Harry Potter is OVER, SINK IN DAMMIT!!!
"Welcome to this one man show
Just take a seat, they're always free
No surprise, no mystery
In this theatre that I call my soul
I always play the starring role, so lonely
So lonely, so lonely, so lonely."
This book can have the emo soundtrack of your choice.
I choose Sting & Police and The Phantom of the Opera.
I have given myself a week to reflect on my feelings and a couple of days to read all people had to say about the book. And still I don't think I am capable of doing the same. I have spent the last hour at work writing almost 5 pages with my opinions, and it all felt so irrelevant and commented to exhaustion, that I have decided to focus on what matters most to me.
Levi's HP profile:
Favorite topic in fanfic and OTP in the series: Snarry
Favorite topic in doujinshi: Percy x Twins
Favourite House: Hufflepuff
I am very thankful because I could read it completely unspoiled. I was happy to get my own copy, happy to have a weekend to myself, happy to have the black book on the table to pick and read whenever I wanted. Happy to enjoy reading so much. I am thankful to JK Rowling because she has made me enjoy reading like a kid. I know that if I had read them when I was younger, I would have liked them even better. But nevertheless these years in the wonderfully entertaining, albeit terrible imperfect, magical world of Harry Potter have been an unforgettable experience.
In general, I truly loved this book.
From Dudley until Albus Severus.
It made me laugh and cry and feel, feel so much, particularly about three specific characters, two dead and one alive and back to his family at last.
Of course, it had its flaws. As did the other previous volumes, the top of the WTF still being OotP.
I would like to know how Rowling had planned the story at the start and how much it has changed throughout the years. How going from single mother to happy mother of three has influenced the outcome. They say she had written the epilogue first, thus the "boy who lived" would have always kept its meaning from beginning to end. I just hope fandom hasn't changed the outcome of several characters for good, because it must have influenced her somehow. Or in many ways. Who knows. For starters, it has put pressure on her to finish as quick as possible to deliver to an increasingly greedy and rebellious fandom.
Before I formed a final conclusion, I had to remind myself that, whatever we might be inclined to believe, this is after all a children-juvenile series, which means that as much as they can also be enjoyed by adults, they are ultimately designed and expected to be read by children, therefore, certain things cannot be described as they would had it been for mature audiences only. JK has a moral and editorial duty to be careful of. Her own children are going to read the book! Romance must be taken in a light way and almost childishly, death and suffering much more so. Also, the ability of the author to do better is one thing, but since she has kept us so wonderfully entertained for years, we must take what is given and accept it the best we can, with either admiration or objective criticism. For higher levels in the aspect of your choice, please refer to fanfiction. That is fanfiction’s purpose, and there is candy aplenty for those of us who want to read between the lines, and also circle a couple of them straightaway in the process.
"And how did the mysterious Ariana die? [...] Did she stumble across something she ought not to have done..."
I am almost positive Ariana walked in on Dumbledore and Grindelwald. HONEST.
Aberforth and Regulus have turned to be better siblings than they looked, too.
For more quotes deliciously out of context, check The Rude Bits.
I couldn't help seeing Ariana Dumbledore as a kind of parallel to Lyanna Stark, misterious death and all.
Only, Albus didn't follow Grindelwald like Ned did Robert.
In a way, I am almost thankful for having read George R.R. Martin’s “A song of Ice and Fire” published books, because after those, nothing sounds “cruel” or “bloodshed” or “torture” to me. Maybe because I had fresh in my memory what happened to my fave charas in the latest Martin' book, whenever the HP characters came to a dangerous situation I was fearing madly what would become to them, like when they were taken to Malfoy Manor. It seems all my fears were in vain. People died randomly and at the oddest moments, as usual in this series. Some say that is realistic, I just shrug. I know that as a reader I prefer the fewer killed, the better. But had I written that book, I would have killed much more people. I guess everyone has their preferences, and there is no point in arguing. I am just shocked whenever I read a newspaper reviews that says how it was “a massacre”. Wow. 50 people got killed in Hogwarts. I guess reading the newspapers every day make you immune to numbers. It’s names what matter, after all. And I am glad she didn’t give more.
I think killing Fred Weasley was not only mean, cruel and unnecessary, but also ungrateful on her part. She owes so much to the twins and their jokes that she could have shown the same mercy she showed to Lupin and Tonks, and kill them both or none at all. That has hurt me more than I am ready to confess, because I still remember how several years ago, when I devoured so much HP fic, I used to read a lot of the twins and hope against hope one wouldn't die without the other. I am sure they had their serious talks about the possibility before going into battle, but that doesn't make the blow lighter. Fred, no. Not right after Percy's return and Percy's joke. Percy pairing up with George for the joke shop is a nice possibility already worked out as a full story in my head, but the twins are THE TWINS. What first brought me to read the books in the first place, the "funny read-headed twins!" that were promised in the magic lot. I now remember with nostalgy the pirate radio with Lee Jordan, as a homage to the Quidditch commentary. How much hope it gave back, as usual. So unfair, so very silly.
