Some minor Deathly Hallows nattering

[jacquez]

I re-read the ending last night, because I wanted to read it while not excited and breathless from the headrush of first reading.

Some things I that struck me this time through:

Comments

[ozreison]

Here via friendsfriends, and, well...

what if it's, instead, the last piece of Voldemort's soul that is in Voldemort?

This was something that bothered me too in the reading. As soon as I read that, I thought "Yes! That's it!" Brilliant thinking. It does fit in perfectly.

*is happy that this theory is now in brain*

[jacquez]

It does make sense, doesn't it? And I like that, with that reading, Harry does try to help the thing that Dumbledore says is beyond help -- I just wish we'd seen him figure that out, that it was textually explicit -- because I think it says a lot about Harry that he makes the effort to get Voldemort to repent, and I think it would be even stronger if we'd seen him have the realization about the flayed thing.

There's a lot about Harry's speech there that feels like...speaking from revelation, to me, and I wish we'd witnessed the actual revelation rather than just the moment when Harry told people about it. He had time to think while pretending to be dead, after all...

[manycolored]

Holy crap, and she takes after her daddy. Who never fed his squib daughter. And so now she's a Muggle pop star. Damn.

[jacquez]

for serious. 'Tes a bit freaky, no?

[hafital]

perhaps he was trapped there, too, just the tiny bit of soul that he hadn't strip-mined out of himself.

That's how I initially read it, the first time, until others kept saying it was the piece of soul in Harry. But I've seen returned to my original way of thinking -- that malformed child/thing is Voldemort, representing what he's done to himself.

Harry puts a lot together at the end. I hadn't figured out the whole wand business myself until he explained it. The bit of him trying to get Voldemort to feel remorse is, imo, Harry showing that he figured out what the deformed baby was.

:D

[jacquez]

I just would have liked more of a sense either that Harry had figured it out beforehand (a sentence like "Hanging limply over Hagrid's arm, Harry thought back to the flayed thing, and suddenly knew what it must be" or whatever), or a sense that he's feeling along and figuring it out AS he says it ("as he spoke, Harry realized that the thing Dumbledore said was beyond help must be Voldemort himself, and he knew what he should do....")

Because as it's written, I have no sense of Harry's thought process, and that's a little jarring because something like 99.9% of the whole series is from his POV.

[hafital]

::nods:::

I can see that. It didn't bother me, but I can see why it would. And maybe she purposely had it that way to leave up to interpretation.

[jacquez]

a) I am made of win
b) this is actually my favorite bit: After a few years as a celebrated player for the Holyhead Harpies, Ginny retired to have her family and to become the Senior Quidditch correspondent at the Daily Prophet!

GO PRO SPORTS GIRL! *uses rugby icon*

...yes, I am still a Dreadful Sporty Type.