Throughout the books Dumbledore is so contradictory. It is like he keeps changing his mind on wether he wants Harry to succeed.
In the ss, he couldn’t lock the door to the vault properly? There are spells that stop alohamora. Why didn’t he do that? If you really want to keep something safe maybe make it child proof first. And why did it take him so long to get to and from the ministry? He took the longest possible way. He was just playing with Harry, Ron, and hermione’s lives. What if Ron had been killed by the chess pieces? What if hemione had drank the wrong potion? What if Quirrel had succeeded in killing Harry? Wtf was Dumbledore doing? He could have easily felt with Quirrel and kept the sorcerer stone safe. Also, in Snape’s memory it is showed he already suspected Quirrel so why didn’t he just kill or imprison him? It would have been so easy.
Throughout the books Dumbledore has shown such terrible security. For “the safest place on earth” a lot of terrible things seem to happen. He can’t keep track of students and doesn’t even care that they might die in there excursions, has a giant 3 headed dog on the 3rd floor, and if you know that there is a chamber of secrets that has a monster that goes around killing people, why is that not your number 1 priority? He was at the school for 50 years between the two times it was opened and the greatest wizard ever couldn’t work out something 12 year olds managed to do. He knew Murtle was killed in the bathroom that was out of order, and Ms Norris was killed outside that very bathroom, with water from that bathroom splashed everywhere. He couldn’t put 2 and 2 together? It was obvious the bathroom had something to do with it.
And finally, in the ootp when the ministry kept claiming Harry was lying about Voldemort, why couldn’t he just use the pensive? He has it in his office and uses it quite a bit. He could just pop the memory out of Harry’s mind and show fudge. Pretty easy. And we know that a tampered memory is easy to spot with the example of slughorns. I think it was an easy solution that was completely overlooked.
I could go on forever but I am going to cut it short. I just don’t see why dumbledore doesn’t use a lot of common sense and why he plays with people’s live for no reason.
by Mobile-Mushroom-6737
39 Comments
there are other far worse issues with harry potter than this. a character acting in ways that is convenient for the furtherance of the plot is fairly excusable in the grand scheme of things
JK Rowling has recently confirmed that Dumbledore was in fact suffering from severe irritable bowel syndrome throughout the books, despite never mentioning that fact in any of them. I suppose that hidden struggle might explain some of his regrettable judgements. Unrelated, but JK Rowling has also stated that she always intended Dumbledore to be Mexican, she just decided not to include that explicitly in the text as well.
Because the series was based on a genre of general boarding school novels. I think their major popularity was mid 1900s? Not 100% sure and too lazy to look.
And those books, from the perspective of kids? The school yard drama was life and death. The headmaster was some impossibly distance Super Important Person who was famous and amazing and him being there makes the school super special. One of the teachers was always really strict and seemingly cruel (but often it was because, oh, they were a chemistry teacher who didn’t want the kids accidentally killing themselves with chemicals during labs).
The main divide in the school was old rich, new rich, and scholarship kids.
You can see how she took those basics (and there’s lots of others) and turned them into a fantasy version.
Effectively, she took like… The Hardy Boys and made them into *magical* kid detectives. Or took the rags to riches genre and made it stories about plucky magical orphans coming up from the streets to be magical titans of industry or whatever.
In any case, the whole concept *struggles* when you take the stakes from boarding school to “real world”. Like having the stern chemistry teacher with a checkered past or PTSD is one thing, it’s another when you decide he’s a *Nazi*.
You can see it go off the rails as more and more “real world” stuff hits, because trying to claim school yard fights between a spoiled old money kid and a scholarship kid is *also* a fight between Nazis and the Allies is a….stretch.
A headmaster who used to be a big politician or diplomat? Sure. Currently like the Prime Minister and also somehow the UN Rep?
Any character that is written as being a genius either needs to be written by a genius, or be pretty carefully measured out to work well. Not a lot of authors can match the level of genius they propose their characters have, so things fall apart if you look too closely at them.
You can pick almost any work of fiction and find issues like this in them. It’s worse in some books and better in others, but “suspension of disbelief” is necessary for enjoyment of most/all works of fiction to some degree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
Idk the reasons but these books were still fun af to read as a kid. Reading as an adult will of course be a different experience. You’re reading a YA fantasy series.
