Changed character perceptions (long)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 185035

  
Montavilla: 
> My feelings about Dumbledore were a bit shaken in OotP when
> he gave Harry the wrap-up of events, because he was a bit of jerk.
> What bugged me most was the remark about giving Ron the Prefect
> position because Harry would be too busy... doing what, exactly?  
> But it wasn't that.  It was that, when Harry's beloved Godfather 
> has just died, whether or not he got to wear a shiny badge seemed
> like the most irrelevant thing in the world.  Nevertheless, 
> Dumbledore took time to assure Harry that Ron was just not quite
> as good as Harry, an idea that did not need emphasis.
> <big snip>  
> 
> The Prince's Tale didn't change my perception of Dumbledore,
> it merely intensified my feelings.

Pippin:
My perception of Dumbledore has changed more than once after reading
DH.   Looking back, I came to think that Dumbledore's commitments not
to lie  in PS/SS and to tell Harry everything in OOP, which I once
defended, had been made as emptily and cynically as Harry's promises
to Griphook in DH. But when I actually reread the final chapters of
OOP, I felt differently.

To my surprise, it read as if Dumbledore  really was prepared
to tell Harry everything,  mentioning the scar and saying that Harry
wasn't nearly as angry with him as he should be. Darn right!  But the
topic turns to Sirius and Kreacher, and when it comes back to Harry
again, Dumbledore seems to have reached a decision that he's only
going to speak about the prophecy for now. 

In the light of the revelations in DH, trying to get  Harry to
understand about Sirius's flaws feels less like an  intrusion and more
like a test -- if Harry was not ready to deal with the truth about
Sirius, how could he be expected to deal with the truth about himself? 

He wasn't ready yet, IMO. He'd have refused to understand, or he'd
have felt horrible and contaminated, as he did earlier in the book
when he feared that Voldemort had possessed him. 

In OOP, Harry was still child enough to need to see himself as an
innocent. He wasn't yet ready to understand that in Rowling's world
the urge to do evil isn't unique to the bad guys -- the instinct to
harm others is in everyone whether they recognize it or not. 

It's noteworthy that when the truth finally comes to him in DH, he can
recognize his kinship with Voldemort and Snape without feeling
polluted by it. 

It reads to me now as if Dumbledore wasn't  talking about the
prefect's badge at all -- he was apologizing in code for not being
able to do as he had promised and tell Harry everything when the time
came -- because Harry had enough to be going on with. That's what the
tear was for, IMO.

 
Montavilla: 
> Here's the big thing that turned me off to Harry:  He dropped the
> D.A.  The year before he (and Hermione) had asked a lot of their
> fellow students.  They asked them to give up time, risk punishment
> and expulsion, in order to prepare themselves to fight Voldemort.
> I felt that Harry had a responsibility to those students, but when
> it became inconvenient for him, he simply dropped them.  

Pippin:
Um, *they*  had already dropped him. When Hermione called them to help
Harry find out about Sirius in OOP, only Neville, Ginny and Luna
responded. *I* think it's because the others thought, like Cho, that
Hermione had gone too far in punishing Marietta. 

 Harry seemed to think they'd lost interest because they wouldn't need
DADA coaching anymore. But that Neville was able to revive the group
argues that there was something else to it. Certainly Neville didn't
find it necessary to punish a fellow student. In fact, he refused to. 


Pippin