A Comprehensive Analysis of Literary Protagonists - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Albus Dumbledore - “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling

An Internet Critic’s Ongoing Crisis With the Wizarding World's Most Politely Manipulative Old Man

There’s a moment in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince—right after Dumbledore has dragged Harry through a literal death swamp to drink ghost juice—that I remember pausing and thinking: wait. Why does this man keep getting away with everything? He just fed a traumatized orphan to Voldemort like a pig to slaughter, again, and somehow he still reads as wise. Like Gandalf in sensible shoes. And it’s not just Harry forgiving him. It’s all of us. Why?

It’s not just nostalgia blindness. It’s worse. It’s character Stockholm syndrome, and Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore is the most beautifully gaslighting authority figure in all of children’s literature.

This isn’t a hot take. We’ve known it forever. Tumblr laid the groundwork years ago with those endless gifsets of “Dumbledore’s Greatest Crimes,” and still, people love him. They defend him the way some people defend their emotionally unavailable exes: “He was just trying his best.” Yeah? His best involved raising a child weapon. We need to talk about that.

But first—can we admit the charisma works? Because god, it works. The glasses. The twinkle. The little sugar quirks and Latin names and way he refuses to die without a final dramatic sentence. He’s like your favorite English teacher mixed with a riddle-loving cult leader, and it’s intoxicating. You think you’re immune until you realize you’re parroting his ideology: “It is our choices, Harry…” Yeah, but what about your choices, Albus?

Let’s rewind. He starts as a headmaster who eats lemon drops and wears whimsical socks, and ends as a Machiavellian tactician who’s known Harry’s fate since babyhood and never once said, “Hey, by the way, this entire war hinges on your body count, kiddo. Sleep tight.” The pivot is Shakespearean. But the real drama isn’t that he lies. It’s that we excuse it.

I used to think Dumbledore was my moral compass. Now I think he’s a slow-burn villain hiding in the protagonist’s campfire glow.

Dumbledore as Worldbuilder, Dumbledore as Ruin

J.K. Rowling, in her pre-TERF-era wizarding peak, created Dumbledore with layers so dense they almost smell of plot twist. He is the architect of so many things in Harry Potter: the Order, the Horcrux hunt, the boy-hero narrative itself. Without Dumbledore, there’s no story. And that’s… part of the problem.

He’s the reason Voldemort didn’t die the first time (hey, let’s leave Tom Riddle in the school basement with a cursed diary—what could go wrong?), and also the reason Harry is raised in an abusive household (“it’s safer this way” sounds a lot like bureaucratic cowardice dressed up in magical ethics). His fingerprints are on every disaster and every solution, which means you never know whether to thank him or slap him with a book.

He’s God if God had a guilt complex and a flair for theatrical exits.

And the tragedy is: he knows he’s wrecked things. That’s the whole point of his late-career regret spiral. By the time we hit Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore’s legacy is being filtered through multiple POVs—Harry, Aberforth, even Rita Skeeter—and it’s finally cracking. But the emotional core doesn’t snap until we meet teenage Albus, the one who wanted to “rule for the greater good.” It’s giving Che Guevara in a powdered wig. And worse: it’s giving Grindelwald. Like, literally. They were in love. Maybe. The ambiguity is so deliciously tragic it makes me want to scream into a broken mirror.

But here’s the kicker: instead of rejecting power after his sister’s death, he hoards it more quietly. He becomes the benevolent face of wizard capitalism. The headmaster, not the dictator. A different brand of control, one that looks so much like care that we forget to question it. And I mean—we’ve all had that boss. The one who calls you “kiddo” while assigning impossible tasks. That’s Dumbledore.

The Ethics of Using Children as Chess Pieces

Let’s talk war ethics. And no, I’m not being dramatic. That’s the genre. Harry Potter is children’s war fiction dressed in butterbeer and enchanted staircases.

Dumbledore conscripts eleven-year-olds into a school full of active threats. He allows a three-headed dog to patrol the halls, stores the Philosopher’s Stone in a riddle trap any honors student could bypass, and lets teenagers duel like it’s TikTok drama meets ancient Rome. You could argue this is all in the name of magical pedagogy. Or, you could say he is deeply unserious about safety protocols.

