This post just passed 50,000 notes, which is way more than I expected when I first made it, and can I just say, the tags and notes are full of so much vitriol against Dumbledore. People loathe him so much. I don’t think I ever realized how much before this!
I find that so interesting, because god knows Tumblr and fandom and fans at large tend to love tricksy bastards who play chess games in their heads. Dumbledore’s far from the first old man who sent other people to die for his war. He’s not the first character who’s manipulated kids, or raised children to be warriors because he believed they had to be. He’s a long, long way from the first desperately flawed mastermind we’ve seen. But god, do fans hate Albus Dumbledore.
And I wonder: how much of that is because we feel like Dumbledore betrayed Harry, and how much of it is because we feel like Dumbledore betrayed us?
Most of us were so young when we started reading the Harry Potter books. The world was magic and Harry’s home was terrible, and a kindly old man with twinkling eyes and a white beard winked, and seemed to know everything in the world, and we thought he’d promised to take care of each and every child given unto his care. We thought that meant us too.
There’s a thing that happens as kids grow up, when they begin to realize that their parents and the adults around them are flawed and broken and making things up as they go, and sometimes make very real mistakes. Sometimes as grown-ups we find ways to forgive the adults that raised us for all the good and bad they did, and sometimes we cut them out of our lives forever. But there’s always that feeling of betrayal, with the realization that a trusted adult did actually cause us harm–and not just because they used their best judgment and tried their best to protect us and it wasn’t enough, but because they decided something else was more important than our well-being and meant it.
As a human and a character, Albus Dumbledore is fascinating, flawed, fallible, with complicated priorities and a chess board for a brain, and he’s motivated by guilt and big-picture thinking and ego and a very real desire to do good for the world in the broadest possible sense all at once. As an adult that Harry trusted he failed rather badly, but it’s up to Harry to decide how he feels about that, and Harry has plenty of complicated feelings of grief and forgiveness and self-sacrifice of his own.
We trusted Dumbledore to be the Good Adult. The kindly man who had his students’ best interests at heart. And he wasn’t. He wasn’t what he promised us he’d be, and I think that’s what so many readers can’t forgive him for.
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