Harry Potter
Aug. 9th, 2005 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatYeah, yeah, I'm okay, survived the tube down the throat thingy, couldn't tell you what it was like, since they drugged me with valium and demerol. Still a little loopy. A kind wonderful friend showed up at the hospital, escorted me home, stayed with me until she was certain I was fine and even made a call to my family to let them know. She made me feel safe, which was exactly what I required.
Also finished Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince (only a month after everyone else read it...didn't take me a month to read, but it did take longer than 36 hours, but that's only because I read it intermittently in doctors offices and subways. Spent an hour tracking down people's reviews, could only find one - d'herblay's and stuff on the ATPO board, lj won't let me scroll all the way back to July 16 - stops at July 22, damnit!). Now that I've finished it, I'm not sure what all the fuss and bother was about. Was the kerfuffle about who Harry ends up with?
Pretty formulaic book actually. No where near as interesting and complex as the first five. My two favorites continue to be Prizoner of Azkaban, Phoenix, and then Sorcerer's Stone. It really is every other one. Which means I'll probably like seven better than six. Assuming of course she does the plot twist I'm hoping she does in seven and doesn't go the trite and true route. There's evidence supporting both, depends on how good the writer is, I suppose.
What worked for me in the book was Harry and the Half-Blood Prince, who'd I pretty much figured must be Snape at one point. A theory I liked better than Voldemort (been there done that) or some other person. It also provided Harry with a different perspective on Snape's character - the Half-Blood Prince to Harry was a clever boy, helpful, interesting, someone he would be friend's with - even when he uses the dangerous spell the Prince made up against enemies...Harry doesn't see the Prince as evil. The Prince didn't tell him to do it. He merely made it up. Just as Harry didn't intend to hurt Malfoy with it - he innocently uses it. A nice corollary can be drawn between Snape who may not have intended for James and Lily to die at Voldemart's hands, he had, just as Harry does with Malfoy, done something stupid with dire results. Interesting - if this was what Rowling intends.
I hope so, because the other, far simpler reading is that Harry is good, Snape bad - just as Harry good, Voldemort bad. Which is somewhat dull in my view.
I also enjoyed Slughorn - one of the best new characters, I've seen in a while. Like Dahl, Rowlings has a deft hand at creating word caricatures of certain adult personality types. I could see more than one famous British personality within this caricature. The manipulator, who gets manipulated by both Tom Riddle and Harry Potter.
And the characters of Snape, Draco and their interactions with Harry, which can be read in more than one way.
Draco is becoming a little more interesting. I wish we had a bit more of Luna, one of the few female characters that Rowlings has created that has complexity and depth. Neville, I also missed.
Dumbledore and Hagrid did not grip me as much here. And while in Phoenix, Dumbledore had me in tears, I felt nothing when he died in this book. More a sense of relief. He'd gotten on my nerves in this book. Hadn't in any of the other ones, just this one. Not sure why - I think because the character had lost a bit of it's edge, it felt too stall. So wasn't at all surprised that the writer planned to kill him - felt more or less inevitable to me. For two reasons: 1) the formula calls for it - the boy journeying to become a man, must lose all his mentors. Heck, in case, we don't figure this out on our own, Rowlings writes a three paragraph explanation at the end of the book telling us why this is the case. He must learn he can't rely on anyone but himself. To grow up, he must lose his parents and teacher. Whedon did the same formula in BTVS. Except, instead of killing the mentor, he had the student realize that she'd outgrown the mentor's teaching and while she did still need him, she could stand on her own. (The most realistic approach and rarely done in fantasy.) Tolkien did it Rings, with Frodo losing Gandalf. Lucas in Star Wars with Luke losing Obi Wan, and Obi Wan/Anakin losing their Jedi teacher.
So, it was pretty obvious to me Dumbledore would bite it. Just as I knew they'd kill Sirius at some point. Would have been more interesting if he hadn't...but you have to be a pretty talented writer and imaginative to break with formula. Philip K. Pullman broke with formula in places, but does not have the success Rowlings does, because let's face it, people like formulas. Ain't broken? Don't fix it. 2) Only way to have Harry go up against Voldemort is to take away the Wizard who is the first choice for the role. Dumbledore. The only Wizard Voldemort ever really feared. Plus Harry would be the most traumatized by Dumbledore's death right now. Forces him to grow up.
