HP7: broader commentary

[rm]

- Okay, when the whole sign of the Hallows thing started with Krum I was like "the awesome! This is going to parallel Nazi interest in occultism, this is so brilliant!" but then it turned into a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. In fact the whole quest logic of the whole book breaks down around the Deathly Hallows, because this book is about two quests neither of which might actually be important, wha? Okay, anyway.

- Dumbledore, WHY THE FUCK DIDN"T YOU TELL SNAPE ABOUT THE FUCKING ELDER WAND? Even if his killing you didn't make him a master of it, it still would have been safer on his person than in your fucking tomb. Also, might be nice if he knew about the risk! I realize you don't trust Snape not to go on the quest for himself, but wow, the man has put twenty years of his life into this anti-Voldemort nightmare, do you really think he's just gonna go "fuck it, I want to be the msot powerful dude" now? Huh? If you're going to make everyone around them a tool, at least fucking respect them.

- Tonks & Lupin. As much as I loved Harry's confrontation about Lupin why and how did Lupin become an asshat? I wasn't buying the self-hating werewolf thing, and he wasn't a playboy like Sirius who would really hate marriage. So What the Fuck? It's like she wrote herself into a corner with them, gave up and killed them off camera. It was appalling.

- Hermione is a scary, intense woman. And I thought the stuff with her parents were a real gift to the fans who always thought she worked in a Snape/Hermioen way. Clearly.

- Luna is wonderful. Luna's bedroom made me cry.

- Again, so all about the houseleves in this one! And in fact they are one of the first instances of a lot of really important content about choice and freedom. almost everything in these books is a product of choise, not prophecy. In fact prophecies are incidental, incomplete or destroyed throughout the series. People are brave not because they have to be and not because of what they must endure, but because of the things they choose to put themselves in the way of. Almost everyone in these books had multiple options to take easier paths, and it's one of the things I love about the books, bravery being defined not how you endure the shitty hand you got dealt, but what choices you make with it.

- JKR's world is full of so much bigotry, but she only acnkowledges and condemns some of it, and that's icky as sin. Did anyone else feel like Potterwatch fetishized Muggles in a really creepy way? Or that the only Jew-figure redeemed in the whole mess is Snape and then only because he makes a christian-style sacrifice? The goblins are really, really, discomforting to me, and always have been. The death by molten treasure factor? *shudder* And let's not forget the muggleborns on blood-status trial at the ministry, all of whom seem reduced to snivelling, powerless children.

- Harry screams at Voldemort, "Snape wasn't yours; he was Dumbledore's." I get the point. I really do. But wow, Harry, you just finally, grokked that Snape was a human being. Human being's don't belong to people, and Snape's life was a misery, not just because he had once made poor choices and was now repenting, but because his life was not his own. Did you have to fucking phrase is that way and rub it in his porr dead face? Why wasn't Lupin alive at the end to help Harry with the complexity of understanding Snape after the final battle was all over.

- That said, I loved Harry in this book. Loved him walking to his death. And felt that JKR actually had real moments of sophistication in Harry's self-analysis of those moments.

- Okay, back to Snape -- Severus pouring out those memories at the end -- so speaks to how much power and how much presence of mind Snape has always had to fuckin do that. we've never seen such a thing before. It's not an ordinary part of wizarding death. She could have just given us an occulemency moment, but no. Awesome!

- Malfoys. I can deal with Draco being unredeemed, but he was so not complex, and I thought his failures in Book 6 were really going to give him some depth. I felt like she just said "fuck it, I don't care" here as well, and it made me angry.

- Which leads us to the failure of anything making any sense of Slytherin House! While one might argue that the only people in Slytherin by the time of the confrontation are purebloods, as any non-pureblood would be barred from Hogwarts , I can't believe that the Weasley's are the only pureblood family on the side of light. The utter non-redemption, not just of Slyterin House, but of anyone in it, is just lame and doesn't make sense and says that 25% of people are just entirely unreemable because they have a different code of personal priorities. At the end, when little Albus Severus (who I LOVE) is scared about winding up in Slytherin, I think Harry does a great job with him there, and Snape gets his due, but! why not say that there are good things about both houses, as oppsoed t the notion one can be brave or good despite being in Slytherin. ARGH!

- Dumbledore's story. OMG, awesome. fandom conscensus pretty quickly has become that the sister was raped or sexually abused, because everythign that stems from the attack on her is so insane.

- Neville. The awesome.

- McGonogall. Amazing in her brief appearances.

- Death Eaters. Yeah, all teh dark revel fics no longer look stupid, now do they?

Comments

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

You know how much I completely agree with much of this. I'd only add that in regard to the thing about "Snape wasn't yours; he was Dumbledore's," - remember with what pride Harry used to say, "I'm Dumbledore's man through and through,"? I don't know if he'd look at it as a bad thing, you know?

Not that he'd necessarily be right. But I just wanted to throw that out there.

[austen.livejournal.com]

I just made my post about this, and I agree with you on a lot of those things. The pairing of Remus/Tonks and Lupin's attitude definitely made me sad with the way he treated Tonks as well as their marriage/baby. Harry telling him off made me happy.