But it goes deeper. By the time we get to the prophecy—the whole “neither can live while the other survives” situation—he’s known for years that Harry’s survival is conditional. And instead of telling Harry this up front, he withholds it like a season finale cliffhanger. Classic grooming behavior masked as emotional protection. You don’t get to decide when someone is “ready” for the truth just because you think you love them.

And yes, it is love. Dumbledore’s whole thing is that he does care. That’s what makes this so confusing. He’s not Dolores Umbridge, all evil grin and fascist pink. He’s love twisted by guilt. The saddest kind.

He sees Harry as both martyr and surrogate son, and never fully commits to either. So we get a hybrid approach: teach the boy to fight like a soldier, but protect him like a precious relic. No wonder Harry ends up wandering the forest with a suicide mission and a broken wand. No wonder he names his kid after this man. That’s what happens with emotionally complicated father figures—you name things after them, hoping it’ll redeem the story.

Can You Be Queer, Good, and Powerful? (Or: Dumbledore’s Closet Is a Tomb)

Okay. Let’s go there.

The whole “Dumbledore is gay” thing was dropped post-series, in one of Rowling’s classic Twitter-as-textbook revelations, and the fandom has been trying to retroactively make it make sense ever since. And you know what? It does track. Not just because of Grindelwald, or the over-articulate loneliness, or the vaguely Oscar Wilde aesthetic. But because Dumbledore’s entire arc is about desire repressed into responsibility. He wanted a world. He got a school. He wanted a life. He got a legend.

It’s not a stretch to read Dumbledore as someone who decided early on that he could only be one thing. So he became good. Or rather, useful. He weaponized his pain into purpose, and it worked so well we didn’t notice how empty he looked whenever someone tried to love him.

His queerness isn’t textual, but his alienation is. He doesn’t belong anywhere—not really. Not with his family. Not with other wizards. He’s too powerful to be normal and too ethical (now) to be radical. So he settles for being clever. For being necessary. The queer loneliness of usefulness is rarely discussed, but Dumbledore lives it: the person who everyone needs but no one really knows.

And maybe that’s why we still forgive him. Because we see ourselves in that alienation. In the performance of competence. In the way he hides behind knowledge and never says what he actually wants. He’s not just gay-coded. He’s tragedy-coded. And nothing sells like a tragic gay who knows how to monologue.

Legacy is Just Another Spell for Erasure

By the end of Deathly Hallows, we’ve been through the wringer. We’ve watched our heroes break and bleed and rise. And Dumbledore? He’s dead. Again. Only now, we get the version that’s stained and sad and finally honest. The King’s Cross scene is supposed to feel redemptive, but to me it reads like a ghost begging for forgiveness before vanishing for good.

He admits he was wrong. He apologizes. He says the quiet part out loud: that he raised Harry for slaughter.

And Harry—of course—accepts it. Because Harry is still the child he raised. The boy who believes that sacrifice equals love. That pain is noble. That trust is something you give, not something people earn. It’s heartbreaking.

Dumbledore’s legacy becomes a paradox: he saved the world, but cost it so much. He did the right thing the wrong way. He believed in love, but only if it hurt enough.

So, What Do We Do With a Man Like This?

Nothing. We don’t cancel him. We don’t canonize him. We hold the contradiction.

Because Dumbledore is the rare character who reflects power’s seduction and its cost, wrapped in a sugar-plum shell. He’s the poster child for the weaponized mentor trope, the one who teaches you to fight but never shows you how to heal. He’s what happens when wisdom calcifies into control. He’s every leader who thinks intention is enough.

But he’s also—somehow—still lovable. Maybe that’s the real spell. Not his magic. Not his plans. Just that infuriating, impossible ability to be both monster and mentor, and to make us mourn him anyway.

I hate that I still miss him.

I hate that I still quote him.

But I do. Because Albus Dumbledore is not your dad. He’s worse. He’s the man who could have been your dad, if only he hadn’t believed in destiny more than you. And that’s what makes him unforgettable.