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On Friday nights, I generally go pick Mary up from work at her funky downtown late-night job a few blocks down from a funky downtown independent bookstore, so I had it all planned that we should go to The Regulator that night and get our books and Experience the Experience and all that -- and then I drove past the Experience, and it was -- dude, it was like a fucking Stones concert out there! The line went two blocks in both directions, multiple people deep in many places, and just, no. I can be a little chary about crowds (my claustrophobia/suffocation issue kicks in, often without warning), and also, I wanted to *read* the damn book before work today, not spend five hours in line and then not have time. So we picked up two copies at the grocery store, done and done.
I was a little wistful, because it might've been cool to stay and do the whole deal, but then honestly, I'm not *fannish* about Harry Potter, so it almost felt insincere somehow. Right there on the Duke campus, an awful lot of the people I saw were college-aged, and I realized that these kids, these eighteen-, twenty-year-old kids are the ones who probably starting reading the series ten years ago when they *were* children. This *is* their childhood, this is their *thing.* This is their Star Wars.
I personally just wanted to get through the thing before I got spoiled left, right, and center. I'm not *freaky* about HP spoilers, but I thought it would be nice to go without them.
What really surprised me about it was...how not that surprising it was. Often with HP, there's some kind of utterly wonky plot twist at the very end that isn't *totally* out of left field, but pretty much. Mad-Eye Moody has been living in a trunk all semester long! Ron's annoying little sister is possessed by Voldemort! WEREWOLF! You know, stuff that there were little clues for, but not so as anyone would reasonably be expected to put it together until that last evidence pops up in the final reel. This time it was like -- Snape and Dumbledore were in it together all along? Harry's a Horcrux? Dude, WE KNOW. We all know. Honestly, there was nothing in the book that even *startled* me a little, let alone shocked me.
Which isn't to say I didn't like it. It was well-done, I think, and there's significant virtue in using your final installment to do the much-needed wraps to long-standing plot threads, rather than throwing in a bunch of new craziness into the mix. Still, was I a little disappointed that it didn't turn out that Ron was Dumbledore or Hermione was a dude or something else outre? Little bit.
The philosophy/morality wasn't all that awful, even if it was a little thickly sprayed-on for my tastes -- it's bad to covet power so much that you destroy others for it! It's good to be selfless and willing to sacrifice! If you have to say that kind of thing, Mystical Magical Metaphor is totally the way to go, so I thought the whole "Hallows or Horcruxes?" issue was a pretty decent gloss on the Themes.
And certainly I enjoyed it, if only because I've been waiting LO THESE MANY YEARS for Snape to get his credit, and he finally did, even if only in flashback. I was glad Rowling didn't back out at the last second from that whole thing where James and Sirius were bullying assholes in school, and I thought it was really awesome that instead of going the Snape Loved Pure Princess Lily From Afar and Without a Chance In Hell route, which I assumed was the plan, she actually gave them this interesting intimate friendship -- and made it in large part *Snape's unwillingness to take responsibility for his rebellious adolescent fascism* that pushes her out of his grasp, not just that she dug the Quidditch hottie more. Even more now than ever, I find that previous generation even more interesting than our current heroes -- from fucked-up black sheep Sirius to poor, tortured Remus to idealistic Lily to James, this self-involved, vain, vicious kid who, when he grows up into a world in crisis, manages to find his footing and become someone who will die for a cause -- and, of course, Snape, who was pressed and pressed and pressed all his life to conform to something ugly, by his friends and his enemies alike, and is, in fact, the bravest guy for the least reward in the entire damn series. I especially loved it that a lot of people's rationale for Dumbledore's trust was that, well, Snape must have been under an Unbreakable Oath to help him -- and yet it turns out, not at all. Dumbledore trusted him completely because Dumbledore knew him; he never had any hold over Snape except for Snape's word, which it turns out really was all that was needed. ROCK.
