Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I got the book last Saturday morning, and had it finished by Sunday afternoon. I haven’t commented on it yet so as to give the readers of this blog time enough to get through the book before I reviewed it.
One of the hurdles I had in reviewing this book were the inevitable comparisons to my brother’s own continuation from The Order of the Phoenix, a continuation my brother already followed through the seventh year of Harry at Hogwarts, and beyond. After having read even the first of my brother’s novels, I knew I’d have a tough time trying to figure out which was better.
In the end, I choose my brother’s Veil of Mystery over Rowling’s Half-Blood Prince. I’ll try to go into the details here, though any spoiler information for Rowling’s book will go below the fold (if you are reading this in the archives, it’s all here in one piece).
This is not to say that I didn’t like The Half-Blood Prince; I did find it entertaining. However, it was not as good as it could have been, either for my brother’s prose or for Rowling’s herself.
A few things one has to take into account for the Harry Potter books is that Rowling’s style is toward caricature, brooding, and more than a bit into darkness. Her characters tend to act in extremes, to the extent of often seeming unreasonable. Harry’s brooding in The Order of the Phoenix was more than most would have felt reasonable, even for a 15-year-old. Snape’s cruelty has always been almost cartoonish, as have Malfoy’s nasty sneers and cowardly bullying. But then again, we are dealing with children’s literature, so this can be excused–though for that genre, there is more than a little of the usual touch of darkness. In the first book, Harry had to face his parents’ murderer, grafted onto the back of a professor’s head, and when he touched the villain’s face, it crumbled into ashes. Kinda dark stuff for kids–but maybe that’s a big reason why it’s so popular.
In that respect, Rowling is in usual form in The Half-Blood Prince. Harry’s upset a lot again, Ron and Hermione are going to extremes to tick each other off, and Dumbledore is amiable yet mysteriously reticent. We learn more about Voldemort. There’s a mystery afoot, misleading clues abound, and a truth is revealed at the end. These aren’t spoilers–this could describe most if not all of the Potter books.
There are a few inconsistencies, however. For example, Rowling departs from her long-held writing style of third-person limited (writing about Harry in the third person, but limiting the action solely to what Harry himself experiences). The first two chapters of the new book center on events completely outside of Harry’s experience; after the third chapter begins, however, we again pick up with Harry’s limited point-of-view. This is a strange stylistic departure, especially given the nature of the opening chapter, when we learn of the British prime minister’s contact with the wizarding world. What’s strange with this first chapter is that it is completely unnecessary. Unless Rowling has something planned for the seventh book that requires this initial scene, it is inexplicable why she would want to start the book with it. The book’s second chapter is more understandable; it introduces an important plot element which Harry cannot witness–though it could have been possible for Rowling to work this information into the story at a later time. But at least this scene would have made more sense as the book’s opening chapter.
Once we get back to Harry’s point-of-view, we see the usual course of events unfold: Harry at the Dursley’s, the trip to Hogwarts, Harry getting into trouble and missing the Sorting ceremony, the introduction of the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. All of these with the expected new twists and diversions, but the same routine all the same.
Once into the meat of the story, another inconsistency–albeit a consistent one–appears. Dumbledore, as usual, acts completely unwilling to tell Harry what the hell is going on. While Harry himself is more forthcoming in responsibly telling everyone what he thinks they should know, Dumbledore is yet again being frustratingly closed, cutting short Harry’s questions, only giving out mysterious snippets of information for little-understood reasons, and then quickly hustling Harry out of the room, when he has so many questions to ask. While this is consistent with Dumbledore’s past behavior, it is not consistent with the conclusion of the previous book, when Dumbledore apologizes to Harry for keeping him in the dark, and laments about how foolish he was not to tell Harry what he needed to know. And yet from the start of this book, he’s right back at it again, as reticent as ever, for no reason we can figure. A bit annoying, that.
Aside from these nits, however, the book forms up well. We get the usual serving of Rowling’s adventure, twists, and revelations, and the usual confrontation at the end, and the denouement afterwards. Of course I won’t reveal–above the fold, at least–the nature of the climax, what we learn about Voldemort, or who the half-blood prince is. Suffice to say that none of these could be guessed at, all of them being original beyond any clues in past books.
Still, the book left me unsatisfied, beyond even the inevitable comparisons between this novel and Veil. It just seemed like it could have been much more than it was. The characters acted less than convincingly, and the story seemed to lack meaning. Perhaps this is an artifact of the being the lead-up to the final book; it does leave you wondering, at the end, about how much you’ve read really happened, and how much is part of some plan that Harry has not been let in on.
Nevertheless, it is an interesting yarn. Worth reading, but it could have been better.
More below the fold…
• • • SPOILERS BELOW • • •
All right, you’ve been warned.
I am assuming that if you are reading this, then you have either finished reading the book, or don’t care about reading spoiler details about the storyline. So here goes.
Above, I explained Dumbledore’s unexplained secrecy as one example of inconsistent behavior. Another example is Hermione and Ron’s. Rowling makes it clear in this novel that the two are destined to pair up (just as Harry and Ginny are, though that’s been hardly less a secret). But of course, they can’t just fall in love, get together, and be happy. They have to screw things up, and badly. Jealousy, mostly, gets in the way, as Ron and Hermione use for-the-moment lovers to hurt each other, with Hermione getting invited to exclusive parties and getting along too well with Slughorn suck-up Cormac McLaggen, and Ron retaliating by snagging Lavender Brown and making out with her rather outrageously in public. The whole thing goes more than just a little too far; caricature is fine, but you can’t have too much of that and take the story very seriously. (Edit: on review of this paragraph, I should have called Ron & Hermione’s behavior “outlandish” or “extreme” rather than “inconsistent.”)
