Dumbledore is Not a Sidekick
Or, How I Inadvertently Horrified a Group of Apples to Apples players
It’s storytime, my friends, and today I’d like to take you back to the early to mid-2000s. I was in college then; I don’t remember exactly which year it was , but I do remember it was not very far after Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had come out, either the book or the movie (I’m not sure which, but it was enough for the dramatic spoiler ending to be commonly known). This is key.
Another bit of background information you need to know for this story is that I was homeschooled from first grade until college, and that I was raised Pentecostal (I’m Catholic now, but that’s a story for another time). One result of all this is that although I read Narnia and even Tolkien after a bit, I missed out on the whole Harry Potter trend from the get-go. I was vaguely aware of the broader details, through inescapable cultural osmosis. I knew, for instance, that the story involved a boy named Harry Potter (duh), that magic was involved but not in quite the same way as Narnia and LOTR, and that if you weren’t magical you were a Muggle. That was about the sum total of my knowledge. One more thing: I knew that there was a character named Dumbledore, but I knew nothing else about him or his role in the story. I was under the impression that he was some sort of an elf or plucky sidekick, possibly both. I thought he had a minor role in the story, maybe contributed to morale, maybe the equivalent of one of the Dwarves (not Thorin) in The Hobbit) at best. And, yes, I knew that he died; I didn’t know how, who killed him, or why it happened.
Little realizing the gaps in my knowledge, I went to college (IUS, great school), got involved with some student groups, made friends, and in the course of events I found myself with some of those friends playing a game of Apples to Apples. If you haven’t played this, it’s great fun; each player starts with seven red noun cards in their hand, then one player pulls a green adjective card. The other six play whatever noun card they think best matches (or most hilariously doesn’t match) the noun card. (example: if the adjective card is Sparkly, one might play Edward Cullen, etc). I’ve seen some plays that were side-splittingly funny but that I couldn’t dare tell you about now (I suspect it was similar matches that led to the more adult-oriented Cards Against Humanity game). At any rate, that particular night someone pulled the adjective card Expendable. I played Albus Dumbledore.
This was, I remind you, shortly after the big twist at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had become known.
The shock and outright horror in my friends’ faces was something to behold. It was as if I had done the deed myself. It was then that I realized I had made a faulty assumption about the relative importance of Dumbledore’s role in the Harry Potter series.
Closing Time
One of the things that did get me into the series was the lovely music; specifically, the trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. I saw that trailer and heard those brilliant chorals and I thought, I had to get into this. And so, I did. (Even though, I confess, in the books, my own mental image of Voldemort has hair. Go figure).