Idiot Plot: Difference between revisions
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*** Both characters who are arguing over that book had been in the Muggle school system for the first eleven years of their life. Even if nobody else in the class knows this trope, ''they'' should.
** Continuing with the problems with Harry Potter, you really have to question why Dumbledore just didn't keep Harry in the loop. Some claim he didn't tell Harry everything as some sort of test to prove himself, but why? Or he wants to give Harry a normal childhood so he tries to protect him from it all, but Harry's evidently never going to get to be a normal kid since he ends up running into Voldemort practically all the time, so why keep sheltering him and never telling him anything? Why risk Harry getting killed if he's {{spoiler|the only one who can kill Voldemort?}} Dumbledore does so little to prepare Harry and after {{spoiler|Dumbledore's death, Harry has absolutely no guidance and can't talk to anyone except two other students. Dumbledore knew he'd be dying in advance so why didn't he leave him something more than a few cryptic clues?}} You also have to question Dumbledore's wisdom in telling all the students at the start of the first book, among them ''Fred and George'', whose curiousity will almost certainly be piqued because of the warning, not to try to get past a certain door. A certain door that can be unlocked with an alohomora charm and has an enormous, extremely dangerous multi-headed dog behind it, ready to maim anyone, adventurous student or not, who gets near? This is only one of the ''[[Idiot Ball]]''s flying around. Voldemort takes his own turn by never killing Harry when he has the chance. If he had, the books would have ended far sooner.
*** It still qualifies as this trope because Dumbledore is still being an idiot, but its actually an in-character idiocy. The two major driving forces of Dumbledore's character are intellectual arrogance (a character flaw he has struggled with since childhood) and his guilt over having almost become a Dark Wizard like his old friend Grindelwald and how it took the accidental death of his sister (possibly at his hand) to turn him away from that path. And so for the rest of his life Dumbledore goes around being the worst sort of patronizing overprotective mentor -- out of a mix of 'nobody else will die on my watch if I never involve them in anything potentially dangerous' ''and'' a 'I know best and nobody else can possibly handle this as well as I could' mixture of impulses.
** You also have to wonder why Dumbledore didn't just {{spoiler|confront Draco the minute he learned the kid was trying to kill him. The case can be made that doing so would have wrecked Dumbledore's plan to have Snape kill him and win favor with Voldemort, but c'mon....does Rowling really expect us to believe that Dumbles KNEW Draco would smuggle Death Eaters into the school at the end of the year?}}
** But all of the above pales into absolute insignificance when you consider that '''the entire plot of the story''' ceases to exist if James and Lily Potter had simply had the wherewithal to use one of ''themselves'' as their Secret-Keeper. To further draw a line underneath the idiocy, later on in the series multiple characters (Dumbledore for Grimmauld Place, Bill Weasley for Shell Cottage, and Arthur Weasley for whereever the Weasleys were hiding in book 7) will all use themselves as their own Secret-Keepers for Fidelius Charms they have themselves cast, thus demonstrating not only this tactic's possibility but also its usefulness.
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