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Harry Potter and the Skittering Spouse

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Fencer said:
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?
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The main issue with perspective switches is that authors often abruptly change perspective without giving sufficient clues to the reader that the perspective has changed and/or whose perspective you are now seeing things from.

I hate it when I have to spend half the chapter playing "ok, whose talking now and whose point-of-view (POV) is this?" instead of focusing on the story.
Most of those stories could have been greatly enhanced by simply including a "X's POV:" and "Y's POV:" or just "X:" then "Y:" heading at the start of the POV change and most of my objections to the multiple perspectives would have been withdrawn.

Yes, sometimes you want to hide whose POV that is. That's easy, just make an "Unknown:" or "Mysterious shadowy figure" or "Intruder POV:" or something like that.
If you are doing multiple unknowns, make sure the reader knows it is different people.

If you handle letting the reader know whose POV it is well with something in the first few lines (not 5 pages into the new POV or half way through until the next POV shift) to make it obvious whose POV it is, then multiple perspectives are fine even without headers. It's when the author ends one paragraph with one person in a conversation's POV, then starts the next paragraph from another person in the conversation's POV without giving any indication of the shift until the new character mentions a relation or something that doesn't make sense from the previous POV that people criticism the multiple perspectives.

Sadly it is a common problem that most authors don't handle well, and don't like the criticism about not being able to tell whose POV it is.
 
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Dumbledore is very well educated, and on a purely book smarts level, is very intelligent yes.

However, when it comes to planning things out, thinking about the consequences of his actions, or offering anything more than a series of knee jerk responses in a continuous Indy Ploy, he is very very stupid. It was a problem when he was young, and while he got better, it wasn't by enough.

He also has a relatively low emotional intelligence, coupled with a well hidden lack of self-awareness, from the very first book.

He understands magic to an incredible degree, but when it comes to people he whom doesn't make a concerted effort to figure out or have a great deal of experience with, he has an equally incredible difficulty relating to and understanding them.
 
I feel like a lot of the conversation around doubledore misunderstands something fundamental about writing.

Dumbledore is supposed to be a smart character and his plan is supposed to be a good plan. Unfortuantely for everyone involved, he is a character in a YA series—a genre that is not typically written with strict literary analysis in mind—by JK Rowling—a person who is neither smart nor good at coming up with plans—As a result of this, a lot of his actions become very questionable as soon as you apply any degree of thought to what's going on.

When it comes to writing fanfiction, in broad strokes, there are a few ways to square these facts. The simplest two boil down to favoring the characterization, and improving the plans as you see fit, or the canon plans, and adjusting Dumbledore's characterization appropriately. You can also sort of split the difference by inventing new factors that either make the plans make sense or explain why he's deviated from his nominal characterization. The only thing you can't do is say "He's supposed to be smart, so his plans were good."
 
Fencer said:
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?
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By stating the perspective at the beginning of each switch, you are *already* delineating them as separate chapters in the manner of print books. Making them separate files to boot is just excessive.
 
Honestly none of dumbles plans are in any way functional, lets go through them all.

First Year, the goal of his plan is to trap voldemort's shade with a series of time wasting delays, and force a confrontation with Harry, hoping to destroy him for good. To pull this plan off he: Kept an artifact of incredible value in a school full of children, Either didn't notice or ignored that his DADA was possessed and being drained of his life for the entire term, allowed said possessed professor direct access to children constantly, ignored multiple murder attempts from said possessed professor, let said professor hunt and kill unicorns in the forest and sent Hagrid + 4 first years to find out what was happening, Deliberately set up Hagrid to get tricked by voldy into revealing how to get past the cerberus and nearly got him arrested with an illegal dragon.
So, did it work? He engineered an encounter and harry nearly died keeping Quirrel away from the stone, but Voldy was unaffected.
Plan failed.

Year 2, it's not clear exactly what Dumbles goal is this year, so how about "Don't get kicked out of the school"
To achieve this, he: utterly fails to improve on his detection methods from last year, allowing a very dark object to come into his school and possess someone, hired an obvious fraud as his defense professor, failed to track down a monster after multiple attacks when a first year muggleborn witch was able to identify the monster and where it was hiding and he had a FIFTY YEAR head start, got kicked out of the school by the board of governors, nearly had his chosen hero and sidekick get their memories erased by the fraud he hired and nearly got the daughter of one of his biggest supporters murdered to resurrect the dark lord he was trying to fight.
Technically, he was reinstated after the battle, but all this looks like an awful plan to me.

