Xylophaune

goth - eboy/egirl

jock - himbo

I find that so interesting, because god knows Tumblr and fandom and fans at large tend to love tricksy bastards who play chess games in their heads.  Dumbledore’s far from the first old man who sent other people to die for his war.  He’s not the first character who’s manipulated kids, or raised children to be warriors because he believed they had to be.  He’s a long, long way from the first desperately flawed mastermind we’ve seen.  But god, do fans hate Albus Dumbledore.

And I wonder: how much of that is because we feel like Dumbledore betrayed Harry, and how much of it is because we feel like Dumbledore betrayed us?

Most of us were so young when we started reading the Harry Potter books.  The world was magic and Harry’s home was terrible, and a kindly old man with twinkling eyes and a white beard winked, and seemed to know everything in the world, and we thought he’d promised to take care of each and every child given unto his care.  We thought that meant us too.

There’s a thing that happens as kids grow up, when they begin to realize that their parents and the adults around them are flawed and broken and making things up as they go, and sometimes make very real mistakes.  Sometimes as grown-ups we find ways to forgive the adults that raised us for all the good and bad they did, and sometimes we cut them out of our lives forever.  But there’s always that feeling of betrayal, with the realization that a trusted adult did actually cause us harm–and not just because they used their best judgment and tried their best to protect us and it wasn’t enough, but because they decided something else was more important than our well-being and meant it.

As a human and a character, Albus Dumbledore is fascinating, flawed, fallible, with complicated priorities and a chess board for a brain, and he’s motivated by guilt and big-picture thinking and ego and a very real desire to do good for the world in the broadest possible sense all at once.  As an adult that Harry trusted he failed rather badly, but it’s up to Harry to decide how he feels about that, and Harry has plenty of complicated feelings of grief and forgiveness and self-sacrifice of his own.

It’s 11 at night, I get the last table before closing, and it’s a girl my age. She asks for tea and an egg white omelette. So I bring over her egg white omelette, and she starts screaming. Why? Because it’s not yellow like in the picture on the menu, it’s white, so something must be wrong. I explained that the yolk is what makes omelettes yellow, and she didn’t want egg yolks. She’s still mad, and yells again. And then realizes she could eat while she’s yelling, so she does, and I get to watch her chew with her mouth open while she rants about eggs. I’m exhausted and dying inside. She finally stops. I ask if she wants a refill of tea, and she says yes. She’s quiet for the rest of her meal, for which I am very grateful.

After she paid and left, I collected her receipt. On it, she wrote in all caps “I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW EGGS WORK BUT IT WAS YUMMY.” She left a $20 bill on the table as a tip. She also left some pills in a bag that my manager sent to the police, which were identified as some sort of amphetamine.