Just like Slughorn, Albus Dumbledore collects people. Only, instead of focusing on those with influence, he looks to the outcasts.
The expelled half-giant. The young werewolf. The repentant Death Eater.
He protects them and gives them a second chance. All he asks in return is their loyalty.
And, if on occasion he requests that they undertake a certain task, invoking their debt of gratitude - well, that is no more than he is owed.
He once thought to add a certain disowned Black to his collection, but quickly realised his mistake.
Sirius is not an outcast, but a rebel. He knowingly chose his path, and chooses what price he is willing to pay for it. He refuses to be used.
So Albus Dumbledore abandons him.
Who gave you the RIGHT?
Dumbledore knows Sirius’s loyalty lies with Harry instead of him, and he has no use for someone who is not willing to follow his orders without question.
Ooooohoo if there’s ever a post that fits my aesthetic…
okay but then where does Harry himself fit into this collection? Is he an outcast because he is “the Boy Who Lived”?
Nooonono, my friend, that’s what makes this post so beautiful. Because it fits the meta I’ve been trying to get people to accept for years.
Harry was an outcast due to a childhood filled with abuse and neglect.
Vernon made him an outcast by dismissing his claims of magic, berating him, locking him in a CLOSET and putting bars on his window, and let’s face it, even though her editor made her cut it out, Jo intended for there to be physical abuse.
Petunia made him an outcast by enabling and contributing to this abuse, as well as making Harry do dozens of chores while doting on Dudley.
Dudley made him an outcast by bullying him and threatening any students at school who wanted to be his friends.
And the rest of the wizarding world made him an outcast when they bullied him for being an outsider.
Harry James Potter became an outcast the moment he was placed with The Dursleys.
And who put him there in the first place?
I’m here for this Anti-Dumbledore discussion.
This makes even more sense when you consider why Dumbledore deliberately made Harry an outcast.
Think about it What would Harry have been like if he had grown up in the wizarding world? Or, to put it another way, what would Harry have been like if he had grown up in a world where magic was the norm?
He would have taken magic for granted. He would have been less likely (especially as he got older) to view Dumbledore as a wise mentor and more likely to see him as flawed and capable of bad decisions. He would have seen both the world and Dumbledore as ordinary, with their good points and bad points.
But Dumbledore didn’t need a well-adjusted boy who took magic and the magical world for granted. He needed a child who would love the magical world unstintingly, even irrationally, because it was a haven from neglect and abuse. Even more, he needed a child who feared this world becoming evil and who therefore would not question someone that he saw as the ultimate authority, especially if he believed that obeying that authority would keep the world safe.
Even if obedience meant his own death.
Dumbledore wanted a martyr who would die for the wizarding world, because he believed that Voldemort could not die until Harry did. Which was why he left Harry with the Dursleys and let them neglect and emotionally abuse him for the next ten years.
to be honest since I was a child I’ve just very much had a talent for story-telling. i got bullied a lot and I got terrible grades in everything but the one good note I’d get on report cards and the ONLY nice things my classmates would say when prompted would be something like “she’s so funny” or “she really paints a picture when she tells a story”
So I placed all of my self-worth in my ability to entertain people, which is the story for a LOT of kids! But I was really good at it.
I always took (and still take) ordinary events and made them funny and entertaining. If I went to the store and a cashier said something odd to me, I could retell it in a way that made people laugh.
People would call me over to tell their friends “that one story” they’d heard before. I got invited to lunch tables and parties and homework groups for it. It was how I connected to people and made friends after years of being bullied.
And when you meet a lot of people, and you have a conversation with everyone you meet, something funny starts to happen: you get into a lot of weird situations and encounters that just make for more stories.
So I kept sharing, and it NEVER occurred to me that anyone would think I was lying until in 11th grade a boy said to my younger sister, who was seen as quiet, cool, and I guess thereby trustworthy “why does your sister make shit up all the time?”
And she told him “she doesn’t. I’ve been with her in half the stories she tells.”
He believed her and apologized, but when I heard about it, it really hurt me. I realized suddenly that maybe everyone I talked to, shared with, was laughing behind my back. That they thought I was a liar, desperate for friends and approval.
I had to decide not to care, but it seeded a deep insecurity in me. Sometimes I still catch myself worried my friends are secretly thinking “yeah right” when I tell them about a strange girl I talked to at the library.
I know they believe me, and I trust them, but it’s an old worry, and old worries linger!