-------------------------------------- SOME COMMON COMPLAINTS, DETAILS AND QUESTIONS
1. Until Rowling says otherwise, Harry's first-born is totally James Sirius. Come on. Father and godfather, followed by master and co-puppet. Statistically speaking, almost everybody has a middle name. Although it would be funnier if it were, dunno, James Cedric!
2. That said, I too believe that Remus and Sirius have been vastly mistreated and left aside after PoA, and I hope it was because she didn't have special plans for them from the start, not because of retaliation against fandom. JK seems to hold a grudge against both handsome and popular characters. The fact that House Elves and how to treat them gained more importance plot-wise and detail-wise than characters that had such potential left me aghast. In the end, Kreacher was a better dog than Sirius and took all the biscuits!
3. Krum was not the GoF's Krum that made me happy by ignoring all the fangirls and picking up ugly-duck Hermione instead. It was movie!Krum, physically described as him, and almost running in the beach followed by a cohort. The "joke" about famous Quidditch players and how all the pretty girls were taken was pathetic.
4. Neville couldn't kill Bellatrix just like Draco couldn't kill Dumbledore. They needed to remain innocent.
Rowling tries so hard for us to love Luna and Neville that I cannot help liking them, but I don't share the hype.
That doesn't mean I haven't laughed like mad at the idea of both Che Guevara!Neville and Eowyn!Neville as hilariously depicted in
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, A Parody
A must read!!
5. As some people have said, sometimes you feel as if you MUST feel in a certain way, even if that is not how you feel or you don't agree with what the characters say. I prefer it when I can go along easily, without greater MORAL expectations. Some issues and values in the book are not as universal as critics would have us think. And wizards are medieval in more senses than the lack of technology.
6. Hagrid reminded me of that cow in my beloved movie “Me, myself and Irene”, you know, that one which was apparently dead in the middle of the road, and when Jim Carrey tried to put her out of her misery she would still show life signs and in the end he had to shoot her, strangle her, kick her and she still survived! Like Hagrid! We have been thinking he’d be one of the first to fall, and I was convinced he was dead at the Tonks'. But no. He went "MOOOOO" again and stood up . He had a giant bull’s eye on his back and yet he kept alive until the end. To carry Harry in his arms just like he did 16 years ago when he brought it to Dumbledore after the motorbike ride. He brought him back to Hogwarts again, and alive once more.
7. Wingardium Leviosa was used twice! And it was one of the two things that originally brought Hermione and Ron apart, and now brought them together: the spell that made him make fun of her, so that she cried and went to te toilets where they fought the troll and became friends; now perfectly performed by Ron to enter the Shrieking Shack. And the House elves. I had to laugh with glee when they finally kissed onstage with the excuse of Ron finally seeing the light about how they aren’t mere slaves! (maybe that was in the manual that taught him how to have more emotions than a teaspoon, good one, that book, makes things progress faster with Ron ---again, the twins' work). I just can’t believe that Harry thought for a second they would go at it again right after Fred was killed. Also, I can’t believe she employed no less than one horcrux to decide the shipping battle of the H/Hr VS R/Hr. JK delivered smackdown with Voldemort pretending to be H/Hr snogging and insulting Ron. My brain shortcircuited, but I LOVED knowing Ron's fears. I know it was all a bit childish, but I liked the gradual way JK brought them together. I liked it very much. Harry and Ron spent most of the book in love, and thinking of their girls that every little thing she does is magic, everything she does just turns me on; even though my life before was tragic, now I know my love for her goes on. 19 years alter. (THE KIDS' NAMES MADE MY NIGHT).
8. Hufflepuff. You know, on the morning I was to get the book, I woke up with a foreboding of Hufflepuff death. I started panicking for about 5 minutes, all it took me to devise possible outcomes and how best to justify them, depending on the level of suffering on my part. Two dead boyfriends would be too much for Justin, but Justin dead would be too much for me. Having written a novel-length fic on them with Justin at the center, in my universe his outcome was more relevant than Harry's.
However, ¡my Hufflepuffs live! Ernie and Hannah were heroic and fought well, and were protected (I see now that JK wouldn't kill someone who has his grandpa's name). Zach bravely run away, but still lived. And Susan and Justin were absent, which is for the better. Susan must have been out of the picture in another clear homage to Narnia. Justin, as a muggle-born, must have stayed home all year. At Ernie’s instance. And Ernie secretly stole his DA coin, so he wouldn’t see the final call and remained safe until the end, waiting for him to return triumphant --- well, they tried to prevent Ginny from fighting, so it fits. I so need to add that to the epilogue of “¡Hufflepuff Exists!” asap...
