I absolutely hate it when people make out Professor Dumbledore to be this horribly manipulative evil conniving person who has the entire wizarding world, the Ministry of Magic and International magical politics under his thumb and yet is terribly incompetent in the face of teenagers.
Bonus points if he can somehow manipulate people's fate before meeting them and orchestrate two wizarding wars despite ending one himself (All in favor of equal rights for magical people btw). I'm not saying he's a saint or entirely good, people are allowed to be complex.
I'll be reading a fic on ao3 and suddenly Dumbledore is evil and Voldemort only exists because he wasn't kind to Tom as if Tom wasn't already messed in the head as a child. Or we can take it a step further and twist the narrative in favour of Voldemort and his Death Eaters, say they're good and they're actually stopping Purebloods from getting their rights stripped from them (rich priveileged people with generational wealth backing them) by the evil Muggleborns who make up the smaller percentage of the British magical population by the way.
I digress; my point is that a lot of you are convinced that your ill-thought decision to make Dumbledore a villain, because he would rather sacrifice Harry than the entire wizarding world, is peak writing. Did we all collectively forget that characters can be complex or morally grey?
Also, how is he so evil and powerful but dumb and senile at the same time? How in the world is he able to manipulate fate itself and go against the wishes of primordial beings if he's so incompetent and stoppable?
I'd advise you to make your plot more believable if I didn't find the whole Death Eater worshipping thing weird. They read like the magical equivalent of n@z!$ to me.
"But in my story, they're just worried about their traditions being wiped out!"
Do you mean their pagan practices or the culture that's rooted in bigotry (Hair lore is just another way to make women modest or whatever, muggles being unrefined meanwhile the clothes that wizards wear are obsolete, betrothal contracts which is basically taking away the autonomy of a person to be able to choose who they want to be with, etc). I'm a pagan and a practicing witch at that and the only time I have to wear something different when doing my practice is if the ritual is rooted in religious roots which, as a reconstructionist, I sometimes flout.
Also, let's not forget that the people you're painting out to be the good guys are the elite. They've got money for days; they have seats on their governing body which isn't even democratic for goodness' sake, in the final book they had Muggleborns fleeing and hiding for their lives???
I've scrolled through the pureblood politics tag on ao3 to the end and I've found a mere handful of actually well planned and executed fics that don't paint Dumbledore as a saint nor the Death Eaters as good. Because you know, the world is complex.
I'm not being a hater here rather a critic, I've been in the fandom since I was 9 and the quality of fics are rapidly deteriorating. There's no nuance, no plot twists, bashing every single character on the 'Light side' etc.
I love a good dark fic as much as the other but sometimes it feels like trying to stomach right wing propaganda to some degree.
