Deathly Hallows uberwank: Nineteen Years Later
So.
Here we are.
OK, so honestly, posting this feels weird. This book came out almost a year ago now, and in that time it seems that the majority of people have moved on and just plain got over DH being a bit shoddy at times, and said, "Yeah, the epilogue sucked, so what? I'm just going to disregard it". Whereas here I am, like the sole existing member of an otherwise defunct cult, standing in a town centre with my sandwich board and megaphone, bellowing about how the CIA had Princess Diana assassinated or some shit. In short, this whole chapter just feels like old meme, and maybe I should just STFU, you know?
... Not that I'm going to STFU, you understand. Heh.
Be warned, though. If you thought the previous chapters were wanky... well, this is another one that brings in conversation analysis, put it that way.
And so we go
On with our lives
We know the truth
But prefer lies
Lies are simple
Simple is bliss
Why go against tradition when we can
Admit defeat?
- NOFX, "The Decline"
So, what with the title of this chapter, the year is 2017, and Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione (along with the domestic robots everyone will have by 2017) are putting their kids on the train for school. So is Draco Malfoy, who appears to have some sort of wife. This comes as a surprise to anyone with a functioning gaydar. He also has a receding hairline, just in case any of you still thought he was hot. Harry and Draco exchange a brief nod, which spawns a thousand fics in which they work in the same department of the ministry/go on a "fishing" trip together/get magically bound to one another by accident/whatever, which leads, with a neat inevitability, to fellatio. JKR presumably didn't intend to imply this; however, I see absolutely no reason why Harry and Ginny should still be in a relationship two decades after they first became romantically involved - so little evidence seems to exist of any true emotional attachment, shared interests, or even genuine attraction between them - so I'm guessing at least one of them has a bit on the side. And given that Ginny's sole purpose in these books has been, ultimately, to be Harry's love interest/reward for saving the world, I'm guessing it's not her. (I actually feel kind of bad for her. Even the sorting hat gets a musical number.)
Nonetheless, Harry and Ginny are, apparently, married. Here's a picture of them.
Moreover, they have succeeded in producing three (ahem) younglings. (I dread to think of the number of sue-fics that have doubtless already resulted from this chapter. It's like when they introduced all those potential new Slayers in the last season of Buffy.) The Potters (ugh) have named their younger son - oh, dear god, here it comes - Albus Severus. That weird sort of muffled banging sound you can hear? That's the sound of a billion Harry Potter fans across time and space repeatedly *headdesk*ing. Best part is, we don't find out his full name, with the Severus part included, until the very last page, so it's sort of like a bad punchline. Or a cumshot to the eye. Or the part where the mugger, having taken your wallet and mobile phone, punches you in the face anyway. Or like when you go into a Portaloo on the final day of a music festival, and you already feel like you want to die and you almost certainly have trenchfoot and your mohawk, if applicable, has gone all floppy, and there's a heap of shit and paper rising out of the toilet, and there's one huge shit perched right on the top and some witty fucker has stuck a flag in it.
The stupid thing is, the name isn't that bad per se - at least, not in the context of all the other vaguely Latin, wizardly-sounding names in the book. It's that it's unbelievably trite and saccharine and stupendously unoriginal, and in any case, Harry naming his kid after Snape has got to be the most out-of-character moment in the books since Remus Lupin stuck his dick in a woman. (Is it really any surprise that so many people thought Carpetbook was an elaborate fake?) The other kids, by the way, are named Lily and James, *sticks fingers down throat*, so that the entire Potter family may suffer from Harry's messy, unresolved Oedipus complex together. Now isn't that nice?
Man. I sure hope that if little Al ever asks, "Why did you name me Albus Severus, Daddy? And forget all that bravery crap, I want a proper answer this time," he gets told, "Because it's a nice name. A wizardly sort of name," rather than "Well, the 'Severus' bit comes from this ugly, greasy, quasi-fascist dead guy who wasted his life bullying defenceless students and lusting after my mother. That's who your sister's named after, by the way - my mother. And your brother is named after my dad who - FYI - bullied the guy you're named after, resulting in the guy you're named after hating me while I was a kid - and then got off with my mum. And then the guy you're named after betrayed them both to Lord Voldemort. That, incidentally, is why I grew up a miserable orphan, forced to sleep in a cupboard until I was eleven. That's right - you and your siblings are named after the three main players in a hideous love triangle, all of whom were dead by their mid-thirties. Oh, and the 'Albus' part comes from this queeny lush I knew once. He was killed by that other guy too, and it became a hilarious internet meme, although it was quickly eclipsed by lolcats and the rickroll. Now run along and play with your brother and sister, me and your mum are off to have empty, meaningless sex while I think about Draco Malfoy and she thinks about whether she looks fat. Happy birthday".
Srsly tho, the name thing kind of reminds me of this fact from the Star Wars expanded universe - Leia and Han eventually have kids, and one of them is named Anakin. "Anakin Solo" as a name is pretty fucking tragic, but at least Leia acknowledges later that
"I placed quite a burden on Anakin, didn't I, by giving him that name."
- Dark Tide I: Onslaught by some guy called Michael A. Stackpole
Harry, on the other hand, appears to be using Albus Severus's name as a stick to beat him with as he worries about being put in Slytherin - I named you after these two guys who were both really brave, one of whom was a Slytherin, so tits or GTFO. OK, so he tries to reassure him a little, but only by saying that the sorting hat gives you a choice, so you can always try and weasel your way out if it does hint that you're destined for Slytherin. (And if that isn't a Slytherin thing to do, then I don't know what is.) I really hope Al does wind up in Slytherin, because it might finally be the slap in the face that this one big insular, provincial Weasley family needs to make them wake up and realise that judging someone entirely on a single facet of their personality is flawed. For the same reason, I hope he comes out.
Anyway. Moving on, Ron and Hermione's younglings are called Artoo and Threepio Rose and Hugo. There was a fair bit of wank over those names back in the summer too, as I recall, but I don't think they're that bad, at least not when compared to the rest of the chapter. I'm biased about "Rose" since that's my sister's name, and my sister is one of my favourite people ever, but it's a pretty name anyway. And "Hugo" could be a lot worse. Most importantly, there doesn't seem to be any ~*REALLY SPESHUL IMPORTANT SIGNIFICANCE*~ to their names (except that they begin with R and H), so I guess I can live with them. Not that it matters, since they do pretty much nothing and say pretty much nothing. They might as well be cardboard cut-outs. They're like non-player characters or something - maybe not even that, since NPCs at least usually speak at least a little, saying things like, "I wonder what that dark cloud over Death Mountain signifies?" or "They say that nobody can leave the Lost Woods without the SWORD that can be found HERE on your MAP".