9. Hermione Poppins. Hermione’s bag was totally Mary Poppins’. The umbrella was Hagrid’s, though. And funny how in that old Disney movie women knew better how to defend their rights than in this magical universe (the mother campaigning for the women's right to vote! VS sodding morals on elf slavery. They are not slaves, they are COOKS!!).
10. Slytherin. I have always been wary at people who say they would like to belong to Slytherin. I wonder if they realize the traits that JK gave them on purpose. She has always been apparently upset by people liking Draco (Felton) and Snape (Rickman) so much. However, I believe a couple of students should have remained behind. It would have been more powerful and given more hope to the reader, to see the four Houses finally united. She brings the centaurs and the kitchen elves but not the Slytherins.
And I particularly hated the fact that there were giants. This all felt like the final battle in “The return of the king”, with more and more creatures coming from one side and the other. The giants would be those huge elephants. It is another constant in this kind of literature, though. But she could have brought dragons too. Just one was not enough.
11. Percy came back. I knew he would. He always loved his younger brothers very much, that is why I loved him so much. Rowling was careful to make a homage to almost all the characters, events and locations of all the previous books, that is why she even brought the Quidditch team back. A bit forced, but it was nice to see Oliver. Not carrying Colin's corpse "in a fireman's lift", though. Now Dennis will have to find solace in the giant squid, who was sorely missed. If someone spotted it by accident please let me know the page.
12. I was so sure Harry would die, I was actually disappointed when he didn’t. By the time I had finished the book, I couldn’t believe that I was actually feeling miserable about the happy ending. Everything had been scalating towards climax from Snape’s death on, perfected with the ghosts accompanying Harry, like Lucy and Susan did to Aslan in Narnia before he walked alone to his death at the hands of the Witch, surrounded by enemies (because, CO.ME.ON., resurrection and all!), so when he returned after the Station limbo and faced life, it was my excitement that had died. If it had ended there, with both Voldemort and himself dead, it would have been more perfect to my liking. Finished at the peak of emotion and sacrifice and all that is good and noble. Everything that happened from then on felt like duty. I felt it and Harry felt it and I could share his exhaustion and will to just report to the Master of Puppets and go to bed because it was 3 a.m., he had to prepare for 19 years of happy life, a first, and I still needed one hour to cry my eyes out regarding the end of the saga, the return of the jedi, king, Weasley, Percy with the death of Fred, and the end of Snape. Above all, Snape.
-------------------------------- SEVERUS SNAPE, THE UNLIKELY HERO OF THE WHOLE STORY
"Well, someone told me yesterday
That when you throw your love away
You act as if you just don't care
You look as if you're going somewhere
But I just can't convince myself
I couldn't live with no one else
And I can only play that part
And sit and nurse my broken heart, so lonely
So lonely, so lonely, so lonely"
He was dying in the Shrieking Shack, the same place that almost cost him his life decades ago but was saved by James. Where a werewolf didn't kill him, a snake did. And this time, it was not James but Harry who saw it. If the way he was killed disappointed me, what came after made me cry both with utter sadness and exhilaration. It was the prospect of the memories to come from the silver liquid. It was the "Look...at...me." I put the book down and cried. I knew. I just knew! Something inside me felt complete.
I am still so overwhelmed about his full story that So Lonely came to mind and I had to put it in my mp3, and now I listen to it every day and feel like crying in the middle of the street. I knew I was a Snarry shipper, but not that I was so hardcore.
We had always suspected Lily as the reason for his change, but a Lily he had met at school, not one he had worshipped since childhood. That changes everything. That makes it all more twisted, more obsessive and more beautiful. Snape is not a good person, but he sacrificed his life for his love. Call it obsession if you must, because it is, but what it lead to is the best of him, and the best of the Harry Potter series, to me. Now, when I read the books all over again, I will read with the knowledge that Harry might be the boy who lived (again and again) , the epic Hero with his big sacrifices, the boy who suffered A LOT but who definitively lived long enough to have children, while Snape is the man who never had a life. He had no joys or happy thoughts to remember, only Lily. She was his patronus. All this time (stag and doe, cue fandom jokes!). The letter, dammit, Lily's letter that he kept just because of the Lots of love, Lily! I didn't see that coming AT ALL!
Since you've gone I been lost without a trace
I dream at night I can only see your face
I look around but its you I can't replace
I feel so cold and I long for your embrace
I keep crying baby, baby, please...