Because he’s dumb…ledore… ok sorry I’m leaving
They’re just plot devices in a children/YA novel series.
This was just children’s literature. Mary Poppins, anything R.L. Stine, Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Adults are pretty dumb so that kids can do heroic stuff. In real life, we keep kids away from dangerous stuff if we can. Kids getting into shenanigans while adults be useless is pretty classic.
I think it’s just because they got so popular and pretended to be serious as the books progressed (and the readers grew up) that people started paying attention to this stuff.
Nothing about Harry Potter makes any sense. Magic is almost completely less practical than mechanics and science, except for some things like apperating. Quidditch makes no sense as a sport.
Because they’re whimsical children’s books.
It’s important to remember that the first book in the series is intentionally absurd. Hermione literally says “many of the greatest wizards haven’t got an ounce of logic, they’d be stuck in here forever” when confronted with a simple logic puzzle.
Nothing about the wizarding world’s setting makes sense, and that’s the point. Harry is basically a tourist looking at this weird, whimsical magic world. Staircases lead somewhere different on a friday. Painted figures are sentient and travel between their portraits; meaning pictures of a famous figure are often just empty. They let kids fly on broomsticks as enchanted murder-balls try to smash them off.
Heck, the secretive wizarding world sends people to a busy train station to run through a brick wall at full speed to get onto the platform where the train comes. Hope nobody sees that!
But this is all intentional. The first books are closer to Alice in Wonderland than Game of Thrones. Harry has gone to a whimsically insane world and most of the first books are joust touring different aspects of that world. Plot and character is secondary to the setting’s charms.
There is a giant squid in the lake. People tickle its tentacles for fun.
Then once the world is established and feels familiar, they start telling stories about a war happening in that world.
But let’s look at what’s normal in this weird world: life-threatening injuries. Wizards can fix nearly any problem with magic and heal most wounds in an instant. There are cases of extreme magical injuries that can’t easily be healed but there is a decidedly “devil may care” attitude to child safety. At one point in book 1 Malfoy protests going into the murder forest at night and says his father would— and hagrid interrupts saying “He’d tell ye that’s how it is at Hogwarts.” Malfoy doesn’t deny this and no issue is ever made of it.
Kids basically have to start getting turned to stone by a mysterious monster before parents start getting nervous about their kids attending the school. And not everyone takes their kids out when it happens! They say they’re going to close the school once it’s happened multiple times in a row, because it doesn’t seem like anyone can stop the attacks, but once the attacks are stopped the kids are healed and everything gets better. Totally forgiven, because no *permanent* harm done.
We’re talking about an author that decided before toilets wizards just soiled themselves. Imagine that – you send your child to school and they come back with the ability to use a toilet undone.
In general children’s books is about telling interesting or exiting stories to children about other children. That means risks, dangers, tension and plot turns. It has to feel as if there is some real risks and consequences, where the actions of children really matter. Where they can be the heroes, the agents of some real and even serious causes and consequences.
In the real world that would be a testament of failure. Children are not supposed to have to suffer through such things on their own. And it would be difficult to tell a story heavily centered around children with only child protagonists surviving adversity and solving mysteries if they have a strong adult actually handling things well involved.
A solid, reliable, competent adult figure armed with common sense would be a formidable roadblock in the way of anything too exiting or risky happening to kids in most situations short of apocalyptic or war narratives.
So you either have to take the story into some extremely dark and bleak places, or you have to hobble the adults to get them out of the way. (*Edit* Adults are potentially the unsatisfying Deus Ex Machina solution of a children’s story. So very often you find the ‘fetch an adult!’ option put out of commission one way or the other, at least when the narrative wants an uphill battle*.)
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It’s not impossible to write a good story that is child centered that still has functional grown ups involved, but it is harder, the risks would likely change in nature, and so would the stakes.
In some narratives it would also be hard to keep the adults from getting more screen time or even becoming the protagonists.
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It’s not for no reason why so many child protagonists are orphans or have parents somehow put out of commission for most of the story. It’s to disable the ones who should be protecting the kids without having to turn them into incompetent or neglectful parents.
Any auxiliary adults that are still on the scene as it were, are inexplicably preoccupied with other things, seriously ill, distracted, unlucky, stupid, evil or neglectful.