Year 3, plan: stop an escaped death eater from murdering harry. To do this he: allowed the government to station soul sucking demons around his school, with no method of keeping them from attacking students if he isn't right there, did not remove said soul sucking demons after they attacked a school quidditch game, failed to catch a Wizard armed only with a knife after he attacked the fat lady, failed to capture said unarmed wizard again after he stole the passwords from Neville, and then allowed a massive swarm of demons to nearly kill the entire golden trio, sirius, snape and pettigrew, allowing the rat to escape, and then was forced to send children back in time to prevent sirius's execution.
Plan failed

Fourth year, plan "don't let whoever cheated to enter harry in the triwiz win"
Lets one of his closest friends get kidnapped and replaced for the entire school year and doesn't even notice, fails to prevent harry from being entered into the tournament, despite the age line, fails to notice a portkey he made for the tournament being modified, allows Barty Junior to get rid of Viktor and Fleur in the middle of the final task, allows the minister to bring another soul sucking demon onto the school grounds, resulting in a captured prisoner who could tell the world of Voldy's return being murdered. Oops.
Plan failed.

Fifth year plan "don't let voldemort get the prophecy"
He lets snape teach harry occlumency(eventually), despite knowing that the teaching will need to be done very badly because voldy doesn't want harry to have Occlumency, gets himself run out of public life by the ministry (to the point of losing his government positions), lets umbridge come in and torture his students, gets kicked out again, and in the end harry is tricked by a vision into going to the department of mysteries, and Voldy gets the prophecy.
Plan failed

Year 6: find all the horcruxes
He got the ring which cursed him, and the fake locket. Missed the real locket being in Grimmauld, despite having that as a secret base for 2 years, the diadem anchoring the curse at hogwarts for over 20 years, and the cup in the bank vault (which we can forgive him for missing, but still) 1.5/5, and then he died.
Plan failed

End total, .5 plans out of 6, with a massive swath of collateral damage.
 
OK, your writing. You're doing a good job, excellent characterisation, a clear feeling you're dealing with 'people'. PoV switches seem to work well.

Long stories? Chop it up. Terminate long discussions. Maybe have someone commenting to themselves about how heated things got.
>>> But. <<<
That's my approach. You've got to do what works for you.

Dumbledore? More than a century of working with people. Taylor isn't human. She can shove her emotions into her bugs, go ice-cold rational. Dumbledore is smart enough to notice changing bug behaviour. He knows he can't push her too far, too hard, or... They need to work together, but he doesn't know how to do that. He's fighting, hiding, his fear. But, he suspects Taylor knows that.

Taylor? She needs to treat Dumbledore as a resource, he has knowledge and connections. She might even ask him to 'go meta', if she recalls some of Lisa's tricks. Ask how the problem of working together might be solved, in the abstract? Aims and objectives? How Magical Britain can be worked-around? Is... some aspects of magic messing their plans up? How might that be danced around? Taylor solves problems, even if she gets hurt in the process. No, it's not healthy, but it's what she does.

Death Eaters. Taylor has... delivery options. Draught of Living Death? Stack them up, somewhere secret, technically alive, deal with the people, politics, later. Should work on everyone but Voldemort. Would Dumbledore accept that???

Also, PoV issues. Double-down. Throw-in a doxie PoV? How they love Taylor, the sense of purpose. How there's more than curtains in their future... Taylor's Army.
 
The problem with Dumbledore is that you've switched genres. His plans are excellent plans for children's and young adult literature. They seem reasonably clever at first glance, and all end up with giant holes in them that are exactly shaped like plucky young heroes to fill in perfectly.

But now he's dealing with Taylor Hebert, who is a grim dark superhero story character, and presumably has brought her genre with her. If you leave your success up to the efforts of plucky young children in her genre, you end up with badly maimed children and a lot of dead bystanders because of the adults aren't trying their damndest things get really bad, fast. (The plan still works, because Worm is still a story where children save the day against all odds - they just get more trauma and life altering injuries along the way)

So you need to sit down and decide if the version of Dumbledore's plan, as told in a children's story, is accurate to this world, and thus this world works differently than Taylor expects - or do you acknowledge that the canon story only works because it is a story and in this version we find out what Dumbledore's plan would actually be?

Is prophecy actual plot armour and Dumbledore could confidently trust that fate and circumstance will conspire to put Harry in a position where he could kill Voldemort? Does deliberately leaving the horcruxes entirely to Harry ensures no one else dies while trying to deal with them? They MUST be dealt with for the prophecy to come to pass, so if no one else can deal with them the prophecy will ensure Harry does?

Or is prophecy not a factor, and Dumbledore has a reasonable plan to protect Britain, something different that canon, which he feel should not, under any circumstances, involve endangering children? Lots of options, you just need to pick one that fits Dumbledore being in a different genre, because if you change nothing about him from the version where he's a children's book character obviously he's not going to fit right.
 