I've heard a couple of people compare Snape to the Malfoys, in the sense of being essentially selfish people who make an exception for their own loved ones, but I think in Snape's case that really badly underestimates him: unlike Lucius and Narcissa with their son, Lily had twenty years ago stopped being someone that Snape could have or be with or even be thanked by, ever in his life. I think it's clear in this book that Snape turns on Voldemort because -- and this is very true, I think, to real-life prejudice -- it's all well and good to parrot what everyone you know says about Those People and assume it's all normal and right, but when you really know and care for some of Those People as *individuals,* you can't stay blind to what's done to them. I think he turns on Voldemort because all his life, he'd seen Lily as *everything good,* his only real source of kindness and compassion and respect, and Voldemort destroyed that. Snape sacrificed the rest of his life to a veritable suicide mission to bring Voldemort down, not because it would ever give him Lily back again, but because he simply couldn't live with the gaping hole in the world without needing to atone for his part in causing it - and that's as admirable a motive as I can think of, when most people spend all their time justifying why it's not *their* fault and anyway there was nothing else they could have done. Snape was always too clear-headed for that kind of bullshit; he knew who he was and he knew what he couldn't go back and change, and what he could do from that point out. And from that point out, there was never one thing that needed to be done that Snape failed to step up and do, however degrading, difficult, or dangerous it was. As far as I'm concerned, he's more of a hero than anyone else in the series, and his personal failings and bitternesses only make him more human to me. James Potter fucking *tormented* him for years, preyed in a gang on an isolated, awkward, maladjusted kid, and is remembered now as some kind of great hero, while Snape was widely (and utterly wrongly) known to everyone as a groveling traitor, a Death-Eater when it was convenient to be one and the first to jump ship when the tide turned. Should he have treated the son who looked so much like James with the spite and anger he did? No. But if you're completely sure you wouldn't have, then you're a much better person than I am.
I think she walked a pretty good line with her treatment of Dumbledore -- complicating his character and bringing up the dark underbelly of his role as the scheming mastermind of the Order of the Phoenix without throwing him under the bus entirely. Had it been me, I probably wouldn't have tossed in at the last minute that he suspected Harry would survive -- but then I've always liked the whole Dumbledore the Steely General angle, and I thought it was kind of cool that at that point, Harry saw the same necessity and didn't hold a grudge. His anger was when he was scared that Dumbledore hadn't cared about him; once he got a handle on that, he was pretty down with the idea that Dumbledore *had* cared about him, but was still able to arrange what had to be done. I thought it was rather beautiful and touching that you had this contrast between how difficult Snape found the whole thing to swallow and how quietly calm Harry was about it. Snape is, at rock bottom, kind of a sentimental bastard; Harry, as a man, is Dumbledore's heir in spirit, unflinching and focused on the end game. That was why it felt so appropriate for the Deathstick to pass between them as it did, and for Harry to (presumably) be the one to finish Dumbledore's work of breaking its power.
In other news, Neville is awesome. I held out all the way through Half-Blood Prince, willing to *bet* that the ultimate twist to the series would be that everyone had been mistaken about the prophecy and that Neville, not Harry, was the Chosen One. The blathery thing about self-fulfilling prophecies convinced me finally that wasn't where she was headed, and that always disappointed me somewhat. So I marked this down as a partial victory for me -- it was Neville, after all, who broke the final Horcrux and, in essence, struck down Voldemort for good. In a rather talky final showdown, he got the most cinematic and exciting moment, and I love him.
I feel like if Rowling *didn't want* us all to write Dumbledore/Grindlwald, she wouldn't have made such a fuss everytime the latter came up about what a fox he was. I mean, that's just shameless begging for lots pre-War, sort of E.M. Forester-ish, Christopher Isherwood-ish brilliant-beautiful-and-doomed slash about Albus and Gellert and their sexy teenage Nazi love, RIGHT?