[fleur.livejournal.com]

Totally agree with .. well just everything.

I was disappointed as well that she didn't "handle" Draco in some way, since she made him an integral part of the killing of Voldemort. I'd like to have seen a little more complexity in him, like we did with other characters (such as Snape) that started out in Book 1 as just being found evil but whom evolved throughout. No word at all about who he married, etc.

(and is it just me, or do wizards get married and start having kids sortof young??)

I was very disappointed too not to know more about Teddy Lupin. Who raised him? Tonks's mother? Her dad was dead and I think the Lupins were too, weren't they? I agree with you that it felt like she just got tired of them, or didn't know what else to do with them and had too much else going on, so she just quit.

Overall though, I enjoyed this much more than 5 or 6.

[phaenix-ash.livejournal.com]

did you buy percy's change of heart? at all? i just can't wrap my head around some of the dialogue and kept expecting something more complex out of him.

also: crabbe should not have been allowed to speak. gah

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

I thought the book really floundered in many ways, and the "quest" aspect was one of them... it seems that the characters spent a lot of their time just flapping around wondering what to do next.

- the Tonks and Lupin thing really annoyed me too.
- Hermione really came fully into her own in this one. And I really wish we had learned what Hermione did with the rest of her life besides have babies.
- I thought Luna's bedroom was really interesting in that it never seemed to me that she was super close to the Big Three, and also because it seemed that the painting may have been a magical piece.
- Bigotry: racism and bigotry have been a really big part of British working-class life. Remember when it was a big sport in England to beat up Pakistani immigrants? I think it's possible that Rowling is a white person who really doesn't understand/care about/want to confront bigotry in her books... not least of all because condemning bigotry too strongly can be bad for book sales. But it's also true that many of her characters are not complex or deep, and the muggleborns on trial probably fit into this category.
- In Rowling's world, people DO belong to other people.
- I was sad and disappointed that Snape's death was so pointless.
- Your Slytherin may be peope who have different priorities. Rowling's Slytherin is generally evil or at least willing to tolerate evil if it benefits them. Maybe it's a lesson on the dangers of too much arrogance and power-seeking... that would fit with her penchant for exaggeration.
- RE: Ariana, I don't think sexual abuse is necessary to cause great trauma to a very small child, especially when you consider that her magical talents were just developing. Since her trauma was associated with using her magic, the results make sense.
- I loved seeing Neville come into his own.
- Also, McGonagall was awesome

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Totally with you on the quests. What, did she need material to fill up the first half of the book with? All that tasty Nazi mysticism potential wasted!

The Elder Wand: I kind of feel like Dumbledore not telling anyone is just part and parcel of his many failures to trust anybody else because he knew he couldn't be trusted with the One Ring - so why should anyone else be trustworthy?

It's like - if this was a TV thing, the Tonks and Lupin actors couldn't be gotten back this season, so they got crappily written and written off as soon as they could. Lame. I *could* have seen it to work, esp. if Tonks was psycho what with hormones and maybe her family was psycho worried about the blood purity dangers and so on - but as it was, it's unsupportable and lame.

Hermione and her parents - oh, wow, for the win. Good to see that.

Luna's bedroom was one of the most touching things in the series.

I am going to work on the goblin thing a little; it's redeemable if you remember that objects can have souls or something like that, that all the goblin-mage things we've seen have been beautiful and magical, and that perhaps the goblins put something of themselves into their creations. Still, yuck.

And WTF with no redeemed Slytherins. Even poor stupid Slughorn doesn't get a redeeming moment. And no redeemable purebloods? Writing on that as well, obviously. Grr.

Dumbledore's backstory is awesome. And yeah, the sister thing, good creepy stuff there.

Neville wins.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with a lot of this, especially Dumbledore's not telling Snape. Remus' reaction to his marriage actually made sense in a way that truly stabbed me in the heart: he's always been about needing approval- needing to be liked- and with everyone he knew encouraging him to marry Tonks, at the end of Half-Blood Prince, he simply caved.(This also gives his self-hatred a bit of justification: he knows what a shitbath he's allowed himself to bring Tonks and Teddy into, with the Death Eaters running things.) Tonks, on the other hand, is simply a pod person in this entire fucking book; did Molly put her under an Imperius to speed the marriage along?

[ludimagist.livejournal.com]

On the Slytherins:

Slughorn does run back in with the reinforcements and is battling Voldemort just as Harry shows up.

Draco gets a partial redemption, not by any act of extreme bravery, but by small acts of resistance at Death Eater Central. He pretends not to recognize Harry when he's taken prisoner, he doesn't put up much of a fight in the escape, it's implied that he's being forced to torture prisoners, etc.

In terms of the elder Malfoys, the mother covers for Harry, and both parents do sort of take part in the reinforcements charge, albeit only to save Draco. They are present in the final celebrations, if awkward. There was some attempt to make them sympathetic by having them held as prisoners in their own home and made the butt of jokes by other Death Eaters.

Also in the redeemed Slytherin camp is Regulus, and (though not quite a Slytherin) Kreecher.

Overall I had a lot of fun with this book.