tbh people mock harry for going back to rescue fleurs sister in the second triwizard task but harry knows dumbledore better than anyone else. he probably looked at the situation and thought “would dumbledore let an eight year old drown just because fleur couldnt do this bit? yes. yes he would.”
it’s also possible he was acting off of the lessons he learned in the abusive dursley household. that’s why he does a lot of his so-called “hero complex” shit. he takes a lot of personal responsibility for other people bc he learned growing up that “no one’s here for you, no one will help you, you will not catch any breaks”. he helps bc if he didn’t, who would? certainly not the dursleys, and that’s what he grew up with.
he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts, bc he’s learned that authority figures are no help and will only make things worse. he takes situations at face value bc he’s never seen other options in his life, he’s never HAD other options in his life. speaking very personally, that was a serious marker of abuse that i saw in myself - i never thought abt escape, or what i could do to improve my situation, bc i didn’t even see that as an option. the options were survive or don’t, deal w it or don’t, acclimate or implode.
maybe he wasn’t thinking abt what DUMBLEDORE would do, what anyone at hogwarts would do. maybe he was acting off what he knew the dursleys (his main authority figures) would do. the dursleys would let the girl drown. and harry was there, and harry could do something, and so harry did. he took personal responsibility for fleur’s sister’s safety bc all his life he’s learned that authority figures cannot be trusted to do so.
people characterize these aspects of harry as a “hero complex” or a “stupid nobility” or a “lack of common sense”, but i don’t agree with that. i can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.
it’s called “complex ptsd” and if you get out of the abusive situation before you’re old enough to understand how fucked up it was, like Harry did, you don’t end up with the classic flashbacks so much, just atypical behavior patterns and a high risk of other shit. That’s why Harry is so fucked up by everything that Umbridge does, it’s because he’s being retraumatized in his safe space.
important.
also, dumbledore would not have let an eight year old drown; harry even has a minute after he finished the task while talking with ron where he feels embarrassed and stupid over his performance during the task explicitly because he knows dumbledore would have never let that happen–and harry feels like he should have remembered that before/during the task
not to mention, dumbledore rewarded harry with high marks during the task for caring about the other hostages and for rescuing fleur’s sister. and this wasn’t the only time he’s rewarded students for demonstrating caring behavior towards other people
seriously the way some of you people talk about dumbledore you’d think he was voldemort or umbridge
I agree, and honestly I wasn’t agreeing with the OP as much as I was with the above comments that the Dursleys, not Dumbledore, are responsible for Harry’s behavioural patterns. And yeah, the idea of coping, and of not letting people come to harm if you can help it, aren’t actually bad things and yet people talk of them as if they’re actually moral failings on Harry’s part, something he should be actively punished for.
This–that Harry, in the heat of the moment, assumed that no one would help the girl if he failed to do so, because of the way the Dursleys treated him–seemed implicit to me when I read it for the first time. In the intervening years it’s come to my attention that my childhood was…atypical, shall we say, but even knowing that most people are more decent than my extended family, I still assume that, if I don’t help someone in trouble, no one will. It’s not a hero complex or a compulsion to play the savior, it’s a bone-shaking certainty that I would be left helpless in their situation and I honestly can’t live with leaving someone else in that position. I remember reading that, reading Harry acting like that, and thinking that it was such a relief to see someone who made “foolish” decisions for the same reasons I did.