death to capslock

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.

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... )

An idea sparked by Oryx's "Appendix B" post on the Order of the Phoenix during VoldWar I.

Why didn’t Dumbledore figure out who the spy was, if he’s even a halfway decent Legilimens? Was Peter a fantastic Occlumens? Was Dumbledore actually a total failure at Legilimency?

Or did he think he knew exactly who it was, and so didn’t realize he needed to look again? More to the point, why do we assume there was only one spy in the mix? ( Read more... )