He gave his life, not the lost-in-a-moment life, but the year-after-year life, for Harry. He hated him on the surface, he loved him deep inside. He saw James, he felt Lily. I have long suspected it was so, depending on the Lily theory, but now that we know it is true, I can picture him at Hogwarts, the torture it must have been for him to wait those 10 years, and then share those 6 years together in Hogwarts. A pain. A bliss. If Lily was his reason in life, his reason for coming back, for being a teacher!, only to watch over Harry, ONLY TO WATCH OVER HARRY, together with all the punishments came the self-punishment of wanting to have Harry close.
I suspected it all through book 6, because if Harry was clearly obsessed with Draco and Ginny, Snape was with Harry. He went to pick him personally from the Hogwarts gates, and that's where they parted ways dramatically beat the end, when Snape had to flee after screaming the "Don't call me a coward!" that would contrast later with what Harry tells Albus SEVERUS of Snape. And yes, I believe Snape was the bravest man Harry had ever met. If the WTF epilogue was worth it, it was because of the kids' names (AS/S ajskajsfds) and that.
Nothing reflects the idea of Snape wanting to keep Harry close better than the many detentions in which he put Harry in year 6. As Dumbledore kindly put it in a pensieve-flashback:
"You aren't trying to give him more detentions, Severus?
The boy will soon have spent more time in detention than out."
"He is his father over again-"
"In looks, perhaps, but his deepest nature is much more like his mother's."
Dumbledore knows that Snape MUST have noticed that. He is watching Harry all the time, knows all he has done, not only the rule-breaking, but the deeds, the troubles, the mistreatments, when people leave him aside, when he is made to suffer, when he is loyal to his friends. He MUST know all of this and he even saw pieces of it in OotP during the failed Occlumency lessons (which have been proved only as Snarry fanservice of GOLD quality). And maybe he tried to dismiss it, sure, but he was too intelligent for that. He saw Lily, and maybe he saw the real Harry as well. That is my wishful thinking. And this is too funny to even consider...
"Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you
Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
Ill be watching you"
This. Is. Canon.
Maybe that is why he makes Harry copy all the cards in which her father's gang misbehaved. Maybe he, in his own way, was trying to convey how his father & friends were nothing more than pranksters who had an early end, while he is still fighting and protecting him and all those things he might want to tell him but can't. Now everytime time Snape suggests to Harry that "You are your father's son", I will hear "Sadly, not mine".
Snape is the anti-hero who lived and died alone and uncelebrated, and whose most private feelings ended up exposed before Voldemort and the school (I could see the popcorn in that scene) like his dirty pants had been years before.
Do I have to tell the story
Of a thousand rainy days since we first met
Its a big enough umbrella
But its always me that ends up getting wet
I wonder if he really liked for that to be known in such a way. That Harry said it with such a passion was comforting, it was his first homage to Snape. I wonder if Voldemort cared a bit for Bellatrix, as it is hinted, and I wonder if he had a bit of remorse, and that's why he was definitely destroyed. But Voldemort was to die, the trick of the wand or, better put, the loyalties of the wand that would do him didn't matter so much as the secrets unveiled before that happened, confusingly so.
As I cried for the end of the series and all that Snape finally meant to the story and to myself, I couldn't help match him with the Phantom of the Opera and hear in my head, at top volume:
Child of the wilderness
Born into emptiness
Learn to be lonely
Learn to find your way in darkness
Who will be there for you
Comfort and care for you
Learn to be lonely
Learn to be your one companion
So laugh in your loneliness
Child of the wilderness
Learn to Be lonely
Learn how to love life that is lived alone
Snape a virgin? Who knows. But he didn't dress all in black and reminding us of a bat-priest (flying and all!) for nothing!
He was around 38 when he died. Lily and James were 21.
Rather than having been sorted into Gryffindor, as Dumbledore suggested, Snape should have got out of the magic world and known the wonders of the Internet.
What would the life of a passionate, obsessive loner be without it.
After finishing the book, I wanted to relax a bit reading doujinshi from my unread HP stack.
But since my tastes are coherent and there are no coincidences in my life, these were the topics available:
They couldn't make up before Hedwig died. That was sad too.
The Twins and Percy + Oliver
The idea of Oliver training as hard as Shin cracks me up.
This is how I have always pictured the relationship of Percy and the twins: they bother him, but ultimately Percy loves the attention (seeking):
And finally, a treasure of a cover I HAD FORGOTTEN I HAD until I read the book and...
Percy holding Fred, and Snape holding so much love for Lily/so much trouble for Harry is what still comes to my mind whenever I think of the last book. And then sadness invades me.
So lonely, so lonely, so lonely...
Songs by The Police:
So Lonely
Every Breath you Take
Every Little Thing She Does is Magic