... How could it be anything other than parody? :facepalm

 

By being really shit. I thought I covered that.

 

I'm tempted to point out that the two aren't mutually exclusive, but that would imply you aren't full of shit yourself.

 

How could that not be awesome if not written well? You have Dumbledore, who, let's be honest, is pretty motherfucking bad-ass, and Harry, who could be the same if written well.

You have all of the best bits of the books, and none of the pointless shit, like all the unnecessary angst.

You have the conflict of Dumbledore and Harry fighting through the traps that Voldemort set around his Horcruxes, and, seeing as it's a different universe, they can all be in different places, with different traps.

You then have the need to dispose of them, which could mean fiendfyre, or Basilisk Venom, which means you have to fight and kill a Basilisk, meaning you have an awesome fight, if done right.

You have the actual destruction of the Horcruxes, which could result in literally anything, because it's an AU.

You have the disposal of Voldemort's wraith body, which could just mean him disappearing with his Horcruxes gone, or something else, not to mention you could have him taking over Harry's body, because you have Harry retain his Horcrux, meaning that you have Harry and Voldemort fighting for possession over Harry's body, whilst Dumbledore is torn between ending Voldemort, and killing Harry in the process, or leaving Voldemort alive, in the hope that Harry will tear him out of his mind.

The idea could be turned into a huge fuck off story, and be awesome if written well. There's just so much to do with it.

 

And then there are the DEs. By planting the Diary on Ginny in CoS, Lucius is guilty of X counts of attempted murder, where X is the number of muggleborns in Hogwarts.

Personally, I believe that the crime of "attempted murder" is silly: if premeditation is proven without reasonable doubt, whether the intended victim died or not does not change the guilt. Shooting someone or paying to have someone shot makes you a murderer. Just because the victim survived (because you're a bad shot or medicine is very good) does not make you any less guilty, any less a menace to society, or requires any less punishment/reeducation (whatever you believe prisons are for).

At the end of CoS, Dumbledore knew that Lucius attempted to murder a bunch of his students. Only luck contributed to no one actually dying. As far as we know. There is no hint in canon that Dumbledore did anything to save his students' lives. Then, faced with the knowledge about Lucius, but apparently not being able to prove it in court (common occurrence IRL but I claim this is the biggest failure of magic in the books - the justice system appears to be worse than the one we have IRL, despite magic making lots of impossible things possible), Dumbledore lets him off with a warning. Yes, a warning. For planning and executing multiple premeditated murders of children under Dumbledore's care. So what if the plan ultimately failed - Lucius surely committed the crimes.

In a fix-it do-over, Lucius' body would be found by Aurors, dead by apparent suicide, with a magical record of his confession under oath and Veritaserum. And a signed will that donates all his money to the victims of death eaters fund. I insist that as long as this does not happen, Dumbledore is a scaredy cat politician who only pays lip service to morality and the safety of his charges.

 

I can see where you're coming from with that, but I think you might be underestimating Lucius Malfoy. We don't get a lot of details from canon, but the little we do have implies that he's rich, smart, and both politically and magically powerful. In a straight up Dumbledore vs. Malfoy scenario the victor is clear, but, not only is that not Lucius' style, it's not Dumbledore's style.

It would certainly be satisfying to have Dumbledore be more... proactive, but I imagine it would be a subtler affair than sending Lucius to sleep with the fishes.

 

I think a good do-over story needs a new level of mystery involved to really be fresh. Like Riddle's agenda only being a part of a bigger picture. I think there's still enough unexplored mystery how Riddle as an orphan without any resources managed to get his hand on quality informations and training.

 

@samkar: We can understand how Riddle got to power by studying real history. Of any nation, at any time. Of course, the Potterverse is a caricature, but the idea is the same.

@pdo91: in canon, Lucius got away with everything he did. All of it. Including when Voldemort wasn't around and no one forced him to do anything, like in CoS. That is not a message I would have approved for a morality play written with children in mind. Same goes for Draco. Yes, he was pressured. His life and family were threatened. But the reason Katie Bell and Ron Weasley didn't die is an accident. He could have gone to Dumbledore but he didn't. I don't think "all those Unforgiveable curses are forgiven" works. Same with Snape being allowed to act like no real spy is ever allowed to act. The war as we saw in canon is not what civil war looks like. It's a bad caricature of civil war. And of course, the real problems and the reasons all that shit happened were not actually solved in the books. Riddle was not the cause, he was a symptom. In a healthy society, he would not have been able to gain power. I have seen no indication the post-war British Wizarding society was any more healthy.

So, what did Dumbledore do, during and after CoS? What did he do to protect his students and what did he do to prevent Malfoy from doing that again? Did he find and destroy the horcruxes? Destroy Malfoy's power base? Bankrupt Malfoy? Anything? As far as I can see, Dumbledore's style was exactly to do nothing. There is no canon evidence otherwise. Malfoy was able to fucking overturn the government after everyone knew he was a Death Eater. It's as if one of the people from this photograph was later elected president.