Draco's youngling is named Scorpius. We find this out when Ron says, "So that's little Scorpius". I'm tempted to go off on one about how Ron, too, must have been seeing Draco on the side in order to know his kid's name, except that a) Ron/Draco has never really done it for me and b) I can categorically state that Ron knows this because these fuckers are all each other's friends on Facebook now. (Srsly, I keep getting friend requests on there from people who bullied me. WTF is up with that? I take probably more pleasure that is healthy from clicking "Ignore".) Incidentally, one of my all-time favourite things about Potter fandom is that the AS/S ship was spawned within hours of this book's release. JKR can sink (most of) our slash pairings in canon, but she can never take our FREEEEEDOOOOM!!!!!!!!
Anyway, I keep going off on tangents. So, what actually happens in this chapter?
... Well, not much. Ron and Harry exchange half-hearted, lame banter about Ron's driving test (Ron magically skullfucked the examiner into passing him, which is funny until Ron accidentally drives the car off a bridge). Overall it is misery-inducing. These guys, along with Hermione, are supposed to have saved the world (obviously the extent to which they did is debatable, but that's what the last 36 chapters were for), and now they spend their time making petty, trivial, suburban small-talk about driving tests and, no doubt, house prices and how much their Quidditch season tickets cost (but not about the actual game) and salaries and what the traffic was like on the way over and whether they took the A38 or the A381 turnoff right before that Little Chef and, occasionally, if they've both had a couple of drinks more than they should have, how their lives are so bloody boring now and how their glory days were over by the time they were eighteen, and anyway those "glory days" consisted mainly of sitting around and waiting for the plot to happen to them, and how saving the world by eighteen and getting married to your teenage crush means life is forever downhill and how they haven't heard from Luna or Dean or Seamus or Ernie or anyone in ages and how much they miss the old crowd.
I find it tedious enough when I have conversations about that stuff. But the Boy Who Lived doing it is just really depressing.
Meanwhile, back in the - um - future, Lily v2.0, who I guess is nine or so, is kicking up a fuss because she wants to go to Hogwarts now instead of when she's actually old enough to be admitted. Aw, just like Ginny did when we first met her, fangirling over Harry and her brothers way back in book 1. Presumably by the time little Lily is 16 she'll be presenting boys with the gift of sex for their birthdays. Awwww! So speshul!
That twat Teddy Ruxpin is there too, getting off with Bill and Fleur's youngling, Victoire. Sounds like a boy's name to me, but apparently Victoire is a girl. Dammit! And what the fuck kind of name is "Victoire" anyway? Maybe I'll look it up on some baby naming website or something.
Oh.
Anyway, James v2.0 is flipping out over Ruxpin/Victoire and starting threads on VENOM about it, but everyone else thinks it's great and is all like ZOMG Ruxpin/Victorie OTP. Personally, I'm with James on this one - I think it's unnervingly incestuous. Even if Ruxpin and Victoire aren't actually blood relatives, I am generally a bit squicked by the whole thing of two people growing up together and then becoming a couple, especially when it happens a lot. If it happens like once, ever, and it's done reasonably well, then it can be romantic (although I find myself unable to think of any examples); here, in the context of all these other married couples who met at the age of eleven or younger (not to mention that both the original Lily and James and Molly and Arthur met at Hogwarts, and Snape loved Lily from childhood), it's icky and totally unrealistic. It annoys me greatly that JKR gave the main characters relationships before the ones they ended up in, presumably so that nobody could accuse her of having everyone wind up with their first love and therefore being unrealistic - but nonetheless the relationships they did wind up in still started when they were all teenagers, so what's the difference, really? Are we really supposed to believe that nobody changes as a person after they leave Hogwarts?
Of course, there's no guarantee that Ruxpin and Victoire did grow up together (that was how this rant started, I believe), but we're talking about the OBHWF here - they almost certainly played together as kids at least a few times. Even if they saw each other once a year at the inevitable OBHWF Christmases, that's still more than I saw, say, my cousins when I was growing up, and I sure as fuck wouldn't marry any of my cousins. In many ways, though, that isn't even the point - the point is, it's really annoying that JKR just had to throw in yet another overly-cutesy almost-family-already pairing. Can't we just, I dunno, show people being happy in a way that isn't completely incestuous and all about pairing off into nice little heterosexual couples?
Anyway, just to labour the point, Lily v2.0 squees over the notion of Victoire and Ruxpin getting married, and I have a strange, fleeting vision of hundreds of orange Daleks advancing on a major city, chanting, "WE - ARE - WEASLEYS! ASSIMILATE - OR - YOU - WILL - BE - EXTERMINATED!" Also, Lily makes noises over how if Ruxpin and Victoire did get married, then he'd really be part of the family. And what the hell is with that? I'm talking about the thing where, in the Potterverse, apparently you're not truly accepted into a family unless you marry a bit of it. I see this argument thrown around a lot where Harry/Ginny is concerned, both explicitly and by implication; apparently all that stuff where the Weasleys accepted Harry into their home and gave him the same birthday and Christmas presents as they gave their own sons and fed him and clothed him and supported him and, in places, even explicitly said he was like a son to them (Molly says so in OotP, and her boggart takes on Harry's form amongst those of her children) didn't really count. He had to knock Ginny up to be truly accepted. Here, Harry even says that Ruxpin already comes around for dinner four times a week, and yet nobody thinks there's anything weird about Lily more or less saying outright that he's not really part of the family.
So the kids get on the train, and are told to send love to one "Professor Longbottom". This chapter sucks enormous, hairy balls, but I guess I am kind of glad we know what Neville's up to, even if I figured out that he'd become herbology professor when I was a foetus (as did about three quarters of the fandom, of course). James refuses to send love to Neville and instead kicks his brother. Ah, the power of love etc etc.
Meanwhile, everyone on the train and platform is staring at our little gang, specifically Harry. Ron explains it's because he, Ron, is really famous. Well, LOL, Ron! That was so fucking hilarious I've just literally pissed myself. Uh, no, actually, it's lame and stupid. You suck balls. Plus it implies that the kids don't know anything about what their parents got up to when they were young - that thing where they saved the world and stuff - which is kind of tragic, and, depending on various factors, potentially unhealthy.
Finally, the train GTFOs, and there is some purple prose about how watching Albus go off to school is like a bereavement for Harry (which would be fair enough in real life, except that the general tone of this chapter is simultaneously so clinical and so tooth-achingly sugary that I'm not feeling it). Ginny reassures Harry by getting her tits out saying "He'll be OK" or something, which as far as I can tell is the only part of the chapter where they interact with one another. Soulmates!
