Deathly Hallows uberwank: Chapter 34, The Forest Again
PRINCESS LEIA: Luke, tell me. What's troubling you?
LUKE: Vader is here, now, on this moon.
PRINCESS LEIA: How do you know?
LUKE: I felt his presence. He's come for me. He can feel when I'm near. That's why I have to go. As long as I stay, I'm endangering the group and our mission here. I have to face him.
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
THE EMPEROR: Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design. Your friends, up there on the sanctuary moon, are walking into a trap, as is your Rebel fleet. It was I who allowed the Alliance to know the location of the shield generator. It is quite safe from your pitiful little band. An entire legion of my best troops awaits them. Oh, I'm afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive.
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
From this chapter on, I find a weird sort of double standard (not exactly the term I'm looking for, but it'll do) in my head. If I just sit and read without really thinking about it, these are the best chapters of the book, and I find myself pulled along by the exciting plot and gripping writing and, for crying out loud, I almost found myself with a lump in my throat a couple of times. (Don't tell anyone that, obviously.) But as soon as I grab a pen and notebook, or sit at my computer, I start finding really heinous plot holes and crap writing and I realise I hate almost every character with a passion that burns like a thousand suns. So. There's your warning for the remaining chapters - it's likely I'll swing from squeeing fangirl to angry loner and back again in the space of only a few words.
That doesn't apply to the epilogue, of course. The epilogue is just shit.
So. Harry opens the chapter by following the established pattern: he wangsts. OK, so he has to go and die now, and that really does suck and everything, but there's no need to be so damn flowery about it. At one point he even goes on about how he wishes he could have died like Hedwig did. Oh noes! Poor Hedwig, that owl that was really boring and didn't do anything, is dead! Go cry, emo kid.
He even wishes he could have died "launching himself in front of a wand to save someone he loved", which is all kinds of fail. I bet he wishes he could have died screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" as well.
After almost three pages of lying on the floor of Dumbledore's office, Harry gets up, puts on the Mary Sue Cloaking Device and starts the long walk to death. His wangst is simultaneously interrupted and facilitated when he runs into Neville and Oliver Wood, carrying in the dead Colin Creevey. This is another death that I feel ought to have been shocking and chilling and oh-no-isn't-war-terrible (compare Cedric Diggory), but thanks to this book I'm actually bored of death. So it goes.
Harry emerges from the cloaking device and speaks with Neville. He doesn't say so in as many words, but he's aware that if he, Ron, and Hermione don't make it back, then Neville is the only hope for the Alliance. (I would argue that Neville basically is the Rebel Alliance, but that's a rant for later.) Neville agrees to dispatch the snake. Later, of course, he does, and it is baaaaaadass.
Back under the cloak, Harry continues across the grounds, where he sees Ginny. Ginny is busily comforting someone who is heavily implied to be a little girl (it doesn't say "little", but she is asking for her mother and saying she wants to go home, and the setup suggests that she is younger than Ginny). Not sure what this young-ish girl is doing here, but Ginny is looking after her anyway. Presumably this is because Ginny is so compassionate! OK, so there's another double standard going on in my brain - if Ginny doesn't do anything nice on-page I think she's a cow, and when we do see her doing anything decent I call bullshit. It just feels like - well, too little, too late, I suppose. I don't think a single instance of Ginny being genuinely nice to someone makes up for her being generally pretty underdeveloped as a character and, at times, coming across as quite vindictive. Look, I know Ginny-bashing is old meme, but I'm just trying to look at the evidence, as I see it: OK, she's nice to this kid here, but we've also seen her hiss at a ten-year-old girl who smiled at her then ex-boyfriend; tear out the soul of her ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend from before they were together; call Luna "Loony" behind her back; hex people who say things she doesn't like; throw food at her estranged brother; it goes on.
Harry doesn't go and talk to her, anyway, because he knows that he will never be able to tear himself away from her dancing mane of red hair and her sunlit boobies and blah blah blah blah. And also she'd probably tell him not to kill himself, which, to be fair, I can't fault her for.
