To think Dumbledore was a massive cheater?

[Slytherine]

Just finished watching the first Harry Potter film on TV and forgot about the injustice for the Slytherins at the end. I have changed my name in solidarity.

So the Slytherins get the most House Points (presumably fairly as most of the professors at Hogwarts could barely hide their disdain for Slytherin House so wouldn’t have been dishing out points to them for no reason) and are sat there enjoying their win of the House Cup, and celebrating with the room decorated in their House colours, and then former Gryffindor Dumbledore just decides (even though the school year was officially over!!) to throw out an unreasonable amount of points to Harry, Hermione and Ron drawing them level with Slytherin, and then a further 10 points to Neville pushing Gryffindor over the edge and into the win. And then, just to rub salt into the wound, publicly humiliated them by casting a spell to replace all the Slytherin colours with the Gryffindor colours and gives them the award instead and they all celebrate, including him and most of the teachers, and Slytherin has to sit there and just accept it??

AIBU to think WTAF and that was very unfair and he was biased by doing this and it’s no wonder the Slytherins were openly hostile and dismissive of him after that!? I’d be fuming if I were a Slytherin student and if I were a parent of a Slytherin student I’d be marching up to the school myself and having a word with the head.

At least Severus is a name in a fantasy novel. Severus isn’t as pretentious as XÆA-Xii.

@DdraigGoch, oh, it absolutely fits that the Malfoys would be deeply unlikely to call their PFB anything Muggle-ish, but presumably there are other 'old' snobbish pureblood families with children at Hogwarts, too, but there are no other similar names to Draco's that I can think of in any house. Presumably Crabbe and Goyle are likewise socially impeccable 'old family' purebloods or Draco wouldn't associate with them, but they're the Muggle-sounding Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle...?

The intended sacrifice of Ron makes sense to me, fox.

Dumbledore is an anti-hero. It's a classic trope.

I also didn't like his time turner nonsense with Hermione. I'm no helicopter parent, but I'd be pretty pissed off if I found out my daughter had been drowning in school work and anxiety all year, thanks to a magic watch courtesy of the head teacher. Howlers galore.

"Not my daughter, bitch"

@PeeAche

Dumbledore is an anti-hero. It's a classic trope.

I also didn't like his time turner nonsense with Hermione. I'm no helicopter parent, but I'd be pretty pissed off if I found out my daughter had been drowning in school work and anxiety all year, thanks to a magic watch courtesy of the head teacher. Howlers galore.

"Not my daughter, bitch"

Maybe it was to show Hermione that she doesn’t have to do everything she is interested in?

Maybe it was to show Hermione that she doesn’t have to do everything she is interested in?

Normally, teachers give advice on workloads, rather than helping students run themselves into the ground in order to teach them the lesson.

But through most of the books/films, you get a sense that Dumbledore could intervene but wants them to learn the lesson themselves.

How many times did they almost die?!

@tallduckandhandsome

But through most of the books/films, you get a sense that Dumbledore could intervene but wants them to learn the lesson themselves.

How many times did they almost die?!

Again, it's the classic problem with children's books -- you have to set things up so they can't be solved by the adults in the story, hence the tendency of children's books to have absent, incompetent or evil adults. Otherwise there would be no need for the children to push the action.

But you can't have only bad, evil or incompetent adults at a school which is basically intended as a benign environment, especially when the staff have considerable magical powers compared to the children, who are only learning, and where the Head vanquished the last bigtime evil wizard and is the only one the current dark wizarding threat is frightened of.

So JKR gave herself the problem of having a basically good, wise, almost all-powerful authority figure in a children's book, who nonetheless can't be allowed to solve the problem/save the world -- so she has to come up with endless ways of 'weakening' Dumbledore's position as regards Voldemort, before removing him entirely.

I think it's also an issue to do with the fact that The Philosopher's Stone is basically an unsophisticated children's magic boarding school book with fun, detailed worldbuilding, but that the books which follow gradually become more sophisticated, morally ambiguous and darker, and are intended for older readers, compared to the first two or three, which are aimed at I would say six or seven year olds and are more Bad Voldemort vs Good Dumbledore and Harry.

@44PumpLane

The thing that always gets me about the films is that they made Snape and Sirius and Harrys parents so much older than they were meant to be. In the books Snape would have been about 30 when Harry started school. Which means that when Harrys parents died he would have been about 20/21.

So I could almost forgive his mental attitude towards Lily prior to this as some sort of teenage obsession.... But to then carry that forward for a decade and bully the son of your bully just because he reminds you of said bully (that you effectively had a hand in killing) is just pretty unforgivable in my mind.

You are absolutely right though OP, total dick move by Dumbledore at that feast and many other occasions throughout the series. McGonagall genuinely should have been Head and should have overhauled certain elements of the teaching staff!!

Also...... Just bloody well give people Veritaserum to find out whether they are guilty of being a death eater or blowing up a street of people... Unless there is a completely undiscussed cure to this making it unreliable, this was never touched upon in the books of course.

