the last time I’ll do this (spoilers under cut)

One Response to the last time I’ll do this (spoilers under cut)

1. Mokey says:

   July 24, 2007 at 11:50 am

   Logical flaws

   Lots of problems with the Fidelius Charm:

   JKR has said that with the Fidelius Charm, when the Secret Keeper dies the secret dies with him. Yet suddenly here, everyone he has told becomes a Secret Keeper in turn. That’s not entirely unfair, because she said it in an interview rather than within a book so it isn’t canon, but also because that may have been only what happens only if the Secret Keeper hasn’t told anyone. Still, handing out wrong info in interviews isn’t really cricketQuidditch.

   I don’t really mind this. As you pointed out, the conclusion we can easily reach is that the secret only dies with the Secret Keeper if he hasn’t told. I think that’s how I took JKR’s comment originally, anyway.

   * However, she definitely gave the impression that the Secret Keeper needs to be someone not living under the charm’s protection – yet here, Bill Weasley is SK for Shell Cottage and Mr. Weasley for his house. So why could James or Lily not have been their own SK? I know James trusted his friends, but it just seems entirely unnecessary.

   I completely agree. This has to be explained for me, or else a lot of the story will seem very unnecessary.

   * If Shell Cottage is under the Fidelius Charm, why do Ron, Dobby, Harry, et all have no trouble getting there? I suppose Bill could have told Dobby of its whereabouts, but earlier Ron finds it on his own and there’s no opportunity for him to have been told.

   Exactly. Makes no sense to me at all.

   Other problems:

   * In the very beginning when each pair shows up at the Burrow, at first Lupin insists of questioning each person to determine his / her identity. By the time Bill and Fleur show up, he’s given up on this. Why? It seems like terrible security procedure.

   I’ll have to read this part again. It didn’t strike me as that much of a problem at the time — perhaps I assumed someone else had taken up the questioning, and we hadn’t seen that?

   * Why on earth does everyone gather at the Burrow? I mean, gosh, the Death Eaters would never suspect they’d be there /eyeroll

   Well, they were under great protection. It’s as good a place as any, I suppose. I mean, as good a place as any of the places a DE could predict. Of course they would have been safer in a random hotel room in Tanzania, but… well, they wanted to have a proper wedding, and they had TONS of magical protection.

   * If Dumbledore’s Bodybind curse on Harry ended when Dumbledore died, why does Mad-Eye’s curse on Snape at 12 Grimmauld persist after his death?

   I was under the impression that Mad-Eye had, as usual, thought ahead and accepted that he might not outlive Snape. In light of this, I assumed he had placed a series of enchantments on Grimmauld that would outlast his own demise.

   * In the Gringotts vault, why did Hermione use Levicorpus instead of Wingardium Leviosa to raise Harry? Surely he’d have had more control if not dangling from one ankle? And Wingardium Leviosa is a very basic charm; it’s one of the first they learned.

   Hrm… I don’t know. My magic skills have always been a little lacking, so I’ve always just bowed to whatever Hermione thinks is best. 😉

   * I cannot see any tactical advantage to keeping the Horcruxes secret from at least core members of the Order and the DA – why was Dumbledore so insistent, and why does Harry not stop to think if the situation may have changed?

   I can see an advantage to keeping these things quiet. The fact is, Harry had to keep the whole Trust No One mindset throughout this story because it would have been very irresponsible to do anything else, especially with all the Polyjuice and appearance-altering enchantments we were seeing take place. Of course, I agreed with Ron and Hermione that Harry should let the DA fight if they really wanted to, but I still felt that keeping the Horcruxes secret was the only fail-safe way of making sure they didn’t fall into the wrong hands, etc.

   Questions

   * Ron warns Harry not to use magic for doing up his flies. Why “flies”, plural? Is this standard British usage, or does he just mean, “not only your fly today but the flies of any trousers you happen to be wearing”?

   lol I dunno — maybe because I’m a girl, and an American.

   * Is Moody’s eye on Umbridge’s door supposed to work on its own or only when she’s using the telescope behind it? If the former, note that it can see through Harry’s Invisibility Cloak.

   I was under the impression that it only worked for her when she used the telescope — that was why it didn’t move on its own as it had in Mad-Eye’s head.

   Quibbles

   * Not enough Ginny for me. Part of this is because I’m old and married; I find it nearly offensive not to have one’s romantic partner allowed to be a real partner, secondary to other friends. I’d certainly trust Rudder at my back more than anyone else in the world. I keep having to remind myself that things are different when it’s just a case of a teenage girlfriend. But I still think it’s stupid that she’s not allowed to fight; the idea that there’s a huge gulf between 16 and 17, for everyone, is just weird. Luckily she does seem to end up in the fight in the end, after she’s kicked out of the Room of Requirement; I don’t see how she could live with herself otherwise, in after years.

   Yeah, I was sort of sad that Ginny didn’t get to play a bigger part with Harry at the end. During the most of the book, though, I was okay with her absence. Two couples cooped up in a tent for a year would have gotten downright irritating to watch, and it might have put a major damper on their relationships. I was glad to see her get out to join the fight at the end, though.