Harry reflects that he wishes someone would rescue him, bring him home, but then realises that Hogwarts is his home. He compares himself to Voldemort and Snape - they all found a place for themselves at Hogwarts that they never had before. That's one of the bits that I really like when I read this chapter without thinking about it, by the way.
He wanders on, next passing Hagrid's hut, where his brain provides him with a schmaltzy Hollywood-style montage of all the fun times they had there, like that one time Hagrid got a dragon and it nearly burned down Scotland, or the time Ron vomited slugs and how hilarious that was, and that time they walked in without knocking and found Hagrid posting nude pictures of himself on hairybears.com and it was awkward but then he fed them vole sandwiches or something and it was great. How they laughed.
This train of thought eventually leads Harry to thinking about snitches, and then it hits him that "I open at the close" means that snitch he's been carting around all this time will open now, you know, at the close. Of life. Or something. I think I am maybe not too clever, because I utterly failed to guess that and even now it doesn't make total sense in my head, but I've never been good at this sort of thing. I don't think I've ever heard "the close" being used to mean death, but I know some people figured this bit out in advance. At any rate, it makes sense to Harry, so he kisses the golden orb (badfic term - for what, though?) which falls apart, revealing... a number of small, fiddly plastic components and a set of indecipherable instructions for putting them together in order to build a completely crap toy train or something. And some chocolate. I'm kidding, obviously, it's the resurrection stone really. But if this thing he's been carrying around for almost a year was, in fact, a Kinder Egg, well, that would be epic lulz.
Harry "raises Draco's wand under the cloak" (ahem) and examines the stone properly. It totally has the sign of the deathly hallows on it, which is useful - you know how it is, we've all done it, you're looking through your vault of precious stones and you can't for the life of you find the one that brings people back from the dead. So this one is handily engraved with the hallows logo and comes in an attractive presentation box and with a hand-numbered certificate of authenticity.
We get a nice line about how it's OK for Harry to use the stone, because unlike the guy in the story they read way back in chapter 21, he's not bringing anyone back, he's having them collect him. This is one of the best examples of that dissonance thing I was talking about earlier - I love this bit, it's one of my favourite bits in the book, and I'm about to start ripping it into pieces and taking the piss and comparing it to Star Wars.
So. Harry finally has the resurrection stone, and he turns it over in his hands, summoning himself a little moral support: his parents, his godfather, and that guy that used to work up at the school. Here's an artist's impression of what this scene might look like.
They tell him that everything is cool and that the Force will be with him, always. Harry asks if dying hurts, and Sirius says no, it's like falling asleep. Says the dude who was killed by a curtain. I'd wager that someone who died of a drawn-out and incurable cancer, or was skinned alive, or was shot in the bowel and left to bleed to death, might beg to differ. As far as we know, everyone present died in a relatively quick and painless way (Sirius - curtain, Lily and James - Avada Kedavra, Remus - choose your own!) so I wouldn't call them experts. Frankly, I'd like to hear about things from someone who died slowly and painfully before I take anyone's word for this. Not that it matters, since Harry is planning on going the same way as these fuckers did, but anyway.
Actually, while we're on the subject of painless death, why is the AK curse unforgiveable, anyway? Presumably accio-ing someone's small intestine wouldn't technically be "unforgiveable", even though it would involve a much slower and more gruesome death. There are much worse ways to murder someone (and anyway, would the average psychopath be satisfied killing someone with an instant and painless spell that leaves the body unsullied when they could dismember them and stick their dick in the pieces?). And a part of Dumbledore's rationale for having Snape kill him is that he's going to die anyway, of a horrible curse. He can't be the first terminally ill wizard to request an AK from someone he trusts, you know?
Back to this bit, anyway. It's pretty cool. I like that we get to see these guys as they were when they were young and everything. I also like the part where Sirius and Remus grab hands and exchange a swift kiss, glowing with happiness and... DAMMIT.
