You are in good company. Even in-universe people did not understand Dumbledore, including Aberforth, Harry or Diggle. I'm not sure even Albus understood who Albus was.
Harry Potter and the Skittering Spouse
- Thread starter Fencer
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy Superhero
To fool the enemy, you have to fool your friends.
To go one step further, you have to fool yourself.
After all, if not even you, yourself, can understand your mind, surely your enemy can't understand it either no?
For the Greater Good, of course.
There's a reason I'm pretty sure the man is on drugs out of PTSD
Remade: "Dumbledore is dead, and the Fandom killed him."
Álli Méra
Sometimes I forget my name
This, like a lot of things in HP are (I think) a casualty of Rowling's transition from Children's Fiction to YA to older YA. And Dumbledore's characterization and Harry's Relationships are the things that suffered the most from it. I like a lot of the character work in canon, Hell I just like canon. I've reread the series several times after all. But there are some fairly major instances where the genre switches forced Rowling into a corner and truncated development. (Ginny, Hermione, Neville) Or completely and utterly demolished established characters. (Dumbledore, McGonagall, Lupin and Tonks)
On top of that, we had the shit show that was the movies, which did a lot to inform fanon on top of it all. (I will never forgive the utter character assassination that was done to Ron.)
lancelot
Completely worth it
Canon Dumbledore is a plot device more than a character from what I remember of the books.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Honestly the only way you can make Dumbledore's somewhat erratic behavior throughout the books actually make sense is if he's suffering from a degree of dementia and\or has broken the fourth wall and knows how the story is supposed to go.
He absolutely is yeah. Most characters in the story are in fact: Rowling didn't like writing large numbers of characters, so she didn't; she wrote a small number of characters and a large number of cardboard cut-outs.
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prince84
In central Dogma flirting with Lilith.
- Location
- The Madness Place
I agree with Fencer on his stance on Dumbledore, the man makes NO SENSE as a person... although if you treat him as a jumbled pile of issues and trauma you can get close to his Canon behaviour by figuring out which issue/trauma is being triggered each scene and writing that while ignoring all the others until they get triggered.
That is how I wrote him the few times I have had to, and people keep telling me I was writing Canon Dumbledore.
That is how I wrote him the few times I have had to, and people keep telling me I was writing Canon Dumbledore.
- Location
- Madness realms
Dumbledore is not a character so much as he is a plot device shaped like a person.
ah yes, dharmic Dumbledorism, or something
one of the few thing coherent with canon dumbledore was that he hated the justification "for the greater good", as being grindewald motto and something he had fallen for, then dearly paid the price of that mistake.
Every aspect of the character that is not just 'grandfatherly headmaster archetype can be linked or made compatible with that : the willingness to forgive is an opposition to that (refusal of the lesser evil of expeditive justice) the refusal of politic is an opposition to that, the refusal to share his plans (which stand in opposition with the two previous points) also can be placed as a refusal of a greater good ideology, leading harry to empathise with tom riddle...
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- Location
- Canada
Yep considering how many times I've seen Dumbledore in fanfiction say "For the greater good" he never ever even once says it in all the books.
- Location
- Painting, Peach's Castle
I view Dumbles as a very traumatized man well past the age he should have retired with what he thinks is the best way forward for everybody... and that age is catching up towards the end. He's brilliant, yes, but that's actually getting to him as he gets older and older. He's ironically more paranoid and distrustful despite revealing some of the plan and the details. His actions make less sense because he, himself, is less sensible.
And Book 6, in particular, he's quite out of his normal character...except his hand is being painfully withered by a constant and malicious curse that is slowly killing him, messing with his mind even further.
I think he has good intentions, but his actions aren't necessarily for the good of the individuals he's planning for in the short term but for the good of them and others in the long term... and sometimes? Sometimes he's just wrong. Not through malice or masterminding but because he made mistakes. And he makes more of those as time goes on and his overall health deteriorates.
Even without the curse, even without the war... I think Dumbledore had less than five years left in him. And at the end of one's natural life, people start to deteriorate hard both physically and mentally.
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Frankly he doesn't even really have to have dementia. The man is extremely old - we never meet anyone else even two thirds of his age. Just an outdated mindset and decades without anyone he could call a peer is enough to lead anyone to some very questionable [except there's no-one around to question it that he'll listen to, that's the problem] decision making.
