Think About It: Harry Potter and the Release Date of Storge
In case you weren’t paying attention, the universe ended yesterday. Well, to be more accurate, the end of the universe was scheduled for July 21 of this year. That’s the day that, after ten years of voracious reading, sweating, hoping and geeking out, the world’s biggest literary cash cow will reach its final chapter with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J.K. Rowling has announced this as the day that the story of Harry Potter will come to an end.
The reactions were both swift (“Woot”!) and varied (“Wooo-ooot!”). And with the clock until Deathly Hallows officially ticking, the questions came fast (“What?”) and furious (“Freakin’ WHAT?”). So in order to quell the voluminous concerns that the Think About It Central fans have sent to me via e-mail, voice mail, snail mail and notes tied to bricks hurled through my window, this special edition of Think About It is dedicated to handling your concerns about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Q: Is this book being rushed? It’s coming out just five months after the announcement of the release date.
A: Most writers, with the obvious exception of Thomas Harris, don’t actually wait until the book’s release date is announced to begin writing. J.K. Rowling, who has done a pretty spiffy job of writing these tomes thus far, was working on this book for quite some time - at home, on the road, on airplanes, in the shower, at tables in restaurants… JKR has been writing this book everywhere, until finally her publisher popped to begin sending her shipments of paper to work on so she could stop pulling up those chunks of blacktop she scribbled on while writing on the road.
Q: The book is being released just one week after the fifth movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Has JKR lost her mind?
A: JKR, in all likelihood, has very little to do with the release date of the film. Although she gets to sign off on the script for the movie, Warner Brothers sets the release date, and the film was scheduled long before the movie was. What’s more, all of the Potter books thus far have been summertime releases, and if they were to wait any substantial period of time after the movie came out, they’d have to wait an entire extra year, which would be the death knell of the American bookstore market.
Q: Is Harry really going to die in this book?
A: Yes, by being chopped up into little chunks of kibble and fed to Fluffy, the Cerebus that has been conveniently absent since the climax of book one.
Q: REALLY?
A: That was sarcasm, dude. Really, how should I know? JKR has been wisely tightlipped about this particular development, although she’s been quite careful to keep the possibility that Harry won’t come out of the other end intact present in people’s thoughts. My personal feelings are that she won’t kill him, not because (as some have said) she would want to keep the cash cow alive, but simply because the arc of the story doesn’t feel like it would support it. The Harry Potter series has often been dark and fraught with danger, but it’s not bleak enough to end with the death of the hero, even in the service of good. I think Harry will survive, conquer Voldemort and find some peace in his life, although I wouldn’t go so far as to predict a “happily ever after” ending.
Q: What will you give me if you’re wrong?
A: A baseball bat to the skull. Do you want to talk Harry Potter or do you want to ask stupid questions?
Q: Yeesh. Sorry.
A: No, no, I apologize. I’ve been touchy all week.
Q: Is it true that Harry will be naked in the new movie?
A: You know, two girls in my ninth-grade English class asked me this today. No, seriously. The confusion comes herein: Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry in the films, is currently performing in the play Equus in London, and the play demands some nude scenes. Apparently, some people made a very bizarre leap of logic there. Not only are there no bits in Order of the Phoenix that would call for a nude scene, but this is a family movie. Warner Brothers isn’t about to cripple their cash cow by injecting a nude scene into a family film and bumping it up to an R-rating.
Q: So do you think that Harry will finally hook up with Hermione in this one?
A: Okay, now I’m really ready to reach for that bat. Listen, people - I know there are a lot of folks out there who have held out hope for years that somehow Harry and Hermione would figure out that they’re “meant for each other,” but it ain’t gonna happen. It was hinted at as early as book three, it was obvious in book four, and it was freaking blatant in book six: Hermione is in love with RON. Get over it!
Q: So what about Harry and Ginny?
A: Now we’re talking. If you haven’t yet read the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you may want to skip my response to this question.
