Thoughts on Harry Potter

[andrew_jorgensen]

Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

• I crumpled while reading the scene where Dumbledore and Harry recover Regulus's costume Horcrux as Harry forced himself to pour goblet after goblet of poison down his mentor's throat. The whole chapter was suffused with foreboding -- I was half-convinced that Dumbledore would reveal that Harry was the seventh Horcrux, created through the death of James and Lily, that this was the source of the connection between the two and why one could not fully live while the other survived, and that Harry would have to kill Dumbledore in self-defense. In fact, I'm still holding out hope that this'll be revealed to be the case in the seventh book, and Harry will have to take the noble way out.
  
  
• Now that people have been forced to rewrite the timeline, can they arrange it so that the events of this book take place after Harry has seen Spider-Man but before he's seen Spider-Man 2? Otherwise I think the proper response to "Ginny, I want to be with you but I can't because I have to go save the world and my enemies will come after you" would be a bludger to the bollocks.
  
  
• In North By Northwest, the sinister and effete henchman Leonard, played by Martin Landau, says, "It's an old Gestapo trick. Shoot one of your own people to show that you're not one of them. They've just freshened it up a bit with blank cartridges." You know, Martin Landau would have made a great Snape.
  
  
• 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 loved the scene where Molly, Ginny and Hermione have their worst expectation confounded as Fleur declares the depth of her love for Bill following his disfiguring werewolf attack.
  
  
• In the previous books, have Harry's initial, prejudiced suspicions ever turned out to be right?

Comments

[randomways.livejournal.com]

That was the twist: everyone was a bad guy. From Ron's assholery to Hermione's bitchiness, to Dumbledore's (and McGonagall's) insistent obtuseness, to Snape's Snapery (plus that little thing at the end), to Draco's nasty passive-aggressiveness, to Slug's pandering famewhorishness (was he somehow worse than Lockhart?), to Ginny's manipulativeness, to Tonk's persistent 'woe is me', to Trelawney's whining, to Hagrid's usual ineffectuality, to the entire Weasley clan's...oh, hell, you get the point. I think Rowling's going for the big finish, only eschewing the normal hero's journey for the entirely more contemporaneous "Hell is other people."

Fred and George will save the world. No, really.

[atpotch.livejournal.com]

Well of course Fred and George indirectly allowed Malfoy to escape: the moral ambiguity of anarchy...

TCH