way to tell if the POV is important. Do you have enough to write about in that POV that it can reach a chapter in length. If you can only do a few paragraphs that POV may not be important.
 
The thing to keep in mind about Dumbledore is that Dumbledore is not an idiot. No matter what bashing fics might imply, Dumbledore spent a lot of time and careful thought into his plans; and ultimately they worked.
I have a hard time with this argument. It worked, yes, but there were so many points where it could have failed and every person and interaction between Dumbledores death and Voldemorts death could have derailed the plan entirely. He left the fate of a nation in the hands of three teenagers. He just… no plan survives contact with the enemy. To say that his vague notion of set Harry and friends on the path to collecting all the soul anchors and use my death as a way to deny Voldemort mastery of the death stick was his plan? What if Malfoy actually had the balls to kill him personally and Voldemort knew who to kill for mastery of the wand? Malfoy certainly caught Dumbledore by surprise with the vanishing cabinet trick.

And even then if you count that as a plan that went perfectly wouldn't it imply that Dumbledore bet everything on an all out battle where Voldemort committed everything to a final battle? Which would imply all the death and suffering leading up to that point was something he considered either acceptable or inevitable?

Say what you want about Taylor's plans but even as a villain she tried to protect the people in her city. If she had all Dumbledores information, yes she would be hunting for soul jars but she would also be planning raids and sabotage against the death eaters and later the DE controlled ministry.

Taylor absolutely ran the show and withheld certain information, but she also talked things through with her team. I was rereading the chapter after she meets with Accord, the Teeth and Butcher. Where they plan out a response to the PRT outing her. And yes her Charisma runs over her team and she gets her way, but they debate it, then take a poll on if they should go on the attack or not and the consensus was attack.

Dumbledore… doesn't.

*shrugs* I'm not saying he's stupid, or Taylor could lead an army, she can't, she could probably lead a platoon or strike team though. I'm just… it's like having a NCO with combat experience argue with a political spider.

They both have a piece of the truth but Taylor's truth is about the individuals and the fighting while Dumbledores is about the culture and the politics. And if they both stuck to their lane and consulted one another it would fill a lot of the gaps but instead they see each other as wrong because they come at if from such different angles and in the case of fighting back Taylor has the better idea of how to proceed but she doesn't have any authority and she lacks all the necessary information to make a long term plan instead of going for immediate advantages while Dumbledore is so focused on the endgame he's not working with the present and it's a shit show.
 
I'm going to point out a secret that your brain hid.

You're already writing everyone in third person, almost all the time.

Any time the header says Harry you are writing Taylor in third person.

Any time the header says Taylor you are writing Harry in third person.

Evil brain is just hiding that from you. You are perfectly fine with writing in third person. You can do it and would be totally good at it. Because you are already doing it.

That said write how you want. The headers are working for now. I have no complaints.
 
There's also the part where Dumbledore insisting using non lethal methods on people that wants to kill you and who are able to get up again pretty quickly if they have friends nearby. Seriously! They were in a war, not police action.
 

No, it didn't. Society was pretty much dead at that point, and waiting for an ICW (or another country) takeover . WandMaker had no ingredients or stock. Diagon was mostly closed shops. Goblins mad at everyone. Hogwarts in ruins. Hundreds dead. Hundreds fled the country. We're talking decades of effort to reach the point it was at before. Economy was shot. Government was nonexistent. Nobody trusted anyone. Muggles are freaking out. Magical Creature relations are shot. Tons of people without wands. When you add in how small the community is, rebuilding will take FOREVER. You just can't use magic to make the economy better. You can use magic for the relations, but that's illegal.

If Dumbledore planned all that, he definitely has some issues.
 
I'm going to point out a secret that your brain hid.

You're already writing everyone in third person, almost all the time.

Any time the header says Harry you are writing Taylor in third person.

Any time the header says Taylor you are writing Harry in third person.