And, finally, the chapter - and the book, and the entire Harry Potter series, the series I have invested something like ten years of my life in fangirling - ends with the phrase "All was well", which on the face of it is an enormous anticlimax. (Don't go anywhere, though. I'm going to come back to "All is well" in a bit.)
On the surface, then, that's the epilogue - a fairly uneventful, soft-focus, ordinary day in Harry Potter's life, nineteen years after he vanquished Voldemort. However, this wouldn't be the Deathly Hallows Uberwank without a completely over-the-top exploration and tearing apart of every word, every turn of phrase, every implication, so here goes.
I find the epilogue enormously unsettling. Not just because of the One Big Happy Cheesy Family, not just because of the aspartame-based naming conventions, not just because of Draco's receding hairline. No, most of all I'm bothered because - to me at least - it's quite clear that nothing's actually changed.
I'm going to have to flirt with Godwin's in order to explain what I mean, for which I apologise. Dictatorships, civil wars, fascist regimes, police states - these don't appear out of nowhere, they don't spontaneously pop into being. They evolve, arising out of hotbeds of political upheavel, social change, radicalisation, politicisation. They might be tipped over the edge by a specific event, but ultimately they come about as the result of a long, slow, ongoing buildup of unrest. (Terry Pratchett, unsurprisingly, puts it better than I do: "Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?")
The point is, it's very easy and far too simplistic to put these things down to the person at the top being evil and that's it. The causes of World War II, for example, can be traced back at least to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, taking in along the way the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, hyperinflation, World War I reparations, the Reichstag Fire, and so on and so forth (way too tl;dr for me to explain in detail here, but Wikipedia is your friend). The point is, the existing social and economic and political climate of Europe at that time was such that if the Nazis hadn't taken power in Germany, it's entirely possible, indeed likely, that someone else would have, there or somewhere else. Something was ready to happen.
Godwin's Godwin's Godwin's I know, but - if we're going to examine the wizarding world as a believeable society, and I think we ought to be able to, and in any case JKR has quite explicitly drawn parallels between the world she created and Nazism - something unnervingly similar is going on here, and that bothers me. Sure, Voldemort was defeated two decades ago, but the old rivalries, the old prejudices, the old assumptions still appear to thrive. Put another way, the circumstances that allowed Voldemort's rise to power don't seem to have been re-examined; as far as we can tell, nobody has learned anything.
At the base level, there's obviously still hostility between Gryffindor and Slytherin beyond a healthy sporting rivalry (evidenced by James's teasing of Albus, and Albus's distressed reaction, and Ron's comment about how his kid needs to beat Draco's in every test - although to be fair, Ron is a fuck in his own right, and Hermione does bollock him for that comment), and moreover we hear that "Grandad Weasley" would disown any grandchild who married a pureblood. It's framed like a (weak) joke, but that's immaterial - it's clear that the very notion of blood purity is still a valid concept, and one used in everyday life, without explanation, as a form of classification. The sorting ceremony, self-fulfilling prophecy that it is, is still being used (even though, as we've seen, even the sorting hat itself thinks it's flawed), dooming kids at the age of eleven to a certain path in life, an existing set of minutely specified details, etc. Moreover, we don't see any house-elf children, goblin children, or centaur children getting on the train, so I think it's probably safe to assume all those inequalities between the magical "races" still exist.
So I don't believe - not for a second - that "all is well". I think JKR intended to present this epilogue as a sort of soft, pleasant, domestic, cosy snapshot of the lives of these characters, an indicator that they are living normally and happily, that the turmoil of years past is over and there is lasting peace. But that isn't what I get from the chapter at all.
And the thing is, if I thought JKR had intended to convey the dark undercurrent that I can't help reading into this, I'd be really impressed, at least with that aspect of the chapter - but I'm fairly sure it isn't deliberate. Of course, if ten years down the line JKR releases a series of next-gen novels - starting with, say, Albus Potter and the Magical Gay Bar - in which everything has once again gone to shit and there is a threat a thousand times worse than Voldemort about to take over and it's all because the rifts in wizarding society were never truly healed - well, then I'll be very impressed with this clever bit of foreshadowing. I very much doubt this is going to happen.
Actually, the use of "All was well" serves to perfectly underline what I'm talking about here. Consider: in the OotP movie, scene changes are marked by showing newspaper headlines, one of which reads "FUDGE: ALL IS WELL". Now, chances are JKR wouldn't have known that the film-makers were going to use those exact words, but my point is that the phrase itself carries with it connotations of protesting too much, attempting to reassure without foundation, and telling rather than showing. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Really, everything is OK, and that's my final word on the subject. That's why it was used for those scenes.
I suspect that JKR's use of "All was well" is intended as a less cliched alternative to "And they all lived happily ever after", but I don't think it reads that way, partly because "happily ever after" is an established storytelling trope but also because, and this is the crux of the issue, "All was well" is a deliberate statement of closure, and not only in that it's the final sentence in the book. To illustrate what I'm getting at, I'm going to have to stray off the main topic at hand for a moment. Compare this chunk of interaction:
YOU: Hey Fera, how was work?
ME: Oh god, terrible!
YOU: Oh no, what's up?
ME: Well, I spilled my coffee, and then... [continues to moan]
With this one:
YOU: Hey Fera, how was work?
ME: Fine thanks. You?
YOU: OK thanks. [Conversation moves on to another topic]
In the first example, I genuinely want to talk to you about my day, so I provide a specifically negative (it could just as easily have been positive, of course) answer to the fairly neutral question of "How was work?" - whereas, in the second example, for whatever reason I don't want to talk about my day. However, saying, "I don't want to talk about it" implies there is anything to talk about, and would act as an invitation for you to ask me more. Therefore, in giving an utterly neutral description of my day, I draw the topic of conversation away from my day and therefore towards something else.
"All was well" serves the same purpose: JKR is ending the conversation. She's saying - that's it, nothing more to see here. She is making an attempt to draw the series, and therefore discussion of the series and interpretation of the series, to a complete close on her own terms. That's it. It's finished. Everyone go home. (This rule doesn't apply to her, of course, as we see every time she releases another snippet of information about how Luna hooked up with Wicket the Ewok or whatever.) The point is, that the use of "All was well" (as opposed to, say, "Everything was perfect" or "Harry was finally, at last, happy" or "The old wounds had finally healed" or whatever - I'm not a skilled enough writer to come up with a really good alternative, but I hope the gist is clear) implies, whether JKR intended it to or not, there is nothing more to worry about, now stop talking about it.