 

Possibly, but that would possibly inspire a whole new story, with Tom Riddle Jr. the main character, as we see his explorations into Dark Arts, and all of that shit.

Personally, I reckon that if someone like Joe wrote that, it would be one of the lesbian mothers of all the mother-fucking bad-ass stories out there that are just too fucking awesome.

 

He didn't do anything about Malfoy. That part's not in question, unfortunately. But if you think Dumbledore's the kind of character who'd go Boondock Saints on the Death Eaters, then we've obviously been reading different books.

As for the second part: it got to the point that the kind of people from that photograph were elected president (or rather high ranking officials working for Voldemort's catspaw). That was a major plot point.

 

They weren't elected. There was a coup. Also, I really can't remember Dumbledore actually doing anything about DEs and public safety in canon.

He did not reprimand Snape for trying to get Sirius Kissed while knowing he is innocent (Snape had seen Pettigrew).

He missed Crouch Jr. pretending to be his friend/2IC in the Order.

He had people guarding the DoM and almost got an agent killed. For what reason? Destroy the sphere and set up an alarm for when someone tries to steal it.

He got an agent killed in St. Mungos.

He got an agent killed during the battle at DoM, partly because the way Sirius was treated (he could have stayed abroad and been as useful to the Order as he was at home).

He wasn't able to do anything about keeping caught DEs in prison.

He wasn't able to not let DEs into Hogwarts in HBP.

He left some really critical stuff for Harry to do on his own.

Weigh that against the Order's and Dumbledore's achievements.

It's as if, before the coup, the government was already pro-Voldemort, Dumbledore and the Order were a persecuted minority, he was unwilling to use his personal skills as a super-wizard and their anti-Voldemort cause had no support from the population. Like fighting for Democracy in a 99% Muslim country. What's the point? If the situation is really that bad, you move. Or, if you are serious about saving the minority who are going to be exterminated by the new regime (mudbloods, gays, whatever), you fight differently from what we've seen Dumbledore's people do.

 

That's the sticking point right there. The Ministry wasn't exactly pro-Voldemort, but they agreed with a suspicious number of his ideas. And people like Umbridge were definitely elected, or as elected as people get in the wizarding world. Just because someone is a hateful bigot doesn't mean they worked for Voldemort, and there were hateful bigots in power before Voldemort was even on the map. Voldemort certainly seized power, and I suppose that technically is a coup, but I doubt the average wizard noticed much change because not much changed for the average wizard. This has been argued over by people far more articulate than I am.

The only thing in your list of things Dumbledore failed at that I agree with is Crouch Jr. The others I feel are either implied to have happened off screen (reprimanding Snape about Sirius), you acting like Dumbledore is supposed to be omniscient and/or infallible (Death Eaters at Hogwarts, keeping every Death Eater in prison), or just moot (You assume that it's easy to get into the Department of Mysteries in secret; Dumbledore might be up there with Voldemort, but he has morals and was persona non grata at the time. And you're annoyed because he lost someone while they're essentially fighting a war?).

I think part of it is the fault of the medium; a children's book isn't the place you find nitty-gritty politicking, as well as the perspective issues discussed a page or two back in the thread. We don't know many specifics about anything the Order or Dumbledore did in the fight against Voldemort. But if you think they just sat around being useless, or that Dumbledore never exercised any of his reportedly large political muscle, then you need to read between the lines.

Maybe I just have a vivid imagination, but I've always assumed the characters in Harry Potter are far more nuanced than people give credit. Which, I suppose, is where most of my pet peeves stem from.

 

So we wouldn't have seen it happening, but we'd have seen results. Like, laws passed, DEs arrested, stuff seized, pro-Voldemort people fired. Anything. We know of Order losses that happened off-screen. We don't know of Order victories that happened off-screen.

Reprimanding Snape happened off-screen? Do we see any change in how Snape acts or how Dumbledore acts about Snape? What Snape did, doing all within his power to get Sirius executed for a crime Snape knew Sirius didn't commit, was tantamount to murder. He had a reason: twenty years before, Sirius tried to murder Snape (and get Lupin executed by the Ministry). But, after Snape did that, Dumbledore could no longer sanely pretend as if Snape can be trusted to act in Dumbledore's best interests. Yet he kept insisting that Snape is 100% trustworthy.

Dumbledore is really good at magic. Sneaking into the DoM and destroying the sphere was within his abilities. Without hurting any employee or putting his people in danger.

Spying on Draco within Hogwarts to thwart the DE infiltration was within his capabilities. As soon as Snape failed to suss out Draco's plan, Dumbledore had to use his abilities to find out what Draco was doing. The goons polyjuicing into first years wasn't undetectable to Dumbledore. Draco's Dark Mark wasn't undetectable to Dumbledore. Draco didn't even have the Cloak.