Evil brain is just hiding that from you. You are perfectly fine with writing in third person. You can do it and would be totally good at it. Because you are already doing it.

That said write how you want. The headers are working for now. I have no complaints.
Thanks! That is useful. And encouraging my problem is more when I try to dip into characters thoughts while writing in third person. That feels really clunky when I try still.
 
Ahhh… guess I'm double posting because this deserves a response.
No, it didn't. Society was pretty much dead at that point, and waiting for an ICW (or another country) takeover . WandMaker had no ingredients or stock. Diagon was mostly closed shops. Goblins mad at everyone. Hogwarts in ruins. Hundreds dead. Hundreds fled the country. We're talking decades of effort to reach the point it was at before. Economy was shot. Government was nonexistent. Nobody trusted anyone. Muggles are freaking out. Magical Creature relations are shot. Tons of people without wands. When you add in how small the community is, rebuilding will take FOREVER. You just can't use magic to make the economy better. You can use magic for the relations, but that's illegal.

If Dumbledore planned all that, he definitely has some issues.
….. valid. I mostly meant that his plan succeeds in defeating Voldemort, if that was really his plan and not a last second hail Mary after Malfoy caught him off guard. Though now I feel like I should reread the last book. (I really don't want to 6 was bad enough) because frankly it's been so long a lot of the details feel vague to me…. Damn it I probably should…… the things I go through in the name of research….. urghhhhhhg I do have the audible credits……
 
Thanks! That is useful. And encouraging my problem is more when I try to dip into characters thoughts while writing in third person. That feels really clunky when I try still.

It's probably going to take a bit to feel natural with any change to your workflow, but for those specific circumstances, it's just a matter of writing the character name and the appropriate verb tense instead of "I".

But you still do it quite a bit for the non focus characters and they're doing quite well, which is why I can be confident in saying you're just fine at it :)

Anyway again I have no complaints. Do what makes your heart sing!
 
It worked, yes, but there were so many points where it could have failed and every person and interaction between Dumbledores death and Voldemorts death could have derailed the plan entirely.
My understanding of Dumbledore character makes me think he didn't really have a plan, he just belived in the prophecy and that Harry would eventually succeed, all he needed to do is to nudge him here and there to arrange some events.
Basically, a fantasy novel character mindset, which, in my opinion, suits him. After all, he really is a Gandalf knock-off. As an unfortunate side effect of such attitude he's horrendously inefficient, sadly.
 
He left the fate of a nation in the hands of three teenagers. He just… no plan survives contact with the enemy. To say that his vague notion of set Harry and friends on the path to collecting all the soul anchors and use my death as a way to deny Voldemort mastery of the death stick was his plan?

There's also the prophecy angle.

At the time of his death, there had been 3 horcrux "hunts."
1) Harry defeats the Basilisk against all odds
2) Dumbledore gets the ring with horrible consequences
3) Dumbledore sacrifices himself to get a fake pendant.

He might have been thinking "only Harry can get the horcruxes at all" and extend that to "Harry will succeed where everyone else will fail."
Not a plan, but a limitation.

He and Taylor can bond over being jerked around by prophecies!
 
The thing to keep in mind about Dumbledore is that Dumbledore is not an idiot. No matter what bashing fics might imply, Dumbledore spent a lot of time and careful thought into his plans; and ultimately they worked. Dumbledore has been playing chessmaster and doing so successfully for longer than most people have been alive. It's tempting to make Dumbledore's plans be stupid, but that does a disservice to all of his successes and doesn't actually address why his failures were failures.
No.

If it's stupid and it works, it was still stupid and you just happened to get lucky.

Dumbledore is an idiot. A very smart, very well educated, very powerful, very well-intentioned idiot, but an idiot still. His foolishness is understandable, given his background and his life experiences. It's even sympathetic. And in the end it (mostly) works out through dumb luck.

But it's still foolishness.
 