At the end of that book, Harry and Ginny were dating, but Harry - having apparently seen the first Spider-Man movie one too many times, broke up with her after he realized that he had to devote himself completely to the war with Voldemort. The thing is, Ginny accepted this way too easily, and the reason for this should be obvious. Women are smarter than men. Harry has himself all set up to be proud and noble, forcing distance on her to protect her, but Ginny knows that she has no intention of walking away from him. What’s more, he needs her. The one power he’s got, the one weapon that Voldemort can never combat, is love. In an essay I wrote shortly after the sixth book came out, I theorized that Harry’s love for Ginny is twofold - on the one hand, it’s a true, pure love, the way real first love always is. (I don’t count Cho - that was a crush, this is the real thing).
On the other hand, Harry wants to be a Weasley. Look back at the very first book, when Harry gazed into the Mirror of Erised, which displays one’s deepest desire. What did he see? His family. Harry wants a family more than anything in the world, and the Weasleys are the first family he’s ever really felt a part of. He’s already been practically adopted by Ron Weasley’s mother and father. Were he and Ginny to ever get married (which I don’t think we’ll actually see in the book), he would finally be family not just in spirit, but in fact. So it works as both a character point and a structural point.
Q: Wow. Do you realize, expect perhaps for the Spider-Man crack, you got through that whole passage without making a snarky remark?
A: Sorry. I’ll try to do better next time. Dillweed.
Q: Deathly Hallows? I thought the last book was going to be called Harry Potter and the Pillar of Storge.
A: That was a rumor/joke that JRK circulated a while back. She finds it quite amusing that anybody thinks such a title would have been real. She is correct to think so. Can you imagine kids walking through a movie theater saying to each other, “Dude! Did you see Storge yet? It’s awesome!”
Q: Is there any significance to the fact that the book’s title includes the word Hallows instead of Hollows? Is it like a Halloween thing, or is it just that weird British Spelling problem that seems to infect words like “colour?”
A: Well, this isn’t a case of superfluous letters, just different ones. But just to inspire pointless argument, let’s look at the meanings of both words. According to Dictionary.com, “Hollow” means “A cavity, gap or space”, while “Hallows” is a verb meaning “To make or set apart as Holy” or “To respect or honor greatly; revere.” Obviously, this means that Harry will be revealed in this final book to be a bloodsucking death worshipper, meaning the people who have railed against this series’s Satanic undertones will be proven to have been correct all along and we’re all going to Hell. See you there. I’ll be wearing the t-shirt that says Joss Whedon is my master now.
Q: Is it true that JKR has had the series finished for years and they’re only just now finally releasing the last book?
A: Not quite. Reportedly, she wrote the final chapter some time ago. She’s even said what the last word in the series will be: scar. But if she had actually finished the series itself years ago, the publishers would never have sat on them for this long. They want their money now, damn it.
Q: So are you gonna be one of those geeks who waits in line at midnight to get a copy of the book on the first day?
A: You know, for the last couple of books I’ve ordered them through Amazon.com, because they promised to deliver the book on release day. (And they did.) But for this last one, I think a midnight release party may just be the thing. If I can find someone to go with. Any other geeks in New Orleans want to join me?
Q: Is there anything we can do to quell the gaping emptiness in our hearts after the Harry Potter series is over once and for all?
A: Absolutely. Great though Harry is, there are still a lot of cool books out there - the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer, a whole line of spiffy new young readers’ novels produced by Actionopolis, J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog’s beautiful Abadazad books… and even, if you’re really hard up, those books Other People’s Heroes and The Beginner by… oh, shoot, I can’t remember the guy’s name. But I hear they’re pretty good. Especially the second one.
Q: Hey, you managed to hold off on the shameless plug until the very end. Not bad.
A: Thanks. I try.
Blake M. Petit actually feels he hasn’t been aggressive enough with his shameless plugs lately. Buy his freaking books. And then contact him with comments and suggestions at BlakePT@cox.net.