Best moment involving snakes: Nagini erupts out of Bathilda's corpse. FUCKED UP and awesome, the only bit in the book that genuinely gave me the wig. Worst moment involving snakes: Ron speaks Parseltongue phonetically. WTF? Not buying it.
Best moment involving babies: Harry's freakout over Parents Who Go Away, which was very poignant and in character. Worst moment involving babies: ALL THE REST OF THEM. Seriously, if the epilogue could have been just a tiny, tiny bit less all about how everyone's happiness is crystallized around raising a passle of wizarding babies, that would've been cool. I don't even mind everyone marrying each other -- much. Somewhat cheesy, but hey, whatever. But, like, what the fuck do these people even do for a living? We spent all these years follwing the minutiae of their education, and we know fucking NOTHING about what they've done with themselves for twenty years, except proven quite fertile. I find that galling. I actually gave a damn about what they were all going to do with, you know, the vast majority of their lives! But apparently it wasn't interesting enough to shoehorn into a paragraph anywhere in there.
I'm sort of torn about the big Molly/Bellatrix showdown, because honestly, I've found it sort of gross and weird how Molly is this, like, psychotic, fetishized Wizarding Donna Reed, totally neurotically focused on her kids even when everyone else on the planet can see that there's a whole World At Stake issue here. I mean, yes, she's their mom. But Arthur is their dad, and he's always been able to be loving and protective while also *wanting* them to grow up and do right, whereas Molly's love has always read to me as well-intentioned, but also creepy and smothering. So I thought it was cool to see her be a badass, but at the same time, watching her go psycho and scream about her children, the DEAR AND PRECIOUS CHILDREN -- I don't know, it hit my buttons in a bad way. She's not allowed to hate evil the way the rest of them do, because it's *evil?* She's never allowed for one single second to step out of this thing where everything is about her kids -- even in the middle of the frigging apocalypse, that's literally all she thinks about? Weird. I didn't feel like the other characters' genuine love for their friends and family was diminished by the fact that they had other lenses through which to view the world, but it kind of felt like Molly wouldn't have been a Good Enough Mom if she cared for a second about anything else, ever, in seven books. Which is part of that whole disingenuous Motherhood Mystique that really bothers me because of how no one is actually like that, and it feels designed to punish women for never truly being the Good Enough Mom.
To sum up: Not bad at all. Thanks, Jo -- we've enjoyed it much.
I was a little wistful, because it might've been cool to stay and do the whole deal, but then honestly, I'm not *fannish* about Harry Potter, so it almost felt insincere somehow. Right there on the Duke campus, an awful lot of the people I saw were college-aged, and I realized that these kids, these eighteen-, twenty-year-old kids are the ones who probably starting reading the series ten years ago when they *were* children. This *is* their childhood, this is their *thing.* This is their Star Wars.
I personally just wanted to get through the thing before I got spoiled left, right, and center. I'm not *freaky* about HP spoilers, but I thought it would be nice to go without them.
What really surprised me about it was...how not that surprising it was. Often with HP, there's some kind of utterly wonky plot twist at the very end that isn't *totally* out of left field, but pretty much. Mad-Eye Moody has been living in a trunk all semester long! Ron's annoying little sister is possessed by Voldemort! WEREWOLF! You know, stuff that there were little clues for, but not so as anyone would reasonably be expected to put it together until that last evidence pops up in the final reel. This time it was like -- Snape and Dumbledore were in it together all along? Harry's a Horcrux? Dude, WE KNOW. We all know. Honestly, there was nothing in the book that even *startled* me a little, let alone shocked me.
Which isn't to say I didn't like it. It was well-done, I think, and there's significant virtue in using your final installment to do the much-needed wraps to long-standing plot threads, rather than throwing in a bunch of new craziness into the mix. Still, was I a little disappointed that it didn't turn out that Ron was Dumbledore or Hermione was a dude or something else outre? Little bit.