Sort of wish she'd get rid of Hagrid, who is becoming more and more clownish as the books progress. In the first book, he was intimidating and strong. Second, mysterious. But as we move forward, he becomes more and more like a half-witted teddy bear. Not sure why? Is the author's purpose here to show how a child's view of something changes as they mature? When Harry's 11, Hagrid seemed stalwart protector, clever, knowledgable, but as 16 year old, he seems almost childlike, someone to be protected? It works plotwise, but it also removes something from the character.
Ginny Weasely grated on my ever-living nerves. Adored the character in the previous books. But now, she seems to have morphed into super-girl. The quintessential Mary Sue. The romance with Ginny is a bit too predictable and very cliche, it's also every girl's fantasy. To have the boy you have a crush on, suddenly notice you and fall for you. Not realistic - this folks, never happens in real life, or very seldom. But it does seem to happen in just about every young adult romance I've read or romance novel. I think it would have worked a little better for me, if Rowlings had built it up differently, and kept Ginny closer to the character she was in Phoenix, a little more human, a little less "all that". She did not for instance need every boy in school falling over themselves for her. To be the best Quidditch player. To be fantastic at Hexes...After a while I started rolling my eyes. And Harry's line to her about breaking up because he couldn't endanger her - was cliche as hell. It is every superhero's lament. You can almost see it coming. AND it did not work here. When I read it, I fell out of the moment. It jarred. It felt taken out of something else. Rowlings has already built up in Harry - how much he relies on his friends. Harry even askes Ginny to join Hermoine and Ron to figure out what Malfoy and Snape are up
to. He's known since book one that anyone who is friend's with him could be hurt by Voldemort. So this just doesn't work...it's too pat. To be honest, none of the romantic bits work in this book. Romance is hard to write, people think it's easy, it isn't. You have to build it gradually.
Don't get me wrong - I don't mind Ginny and Harry together... (Although I can see why people might have been a bit put out by it not being Luna/Harry - that would have been incredibly risky and hard for Rowlings to pull off, but would have created much more friction with Harry's friends and would have involved the examination of a character that is a little less "perfect". Doesn't completely track though - Harry isn't the sort who would fall for Luna, she's not what he's looking for, he wants the safe/ordinary loving family that he perceives Ron has and Ginny is part and parcel of that. Luna is what Harry is fleeing from - being different, standing out, being the odd-duck. His life with the Dursely's. Which is why that would have been an incredibly difficult relationship for a writer to pull off. But, amongst the fanbase, far more people, particularly adolescent girls, identify with Luna Lovegood. I can't imagine many people were like Ginny, actually I think most women hated people like Ginny in school.) I just find it sort of dull. But it's okay.
Prefer Ginny to Cho, who grated on my nerves in Phoenix...more than Ginny does here, actually. But to be honest?
Don't really care who Rowlings put Harry with. Just as long as it built up well.
Rowlings does it right actually in Phoenix - showing the foibles and letting it disappear. Here, she keeps placing exclamation marks - metaphorical ones - next to the characters that will be together. Making it too predictable, too set-in-stone.
The Ron/HErmoine romance should work, but doesn't. Both characters grate and seem silly. And every time the author focuses on it, the book got bogged down for me. I found myself skipping ahead. Somewhat bored.
Yeah, yeah, we know they'll be together, you've been telegraphing that for three books now...enough piddling around, can we get back to the story please? Romance is hard to do. And I don't think Rowlings can pull it off without falling into the trap of making at least one of the genders appear idiotic. Here, her girls do.
The difficulty I had with this one, was the girl characterizations were weaker. Hermoine doesn't do very much here but pine over Ron, which seems a bit odd and out of the blue at times. Or chastise Harry for doing things.
Ginny...seems to either be playing the Mrs. Weasely role of chastising Ron, or being super-girl. Luna is goofy friendless and barely seen. Professor MonGonagall (sp?) is oblivious to everything. Trewlaney - a drunken nit.