EDIT: I had his age in my head as 150 rather than 115, but that's still impressively old. He was an adult already at the start of the 20th century.
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- Location
- United Kigdom
Aberforth is only a few years younger I think, Doge was his year mate, and Professor Tofty was apparently the one who judged Albus' own owl exams and they seem reasonably together... Though the comparatively small screen time is hard to judge
Though all of them seemingly have not gone through as much as him
- Location
- New England
Ah, but what about Confirmation? She's amazing to be around (so long as you're not Taylor)
Also, yeah Fencer I'm with you on DD
Then you get some bullshit like Fate: Bonds Beyond Humanity. Which is a Fate and DxD crossover that is 2,736,610 words long. That is over 2.7 million words. And that story started 4 years ago, April 2021, and is still ongoing.
Hear hear!
Canon Dumbledore is so inconsistent that he simultaneously proves and disproves every conspiracy theory about him.
If I ever bother to write a HP fic, that man is gonna be going senile with dementia from the stress and burden of having the entirety of the wizarding worlds needs placed on his shoulders for 50 some odd years. Because that's about the only way I can find to justify/explain how so caring a man who genuinely wants to help Harry can willingly do to Harry/deprive Harry of (and Hogwarts) what he did.
Canon Dumbledore is so inconsistent that he simultaneously proves and disproves every conspiracy theory about him.
If I ever bother to write a HP fic, that man is gonna be going senile with dementia from the stress and burden of having the entirety of the wizarding worlds needs placed on his shoulders for 50 some odd years. Because that's about the only way I can find to justify/explain how so caring a man who genuinely wants to help Harry can willingly do to Harry/deprive Harry of (and Hogwarts) what he did.
or a giant chicken.
There is no pet phoenix : there is a fire chicken ventriloquist, and everybody talk to the empty chair instead.
To complete the meme, everybody but one person (filch ?) act as if it was perfectly normal, and hear what the expect to be told (which is why he never give any information, the listener cannot extrapolate from nothing).
- Location
- That place over there.
- Pronouns
- He/Them
Yeah Dumbledore's thoughts, if we ever saw them, would most likely be a jumbled mess of conflicting priorities and unexamined trauma responses.
"I have to defeat evil! Everyone deserves forgiveness! I need to protect the children! Children need space to make mistakes to grow! I need to make hard choices! 'for the greater good' is an evil justification! I need to sacrifice for everyone else! Only working together can fix things! Trust is beautiful! I've been betrayed in the past!" And probably a dozen others I can't think of .
"I have to defeat evil! Everyone deserves forgiveness! I need to protect the children! Children need space to make mistakes to grow! I need to make hard choices! 'for the greater good' is an evil justification! I need to sacrifice for everyone else! Only working together can fix things! Trust is beautiful! I've been betrayed in the past!" And probably a dozen others I can't think of .
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My personal belief is there is no canon fanfiction. If someone wants canon they should go read the originals. I always find it weird when people start complaining about people acting out of character or some part of the story being non-canon. All fanfiction is AU, it's like the legal definition.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Based.
And yeah old dumble d is really the epitome of the problems in HP
Epsilon Rose
The King of Unrest
It somewhat depends on what a particular piece of fanfiction is supposed to be. If a story is just using canon as a basic jumping off point or inspiration, then yeah, characters can be very different. However, if it's meant to be more of a "for want of a nail" story or something that explores an aspect of canon, then starting with non-canon versions of the cast can take away from that aspect, simply because you're no longer looking at how that nail would have changed canon. Beyond that, if the characters that an author is writing about aren't recognizable as the canon characters you were interested in, then is the story still worth reading and is there any reason for it to still be using their names? Now, obviously, the line where that becomes an issue is nebulous and varied, based on both the reader making the judgement, the type of story being told, and even the character within the story.
Overall, complaints about something not lining up with canon can be valid, especially if the discrepancy wasn't intentional, but the details mater.
prince84
In central Dogma flirting with Lilith.
- Location
- The Madness Place
You forgot "Where's my sock?! Why do I only have one sock out of the pair?! Why does no one make good socks anymore?!"
I disagree, but then I am a I am getting off at the next stop type of reader. If I don't like the direction a story takes (fanfiction or otherwise) then I just move along. I am not the type to complain to the person writing it.