Oh, thank you Wendy! I was bursting to talk about the book, but half the fandom are still reading. It's the height of irony that I had to come here to discuss it.
In my not-so-humble opinion, this book kicked BUTT!! Children's books, my foot! That was nothing less nor nothing more than Young Adult! Anybody noticed all the swearwords? There's an awful lot of "effing' going around, Aberforth repeatedly says “bastards”, Hermione screams "you great ARSE!" and MRS. WEASLEY SCREAMS “YOU BITCH”?! I stared at the page for ten seconds thinking I must just be dreaming of reading HP! I guess this is just Jo's way of telling all the "concerned adults" to grow up.
The most famous fanfic writers have been vindicated. All their theories have more or less come true. And in a completely weird freakishly psychic way, the fic that was attempted to be passed off as the leaked original book weeks ago on Portkey (Melindaleo’s The Seventh Horcrux) so closely resembled the plotlines that it freaked me out monumentally.
Of course, the shippers are going to start complaining. I can see the WotcherWolvie petition now. The Harry/ Hermione shippers are going to howl about the One Big Happy Weasley Family ending, despite the loads of potential conciliatory Harmony material JK has offered. The H/G shippers are going to howl about the lack of Ginny. The Ron/Hermione shippers are going to howl about the limited kissing time. The Lily/ Snape shippers are going to light a bonfire and do war dances. One day, if one is sanguine, they'll all actually realize that romance was never meant to be a focal point in the Harry Potter books.
And then they'll all start howling about how it reads like fanfic. I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.
Character-wise, this was the best book of the series. I don’t dislike Dumbledore, as some now do, but I finally can see past the hero-worship to the man underneath. Harry is, in the end, better than any of us, because he alone had the wisdom and maturity to come to terms with the truth of his mentor’s ambitions and still remember him with love and respect – but also as an equal. This is the crucial point of any child’s development; it is at the point when a child can view his guardians as people and not just as parents that he will have reached the zenith of his emotional maturity. Which some among us has yet to achieve. Harry’s transition from boy to man is breath-taking, and the corresponding shift in his perceptions of the people around him are equally so. I give full kudos to JK Rowling for this.
The parallels between the real-world situations are also well done, though none-too-subtle. The Third Reich comparisons were so obvious, I felt a little like she was beating us on the head with them until I had to repress the desire to shout, “We get it already!” Grindelwald took the sign of the Hallows for himself and corrupted it the same way that Hitler took the Hindu sign of prosperity, the Swastika, and turned it into a symbol of horror. The moral ambiguity of people and situations was the paramount theme in this book, which features Harry using Unforgivables, Dumbledore using people as pawns in his great design and grey characters such as Xenophilius Lovegood. It demonstrates how bigotry and race-bias isn’t the one-sided product of the wizarding sense of superiority but reaped and sown by both sides. The Muggle attack on Ariana Dumbledore, Griphook’s double-crossing and the explanation of Kreacher’s motivations create a sense of depth in this book that sets it apart from the superficial childish black-and-whiteness of the others. A lot of Puritan idealist fans of Potter are going to be very disillusioned. The nature of the Muggle attack on Ariana is left purposely unelaborated, leading the more mature reader to draw some extremely unpleasant R-rated conclusions. Anyone who can still classify this as a children’s book is delusional.
Plot-wise though, it was very precarious and holey and flints abounded. The whole wand lore thing was the most convoluted and precarious plot line I've ever come across. The wand belongs to whomever disarms the wand-bearer? Has Jo even considered the implications of that in relation to a multitude of other people's wands, who routinely get disarmed? Including Harry’s?
And why didn't anybody get her to stop the chapter at the point Voldemort dies? It's supposed to be THE climatic moment of the entire series! Instead what we get is, in the space of four pages, in quick succession - Vodie dies, everybody's happy, Hooray Hooray, Peeves does his Eminem routine, Ron cracks a lame joke and the book ends with Harry contemplating the possibility of a kip in Gryffindor Tower and a sandwich. It's official, boys and girls. JKR has succumbed to her Enid Blyton influences in the end. The title of the 8th book will be "Harry Potter Has A Lot Of Fun" featuring PG bathing suits and a lot of salad and ginger beer.