Dumbledore is as stupid as the story as it is written needs him to be, and it’s why the faculty of Hogwarts from a grown up’s perspective couldn’t be trusted to oversee a sandbox, and makes you wonder where on earth the child protective services are in that world.
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If the story had the kids on the move most of the time it would be easier to have more sensible adults because they could be far more temporary in their appearance and influence, but less so when the story plays out for the most part in the exact same place for years and years.
Because Dumbledore would have tolerated Harry dying if it meant voldemort could be exposed and to the death of voldemort.
It is not until the last book that Dumbledore sees a way to kill voldemort without killing Harry.
I thought everyone knew this.
Off topic, but I will never overlook the fact that Dumbledore let everyone believe >!Slytherin won the house cup, hall and everything decked out in slytherin colors, just to pull out some bs points out of thin air and give first place to Gryffindor.!< Dick move.
Obviously it’s a children’s book series and all that, but a few thoughts –
1) leadership of any kind, especially school headmasters, being absent, incompetent, and just indifferent is completely realistic and has no correlation to their actual intelligence
2) this is all needed for kids to have insane magical adventures
3) re: fudge – it’s understandable a leader in denial protecting their position from a huge threat would make excuses and refuse to even look at memories. He was already immediately attacking Harry and dumbledores characters rather than their claims, which is also very realistic and lines up with this. “Why didn’t dumbledore just do x to prove it” – because the ministry didn’t want him to and would use their power and influence to block his every move.
If you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, he was playing 5D chess the whole time and ensuring that Harry, Hermione, and Ron were challenged as much as possible in order to hone their skills and abilities so they would be able to survive the trials they faced in their futures.
After all, if Dumbledore just saved their asses every time they got into trouble, they wouldn’t have grown the confidence and practical abilities they needed after he was gone.
HP has what I call the “Disney veil”. I think we can in general say that Disney movies are made for kids, and a lot of people just happen to like them. However, you watch a Disney movie with this understanding: enjoy the ride and the story as-is, and DON’T think too deeply about the movie.
Because both HP and Disney movies share this similarity: once you decide to actually think deeper about them, you realize there’s a TON of messed-up stuff and inconsistencies, especially in the earlier Disney movies and the early HP books. So, just enjoy the stories as they’re presented, and don’t think too hard about the story.
On an unrelated note: what does the three headed dog eat? Do they get three bowls? Do the heads fight over food?
The “problem” with children protagonists when people who are not children read the books is that, the problem either needs to be something trivial only kids would care about, or (in the case of HP), if it’s serious, there needs to be a reason why adults don’t solve it. The thing is, the second one rarely (if ever) is something that makes sense, and so it’s the same here. Dumbledore is supposed to be the most powerful, smart, knowledgable etc., but realistically, a person like that would organize their school so that children are not in danger. So that dangerous artifacts lie the Philosophers stone ar enot guarded by idiotic riddles, but real security… In that case however, the adventures of Harry and the gang would be impossible.
It’s one of those time you need to turn your suspension of disbelief to 11.
It’s just a book and the author wasn’t looking at it from Dumbledores perspective.
Because then a child couldn’t save the day
Most of the books would be fairly boring if proper caution and child endangerment was exercised:
Harry Potter and the Thing Stored In A Bank and Not At School
Harry Potter and the Long Year With the Dursleys because School’s Closed
Harry Potter and the Cancelled Tournament
Mostly because he is a plot device first and a character second
Because children’s books are meant to have children solve the problems. That makes the adults the villains or just dolts in power.
A lot of people have already said this, but the point of HP is that the first part was aimed at children. I don’t know what Rowling’s plans were for future, but something tells me that a huge series of books grew because, unexpectedly for everyone, the first book began to sell really well. It’s that simple.
But at the same time, I can say that even in children’s books a certain narrative logic must be observed. Yes, most of the adult characters in them are usually either villains who interfere with the main characters, or idiots who also interfere with the main characters. Yes, from a real world perspective, all their problems should be solved differently. But in books must still be logic. One of my favorite children’s book series, ASOUE (*A series of unfortunate events*), has no logic at all. Times are layered on top of each other, technology, places, geography, everything is mixed up because the author wrote *absurdist literature*. Yes, that’s right, these are 13 books for children in the genre of absurdist literature. And they are beautiful! (Seriously, I recommend it to absolutely everyone, the tv series is also very good). But Harry Potter is an ordinary children’s fantasy. He won’t get this excuse. The more the series grew, the more the internal world of the books expanded, the more plot holes there were that could not be simply patched without rewriting all the books.
