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Harry Potter and the Skittering Spouse

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sunsunsunsunsun said:
The point you made is that without Voldy, his minions would be too cowardly to do a terrorism. he was wrong about that.
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He was right for over a decade.

sunsunsunsunsun said:
That's not good politics. That's explicitly awful politics, that's doing what is easy instead of what is right. The one thing Dumbledore claimed was most important, he couldn't or wouldn't manage.
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Yes it is. As I have said multiple times now; Dumbledore wanted the violence to stop, not to perpetuate it even if doing so was for a good reason, because he believed he could solve the overall cultural problem in the aftermath through peaceful means.

Dumbledore is not a warrior. He hates violence due to his own past history with it and this does indeed cause him to make a number of poor decisions throughout his life and the books. Again: I do not disagree with you that he is a bad politician, I disagreed that he was a bad politician because he couldn't push for every Death Eater to be thrown in jail, as that is simply incorrect. He could have pushed for it, he chose not to because he wanted to end the violence.

Was this a good decision? No, not really. But it's an understandable one coming from a traumatized old man who has a deep emotional dislike for violence.
 
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Neruz said:
Which is a far cry from open warfare and people getting murdered in their homes. It also took over a decade for them to work up to that.
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Considering it happened after Draco started at school where he gets worse grades than a muggleborn and after Harry cost him his elf and such, he may have just been legitimately angry enough to do it despite all common sense.
Possibly thought he could capitilize on Sirius Black escaping again?
 
FictionPack said:
Considering it happened after Draco started at school where he gets worse grades than a muggleborn and after Harry cost him his elf and such, he may have just been legitimately angry enough to do it despite all common sense.
Possibly thought he could capitilize on Sirius Black escaping again?
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Sirus hadn't escaped yet.

IIRC we get told that the ministry was launching raids to find dark magic artifacts, so the implication is that Malfoy decided that keeping the book was too dangerous with that in mind, as it was a powerful dark magic artifact and thus presumably rather difficult to hide from a concerted search. Then, since he didn't actually know what it was or its importance to Voldemort, he decided to just unobtrusively get rid of it and hopefully cause Dumbledore a few problems in the process.
 
FictionPack said:
I was referring to the attack at the international quidditch game. Which was the year directly after Suriys escaped twice.
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Oh that. Possibly.

Personally I think the attack was Malfoy trying to 'wave the flag' and convince the others to back whatever shenanigans he was up to, that's why they all bailed immediately when the Dark Mark showed up: They were batshit terrified that Voldemort actually had returned and was about to come down on them all for not being loyal minions.
 
Aineko said:
That would require figuring out what his internal rationalization is in more detail, which might be quite difficult? And honestly potentially way more bashing than him looking bad from outside perspectives.


There's a pretty good 'yes, he genuinely is incompetent' read of the canon plot, I think. There's lots of justifications, but fundamentally he almost never is seen to do something that actually works, unless you credit him for putting Harry in death ground from which Harry then fights to victory. Which is questionably creditable.

Trying to think of actual Dumbledore victories, the top thing coming to mind is 'turned around Malfoy's ouster in book 2'...
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Good written characters have justifications. Whether they be hero or villain. I mean, I assume @Fencer knows what Dumbledore is thinking and why he is thinking it. As for fundamentally doing something that actually works, he canonically fought Riddle in the ministry atrium and won the duel. He won soundly enough that Tom had to use Draco to assassinate him later. I am sure there are more examples to list, but that would probably the easiest one to point out.


M. H. Fuzzball said:
If he's tired, why doesn't he bring someone in he can offload some of his responsibilities on? He's had three full-time jobs for at least 15 years at this point; why doesn't he step back from one or more of them? Post-Voldie's reveal, he's got at least some of his political capital back, so if he wants to stick to making sure that Tom's sympathizers don't push their agenda in the Wizengamot, just hand the Headmaster post to Minerva and stick with his job as Chief Warlock. He's been headmaster of Hogwarts for decades; if there isn't anybody who can take up some of his slack, at some point the responsibility for that comes back on him.
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It's subtle, but one of the major points of JK's world building is that he majority of people do not care about things that do not directly affect them. I can't remember the exact page, but I do recall reading that Dumbledore refused to be minister of magic because he didn't want more responsibility. As for why he did not hand it off, I also got the impression from the books that he could not. Dubledore would have loved to retire and just teach children, but he could not because there were no other candidates that the wizarding world would approve. It is one think to approve the conquering general ala Andrew Jackson or Julius Caesar. It is another to approve their XO/2IC you've never heard of. Going back to the Jackson example, Tyler only won the preseidency because Jackson was so popular. He only served one term, similar to the first Bush did because Reagan was so popular. Without them being VP, they never would have made president and just ran on their senior's coat tails.

