The situation about HP and JKR's public comments is fascinating to me, in an extremely morbid kind of way. Because I constantly find myself going into the story and finding messages -- excellent messages -- that I think are buried there, in plain sight for all of her readers to work hard and find. And then the author sends out interview statements that contradict my assumption that it had been the author's intention to send those messages. Dumbledore described as "innately good" from her lips is one breathtaking example.
After all, the series has always had an aspect of morality-related mystery and hidden truths buried all over it, which readers were sometimes made to guess at for a long time before the next book came out to give answers. And the constant theme has been: You can never tell if somebody is good or evil, because appearances can be deceiving -- Snape vs. Quirrell [PS/SS], Tom Jr. vs. Hagrid [CoS], Sirius vs. Peter [PoA], the true nature of "Moody" [GoF], the true nature of the James vs. Snape interactions and James' characteristics [OotP], the moral nature of Snape [HBP-DH], and finally, for the grand finale, the true moral personality (and, less importantly, criminal history) of the patriarchal symbol of omniscience, Albus Dumbledore [DH] …Or so I thought. I felt that final Dumbledore reveal was done spectacularly well, actually, with Snape's POV memories revealing down-right cruel (and utterly unnecessarily so in cases like the Yule Ball scene) sides of Dumbledore that were news to us who assumed Dumbledore was supposed to be unquestionably "good." Those scenes made us realize suddenly that the same character traits have been hidden right there in plain sight all along. Such as Dumbledore leaving Harry on his deceased mother's sister's doorsteps without even bothering to knock, or him telling Harry a straightforward lie about why Snape was protecting him in PS/SS, of a type that was completely uncalled for even to keep his promise of secrecy, and served to make Harry under-appreciate and mistrust the man Dumbledore knew to be willing to live and die for the boy.
Which I thought was marvelous. Way to shift the paradigm, and ruthlessly, daringly send us a message saying: "Hey, even people you are led to believe are impossible to doubt can be extremely different inside from what they project themselves to be! In fact you have to be especially careful about trusting exactly those people!" So I thought JKR was sending a wonderful message by making Dumbledore out to be such a despicable person who just happened to end up saving the world out of sheer luck (or fated destiny or whatever it was). I thought we were finally given a crucial piece of the puzzle that shows us Dumbledore's words cannot always be trusted, especially where they concern love and morality. He's right about a lot of things but wrong about some -- as you point out, he's disastrously wrong about close attachment and romantic love for him being destructive.
Yet, just as soon as I think that I have finally solved JKR's grand mystery -- which I found it marvelous that we still had mysteries to solve post-DH -- she turns around to us, smiles, and agrees with the bad side of Dumbledore. And I'm head-desking like mad and my brain hurts. Because it's not like the text of the books suddenly changes; the wonderful messages I found are still there, it's not like they disappear, but suddenly they're not the Authorial Message.
raisin_gal on LiveJournal, from the comments to sistermagpie's discussion post immediately following the author of Harry Potter's announcement that she always intended Dumbledore to be a queer character and that she "would have put it in the books if [she]'d known it would make [her readers] happy"
