HP6:HBP - after even more reaction reading

[hermionesviolin]

  'ship thoughts i haven't already mentioned:

1. Lavender didn't particularly annoy me.

2. Fleur annoys me.  I think it's the accent primarily.  Also just the over-the-top-ness of her in general.  Yeah her insistence that she's still gonna marry Bill is nice and all, but it doesn't redeem her as someone i actually wanna have to suffer through.

mistful made me giggle:

FLEUR: Why would you zink that I was marrying him for his looks? If I wanted to do that, I would marry a mirror!
MRS WEASLEY: I love my hot daughter-in-law!
FLEUR: Don't zink I didn't consider marrying a mirror. But I couldn't breed with one.

[...]

Personally I presume Aunt Petunia got tired of CAPSLOCK and put Valium into the single rice cake emo!Harry nibbled at every day.

[...]

I will admit to becoming a little fond of Luna. She's poignant without ever being pathetic, and her Quidditch commentary was enormous fun. I think she and Zacharias Smith are better than Lee. I also think that it's a real shame that Draco never thought of that foolproof method of beating Harry Potter: simply becoming the commentator.
DRACO: And as Potter flails blindly about the sky in search of the Snitch, I shall take this opportunity to pass on my condolences about his pet dog. I hear he went to the kennel in the sky last summer... Does everyone see that? He's flying at the commentator's box... that's not in the rules... arrrgh, arrgh, mfff, mfff, HELP! DISQUALIFY THIS MAN! OW!
PROFESSOR MCGONAGALL: I can't hear you, Mr. Malfoy. I fear you dropped your megaphone.

[...]


Merope Gaunt, named for the star that shone faintest because she mated with a mortal, was a fascinating character, both piteous and menacing. Product of a family who may very well be the end result of the pureblood breeding program (Take a good look, Slytherins, and rethink those hot cousins of yours), her only contact with men brutal and insane, the atmosphere she lived in redolent of incestuous rape while lying in the dirt hissing Parseltongue to each other... No, wait, seriously, where are you going? Don't judge me! Let's examine this logically. Dumbledore had access to Morfin's memories. I'm sure Morfin had a ton of memories involving his sister's love for Tom Riddle and his father's Slytherin heritage, but no, JK Rowling chose to show us the Gaunts from Ogden's, the outsider's, viewpoint. I think this is a subtle indication that what went on without guests was pretty damn bad.

The post continues with interesting thoughts about Riddle, and also about Regulus.

3. Am i the only person who thinks Neville and Luna are together at the end of the book?  Harry says they're the two who needed the DA most. Luna helps Neville into a chair at the funeral. They're so totally together, but in a refreshing understated manner instead of the drowning of randomosity of every other pairing in the book. The fact that i already think they're darling together helps, but ya know.

4. How could i forget to mention Fred/George?  I loved their joke shop (don't be scared of You-Know-Who, be scared of U-NO-POO) and loved them honestly being responsible adults.

People have mentioned the lack of mourning for Sirius, which is an entirely valid complaint when it is point out to me.  But i was never particularly fond of Sirius, so i didn't notice or mind at all.

And sae pointed out:
You have implications of serious depression from Harry (not eating, not talking about it, isolated...), and probably some of the others, and then everybody goes kind of quiet and doesn't discuss it again. I hate to play the real life card, but no matter how profoundly you're hurt by someone's death, that's really... normal. There's kind of an unspoken "we do not actively mourn beyond this date" rule for these things and that's about the point we walk in on.

Smart words from dherblay:

• The book is so full of snogging and almost-snogged and should've-snogged that I was quite afraid that when Harry burst in on Draco in the Room of Requirement he'd interrupt a Slytherin make-out party. Slytherin's an ambitious lot, so make that a full-out orgy.
  
• Hell, other than making out, for what would a sixteen year-old want a Room of Requirement?

I also have love for TBQ:

Harry, you're the Boy Who Lived, not Spiderman. Keep the chick. She's already shown she's a kick ass fighter, she's older than you were when you first started actively going against Voldemort, plus if you die this way you won't be a virgin (and you know Ginny's going to be good at it). Win/win, my friend.

[...]

I've never been overly fond of Dobby and not that I have anything against Kreacher per se but dude? Dobby opening a can of whoop-ass and doing the whole "Shut your mouth or Dobby's gonna SHUT IT FOR YOU" was hilarious. Clearly Dobby has learned in his time spent with Gollum.

Also:

Why the lack of follow-up on that whole Dementors-breed-as-depressing-fog thing?  That was cool.

When did Harry learn to swim?

I clearly wasn't reading every sentence of this book (which we so already knew) since it took reading TBQ's entry to tell me that Dumbledore was in a portrait (i looked back in the book and found it, having no recollection of having read it).  Hey, yet another time i see hesychasm's A Place to Be.

I'm confused as to why the NYT felt the need to spoil like every plot point in the entire book in their review whosie.  And, um, refreshing after that ode, was A. S. Byatt laying the smack down.

She makes some interesting points i hadn't particularly thought of before.

The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman -- trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines. Ms. Rowling's wizards shun them and use magic instead, but their world is a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs.

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

[...]

Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

And of course i take issue with her bashing of cultural studies.



Everything I need to know I learned from my friends list: The State of the Fandom, based on skip=infinity since the release of HBP by penknife
Hysterical.