Stahor said:
Problem number 1 here is that he adult and authority in children \ YA novel. He has to give space for protags to act. So he either incompetent or malicious to put children in danger and not solve everything, given amount of tools he has.
He also a "wise mentor" figure. They usually die\left behind early for a reason.

Dd would be fine if he was just powerful, but he also presented as wise and all-knowing. In theoretical from scratch rewrite, i would not "all according to keikaku" route, but instead present him as insanely busy to make real plans and basically thinks he uses Batman Gambits, but because [circumstances] it, mostly fails, and kids have place to act and it becomes more like Indy Ploy. Dumbles convince everyone involved that it's was Xanatos Speed Chess entire time [it was not].
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He is presented as wise, and IIRC retracts his threats of expulsion in book two. I never really got the impression of all-knowing. I think he also apologized at the end of book five as well when Harry decided to remodel his office. I mean, at this point I hate to say it but we might be reading different source material. My impression of Dumbledore was he was a wise man who occaissionally made mistakes, but because of the power he had those mistakes were magnified. He also typically apologized to the parties that he wronged. Whether or not that intepretation is correct in this particular setting, only the OP knows. But I recall the books painting Dumbledore in a far more human light than what has been suggested in this thread.
 
TheManW/oAPlan said:
Good written characters have justifications. Whether they be hero or villain. I mean, I assume @Fencer knows what Dumbledore is thinking and why he is thinking it. As for fundamentally doing something that actually works, he canonically fought Riddle in the ministry atrium and won the duel. He won soundly enough that Tom had to use Draco to assassinate him later. I am sure there are more examples to list, but that would probably the easiest one to point out.
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"Had to use Draco" is stretching so far you've snapped in half. Firstly, Dumbledore didn't beat Riddle in the ministry atrium. They drew, and the fight took long enough that a bunch of Aurors and the Minister showed up and looked him right in the face, and he decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Him deciding to use Draco as a "kill dumbledore" pawn is because Draco is expendable. He has easy access to Dumbledore, because dumbles is a moron, and that gives him space for lots of indirect plans that shouldn't possibly have worked (Sure, Draco can manage a 3 imperius chain that prevents Madame Rosmerta from noticing him. Sure.) as well as they did. But Dumbles was dead before book 6 even starts. He died the second he put the ring on and now all Voldy has to do is wait for him to drop. Heck, we never see Voldy and Dumbles fight after he got that curse, because you know, dumble would have died. Draco doylistically only exists so Harry can beat Voldy in book 7 despite not having a snowball's chance in hell.
 
Also, wasn't using Draco or try and assassinate Dumbles partly just to fuck with the Malfoys? Because now their son had to try and assassinate one of the most powerful wizards alive or be killed by Tom for failing? I thought that it was a punishment for Lucius cocking up so many times by then.
 
I figure Voldemort did it that way because either Malfoy would succeed and Dumbledore would be dead, or Malfoy would be killed for failing. From Voldemort's perspective, either outcome is acceptable.
 
Fencer said:
AN: From here on out I will do everything in my power to keep Taylor and Dumbledore from interacting. I just cannot write them arguing without it turning into a back and forth where no one walks away satisfied. They are like oil and water if there was a constant threat of someone tossing in a chunk of an alkali metal. I like writing dialogue. It is a skill I fought tooth and nail to develop, but this was exhausting, and it went nowhere while still being plot relevant. Because their working relationship, such as it is, is important. At least the rest of the dialogue went somewhere useful.
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I still think that Taylor could've served the role of a wakeup call, pointing out how he's doing "for the greater good" in all but name and giving him a healthy dose of reality. I think Dumbledore's problem isn't an unwillingness to listen to anyone who disagrees wjth him, but the fact that he hasn't had anyone do so in decades who wasn't a nazi cultist.
 