Honestly, what is Jo's editorial team DOING?
All in all though, it was a truly grand finale. Trust JK to live up to her threats of killing Harry and then doing it in a way that didn't hurt the fans. Almost came close to matching the magnificence of the third and fourth books. Everyone kicks *** ...none more so than Mrs. Weasley. Take that, Weasley haters!
Ron-bashers, who are gearing up to rip him to pieces for having walked out – it takes a lot of guts to walk out, but it takes even more to walk back in. The whole book is about good people being carried away by their insecurities, their ambitions and their frustrations and making mistakes on account of them. The good guys are not those who never makes mistakes – Rowling makes it clear that such a person does not exist even in Dumbledore or Harry. The good guys are those who are willing to do everything in their power to fix those mistakes and face the consequences.
One thing I'm still steaming over...a few days after HPB came out, the fandom was agog with the notion that Harry's scar was the 7th Horcrux and he would need to kill himself to destroy it. JKR firmly debunked this a few months before DH came out, saying Harry's scar was NOT a Horcrux. I would scream foul at this now, if it weren't for the fact that she was technically right...it was Harry himself who was the Horcrux. Oh, what the heck... FOUL!!!
I can’t get over Fred’s death though. I never thought she’d kill just one of the twins. Actually, I never thought she’d kill the twins, period. That would have been bad enough but killing just one of them is evil. She might as well have amputated George’s arms and be done with it. At least Remus and Tonks died side by side, although even that is small comfort. I always thought it would be Percy who would die, as did everyone else, I think. But his redemption was one of the high points of the book. And the fact that Percy was the one fighting beside Fred when he was killed was as fitting as the fact that Fred died while he was laughing. Fred and Percy had always been each other’s prime antagonists in the family.
Every death felt like a blow to the gut, really, starting with Hedwig’s. I felt winded and numb after a while, although I can’t believe how cut up I felt over Ted Tonks. I cried hardest at Dobby’s death – I actually had to put the book away and sob uninterruptedly for 15 minutes. She wasn’t exaggerating when she said “bloodbath”.
Neville and Luna, though. How frickking AWESOME were they?
The epilogue was a bit of a WTF for me though. Not the content, but the writing style. It was bizzarely tame and regressive. Moral of the story - never write the final chapter of a bildungsroman
first and
then leave it unchanged , because in the intervening 17 years, your skills as a writer are going to grow so much that it will end up looking like you've pasted a fifth-grader's essay at the back of your Master's degree thesis.
Possible icon captions:
1. Harry/ Hermione - Like a sister, my *** !
2. Remus/ Tonks - In death not divided.
3. Molly Weasley - NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH! (Gang way! Kick-*** Molly coming through!)
4. Hermione - "Ron Weasley, you great arse !! (Punch, punch, punch)"
5. The great shame of Petunia's life...Tuney!
6. Harry: "Stuff like that always sounds cooler than it really was."
7. Percy: "I was a fool! I was an idiot! I was a pompous prat! I was a -"
Ministry-loving, family-disowning, power-hungry moron?
NO SHIT!
8. Harry: "I am the master of the Elder Wand!"
*Pause*
Observe teh sex.
9. James Potter/ Draco Malfoy: "Imagine being in Slytherin/ Hufflepuff! I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?"
Potter and Malfoy -United in the Brotherhood of Berks.
10. Lily/ Severus - Liliverus: now offically canon! Long live the cheese!
11. The new HMS WotcherWolvie slogan - We ship dead people.
12. Dumbledore - Ain't no Obi wan Kenobi after all. PWNed you!
13. Ron Weasley - Parselmouth Extraordinaire! Just gag and blow a raspberry. Snakes will come running.
14. Ron and Hermione kissing - Long live, S.P.E.W!
15. Ron and Hermione - "Always the tone of surprise."
Wotcher Wolvie, for those who can't tell simply by the name, is the fandom Mecca for Remus/Tonks shippers.
And check this out, people:
Harry Potter in 100 words Hilarious!