The thing about Harry Potter characters... is that they didn't START as Characters, in the first few books Rowling is writing Caricatures and then she tries to make them Characters... by adding traits that the Caricature wouldn't have. And Dumbledore's Caricature WAS along the lines of "The Wise Old Man Who's Always Actually Right"... so Rowling made him be wrong, made him fail, because that would add "depth".

So like, when you try to ACTUALLY write "Dumbledore the Character" instead of "Dumbledore the Caricature whose author tried to add depth and failed miserably" you can go all sorts of ways with him...
 
Things Dumbledore could say:

* There's magical forces in play, some we know about, some we can guess at, but we should not ignore them.

* Riddle is a half-blood (so is Snape, but, probably won't be mentioned). He is likely using ideas (revolutionary) from the mundane world, in the magical one, and that might be one reason he's still going.

* Voldemort is Dark Lord, Harry is (originally innocent) Hero, both raised outside magical society. Magical history seems to like those sorts of clashes. His Companions, one Magical, one Mundane, backgrounds, also fits magical patterns.

* Some places seem to... magically mess with people's minds, problem solving abilities. Hogwarts, places of intense magical power. Staff and students are affected. With enough practice, this can be resisted, 'ridden'. But, plans are best made outside these places. (This explains a lot of 'cardboard Dumbledore' in the earlier books.)

* Bug control is a total game changer. But. It needs to be carefully, subtly, used. Leaving no evidence would be good, blindfolding magicals might help. Eventually, magical forces might adapt to handle it, but, if careful the War cam be won, necessary changes made, before that happens.

...

Just some ideas... A, really trying to be helpful (likely terrifying the OotP) Dumbledore.
 
sunsunsunsunsun said:
Even if he wasn't deliberately set up to spill the beans to Quirrel (which I suspect he was, Quirrel needed a way past the cerberus) he was deliberately set up to spill the beans to Harry. Which is still an abuse of friendship and trust.
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Arguably, you are trying to apply rationality to a non-rational situation. All the staff are cardboard cutouts, only the children are 'real' - a classic school story, with the twist it's a magical school, in a hidden, magical world, 'just around the corner'.

Hagrid is 'bumbling, friendly, giant' - there is nothing else to him. (Until later books.)

You can make this rational by saying 'magical logic' is driving things. Compare 'faery lands' - the weather might reflect the Queen's temper, and... distances are whatever 'suits the story'. Scary. Assuming you're allowed to be scared...
 
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The thing to remember about Dumbledore is that he is old, and he really doesn't want any of his students involved if he can manage it.

There's also the fact that he is genuinely a good person, and expects most people to be good people as well.

His plan with Harry was to figure out how to keep Harry and Tom separated until he figured out Tom's immortality. Unfortunately both Harry and Tom refused to cooperate and then forced the prophecy to activate by believing it.
 
Fencer said:
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……
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The problem is that Dumbledore in the last books is a standard 'wise older adult'. "I've lived through this sort of thing before, so I know what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter that the world has actually changed some; I know I'm right, and while you make excellent points, time will prove me right, so I will humor (or 'humour', since he's British ... *laugh*) your arguments and do it my own way anyway."

I've known people like that growing up, and now that I'm sixty, I'm doing my damnedest to NOT become one myself.

frogjg2003 said:
No matter what bashing fics might imply, Dumbledore spent a lot of time and careful thought into his plans; and ultimately they worked.
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One of the big problems with his plans is that some of them require him to be a small g God to get them done. Someone pointed out that one the conversations between Snape and Dumbledore that we see in Book 7 has about a one week period it could take place in, and then requires that he knew something that he had no way of knowing. (I got the book when it came out in - what, 2007? - and have never picked it up again. It was a planning conversation before the Hunt could take place. It works if you don't pay close attention to the timelines. But the second that you realize that it's a stupidly tight timeline that requires information that he couldn't have had, things fall apart. (Sort of like an X-Men annual where someone calculated that the only time the story could have happened was during the drive the X-Men were taking to JFK Airport ... and the story in question took place in the Savage Land, I think....*laugh*)
 
You guys are really making this whole Dumbledore thing overcomplicated.

Dumbledore has god-level planning skills the exact same way Itachi does.

Namely "god-level" in that they are convoluted and don't make sense....... but still work?
 