Merope - a love-sick witch. Tonks - moping over something. Always in tears. It's odd, people say that women have trouble's writing strong male characters and men can't write women characters...yet here, Rowlings does an amazing job of rendering complex, interesting, charismatic, and identifiable male characters - yet seems to have difficulties writing female ones. Not sure why this is - at least in this book. The other books, the female characters were far more well-rounded. I think the culprit is Rowlings attempt to do teen romance.
I have mixed feelings about the Snape sub-plot. It depends on what happens with the next book. Rowlings can go two ways with this. She can either have Snape be the bad guy or she can have him be Dumbledore's man, acting, somewhat reluctantly on Dumbledore's orders and attempting to redeem himself. My first reaction upon finishing the book was disappointment, damn, Snape has turned into the cliche moustache twirling villian at last. But upon reading a few things online and in a magazine, and thinking over bits and pieces in the book - I'm inclined to believe that it makes more sense that this isn't the direction the writer is going. That Snape did kill Dumbledore on his orders and did it to save Harry, Draco, Draco's family and himself. Knowing that everyone would hate him and that he had killed the one person who supported him or cared for him. This interpretation sheds a whole new and far more interesting light on the fight between Snape and Harry at the end of the book.
Where Harry tells Snape he is a coward. And Snape furiously tells him not to say that. Because, if the above is correct, Snape is right, he isn't a coward. What he is doing is in fact very courageous and difficult. Nice plot-twist, if it is one. Because that was what this book lacked, which the other's did not - the Snape plot-twist.
Snape throughout the books has been Rowlings trickster character - the one you are never quite sure of. Tough characters to pull off, because sooner or later the audience/reader figures out your game and knows, wait he's not going to betray the hero, he hasn't before. Or wait, of course he'll betray the hero, is the hero, deeply stupid? So you have to flip back and forth. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn't. But give reasons to back up why. Eventually the writer does have to make a choice - do I redeem trickster or kill him? I'll say this much, the better stories find a way to redeem than just kill. Because those are usually the one's who have something to say. That said, you can kill trickster in such a way that he is redeemed or his death has importance - see how Tolkien dealt with Gollum in Rings as an example.
Trickster characters are easy to spot in stories - they are usually the most controversial characters and fought over the most by fans of the story. You either love him or hate him. Or if you are like me - both.
From the very beginning I knew Snape was Rowling's trickster. This book she literally telegraph's it with the Half-Blood Prince reveal. Which is meant to tell the audience - don't trust everything Harry thinks. Harry, being an adolescent, still sees the world in black and white tones. The good guys are over here and the bad guys are over there. But in each book, Rowlings gives Harry information that the world isn't that clean cut.
In Phoenix Harry finds out that his beloved father, Sirius, and Lupin played horrible and bullying tricks on Snape. Some that are in fact reminiscent of the stuff Draco tried to do to him in Sorcerer's Stone. Then in Prince, Harry himself uses a forbidden curse to hurt Malfoy - one as bad as the one Malfoy attempts to inflict on him. That almost kills Malfoy. He didn't mean to. But...how far is Harry from Snape morally? Or Harry's use of the Potions book to aid him? The lines are getting blurred. In contrast, we see Tom Riddle who does see things in black and white - good and evil. Who cannot love. Who only wants to live forever, yet doesn't live.
Misses out on what living is, so intent is he on avoiding death. These themes lie at the core of the novel and are most likely the reason people are devoring it.
The other theme in the book which to some extent is lost on an American audience, is class or rather caste. I'm sorry, but the whole pure blood, mud-blood deal is sort of lost on me. I understand it, can sympathsize with it, but not empathisize. It's a culture clash. In the US we do have a class system more or less, but it's very different than the ones you'll find in England. Pure-blood in Us, is blue-blood, which we tend to make fun of, because, hello? Paris Hilton. Self-made millionaires run our country not royalty. We don't have Kings or Queens and tend to find the concept sort of silly or incredibly romantic like a fairy tale. And all that in-breeding? I laughed at some of Rowlings snarky comments on it in the book, but I don't believe I appreciated them the way she intended. So the closest an American audience can come to appreciating that theme is I believe in the context of racism, which isn't exactly the same thing. We don't have a "caste" system here, at least not in the same way. Ours is based on money and yes it is broken up into old wealth and new wealth, but it's not into pureblood in quite the same way. Saw a little of this examined in Bride and Prejudice - which actually did a decent job with it.