Folks let me let you in on a secret. I have no fucking clue what the hell I'm doing.

Taylor and Harry? I could tell you their thought process.

Dumbledore? Not a chance in hell. The books are ridiculously inconsistent. The fanon is all over the place. And despite listening to book six twice I still can't make this man fit any kind of mold. I got through most of this scene by treating him as an offended authority figure who's been directly challenged by someone under his authority.

Simply put he got offended and doubled down.

You want his thought process before it all went to hell? Fuck if I know man, because none of it makes any sense to me. Malfoy's murder attempts nearly killed people under his protection twice and Dumbledore never acts which is beyond baffling.

I can not figure out the geriatrics thought process possibly because Rowling didn't bother to have one for him if he was only meant as an exposition engine.

I can make generalities, he wants everyone to be reformed. He wants to end the violence. He wants equality in a sort of detached way where it's something he supports but is apparently not motivated enough to push for given the lack of push back against even just slurs within a school.

I can write dumbledore, apparently pretty well based on feedback, but I do not understand him. I'm just sort of letting a loose collection of traits and ideas loose on the page. Which was particularly useful for this back and forth because his whole thing was deflecting. Which meant I could bounce from argument to argument. And which one's were most important to him is funnily enough, largely up to the reader. Because there isn't a clear front runner.

hopefully his character will solidify in my mind as I'm forced to write more if him. But even if it doesn't the simplest solution is to just relegate him to the mysterious wise elder role because well he's mysterious isn't he? Not like we're meant to know what he's thinking.

*shrugs* we'll all find out together.
 
Fencer said:
I can write dumbledore, apparently pretty well based on feedback, but I do not understand him.
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The key to understanding Dumbledore (IMO) is to realize that his entire life, his entire personality, revolves around his being seduced by fascism/authoritarianism and NOT pulling himself out of it until he was shocked out of his mental complacency when he helped kill his sister. He NEEDS to believe that people require assistance to be helped out of their own bad choices, otherwise he's directly responsible for his sisters' death for failing to save himself. He can't bring himself to judge children because he knows how badly he judged Grindelwald and assumes that he would make more mistakes and that ruining a child's life would be worse than letting them make mistakes up until the system deals with them as adults.

AT least, that's how I view canon Dumbles. He's afraid of fucking up again, so he 'solves' the issue by not acting at all.
 
Your characterization seems so far pretty consistent with e.g., "Everyone should be redeemable (because then I/Gellart will be) and everything should be solvable without any actual violence because my big mistake was thinking Gellart and I should've remade the world to our liking through force. So now I'mma sit in my spider web pulling strings and if you just let me cook I'll save everyone (except for a few necessary sacrifices) and make it so nobody has to sin or hurt or kill (and Arianna will forgive me)." (Where "hurt" means "hurt others", not "be hurt" - it's okay if people get hurt, that's not a sin: the sin is choosing to act on your will because actively pursuing his goals is what got Arianna killed.)

This is my approximate interpretation/psychoanalysis of canon Dumbledore, anyway -- he's acting irrationally for normal human self-deceptive/cognitive-dissonance type reasons, where his goal is to not ever actually have a goal, just make everything so it's all about responding to others' actions so he's not doing the unforgiveable thing (pursuing his own goals/ambitions) any more. (This is probably also why he has a dim view of Slytherins: ambition, in his mind, is the root of bad (if perhaps unintended) consequences, and evil if pursued into adulthood.)

This theory supports his general passivity and reactivity, why he almost never actually tells Harry to do anything in particular but only ever suggests, inquires, implies, etc. -- because then Harry's actions aren't his doing or responsibility. He can't just say, "here's where I think some horcruxes are", because that would be making a choice. He can't reveal his plans because he would then have to have plans. He doesn't have plans, he has possibilities that will likely unfold, with people who are doing things (entirely of their own choices, he's merely mentioned some possibilities to them after all), and that you meddling kids will get in the way of. If you try to have any plans around him that get too concrete, he's going to throw distraction and confusion your way, because he can't tolerate too much clarity around decisive actions. Only people who are independent enough to do their own thing and leave him out of it (Snape, Moody) can be tolerated to actually do things, because he can very easily wash his hands of any responsibility for their actions.