On that note, though, I do like that they are all described as looking happy and relaxed and stuff; Sirius looks younger than Harry ever saw him in real life, and - this is really weird - Remus looks sober. And, being an angry, bitter slash fangirl, I like that Remus is happy and Tonks, though dead, is nowhere to be seen. Fish in a barrel, I know. Still.
So, yeah. This is one of my favourite bits in the book, but only if I don't think about it in too much depth. Because, here's the thing - these four people, all of whom in some way died to protect Harry, have now shown up urging him to commit the fantasy novel equivalent of suicide by cop. I know what's meant to be happening is that they're there to support him and be with him when he, you know, crosses over or whatever, but the underlying implication is rather a sinister one in my view. They just all seem a bit too happy that he's about to die, considering they all gave their lives for him in one way or another.
The most disturbing theory I've heard regarding this bit (and one which I can't credit properly, as I've forgotten where I read it) is that this isn't a resurrection stone at all, but something rigged up by Dumbledore to produce images of Harry's dead loved ones telling him to kill himself. It's not inconceivable - portraits, the Marauder's Map, Tom Riddle's diary and to a lesser extent photographs all have the ability to echo specific personalities without simply playing back recordings (a kind of artificial intelligence we muggles haven't achieved yet), and Dumbledore is meant to have been one of the greatest wizards who ever lived. Oh, I don't think that is what's supposed to be going on here, I think it's a resurrection stone and these really are the people they are supposed to be, at least as far as JKR is concerned. My point is that I can easily believe Dumbledore would have done something like that, as one more way of manipulating Harry towards accepting and walking into his own death. Fucker.
Whether this is for real or not, they all spend a little quality time together. Harry apologises to Remus for, you know, him dying and stuff, especially what with baby Ruxpin who will now have to be an orphan. Remus pulls out some cue-cards and delivers a hastily written speech about how it's cool, don't worry about it - and anyway, my kid will grow up knowing I died to build a better world for him. I could swear he's stolen about half of it from those old Coke adverts from the 80s, but it does the trick - the trick being, hiding the fact that Remus is secretly relieved he won't have to pay child support.
... Wow. I really am a horrible person. :-/
They hike through the woods for a while, eventually finding and following a couple of death eaters on their way back to base camp. Harry is still under the cloaking device and, rather handily, the Force Ghosts are apparently "a part of Harry" and invisible to everyone else. Where I'm from, that's called a hallucination, especially considering that they are urging him to kill himself, but what do I know. Eventually they arrive, and Harry - without even saying goodbye to the Marauder Force Ghost Cheerleaders of Death - drops the resurrection stone on the floor, snuffing them out.
The scene is this: the death eaters are hanging around in some clearing, and at their centre, Voldemort is totally wangsting out about the fact Harry's not there. (Well, you can't spell "Voldemort" without "emo".) All over the world Harry/Tom shippers are going squee. Harry lets him say, "He didn't come! He promised he'd come!" a few times before pulling off his cloak and revealing himself (ahem). Voldemort, desperate not be seen as, well, desperate, pulls himself together and starts flirting pathetically with Harry, giving it all, "Welcome, young Skywalker. I have been expecting you" and "You underestimate the power of the dark side. If you will not fight, then you will meet your destiny". This goes on for a little while until I get bored of looking up Return of the Jedi quotes. All this is interspersed with Harry's thoughts on death and a bunch of stuff about how he won't fight and things like that. There's a fucking brilliant line in there as well, which I will quote in full:
Bellatrix was panting, and Harry thought inexplicably of Ginny, and her blazing look, and the feel of her lips on his -
Voldemort had raised his wand [...]
Actually, typing that out just there I realised it's probably supposed to mean "Ginny's lips on Harry's lips" as opposed to "Ginny's lips on Harry's bell-end", but come on - blowjobs! Those are always funny. Or I'm a twelve-year-old boy, whatever.
