death to capslock

I had an idea which might explain a few of the more frustrating bits about the Order’s failure to catch the spy and the whole Godric's Hollow fiasco. Help me poke it to see if it holds up!

On November 1, 1981, Dumbledore might have concluded that my Prank Redux theory was the correct one. But what did he think before that?

My first spy in the Order theory was that maybe (despite them pretending 1996 was Remus's first werewolf spy rodeo) Dumbledore had in fact gotten Remus into Greyback's pack as a spy during VoldWar I, had him leak some genuine information to sell his cover, and assumed that information filtered back to Voldemort and accounted for enough of the Order's problems that there needn't be a real spy in the Order. This isn't impossible, but it is flimsy.

But suppose Dumbledore thought James was the spy. ( Read more... )

Slughorn lived on the run for a year, never staying anywhere more than a week. Voldemort and the Death Eaters weren't able to track him down.

But Dumbledore was.

How? Does he place undetectable tracking enchantments on outgoing staff just in case he ever needs to reel them in?

One bit in the memory of Voldemort's job interview that has always bothered me is Dumbledore's statement that he knows which Death Eaters are waiting at the Hog's Head because he's friendly with the local barman. Voldemort has just returned to Britain, no doubt planning terrible things...and Dumbledore immediately outs his brother as a spy? WTF? And then Voldemort continues to let his followers gather in the spy's pub?

I'm sure you could make a good story out of a Cold War-esque game where Voldemort is sending his followers in with false information to mislead Dumbledore while Dumbledore tries to filter out the misinformation to get at the real information they inadvertently reveal, and they both know the other knows... But it seems odd for Dumbledore to choose that option instead of trying to maintain his spy's cover first.

There's another possibility: maybe Aberforth wasn't the barman yet. Maybe the proprietor at the time was a Voldemort sympathizer, or at least a potential one, and Dumbledore wanted to oust them so he could put his own agent in place. Either he tricked or coerced them into telling him about the Death Eaters, or they wasn't involved and it was Willy Widdershins or his predecessor hiding under a veil who really reported to Dumbledore.

Voldemort shouldn't be so easy to manipulate that he immediately believed the proprietor was Dumbledore's agent. But the suspicion might have grown over time, no doubt nurtured by other "clues" Dumbledore helpfully planted, until Voldemort decided it was time the proprietor found a new job. (Possibly that job was "inferius.")

And he should have been deeply suspicious when Aberforth Dumbledore took over the pub, no matter how public the brothers' estrangement was. Aberforth couldn't just indignantly protest his hatred of Albus and all his works and give the Death Eaters a load of intelligence to prove his loyalties--that would be too much, too soon. But letting a few things slip over time, and griping about his brother just often enough to sound natural (well, it was--he just secretly hated Voldemort even more), and Dumbledore deliberately not acting on information Voldemort deliberately leaked via Hog's Head patrons to make it look like he never got the intel, might eventually convince them that he was on their side, not his brother's. Or at least that he was genuinely neutral.

A third possibility is that Aberforth was already the barman, but not yet Dumbledore's spy--again, it would really have been Willy Widdershins reporting on the gathering. Instead, this was Dumbledore's overly-complicated scheme to force Aberforth into becoming his spy. ("If I get Voldemort to suspect him, the means Voldemort will use to try to get the truth will convince Aberforth that Voldemort is dangerous and must be opposed. He's smart enough to realize that the best way to do this is to convince Voldemort that he doesn't trust me or report to me, then turn around and report to me. I'm a genius!") But that's even more convoluted and risky than most of Dumbledore's usual plans. I think it works more smoothly if Aberforth wasn't the barman yet, and this was Step 1 in Operation: Trench Coat Goat.

No wonder Aberforth is so cynical about how many people his brother is willing to sacrifice.

I know, there's an obvious, cynical answer to this one. But I'm curious how it holds up under somewhat-methodical examination.

Snape sells Bellatrix and Narcissa the line that Dumbledore’s weakness is wanting to believe the best in people. Now, just because he’s giving them a “likely story” doesn’t mean this must be untrue. Certainly the wizarding world at large seems to believe Dumbledore is kindly and helpful to suspected and marginalized people.

So, is his reputation warranted? And—a different question, but also interesting—either way, does Voldemort believe it?
( Read more... )

Can anyone think of additional examples that might support or undercut Dumbledore's reputation?

For several years (after gradually, reluctantly losing all faith I once had in Dumbledore), I’ve accepted that the most likely reason Dumbledore didn’t reveal Tom’s youthful crimes, expose him as a Parselmouth, and suggest that the monster was a basilisk after Myrtle’s death was that in doing so, he would implicate himself—for knowing what he did about Tom and not warning anyone earlier.

