to complement his ranking, here's one of my favourite fics. and character studies on Dumbledore:

You will want to know who the unhappiest student to ever walk the halls of Hogwarts was.

I mean the one who probably deserved Hogwarts the least.

For unhappy, after all, must mean ungrateful in this case, and that must mean also undeserving. For Hogwarts is a home to so many! Hogwarts is a warm roaring fire or the cool spark of knowledge beyond the windows looking out onto the murky secrets of the lake, of the heart. Hogwarts is everything dead — portraits, alumni — coming back to life again, and forbidden adventure just beyond the reaches of the forest, and a humorous and twinkly-eyed Headmaster offering a lemon drop. So anyone who does not love Hogwarts surely does not deserve these rewards, does not deserve the warmth or the excitement or the secret knowledge Hogwarts gives one. He surely did not deserve it. And he knew he was undeserving.

Everything came easily to him. This is the first point we must make. Some people struggle with their magic. They hold out a hand to make a duck into a dove, and instead they produce a dragon which turns on them, or else a damselfly, or else they only kill the duck. Magic is at odds with these people. They might possess is, but in fact they are less worth bothering with than any Muggle, for Muggles simply walk on past magic, unheeding, and attend to their own business. They do not pervert it, or cause it to snap back angrily at them, as though they have no business mucking about with it.

But magic loved him. This is like being loved by the Fates. You do not have to try. The duck becomes a flock of doves, which in turn fly out of the tower window in a cloud of ethereal white, which return a moment later with berries and flowers and crowns of leaves, and drop one glorious gift before each gasping Gryffindor, each hale Hufflepuff maiden, before reverting, at last, to a common duck. And then there is applause. All eyes turn to you. Favored, talented, lucky, magical. All without the slightest effort.

Understand that this is a bit like being a fraud. Success so easily won means nothing. Classmates cluster about, good friends clasp you on the shoulder. And you only think, Well. Alright. But that was easy enough. And you begin to see that what really happened (not trying at all; suffering no pain; deserving no reward) is perceived as something very different (leaping ahead of the rest; exceptional without a doubt; deserving extreme praise). You begin to feel as though you were dreaming, and when you awoke, someone had thrown a disguise on you. The disguise was one of those crowns. They felt you deserved it the most.

For him, this did not happen only with magic. It happened, too, like a kind of happy accident, when he should give away, rather carelessly, a kind word. When he should blink his clear blue eyes in such a way that it seemed like he understood someone perfectly. When he helped a classmate with their homework, or without thinking obliterated someone else’s cruel Howler at supper. It cost him nothing to do these things. But more and more people saw this as evidence of greatness, of some lofty and noble soul. They would see the crown even if he did not intend them to. It caused him no small amount of discomfort. The Hat had warned him of this, told him that his life would be artificial, all keeping close his secret listlessness, and that he would be better served being honest about that, at least. For he was an artificial creature, often without meaning to be. The more he protested that he was not so wonderful, that he was not trying, the more eyes flickered down to his house scarf or his badge and replied that it must be false modesty. Which of course made him even grander to them. But he had done nothing worth their approval. Not really. He was a secret double-dealer, a hoax. This ate at him.

It ate at him more when he should read of the lives of the luckless. Those Fate cared nothing for. There were people living oceans away, in tin-roofed hovels, who could summon up magic as easily and wonderfully as he could. But no Hogwarts letter would ever come for them. They often had no local school. There were sick and mad people, some of them people he knew intimately, who likewise had no avenues for earning crowns. No one wanted to applaud them even if they should accomplish something great. It was better that they be locked away. There were even people in his own dormitory, separated by thin layers of bedhangings, who tried and tried and at last summoned up a dove, at last saw some glimmer of reward. But no one cared. Their eyes were not so blue, their demeanor not so easy and kind, their blood was perhaps a touch too muddy.

Oh, how good you are to care about people like that! others would say, simpering, when he explained this. Oh, you are such a hero.