So when my posts first started getting a lot of attention, and people started commenting “and everyone clapped,” “that man, was albert einstein,” “this is literally peak fake tumblr,” it hurt my feelings! I felt silly to have my feelings hurt by a meme. Like, I’m an adult, but it still did!
But then I started getting into watching standup comedians, and they tell the most bonkers off-the-wall stories I’ve ever heard. And people dissected them and tried to prove them fake, and then instead they’d find proof the stories were real. And in fact they’d realize, the stories weren’t really that unbelievable in the first place.
They were often about normal life with one strange element tossed in, that anyone else would have summarized in two sentences or less, and no one would have blinked.
But the comedians had made a career out of making an event funny. Making life bigger and better and more entertaining than it ever is while it’s happening.
And I realized I have that same skill.
At the end of the day, I’m just really funny, and really talented, and you can take it or leave it, that’s your choice, and that’s that on that!
There’s something quite key in this, and that’s the story shape. Finding things that are story-material, isolating them from the stream of everyday occurrences, FINDING THE STORY SHAPE, crafting a satisfying story from the shape, packaging it for easy consumption, and presenting it to others so that they get the intended effect? That is a long series of interlinked skills, which genuinely takes years to learn. Done correctly, the packaging becomes invisible, and people focus on the narrative, generating the reaction you wanted. But because people are increasingly fiction-oriented, they sometimes become suspicious when the job is done “too” well: “This packaging is crafted to a professional standard! It is similar to that used in fiction, to make stories for money!! Therefore, I don’t believe the event! You must be a fiction storyteller! Fiction is the only important story. I refuse to believe that story-shapes occur in nature, and that story-telling is a deliberately cultivated skill.”
Etc. etc.
Most of my own stories are actually incredibly mundane, and frequently happen to anyone who puts themselves in the right situations. The only difference between my stories and everyone’s constant stream of everyday life: the fact that I like to spot story shapes, cut them out of the rest of the fabric, and show them off to people.
People laugh and clap at my standup routines, they reblog my tumblr stories, and they persist in coming to dinner at my house despite the danger that I might talk to them. I have evidence that they appear to enjoy the stories. They do that because of the packaging, not because I am a person to whom weird events happen. The weird events are not interesting or enjoyable: Things Just Happen and Keep Happening to everyone, constantly, anyway. But people laugh because they like being shown a funny thing in an obviously funny light, and being invited to laugh. Not because of the series of improbable circumstances (which are actually quite mundane and highly probable - part of the packaging of a story-shaped occurrence is obscuring this.) You titer out the dramatic tension for maximum effect, and everyone goes “woo!!” at the right moment, because the buildup and release of dramatic tension is officially Enjoyable to Humans.
For example, the actual story that I relate in the Salmon Transportation Story series is an entire Tumblr post spun out of nothing in particular. A man dropped a fish in an unexpected way. It is simply presented in a format that my followers on Tumblr were prepared to appreciate in November 2017. You can tell it in such a way that it is called a “wild ride,” or you can stumble and stammer over it in a confusing manner, or you can write it up for a scientific paper, or you can just ignore it. Every discrete event that subverts expectations can be turned into this exact kind of story, and there are three standard off-the-shelf packages that you can wrap around it to make people laugh. To make the exact same kind of story as this one, just look for an event that subverted your initial expectations for how it was going to go, and try fitting it into the same narrative arc.
It’s a good skill to identify things that are story-shaped and how storytellers construct and deploy them. It’s an even better skill to admire the craft and mechanism of the construction, seeing how an event can be spun up into a Story. This will be absolutely key for your survival as a citizen, in a time when nations are entirely directed by stories, many of them fictional, and power is awarded to the person who is best at story-construction, and news travels - not because of its importance - but because of its packaging. This is called rhetoric, and it is the art of the discourse; it is a genuine field of study, and the reason it is so powerful and insidious is partly because it is practically invisible.
For any of you who are writing ‘across the pond’-here is a little guide I put together of some common differences between British and American English!
I like how the only reason Harry is able to fight the imperious curse so easily is because it hits him and he’s like “Ah I feel calm and relaxed and happy…this is wrong.”
![historyarchaeologyartefacts:
“Golden Headband with a frieze consisting of flowers, Gazelles and a Stag Head. Egypt, 15th (Hyksos) Dynasty. 1648 to 1540 B.C. [3857x2710]
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