But on second thought, would anyone have found him culpable?( Read more... )

I was re-reading some old DTCL posts, and a quote jumped out at me. Kings Cross Dumbledore, in his (muddled, probably incomplete) explanation for why he put on a cursed ring, says,

"I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry I was…"

Hang on a minute. He wants to tell his father how sorry he is?

Ariana, sure. He thinks he might have killed her, and even if he didn't, he was partly responsible for the fight in which she got killed. That definitely calls for an apology. His mother, okay, maybe he was sorry he left to go on a Grand Tour instead of staying home to help her care for Ariana, and wonders if he could have saved her if he'd been there. Or he wants to apologize for failing so badly in the responsibility she passed to him. I'm sure Kendra would have been upset about Albus getting Ariana killed after a mere two months because he was plotting to conquer the world.

But his father? What was he sorry for there--that he didn't, at the age of ten, stop his dad from torturing Muggle kids and going to prison? That he didn't break him out of prison? Maybe he just generally wanted to express sorrow that his dad was psychologically tortured to death in Azkaban, because that's awful... but it seems a little odd to lump general sympathy in with apologizing to two other people he felt he wronged. Not impossible, but odd.

Years ago, Terri wrote a fic where little Albus was the one who really hurt the boys (in a panic, without intending to hurt them as badly as he did), and his father took the fall for it. This quote isn't proof, but it might tilt the odds more favorably in that direction.

You'd think by now I would have learned not to believe anything Dumbledore says uncritically. Let's take another look at the passage where he confirms the curse's existence:

"Oh, he definitely wanted the Defense Against the Dark Arts job," said Dumbledore. "The aftermath of our little meeting proved that. You see, we have never been able to keep a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for longer than a year since I refused the post to Lord Voldemort."
--HBP Chapter 20, "Lord Voldemort's Request

You'll notice that he never actually says Voldemort cursed the position. He doesn't even say he suspects Voldemort cursed the position. He just says that no one has lasted longer than a year in the job since and lets us draw our own conclusions. Even for a man who routinely uses academic hedging and waffling, that's... curious. He isn't afraid to "believe" or "suspect" things like the exact means by which Merope Gaunt got Tom Sr. to run off with her, so why so circumspect here?

Maybe because the means by which Voldemort proved he wanted the job wasn't as straightforward as cursing the job himself.( Read more... )

I've been trying to piece together the Marauders' group dynamic from what little we see, and found something that didn't quite square with how the characters themselves describe things. I know, shocker. But it's a discrepancy which might mean something.

Everyone describes James and Sirius as a "double act," and Harry compares them to Fred and George.

But is that an accurate analysis?( Read more... )

Thanks to torchedsong for bringing up the topic of character complexity (or the destruction thereof). JKR's desperate attempts to force characters that had grown beyond her control back into simpler, Really Good vs. Really Bad boxes in DH always gets me thinking.

Some HP characters I used to love disappointed me so much once I'd processed DH that I lost sympathy for them for a while. JKR excusing some characters’ flaws and not others also makes it tempting to blame her pet characters and dislike them forever more. Now, I prefer a complex cast of characters who might have sympathetic motivations and flaws which inevitably bring them into conflict over what I felt JKR wrote in DH, so I’ve been trying to re-examine the HP books with a view toward finding some sympathy for all the characters, even the really terrible ones. (No luck so far with James. I’m not sure I’ll ever manage that.)

This led me to Prisoner of Azkaban, where Snape is responsible for brewing Lupin’s medication and making sure he takes it. Even Dumbledore ought to have noticed that this is a no-good, horrible, very bad idea. Snape will be freshly reminded of the time Lupin nearly killed him at regular intervals. Lupin will be freshly reminded of the time he nearly killed Snape because his good friend Sirius set him up (and possibly react by trying to minimize it all to avoid a debilitating guilt-spiral), plus will face the anxiety that maybe the guy he bullied for years and nearly killed will poison him in revenge. Why on Earth would anyone set them both up for this? Yes, Snape is one of the few people talented enough to brew Wolfsbane… but Dumbledore is supposed to be a genius at everything magical, and he studied alchemy, which surely has skills that translate to potions. Why can’t he brew the Wolfsbane and deliver it with a twinkle? Even if he can’t, why can’t he deliver it instead of Snape? Forcing them to deal with each other directly over such a fraught subject is guaranteed to make them both suffer.

*headdesk* Probably because that’s the point. This is part of Dumbledore’s war strategy. Snape is probably in on it to some degree—not that it makes it any less miserable for him.( Read more... )