(That last sentence does, in fact, make sense.)
Of course, I have personal reasons for disliking the way this chapter goes, too. It bothers me on the wankiest level - that is, in terms of, "Well, this sucks, I wanted this to happen". We'd all known since the dawn of time that we'd be getting an epilogue that tied up any remaining loose ends; personally I had wanted/expected this to be told in a detached sort of way, as an outsider's view that might have been peppered with small specific details about individual characters' lives but ultimately gave us a very general picture of the state of the world. JKR has used a similar style before - for example, in the very first chapter of the first book, before we even shift into Uncle Vernon's perspective - and it has worked on those occasions. The omniscient narrator thing is what I am getting at, I guess. (IMO, this fic got it right.)
What JKR offers us instead is a very narrow picture of domesticity, showing a limited set of achievements for a limited set of people. Any sense of the general state of the world we get - the stuff I was talking about above where nobody seems to have learned anything - doesn't count here, because in my view we get that impression not because JKR wrote it in on purpose but because she glossed over that aspect of the story in the hope that nobody would pick up on it. Oh, I know in interviews she gave us details about specific jobs and so on - Harry became head Auror and Luna married Wicket the Ewok and Percy opened a successful BDSM club and Ruxpin managed a chain of specialist whisky importers and the rest of it - but I don't want to have to pay attention to interviews to find that stuff out. After all, how many future readers will bother to seek out this information? (You know, I could even go off into another enormous tangent around Roland Barthes and the Death of the Author and how once the text is out in the world, JKR no longer gets to say what is the "right" way to interpret it, and that this has implications for her attempting to assert control by giving out extra-book information about characters she didn't include in the epilogue and that, in turn, links back to my points above about "All was well", but god I'm so tired.) As far as the book itself is concerned, all we know is that both the "main" couples have kids now. FWIW, my own stance on this is that having kids is never automatically an achievement or a failure - it is utterly dependent on the person involved and the circumstances they are in and so on. So I'm not going to whine about how all the characters are completely degraded and ruined because having children always does that to a character. However, what does worry me here is that we aren't shown any other kinds of achievements or successes or character development - just that they've all got married and had kids, and therefore the implication seems to be that getting married and having kids is a be-all, end-all measure of happiness and success.
Take Hermione, for instance: in terms of the way her character has always been written, I think her career path is more interesting and important than whether she has children or not. Throughout the books she is consistently presented as clever, resourceful, relatively independent, hard-working, a perfectionist and so on, but not really very... domestic, I suppose is the word. In fact, the few times in the books that she does do anything domestic she generally cocks it up (she does some lumpy knitting in GoF, and fails to cook fish and mushrooms to an edible standard in this book). So hearing that she is married and she has children and, as far as we know, that's it - is jarring. Because, actually, if she'd been presented from the get-go as somebody who was interested in getting married and having kids (and not even as someone for whom getting married and having kids was her greatest wish - just someone who had shown any inclination ever towards settling down) then I'd be perfectly satisfied, because ultimately that would be in line with her character. But Hermione has never been presented that way; she's been presented as someone for whom measured, academic achievement is important (and another of her priorities is friendship, of course, but getting into friendship as a theme in the series would be a tangent too far for the moment). Getting married and having children has never been shown to be a particularly important part of her identity. But that's all we know about her as she is nineteen years on.
To an extent this all goes for Ron as well, by the way. All we know about him from this chapter is that he's got kids now and is married (well, and that he mindraped a driving instructor). Oddly enough, I can buy all this a little more easily in Ron's case because we know he likes things like home cooking and having someone else do his laundry for him. Huh.
But this development is, by far, the most glaring where Harry himself is concerned. I have real trouble buying this version of him: the well-adjusted, mentally healthy family man. It seems like a cop-out that after seven years of being the only one who could defeat Voldemort, of being manipulated by Dumbledore, of being famous for something he didn't choose, of seeing countless loved ones and allies and innocent people die, of being tortured and victimised, of internalising the idea that unforgiveable curses are sometimes OK - and this isn't even taking into account his abuse-laden, loveless childhood - Harry can shrug all that off and go back to being normal when he was never normal to begin with. (I will happily admit this is why I love angsty, post-DH Harry/Draco, but that's neither here nor there.)
What I'm getting at is, I find it really difficult to believe that Harry could so easily and happily get married and start cranking out the offspring. Even if he managed to deal with all that baggage on his own, surely the shock of suddenly, for the first time ever, having a "normal life" would affect him massively. Although I suppose we don't know how much therapy he's had in the last 19 years. Maybe right after the last chapter ended he got himself set up with a good gestalt therapist and has been seeing him/her once a week ever since. Somehow, though, I doubt it. (I bet if JKR was ever asked if Harry went to therapy, she'd say no, he didn't need it, and anyway there are no wizard therapists because no wizards ever need therapy. Like how there are no wizarding universities, you know? There aren't any because she says so, not because it actually makes sense within the confines of the world she's created.) There's nothing in the chapter to indicate that change, and OK, 19 years have gone by, but still, it would have been nice to have some indication that it took work for Harry to be happy with life, or that shadows still remain or something. It's all just too neat. A recurring theme in hero-saga stories is the thing where having gone through the massive quest and everything, the hero finds himself (it's usually a him) so changed by the experience that he no longer fits into the life he left behind, or the life he thought he'd have after everything was over. The uber-example is Frodo Baggins, of course, who finds himself utterly unable to adjust to life in the Shire and leaves for good; you also see this in stories that aren't necessarily about saving the world, just about getting home (off the top of my head, Neverwhere, Stardust, and Life on Mars all did this). And Luke Skywalker decides quite early on to permanently leave Tatooine. But here is Harry Potter, being all happy and cosy and normal, and showing no indication whatsoever that he's struggled to get here.
In fact, as I recall, in HBP doesn't Harry even say something about how the few weeks (weeks!) he spends going out with Ginny are like something from somebody's else's life? I find it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that he is Harry Potter, he will have been marked by his experiences and his life will be apart from other people's. If being with Ginny makes him feel like someone else - well, that strikes me as a cheap solution, not a deep one. Happiness, ultimately, is not actually this easy to obtain.
Ah, fuck this. Tl;dr. Let's just cut to the obligatory Star Wars moment, shall we?
Right. The uberwank is hereby finished*. I'm going to go and kick a house-elf or tell Teddy he was an accident or something.
