Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Spoilers are inside here, and I probably won't tag the ones I type myself.
I didn't get to discuss it with you kind people last time around, and reading the other thread made me really want to.
SO LET US DISCUSS THIS WONDERFUL BOOK.
I thought it was purdy and nice and purdy. I'm kind of curious to hear about Poor Teddy's life growing up.
I thought it was rather average actually, and I was disappointed by it. (Although I really shouldnt have been, since only a few in the series are what I'd call 'really good'.)
Still, I did enjoy reading it, although the epilogue sucked balls. Can't remember much about it though, apart from the tragic death of our D friend.
"They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do." - Barack Obama.
clicky clicky clicky
Snape kills Dumbledore.
I like Kung-Fu.
Snape dies.Originally Posted by DMKA
The below sentence is true.
The above sentence is false.
You die.Snape dies.
This is the only death that I perpetually forget about, even though it's one of the only ones in the book that I gave a <img src="http://forums.eyesonff.com/images/smilies/rpg_009.gif" alt="skull" /><img src="http://forums.eyesonff.com/images/smilies/rpg_009.gif" alt="skull" /><img src="http://forums.eyesonff.com/images/smilies/rpg_009.gif" alt="skull" /><img src="http://forums.eyesonff.com/images/smilies/rpg_009.gif" alt="skull" /> about. Unfortunately I didn't see any other way for her to finish off Snape's character arc, thoughSnape dies.
The random appearances of Death Eaters every where was cool, because throughout the other books she never really developed a sense of terror or anything. It was always stories about Voldemorts last reign, then BAM omg everyone is dying everywhere~
Also - Dumbledore<3
I liked the book overall, but the epilogue was a little too sugar sweet for my tastes. Although I guess it might have been somewhat needed as closure for all the tragedy in the book (and series).
The epilogue was just so SO bad.
Overall the book was a disappointment. The buildup was huge and the payoff... not so much.
Spoilers abound, but this should be apparent at this point. I'm not gonna bother marking them.
At this point, I feel like I should have seen it coming. It, of course, being a terrible deus ex machine ending relating to the nature of magic as poorly defined by Rowling. I know enough of fantasy at this point to say that basing the limitations on what magic can't do is asking for trouble. It leaves the writer with a the means to explain away an awful lot of problems.
The thing is, Rowling wrote herself into a bit of a corner, and it's awfully tempting to explain away problems with such a blanket excuse. "The relationship between body and soul is unexplored magical territory, Harry! Nobody could have predicted what would have happened!" certainly explains away the need for more than the barest of foreshadow (really all we got was the famous gleam in Dumbledore's eye at the end of The Goblet of Fire). If nobody could have seen it coming in the diegesis of the novel because magic isn't so well understood, why should the reader, especially when Rowling likes to play a fairly unreliable narrator.
That said, the opposite isn't much better. Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings is quite possibly the most powerful being in Middle-earth; he is, like Sauron, a demi-god of sorts, after all. Yet his power is not properly defined in the series, and it's only through the Silmarillion and Tolkien's notes that we ever learned what exactly an Itsari is. He's the stereotypical (although Tolkien is responsible for a great many of our fantasy genre stereotypes, so I can't fault him too much for it) old mentor with boundless magical power. He's an example of what happens when an author resists the temptation to use a deus ex machina as a cure-all to the problem, and it's result isn't much better. There are plenty of times with Gandalf and characters like Gandalf where one wonders, "Why the hell didn't he just use his power to fix it all right away?" Gandalf's excuse isn't strictly explained in the Lord of the Rings, but from what I understand, he and the other Itsari were forbidden to use their powers to explicitly aid the inhabitants of Middle-earth. Rather, they were meant to be guides.
In either case, the reader is often left with a strong sense of, "Well, that was lame." As such, I generally think defining magic by what it can do as opposed to what it can't can avoid both situations entirely. Unfortunately, Rowling did the exact opposite and we ended up with The Deathly Hallows. I didn't mind at first. I was too busy being annoyed by the atrocious epilogue. I don't really care much at this point, though, since the whole series basically led itself up to that one giant moment of let-down. Should have seen it coming.
Still liked the book as a whole, though.
Summed up in the final showdown between hero and villain, no less.
Why am I the only one who loved everything about the end of this book? xD
More easily pleased?
I couldn't agree less. Much of what I enjoy about fantasy is the possibilities that are opened by a new world. By defining magic and other supernatural forces as being able to do this and that, but nothing more, you limit the possibilities and, doing that, you enclose the world in a box. You make it predictable.
I absolutely hate the idea of a perfectly defined world, a world where there is nothing new to discover. I don't see the point of a world where there is already an answer to everything. One of the most charming things about even the real world is that we don't know everything, that there are still some mysteries left.
I found the ending better on the second read. Once you get over the poor resolution to the prophecy, everything else is actually pretty good. Everything after King's Cross is awesome, and finished the series well. The epilogue is actually forgivable too I think. Admittedly it probably would have been better left out, but I think it was primarily to avoid fan-fiction...
As for the rest of the book, the camping was awful, and the planning section for the MoM was dull enough, so why it was repeated for Gringott's I don't know. Overall, probably weaker than the rest of the books, but as keeping the old (winning) formula was out of the question it was a good end to the series.
I say what I think. If you disagree, then that is up to you.
good book! but tbh i like the fan made epilogues more! Jo said there would be those who hated the ending of this book, but she liked it! i agree! it was always something that was gonna be odd! Harry was always gonna win dead or alive. remember its supposed to be for the kids! also i think the epilogue was so bad because of 2 things! 1 that there were people who wanted to know everything what happened after that and 2 she may decide that shes not finished yet. So she wrote the epilogue that way to give her that choice if she wanted to!
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