Just ignore Dumbledore's plan in books 6 and 7. Everyone was holding the idiot ball in book 6 and book 7 was a contradictory mess. You're writing fifth year Dumbledore, which is peak Dumbledore in my opinion. It's when we're finally seeing past the kindly and all knowing grandfather fight and seeing the beleaguered leader trying to juggle too many balls and doing the best he can. Dumbledore in book 5 was competent but human. He didn't have stupid Hail Mary plays that only worked because of chance, he didn't have gambles that only survived because Voldemort was even stupider.

Let Taylor point out the flaws in his plan because Dumbledore does need to be humbled by sometime who isn't his enemy. But don't punish him for actions he hasn't done yet and now won't do because of differing circumstances.
 
Just ignore Dumbledore's plan in books 6 and 7. Everyone was holding the idiot ball in book 6 and book 7 was a contradictory mess. You're writing fifth year Dumbledore, which is peak Dumbledore in my opinion. It's when we're finally seeing past the kindly and all knowing grandfather fight and seeing the beleaguered leader trying to juggle too many balls and doing the best he can. Dumbledore in book 5 was competent but human. He didn't have stupid Hail Mary plays that only worked because of chance, he didn't have gambles that only survived because Voldemort was even stupider.

Let Taylor point out the flaws in his plan because Dumbledore does need to be humbled by sometime who isn't his enemy. But don't punish him for actions he hasn't done yet and now won't do because of differing circumstances.
Ahhh I'm trying to write peak Dumbledore, but this is book 6 which makes my balancing act more difficult because a number of plans were already in motion so… I'm trying.
 
I thought peak Dumbledore had eyes that twinkled like a Lite-Brite, only referred to Harry as "my boy," and was secretly sapping Harry's magical core for years to power evil schemes for Da Greater Good
 
and ultimately they worked.
No they didn't. Just jumping on the bandwagon here I guess, but even assuming Malfoy was his plan, Dumbledore's entire strategy falls apart if Voldemort just, decides not to use the elder wand. Or the wand doesn't decide to turn against him for no adequately explained reason. Or the most deadly fighter on the villain team doesn't throw the fight against a housewife. Or voldemort, who controls pretty much the entire country at that point, just decides to send more disposable mooks.

A plan that falls apart if one thing goes wrong = his plan was fucking stupid and he got lucky.
 
Bumbledore's plan had plot armor. That's the only reason it succeeded, for a given version of it. Considering the hell everyone suffered, it was a pyric victory at best.
 
Just ignore Dumbledore's plan in books 6 and 7. Everyone was holding the idiot ball in book 6 and book 7 was a contradictory mess. You're writing fifth year Dumbledore, which is peak Dumbledore in my opinion. It's when we're finally seeing past the kindly and all knowing grandfather fight and seeing the beleaguered leader trying to juggle too many balls and doing the best he can. Dumbledore in book 5 was competent but human. He didn't have stupid Hail Mary plays that only worked because of chance, he didn't have gambles that only survived because Voldemort was even stupider.
I wonder if something caused Dumbledore to suffer some form of cognitive decline (either as part of the nature of the curse or as the result of a supercentenarian suffering rapid necrosis or as the result of the past stressful year), but because he's Dumbledore, no one noticed that he dropped some IQ points. Which is why his plans post ring feel less fleshed out and not up to the standards of 'peak' Dumbledore; Dumbledore is no longer near his best mentally.
 
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I wonder if something caused Dumbledore to suffer some form of cognitive decline (either as part of the nature of the curse or as the result of a supercentenarian suffering rapid necrosis or as the result of the past stressful year), but because he's Dumbledore, no one noticed that he dropped some IQ points. Which is why his plans post ring feel less fleshed out and not up to the standards of 'peak' Dumbledore; Dumbledore is no longer near his best mentally.

I'm guessing his death was never part of the 'Plan', and he had to rush together a new plan of bread crumbs for Harry instead of leading him around by the nose. If the story was more than a kids book series, I'd doubt that Harry was even meant to survive.
 
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