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* Not actually true. There's one more post coming, and it's interactive! :D
Here we are.
OK, so honestly, posting this feels weird. This book came out almost a year ago now, and in that time it seems that the majority of people have moved on and just plain got over DH being a bit shoddy at times, and said, "Yeah, the epilogue sucked, so what? I'm just going to disregard it". Whereas here I am, like the sole existing member of an otherwise defunct cult, standing in a town centre with my sandwich board and megaphone, bellowing about how the CIA had Princess Diana assassinated or some shit. In short, this whole chapter just feels like old meme, and maybe I should just STFU, you know?
... Not that I'm going to STFU, you understand. Heh.
Be warned, though. If you thought the previous chapters were wanky... well, this is another one that brings in conversation analysis, put it that way.
And so we go
On with our lives
We know the truth
But prefer lies
Lies are simple
Simple is bliss
Why go against tradition when we can
Admit defeat?
- NOFX, "The Decline"
So, what with the title of this chapter, the year is 2017, and Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione (along with the domestic robots everyone will have by 2017) are putting their kids on the train for school. So is Draco Malfoy, who appears to have some sort of wife. This comes as a surprise to anyone with a functioning gaydar. He also has a receding hairline, just in case any of you still thought he was hot. Harry and Draco exchange a brief nod, which spawns a thousand fics in which they work in the same department of the ministry/go on a "fishing" trip together/get magically bound to one another by accident/whatever, which leads, with a neat inevitability, to fellatio. JKR presumably didn't intend to imply this; however, I see absolutely no reason why Harry and Ginny should still be in a relationship two decades after they first became romantically involved - so little evidence seems to exist of any true emotional attachment, shared interests, or even genuine attraction between them - so I'm guessing at least one of them has a bit on the side. And given that Ginny's sole purpose in these books has been, ultimately, to be Harry's love interest/reward for saving the world, I'm guessing it's not her. (I actually feel kind of bad for her. Even the sorting hat gets a musical number.)
Nonetheless, Harry and Ginny are, apparently, married. Here's a picture of them.
Moreover, they have succeeded in producing three (ahem) younglings. (I dread to think of the number of sue-fics that have doubtless already resulted from this chapter. It's like when they introduced all those potential new Slayers in the last season of Buffy.) The Potters (ugh) have named their younger son - oh, dear god, here it comes - Albus Severus. That weird sort of muffled banging sound you can hear? That's the sound of a billion Harry Potter fans across time and space repeatedly *headdesk*ing. Best part is, we don't find out his full name, with the Severus part included, until the very last page, so it's sort of like a bad punchline. Or a cumshot to the eye. Or the part where the mugger, having taken your wallet and mobile phone, punches you in the face anyway. Or like when you go into a Portaloo on the final day of a music festival, and you already feel like you want to die and you almost certainly have trenchfoot and your mohawk, if applicable, has gone all floppy, and there's a heap of shit and paper rising out of the toilet, and there's one huge shit perched right on the top and some witty fucker has stuck a flag in it.
The stupid thing is, the name isn't that bad per se - at least, not in the context of all the other vaguely Latin, wizardly-sounding names in the book. It's that it's unbelievably trite and saccharine and stupendously unoriginal, and in any case, Harry naming his kid after Snape has got to be the most out-of-character moment in the books since Remus Lupin stuck his dick in a woman. (Is it really any surprise that so many people thought Carpetbook was an elaborate fake?) The other kids, by the way, are named Lily and James, *sticks fingers down throat*, so that the entire Potter family may suffer from Harry's messy, unresolved Oedipus complex together. Now isn't that nice?
Man. I sure hope that if little Al ever asks, "Why did you name me Albus Severus, Daddy? And forget all that bravery crap, I want a proper answer this time," he gets told, "Because it's a nice name. A wizardly sort of name," rather than "Well, the 'Severus' bit comes from this ugly, greasy, quasi-fascist dead guy who wasted his life bullying defenceless students and lusting after my mother. That's who your sister's named after, by the way - my mother. And your brother is named after my dad who - FYI - bullied the guy you're named after, resulting in the guy you're named after hating me while I was a kid - and then got off with my mum. And then the guy you're named after betrayed them both to Lord Voldemort. That, incidentally, is why I grew up a miserable orphan, forced to sleep in a cupboard until I was eleven. That's right - you and your siblings are named after the three main players in a hideous love triangle, all of whom were dead by their mid-thirties. Oh, and the 'Albus' part comes from this queeny lush I knew once. He was killed by that other guy too, and it became a hilarious internet meme, although it was quickly eclipsed by lolcats and the rickroll. Now run along and play with your brother and sister, me and your mum are off to have empty, meaningless sex while I think about Draco Malfoy and she thinks about whether she looks fat. Happy birthday".
Srsly tho, the name thing kind of reminds me of this fact from the Star Wars expanded universe - Leia and Han eventually have kids, and one of them is named Anakin. "Anakin Solo" as a name is pretty fucking tragic, but at least Leia acknowledges later that
"I placed quite a burden on Anakin, didn't I, by giving him that name."
- Dark Tide I: Onslaught by some guy called Michael A. Stackpole
Harry, on the other hand, appears to be using Albus Severus's name as a stick to beat him with as he worries about being put in Slytherin - I named you after these two guys who were both really brave, one of whom was a Slytherin, so tits or GTFO. OK, so he tries to reassure him a little, but only by saying that the sorting hat gives you a choice, so you can always try and weasel your way out if it does hint that you're destined for Slytherin. (And if that isn't a Slytherin thing to do, then I don't know what is.) I really hope Al does wind up in Slytherin, because it might finally be the slap in the face that this one big insular, provincial Weasley family needs to make them wake up and realise that judging someone entirely on a single facet of their personality is flawed. For the same reason, I hope he comes out.
Anyway. Moving on, Ron and Hermione's younglings are called Artoo and Threepio Rose and Hugo. There was a fair bit of wank over those names back in the summer too, as I recall, but I don't think they're that bad, at least not when compared to the rest of the chapter. I'm biased about "Rose" since that's my sister's name, and my sister is one of my favourite people ever, but it's a pretty name anyway. And "Hugo" could be a lot worse. Most importantly, there doesn't seem to be any ~*REALLY SPESHUL IMPORTANT SIGNIFICANCE*~ to their names (except that they begin with R and H), so I guess I can live with them. Not that it matters, since they do pretty much nothing and say pretty much nothing. They might as well be cardboard cut-outs. They're like non-player characters or something - maybe not even that, since NPCs at least usually speak at least a little, saying things like, "I wonder what that dark cloud over Death Mountain signifies?" or "They say that nobody can leave the Lost Woods without the SWORD that can be found HERE on your MAP".
