(no subject)

[verbminx]

I'll talk about the actual EVENING later. For now,



I'm not finished reading the book, but I've skimmed, then read the last chapter. So far I don't really love this one. The last one was great... appalling, but great. This one is not so much.

1. Yes, it's Dumbledore who dies. This was pretty logical, and not too surprising. What DID surprise me is the killer: Snape. What surprised me even more is that a camshot was repeatedly posted to a MySpace Harry Potter community the other day depicting the bottom of page 606. When I got home with my book, the first thing I did was check page 606 to see if it was the same... I really thought the camshot would have been easy to fake. But it WASN'T faked, and I wonder who got it ahead of time and leaked it?

2. Snape is the Half-Blood Prince, and it's a pun. His mother's last name was Prince. Snape also gets DADA this year. Snape is also working for the Death Eaters, NOT the Order of the Phoenix.

3. That sickening-ass spoiler that ragdoll was complaining about the other day was tru-EW. Yeah, Tonks and Remus. Suck it up.

4. Even more sickening for me: Harry and Ginny in wuv. I knew it would probably come, but ick. I've never liked Ginny at all, and I never wanted it to happen. In fact, even though I was pretty sure that it would be Dumbledore dying in this volume, I was kinda hoping it would be Ginny, and I even said so more than once.

5. Wonder no more about Blaise Zabini. He's a he, and you get a description of him on the train to Hogwarts. I can't recall whether the gender was cleared up in the last book or not.

6. JKR seems, so far, to have started writing Dumbledore with Michael Gambon in mind. The portrayal in his first few scenes in this book is similar to how Gambon played Dumbledore in PoA.

7. I'm thinking that R.A.B. (someone who thwarted Voldemort in something and left a note about it) will turn out to be Regulus Black, though it isn't answered by the end of the book.

8. Fleur and Bill are getting married. In the climactic battle, Bill is bitten and disfigured by a werewolf (evil Fenrir Greyback, NOT Remus). Everyone assumes that Fleur, La Hotnesse, will dump him, but she gets really pissed off that everyone assumes she's so shallow just because she's beautiful, and the wedding will go on anyway.

9. Draco becomes a Death Eater and is tasked by Voldemort with killing Dumbledore, but is also kind of being set up, as Voldemort expects him to fail. Snape makes a magical pact with Narcissa that he will protect Draco AND do the job if Draco can't.

10. The entire first chapter would appear to be about... John Major? (Too early chronologically to be Tony Blair, so Blair must be the "opponent" to whom the Prime Minister alludes.)

Can't think of anything else to add to this for the time being. I'm going to bed.

Comments

(frozen)

[ragdoll.livejournal.com]

1. No big surprise. That was obvious for like forever. However, I still wonder about his death and Snape's involvement in it. Because either Dumbledore is the world's biggest dumbass (along the lines of Yoda and the rest of the Jedi Council) or there's more there than meets the eye. I'm not a Snape-apologist at all but I guess there's still some possibility that all the stuff we saw from his P.O.V. was still skewed to make us think he's really EVIL and yet perhaps not. I dunno.

2. Yeah. Great. Wow. Oh, I'm so impressed. (Not)

3. What's worse is that Tonks was turned into a one dimensional whining pining girlie whose only reason for living is Remus Lupin. You know, I would not have minded this if there was some build up and/or something that Remus did to make us go "wow, that works". Nope. She just spends AN ENTIRE YEAR MOONING (PUN INTENDED) OVER HER TWUE WUV WHO FINALLY MAKES IT ALL BETTER. *gags* Remus's arguments against their relationships were good. Too bad she didn't listen. (And why does JKR seem to have a thing for older men and younger women -- Bill is 26, Fleur is like 20, maybe 21. Tonks is 24. Remus is 36-ish.)

4. I wanted it to happen but it feels really forced and the final ripped off from Spiderman 2 ending is pretty painful (as in awful)

5. I still don't get the whole Girl-Blaise thing. I always knew Blaise was a boy's name but no one believed me. Funny that he turned out to be black (can't say African-American as he's from England!). There hasn't ever been a description of him before though.

6. I haven't picked up on that yet.

7. I skimmed through the book and caught some of that but yeah, that was my first thought. Apparently Harry is still a dumbass if he can't figure that out too. Isn't he still Sirius's heir? Betcha he'll conviently find something from Regulus amongst all the stuff at 12 Grimmauld Place in the next book. Oh wait, we need to redeem Kreacher. It'll be one of the things he took from the stuff they threw out in OotP. (Having skimmed stuff, the Dobby/Kreacher fight was actually funny...)

8. Yeah, whoopie. We're supposed to love her now because she's only slightly less annoying and shallow than before. I still think mutilating Bill is pointless. I have a small kernel of hope that somehow he'll get past the cursed wounds thanks to Fred & George (who so far seem to be sorely lacking in terms of personality all of a sudden) or Fawkes but I'm sure it's just wishful thinking. It's really sad when I find Fleur more interesting a character (not likeable but at least fully formed) than Tonks now.

