...once again Dumbledore!Abuse - a Balanced Approach

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 142866

> Pippin:
> in the broad sense, yes,  we're all guilty for every real-life, 
flesh and 
> blood child who's suffering at this moment and we, not being
> fictional,  have no excuse if we're not doing something about it. 
> 
> But the bottom line for me is that just as people don't like being 
locked
> up, whether they deserve to be or not, people don't like being
> ordered about, even if the orders would be good for them. They 
will 
> rebel, eventually,  no matter how powerless and intimidated they 
seem 
> to be. That's what happened with Kreacher, and it would have 
happened 
> with Vernon and Petunia. Dumbledore's intervention might have 
handed 
> Harry straight to the death eaters. 

Magpie:

But if Dumbledore actually trying to make them stop actively abusing 
Harry *might* get him turned over the Death Eaters somehow (I assume 
the Dursleys wouldn't be doing it, as they wouldn't know how) or 
make the Dursleys worse, why do some of the books end with the happy 
idea that the Dursleys are going to be threatened into behaving 
now?  Why does Harry scare them with the idea of his godfather?  Why 
does the entire Order put on a big show of muscle in OotP?  Similar 
things could have been done at any time. 

Basically, to me it seems like the problem is this: Rowling started 
out with a fairy-tale/Roald Dahl idea so Harry has terrible 
parents.  Unfortunately, due to her plot, the magical mentor 
character was also the person engineering his early abuse.  It's the 
mixing of two genres, I think, that's causing a problem.  Dumbledore 
is supposed to be doing the thing where he makes sure that the hero 
is raised ignorant of his destiny, by simple people far from court.  
But in those cases that usually means the kid is raised on a farm so 
that he's simple and maybe made to work hard, but he's not gleefully 
abused Cinderella-style.  Rowling kind of wanted both here--
Cinderella and Percival or whoever, so she leaves you with the 
obvious question of why the Wise Mentor felt it necessary that our 
hero was absued as a child. 

Personally, I really don't get any satisfaction out of the scene 
with Dumbledore and the Dursleys.  First because, I must confess, I 
am a Muggle.  After 6 books I've gotten a little tired of the 
constant Muggle-baiting. The Durlseys are probably intended to be 
wholly unsympathetic, but whenever yet another wizard starts teasing 
them with Magic or making it clear that as Muggles they can not be 
treated as equals and Vernon manages to stand up to them in his 
awful way anyhow, I have to cheer for him.  Even if he's a jerk, at 
least he's rebelling like few Muggles ever can or do.  Besides that, 
it just seems incredibly silly to me that Dumbledore is, as I said 
above, the puppetmaster behind all these years of abuse, so his 
showing up to give the Dursleys a few noogies and an enigmatic 
criticism of the way they raise their son (hey, it's all relative--
they don't enter him in deadly Tournaments so they've got that going 
for them) just seems a little...odd. Like yeah, way to prove a 
point, Albus.   

-m