IOW, Albus is roleplaying being burdened by the terrible weight of his responsibilities, while actively avoiding being responsible for any choices at all. He's just trying to manage the terrible burdens others put on him, you see, whether it's children or Death Eaters or the ministry. Why, he's being forced to take action, don't you see? Everything he ever does is because it's necessary, not because he chooses it.

Anyway, that's my theory, but to be fair I haven't read any of the books past Philosopher's Stone, so maybe his characterization isn't as consistent as I'm implying here. But at least this concept is entirely consistent with how you've written him thus far, and it's also a real-enough type of actual human being that I wouldn't be surprised that this is basically what JKR had in mind for the later books, even if it was plot-driven to begin with and the Gellart/Arianna backstory parts added in later to justify why he's like this.
 
Fencer said:
You want his thought process before it all went to hell? Fuck if I know man, because none of it makes any sense to me. Malfoy's murder attempts nearly killed people under his protection twice and Dumbledore never acts which is beyond baffling.
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I've always had a theory about why Dumbledore seemed so cavalier with his students safety, and while there's absolutely no evidence for it, there's also no evidence against it and it explains a lot. It's also cobbled together from a mix of info from the books and movies, so take everything below with several grains of salt.

The theory is as follows: Hogwarts isn't the safest place in Magical because of Dumbledore, it's the safest place in Magical Britain because the founders put some downright terrifying protections in place for the students, up to and potentially including either precognitive or retroactive intervention making it impossible for a student to die barring some very specific and unusual circumstances.

The justification for this belief is as follows: Despite the horrifying lack of safety features, there are exactly 3 known cases of students dying at Hogwarts. The first example was Slytherin's heir using a monster that said founder had placed in the castle, presumably resulting in it being inside of the protections and not having to worry about overcoming them. The second time was during a potentially lethal tournament which the student in question had volunteered for, and even then they weren't killed on school grounds, just moved off of school grounds. Finally the third instance was the Battle of Hogwarts, where not only was Hogwarts not being used as a school, but it also opened with the castle being attacked by the Elder Wand itself (which cracked under the strain!).

While Hogwarts is operating as a school we never see a student die on school grounds from anything that wasn't deliberately included as a method of doing so by one of the founders. This is despite everything from the moving staircases to the dangers of improperly preformed magic presenting more than enough opportunities for an 11 year old to accidentally kill themselves.

If (and I'll admit that it's one hell of a big if) the above speculation is accurate, then Draco would present no real threat to any of his fellow students due to not knowing about the protections. In fact, this could even be a case of Dumbledore deliberately keeping the protections secret because of the loophole presented by removing students from school grounds before killing them. As long as nobody knows about the protections, nobody can try to circumvent them.


Once again, everything I've said here only has slightly more basis than most conspiracy theories, but it does at least provide some sort of explanation.

Edit: resolved autocorrupt issues
 
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kklusmeier said:
The key to understanding Dumbledore (IMO) is to realize that his entire life, his entire personality, revolves around his being seduced by fascism/authoritarianism and NOT pulling himself out of it until he was shocked out of his mental complacency when he helped kill his sister. He NEEDS to believe that people require assistance to be helped out of their own bad choices, otherwise he's directly responsible for his sisters' death for failing to save himself. He can't bring himself to judge children because he knows how badly he judged Grindelwald and assumes that he would make more mistakes and that ruining a child's life would be worse than letting them make mistakes up until the system deals with them as adults.

AT least, that's how I view canon Dumbles. He's afraid of fucking up again, so he 'solves' the issue by not acting at all.
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I like this take, though I think it's worth adding that I also think another aspect of Dumbledore's character is that he is terrified of basically falling back into fascism. This is part of why the OOTP is so ineffective/hesitant - he views any decisive action, whether it be direct (ie. attacking the Death Eaters) or indirect (ie. engaging in propaganda against them) as being the next step on the slippery slope.