Regardless of the blowjob stuff, actually, this line is kind of stupid. Because Ginny is meant to be - meant to be - nice and sympathetic and everything, and Bellatrix is supposed to be a sociopath. A similar thing occurred in chapter 6, where Molly is berating Harry for something and he notices that she and Ginny have the same eyes. The only explanation I can manage is that JKR wants to show us that Harry is thinking about Ginny a lot, but I'm not sure it works.
It's also revealing, I think, that Harry doesn't think of Ginny's alleged loyalty/compassion/feistiness/whatever but of her physical attributes. You know, stuff like this, that's the reason people don't buy Harry/Ginny. We might have seen her being encouraging to some kid earlier in the chapter, but when Harry thinks he's about to die, his last thought of her is not to do with the comfort she provided him or how he can, at least, die having found his soulmate or how much he loves her (as I recall, the word "love" is never used in reference to their relationship), but about the physical stuff, and to me that speaks volumes.
Anyway, after all this wangst, Voldemort finally gets his act together. And so, like Jesus, Aslan, and... uh... Captain Jack Harkness at the end of the first season of Torchwood (well, actually, in almost every fucking episode of Torchwood - but I digress) before him, Harry allows himself to be pwnt. Of course he's not fucking dead, there's three chapters to go yet, but let's just go along with it. Usual flash of green light (considering how many deadly, or at least painful, spells involve flashes of brightly coloured light, I bet your average wizard gets pretty jittery in a nightclub), and Harry topples over and, you know, dies and stuff.
Honestly, I think Harry's big sacrifice would have a little more gravitas if he hadn't hit an unsuspecting opponent with the cruciatus curse within the last 24 hours, not to mention he was just thinking about Ginny sucking his dick. I dunno, I just reckon, if you're going to bring out the messiah metaphors, do them properly, you know?
But, anyway, what will happen next? Will Harry survive? All will be revealed next time on The Deathly Hallows Uberwank Show!
... Oh, and Hagrid's there too, watching Harry being pwned and crying and stuff. He survives. This is completely inexplicable.
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LUKE: Vader is here, now, on this moon.
PRINCESS LEIA: How do you know?
LUKE: I felt his presence. He's come for me. He can feel when I'm near. That's why I have to go. As long as I stay, I'm endangering the group and our mission here. I have to face him.
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
THE EMPEROR: Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design. Your friends, up there on the sanctuary moon, are walking into a trap, as is your Rebel fleet. It was I who allowed the Alliance to know the location of the shield generator. It is quite safe from your pitiful little band. An entire legion of my best troops awaits them. Oh, I'm afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive.
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
From this chapter on, I find a weird sort of double standard (not exactly the term I'm looking for, but it'll do) in my head. If I just sit and read without really thinking about it, these are the best chapters of the book, and I find myself pulled along by the exciting plot and gripping writing and, for crying out loud, I almost found myself with a lump in my throat a couple of times. (Don't tell anyone that, obviously.) But as soon as I grab a pen and notebook, or sit at my computer, I start finding really heinous plot holes and crap writing and I realise I hate almost every character with a passion that burns like a thousand suns. So. There's your warning for the remaining chapters - it's likely I'll swing from squeeing fangirl to angry loner and back again in the space of only a few words.
That doesn't apply to the epilogue, of course. The epilogue is just shit.
So. Harry opens the chapter by following the established pattern: he wangsts. OK, so he has to go and die now, and that really does suck and everything, but there's no need to be so damn flowery about it. At one point he even goes on about how he wishes he could have died like Hedwig did. Oh noes! Poor Hedwig, that owl that was really boring and didn't do anything, is dead! Go cry, emo kid.
He even wishes he could have died "launching himself in front of a wand to save someone he loved", which is all kinds of fail. I bet he wishes he could have died screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" as well.