At any given moment throughout the books, Dumbledore is exactly as intelligent as the plot needs him to be, that’s all there is to it.
Harry Potter is either intentionally or unintentionally a scathing critique of British culture, and the whole boarding-school thing is a big part of that.
Dumbledore is a confoundingly, inconsistently negligent headmaster who endangers his students’ lives on a regular basis (who’s still somehow better than bureaucrats in the central government) because *of course he is.* It’s Britain, baby!
“What, I’m supposed to believe that this fucking caterpillar was so hungry that he ate an apple, three pears and an ice cream? And that’s fucking CANON?”
Can’t use logic in a world with magic.
I could engage with this post like a normal human being, instead I’m gonna cry Philosopher’s Stone.
>I could go on forever but I am going to cut it short. I just don’t see why dumbledore doesn’t use a lot of common sense and why he plays with people’s live for no reason
Well if you believe his sheep shagging brother it’s because Dumbledore is a self-absorbed asshole that uses people like pawns. At the very least it explains a lot of the earlier book stuff. Another opinion specifically about Harry is Dumbledore figured out he was a horcrux from the beginning and knowing it meant Harry would have to die, Dumbledore kept allowing for scenarios that might lead to Harry’s death, rather than having to do it himself.
Edit: yes I know it was a goat, but sheep shagger sounds better
Because all this was designed for fun scenes in a magical series of novels that was originally made for children. All the things the trio did so that HP could confront Quirrel was a fun adventure that kids loved reading.
Fantasy fiction in general leaves A LOT of creative license to authors. Its something most readers expect. HP is in no ways an outlier in this.
Because it’s a magical world and magic doesn’t really exist, most things can be explained by magic. All rules can be invented. For example, anyone can have a memory charm placed on them which would show as a real, untampered memory in a pensive. That’s why those aren’t used in criminal trials in the book and aren’t considered evidence.
Also, Fudge is a parody of stupid British politicians with little backbone and how easily swayed the public is. I think we have seen from very recent events that politics and public perception have little to do with reality.
Because it’s a children’s book. Like most things in them, dumbledore doesn’t endure even 10 seconds serious contemplation without looking ludicrous.
Because he’s a plot device, not a character.
He’s hyped up to be very powerful (“Even Voldemort is afraid of him!”).
Which leaves the obvious problem that if he’s so powerful, *and* on Harry’s side – why doesn’t he just solve all the problems? The only real ways around it are some combination of he’s playing some complicated 4d chess, or he’s trying to teach Harry something. Or, as you say, he’s dumb.
The answer is that these contradictions are necessary, or forced choices, for this kind of story.
If you have wise and competent school management, then Harry won’t run into trolls and crazy dangers and have to fight them or find his way out. The plot would shrink.
I agree about spells. I don’t like Rowling’s magic system. She makes a spell for anything she likes and arbitrarily decides its power. The spells don’t have underlying principles. This kind of writing is bound to create plot holes.
Isn’t it just that the books were masterfully written to play on the hopes, misperceptions and insecurities of young people? That hope that someone will come along and tell you you’re special and not mundane? That (sometimes accurate) constant feeling about adults being wrong and not understanding?
I thought that they whole thing with Dumbledore is that he knew Harry was a horecrux and anything he said to Harry may as well have been said directly to Voldemort. Under that lense his cageyness and infuriating lack of info of assistance makes more sense. But that may just be head canon I created.
It’s impossible for child protagonists to shine if adults are even remotely competent. Authority figures being borderline idiots at times is a trope in YA fantasy.
Because you can’t write characters smarter than yourself.
Honestly, my favorite “wtf Dumbledore?” moment is in POA, where at this point, DD and the whole wizarding world think Sirus Black is the next most dangerous dark wizard after Voldy, and after this dude had broken into hogwarts, Dumbledore send freaking FILCH to search the dungeons ALONE!
Like my man, you know that dude is a squib. Are you trying to get him killed?