   * According to JKR, the whole message of the book is supposed to be about choosing what is right over what is easy. It seems to me that a corrollary of that is that the ends do not justify the means. It really upsets me, then, that Harry is so free with Unforgiveable Charms, not only Imperius (which is at least useful) but even Cruciatus, which has no purpose but malice. The upright McGonagall, too, uses Imperius. This is far too close to my taste to “Torture is always wrong – unless you’re in a hurry and there’s no time for another method.” This is a slippery slope on the level of a Glisseo charm.

   Yes, this shocked me. I appreciated it in Order of the Phoenix because I felt like it was Harry’s big moment of temptation, and he was going to have to learn to rise above it in the later books. But instead he fought fire with fire, so to speak. Of course, Harry’s hands are otherwise clean at the end — he didn’t kill anyone. Even Voldemort was really responsible for his own death. But I have a hard time not agreeing that the message “Torture is always wrong – unless you’re in a hurry and there’s no time for another method” really did come across like this. I’m still open to discussion on that one.

   Comments

   * Same nice touches and language use as always – I love the portraits in Luna’s room, and “by Merlin’s baggiest Y-fronts!”

   Luna’ portraits were so sweet! 🙂 I really liked them. I wonder, though, how they might come across if they were used in the film… might it seem a little weird? Stalker weird? It didn’t feel anything other than loving and sweet in the book, but I couldn’t help but wonder how it would come across on screen.

   * So many penis jokes!

   I know!!! OMG! lol

   * How perfect that Mr. Lovegood’s name is Xenophilius (=lover of the strange)

   I loved his name. I wanted to see him turn out, by the very end of the book, to have been right about the horn.

   * About Snape / Lily: I keep reminding myself that, just because a horde of obsessive people picking over every last word as if they were studying Talmud were able to predict this, doesn’t mean it’s really glaringly obvious by rational standards. Snape’s Patronus being a doe does raise all kinds of interesting questions about his relationship to James and Harry, with their stags, though.

   I thought it was pretty clear early on — in fact, the suggestion, as far as I read it, was that everyone was a little in love with Lily Evans. Why not Snape? I was glad, however, that we got to see Snape’s true reasons for being a member of the Order after all.

   * I like this Narcissa, largely because I do see echoes in her of the Narcissa I loved in A.J. Hall’s Lust Over Pendle series.

   Narcissa was GREAT! 🙂

   * Hints of Dean / Luna! Yay!

   I had originally thought Neville should have a relationship, not necessarily with Luna. I still sort of wish he would. Hogwarts professors aren’t monks. For instance, I will always firmly be on the Albus/Minerva ship. /sigh So maybe Neville found love in the staff room.

   * Harry’s purported pureness of heart is much easier to se here than in the last couple of books; it becomes more believeable that Dumbledore thinks harry is the better man. EXCEPT for the unse of Unforgiveable Charms, see above.

   It was sad to see them more as equals at the end, though I really liked it. All this time, Dumbledore has been a comforting father figure, and though he still is to some degree, he and Harry have really both come to each other’s levels and met in the middle.

   * I do love the sympathetic views we get of fallible humanity, of good people who do not always have the strength to do the difficult thing they know is right when they are under unbearable pressure: Xenophilius, Ollivander, Ron, and of course Dumbledore.

   … And Harry, who does Unforgiveables. There’s just no sense of remorse there.

   * I didn’t find the Epilogue cheesy, as many people seem to have. Especially, the Potter children’s names seem entirely normal and expected to me; after all, my tribe’s naming tradition is exactly that: to name children after people you love who have died, to keep their memory alive. (I can only assume James is James Sirius, and perhaps Lily is Lily Dora. Remus already has a namesake, of course.) It occurred to me afterward, though, that the Epilogue is unnecessary. Most of the information it gives us is stuff we already knew; it was plain, for instance, that Harry would end up with Ginny. Of course we didn’t know that they’d still be together nineteen years later, but that doesn’t strike me as a burning question, any more than I’m dying to know if they divorced a decade after this vignette. We only learn three new things that I can see: Neville does become a professor (big surprise!); Hermione does retrieve her parents from Australia (or Ron would have said “Grandpa”, without having to specify “Grandpa Weasley”); and Harry does spread what he learned from Snape’s memory to clear Snape’s name (or Albus Severus would have been tortured and teased unmercifully by anyone who knew his middle name).

   I agree completely. Not cheesy, but not 100% necessary. All very predictable. Still, very nice to see. 🙂 A nice way to promise us that things really were okay. AND a good way to prevent someone 100 years down the road from saying, “Hey! I have an idea! I’ll write the story of what happens AFTER Deathly Hallows, in which Harry Potter commits suicide the following day!” Ugh.

   * Considering how many times JKR has said there will be no further HP books, the ending has been left curiously open: all three Deathly Hallows exist and are retrievable, Harry’s middle son is set up as a viewpoint character (and not an arrogant git like his brother) with a posse already built in, and the final words are that Harry’s scar hasn’t hurt in 19 years – but with no guarantee about the future. Is this leaving herself a loophole, or is it a final gift to fanfic writers?

   My vote is for final gift. 🙂 She loves leaving us with questions, and I expected her to leave some things open at the end of it all. Also, as many of us have always said, there had to be some remaining sense of evil left in the world after Voldemort fell. That’s just reality. And something fun for James, Albus, and Lily to work on. 😉 However, if JKR wants to write that series, I will be the first to pre-order!

   Overall, though? I’d call it incredible.

   No kidding. Her best work yet.