#this is why......this chapter hits me so hard lol obviously its heart-wrenching how he reacts to sirius's death but overall i think

[kohakhearts]

can i just. ramble about the lost prophecy for a moment. my most loved and simultaneously detested chapter (ok well. the forest again is up there but that one’s just...fucked up. in a genuinely disturbing way. happy to talk about that any time too tho lmfao). anyway im going to put my thotstm under a cut because i have a lot of them but yeah im just Thinkng

anyway like - i dont actually dislike dumbledore as a character, but this chapter is like...the largest of many moments where i really question why he’s the moral centre of the series...uh, you could make an argument hes not, but then what are your other options? harry? snape? like...no, i don’t think that we need a “moral guide” in any story, but undeniably the narrative suggests that dumbledore’s morals are the Ultimate good, which is why it’s, like...something harry’s willing to die for. but he says in the lost prophecy to harry “five years ago ... you arrived at hogwarts neither as happy nor as well-nourished as i would have liked, perhaps, but alive and healthy. you were not a pampered prince, but as normal a boy as i could have hoped under the circumstances.” let’s not forget that in this very same book harry’s uncle quite literally strangles him - and that’s, you know, five years after his arrival at hogwarts. of course, there’s the fact of them learning in cos that he’s not supposed to do magic outside of hogwarts, but it is mentioned that the dursleys kind of like...backed off of harry in certain respects after he went to hogwarts, because they were afraid of magic. well, anyway, dumbledore also says right after this “five years ago you arrived at hogwarts, harry, safe and whole, as i had planned and intended. well - not quite whole. you had suffered. i knew you would when i left you on your aunt and uncle’s doorstep. i knew i was condemning you to ten dark and difficult years.”

what’s really interesting to me is that like...when he says this, harry doesn’t respond. what he does respond to is when dumbledore says he left him with petunia because she was lily’s last living relative: “she doesn’t love me. she doesn’t give a damn -” and dumbledore interrupts with “but she took you. she may have taken you grudgingly, furiously, unwillingly, bitterly, yet still she took you.” this is also the moment we learn that dumbledore was the one who sent the howler to petunia at the beginning of this book, and what did that say - “remember my last.” so...yeah, honestly? i’ve always found it kind of weird that the dursleys kept harry around, especially after he went to hogwarts. from what all of what dumbledore says here, it sounds a lot like they were threatened into taking harry. or. petunia was, at least. and in the very beginning of dh, there’s that moment where petunia looks back and harry thinks she looks like she has something she wants to say to him, but she doesn’t. this always felt kind of, like...strange. even if she did love her sister, it wouldn’t make that much sense for her in that moment to be thinking of lily, whom she hadn’t seen in, like, twenty years, when she had been housing harry for sixteen. if anything, it’s just that she (parallel to snape? lol. which, unrelated really but interesting - love in the prince’s tale how every time we see snape talking to dumbledore about harry he’s saying he’s just like his father, until dumbledore tells him harry has to die. and then he calls him lily potter’s son. just interesting. but anyway. i digress) never bothered to see harry as anything but lily’s son, but i really feel like...yeah, okay, they clearly had issues, but i don’t get the impression that petunia blames lily for forcing harry into her life. blames her for dying, maybe, but...dumbledore was the one who brought harry there. dumbledore gave her the mysterious letter. when she gets that howler, she’s described as, like, pale and shaking - clearly very afraid. she doesn’t show much concern over voldemort at, like, any point. even in dh, she’s not arguing against anything like vernon is, but she’s not exactly telling him why they oughtn’t be. which leaves me to think that the person she’s afraid of if they kick harry out isn’t voldemort (after all, she’s not stupid. it’s entirely logical to conclude that voldemort would leave her and her family well enough alone if they cut harry off entirely. sure, the wards protect them too, but realistically they’re probably not at any higher risk than any other muggles. in the lost prophecy, dumbledore says that voldemort chose sirius because kreacher had informed them that sirius was the person harry loved most. it wasn’t merely a matter of him being harry’s godfather. the emotional attachment was highly relevant in that decision). rather, i get the idea that she’s afraid of dumbledore.

