runeofluna replied to your post “The whole meta around ‘Abusive Dursley Family’ and ‘Evil Dumbledore’...”
Ummm, I'm curious about the gay part? Are you talking about the Dursleys or Dumbledore? And if you're talking about Dumbledore, I know some people love bashing him but I thought that was less him being gay and more him being a manipulator who thinks he knows what's for the best?
Dumbledore is gay by WoG, and I also disagree about the ‘manipulator who thinks he knows what’s for the best’ fanon.
People keep depicting him as just the same as Grindelwald when the most defining moment in his life showed him very clearly that claiming you’re doing things for ‘the greater good’ is just going to fuck over the individual people you are fighting for/that make up that good.
In fanon, he’s getting bashed for ‘only caring about Harry as a pawn to die’ and at the same freaking time ‘not treating Harry as a disposable soldier but trying to let him have a life because he’s a freaking kid.’
Dumbledore repeatedly in the books goes with the option that helps and protects individuals, to the point that a lot of the places where he did legitimately fuck up (Snape) come from him placing helping one person over what’s best for a group of others (protecting Snape meant sub-par potions instruction).
This makes sense, when for him the concept of ‘the greater good,’ many over the one, is tied to massive trauma.
And then someone with that life philosophy finds themselves in a situation where Harry can’t live unless he dies, oh, and to make it worse, the world/Greater Good require that Harry die, meaning a massive emotional reaction of NOPE. That’s a freaking nightmare.
Instead of being a manipulator/planner, he suffers a lot from being overly self-sacrificing.
His one major actual plan in the books is 'how the eff am I going to keep this kid alive’ because of his utter rejection of the idea of sacrificing one innocent soul for the good of the world. (...not that this applies when the soul of his of course, due to the trauma and self-hate).
And even that is last freaking minute because they’re figuring out this stuff as they go along.
Dumbledore’s treatment in fanon reminds me of the rampant gay bashing of Kaworu Nagisa from Evangelion in the English-speaking fandom, where a character (who was clearly gay on-screen confirmed by WoG, not Rowling’s implied-only, WoG later stuff) was treated by the fandom as a heartless manipulator trying to torment/abuse/break Shinji as part of an Evil Plot when instead of being some diabolical mastermind he got completely blindsided by two groups’ evil plots in the episodes and then got tricked by Gendo again despite being Groundhog Day Looping in the movies. Canon!Kaworu cannot plot his way out of a paper bag and keeps getting blindsided even after going through these events over and over, and this is even freaking part of the worldbuilding because Lilim are Black Seed and that’s their thing, and he’s not a Lilim.
But according to the English-speaking fandom, he was a heartless evil Out To Abuse A Boy who absolutely deserved to Die Horribly, and clearly he’s a manipulator because he must have tricked the Straight Hero into loving him, the Straight Hero they self-inserted into couldn’t possibly be Bi, it had to be the evil gay person’s manipulations.
This is a character who canonically is ‘such a good person just meeting him was going to give Shinji a complex,’ but the homophobic parts of the fandom went so far as to hound slash writers and not translate/mistranslate materials so people coming into the fandom would see literally everywhere saying that he was evil and listen to that fanon instead of their own analysis of the episode.
Dumbledore-bashing showed up well before the WoG on his sexuality, but even then we were talking about a character who wears rainbow colors and was not demonstrating straightness by marrying/taking lovers. Think for a second about the fact that JK first revealed he was gay to keep them from writing a female love interest for him into the movies, because the writers looked at how Dumbledore dressed and acted in the books and were like ‘we have to have him go No Homo’ instead of just letting him be a bachelor that long because ace/aro... or his first crush turned out to be evil leading to a lot of internalized homophobia added to his self-hatred.
In any case, do I think that a lot of Dumbledore bashing is motivated by homophobia? Yes. Absolutely. Even though the homophobes in the HP fandom haven’t managed to take control of the fanon as much as they did in Eva before the new material, people who will deliberately work to defame homosexual characters exist, and the idea that none of them would try to go to work on a fandom as large as HP, to link the idea of ‘gay’ and ‘manipulative abuser’ in the minds of a generation of fans, is wistful thinking.