Draco's youngling is named Scorpius. We find this out when Ron says, "So that's little Scorpius". I'm tempted to go off on one about how Ron, too, must have been seeing Draco on the side in order to know his kid's name, except that a) Ron/Draco has never really done it for me and b) I can categorically state that Ron knows this because these fuckers are all each other's friends on Facebook now. (Srsly, I keep getting friend requests on there from people who bullied me. WTF is up with that? I take probably more pleasure that is healthy from clicking "Ignore".) Incidentally, one of my all-time favourite things about Potter fandom is that the AS/S ship was spawned within hours of this book's release. JKR can sink (most of) our slash pairings in canon, but she can never take our FREEEEEDOOOOM!!!!!!!!
Anyway, I keep going off on tangents. So, what actually happens in this chapter?
... Well, not much. Ron and Harry exchange half-hearted, lame banter about Ron's driving test (Ron magically skullfucked the examiner into passing him, which is funny until Ron accidentally drives the car off a bridge). Overall it is misery-inducing. These guys, along with Hermione, are supposed to have saved the world (obviously the extent to which they did is debatable, but that's what the last 36 chapters were for), and now they spend their time making petty, trivial, suburban small-talk about driving tests and, no doubt, house prices and how much their Quidditch season tickets cost (but not about the actual game) and salaries and what the traffic was like on the way over and whether they took the A38 or the A381 turnoff right before that Little Chef and, occasionally, if they've both had a couple of drinks more than they should have, how their lives are so bloody boring now and how their glory days were over by the time they were eighteen, and anyway those "glory days" consisted mainly of sitting around and waiting for the plot to happen to them, and how saving the world by eighteen and getting married to your teenage crush means life is forever downhill and how they haven't heard from Luna or Dean or Seamus or Ernie or anyone in ages and how much they miss the old crowd.
I find it tedious enough when I have conversations about that stuff. But the Boy Who Lived doing it is just really depressing.
Meanwhile, back in the - um - future, Lily v2.0, who I guess is nine or so, is kicking up a fuss because she wants to go to Hogwarts now instead of when she's actually old enough to be admitted. Aw, just like Ginny did when we first met her, fangirling over Harry and her brothers way back in book 1. Presumably by the time little Lily is 16 she'll be presenting boys with the gift of sex for their birthdays. Awwww! So speshul!
That twat Teddy Ruxpin is there too, getting off with Bill and Fleur's youngling, Victoire. Sounds like a boy's name to me, but apparently Victoire is a girl. Dammit! And what the fuck kind of name is "Victoire" anyway? Maybe I'll look it up on some baby naming website or something.
Oh.
Anyway, James v2.0 is flipping out over Ruxpin/Victoire and starting threads on VENOM about it, but everyone else thinks it's great and is all like ZOMG Ruxpin/Victorie OTP. Personally, I'm with James on this one - I think it's unnervingly incestuous. Even if Ruxpin and Victoire aren't actually blood relatives, I am generally a bit squicked by the whole thing of two people growing up together and then becoming a couple, especially when it happens a lot. If it happens like once, ever, and it's done reasonably well, then it can be romantic (although I find myself unable to think of any examples); here, in the context of all these other married couples who met at the age of eleven or younger (not to mention that both the original Lily and James and Molly and Arthur met at Hogwarts, and Snape loved Lily from childhood), it's icky and totally unrealistic. It annoys me greatly that JKR gave the main characters relationships before the ones they ended up in, presumably so that nobody could accuse her of having everyone wind up with their first love and therefore being unrealistic - but nonetheless the relationships they did wind up in still started when they were all teenagers, so what's the difference, really? Are we really supposed to believe that nobody changes as a person after they leave Hogwarts?
Of course, there's no guarantee that Ruxpin and Victoire did grow up together (that was how this rant started, I believe), but we're talking about the OBHWF here - they almost certainly played together as kids at least a few times. Even if they saw each other once a year at the inevitable OBHWF Christmases, that's still more than I saw, say, my cousins when I was growing up, and I sure as fuck wouldn't marry any of my cousins. In many ways, though, that isn't even the point - the point is, it's really annoying that JKR just had to throw in yet another overly-cutesy almost-family-already pairing. Can't we just, I dunno, show people being happy in a way that isn't completely incestuous and all about pairing off into nice little heterosexual couples?
Anyway, just to labour the point, Lily v2.0 squees over the notion of Victoire and Ruxpin getting married, and I have a strange, fleeting vision of hundreds of orange Daleks advancing on a major city, chanting, "WE - ARE - WEASLEYS! ASSIMILATE - OR - YOU - WILL - BE - EXTERMINATED!" Also, Lily makes noises over how if Ruxpin and Victoire did get married, then he'd really be part of the family. And what the hell is with that? I'm talking about the thing where, in the Potterverse, apparently you're not truly accepted into a family unless you marry a bit of it. I see this argument thrown around a lot where Harry/Ginny is concerned, both explicitly and by implication; apparently all that stuff where the Weasleys accepted Harry into their home and gave him the same birthday and Christmas presents as they gave their own sons and fed him and clothed him and supported him and, in places, even explicitly said he was like a son to them (Molly says so in OotP, and her boggart takes on Harry's form amongst those of her children) didn't really count. He had to knock Ginny up to be truly accepted. Here, Harry even says that Ruxpin already comes around for dinner four times a week, and yet nobody thinks there's anything weird about Lily more or less saying outright that he's not really part of the family.
So the kids get on the train, and are told to send love to one "Professor Longbottom". This chapter sucks enormous, hairy balls, but I guess I am kind of glad we know what Neville's up to, even if I figured out that he'd become herbology professor when I was a foetus (as did about three quarters of the fandom, of course). James refuses to send love to Neville and instead kicks his brother. Ah, the power of love etc etc.
Meanwhile, everyone on the train and platform is staring at our little gang, specifically Harry. Ron explains it's because he, Ron, is really famous. Well, LOL, Ron! That was so fucking hilarious I've just literally pissed myself. Uh, no, actually, it's lame and stupid. You suck balls. Plus it implies that the kids don't know anything about what their parents got up to when they were young - that thing where they saved the world and stuff - which is kind of tragic, and, depending on various factors, potentially unhealthy.
Finally, the train GTFOs, and there is some purple prose about how watching Albus go off to school is like a bereavement for Harry (which would be fair enough in real life, except that the general tone of this chapter is simultaneously so clinical and so tooth-achingly sugary that I'm not feeling it). Ginny reassures Harry by getting her tits out saying "He'll be OK" or something, which as far as I can tell is the only part of the chapter where they interact with one another. Soulmates!
