Hopes and Fears For Book 7
Hopes and Fears for Harry Potter and the Answers to Most of Your Questions
What do you want to see in Book 7? (Or as I’m calling it, Harry Potter and the Answers to Most of Your Questions.) What are you afraid of seeing? Is there anything that will make your heart swell with joy, or disappoint you so deeply that you never pick up the series again? Here’s my list. Maybe some of them will happen, maybe not, but it’s nice to fantasize while we wait.
Love To See:
Snape really is on the side of light. I’ve written quite a bit on this, so I’ll keep it short. I want Snape to be a good guy. The two main reasons, I hate to think Dumbledore really is that bad a judge of character. (Yes, we’ve been told about three hundred times that Dumbledore trusts too easily, but please, let it not be true in this case!) Reason two, Rowlings is a big fan of the mistaken identity. Snape has been billed from our first glimpse of him as "The Bad Guy!" Him actually being one of the Order would be the biggest mistaken identity she could give us.
A good explanation for how Harry and Co. get good enough to take on Lord Voldemort. Right now it would be ridiculously easy for Voldemort to apparate to where ever Harry and Pals are, and kill them before they get a peep out. Think of it, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are at Godrick’s Hollow, they decide to grab a bit of sleep before heading to the next step of the trail. While they are gently snoozing away, Voldemort comes to them, casts silently, and voila, three dead heroes. So I really want to see something about them learning to protect themselves. At the very least Harry manage to learn enough Occulmency so that Voldemort can’t track him by his scar.
Why Dumbledore trusts Snape. Do I need to expand on this? Is there anyone out there satisfied with the answer as we have it now?
Harry will be without Ron and Hermione at the final battle. This has been true for all the rest of his final battles, so I don’t see the pattern changing. The real question on this one, will Hermione and Ron be dead, incapacitated, or just somewhere else? I’m hoping for incapacitated or just in another place, but dead would also work for the idea of really hammering home the idea of Voldemort is EVIL. Also, Harry has never actually been alone in any of his last battles, something has come out of the ethers to save him, Dumbledore (PS, OOTP, HBP) Fawkes (COS) Harry from another time (POA), his parents shadows (GOF). I’m hoping that at the final battle with Voldemort, his angel will be Snape.
Harry survives the final battle, returns to Ginny, and they both live happily ever after, raising a mess of green-eyed red-heads. Do I think it’s likely to happen? That’s a hard one. It would nicely mirror Harry’s leaving Ginny at the end of HBP. Also, Rowlings does seem to at least nod at traditional forms of literature, and ending with a wedding is a very common tradition in BritLit. However, we’ve also seen a build up of Harry as Christ Figure, so his dying to save the Wizarding World would also be in
character, and a satisfying (if saddening) ending.
Hate To See:
Something horrible happens to Fred or George. Unfortunately I think this is pretty likely. They’re too out in the open. They are making life quite a bit harder for the Death Eaters by providing protective gear that actually works for the rest of the Wizarding World. They are precious to the Trio, and we know that Bellatrix is at large and inflicting pain is her cup of tea. The woman who helped torture the Longbottoms into madness doesn’t strike me as being reticent about doing something like it again. Also, Rowlings has talked about wanting to write about Evil, and watching Fred and/or George be tortured into death would certainly fit that bill.
Ron dies. Of the Trio Harry is the sword, Hermione is the brain, and Ron is the heart. Well, on a mission of destruction you need a sword and a brain, the heart is expendable. If these books were aimed at an older market, I’d consider this all but certain, but since the books are aimed at kids as well, I’m not so sure. Making Harry and Hermione’s emotional responses realistic would make much of Book 7 very unpleasant to read. Either they’d get over it too quickly, and we’d be left wanting to see more sorrow, or we’d have to read through however many pages of Harry and Hermione emotional torment. Neither sound like much fun to me. On the other hand Hermione without Ron probably becomes a match for Bellatrix…. Shades of Dark Willow from Buffy. Dark Hermione could be very interesting. But still, the books are "Harry Potter and the…," if the last one is "Hermione and the…," we know Ron gets it pretty early on.
The whole book is just the Trio off on a mystery adventure. I want to see the rest of the Wizarding World. It would be very easy for this book to be a chapter of wedding in the beginning where we see everyone we’ve come to love for five minutes, and then whatever wrap up comes at the end. Meanwhile the middle is just a great big treasure hunt. Just because Dumbledore is dead doesn’t mean the Order is. How will it look if Minerva takes over? How about the Order under Moody? Will the Order fall apart without Dumbledore?
The Redemption of Lord Voldemort. Please, Please, NO! First off, Star Wars did it better. Secondly, it would be so horrendously out of character for Voldemort that reading it would be painful. We have never seen any spark of goodness in Voldemort, and him suddenly discovering one would be awful. This is the only thing I can think of that would make me regret spending so much time and energy on this series.
So that’s my short list. What do you want to see?