some initial reactions to Deathly Hallows
Jul. 23rd, 2007 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThis isn't a review. It's just a collection of reactions and thoughts in no particular order and with no real attempt to string them together in any coherent fashion.
1. First of all, I like the book. It's not the greatest book I've ever read, but it's good and I enjoyed reading it, and despite the occasional moments of nerve-wracking tension, I was good and didn't skip ahead to read the ending.
(I often end up skipping ahead once I get 1/4 to 2/3 of the way through a book, because the sympathetic tension gets to be too much for me -- I'm too caught up in the story, and I need a way to take the knife-edge off so I can continue reading without shaking. I think one reason I don't like movies as much as books is because I can't skip them ahead and I just have to grit my teeth and ride it out.)
2. JKR was hitting some points with a fricking sledgehammer, wasn't she. Harry thinks of Hermione like a sister. Okay. Everyone is clearly heterosexual and married. Okay. Whatever. Moral subtlety has never been her strong point.
3. In a related point, why doesn't anyone ever mention, or even realize, that horrible things are horrible things, even when the 'good guys' are the ones doing them? Harry uses Cruciatus because someone insults McGonagall, when he wasn't able to muster that kind of hatred after watching Bellatrix kill Sirius? Hermione wipes her parents' memories? (Possibly without even consulting them!) I have always thought that even the 'good' parts of the wizarding world were morally bankrupt in some respects, and this book has confirmed me in that opinion.
4. The vaguely creepy epilogue shows not one single sign that anything has changed in the wizards' attitudes toward goblins, house elves, Muggle-borns, etc. That bothers me. A lot.
5. Also, nobody's attitude toward the Slytherins has changed either. And not a single Slytherin was allowed to be good in the end; they were monolithic as a house, and monolithically evil/selfish. (Okay, Slughorn was good. And Snape and Draco and Narcissa were ambiguous, and Lucius at least cared about his family even if he didn't give a damn about anyone else. But still.)
6. The romance was handled much better than in HBP, though Ginny retreated to a background cardboard cutout again, just like in the first four books. *sigh* And the Lupin/Tonks, I think, was meant as a portrait of a relationship entered into too hastily and now floundering under the pressures of war and prejudice and so on. Or maybe JKR meant it to be sweet...? If that's the case, she failed miserably, but I do think it was a fairly realistic look at what would happen to two people with those issues in that sort of situation.
The Ron/Hermione was lovely. :-) You know, one of my favorite bits of Star Wars is two paired exchanges of dialogue, one in ESB and one in RotJ. The first is when, as Han is about to be frozen in carbonite, Leia finally says "I love you!" and instead of getting sappy, he just says, "I know." And then, near the end of RotJ, when they're fighting on Endor and Leia is kicking ass, Han says to her, "I love you!" and she just smiles and says, "I know." It's the reciprocity that gets me every time.
I bring that up because of the scene where the trio need to get into the Shrieking Shack, and Ron is wishing they had Crookshanks to push the knot in the Whomping Willow, and Hermione says to him, "Are you a wizard or what?" in complete exasperation. It's a beautiful circle back to PS/SS when they're caught in the Devil's Snare, and Hermione is dithering about how she can't light a fire because she has no wood, and Ron says to her, "ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?"
It's the echo, the balance. I love that.
Mind you, I still don't think they're necessarily well-suited for a long-term relationship. I think they'd have to work at it, because they strike sparks off each other in negative ways as well as positive ones -- and on their own, without Harry there to play fulcrum during the tense moments, I wonder how long it would take before they'd say unforgiveable things. But if they were willing to work, they could be very good for each other. They know each other way deep down by now, and while it's not always obvious, there's a lot of mutual respect for each other's talents, and an understanding and forgiveness of each other's failings. Sometimes the forgiveness is pretty grudging, but it's there.
