Villain!Dumbledore (was: re:HatingDH/Dementors/...Draco/.../KeepSlytherin House)

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 177688

> Prep0strus:
> I'm confused as to why so many people HATE Dumbledore at this 
point,
> especially Slytherin lovers. We learned a lot about him, and he is 
not
> perfect, by any means. But he is, by and large, good.  It sounds 
like
> many of his failings are failings we see in Slytherins - ambition,
> arrogance, secrecy, the willingness to use people for his own 
means. 
> But, his means are for GOOD.  

Magpie:
I can't speak for anyone else--and I don't hate Dumbledore, but if I 
were to say he makes a great villain it's more because I think he 
*could* be rather than that he is one. The way he's so manipulative 
and isolated in his understanding under this frosting of being 
twinkly and kind--it's wonderfully chilling to me. Especially when 
he gets tearful and wants forgiveness for being a little 
Machievelli...that kind of thing just always gives me the willies, 
where you can imagine the person killing somebody and then being 
all "feel sorry for me!" I thought his speech in OotP was hilarious 
that way, how even when he attempts to explain how it's all his 
fault he just can't help but explain how it was everybody's else 
fault because they didn't live up to what they should have been. 

So I don't consider him a villain in this series (obviously, he was 
trying to defeat Voldemort and he really loved Harry and will Harry 
forgive Dumblekins for being such a silly billy about his thing for 
power and wanting to be the Master of Death and making boo-boos 
because he's such a very good boy?), but I'd love to see him as a 
villain and he's been made into a great one in fanfics that focus on 
everybody, including the adults, waking up and running their own war 
instead of wondering what Dumbledore wanted. (And now we've got the 
backstory that makes it even more believable--you could write him as 
like the anti-Snape, resenting his commitment to the good side 
because he feels like he *should* care about his sister's death 
because that's what good guys do when he really isn't eaten up by 
guilt like Snape is, and he hates Snape for always reminding him of 
it.)

In terms of Snape, I guess it's kind of the opposite. He's a villain 
because he's a jerk, he bullies children, he's bitter and cruel. But 
that's why he's sort of what you see is what you get. In the end it 
makes sense that underneath, imo, he really is the one who seems far 
more vulnerable than Dumbledore (Dumbledore's a Gryffindor who had a 
shameful moment of Slytherin, Snape's saddled with being a Slytherin 
who had the terrible enlightenment of realizing he should have 
wanted to be a Gryffindor). 

I don't consider Snape the more admirable of the two; they're 
screwed up in different ways and objectively Dumbledore pretty much 
spent most of his life working for the right things while Snape 
joined a murderous organization of terrorists supporting a maniac 
and spread nastiness wherever he could outside of his one single-
minded quest to make right getting Lily killed. So he makes a more 
interesting good guy than villain, while I think Dumbledore makes a 
more interesting villain. As a villain all his goodness gets 
deliciously twisted and creepy. As a good guy who's just supposed to 
be flawed it's like the twisted creepiness and egotism that I sense 
is just supposed to be a forgivable mistake. 

Of course, taking that to its conclusion, that's probably also why I 
find a character like Draco ultimately more interesting the closer 
he is to good, while Hermione has more potential edging towards evil 
to me. Not that I'm pushing Draco as the good guy and Hermione as 
the villain in canon either. But there seems to be something in the 
way good and bad are presented sometimes in this series that always 
makes flipping them seem logical, maybe because the root of the 
problem always seems to be in the opposite place than the series 
tells me it is. I just can't not keep seeing my quasi-Jungian 
interpretation, where Slytherin is basically a projection of 
Gryffindor's Shadow, so Slytherin *is* Gryffindor and vice versa.

-m