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.
@ladyknightley - FYI…
That was always how I interpreted Harry’s behavior, because I’m also prone to the same sort of reactions. It’s not about mistrusting a specific person or a specific group of people, it’s about the automatic bone-deep assumption that no one will help. Personal example: I don’t trust authority figures, even the ones I know and like on a personal level–I reported a sexual assault to a teacher a year and a half ago and I had a worse panic attack about that than I did about the assault, ever. The assault was business as usual. Telling an authority figure about it, giving someone that kind of weapon to use against me, was fucking traumatic, my roommate had to come with me and I had to sit down on the ground outside the building before I could walk. Harry Potter example: he doesn’t tell anyone about Umbrige because he assumes that not only will they do nothing, they might use it against him–if I hear literally one more person bring up the fact that he didn’t tell McGonagall, I will have an aneurysm. It’s not that he doesn’t think McGonagall cares about him, nor that, in the Triwizard Tournament, he thinks Dumbledore would let a kid die. It just doesn’t even occur to him that someone else might help. When someone suggests that he go to McGonagall about Umbrige, his response is basically “wait, what?” Once he’s out of the second task in the Triwizard Tournament, and the adrenaline’s clearing, he does sit back and go “why did I do that, Dumbledore would never have let her get hurt.” He doesn’t even realize what he’s doing in the moment, he just sees a threat and resolves it because no one else will help.
It’s not…personal, okay? It’s just the learned knowledge that no one is going to get you or anyone else out of a situation, so you have to do it. Every time.
And as long as we’re on the subject, this is part of the reason I dislike Snape pretty hardcore. I mean, I have a litany of sins for Severus Snape, which ends with ‘you can die like a hero but that doesn’t make you a good man’, but this is one of them. He treats this impulse of Harry’s as an attention-seeking behavior, not just a ‘saving-people-thing’ but something entirely motivated by some perverse desire to be in the spotlight. And he punishes him for it. He repeatedly penalizes Harry for trying to save people. And let me tell you something, from personal experience, the more people punish you for this, the stronger the impulse becomes. It’s a self-feeding cycle. Because, says the little voice in your brain, if they’re punishing me for helping, that means they wouldn’t have helped, so that means that it had to be me. Because better they punish you, right? Better you pay for helping someone because you would have paid for something anyway, right?
I’m not saying it’s a healthy mentality, but I’m also not going to condemn it as an unhealthy one, because sooner or later you might actually be the only person who will help. You might be the only person available. And if nothing else, this mentality does teach you to keep a cool head in a crisis.