After almost three pages of lying on the floor of Dumbledore's office, Harry gets up, puts on the Mary Sue Cloaking Device and starts the long walk to death. His wangst is simultaneously interrupted and facilitated when he runs into Neville and Oliver Wood, carrying in the dead Colin Creevey. This is another death that I feel ought to have been shocking and chilling and oh-no-isn't-war-terrible (compare Cedric Diggory), but thanks to this book I'm actually bored of death. So it goes.
Click to viewHarry emerges from the cloaking device and speaks with Neville. He doesn't say so in as many words, but he's aware that if he, Ron, and Hermione don't make it back, then Neville is the only hope for the Alliance. (I would argue that Neville basically is the Rebel Alliance, but that's a rant for later.) Neville agrees to dispatch the snake. Later, of course, he does, and it is baaaaaadass.
Back under the cloak, Harry continues across the grounds, where he sees Ginny. Ginny is busily comforting someone who is heavily implied to be a little girl (it doesn't say "little", but she is asking for her mother and saying she wants to go home, and the setup suggests that she is younger than Ginny). Not sure what this young-ish girl is doing here, but Ginny is looking after her anyway. Presumably this is because Ginny is so compassionate! OK, so there's another double standard going on in my brain - if Ginny doesn't do anything nice on-page I think she's a cow, and when we do see her doing anything decent I call bullshit. It just feels like - well, too little, too late, I suppose. I don't think a single instance of Ginny being genuinely nice to someone makes up for her being generally pretty underdeveloped as a character and, at times, coming across as quite vindictive. Look, I know Ginny-bashing is old meme, but I'm just trying to look at the evidence, as I see it: OK, she's nice to this kid here, but we've also seen her hiss at a ten-year-old girl who smiled at her then ex-boyfriend; tear out the soul of her ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend from before they were together; call Luna "Loony" behind her back; hex people who say things she doesn't like; throw food at her estranged brother; it goes on.
Harry doesn't go and talk to her, anyway, because he knows that he will never be able to tear himself away from her dancing mane of red hair and her sunlit boobies and blah blah blah blah. And also she'd probably tell him not to kill himself, which, to be fair, I can't fault her for.
Harry reflects that he wishes someone would rescue him, bring him home, but then realises that Hogwarts is his home. He compares himself to Voldemort and Snape - they all found a place for themselves at Hogwarts that they never had before. That's one of the bits that I really like when I read this chapter without thinking about it, by the way.
He wanders on, next passing Hagrid's hut, where his brain provides him with a schmaltzy Hollywood-style montage of all the fun times they had there, like that one time Hagrid got a dragon and it nearly burned down Scotland, or the time Ron vomited slugs and how hilarious that was, and that time they walked in without knocking and found Hagrid posting nude pictures of himself on hairybears.com and it was awkward but then he fed them vole sandwiches or something and it was great. How they laughed.
This train of thought eventually leads Harry to thinking about snitches, and then it hits him that "I open at the close" means that snitch he's been carting around all this time will open now, you know, at the close. Of life. Or something. I think I am maybe not too clever, because I utterly failed to guess that and even now it doesn't make total sense in my head, but I've never been good at this sort of thing. I don't think I've ever heard "the close" being used to mean death, but I know some people figured this bit out in advance. At any rate, it makes sense to Harry, so he kisses the golden orb (badfic term - for what, though?) which falls apart, revealing... a number of small, fiddly plastic components and a set of indecipherable instructions for putting them together in order to build a completely crap toy train or something. And some chocolate. I'm kidding, obviously, it's the resurrection stone really. But if this thing he's been carrying around for almost a year was, in fact, a Kinder Egg, well, that would be epic lulz.
Harry "raises Draco's wand under the cloak" (ahem) and examines the stone properly. It totally has the sign of the deathly hallows on it, which is useful - you know how it is, we've all done it, you're looking through your vault of precious stones and you can't for the life of you find the one that brings people back from the dead. So this one is handily engraved with the hallows logo and comes in an attractive presentation box and with a hand-numbered certificate of authenticity.