Overall...I enjoyed aspects of this novel. But I'll reserve judgment on how good it is - until I see the next installment, which should be sometime in 2007, I'd imagine.
Also finished Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince (only a month after everyone else read it...didn't take me a month to read, but it did take longer than 36 hours, but that's only because I read it intermittently in doctors offices and subways. Spent an hour tracking down people's reviews, could only find one - d'herblay's and stuff on the ATPO board, lj won't let me scroll all the way back to July 16 - stops at July 22, damnit!). Now that I've finished it, I'm not sure what all the fuss and bother was about. Was the kerfuffle about who Harry ends up with?
Pretty formulaic book actually. No where near as interesting and complex as the first five. My two favorites continue to be Prizoner of Azkaban, Phoenix, and then Sorcerer's Stone. It really is every other one. Which means I'll probably like seven better than six. Assuming of course she does the plot twist I'm hoping she does in seven and doesn't go the trite and true route. There's evidence supporting both, depends on how good the writer is, I suppose.
What worked for me in the book was Harry and the Half-Blood Prince, who'd I pretty much figured must be Snape at one point. A theory I liked better than Voldemort (been there done that) or some other person. It also provided Harry with a different perspective on Snape's character - the Half-Blood Prince to Harry was a clever boy, helpful, interesting, someone he would be friend's with - even when he uses the dangerous spell the Prince made up against enemies...Harry doesn't see the Prince as evil. The Prince didn't tell him to do it. He merely made it up. Just as Harry didn't intend to hurt Malfoy with it - he innocently uses it. A nice corollary can be drawn between Snape who may not have intended for James and Lily to die at Voldemart's hands, he had, just as Harry does with Malfoy, done something stupid with dire results. Interesting - if this was what Rowling intends.
I hope so, because the other, far simpler reading is that Harry is good, Snape bad - just as Harry good, Voldemort bad. Which is somewhat dull in my view.
I also enjoyed Slughorn - one of the best new characters, I've seen in a while. Like Dahl, Rowlings has a deft hand at creating word caricatures of certain adult personality types. I could see more than one famous British personality within this caricature. The manipulator, who gets manipulated by both Tom Riddle and Harry Potter.
And the characters of Snape, Draco and their interactions with Harry, which can be read in more than one way.
Draco is becoming a little more interesting. I wish we had a bit more of Luna, one of the few female characters that Rowlings has created that has complexity and depth. Neville, I also missed.
Dumbledore and Hagrid did not grip me as much here. And while in Phoenix, Dumbledore had me in tears, I felt nothing when he died in this book. More a sense of relief. He'd gotten on my nerves in this book. Hadn't in any of the other ones, just this one. Not sure why - I think because the character had lost a bit of it's edge, it felt too stall. So wasn't at all surprised that the writer planned to kill him - felt more or less inevitable to me. For two reasons: 1) the formula calls for it - the boy journeying to become a man, must lose all his mentors. Heck, in case, we don't figure this out on our own, Rowlings writes a three paragraph explanation at the end of the book telling us why this is the case. He must learn he can't rely on anyone but himself. To grow up, he must lose his parents and teacher. Whedon did the same formula in BTVS. Except, instead of killing the mentor, he had the student realize that she'd outgrown the mentor's teaching and while she did still need him, she could stand on her own. (The most realistic approach and rarely done in fantasy.) Tolkien did it Rings, with Frodo losing Gandalf. Lucas in Star Wars with Luke losing Obi Wan, and Obi Wan/Anakin losing their Jedi teacher.
So, it was pretty obvious to me Dumbledore would bite it. Just as I knew they'd kill Sirius at some point. Would have been more interesting if he hadn't...but you have to be a pretty talented writer and imaginative to break with formula. Philip K. Pullman broke with formula in places, but does not have the success Rowlings does, because let's face it, people like formulas. Ain't broken? Don't fix it. 2) Only way to have Harry go up against Voldemort is to take away the Wizard who is the first choice for the role. Dumbledore. The only Wizard Voldemort ever really feared. Plus Harry would be the most traumatized by Dumbledore's death right now. Forces him to grow up.
