(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 comment)

[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.