'Dumbledore, A Personal Favourite White Boy?'

[borg-princess.livejournal.com]

Thought some of you may enjoy the read - I just came across this essay on Dumbledore that pleased me greatly. The facts are nothing new to us, of course, but they're outlined in a lovely cohesive discussion of his many flaws that fans tend to excuse or overlook.

And even though the author's not a Snape fan, I like that they acknowledged how Dumbledore screwed him over as well. I was of course furious with Dumbledore coming up with the plan to commit suicide via Snape (which unwittingly placed him in Voldemort's firing line over the Elder Wand), but I haven't thought of using the fact that this was done without informing the Order and thus squandering the possibility of any intel from Snape during DH. That could've been useful!

***The title refers to a term explained in a previous article, basically: "Personal Favorite White Boy (n.): A (usually white) male character who can commit acts ranging from “pretty damn douchey” to “outright atrocities”, but is constantly defended by or stanned for by a furious fan base who will go to any lengths to excuse their actions and vilify critics. A male fave who is portrayed as a precious cinnamon roll who are only ever victims and heroes, and anyone who says differently is evil or illiterate."

Comments

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/Instead of teaching him to temper his impulsiveness, Dumbledore teaches him it’s a good thing./

He also teaches that it's a good thing to look down on Slytherin in COS when he suggests that Harry's rejection of Sorting into Slytherin was a good thing and a mark of good character.

/Harry did not learn anything important for the later Horcrux hunt there, it was not an experience he needed to have./

I'm surprised that the writer didn't mention that Albus didn't tell Harry anything about how to destroy a Horcrux.

/we learn that Dumbledore tasked Snape with killing him without telling a single Order member about it./

And told Harry to only tell Ron and Hermione about the Horcrux quest. What's the point of having the Order if you don't tell them anything?

/Literally, it’s only Draco and Pansy (and Crabbe and Goyle, I suppose, but they simply follow Draco’s orders) who had done anything to Harry by the end of book one/

Actually, did Pansy even do anything to Harry in the first book? She insults Neville and argues with Parvati during the flying lesson, but I don't remember her doing anything to Harry.

/But…there are lives of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy on one hand, whom are both adults and far from being innocent, and on the other hand there are the lives of children he is responsible for./

Which calls into question why the headmaster of a school is also the leader of the war front.

/I’m willing to give Dumbledore a break for the Defence ones./

Yet was anything done about the curse that Voldemort had put on the position?

/Moody tortures Draco as punishment?/

I'm actually surprised that the writer acknowledges that what "Moody" did was harmful instead of funny.

/And I just really, really wish Harry had called his son Cedric Colin. Or, you know, Dobby./

James Jr. would probably make fun of him for being named after a house elf, and Harry found Colin annoying and wasn't that close to Cedric when he was alive. So, I'm not sure if either of those names would be much of an improvement.

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

Yet was anything done about the curse that Voldemort had put on the position?

I don't think DD did bother to do anything. We never got any indentation that the great Dumbles tried and failed to break the curse. Or tried changing the class to get around the cures.

It would have been nice to see something showing Ginny had an input on her children's names. Like James being James Arthur. We do get Lily Luna - but were Ginny and Luna really that close? Why not Lily Molly?

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

If James had been James Arthur (I approve!), would Al Sev have been Sirius Severus? Arrrrg!

I remember an excellent fanfic re-do of DH in which Harry’s second son was named Arthur S. Potter. It was left up to the reader to decide what the middle initial stood for. And yes, he was a Slytherin, but it was not any sort of “issue.”

[oryx_leucoryx]

Bill is William Arthur, and Ginny is Ginevra Molly. Not sure how soon names can be reused as middle names.

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

So than we could have - James Harry and Lily Ginevra.

When I try to do my family tree it seems like reusing name use to be more common. There would be a large family like the Weaslys for example and you would see Bill having children - including an Arthur and a Molly in some form. Than Charlie have a large family - children including an Arthur and a Molly in some form. Than Ginny having a large family - including an Arthur and a Molly in some form and so on. Than they have different nicknames in the family they go by. It than gets to be the challenge of figuring out which of the similar names is which person.

[borg-princess.livejournal.com]

Hell, my family reuses names and doesn't even use them for middles - I'm one of four Annies in my generation (named for our grandmother). At least the other two are overseas, but one cousin lives locally and it was quite aggravating that the way family distinguished us was 'big Annie' and 'little Annie'. >_< As the older, I got to be 'big Annie'.

[oryx_leucoryx]

This really depends on the culture. Among Jews, Sephardi Jews prefer naming children after elderly living relatives, in hope that the child will live to be as old as the person they are being named after, so you get many cousins (from different branches of the family) named after the same elderly grandparent or great-grandparent.

OTOH Ashkenazic Jews avoid having living people with identical first names in the family (especially if they are in different generations) in order not to confuse the Angel of Death - the fear is that a child might die when it was time for the older relative to die.

(All these superstitions are a reminder that not-too-long ago people did not take it for granted their child would live to adulthood.)

[oryx_leucoryx]

Funny case from my family - one of my great uncles named his son after his father (the son's grandfather) and after the fact realized his father was still alive, so the naming was inappropriate. He unofficially changed the child's name, and until his last day he never used his son's legal name.

[mitchell bender (from livejournal.com)]

My family is culturally Ashkenazic and while I don't recall that justification being mentioned much, I'm pretty sure that's right.

It ended up manifesting as recycling of first initials, so when a child was born they'd be given names that shared first initials with recently-deceased family members (and ideally if the first name was after a paternal relative, the middle name would be after a maternal relative). So I ended up getting Mitchell Cole after Milton and Carl, a great-grandfather on either side.