9. And he's a big crybaby too. A big sadistic crybaby.

10. Yeah, I was thinking Major since he didn't seem to be like Blair and it couldn't be Margaret Thatcher since the Prime Minister is a man. Oh yeah, it would've been kind of cool if we'd heard more about Kingsley working for him but like every other adult in the book other than Dumbly and Snape, he got really really short shrift.

(frozen)

[ragdoll.livejournal.com]

Oh p.s. I'm actually disappointed too. Not because of the shipping persay but the way it was all handled, the pointless mutilation (and not even getting to see how/why Bill was so brave vs. Mr. Evil Werewolf -- unless I missed that scene some how), but also the general feeling of the book. I know a lot of ppl didn't like OOTP but I couldn't put it down and I still think it's riveting and the characters really well written and fully formed. We learned a lot about Neville and Luna and Umbridge etc.

This one is just meh. Slughorn is dull although I think she's trying to show that not all Slytherins are evil geniuses. Some of them are just overly ambitious and like their creature comforts etc. Most of the more interesting adults just sort of walk on, have a few lines and then walk off and then the romances all seem really forced. I have only read like the first 90-120 pages for real (vs. the skimming to see about the spoiler stuff I read) so maybe I'll feel a little differently later but right now, this one just seems lackluster. Plus a lot of the things she hinted at in the last book (including Ron's fight with the flying brains and Sirius's death) either are ignored or just sort of glossed over. "Oh yeah, Sirius is dead." Maybe having 2 babies in 3 years and all the hype just didn't do much for her writing.

and like I said, apparently Dumbledore is the world's biggest dumbass who isn't nearly as clever as Harry who obviously knows better.

(frozen) harry potter commentary roundup! finally replying!

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm finally done with the last few chapters, so I can answer some of this.

1) I definitely can see where this is coming from; it seems like words in certain places were chosen very carefully. Dumbledore's words to Snape before he was killed could easily have been interpreted as "Do what we've talked about; it sucks, but now is the time." This would serve to explain Snape's general mood. If this is the case, it could have been to draw Death Eaters out of Hogwarts so that kids would be safer (the only prizes there for them are Dumbledore and Harry, and Dumbledore was pretty clearly the target of this raid, as well as the previous assassination attempts).

It occurred to me that the reason Dumbledore trusts Snape must be that they have an Unbreakable Vow of their own. And I noticed that, while leaving Hogwarts, Snape made a point of not hurting anyone permanently. He did his job and he got out.

Another interesting question is whether Dumbledore has any horcruxes of his own, and of course it doesn't seem like he would. However, he effectively (passively) killed Nicholas Flamel, and with Flamel's agreement, he could have created one there. I don't think this actually happened, though, because I don't think AD would have done it.

3) I don't think it's good, and I don't like the portrayal of Tonks, but I don't think there's any particular wrongness about her relationship portrayals in terms of age (for example, despite what a THOUSAND FANFIC AUTHORS have portrayed, with Hermione/Snape fics or whatever, most Hogwarts couples are the same age or maybe a year apart; I think the biggest age difference was Cedric and Cho). She makes a point of noting that Lupin is quite a bit older than Tonks and that this is a possible argument against their relationship.

4) Once again, I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the ending of Spiderman *1*, where the statement you mentioned by Peter is made at Norman's funeral. Fans would have revolted if the SECOND movie had ended the same way as the first. I haven't replied to your reply to my "pedantry ahoy" comment about it, because I know the movie is on HBO tomorrow night, and we'll see then! :) I haven't seen the movie since the theater (and I've seen the first one at least a dozen times), but really you only need to check the Moviepooper entries for both movies. I think you're conflating Spiderman 2 and Superman 2.

5) I don't remember what they were actually about, but I remember having a couple of "aha!" moments when I was reading, as I saw things sort of folded into the text that I knew were answers to long-running fan questions. The most obvious was the Blaise thing, but there were a handful of other clarifications.

6) If you ever read it again, take note of how much more often Dumbledore says things "airily" and how much more sarcastic he becomes in comparison to earlier books. This is not the gentle-and-wise-and-reassuring Richard Harris Dumbledore.

7) I dunno that Kreacher will ever be "redeemed" - but I am pretty sure that RAB is Regulus, and I'll probably go back to OotP and read what I can about him again (maybe using the search function in the PDF that I have of it). It will significantly shorten Harry's effort if he finds that Regulus got to more than one of the horcruxes.

What I disliked about the book was its general lack of subplots. The only real subplots to speak of (that were not just threads of the main plot) were very minor things about people dating. The most fully developed was Ron's love triangle, which was kind of obvious and boring. The last few books have been so much better in terms of detail and subplot, although HBP has a handful of chapters and scenes that are as good as anything in the series. The chapter "The Cave", for example, is excellent.

I did like that in Slughorn, she managed to show a Slytherin who was obnoxious, but not evil. You said "not all Slyths are evil geniuses" - that's true, but for me the point was more that not even all Slyths go bad. Did have to wonder why McLaggen was in Gryffindor with all those Slytherin traits, though. The sorting hat must have tripped over him the way it did Harry, or maybe he wasn't as arrogant and pushy when he was a first-year.