InsaneJournal

Current mood:	content
Entry tags:	c'est la vie, harry potter, teaching

Mostly Deathly Hallows
Oh, it is so nice to no longer have to spend every moment I'm not at work chained to my keyboard. Fic (both fics, actually) is posted and I can stop wibbling and worrying it won't get done in time. I celebrated yesterday by going shopping with my sister; Ann Taylor Loft was having an amazing sale and I got a $60 pair of crop pants I can wear to work for $12. Yay clothes! I generallly hate shopping, but having dropped a few pounds recently is making it a lot more fun.

Work is good. My advanced students are well-behaved and wonderful. Annoying co-working and I have achieved a truce by simply not speaking to each other, which is probably the best I can hope for - except now our mutual students are complaining to me about him, which is awkward, but at least they're not complaining about me!

Oh, and my visa came! It's funny how different all the visas are. My visas for Germany are pink, the one for Ecuador is just stamped in with some handwritten info, and the one for England is yellow and is the only one with an actual picture of me on it. A really, really atrocious picture of me, unfortunately.

What else? Oh, well, I guess I should talk a little bit about Deathly Hallows.

First of all, it has to be said: I CANNOT BELIEVE SHE KILLED REMUS. And especially like that. He was just . . . dead. I didn't believe it actually, right up until his shade walked with Lily's and James's and Sirius's into the forest with Harry. I bawled that whole chapter and I still can't think about it too hard or I get really upset. And to find out later that she swapped him for Arthur Weasley of all people, who should have bit it in Book 5 (thus explaining why he's done pretty much nothing since then), made it even worse in a way. Though also somehow easier for me to just go, "Nope, it didn't happen. It was a fuck-up at the printer's."

Things I liked:

The way she complicated Dumbledore's and Snape's characters. Hurray for moral ambiguity. I especially loved the way the whole thing with the Deathly Hallows slotted into the end of Philosopher's Stone and the way Dumbledore chose to use the Mirror of Erised. I feel like I should go back and reread Snape's death scene, because I was so wrapped up at that point that I didn't take it all in; it didn't really affect me emotionally - anyone could see that coming, I think, and I wasn't all that attached to Snape as a character - but the way it was done, with him staring into Harry's eyes was unexpectedly intimate.

But mostly I loved what she did with Dumbledore. It's so rare that Obi Wan gets to be a fully developed character with flaws and a hidden past. That really increased my respect for JKR as a writer, because I wasn't expecting it from her.

As a side-note: Besides Remus's, the deaths that affected me the most were Dobby's and Hedwig's. I teared up while reading about Harry digging Dobby's grave. Never saw that coming, not in a million years. I liked Kreacher's turn-around though, a lot, and the fact that SPEW really was important in the end.

Things I didn't like:

Let's play a game called "Cook, Clean, or Die" in which everyone pretends to be a mother in JKR's universe. WTF?! What is with her, goddammit? Yeah, okay, Molly Weasley got her shining moment with, "Not my daughter, you bitch!" but this was not enough for me. She and Petunia both are never seen doing anything but cooking, cleaning, and fussing, while Tonks and Lily get to do pretty much nothing but die once they become mothers. It's . . . really ridiculous.

Grawp and Hagrid were not nearly important enough at the end to warrant their page time in the fifth book (or their presence in the fifth movie). I was in awe of the way many of JKR's plot elements fit together so very neatly at the end, but that? That was pure sloppiness.

The epilogue. Oh, the epilogue. God, I really thought I'd be able to get away from crap like that once I stopped reading random fics on Fiction Alley, but alas, it seems that a twelve year old's Harry/Ginny baby!fic was destined to become canon. Why, Jo, why? You could have written such an interesting epilogue set just a few weeks or months later. And the NAMES! What were you thinking? "Albus Severus"? It doesn't even sound good! Thank goodness I followed twitchylizard's advice and didn't read it right away - advice that I have since passed along to both my sister and my student who's reading the book.

Overall, I think it was an excellent end to the series - the best we could have hoped for, really. There are things I certainly would have done differently - and probably will do differently in fic - but overall I was more than satisfied.

I was going to do a post-mortem on A Heavy Darkness Falling but I don't know that I can yet. I think I want to, though; in my opinion, it's hands-down the best thing I've ever written, but there were things I could have done better, I think. I must ponder.