And I'm just going to go off and squee about reciprocity again. :-)
7. I was going to talk about Dumbledore and Snape and Grindelwald and stuff, but I've kind of run out of critical thought... Oh, now I remember! Okay, of all the blatant parallels between Grindelwald and the Nazis (the way the slogan over his prison echoes the mottoes over concentration camp gates smacked me in the face, for one), the one I liked best was about the symbol of the Deathly Hallows. Because, see, the swastika was an ancient religious symbol and good-luck talisman (see Wikipedia article) but its older meanings have been overwritten by its association with Nazism. Krum's reaction to Xenophilius Lovegood's use of the Deathly Hallows icon shows that Grindelwald's adoption of it as his calling card has done something similar in the wizarding world. I like that.
8. Also, "Secrets" is now officially AU, not because JKR revealed anything new about Ginny or Tom, but because her treatment of Slytherin House makes it impossible for me to continue reconciling her black-and-white, us-vs.-them worldview with my (hopefully more nuanced) portrayal of Daphne and Electra. The way my story is going, there's no way Daphne, at least, would not join the DA in OotP, or would fail to shout down Pansy in DH when Pansy suggests selling Harry out to save Hogwarts. And there's no way my Ginny (whose prejudices I am slowly and awkwardly attempting to beat out of her) would stand for the exclusion of an entire house from any resistance attempts.
So. I've tried my best to stay canon-compliant through the publication of OotP and HBP, but while I will still do my best not to contradict any other parts of JKR's world, I am going to have to put my foot down and say that any moral system that condemns an entire quarter of a society as a monolithic set of 'bad guys' and then lets the 'good guys' off the hook when they imitate the 'bad guys,' is not a moral system I will ever be okay writing... at least not without doing my utmost to show that while it may be a socially accepted moral system, it is still utterly, completely WRONG.
(I think that in some ways, that sort of blinkered good-vs.-evil worldview is just as evil as the Death Eaters. True, it doesn't lead directly to murder, but it closes down dialogue, it isolates and traps people, and it probably does lead indirectly to murder, by fostering the preconditions for creating groups like the Death Eaters. I do not excuse the Death Eaters -- they made utterly reprehensible moral choices -- but I don't excuse the 'good guys' either. Opposing genocidal terrorists is good, but it's not an unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card. You still have to be moral in all the other aspects of your life as well.)
And that's all I have to say about that.
1. First of all, I like the book. It's not the greatest book I've ever read, but it's good and I enjoyed reading it, and despite the occasional moments of nerve-wracking tension, I was good and didn't skip ahead to read the ending.
(I often end up skipping ahead once I get 1/4 to 2/3 of the way through a book, because the sympathetic tension gets to be too much for me -- I'm too caught up in the story, and I need a way to take the knife-edge off so I can continue reading without shaking. I think one reason I don't like movies as much as books is because I can't skip them ahead and I just have to grit my teeth and ride it out.)
2. JKR was hitting some points with a fricking sledgehammer, wasn't she. Harry thinks of Hermione like a sister. Okay. Everyone is clearly heterosexual and married. Okay. Whatever. Moral subtlety has never been her strong point.
3. In a related point, why doesn't anyone ever mention, or even realize, that horrible things are horrible things, even when the 'good guys' are the ones doing them? Harry uses Cruciatus because someone insults McGonagall, when he wasn't able to muster that kind of hatred after watching Bellatrix kill Sirius? Hermione wipes her parents' memories? (Possibly without even consulting them!) I have always thought that even the 'good' parts of the wizarding world were morally bankrupt in some respects, and this book has confirmed me in that opinion.
4. The vaguely creepy epilogue shows not one single sign that anything has changed in the wizards' attitudes toward goblins, house elves, Muggle-borns, etc. That bothers me. A lot.
5. Also, nobody's attitude toward the Slytherins has changed either. And not a single Slytherin was allowed to be good in the end; they were monolithic as a house, and monolithically evil/selfish. (Okay, Slughorn was good. And Snape and Draco and Narcissa were ambiguous, and Lucius at least cared about his family even if he didn't give a damn about anyone else. But still.)
