Harry Potter

Yeah, he was a little bit manipulative a times....and that in the present, younger dumblodore was a nasty piece of work.

I like young Dumbledore in the sense that I can respect how people aren't always born with right ideas. It's not hard to get twisted around the wrong way, especially as a kid, and especially as a kid with a crush.

I know some people feel like that sequence left the character Ruined Forever but personally, it just makes him feel more real to me. Imma drop one of my favorite quotes here, from Sten:

"You have led either a pitiable life or an enviable one to know nothing of regret."

Dumbledore's problem is that he is a genius always playing on a huge scale. And as you guys said, he is human, he makes mistakes, so his accomplishments tend to be epic, but his failures are catastrophic, not to mention it causes him to make quite morally ambiguous choices.

And it's hardly like he's alone there. The Potter books are full of characters fucking up in ways ranging from being kind of a prat to being a magic Nazi and moving on from it to become better people. Ron, Dudley, Percy, Snape, the Marauders, the Malfoys, RAB, it's all over the place.

There seems to be a tendency for fandom to demand more from the protagonists than from the antagonists. Or maybe the draco in leather pants sector are just more vocal (more frustrated), maybe.

(tired) Here's hoping that I find fantastic beasts movies less wtf than cursed child.

Well, yes, people do demand more from protagonists than antagonists. Antagonists are The Characters Who Are Supposed To Be Wrong. They can get away with a lot more wrongness because them being wrong is the entire point of the story. Thus, tons of leeway. Nobody's shocked if a villain expresses an interest in ethnic cleansing. That's what makes him a villain.

Protagonists, however, are typically The Characters Who Are Supposed To Be Right. So when they do awful shit, it's a big deal - especially if the story fails to call them out on it. If Harry woke up one morning and was like, "Hey guys, I just learned that black people are subhuman, isn't that neat?" and then nobody ever corrected him and it never came up again, it would leave a foul taste in the audience's mouth because of the implication that Harry, the Person Who Is Right, is supposed to be right about this.

However, some people take it to the extreme that protagonists aren't allowed to ever be Wrong, that it ruins the character for them to have flaws to overcome or for them to have extolled Wrong values in the past before learning to be Right. That in order to be Good, one must be born Good, and the slightest deviation forever corrupts them to Evil. That's excessive.

edited 19th Oct '16 7:44:24 AM by TobiasDrake

chararter can be wrong but only in a way they can learn the error of their way and have a nice aseop about it.

funny thing is, people can expect villian to be evil but not unconfortable, just look Umbrige, I mean people ship voldemort with Harry but Umbrige just get hate,hate and more damn hate

Fandom are weird

What is better? To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?

Although that character struggles every day with the temptation to fall back to evil. And every day overcomes it.

That, or he's pulled a millenium-long con, waiting for the right moment to betray his former thurii and take his place.

Neither. Which is better is to be able to admit when you were wrong, to own your mistakes, and to make new choices based on the lessons of the past.

Nobody is born good or evil. We make choices based on the lessons of the past and those choices define who we become. Dumbledore learned from his mistakes, recognized where he went wrong, and grew into a better person because of it.

Snape, meanwhile, never really repented his mistakes. He regrets only a consequence of his choices, never the choices that led to that consequence. This led him to become a Token Evil Teammate, playing for the side of the angels and "rising above his evil nature" out of aimless despair and outrage but never actually making any effort to be better. He was still a villainous shithead, he was just Dumbledore's villainous shithead.

edited 20th Oct '16 1:03:34 PM by TobiasDrake

Funny thing is, the reason he end in the heroes side is the same reason he cant be a good guy: he cant let the past go.

I mean, he is trap in his own little paradox, he cant let his love for lily so he is stick with harry but he cant let his hate for james so he is stick with harry.

Or in short, Snape fatal flaw is the same thing that drive him: is incapacity to move one AT ALL.

Add him the to list of ever growing characters that seriously needed therapy.

Poor guy, no matter how you feel about him, there is something pitiable about a guy who seems to make himself miserable.

His problem is basically that he has the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone. He's the devoted widower of a woman who never loved him, who grew apart from him in childhood, and who spent the last however many years of her life having no contact with him because she detested who he grew up to be.

That's not romantic. That's creepy. He's stalking a corpse.

Not really true. Have you ever heard of Villain Protagonists or Hero Antagonists?

edited 21st Oct '16 3:18:08 PM by MadSkillz

Yes, but only because it's established that they're villains. Once again, we expect villainous behaviour from villains.

Anti-heroes? Tragic heroes?

edited 22nd Oct '16 2:20:46 AM by MadSkillz

Still require a lot more sympathetic moments in order to remain likable.

Yep. If the Joker shoots up a school bus, we just assume this is a darker take on the character. If the Punisher does it, then there's outrage.

@ninety Heroes don't need to be likeable to be heroes.

It helps if they have a good reason to do the bad stuff, and that you can understand why they do their actions, even if you don't agree with their actions.

edited 22nd Oct '16 10:37:50 PM by dysphere

edited 23rd Oct '16 3:00:30 AM by Furienna

@Mad: They need to be sympathetic or relateable on some level though, even if not outright likeable. Rlse there's just no engagemwnt from the audience.

As an adult, DD's a lighter shade of morally ambiguous figure in the guise of a noble, selfless Obi-Wan mentor. He's essentially grooming Harry to die. There have been a lot of similar characters with a protégé they're preparing to deliberately sacrifice to some greater cause, and those characters are often villains.

What sets Dumbledore apart from those characters, however, is that he genuinely seems to care about Harry as a person and is concerned with him actually having a decent life up until that point. And he also cares about the other students who are intended to live past Harry's sacrifice as well. He may not give them as much attention because they aren't being groomed to die, but he does care.

Now, YMMV on whether or not he's a good headmaster. In his role as the leader of the Order of the Phoenix, however, he both recognizes the necessary sacrifices that will be needed to defeat Voldemort but also tries to make those sacrifices as carefully and humanely as possible. And does not hesitate to make them, even when one of them is himself.

This is the brilliance of the Dumbledore character. He's introduced as basically the Big Good Obi-Wan figure, and throughout the series, we steadily learn more and more that he's just a guy who's trying to make the world a little bit better, locked in a decades-long stalemate with another guy who's trying to make the world a little bit worse.

edited 24th Oct '16 10:56:15 AM by TobiasDrake

A big bit worse if you ask moi.

Dumbledore is interesting in that he does do some genuinely rather dubious things (his manipulation of many people, his prioritising Harry's eventual success over the safety of pretty much everyone else, the aforementioned grooming/training Harry to die) but with completely altruistic intentions.

It would be interesting to see what would have happened in a hypothetical story where DD didn't actually die but Harry's death/resurrection and ensuing victory played out in a similar fashion. By his own admission he did some pretty shitty things and made some mistakes - would there (could there?) be another karmic comeuppance for old Albus?

edited 24th Oct '16 3:07:05 PM by jakobitis