Draco and Dumbledore WAS: Re: Dumbledore Does Lie - Sort Of

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 159974

Pippin:
> I'm wondering now about Draco's attempt to crash Slughorn's
> Christmas party. I doubt he wanted to be a guest at a gathering
> where poisoned mead might be served. Could it be he was having
> second thoughts about his plan and realizing that the mead might
> go astray and harm his friends? He doesn't make any more
> attempts that we know of, but seems to go back to the cabinet
> plan.

Magpie:
He wasn't trying to crash; he was trying to work on the Cabinet and 
was caught on his way by Filch.  The story about going to the party 
was a cover, and when Filch actually dragged him to the party where 
he wasn't really invited he chose to pretend to be crashing, despite 
it being humiliating.

a_svirn:
By what definition? There is an ongoing debate on whether or not
children should be fully responsible for their actions. No one ever
doubted, however, that they are capable of forming intent and
committing crime. Besides, at sixteen Draco is hardly a child. In 
real life certain allowances would be made for him but certainly not 
to a point of dropping the chargers. In the world where seventeen is 
the age of majority this argument seems even less valid. Voldemort 
had at least four murders on his conscience at sixteen, would you 
shrug them off on the ground that he was but a child? And finally, 
if you are right, and Draco was too young to be held responsible, it 
follows that he was too young to be allowed a choice.

Magpie:
Yes, I don't actually think this is Dumbledore's thinking, that 
Draco isn't responsible.  As I read the story, taking into account 
the themes and the ways things pan out with other people, it seems 
more not that Dumbledore doesn't consider Draco responsible for his 
actions but that he considers those murder attempts an acceptable 
part of things.  To me it seems like the attempted murders did a 
couple of things--first they let Harry see that there was a murder 
plot going on.  That was necessary just for that reason. Besides 
that I thought the idea was to actually give Draco some taste of 
what he was doing--he may have removed himself from the murder a bit 
by doing it from a distance, but it had a real consequence.  I think 
that's part of where she's going with Draco's character so disagree 
with Carol's interpretation that these murders have no effect on 
Draco and he only stops these kinds of attempts when DE!Snape says 
it might get him caught.  (Draco has no independent reason to think 
that, after all--he doesnt' seem to be brought in for questioning or 
anything like that.)

So to me it seems like the "wait and see," for Dumbledore isn't at 
all "let's wait and see if he'd really kill someone."  It's that he 
knows already what Draco's personality is and perhaps thinks that a 
couple of near-misses is fine for him.  Characterwise I think he is 
correct and that every brush with death Draco puts him in a slightly 
different place on the Tower.  Rather than just pointing his wand at 
Dumbledore and saying, "Hey, why am I hesitating?" he already knows 
he doesn't have the stomach for it from his own reactions to his 
previous attempts.

But that of course still leaves us with Dumbledore considering the 
danger to others an acceptable risk.  Him saying on the Tower 
that "no real harm has been done" seems to point to this as well. 
I'm not bothered by his not talking more about Ron and Katie's 
attacks only because I don't agree that they had no affect on Draco, 
but I did have to laugh a bit at Dumbledore's casual dismissal of 
the harm to other peoples' children as no real harm being done.

Steve:
We don't
actually know that Dumbledore has continued on-going
knowledge of what Draco was doing. It is very possible
that Dumbledore is just in that very moment pulling the
pieces of the puzzle together and understanding what
happened.

Magpie:
Dumbledore is certainly playing it cool in the scene, but he's not 
pretending to know everything. I think JKR intentionally wrote it so 
that we can tell which pieces he's just putting together. The things 
he didn't know about he asks about or realizes in front of us.  Had 
he just realized Draco was behind the attacks, imo, he would have 
spoken of them more like he did the Vanishing Cabinet or some of the 
details of the plan, which he obviously has just put together.  But 
with the murder attempts there's no beat of understanding.  He 
brings it up first and also claims to have taken action on them 
earlier, through Snape.  He's also been claiming all year that he 
knows what's going on.  Removing this knowledge of Dumbledore 
unravels much of his behavior throughout the book that's tied up 
with him saying he knew this.  There's a lot of stuff Dumbledore 
didn't know; I just don't think this is one of those things. Knowing 
about the murders seemed to me the one thing Dumbledore brought to 
the meeting to intentionally use the way he did. 

Steve:
Yet having seen Draco's reluctance
to kill Dumbledore, and seen Draco's frustration with
being a DE, stuck with Harry, and may influence how Harry
reacts when he and Draco confront each other in the
future....I think he had to let Draco come to a crossroads, and had 
to have Draco face a choice about his future and the path it was
going to take.

Magpie:
Yes, I agree this was his thinking, and that it will be important to 
Harry for this reason. Storywise Dumbledore's decision not to act 
makes perfect sense to me.  I just also think that the decision 
included the understood risk that we saw.

-m