6. The romance was handled much better than in HBP, though Ginny retreated to a background cardboard cutout again, just like in the first four books. *sigh* And the Lupin/Tonks, I think, was meant as a portrait of a relationship entered into too hastily and now floundering under the pressures of war and prejudice and so on. Or maybe JKR meant it to be sweet...? If that's the case, she failed miserably, but I do think it was a fairly realistic look at what would happen to two people with those issues in that sort of situation.
The Ron/Hermione was lovely. :-) You know, one of my favorite bits of Star Wars is two paired exchanges of dialogue, one in ESB and one in RotJ. The first is when, as Han is about to be frozen in carbonite, Leia finally says "I love you!" and instead of getting sappy, he just says, "I know." And then, near the end of RotJ, when they're fighting on Endor and Leia is kicking ass, Han says to her, "I love you!" and she just smiles and says, "I know." It's the reciprocity that gets me every time.
I bring that up because of the scene where the trio need to get into the Shrieking Shack, and Ron is wishing they had Crookshanks to push the knot in the Whomping Willow, and Hermione says to him, "Are you a wizard or what?" in complete exasperation. It's a beautiful circle back to PS/SS when they're caught in the Devil's Snare, and Hermione is dithering about how she can't light a fire because she has no wood, and Ron says to her, "ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?"
It's the echo, the balance. I love that.
Mind you, I still don't think they're necessarily well-suited for a long-term relationship. I think they'd have to work at it, because they strike sparks off each other in negative ways as well as positive ones -- and on their own, without Harry there to play fulcrum during the tense moments, I wonder how long it would take before they'd say unforgiveable things. But if they were willing to work, they could be very good for each other. They know each other way deep down by now, and while it's not always obvious, there's a lot of mutual respect for each other's talents, and an understanding and forgiveness of each other's failings. Sometimes the forgiveness is pretty grudging, but it's there.
And I'm just going to go off and squee about reciprocity again. :-)
7. I was going to talk about Dumbledore and Snape and Grindelwald and stuff, but I've kind of run out of critical thought... Oh, now I remember! Okay, of all the blatant parallels between Grindelwald and the Nazis (the way the slogan over his prison echoes the mottoes over concentration camp gates smacked me in the face, for one), the one I liked best was about the symbol of the Deathly Hallows. Because, see, the swastika was an ancient religious symbol and good-luck talisman (see Wikipedia article) but its older meanings have been overwritten by its association with Nazism. Krum's reaction to Xenophilius Lovegood's use of the Deathly Hallows icon shows that Grindelwald's adoption of it as his calling card has done something similar in the wizarding world. I like that.
8. Also, "Secrets" is now officially AU, not because JKR revealed anything new about Ginny or Tom, but because her treatment of Slytherin House makes it impossible for me to continue reconciling her black-and-white, us-vs.-them worldview with my (hopefully more nuanced) portrayal of Daphne and Electra. The way my story is going, there's no way Daphne, at least, would not join the DA in OotP, or would fail to shout down Pansy in DH when Pansy suggests selling Harry out to save Hogwarts. And there's no way my Ginny (whose prejudices I am slowly and awkwardly attempting to beat out of her) would stand for the exclusion of an entire house from any resistance attempts.
So. I've tried my best to stay canon-compliant through the publication of OotP and HBP, but while I will still do my best not to contradict any other parts of JKR's world, I am going to have to put my foot down and say that any moral system that condemns an entire quarter of a society as a monolithic set of 'bad guys' and then lets the 'good guys' off the hook when they imitate the 'bad guys,' is not a moral system I will ever be okay writing... at least not without doing my utmost to show that while it may be a socially accepted moral system, it is still utterly, completely WRONG.
(I think that in some ways, that sort of blinkered good-vs.-evil worldview is just as evil as the Death Eaters. True, it doesn't lead directly to murder, but it closes down dialogue, it isolates and traps people, and it probably does lead indirectly to murder, by fostering the preconditions for creating groups like the Death Eaters. I do not excuse the Death Eaters -- they made utterly reprehensible moral choices -- but I don't excuse the 'good guys' either. Opposing genocidal terrorists is good, but it's not an unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card. You still have to be moral in all the other aspects of your life as well.)
