I've had enough trouble for a lifetime
I watched Deathly Hallows 2 with my family (it's a time-honoured family tradition - we have seen all the HP and LoTR movies together), and I quite enjoyed it, although I think the first part stood better as a good, coherent story. There are places where I cried - here lies Dobby, the Resurrection Stone, Fred, and so on - and places I squeed like a small child - everything involving NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM, McGonagall being BADASS (Tumblr tells me that Maggie Smith was undergoing chemotherapy while shooting was going on, and she insisted on finishing her parts anyway) - and places I was annoyed, like the absence of the Grindelwald backstory, or Snape dying in some random place that is not the Shrieking Shack (places are important in the Potterverse! I don't think Steve Kloves ever really got that). I even liked the cheesy epilogue with the silly aged-up Harry and co., but again I wish they hadn't omitted "I've had enough trouble for a lifetime" in favour of OTT Trio staring at the sun. That line really summed up Harry's journey in JKR's inimitable tongue-in-cheek way, and that lighthearted ending meant more to me than the srs bzns faces Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were trying to make.
Unlike some other fandoms, where adaptations into different mediums exist as universes in their own right alongwith the source text, the HP movies aren't really canon - they have been, at best, like animated scrapbooks, putting faces to names and images to certain ideas, with fans picking and choosing the bits they like and rejecting the rest. For me, canon was over when the last book came out, and I have no emotional investment in the movies as such. But I'm sad to see it go, because they were fun in their own way, and I will miss squeeing about them (unless someone does a reboot after ten years - it has been known to happen).
I would also not mind reading some post-DH fic now. Hmm.
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Speaking of HP, I've been meaning to rec this webcomic for a while now: Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell, which I know some of you already follow. I'd started reading it sometime back, got distracted after a couple of chapters, and got back to it after
bell mentioned it in a post. It's a really wonderful science fantasy-ish series set in a school called Gunnerkrigg Court, featuring a girl called Annie (short for Antimony) and her best friend Kat. It feels a little bit like what HP might have been if Harry went to a Hogwarts where his parents' friends were teaching and where he happened to befriend Sirius and Remus' daughter and had all sorts of adventures and discovered things about himself and his weird school. The world-building is seriously fantastic, especially the things it does with science and magic, and the art is really pretty.
http://swatkat.dreamwidth.org/296726.html |
comments | Comment at Dreamwidth
Unlike some other fandoms, where adaptations into different mediums exist as universes in their own right alongwith the source text, the HP movies aren't really canon - they have been, at best, like animated scrapbooks, putting faces to names and images to certain ideas, with fans picking and choosing the bits they like and rejecting the rest. For me, canon was over when the last book came out, and I have no emotional investment in the movies as such. But I'm sad to see it go, because they were fun in their own way, and I will miss squeeing about them (unless someone does a reboot after ten years - it has been known to happen).
I would also not mind reading some post-DH fic now. Hmm.
+
Speaking of HP, I've been meaning to rec this webcomic for a while now: Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell, which I know some of you already follow. I'd started reading it sometime back, got distracted after a couple of chapters, and got back to it after
bell mentioned it in a post. It's a really wonderful science fantasy-ish series set in a school called Gunnerkrigg Court, featuring a girl called Annie (short for Antimony) and her best friend Kat. It feels a little bit like what HP might have been if Harry went to a Hogwarts where his parents' friends were teaching and where he happened to befriend Sirius and Remus' daughter and had all sorts of adventures and discovered things about himself and his weird school. The world-building is seriously fantastic, especially the things it does with science and magic, and the art is really pretty.
http://swatkat.dreamwidth.org/296726.html |
comments | Comment at Dreamwidth