Sort of wish she'd get rid of Hagrid, who is becoming more and more clownish as the books progress. In the first book, he was intimidating and strong. Second, mysterious. But as we move forward, he becomes more and more like a half-witted teddy bear. Not sure why? Is the author's purpose here to show how a child's view of something changes as they mature? When Harry's 11, Hagrid seemed stalwart protector, clever, knowledgable, but as 16 year old, he seems almost childlike, someone to be protected? It works plotwise, but it also removes something from the character.
Ginny Weasely grated on my ever-living nerves. Adored the character in the previous books. But now, she seems to have morphed into super-girl. The quintessential Mary Sue. The romance with Ginny is a bit too predictable and very cliche, it's also every girl's fantasy. To have the boy you have a crush on, suddenly notice you and fall for you. Not realistic - this folks, never happens in real life, or very seldom. But it does seem to happen in just about every young adult romance I've read or romance novel. I think it would have worked a little better for me, if Rowlings had built it up differently, and kept Ginny closer to the character she was in Phoenix, a little more human, a little less "all that". She did not for instance need every boy in school falling over themselves for her. To be the best Quidditch player. To be fantastic at Hexes...After a while I started rolling my eyes. And Harry's line to her about breaking up because he couldn't endanger her - was cliche as hell. It is every superhero's lament. You can almost see it coming. AND it did not work here. When I read it, I fell out of the moment. It jarred. It felt taken out of something else. Rowlings has already built up in Harry - how much he relies on his friends. Harry even askes Ginny to join Hermoine and Ron to figure out what Malfoy and Snape are up
to. He's known since book one that anyone who is friend's with him could be hurt by Voldemort. So this just doesn't work...it's too pat. To be honest, none of the romantic bits work in this book. Romance is hard to write, people think it's easy, it isn't. You have to build it gradually.
Don't get me wrong - I don't mind Ginny and Harry together... (Although I can see why people might have been a bit put out by it not being Luna/Harry - that would have been incredibly risky and hard for Rowlings to pull off, but would have created much more friction with Harry's friends and would have involved the examination of a character that is a little less "perfect". Doesn't completely track though - Harry isn't the sort who would fall for Luna, she's not what he's looking for, he wants the safe/ordinary loving family that he perceives Ron has and Ginny is part and parcel of that. Luna is what Harry is fleeing from - being different, standing out, being the odd-duck. His life with the Dursely's. Which is why that would have been an incredibly difficult relationship for a writer to pull off. But, amongst the fanbase, far more people, particularly adolescent girls, identify with Luna Lovegood. I can't imagine many people were like Ginny, actually I think most women hated people like Ginny in school.) I just find it sort of dull. But it's okay.
Prefer Ginny to Cho, who grated on my nerves in Phoenix...more than Ginny does here, actually. But to be honest?
Don't really care who Rowlings put Harry with. Just as long as it built up well.
Rowlings does it right actually in Phoenix - showing the foibles and letting it disappear. Here, she keeps placing exclamation marks - metaphorical ones - next to the characters that will be together. Making it too predictable, too set-in-stone.
The Ron/HErmoine romance should work, but doesn't. Both characters grate and seem silly. And every time the author focuses on it, the book got bogged down for me. I found myself skipping ahead. Somewhat bored.
Yeah, yeah, we know they'll be together, you've been telegraphing that for three books now...enough piddling around, can we get back to the story please? Romance is hard to do. And I don't think Rowlings can pull it off without falling into the trap of making at least one of the genders appear idiotic. Here, her girls do.
The difficulty I had with this one, was the girl characterizations were weaker. Hermoine doesn't do very much here but pine over Ron, which seems a bit odd and out of the blue at times. Or chastise Harry for doing things.
Ginny...seems to either be playing the Mrs. Weasely role of chastising Ron, or being super-girl. Luna is goofy friendless and barely seen. Professor MonGonagall (sp?) is oblivious to everything. Trewlaney - a drunken nit.