And that's all I have to say about that.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-24 01:54 am (UTC)And also, I think that Snape should be counted as good, or at least, moreso than Horace Slughorn. Snape, after all, does everything for the sake of keeping Harry alive (albeit, more because he's Lily's son than anything else), whereas Horace has to be coerced into abandoning his safe retirement, back in Book 6. Even Dumbledore acknowledges this.
And I also think Book 7 tries (and almost succeeds) in trying to get rid of that good-vs.-evil worldview, possibly. After all, what some have referred to as the desanctification of Dumbledore involved, in large part, Harry doubting for the longest time whether Dumbledore was "good" and in the end deciding it didn't matter. Is keeping secrets from people good? No. Is defeating Voldemort in the end good? Well, yes.
It did bother me that Harry used Unforgivables. But I don't think that you can compare his being able to cast the Cruciatus now as opposed to back in Book 5. First of all, he's suffered more (I suppose), so he has more of that anger in him. Furthermore, he's already cast an Unforgivable (Imperio), and at least in my mind, that's kind of like breaking the barrier, like he already has the capability of casting those Unforgivables. I'm not sure if I'm making any sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-24 03:18 pm (UTC)Word. But I think at the time of Sirius' death, his anger wasn't focused enough to actually cast the spell effectively. Regardless of what he wanted to do to Bellatrix, in the end, the fact that Sirius was dead was overriding everything else he felt.
Also, wordymcword for what you said regarding the Slytherins.
2. JKR was hitting some points with a fricking sledgehammer, wasn't she. Harry thinks of Hermione like a sister. Okay. Everyone is clearly heterosexual and married. Okay. Whatever. Moral subtlety has never been her strong point.
Some would argue that it as some sort of baby boom in response to everything.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-27 08:35 pm (UTC)I guess. I just am the sort of person who would have been equally happy if they'd all gone off and met new people and/or not married at all (since romance is not really my focus in any story), so the whole who's-married-to-whom bits, and the Deeply Symbolic Names of the kids just made me go "eh, whatever" and look around for anything that was actually important.
And yeah, I get that for some people, that sort of thing is important. It just isn't for me. YMMV.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 10:38 pm (UTC)Point by point: so the Slytherins would be mistrusted. Okay. They're not stupid; they'd know that. So they could form their own little battle unit and stay off to one side and be support troops, or something that didn't require them to trust the Gryffindors (et al) to watch their backs. So I don't buy your excuse for JKR's sloppy morals.
Snape is selfish. He does everything because of Lily, not because it's the right thing to do. I got the feeling that if Voldemort had gone after Neville instead of Harry, Snape would never have switched sides and never seen anything wrong with being a Death Eater for the rest of his life. He didn't have an epiphany. He just had a threat to something he held personally dear. And yes, maybe over the years at Hogwarts, with Dumbledore and away from Voldemort, he came to be a better person... but while he isn't evil, I still wouldn't call him good.
Slughorn, on the other hand, protests like mad but knows what the right thing is and why it's right.
Look. I don't care about Harry suffering more and having more anger. He's become a worse person if he can cast an Unforgiveable over something as petty as an insult, and not suffer a single damn moment of remorse afterwards. And then, that same day, he goes and tells Voldemort to feel remorse? He's a hypocrite. That is what I dislike about the moral message of all the HP series. The lines between good and evil are there as much because JKR just says so as for any real reasons, so the good guys can be just as horribly immoral as the bad guys. The difference is that the good guys get away with it. And are sometimes even praised for their actions.
I am deeply uncomfortable with that implicit message.
I am being kicked off the library computer now. Sorry for not having time to edit and say things more politely. This is not meant as an attack, not at all! I just care about these points, so I get a little worked up talking about them.