and this makes sense, right? because in this chapter, the whole time, he’s talking about a plan. he had a plan. he had a plan, and he ruined it by caring too much about harry’s wellbeing. implying, of course, that the only way he could follow through on this plan was to neglect harry’s wellbeing. he says here that he hadn’t wanted harry to suffer at the hands of the dursleys, no, but there is the suggestion in his dialogue (and this is something that comes up in the beginning of hbp too, when he comes to privet drive. he says something about how the dursleys did better by harry than by dudley, because by spoiling dudley they made him unkind or whatever. this one really pisses me off lol but - whatever. not the point) that he would rather harry have been abused than spoiled and arrogant. i’m not the first to say it, and i can see why people disagree, but i really do think dumbledore’s plan relied on harry being abused. it makes a lot of logical sense. and i don’t think it’s a coincidence that the person dumbledore gives the task of telling harry he has to die to is snape, whose background is very similar to harry’s in this regard. an abused kid is a lot less likely to value his life...especially if one of the only adults who ever cared for him is the one saying it’s better if he dies.

and, okay, no one else does either and that’s just on weird narrative choices for the sake of plot convenience imo, but i do think it’s significant that dumbledore never really disparages harry for not trusting adults. he finds him after he faces quirrell, sure. fawkes saves him in the chamber of secrets. dumbledore suggests using the time turner. he comes to the ministry. but he praises harry for doing things on his own. in many ways, he sets him up to do so. he doesn’t even suggest trying to find a way to get harry out of the triwizard tournament. even in this specific chapter, when harry can’t look at him because he feels so guilty over having gotten others hurt or worse, his tone is described as kind, and his gaze is not “accusatory.” only in hbp do we really see dumbledore working with harry on something (when they find regulus’s locket) - and he does this with the awareness that he’s going to die, and harry will be left to do everything that remains on his own. interestingly, harry does feel betrayed by dumbledore when he sees snape’s memories. but it’s so fleeting. he forgives him just as fast. it seems that he wholly believes that dumbledore didn’t want him to die - it was just necessary. but dumbledore did at least try to give him a way to stay alive, with the hallows, if lily’s blood tying him to voldemort turned out to not be enough. harry’s entire life was planned out by dumbledore, and in the end he still forgives him, because he thinks dumbledore just didn’t have any other choice.

which is like...a huge gripe i have with harry potter in general, actually. there’s this ongoing theme about choices. right from when harry chooses gryffindor over slytherin (not about to say this was a bad narrative choice, but the impact of the story would’ve been a lot more significant if he had bee in slytherin imho but whatever) but time and time again we see like...sure, voldemort chose harry over neville, but otherwise...there’s only one interpretation of the prophecy. there’s no other way to rid harry of the piece of voldemort’s soul he’s carrying than for him to die. snape must be the one to kill dumbledore. it just seems misplaced, with this big theme of the power of choice, for so many things to just...only have one solution. and ironically, you know - in ootp before they go to the ministry, hermione says harry has a “saving people thing,” and in gof ron said he had a “hero complex” or something, right? and voldemort knows that too, but so does dumbledore. and when harry dies, dumbledore says he has a choice whether to pass on or go back, but he adds, too, that he thinks more people might be saved if harry goes back. so i think, honestly...that wasn’t a choice at all. and i think dumbledore knew that too, which is why he said it. but it’s funny, obviously, when everything else he did was to ensure harry would be willing to die...but in this moment, he wants him to live. in a way, i think that’s almost more cruel, to be completely honest. make him accept something, and find peace in it, then turn it back around...yeah. there sure are things worse than death, dumbledore. it’s what you did to this literal child lmfao.

anyway, back to the chapter in question, though. the line harry has about petunia sticks out to me, but so does this one, when they’re talking about sirius: “people don’t like being locked up!” and then he says “you did it to me all last summer,” but what really gets me about this is that harry wasn’t exactly locked up, then; he was just cut off. nobody was telling him anything. he felt trapped, and alone. but he had been locked up. in the cupboard under the stairs, in dudley’s second bedroom...i mean, in cos he was very literally locked up. to the point of needing to be broken out. and what’s really interesting to me about ootp as a whole is that, like...people are calling harry crazy, right? they’re saying he’s some sort of delinquent. that he’s dangerous and disturbed. and isn’t this exactly what the dursleys told people about him? isn’t this their entire cover story for where he goes to school? “st brutus’s secure centre for incurably criminal boys.” a “first rate institution for hopeless cases.” they tell him from the time he’s young that his parents were, like, unhinged drunkards who got themselves killed in an accident that was all their own fault.