And, finally, the chapter - and the book, and the entire Harry Potter series, the series I have invested something like ten years of my life in fangirling - ends with the phrase "All was well", which on the face of it is an enormous anticlimax. (Don't go anywhere, though. I'm going to come back to "All is well" in a bit.)
On the surface, then, that's the epilogue - a fairly uneventful, soft-focus, ordinary day in Harry Potter's life, nineteen years after he vanquished Voldemort. However, this wouldn't be the Deathly Hallows Uberwank without a completely over-the-top exploration and tearing apart of every word, every turn of phrase, every implication, so here goes.
I find the epilogue enormously unsettling. Not just because of the One Big Happy Cheesy Family, not just because of the aspartame-based naming conventions, not just because of Draco's receding hairline. No, most of all I'm bothered because - to me at least - it's quite clear that nothing's actually changed.
I'm going to have to flirt with Godwin's in order to explain what I mean, for which I apologise. Dictatorships, civil wars, fascist regimes, police states - these don't appear out of nowhere, they don't spontaneously pop into being. They evolve, arising out of hotbeds of political upheavel, social change, radicalisation, politicisation. They might be tipped over the edge by a specific event, but ultimately they come about as the result of a long, slow, ongoing buildup of unrest. (Terry Pratchett, unsurprisingly, puts it better than I do: "Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?")
The point is, it's very easy and far too simplistic to put these things down to the person at the top being evil and that's it. The causes of World War II, for example, can be traced back at least to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, taking in along the way the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, hyperinflation, World War I reparations, the Reichstag Fire, and so on and so forth (way too tl;dr for me to explain in detail here, but Wikipedia is your friend). The point is, the existing social and economic and political climate of Europe at that time was such that if the Nazis hadn't taken power in Germany, it's entirely possible, indeed likely, that someone else would have, there or somewhere else. Something was ready to happen.
Godwin's Godwin's Godwin's I know, but - if we're going to examine the wizarding world as a believeable society, and I think we ought to be able to, and in any case JKR has quite explicitly drawn parallels between the world she created and Nazism - something unnervingly similar is going on here, and that bothers me. Sure, Voldemort was defeated two decades ago, but the old rivalries, the old prejudices, the old assumptions still appear to thrive. Put another way, the circumstances that allowed Voldemort's rise to power don't seem to have been re-examined; as far as we can tell, nobody has learned anything.
At the base level, there's obviously still hostility between Gryffindor and Slytherin beyond a healthy sporting rivalry (evidenced by James's teasing of Albus, and Albus's distressed reaction, and Ron's comment about how his kid needs to beat Draco's in every test - although to be fair, Ron is a fuck in his own right, and Hermione does bollock him for that comment), and moreover we hear that "Grandad Weasley" would disown any grandchild who married a pureblood. It's framed like a (weak) joke, but that's immaterial - it's clear that the very notion of blood purity is still a valid concept, and one used in everyday life, without explanation, as a form of classification. The sorting ceremony, self-fulfilling prophecy that it is, is still being used (even though, as we've seen, even the sorting hat itself thinks it's flawed), dooming kids at the age of eleven to a certain path in life, an existing set of minutely specified details, etc. Moreover, we don't see any house-elf children, goblin children, or centaur children getting on the train, so I think it's probably safe to assume all those inequalities between the magical "races" still exist.
So I don't believe - not for a second - that "all is well". I think JKR intended to present this epilogue as a sort of soft, pleasant, domestic, cosy snapshot of the lives of these characters, an indicator that they are living normally and happily, that the turmoil of years past is over and there is lasting peace. But that isn't what I get from the chapter at all.
And the thing is, if I thought JKR had intended to convey the dark undercurrent that I can't help reading into this, I'd be really impressed, at least with that aspect of the chapter - but I'm fairly sure it isn't deliberate. Of course, if ten years down the line JKR releases a series of next-gen novels - starting with, say, Albus Potter and the Magical Gay Bar - in which everything has once again gone to shit and there is a threat a thousand times worse than Voldemort about to take over and it's all because the rifts in wizarding society were never truly healed - well, then I'll be very impressed with this clever bit of foreshadowing. I very much doubt this is going to happen.
Actually, the use of "All was well" serves to perfectly underline what I'm talking about here. Consider: in the OotP movie, scene changes are marked by showing newspaper headlines, one of which reads "FUDGE: ALL IS WELL". Now, chances are JKR wouldn't have known that the film-makers were going to use those exact words, but my point is that the phrase itself carries with it connotations of protesting too much, attempting to reassure without foundation, and telling rather than showing. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Really, everything is OK, and that's my final word on the subject. That's why it was used for those scenes.
I suspect that JKR's use of "All was well" is intended as a less cliched alternative to "And they all lived happily ever after", but I don't think it reads that way, partly because "happily ever after" is an established storytelling trope but also because, and this is the crux of the issue, "All was well" is a deliberate statement of closure, and not only in that it's the final sentence in the book. To illustrate what I'm getting at, I'm going to have to stray off the main topic at hand for a moment. Compare this chunk of interaction:
YOU: Hey Fera, how was work?
ME: Oh god, terrible!
YOU: Oh no, what's up?
ME: Well, I spilled my coffee, and then... [continues to moan]
With this one:
YOU: Hey Fera, how was work?
ME: Fine thanks. You?
YOU: OK thanks. [Conversation moves on to another topic]
In the first example, I genuinely want to talk to you about my day, so I provide a specifically negative (it could just as easily have been positive, of course) answer to the fairly neutral question of "How was work?" - whereas, in the second example, for whatever reason I don't want to talk about my day. However, saying, "I don't want to talk about it" implies there is anything to talk about, and would act as an invitation for you to ask me more. Therefore, in giving an utterly neutral description of my day, I draw the topic of conversation away from my day and therefore towards something else.
"All was well" serves the same purpose: JKR is ending the conversation. She's saying - that's it, nothing more to see here. She is making an attempt to draw the series, and therefore discussion of the series and interpretation of the series, to a complete close on her own terms. That's it. It's finished. Everyone go home. (This rule doesn't apply to her, of course, as we see every time she releases another snippet of information about how Luna hooked up with Wicket the Ewok or whatever.) The point is, that the use of "All was well" (as opposed to, say, "Everything was perfect" or "Harry was finally, at last, happy" or "The old wounds had finally healed" or whatever - I'm not a skilled enough writer to come up with a really good alternative, but I hope the gist is clear) implies, whether JKR intended it to or not, there is nothing more to worry about, now stop talking about it.