The philosophy/morality wasn't all that awful, even if it was a little thickly sprayed-on for my tastes -- it's bad to covet power so much that you destroy others for it! It's good to be selfless and willing to sacrifice! If you have to say that kind of thing, Mystical Magical Metaphor is totally the way to go, so I thought the whole "Hallows or Horcruxes?" issue was a pretty decent gloss on the Themes.
And certainly I enjoyed it, if only because I've been waiting LO THESE MANY YEARS for Snape to get his credit, and he finally did, even if only in flashback. I was glad Rowling didn't back out at the last second from that whole thing where James and Sirius were bullying assholes in school, and I thought it was really awesome that instead of going the Snape Loved Pure Princess Lily From Afar and Without a Chance In Hell route, which I assumed was the plan, she actually gave them this interesting intimate friendship -- and made it in large part *Snape's unwillingness to take responsibility for his rebellious adolescent fascism* that pushes her out of his grasp, not just that she dug the Quidditch hottie more. Even more now than ever, I find that previous generation even more interesting than our current heroes -- from fucked-up black sheep Sirius to poor, tortured Remus to idealistic Lily to James, this self-involved, vain, vicious kid who, when he grows up into a world in crisis, manages to find his footing and become someone who will die for a cause -- and, of course, Snape, who was pressed and pressed and pressed all his life to conform to something ugly, by his friends and his enemies alike, and is, in fact, the bravest guy for the least reward in the entire damn series. I especially loved it that a lot of people's rationale for Dumbledore's trust was that, well, Snape must have been under an Unbreakable Oath to help him -- and yet it turns out, not at all. Dumbledore trusted him completely because Dumbledore knew him; he never had any hold over Snape except for Snape's word, which it turns out really was all that was needed. ROCK.
I've heard a couple of people compare Snape to the Malfoys, in the sense of being essentially selfish people who make an exception for their own loved ones, but I think in Snape's case that really badly underestimates him: unlike Lucius and Narcissa with their son, Lily had twenty years ago stopped being someone that Snape could have or be with or even be thanked by, ever in his life. I think it's clear in this book that Snape turns on Voldemort because -- and this is very true, I think, to real-life prejudice -- it's all well and good to parrot what everyone you know says about Those People and assume it's all normal and right, but when you really know and care for some of Those People as *individuals,* you can't stay blind to what's done to them. I think he turns on Voldemort because all his life, he'd seen Lily as *everything good,* his only real source of kindness and compassion and respect, and Voldemort destroyed that. Snape sacrificed the rest of his life to a veritable suicide mission to bring Voldemort down, not because it would ever give him Lily back again, but because he simply couldn't live with the gaping hole in the world without needing to atone for his part in causing it - and that's as admirable a motive as I can think of, when most people spend all their time justifying why it's not *their* fault and anyway there was nothing else they could have done. Snape was always too clear-headed for that kind of bullshit; he knew who he was and he knew what he couldn't go back and change, and what he could do from that point out. And from that point out, there was never one thing that needed to be done that Snape failed to step up and do, however degrading, difficult, or dangerous it was. As far as I'm concerned, he's more of a hero than anyone else in the series, and his personal failings and bitternesses only make him more human to me. James Potter fucking *tormented* him for years, preyed in a gang on an isolated, awkward, maladjusted kid, and is remembered now as some kind of great hero, while Snape was widely (and utterly wrongly) known to everyone as a groveling traitor, a Death-Eater when it was convenient to be one and the first to jump ship when the tide turned. Should he have treated the son who looked so much like James with the spite and anger he did? No. But if you're completely sure you wouldn't have, then you're a much better person than I am.