Merope - a love-sick witch. Tonks - moping over something. Always in tears. It's odd, people say that women have trouble's writing strong male characters and men can't write women characters...yet here, Rowlings does an amazing job of rendering complex, interesting, charismatic, and identifiable male characters - yet seems to have difficulties writing female ones. Not sure why this is - at least in this book. The other books, the female characters were far more well-rounded. I think the culprit is Rowlings attempt to do teen romance.
I have mixed feelings about the Snape sub-plot. It depends on what happens with the next book. Rowlings can go two ways with this. She can either have Snape be the bad guy or she can have him be Dumbledore's man, acting, somewhat reluctantly on Dumbledore's orders and attempting to redeem himself. My first reaction upon finishing the book was disappointment, damn, Snape has turned into the cliche moustache twirling villian at last. But upon reading a few things online and in a magazine, and thinking over bits and pieces in the book - I'm inclined to believe that it makes more sense that this isn't the direction the writer is going. That Snape did kill Dumbledore on his orders and did it to save Harry, Draco, Draco's family and himself. Knowing that everyone would hate him and that he had killed the one person who supported him or cared for him. This interpretation sheds a whole new and far more interesting light on the fight between Snape and Harry at the end of the book.
Where Harry tells Snape he is a coward. And Snape furiously tells him not to say that. Because, if the above is correct, Snape is right, he isn't a coward. What he is doing is in fact very courageous and difficult. Nice plot-twist, if it is one. Because that was what this book lacked, which the other's did not - the Snape plot-twist.
Snape throughout the books has been Rowlings trickster character - the one you are never quite sure of. Tough characters to pull off, because sooner or later the audience/reader figures out your game and knows, wait he's not going to betray the hero, he hasn't before. Or wait, of course he'll betray the hero, is the hero, deeply stupid? So you have to flip back and forth. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn't. But give reasons to back up why. Eventually the writer does have to make a choice - do I redeem trickster or kill him? I'll say this much, the better stories find a way to redeem than just kill. Because those are usually the one's who have something to say. That said, you can kill trickster in such a way that he is redeemed or his death has importance - see how Tolkien dealt with Gollum in Rings as an example.
Trickster characters are easy to spot in stories - they are usually the most controversial characters and fought over the most by fans of the story. You either love him or hate him. Or if you are like me - both.
From the very beginning I knew Snape was Rowling's trickster. This book she literally telegraph's it with the Half-Blood Prince reveal. Which is meant to tell the audience - don't trust everything Harry thinks. Harry, being an adolescent, still sees the world in black and white tones. The good guys are over here and the bad guys are over there. But in each book, Rowlings gives Harry information that the world isn't that clean cut.
In Phoenix Harry finds out that his beloved father, Sirius, and Lupin played horrible and bullying tricks on Snape. Some that are in fact reminiscent of the stuff Draco tried to do to him in Sorcerer's Stone. Then in Prince, Harry himself uses a forbidden curse to hurt Malfoy - one as bad as the one Malfoy attempts to inflict on him. That almost kills Malfoy. He didn't mean to. But...how far is Harry from Snape morally? Or Harry's use of the Potions book to aid him? The lines are getting blurred. In contrast, we see Tom Riddle who does see things in black and white - good and evil. Who cannot love. Who only wants to live forever, yet doesn't live.
Misses out on what living is, so intent is he on avoiding death. These themes lie at the core of the novel and are most likely the reason people are devoring it.
The other theme in the book which to some extent is lost on an American audience, is class or rather caste. I'm sorry, but the whole pure blood, mud-blood deal is sort of lost on me. I understand it, can sympathsize with it, but not empathisize. It's a culture clash. In the US we do have a class system more or less, but it's very different than the ones you'll find in England. Pure-blood in Us, is blue-blood, which we tend to make fun of, because, hello? Paris Hilton. Self-made millionaires run our country not royalty. We don't have Kings or Queens and tend to find the concept sort of silly or incredibly romantic like a fairy tale. And all that in-breeding? I laughed at some of Rowlings snarky comments on it in the book, but I don't believe I appreciated them the way she intended. So the closest an American audience can come to appreciating that theme is I believe in the context of racism, which isn't exactly the same thing. We don't have a "caste" system here, at least not in the same way. Ours is based on money and yes it is broken up into old wealth and new wealth, but it's not into pureblood in quite the same way. Saw a little of this examined in Bride and Prejudice - which actually did a decent job with it.