We get a nice line about how it's OK for Harry to use the stone, because unlike the guy in the story they read way back in chapter 21, he's not bringing anyone back, he's having them collect him. This is one of the best examples of that dissonance thing I was talking about earlier - I love this bit, it's one of my favourite bits in the book, and I'm about to start ripping it into pieces and taking the piss and comparing it to Star Wars.
So. Harry finally has the resurrection stone, and he turns it over in his hands, summoning himself a little moral support: his parents, his godfather, and that guy that used to work up at the school. Here's an artist's impression of what this scene might look like.
They tell him that everything is cool and that the Force will be with him, always. Harry asks if dying hurts, and Sirius says no, it's like falling asleep. Says the dude who was killed by a curtain. I'd wager that someone who died of a drawn-out and incurable cancer, or was skinned alive, or was shot in the bowel and left to bleed to death, might beg to differ. As far as we know, everyone present died in a relatively quick and painless way (Sirius - curtain, Lily and James - Avada Kedavra, Remus - choose your own!) so I wouldn't call them experts. Frankly, I'd like to hear about things from someone who died slowly and painfully before I take anyone's word for this. Not that it matters, since Harry is planning on going the same way as these fuckers did, but anyway.
Actually, while we're on the subject of painless death, why is the AK curse unforgiveable, anyway? Presumably accio-ing someone's small intestine wouldn't technically be "unforgiveable", even though it would involve a much slower and more gruesome death. There are much worse ways to murder someone (and anyway, would the average psychopath be satisfied killing someone with an instant and painless spell that leaves the body unsullied when they could dismember them and stick their dick in the pieces?). And a part of Dumbledore's rationale for having Snape kill him is that he's going to die anyway, of a horrible curse. He can't be the first terminally ill wizard to request an AK from someone he trusts, you know?
Back to this bit, anyway. It's pretty cool. I like that we get to see these guys as they were when they were young and everything. I also like the part where Sirius and Remus grab hands and exchange a swift kiss, glowing with happiness and... DAMMIT.
On that note, though, I do like that they are all described as looking happy and relaxed and stuff; Sirius looks younger than Harry ever saw him in real life, and - this is really weird - Remus looks sober. And, being an angry, bitter slash fangirl, I like that Remus is happy and Tonks, though dead, is nowhere to be seen. Fish in a barrel, I know. Still.
So, yeah. This is one of my favourite bits in the book, but only if I don't think about it in too much depth. Because, here's the thing - these four people, all of whom in some way died to protect Harry, have now shown up urging him to commit the fantasy novel equivalent of suicide by cop. I know what's meant to be happening is that they're there to support him and be with him when he, you know, crosses over or whatever, but the underlying implication is rather a sinister one in my view. They just all seem a bit too happy that he's about to die, considering they all gave their lives for him in one way or another.
The most disturbing theory I've heard regarding this bit (and one which I can't credit properly, as I've forgotten where I read it) is that this isn't a resurrection stone at all, but something rigged up by Dumbledore to produce images of Harry's dead loved ones telling him to kill himself. It's not inconceivable - portraits, the Marauder's Map, Tom Riddle's diary and to a lesser extent photographs all have the ability to echo specific personalities without simply playing back recordings (a kind of artificial intelligence we muggles haven't achieved yet), and Dumbledore is meant to have been one of the greatest wizards who ever lived. Oh, I don't think that is what's supposed to be going on here, I think it's a resurrection stone and these really are the people they are supposed to be, at least as far as JKR is concerned. My point is that I can easily believe Dumbledore would have done something like that, as one more way of manipulating Harry towards accepting and walking into his own death. Fucker.
Whether this is for real or not, they all spend a little quality time together. Harry apologises to Remus for, you know, him dying and stuff, especially what with baby Ruxpin who will now have to be an orphan. Remus pulls out some cue-cards and delivers a hastily written speech about how it's cool, don't worry about it - and anyway, my kid will grow up knowing I died to build a better world for him. I could swear he's stolen about half of it from those old Coke adverts from the 80s, but it does the trick - the trick being, hiding the fact that Remus is secretly relieved he won't have to pay child support.
