the lupin/tonks thread just annoyed the crap out of me, for the reasons you mention but also because those two characters, to me, read as queer. and i can, to some extent, understand jkr sticking them together in that sense for a children's book, but would it really have been so detrimental to just leave a few people un-breederified?? and then dead?? come to think of it, it's a rather horribly poetic fate for the two queers, hahaha. someone needs to write an essay about those two, for real.
i have to say that, as much as harry can be dumb as a post and generally adolescent, i still adore him. he got on my nerves a couple times during the book, and it got a bit tiresome that every. single. step. they took led to disaster, but i was so impressed with him at the end that i didn't mind the painfulness of the journey so much.
i'm reserving judgment on the whole deathly hallows thing itself. it felt a bit tacked-on to me, and weird that as the major plot point, it wasn't foreshadowed or referenced in earlier books (afaik, at least). but it worked well for the battle and that's perhaps the most important thing... i did like how harry used expelliarmus to disarm voldemort, never actively murdered him. it reflected nicely with the beginning when lupin was bothering harry about how he should be using "real" spells, etc.
also, so much of the book was intense character exposition that it was a bit of an information dump at times, and i wished jkr had paced that more strategically. i guess that's hard with the finale of such a huge series, though.
and the epilogue... was just plain bad. that's definitely my biggest nitpick, plot-wise. i didn't need it and furthermore didn't want it. i think epilogues in general point to shoddy writing, because you only need to spell it out if you haven't done your job sowing seeds in the book proper. and this epilogue just needed to beat us over the head with how serene and perfect and one-big-happy-weasley-family heteronormative everyone's future was. blech. i understand that she wrote it primarily for herself way back when, in order to have a future to write towards, but i wish so much that she'd kept it as just that, a personal exercise. personally, i wanted to be able to imagine lots of different futures for the characters, and i thought it was unrealistic in the extreme that the wizarding world just resolved into stepford world after voldemort died. i mean, really, come on. after a series that dark? it kind of undoes a lot of the significant themes jkr had been driving at, even. what about house elf liberation? what about the very interesting tidbit of info on the ministry diving magical beings into wandless and wanded species? what about whether teddy is a werewolf, ferchrissakes?? siiiigh.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2007-07-23 04:53 pm (UTC)i have to say that, as much as harry can be dumb as a post and generally adolescent, i still adore him. he got on my nerves a couple times during the book, and it got a bit tiresome that every. single. step. they took led to disaster, but i was so impressed with him at the end that i didn't mind the painfulness of the journey so much.
i'm reserving judgment on the whole deathly hallows thing itself. it felt a bit tacked-on to me, and weird that as the major plot point, it wasn't foreshadowed or referenced in earlier books (afaik, at least). but it worked well for the battle and that's perhaps the most important thing... i did like how harry used expelliarmus to disarm voldemort, never actively murdered him. it reflected nicely with the beginning when lupin was bothering harry about how he should be using "real" spells, etc.
also, so much of the book was intense character exposition that it was a bit of an information dump at times, and i wished jkr had paced that more strategically. i guess that's hard with the finale of such a huge series, though.
and the epilogue... was just plain bad. that's definitely my biggest nitpick, plot-wise. i didn't need it and furthermore didn't want it. i think epilogues in general point to shoddy writing, because you only need to spell it out if you haven't done your job sowing seeds in the book proper. and this epilogue just needed to beat us over the head with how serene and perfect and one-big-happy-weasley-family heteronormative everyone's future was. blech. i understand that she wrote it primarily for herself way back when, in order to have a future to write towards, but i wish so much that she'd kept it as just that, a personal exercise. personally, i wanted to be able to imagine lots of different futures for the characters, and i thought it was unrealistic in the extreme that the wizarding world just resolved into stepford world after voldemort died. i mean, really, come on. after a series that dark? it kind of undoes a lot of the significant themes jkr had been driving at, even. what about house elf liberation? what about the very interesting tidbit of info on the ministry diving magical beings into wandless and wanded species? what about whether teddy is a werewolf, ferchrissakes?? siiiigh.