Different families end up with different systems even within the same culture (I have cousins who don't follow the pattern perfectly, or who only had one of two names decided like this, etc).

I honestly don't blame Rowling for recycling familiar names, because I think it ends up easier on the reader (especially when the children are basically an afterthought in the main narrative), and it is something that happens in many actual families. But it does become a problem, and an indication of sexism, when all of the names chosen because they're meaningful to only one parent.

There are actually a few different patterns for names, even just amongst the Weasleys (Fred and George actually seem to follow the pattern my family used, in a way, sharing initials with Fabian and Gideon, though we don't know how early their uncles died or what their middle names were). But we did see Harry James, William Arthur and Ginevra Molly (all having the middle name of the matching-sex parent), Percy Ignatius (who was Ignatius?), Ronald Bilius (after an uncle)... do we actually know any other characters' middle names? This does seem to establish a pattern of "use the matching parent's name for the middle name of the firstborn child", which I think a lot of fans use to try to extrapolate names for other characters (how many people assume Draco's middle name has to be Lucius, or Hermione's mother must be named Jean/Jane, etc?) but there isn't any canonical support for that...

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

Just FYI - I'm pretty sure we do know that Fabian & Gideon were still alive when the Fred & George were born. I could be wrong, but IF I recall correctly, they are mentioned as part of the Order in the photo Moody was showing Harry. Even if not, one of their killers was mentioned at Karkaroff's hearing.

It seems they died during the last year of the war - so after Harry was born and so, obviously after the Twins were born.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Regarding the twins, we know Gideon and Fabian were still alive when they were born because they appear in the Order photo which was taken 2 weeks before the McKinnon's died, and that death was shortly before Harry's birthday at the end of July 1981. So Gideon and Fabian were alive as late as the middle of July 1981, by which time Ron was already 16 months old and Ginny was about to be born.

Ignatius Prewett appears on the Black Family Tree, he married Lucretia Black, Orion Black's sister, thus he was Sirius' uncle (by marriage). This is why Molly and Sirius are considered 'cousins by marriage'.

I think Charlie would have been named after Molly's father, but I am surprised nobody is named after Arthur's father (Septimus, according to comments on the Black Family Tree), they go directly to Molly's uncle. Maybe Molly dominated the naming in their family.

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

Percy Ignatius (who was Ignatius?)

The one "Ignatius" I can recall from canon is Ignatius Peverall, a.k.a. the Third Brother who asked for Death's invisibility cloak.

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

The indication that Dumbledore is the head of the only magical school in the UK and also a war leader and also dabbles in other areas of politics is terrifying. Drawing from a fandom well that I'm personally familiar to, it's like how in DC Comics Lex Luthor is ostensibly just a billionaire philantrophist, but secretly is behind a whole chunk of organised crime and illegal dealings out there. In the early 2000s "Justice League Unlimited" series, he started running for PotUS, and The Question (crash course: Justice League's resident conspiracy theorist, and arguably a better detective than Batman) went into his penthouse to kill him because he believes that Luthor becoming President would set off a chain reaction that would lead to the Justice League mutinying and destroying the world in war. For spoiler reasons, Luthor is shown to have gained super strength and invulneralbility, and moped the floor with the Question, as he uttered this famous line: "Foolish little man. You think I did all this to become president? Do you have any idea how much power I'd have to give up to become *president*?"

[kahran042]

For what it's worth, from what I've seen, Septimus is often Charlie's middle name in fanon, which also happens to be my headcanon

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

The Peverell brother with the invisibility cloak was named Ignotus, which is Latin for “unknown,” not Ignatius, which means “fiery one.” I’m not sure why Percy is more fiery than the rest of the red-haired Weasleys, but “unknown” is certainly an appropriate name for a man who supposedly spent his entire life in hiding. Another appropriate name might be Ignavus, which means “coward.”

In fact, I think this is my new headcanon. The third brother in the story had been called Ignavus, because the original message of the tale was that living your life in hiding is a cowardly act, not a noble, philosophical one. A publisher belonging to the Potter family slipped a name-change into an edition of Beedle back in the 18th century that went on to become the most popular version of the book, and the headstone in Godric’s Hollow is a 19th century re-creation by Potter antiquary.

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/The indication that Dumbledore is the head of the only magical school in the UK and also a war leader and also dabbles in other areas of politics is terrifying./

Maybe the idea is the what-if scenario of "What if your high school principal was actually your archenemy's worst nightmare?" and how cool that would be. The problem is that by giving Dumbledore so many roles, it raises the question of why he doesn't do anything with them or properly prioritize them. For example, if Dumbledore is the head of the Wizengamot and Fudge asked him for advice before their split in GOF, why couldn't he have asked for Sirius to be given a trial? If he's the headmaster of a school, why did he hide the Stone there (yes, I know that the real answer is "Because the plot said so") instead of another secure place, one that wouldn't put children at risk? If he's the head of the Order, why doesn't he quit his job as headmaster in order to focus more on defeating Voldemort for good?

If Dumbledore *was* just a headmaster, then it would make sense why he was limited in what he could do: why he couldn't help Sirius, why he couldn't go on a hunt for Horcruxes after Voldemort fell from power, etc.

[oryx_leucoryx]

But that would mean Percy was named after Molly's uncle, skipping her father. Personally I think Charlie has Molly's father's name, and when Percy was born and Molly chose uncle Ignatius was when Arthur started really retreating into his shed with his hobbies.

Does anyone know on which side of the family Uncle Bilius was?