I avoid forums that discuss ongoing fantasy series like the plague. I hate fan theories with a fiery passion. And I won’t claim that my approach is “the right one”, because hey - who am I, really, to tell you how to enjoy fiction? But I have always been on the opposite end of the spectrum. The narrative isn’t about his personal life, after all, right? It’s plausible that it wouldn’t come up. If anything, he is the quintessential ace character - a wise old mentor archetype with no sexuality whatsoever.īut if you think of him as a real person, existing independently of the books that tell his story, he could easily be gay.

There is literally nothing you can even retrospectively point at, and say “This codes Dumbledore’s sexuality”. Such as - you guessed it! - Dumbledore being gay. If you see the fictional story as something real and independent of your perception, you can easily incorporate any piece of external information into the work. But in their extremes, they lead to different perceptions of the reality of the work. In fact, I think they always intertwine to an extent. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course. You can treat it as an alternate reality that you are viewing form the window of the book/screen/whatever or you can treat it as a work of art, with its internal rules and limitations - a sort of fourth-wall approach, in which you are aware of your role as a spectator. I think there are two fundamental approaches to perceiving fiction (just kidding, there are a million. That is not a problem for some people, but it is a massive issue for others. With every new tweet about the Wizarding World, she erodes our love for her books a tiny bit more, but it goes further than that - she adds information that was never part of the narrative of those books. Rowling is the undisputed champion in extra-literary revisions. Now, if the title hasn’t forced your mind in that direction, let me just remind the world that, at present, J.K. Instead, it’s about what is on the page, and what isn’t. I have been trying to examine why this statement bugged me so much, and I realized it has nothing to do with identity. It was Emily Skrutskie’s tweet (and comments in other places), stating that the two main characters of the book were bisexual, when they were not coded as such in the book itself. There is something that has been chewing on the sides of my brain ever since I wrote my review of Bonds of Brass.

Bonds of brass emily skrutskie