In particular, I imagine that Taylor's final remark about violence is going to leave him particularly unsettled, and worried that she's another Grindelwald in the making.
 
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Dumbledore knows other actions can be moral and effective but they're the 'wrong way' to do it because only his way is correct.

You see it all the time IRL as people go to do what they've always done and don't like what happens but don't change because it means they were doing it 'WRONG' and take it as a soul destroying attack that they're not perfect.

Dumbledore reads to me as making up things so he doest have to change, and that's cannon as he could have broken the pure blood movement but flinched from changing things and only went illegal murder and torture is wrong. And any ill look the other way is you give a performance of being sorry of being mind controlled.
 
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Honestly. Its fine. Real people aren't characters anyway. And don't fit into neat little boxes.

Dumbledores old, set in his ways, and too a extent believes he is always right. Which has been reinforced by people always treating him like such a powerful and wise person.

So its kinda fine that he is a little over the place in his values. Because real people are like that too.
 
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I love all of the above analyses, and I think that most of them are not mutually exclusive; it could be a combination of many of these factors. I'll just add in a few other factors for reference:

1) Dumbledore is closet gay; his boyfriend killed his sister and started World War 2 on both sides of the magic fence, and Dumbles defeated his love and condemned him to life in prison. So who knows how that affects his thinking.

2) Prophecy is mysterious. Canon never gets into the nitty-gritty mechanics, so we don't know if True Prophecies can be broken or what happens if they are. Some fandoms posit that breaking a prophecy has catastrophic side-effects, or that there were multiple prophecies, is some sort of cosmic mechanism where True foreknowledge comes with a price of being unable to speak of it directly. That's all fanon, though; given that there are canonical ways to change the past, who zogging knows.

(On a related note, I liked the HPMoR interpretation that Dumbledore used the Line of Merlin to review every prophecy in the Department of Mysteries, and was operating on imperatives that were both unknown and unknowable in order to prevent the end of all life. Dunno if it would work in this story, but food for thought.)
 
One dumb possibility/theory is that magic has a sort of equivalent to a conflict drive where the deeper you get into it and the longer you are immersed into it, the more like a storybook character you end up behaving rather than like a person.

Dumbledore, with how old and powerful he is, alongside just how much trauma he's hiding, over time unintentionally ended up letting himself all but dissolve his ego in magic, thus operating more on narrative than logic even in-universe. You can also note that, the stronger a wizard and the older they are, the more whimsy they seem to end up operating under.
 
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DestinyPlayer said:
One dumb possibility/theory is that magic has a sort of equivalent to a conflict drive where the deeper you get into it and the longer you are immersed into it, the more like a storybook character you end up behaving rather than like a person.
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Magic doesn't have a conflict drive IMO, it's just that the mental gymnastics one needs to undergo to actually cast magic tends to wear away common sense and oftentimes drives the users insane if they're not strong enough in personality.
 
I always liked the idea that after Dumbledor saw the Halloween night effects of the prophecy he went "oh shit that's actually a branch of magic I've been dismissing" and decided to study up.

This is why he is, by the time of the first book, regarded as eccentric, and also why he is certain Voldemort will come back. He spent the last 17 years of his life just learning divination, and not being burdened with a crippling self esteem problem, doesn't need to tell people where he got his info from like Trelawney does.

His new to this war stance of careful chess board moves and mystifying orders can come from this, he's playing with slightly weighted die and hints he shouldn't have. He's just also operating on moon logic that happens to work, but doesn't give out the subclauses.


I also like the idea that there's some kind of luck magic woven into hogwarts, because it explains so much of the lucky breaks that everyone survives with throughout the series.

This fits the chamber of secrets stuff, cause even if Ginny was resisting Tom's control, some of those misses are absurd. And that's not to mention the first time, where despite Tom Riddles best attempts to murder throughout an entire school year (all the earlier attacks) he keeps failing.


The important point RE: this story however, is I like the way Dumbledor and Harry/Taylor bounce off each other, but if he has no redeeming qualities and genuine skills to back up his reputation, then I'm not sure he's quite the same character.

This could be a great sub story about these three characters coming to understand each other and ultimately work together, if the author chooses to go that way, but I know no matter what I'm down for the ride.
 
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