here’s another thing - harry is really defensive of cedric’s death. for someone who was fed lies about how his parents died for ten years, that makes a lot of sense to me. his aunt and uncle lied to him about the circumstances of his parents’ deaths in such a way that robbed them of their honour and bravery; harry isn’t going to accept anyone doing the same to cedric, especially considering that they were all three murdered by voldemort personally, and that all three were momentarily revived by the priori incantatem. similarly, there are a lot of instances in this book where harry wants to turn to sirius, thinking he is the only person who could understand how he feels having his name smeared in the papers. and here, in this chapter, he puts his situation parallel to sirius’s again - in saying they were both “locked up.”

so, the interesting thing about this to me is that this whole time, harry is angry about sirius. he’s angry that sirius died. they’re talking about how sirius hated being locked up. they’re talking about how it’s dumbledore’s fault that sirius died. in this moment, harry is blaming dumbledore for sirius’s death - and as soon as he does, he turns it back on himself. when he says “you did it to me all last summer,” he’s no longer talking about dumbledore ordering sirius to stay in grimmauld place. now, he’s talking about dumbledore never reaching out to him after his fourth year. he’s angry at dumbledore for what dumbledore did to him. my points above are to say, essentially, that the things in this book that make harry so angry are not merely a matter of being angry at being called a liar or worse, or on behalf of cedric. he’s angry because the wizarding world has begun treating him exactly as the dursleys always did. and dumbledore is the very persona of the wizarding world to harry (and probably plenty of others; he’s pretty powerful and influential, never mind being headmaster of their school). he accuses dumbledore of locking him up. but the only ones who actually “locked him up” were the dursleys.

this isn’t the only place where certain things pop up that make me really stop and kinda go oh for this reason. there’s a line in dh, actually, while harry, ron, and hermione are on the run where harry thinks that he’s the one who’s dealing with their lack of food the best, because “he had endured periods of near starvation” in his time living with his aunt and uncle. it’s a total throwaway. by the next paragraph, it’s irrelevant, and it never comes up again. this specific line in the lost prophecy, “people don’t like being locked up,” is really grim to me. harry’s not talking about sirius here. he’s talking about himself. and dumbledore’s reaction to this is also really...something.

“dumbledore closed his eyes and buried his face in his long-fingered hands. harry watched him, but this uncharacteristic sign of exhaustion, or sadness, or whatever it was from dumbledore did not soften him. on the contrary, he felt even angrier that dumbledore was showing signs of weakness. he had no business being weak when harry wanted to rage and storm at him.”

and from here, he springs into his explanation, right? about his plan. but this specific passage does read like genuine remorse to me. maybe he’s feeling the pressure of having made the mistake of not telling harry anything, since it is ultimately his lack of knowledge that moved him to the ministry, but i think it’s significant that he’s reacting specifically to harry’s line about being locked up. and that he starts talking not first about the summer harry mentions, but about when harry was eleven. and he says harry had suffered in those ten years. he says he knew he would. if he’s showing remorse here, then...he’s feeling remorseful over what he felt he had had to put harry through for the sake of his plan. he’s feeling remorseful for leaving harry in an abusive situation.

i have no doubt that dumbledore cared for harry. if it’s not obvious anywhere else, then it certainly is in this chapter. he says “i defy anyone who has watched you as i have - and i have watched you more carefully than you can have imagined - not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered.” then a little later “i have watched you struggling under more burdens than any student who has ever passed through this school.” we know from when they talk in dh that dumbledore considers harry a better person than he was. i think it’s easy to see, from dumbledore’s perspective, exactly why harry is so impressive to him. he holds the one quality dumbledore couldn’t, though he obviously wanted to: selflessness. he says so here, too, when he talks about what sacrifices he might be making by trying to maintain harry’s happiness, something he, dumbledore, wants for him. the end of this chapter, too, really strikes me for this: “you may, perhaps, have wondered why i never chose you as a prefect? i must confess...that i rather thought...you had enough responsibility to be going on with.”

