The obligatory Harry Potter 7 thread with spoilers

[MJW]

I won't insult you guys with stuff that is already on wikipedia... My only real reaction so far that Voldemort's rise to power was very abrupt.

Edit: Rise not was

[Agathon]

I heard that Snape killed Dumbledore.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

I heard that the last line was "...and then Harry woke up, and saw it was all a dream."

[Agathon]

My wife is reading it now.

I guess it is a good thing in that she hasn't bothered me since she got it.

[dannubis]

So, who snuffs it in the end ?

[Spec]

Heres a spoiler, Harry Potter is gay.

I dont get what all the hype is about...AND its a chick flick.

Spec.

[Jaguar]

I thought it was fairly mediocre as Potter books go. I loved it, of course, but books 6, 5, 3, and maybe 1 were better. Maybe I'll post more about it later.

[MJW]

Originally posted by dannubis
So, who snuffs it in the end ?

Voldemort. Duh. It's pretty clear without reading a single page of the book.

[-Jrabbit]

My daughter (age 19, long-tme Potter RPG player) had the book by 12:04am, was home ten minutes later, finished it shortly after 7am, then went to sleep.

She loved the writing, enjoyed the faster-paced feel of it, and was very impressed with the plotting. But she really hated the epilogue.

I think there are PhDs to be had in theses connecting this series to RL, like this book marking the end of childhood for a generation that literally grew up with the series, sort of thing.

(Edited daughter's reading time, at her insistence...)

[Jaguar]

Yes, the epilogue is weak. Seriously, we could have figured that the two main couples would live happily ever after and whatnot.

If you're going to do that sort of "what happened afterwards" thing, do it in detail. I'd be happy to hear about what happens to Neville, or Luna, or even the more minor characters like Slughorn in the aftermath. I'd like to hear about how the school gets repaired, and who fills all the vacant positions, and what jobs the kids in Harry's generation end up getting.

But if she was just going to show that Ron/Hermione and Ginny/Harry got married and had kids and whatnot, she might as well have not included an epilogue at all.

[Jon Miller]

I really shouldn't have opened this thread :sad:

JM

[aneeshm]

After reading it, specially the epilogue, I realised that nothing was really fixed at a fundamental level - the entire larger system was exactly the same.

The system which allowed Voldemort to become the threat he was, which allowed the sorts of ritual abuses we have come to expect students to undergo at Hogwarts, which left the Ministry open to attacks from many fronts, and vulnerable to the oldest trick of them all - the sowing of internal dissension, and in which non-human magical species were treated as inferior, was still unchanged. The systemic flaws were not fixed at all. The old instabilities still remained, and it is a foregone conclusion that given enough time, another Voldemort will arise. And this time, there will be no lucky concatenation of circumstances to stop him.

I'd have considered it a much bigger literary and intellectual feat if Rowling had managed to create a book where Harry's victory consists not only of his triumph over evil as embodied in one deranged man, but in fixing the system which made the regular emergence of such men inevitable.

[MJW]

Rowling "thinks" (and therefore it's cannon) that the only person strong enough to do real damage to the Ministry of Magic was Tom Riddle. With his death no one will be able to take on the MoM. So, even if the injustices remain the people who suffer them will not be able to do anything but moan (without getting crushed by the MoM). So the problem is "solved". Yeah, it's unrealistic (and therefore silly) like Rowling's view of genetics is. But it is still the "truth".

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by MJW

Rowling "thinks" (and therefore it's cannon) that the only person strong enough to do real damage to the Ministry of Magic was Tom Riddle. With his death no one will be able to take on the MoM.

I'd differ with you a bit there. This is what I find so incomprehensible - in the book itself, Dumbledore mentions that his weakness was power, and that that is the reason he has always refused the Ministership (a bit like Gandalf refusing the Ring, and control over its power). Had Dumbledore been a bit weaker, however, he would have taken the post, and would have been completely unstoppable (even Voldemort feared him).

This effectively means that Rowling actually acknowledges, and is aware of, the inherent internal instability of the system as it exists, and the contradictions it constantly faces - and yet nothing is done to resolve this larger issue at the end of the books.

Originally posted by MJW

So, even if the injustices remain the people who suffer them will not be able to do anything but moan (without getting crushed by the MoM). So the problem is "solved". Yeah, it's unrealistic (and therefore silly) like Rowling's view of genetics is. But it is still the "truth".

I wouldn't blame her too much, though. Given that she was a single mother on welfare, it is inevitable that she swallow whole the theories which people in her circumstances would find most comforting, and which are expressed today as the most "correct".

[aneeshm]

Now I'll move on to a more general criticism. I had expected that the previous six books were intended to create and flesh out a world, and the characters in it, and the seventh would involve working within the universe, and by the constraints, created by the previous six. I thought that we would not gain any further insight into the nature of magic than was absolutely necessary. In this, I was sorely disappointed, as in when, for instance, the destruction of the diadem took place due to the Cursed Fire created by Crabbe (or Goyle, I forget which). Had that fire not been created, what would have happened? They'd have effectively had to sit on their arses, waiting for something to turn up.

Far, far too much was dependent on chance. I thought that the liberal use of deus ex machinae in the previous six books was excusable, given that the epic showdown was yet to come, and that Harry was growing into the person capable of actually duelling Voldemort. But when, even in the last battle, you come across very "convenient" twists, it lowers your opinion of the writing as a whole, because then, what was the point of building Harry up as a character at all?