So 30 července 2022

(my comments on “Anger and Albus Dumbledore” by u/HorseLaw14)

I think he doesn’t understand emotions at all. Yes, I will say, he knows nothing about love. And, no, I don’t care whether he is gay or straight, there is absolutely no evidence anywhere for Dumbledore/Minerva (or Dumbledore/Snape, if you wish) ships anywhere close to the neighbourhood of the canon.

As a married man for more than a quarter of a century, I know that love is much more than sex, and we have no evidence that Dumbledore truly loved anybody after the age of fifteen. And without regard to whether they loved each other (we don’t know it, really) or whether they did the deed, they certainly had no time for love to develop into something real. And, as I said, love is much more than that, when thinking about it love is sharing of life most of all. I don’t know if I have ever read it somewhere, but the unit of love for measurement of it is one bit, unit of information. And yes, I understand operational security, but absolute isolation from everybody else, and complete secrecy about his thoughts is not only ludicrous (because bus factor of the Order of Phoenix was essentially one) but it also testifies to quite a dysfunctional personality. For all his talks about love being the biggest magic in the world, he was saying it as somebody who knows love only from afar, not from his personal experience.

Also, if you are telling me that he couldn’t be in love with anybody because he was carrying a torch for Grindelwald all that time, in the same manner, Snape was carrying the torch for Lily, I don’t believe you. I don’t trust that one either (it seems quite obsessive and unhealthy not to be able to grieve through that loss in eleven years at least to the level that one is not bullying a son of your former lover), but at least Snape’s love I can rationalize. Carrying a torch for the equivalent of Hitler or Putin for ninety years is a sign of a seriously disturbed personality, in my opinion. Love is not sickness, and when your crush turns out to be a horrible monster, a normal person grieves for a while mostly for the lost hope and goes on with his life. Not keeping flame for another ninety years.

So, I am not into evil!Dumbledore or the manipulative!Dumbledore, just into his rather a flawed personality. Not morally, but psychologically.

Category: literature Tagged: review harryPotter blogComment