but harry is, in essence, what dumbledore made him into. he’s explaining it all here, just to say, in the end, that harry’s fate is "kill or be killed.” and in dh, he says in snape’s memories that he suspects harry has already guessed, or at least knows on some subconscious level, that he’s a horcrux. by this point, the end of harry’s fifth year - it’s highly likely that dumbledore has already come to this conclusion, at least in part, himself. he implies it in snape’s memories, when they talk about harry needing to learn occlumency. he says something about knowing harry well enough to know that he won’t leave anything unresolved in the end, that harry isn’t like that (which is something he has in common with snape in the end; we see snape very dedicated to ensuring he has followed through on every last one of dumbledore’s orders, and he only dies once he has given harry his memories as was his “duty.” interestingly, they both also put all their faith in dumbledore, then feel betrayed when they learn that dumbledore hasn’t been completely honest with them but still follow on his orders anyway, for the sake of the greater good, even though they know dumbledore used them). looking at this in terms of child psychology, though...it’s abundantly clear that harry is very desperate to have adult figures in his life that he can trust, and who in turn trust him - but at the same time, he doesn’t want to be treated like a child, because he didn’t have a childhood.

anyway, my greater point here is this - harry is actually extremely affected by the dursleys’ abuse and he and dumbledore both know it is dumbledore’s fault it happened at all. but harry forgives him, and has a hard time blaming him at all, really, because he also knows dumbledore loves him, and the thing he wants above all else is to be acknowledged and loved for who he is. it’s why he doesn’t like being kept out of the loop, it’s why he can’t stand being “locked up,” or otherwise somehow stifled. and when dumbledore is talking about how much harry has suffered, so much more than any of hogwarts’s other students...that’s acknowledgement of everything he caused, and he does display real remorse for it here imo. but it doesn’t alter his plan. it doesn’t change anything. considering that dumbledore let his love for grindlewald blind him before, it’s no wonder that he’s a person, now, who values the “greater good” even above those he loves - because he does love harry, and even though harry often doubts this i think there’s never really a point where he doesn’t know on some level that it’s true too - but what’s really interesting is that harry, at this point, is not like that. i mean, he’s just played right into voldemort’s hands because he only cared about saving sirius, never mind that he knew it was a trap. the only person, in fact, that harry doesn’t mind sacrificing for the greater good - or the good of other people, those he loves - is himself. that’s why it’s so easy for him to forgive dumbledore in the end, i’d say.

but, yeah. i think this chapter is just...so interesting. and painful. it’s the moment, for me, where we most see how affected harry is by everything. it’s this huge culmination of his angry throughout this whole book, yes, but it’s more than that - it’s things he’s been repressing since he was a small child, anger at an abusive situation, guilt and confusion over what happened in the graveyard, and, most importantly, i think, grief for himself, which is placed equivalent in its parallel to his grief for sirius. it’s very fitting, too, when sirius was, after all, his last hope of having a family, or at least a parent, that was his own. before harry’s hearing, they talked again about harry living with sirius (in this case, if he really was expelled from hogwarts). it’s something they both want, but can’t have - and it’s something that no one else has ever offered to harry. sirius dying takes that away from him, and so his reaction to sirius’s death is not just about sirius, but also about a ten-year-old boy who had spent all his living memory (except, of course, for the memory of his mother being murdered) living in a cupboard and being told he was a freak and a waste of space. who didn’t know anything akin to happiness until he went away to hogwarts, where his life was put in danger again and again but at least here, finally, people cared about him. and it’s something most victims of abuse have to experience at some point (usually as adults, in the case of abused children). it’s a very, very poignant form of grief. and it’s cyclical, too; it doesn’t just “go away,” like any sort of grief or trauma. when i read this chapter, this is the grief i’m seeing. i think it’s why sirius’s death is the one that affects him the most, of all of them (dumbledore’s too; the mentor figure, the headmaster of the only place he ever called “home,” which he knows after dumbledore dies that he can never return to).

#taylor.txt #*meta #this is like 99% just for my own reference lmfao #idk i was just rambling here mostly but yeah #this is why......this chapter hits me so hard lol obviously its heart-wrenching how he reacts to sirius's death but overall i think #that THIS particular moment is indicative of something far grimmer than that. and dumbledore knows it too. and knows it IS his fault #but like he sticks to his plans so!! yknow. anyway. this isnt me bashing him LOL i personally think his morals are bad #but it's pretty clear i think that the narrative ultimately does not. that the lesson IS that one for all is fine or individual suffering #is justifiable in the name of achieving a common good. its a pretty classic moral question actually lol and i 100% see both sides #i just happen to fall on the other side of it than dumbledore personally i guess ! #sorry stream of consciousness btw jfgjhfk i didnt know what my point was here i just had a Lot of them