(That last sentence does, in fact, make sense.)
Of course, I have personal reasons for disliking the way this chapter goes, too. It bothers me on the wankiest level - that is, in terms of, "Well, this sucks, I wanted this to happen". We'd all known since the dawn of time that we'd be getting an epilogue that tied up any remaining loose ends; personally I had wanted/expected this to be told in a detached sort of way, as an outsider's view that might have been peppered with small specific details about individual characters' lives but ultimately gave us a very general picture of the state of the world. JKR has used a similar style before - for example, in the very first chapter of the first book, before we even shift into Uncle Vernon's perspective - and it has worked on those occasions. The omniscient narrator thing is what I am getting at, I guess. (IMO, this fic got it right.)
What JKR offers us instead is a very narrow picture of domesticity, showing a limited set of achievements for a limited set of people. Any sense of the general state of the world we get - the stuff I was talking about above where nobody seems to have learned anything - doesn't count here, because in my view we get that impression not because JKR wrote it in on purpose but because she glossed over that aspect of the story in the hope that nobody would pick up on it. Oh, I know in interviews she gave us details about specific jobs and so on - Harry became head Auror and Luna married Wicket the Ewok and Percy opened a successful BDSM club and Ruxpin managed a chain of specialist whisky importers and the rest of it - but I don't want to have to pay attention to interviews to find that stuff out. After all, how many future readers will bother to seek out this information? (You know, I could even go off into another enormous tangent around Roland Barthes and the Death of the Author and how once the text is out in the world, JKR no longer gets to say what is the "right" way to interpret it, and that this has implications for her attempting to assert control by giving out extra-book information about characters she didn't include in the epilogue and that, in turn, links back to my points above about "All was well", but god I'm so tired.) As far as the book itself is concerned, all we know is that both the "main" couples have kids now. FWIW, my own stance on this is that having kids is never automatically an achievement or a failure - it is utterly dependent on the person involved and the circumstances they are in and so on. So I'm not going to whine about how all the characters are completely degraded and ruined because having children always does that to a character. However, what does worry me here is that we aren't shown any other kinds of achievements or successes or character development - just that they've all got married and had kids, and therefore the implication seems to be that getting married and having kids is a be-all, end-all measure of happiness and success.
Take Hermione, for instance: in terms of the way her character has always been written, I think her career path is more interesting and important than whether she has children or not. Throughout the books she is consistently presented as clever, resourceful, relatively independent, hard-working, a perfectionist and so on, but not really very... domestic, I suppose is the word. In fact, the few times in the books that she does do anything domestic she generally cocks it up (she does some lumpy knitting in GoF, and fails to cook fish and mushrooms to an edible standard in this book). So hearing that she is married and she has children and, as far as we know, that's it - is jarring. Because, actually, if she'd been presented from the get-go as somebody who was interested in getting married and having kids (and not even as someone for whom getting married and having kids was her greatest wish - just someone who had shown any inclination ever towards settling down) then I'd be perfectly satisfied, because ultimately that would be in line with her character. But Hermione has never been presented that way; she's been presented as someone for whom measured, academic achievement is important (and another of her priorities is friendship, of course, but getting into friendship as a theme in the series would be a tangent too far for the moment). Getting married and having children has never been shown to be a particularly important part of her identity. But that's all we know about her as she is nineteen years on.
To an extent this all goes for Ron as well, by the way. All we know about him from this chapter is that he's got kids now and is married (well, and that he mindraped a driving instructor). Oddly enough, I can buy all this a little more easily in Ron's case because we know he likes things like home cooking and having someone else do his laundry for him. Huh.
But this development is, by far, the most glaring where Harry himself is concerned. I have real trouble buying this version of him: the well-adjusted, mentally healthy family man. It seems like a cop-out that after seven years of being the only one who could defeat Voldemort, of being manipulated by Dumbledore, of being famous for something he didn't choose, of seeing countless loved ones and allies and innocent people die, of being tortured and victimised, of internalising the idea that unforgiveable curses are sometimes OK - and this isn't even taking into account his abuse-laden, loveless childhood - Harry can shrug all that off and go back to being normal when he was never normal to begin with. (I will happily admit this is why I love angsty, post-DH Harry/Draco, but that's neither here nor there.)
What I'm getting at is, I find it really difficult to believe that Harry could so easily and happily get married and start cranking out the offspring. Even if he managed to deal with all that baggage on his own, surely the shock of suddenly, for the first time ever, having a "normal life" would affect him massively. Although I suppose we don't know how much therapy he's had in the last 19 years. Maybe right after the last chapter ended he got himself set up with a good gestalt therapist and has been seeing him/her once a week ever since. Somehow, though, I doubt it. (I bet if JKR was ever asked if Harry went to therapy, she'd say no, he didn't need it, and anyway there are no wizard therapists because no wizards ever need therapy. Like how there are no wizarding universities, you know? There aren't any because she says so, not because it actually makes sense within the confines of the world she's created.) There's nothing in the chapter to indicate that change, and OK, 19 years have gone by, but still, it would have been nice to have some indication that it took work for Harry to be happy with life, or that shadows still remain or something. It's all just too neat. A recurring theme in hero-saga stories is the thing where having gone through the massive quest and everything, the hero finds himself (it's usually a him) so changed by the experience that he no longer fits into the life he left behind, or the life he thought he'd have after everything was over. The uber-example is Frodo Baggins, of course, who finds himself utterly unable to adjust to life in the Shire and leaves for good; you also see this in stories that aren't necessarily about saving the world, just about getting home (off the top of my head, Neverwhere, Stardust, and Life on Mars all did this). And Luke Skywalker decides quite early on to permanently leave Tatooine. But here is Harry Potter, being all happy and cosy and normal, and showing no indication whatsoever that he's struggled to get here.
In fact, as I recall, in HBP doesn't Harry even say something about how the few weeks (weeks!) he spends going out with Ginny are like something from somebody's else's life? I find it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that he is Harry Potter, he will have been marked by his experiences and his life will be apart from other people's. If being with Ginny makes him feel like someone else - well, that strikes me as a cheap solution, not a deep one. Happiness, ultimately, is not actually this easy to obtain.
Ah, fuck this. Tl;dr. Let's just cut to the obligatory Star Wars moment, shall we?
Click to viewRight. The uberwank is hereby finished*. I'm going to go and kick a house-elf or tell Teddy he was an accident or something.
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* Not actually true. There's one more post coming, and it's interactive! :D