If Dumbledore was really serious about fighting a war, caught DEs would have been executed. Really. And don't tell me they couldn't name other DEs under Veritaserum. We never see DEs who don't know each other's names by voice. And Voldemort calls DEs out by name in GoF.

The Order wasn't fighting a war. The Death Eaters were. They were killing people (Bones, etc.) and taking and holding territory (politically). I don't remember the Order achieving anything. I think you're seeing things between the lines that are really not there.

 

Wolf is right in that JKR didn't provide a single example of a major Order victory (or even action) in either the first or second war.

 

At this point you're just talking about every crappy grimdark!war!fic out there. Nuance, man, nuance! Yes, if every character was operating at max capacity and efficiency, what you described would have happened. It would also miss the narrative point of the books: regular people can be heroes, heroes are regular people, and good triumphs over evil.


Edit: I also think the whole Dumbledore/Snape dynamic went right over your head. Dumbledore said he trusted Snape 100%, but he also despised him and used him for his own purposes. It's not that he trusted him, it's that he had his balls in a vice-grip. Snape was useful, and so he stayed. And the fact that Sirius doesn't actively try to murder Snape implies there was some sort of resolution, no matter how unsatisfying.


Edit Edit: Looking back, I think we've been misunderstanding each other about the Order. I'm saying they fought, and you're saying they didn't win. I was under the impression that the Order was always fighting a losing battle, but they kept fighting anyway because it was the right thing to do. Again, good triumphs over evil, though maybe an added 'no matter how dark and desperate things get' would be more accurate.

 

No, what the book is about is a fairytale that, despite all evidence to the contrary, has nothing to do with how real people act in real life. That's what pisses me of so much. If it was all happening in never-ever land, with talking animals and cartoon physics and stuff, it would have been awesome. But it explicitly happens in a world that has all of the real world in it. In the background, there is a recognizable prime minister of the UK with a nuclear arsenal and everything. Presumably, within the muggle world in the Potterverse, physics exist. And presumably, inside the Potterverse, muggle adults act like real people. Or the muggle world would have collapsed.

Hell, the real UK had an actual (recent) civil war: The Troubles with the IRA in Northern Ireland. And it wasn't at all like the Voldmort affair. The Voldemort affair also wasn't at all like Hitler's rise to power.

This isn't about peak capacity and everyone makes mistakes. The Allies during WWII made mistakes and had setbacks and losses. Tens of millions of lives lost due to incompetence and strict adherence to bad dogma. But even that made more sense than what we see in canon. Read non-fictional history. WWII for example. Extremely well documented. There you will see regular people who are heroes. And really fucked up shit. And for every "why?" you have an actual answer. And neither side, not even the people in the Warsaw Ghetto, was just getting slaughtered without fighting back.

 

Just saying, I hate that kind of argument.

An idea being a part of crappy grimdark fics =/= a crappy idea

 

Fair enough about the correlation, but I stand by what I said from a literary standpoint. It's a children's book, and when you boil it down that's one of the core morals of the story.

 

The moral of the story is: don't do anything, get slaughtered, it is part of the god's great plan. There is no point interfering with it.

You shouldn't teach that to children. Or anyone at all.

How was Snape useful? What did he actually achieve for Dumbledore? Maybe I'm forgetting DH. Name one instance when he provided information that saved someone's life or something like that. The resolution was that Dumbledore told Sirius to roll over and he did. Just like he stayed in that house.

How was Sirius getting thrown in Azkaban without trial resolved? And not being questioned by Dumbledore to find out how one of the Order was apparently a traitor. Dumbledore didn't want to find out how and when was Sirius recruited? I mean, according to Sirius, the Order knew there was a traitor. So there should have been a counter-intelligence operation to find that traitor. And it failed. They didn't find him, not in time. Dumbledore, Moody, etc. never bothered to find out how Sirius outfoxed them?

Keeping fighting is like this: you are a partisan surrounded by three Wehrmacht divisions. You derail a supply train anyway and get killed. What the Order did was nothing. They waited around doing nothing while they were killed off one by one. They lost the country without doing a single offensive move, and then they didn't engage in effective guerrilla warfare. The Afghanis are much more effective against their occupiers than the Order ever were. How many "Aurors" with Dark Marks were killed by IEDs? Zero. Until the Battle for Hogwarts.

Look, it's useless. My only real beef with it is that it was explicitly not meant to be realistic while simultaneously taking place in a setting that explicitly says it's (a copy of) the real world. If all of this was happening behind the portal at platform nine and three quarters, or inside the Narnia wardrobe, I wouldn't have had any issues with it.

I'm fine with "Avatar: The Last Airbender" being a little strange due to being G-rated because it's not set in the real world. A twelve year old has to save the world because of "Magic!", and it's ok. And the other kids being more important players than most adults. It's ok because it's not pretending to happen in the real world.

 

:/

I'm not even sure where to go with that.