I think she walked a pretty good line with her treatment of Dumbledore -- complicating his character and bringing up the dark underbelly of his role as the scheming mastermind of the Order of the Phoenix without throwing him under the bus entirely. Had it been me, I probably wouldn't have tossed in at the last minute that he suspected Harry would survive -- but then I've always liked the whole Dumbledore the Steely General angle, and I thought it was kind of cool that at that point, Harry saw the same necessity and didn't hold a grudge. His anger was when he was scared that Dumbledore hadn't cared about him; once he got a handle on that, he was pretty down with the idea that Dumbledore *had* cared about him, but was still able to arrange what had to be done. I thought it was rather beautiful and touching that you had this contrast between how difficult Snape found the whole thing to swallow and how quietly calm Harry was about it. Snape is, at rock bottom, kind of a sentimental bastard; Harry, as a man, is Dumbledore's heir in spirit, unflinching and focused on the end game. That was why it felt so appropriate for the Deathstick to pass between them as it did, and for Harry to (presumably) be the one to finish Dumbledore's work of breaking its power.
In other news, Neville is awesome. I held out all the way through Half-Blood Prince, willing to *bet* that the ultimate twist to the series would be that everyone had been mistaken about the prophecy and that Neville, not Harry, was the Chosen One. The blathery thing about self-fulfilling prophecies convinced me finally that wasn't where she was headed, and that always disappointed me somewhat. So I marked this down as a partial victory for me -- it was Neville, after all, who broke the final Horcrux and, in essence, struck down Voldemort for good. In a rather talky final showdown, he got the most cinematic and exciting moment, and I love him.
I feel like if Rowling *didn't want* us all to write Dumbledore/Grindlwald, she wouldn't have made such a fuss everytime the latter came up about what a fox he was. I mean, that's just shameless begging for lots pre-War, sort of E.M. Forester-ish, Christopher Isherwood-ish brilliant-beautiful-and-doomed slash about Albus and Gellert and their sexy teenage Nazi love, RIGHT?
Best moment involving snakes: Nagini erupts out of Bathilda's corpse. FUCKED UP and awesome, the only bit in the book that genuinely gave me the wig. Worst moment involving snakes: Ron speaks Parseltongue phonetically. WTF? Not buying it.
Best moment involving babies: Harry's freakout over Parents Who Go Away, which was very poignant and in character. Worst moment involving babies: ALL THE REST OF THEM. Seriously, if the epilogue could have been just a tiny, tiny bit less all about how everyone's happiness is crystallized around raising a passle of wizarding babies, that would've been cool. I don't even mind everyone marrying each other -- much. Somewhat cheesy, but hey, whatever. But, like, what the fuck do these people even do for a living? We spent all these years follwing the minutiae of their education, and we know fucking NOTHING about what they've done with themselves for twenty years, except proven quite fertile. I find that galling. I actually gave a damn about what they were all going to do with, you know, the vast majority of their lives! But apparently it wasn't interesting enough to shoehorn into a paragraph anywhere in there.
I'm sort of torn about the big Molly/Bellatrix showdown, because honestly, I've found it sort of gross and weird how Molly is this, like, psychotic, fetishized Wizarding Donna Reed, totally neurotically focused on her kids even when everyone else on the planet can see that there's a whole World At Stake issue here. I mean, yes, she's their mom. But Arthur is their dad, and he's always been able to be loving and protective while also *wanting* them to grow up and do right, whereas Molly's love has always read to me as well-intentioned, but also creepy and smothering. So I thought it was cool to see her be a badass, but at the same time, watching her go psycho and scream about her children, the DEAR AND PRECIOUS CHILDREN -- I don't know, it hit my buttons in a bad way. She's not allowed to hate evil the way the rest of them do, because it's *evil?* She's never allowed for one single second to step out of this thing where everything is about her kids -- even in the middle of the frigging apocalypse, that's literally all she thinks about? Weird. I didn't feel like the other characters' genuine love for their friends and family was diminished by the fact that they had other lenses through which to view the world, but it kind of felt like Molly wouldn't have been a Good Enough Mom if she cared for a second about anything else, ever, in seven books. Which is part of that whole disingenuous Motherhood Mystique that really bothers me because of how no one is actually like that, and it feels designed to punish women for never truly being the Good Enough Mom.
To sum up: Not bad at all. Thanks, Jo -- we've enjoyed it much.