Ace Dreamer said:
Arguably, you are trying to apply rationality to a non-rational situation. All the staff are cardboard cutouts, only the children are 'real' - a classic school story, with the twist it's a magical school, in a hidden, magical world, 'just around the corner
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Throwing up your hands and saying "it wasn't meant to make sense" doesn't make for interesting storytelling. Reality ensues is a common fanfiction trope for a reason.
AramilOniasha said:
His plan with Harry was to figure out how to keep Harry and Tom separated until he figured out Tom's immortality. Unfortunately both Harry and Tom refused to cooperate and then forced the prophecy to activate by believing it.
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It explicitly was not, see also how he connived for them to end up locked in a room together in book 1.
 
Fencer said:
*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
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Except... Wizarding Britain is so small that the big Merchant party thing that she and the Undersiders rampage through, with the vials, and Charlotte, and everything... is quite possibly more people in that one place that there are wizards around. As a ward, she seemed to sorta be the tail that wagged the dog of Chicago, and that is millions of people. She literally commanded an army (of capes) bigger that numbered more than every wizard, witch, and child that the whole population of (wizarding) great britain. In this context, Dumbledore is, at best, a small county sheriff in way over his head in comparison. That gang of wanna be wizards (the Adepts) that she facerolls with insects without even being physically present probably out numbered the death eaters...
 
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Itachi doesn't have God level planning, he's just good enough that he can act like it

Notably, if he actually did have that level of planning ability, he wouldn't have actually done most of what he did

Edit: Also Bob has a point, Wizarding Britain has like 10k people at most
 
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Crusher Bob said:
She literally commanded an army (of capes) bigger that numbered more than every wizard, witch, and child that the whole population of (wizarding) great britain. In this context, Dumbledore is, at best, a small county sherrif in way over his head in comparison. That gang of wanna be wizards (the Adepts) that she facerolls with insects without even being physically present probably out numbered the death eaters...
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In fairness, this is Pre-wards Taylor, so she does not have Khepri stats.
 
I do think it makes sense for there to be at least some fiddly shit going on behind the scenes politically, socially, etc that we never see in the books and that Dumbledore is involved in because Harry isn't high society enough to ever get a peek at it from his perspective. Fan fiction goes way too far with faux Regency pureblood society crap, but we see evidence it's happening to some extent thanks to Slughorn and mentions of stuff from the Slytherins and IIRC Hufflepuffs.

In other words, there's wiggle room for some of Dumbledore's weird plans and actions to be justifiable as "he was also working behind the scenes to get XYZ done in high society/the Ministry" and we never see it because Harry doesn't know about it and doesn't care.
 
Fencer said:
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?
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Disregard that complaint. If you're worried about it, just put the name of the perspectivee at the top of the section bolded or underlined. Instantly lets us know who is doing the section in question without being intrusive or requiring excessive work.
 
Fencer said:
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!
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My preferred interpretation on Dumbledore is that he's brilliant, but fading and outstretched. He's 200 years old and workinf 3 extremely stressful and intense full time jobs while also preparing for a shadow war. He's widely viewed as the second coming of Wizard Jesus, and the only people who have told him no in decades are psychotic cultists. His mind is frayed and he's losing touch with both reality and other people.
 
goodpie2 said:
My preferred interpretation on Dumbledore is that he's brilliant, but fading and outstretched. He's 200 years old and workinf 3 extremely stressful and intense full time jobs while also preparing for a shadow war. He's widely viewed as the second coming of Wizard Jesus, and the only people who have told him no in decades are psychotic cultists. His mind is frayed and he's losing touch with both reality and other people.
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He's not even 125. He was born 1881, and died at the age of 116 in 1997
 
SlickRCBD said:
It's when the author ends one paragraph with one person in a conversation's POV, then starts the next paragraph from another person in the conversation's POV without giving any indication of the shift
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I've read some Worm fic recently, there was an Armsmaster's POV chapter and right in the middle of his dialogue with Dragon we can see what clearly were her thoughts. Something about her being AI, which Armsmaster wasn't being aware of at that moment. Hilarious. I see such things relatively often in fanfiction.

sunsunsunsunsun said:
Year 3, plan: stop an escaped death eater from murdering harry
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Assuming Dumbles didn't know about Sirius being innocent, he failed right from the start. Remember when Harry turned his aunt into baloon? He saw Sirius as a dog a little bit later. Imagine Sirius was really a murderous psycho. The story would end right there ☠️
 
Kirakost said:
Assuming Dumbles didn't know about Sirius being innocent, he failed right from the start. Remember when Harry turned his aunt into baloon? He saw Sirius as a dog a little bit later. Imagine Sirius was really a murderous psycho. The story would end right there ☠️
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If Dumbles did know Sirius was innocent, It'd be a huge dick move to leave him in Azkaban for a decade while getting Snape out.
 
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