HP POST--IGNORE IF SO INCLINED
I finished Harry Potter 7: Return of the Son of the Bride of the Deathly Hallows at 6-ish this morning. I read it fairly late because my mom and brother got to it first. It was a good read, but I had some issues, which have probably been touched upon like fifteen times on my flist in the last day alone, but bear with me:
1. I'm alright with her killing off everyone she killed off, except for Tonks and Colin Creevy. In re: Tonks, what was the point of killing off both her and Lupin? She was always kind of a 2-d character, and the way she was killed completely eliminated most of the emotional impact due to the fact that like eight billion people died before that and fatigue had set in. To explain this, I have decided that JKR hates children. Hence killing Colin (another one-note character with very little reason to be killed off), Diggory (again...), and orphaning Ted Lupin (worst wizard name ever.)
2. The endless action sequences. The last scene was barely a climax due to its drawn-out, 300-page length. This is a problem with most of the books, granted. I got so bored with the constant fighting I kind of zoned out and turned my MP3 player on. Running Gun Blues is a good Voldemort-killing song.
3. It got damned predictable. Spoilers were unneccessary. I read nothing but speculation, and most people got it right. Because Snape actually being evil wouldn't be cliched enough, and those boulder-size hints about there being a lot of Voldemort in Harry were too subtle.
4. The fucking Epilogue, man. The writing in that was so bad that I read the page that got leaked and said "That's not real. The writing's too baroque, and besides, nobody depicts a happy future as being 1200 happy little Mary-Sue rugrats running around as extensions of the parent's personalities! This reads like bad fanfic!"
But it was real. This lead me to the realization that JKR is actually, in terms of word choice and style and foreshadowing, not a very good writer. The whole HP canon in retrospect reads a lot like fanfic, most of it pretty good, some great, and some shit. I think it's the world she created more than anything else. She built a nice sandbox and played in it. If she wrote anything other than fantasy, though? Something with characters and more than the same three adjectives over and over and over? She'd be totally screwed.
BTW, I'm back from band camp. It was a lot of fun :D
1. I'm alright with her killing off everyone she killed off, except for Tonks and Colin Creevy. In re: Tonks, what was the point of killing off both her and Lupin? She was always kind of a 2-d character, and the way she was killed completely eliminated most of the emotional impact due to the fact that like eight billion people died before that and fatigue had set in. To explain this, I have decided that JKR hates children. Hence killing Colin (another one-note character with very little reason to be killed off), Diggory (again...), and orphaning Ted Lupin (worst wizard name ever.)
2. The endless action sequences. The last scene was barely a climax due to its drawn-out, 300-page length. This is a problem with most of the books, granted. I got so bored with the constant fighting I kind of zoned out and turned my MP3 player on. Running Gun Blues is a good Voldemort-killing song.
3. It got damned predictable. Spoilers were unneccessary. I read nothing but speculation, and most people got it right. Because Snape actually being evil wouldn't be cliched enough, and those boulder-size hints about there being a lot of Voldemort in Harry were too subtle.
4. The fucking Epilogue, man. The writing in that was so bad that I read the page that got leaked and said "That's not real. The writing's too baroque, and besides, nobody depicts a happy future as being 1200 happy little Mary-Sue rugrats running around as extensions of the parent's personalities! This reads like bad fanfic!"
But it was real. This lead me to the realization that JKR is actually, in terms of word choice and style and foreshadowing, not a very good writer. The whole HP canon in retrospect reads a lot like fanfic, most of it pretty good, some great, and some shit. I think it's the world she created more than anything else. She built a nice sandbox and played in it. If she wrote anything other than fantasy, though? Something with characters and more than the same three adjectives over and over and over? She'd be totally screwed.
BTW, I'm back from band camp. It was a lot of fun :D