... Wow. I really am a horrible person. :-/
They hike through the woods for a while, eventually finding and following a couple of death eaters on their way back to base camp. Harry is still under the cloaking device and, rather handily, the Force Ghosts are apparently "a part of Harry" and invisible to everyone else. Where I'm from, that's called a hallucination, especially considering that they are urging him to kill himself, but what do I know. Eventually they arrive, and Harry - without even saying goodbye to the Marauder Force Ghost Cheerleaders of Death - drops the resurrection stone on the floor, snuffing them out.
The scene is this: the death eaters are hanging around in some clearing, and at their centre, Voldemort is totally wangsting out about the fact Harry's not there. (Well, you can't spell "Voldemort" without "emo".) All over the world Harry/Tom shippers are going squee. Harry lets him say, "He didn't come! He promised he'd come!" a few times before pulling off his cloak and revealing himself (ahem). Voldemort, desperate not be seen as, well, desperate, pulls himself together and starts flirting pathetically with Harry, giving it all, "Welcome, young Skywalker. I have been expecting you" and "You underestimate the power of the dark side. If you will not fight, then you will meet your destiny". This goes on for a little while until I get bored of looking up Return of the Jedi quotes. All this is interspersed with Harry's thoughts on death and a bunch of stuff about how he won't fight and things like that. There's a fucking brilliant line in there as well, which I will quote in full:
Bellatrix was panting, and Harry thought inexplicably of Ginny, and her blazing look, and the feel of her lips on his -
Voldemort had raised his wand [...]
Actually, typing that out just there I realised it's probably supposed to mean "Ginny's lips on Harry's lips" as opposed to "Ginny's lips on Harry's bell-end", but come on - blowjobs! Those are always funny. Or I'm a twelve-year-old boy, whatever.
Regardless of the blowjob stuff, actually, this line is kind of stupid. Because Ginny is meant to be - meant to be - nice and sympathetic and everything, and Bellatrix is supposed to be a sociopath. A similar thing occurred in chapter 6, where Molly is berating Harry for something and he notices that she and Ginny have the same eyes. The only explanation I can manage is that JKR wants to show us that Harry is thinking about Ginny a lot, but I'm not sure it works.
It's also revealing, I think, that Harry doesn't think of Ginny's alleged loyalty/compassion/feistiness/whatever but of her physical attributes. You know, stuff like this, that's the reason people don't buy Harry/Ginny. We might have seen her being encouraging to some kid earlier in the chapter, but when Harry thinks he's about to die, his last thought of her is not to do with the comfort she provided him or how he can, at least, die having found his soulmate or how much he loves her (as I recall, the word "love" is never used in reference to their relationship), but about the physical stuff, and to me that speaks volumes.
Anyway, after all this wangst, Voldemort finally gets his act together. And so, like Jesus, Aslan, and... uh... Captain Jack Harkness at the end of the first season of Torchwood (well, actually, in almost every fucking episode of Torchwood - but I digress) before him, Harry allows himself to be pwnt. Of course he's not fucking dead, there's three chapters to go yet, but let's just go along with it. Usual flash of green light (considering how many deadly, or at least painful, spells involve flashes of brightly coloured light, I bet your average wizard gets pretty jittery in a nightclub), and Harry topples over and, you know, dies and stuff.
Honestly, I think Harry's big sacrifice would have a little more gravitas if he hadn't hit an unsuspecting opponent with the cruciatus curse within the last 24 hours, not to mention he was just thinking about Ginny sucking his dick. I dunno, I just reckon, if you're going to bring out the messiah metaphors, do them properly, you know?
But, anyway, what will happen next? Will Harry survive? All will be revealed next time on The Deathly Hallows Uberwank Show!
... Oh, and Hagrid's there too, watching Harry being pwned and crying and stuff. He survives. This is completely inexplicable.
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