Yes and Sirius and Lupin should have been FIT! I will never forgive the casting director for this oversight.

I was quite unhappy about David Thewlis playing Lupin.

Actually I thought most of the casting for the films were crap. Some really wooden actors!

That said, when we were waiting for the final books and looking for foreshadowing all over the place, I completely believed that Ron's chess prowess in book 1 was foreshadowing. I thought he would turn out to be great at strategy and would have to sacrifice himself towards the end so Harry could proceed to the final showdown with Voldemort. It's the one piece of not-really -foreshadowing that I'm disappointed about.

She has said she thought about killing him off somewhere in the middle. But not as something that was planned from the beginning.

"Funnily enough, I planned from the start that none of them would die. Then midway through, which I think is a reflection of the fact that I wasn't in a very happy place, I started thinking I might polish one of them off” Further on in that quote she says it would have been Ron.

@Itsnotallaboutyoubaby

I was quite unhappy about David Thewlis playing Lupin.

Actually I thought most of the casting for the films were crap. Some really wooden actors!

There were some great actors in it!
The children weren’t that good though, especially at the start. Except Malfoy.
Original Dumbledore was fine but poorly cast given how Dumbledore turned out - you couldn’t have imagined him in a big duel for example. But I guess when he was cast they maybe didn’t know that, I can’t remember when it was filmed.

Yes and Sirius and Lupin should have been FIT! I will never forgive the casting director for this oversight.

Completely agree. Sirius was meant to have been very handsome, albeit blighted by Azkaban.

When my friends and I were at school we had all assumed that Lupin would be reasonably good looking, sort of like David Tennant as the Doctor circa 2005. Ah, the joys of free periods spent in the U6th common room, discussing very important issues

A shame they cast David Tennant as Barty Crouch Jr in Goblet of Fire and didn't utilise him for a better part.

@SickAndTiredAgain

I liked Dame Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman and probably a few more of the older characters… but I just can’t watch the films. Watson, Radcliffe and Grint just ruin it for me. I sympathise with how young they were when they were cast and I’ve no doubt it was difficult for them but I think they were poorly cast. I also get irritated by some of the bits they left out of the films.

I wanted to love the films as much as I loved the books. I just couldn’t. I don’t watch them.

Richard Harris would have been cast around 1999/2000 I expect as Philosopher's Stone came out in 2001. Harris died in 2002, after Chamber of Secrets was filmed. He was possibly cast before Goblet of Fire was published in July 2000, and certainly before we first saw Dumbledore duel in Order of the Phoenix published in 2003.

I didn't think much of him as Dumbledore at first, mainly because I was 12 and couldn't imagine him fighting Grindelwald or scaring Voldemort.

Gambon didn't work as Dumbledore for me though - he didn't seem to 'get' the character. I hated the scene when he shouted at the students after the Trelawney sacking scene in OOTP.

Also, the monstrosity that was 'HARRY, DID YAH PUT YAH NAME IN DA GOBLET OF FIYA' compared to book Dumbledore '"did you put your name in the Goblet of Fire, Harry' asked Dumbledore, calmy'"

Dumbledore was such a crucial character and they just didn't capture the essence of his character IMO.

Itsnotallaboutyoubaby I'm with you. A lot of the acting is questionable at best, as is the casting. I stick with the books.

Sirius looks like a BeeGee.

@Itsnotallaboutyoubaby

I was quite unhappy about David Thewlis playing Lupin.

Actually I thought most of the casting for the films were crap. Some really wooden actors!

I quite fancy David Thewlis as Lupin, actually. He does a good kind of rumpled-cardigan, magic-boffin-y quiet woundedness.

I thought the whole point of Dumbledore is that you can’t imagine him doing these things. He has this gentle grandfatherly image and then suddenly he can raise this terrifying powerful magic, and it’s surprising and unexpected. I don’t think he was meant to appear a frightening or powerful person - he appeared benevolent and kindly.

@FeedMeSantiago I agree about Gambon. I always wondered if he had actually read the books.

@Verfremdungseffekt

I do agree with the miscasting of Sirius/Lupin/Snape though. Surely they were supposed to be young, that’s part of the whole thing. I think in the first book Snape should have been thirty-ish? Or thereabouts. And it does slightly change things in my opinion. James and Lily’s death and how people react to it makes more sense when you think that they were 20/21. Also the fact that people have very little to really say about them other than James played quidditch and Lily was prefect at school. In the books it makes sense because they hadn’t had the chance to do anything else as they were so young.

This might sound strange but my favourite part of book 7 (and film 7 part 1) was the camping around the country basically achieving nothing. Because it was realistic... they aren't going to manage to find all the horcruxes straight away. They do need that time to eliminate possibilities and work out what to do next. They were a group of fugitives.

I’m thinking with the films the change of directors didn’t help at all. Might have had some continuity if it had been the same director from start to finish.

This is interesting:

www.hollywood.com/movies/actors-who-were-almost-in-harry-potter-60405450/#/ms-22504/1

I personally think Hugh Grant would have been a wonderful Lockhart.