Overall...I enjoyed aspects of this novel. But I'll reserve judgment on how good it is - until I see the next installment, which should be sometime in 2007, I'd imagine.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-10 12:15 am (UTC)I quite agree with you about Snape as the trickster, so much more interesting that way.
Glad to hear your test went well and that you are home and safe.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-10 12:34 am (UTC)Agree for the most part about Dumbledore and Snape. Dumbledore was the one who had to die for Harry to move on as the hero. Unexpected, though, was that it was Snape who did it, and equally so that Voldemort had charged a 16 year old with doing it. I was amused that (once again) Harry's suspicions of Draco that were 'pooh-poohed' by Ron and Hermione proved to be validated. Reminded me of the many times Buffy's assessment of a situation was initially brushed aside.
Personally, I think Snape will play a significant, and dangerous, role in the final book. Ultimately I believe he'll come down on the anti-Voldemort side after having played an intricate game of deception. (Notice I don't necessarily think he comes down on Harry's side except that they are both against Voldemort, heh).
And given the possibilities of Snape, the death of Dumbledore, Death-Eaters in Hogwarts and the declarations of Harry, Ron and Hermione that they aren't going back to Hogwarts, the fact that the biggest kerfuffles and outright flame wars have been about who Harry and Hermione 'end up' with amuses the heck out of me. The most vocal are those who ship Harry/Hermione who believe that JKR deliberately misdirected them by all the clues leading to a H/Hr romance for the sole purpose of disappointing a huge sector of her audience. (By the way, one of those obvious clues is that Harry and Hermione rode together on Buckbeak. Yuh huh). For myself, I pretty much figure Harry likes Hermione and Ginny, and Hermione likes Ron and Harry (and Victor--that guy she went to visit in Romania, yes?) and that they're 15 and 16 year olds. Harry having his little epiphany about OMG Ginny! felt much like "I'm seventeen. Linoleum makes me wanna have sex." But then I thought Harry and Ginny was less out of the blue than Ron and Lavender. Right, Lavender. Heh. Then again, I think most of us (not all) are very thankful that our first romances as teenagers did not define our One True Lives for all eternity.
Other reviews that I can think of:
Masq (http://www.livejournal.com/users/masqthephlsphr/252381.html)
oyceter (http://www.livejournal.com/users/oyceter/315912.html)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-10 02:03 am (UTC)Read both Masq and oyceter's reviews, find myself agreeing almost completely with Masq's take on the novel. My difficulty is I'm not sure I trust the writer. (If it were Whedon, I'd know that Snape was not on the side of the Death Eaters...but not so sure about Rowlings.) Also like masq, I like my Snape complex.
I agree with your take on Snape. I think it's highly likely he's against Voldemort, but not on the side of Harry. He may feel towards Harry much the same way Harry felt towards Draco. Far more interesting and complex.
Just not sure she'll carry it off.
Heard about the kerfuffles in the Potter fandom from a friend of mine, who told me all about the H/H ship thing. Which puzzeled me. Because I honestly don't see it. But to be honest, again, I'm like Masq here, don't really see romantic relationships in these books. It's not Rowlings strong suite and she put so little of it in the previous books.
As oyceter puts it in her review - the Ginny/Harry romance seems to pop up out of the blue. You see more interaction in Phoenix between Harry and Luna than Harry and Ginny...which says something. Rowlings should have built it up a bit more. Ron and Hermoine - is built a bit, via Ron, which was why I knew Rowlings wasn't going there with Harry. It's an unwritten rule in stories like this, that you NEVER put the hero with the gal-friday character or best-friend. Buffy could never be with Xander.
The reason is in serials, the romance can't really happen, because it gets boring fast. You'd have to kill or break up or something. Much better to put them with a minor character or supporting one. Yet, fans of both series for some reason don't get that. The writer will always pick the relationship that takes the character into the most interesting place.
Not necessarily the one that would make the character happiest.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-10 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-10 03:25 pm (UTC)But it doesn't work well outside that genre. To be honest, I'm not sure it works well in the genre, but that's just me.