Hermione also has a few character flaws as well. One is when she remains pissed off at Harry for having made Ron think he’d taken the good-luck potion. Okay, while Hermione believed Harry really had slipped Ron the potion for use in a Quidditch match, her anger was understandable. But why should she still think it’s unethical after Harry reveals that he just made Ron feel lucky? Where’s the harm in a placebo, especially if Ron doesn’t mind? It’s just the equivalent of calming Ron’s unreasonable nervousness.
But even more uncharacteristic is Hermione’s reaction to Harry’s use of the half-blood prince’s textbook scrawls. Sure, Harry has an unfair advantage here. But he’s not doing anything Hermione doesn’t do on a regular basis, in that he’s getting useful information from someone else’s writing. Instead of being peeved at Harry for using the book, Hermione–once she recognizes that the book carried useful information–should have immediately asked Harry if she could read it herself, in order to learn more.
Of course, a big part of my dissatisfaction with how the characters act has to do with my brother’s novel. When he wrote Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery, he picked up where Rowling left off, but without her literary excesses. He wrote the story as if the characters were reasonable people–still flawed, but more understandable and sensible. Dumbledore opens up to Harry, telling him what he needs to know; when he keeps information hidden from Harry (such as the reason Fawkes bonds with him), it makes sense. Hermione and Ron fall into their respective relationships in an understandable way; perhaps too mature for teenagers, but far more realistically than Rowling has them acting. And particularly, there is my brother’s handling of Snape, and why he is the way he is; I still don’t know what Rowling has planned for Snape, but the idea of the Cleansing is just too good not to want to have it be part of the story. While Rowling’s Snape is consistent and, especially at the end, scary, he remains much more an enigma, difficult to understand beyond just being a bad guy.
And while Rowling does an acceptable job of working moral values and cautionary tales into her story, The Veil of Mystery was far richer in its coverage of issues and the exploration of philosophy and major themes of life. This is something that you tend to miss after having gotten used to it.
A few interesting contrasts pop up between my brother’s book and Rowling’s. For example, in Veil, Harry becomes the Dark Arts teacher, and when he is introduced, Malfoy lets out an astonished shout from the students’ tables. In Prince, Snape is given the position and Harry lets out the astonished shout from the students’ tables. In both books, Dumbledore dies, but in Veil, the death is with significant meaning; in Prince, if there is meaning to his death, Rowling keeps it well-hidden. Perhaps it is just to isolate Harry and force him to mature and be independent; maybe it was planned so as to allow Snape to infiltrate even deeper into Voldemort’s camp; or perhaps there is something about Dumbledore’s death, or perhaps he didn’t really die–something we’ll find out about in book seven. But for now, his death seems unsatisfyingly empty.
One more contrast is the development of Harry and Ginny’s relationship. A major theme in my brother’s novel was that love could not keep two people apart, even if there is a great deal of risk involved. Despite the dangers inherent in being Harry Potter’s girlfriend, Ginny insists on taking on those risks, the price otherwise being too much to pay. This was echoed in the most recent Spiderman film; even though Peter Parker planned to keep away from MJ, in the end, they both decided that the risk was one worth taking.
In The Half-Blood Prince, however, Rowling not only goes in the other direction, but does so with such brevity and lack of concern that it kind of cheapens the relationship. Ginny is unhappy, but simply accepts it and they both move on. It’s not exactly a break-up, but it’s not example a compelling confirmation of their feelings for each other, either. I like my brother’s solution better–it not only conveys stronger feelings and values, but reinforces the concept of love being a strengthening component of magic, and as such, a self-correcting mechanism for proper use of power.
But what The Half-Blood Prince does very well is to keep the reader guessing. Who is this mysterious “R.A.B.” who seems intent on pursuing Voldemort? Where are the other Horcruxes and how will Harry find them and then defeat Voldemort? Did Snape really kill Dumbledore, or was it somehow fixed? Will Dumbledore reappear, either alive or in some other form? Will he be a ghost, or perhaps a portrait? Is Snape really a bad guy, or a good guy with a hidden purpose as so many believe?
In the meantime, we can speculate. Some are suggesting that R.A.B. is Regulus Black, which would make sense in that Harry is now well-entangled in the Black family, having inherited Grimmauld Place and Kreacher’s service; one could imagine Regulus working into this somehow, affecting Harry from those elements. My sister-in-law quite intriguingly supposed (and it seems that many on the Internet have had the same idea) that Harry himself will turn out to be the final Horcrux, having received a piece of Voldemort’s soul upon the death of his mother and the application of the killing curse that gave him the scar–or perhaps the scar itself is the Horcrux. This makes sense, as it would explain how Harry came to possess so many of Voldemort’s abilities.
We’ll just have to wait another two years to find out….
I liked Half-Blood Prince, a lot. But there were indeed a few things about it that were a bit rough.
I think Rowling has a hard time “writing her way” into the story, and that’s what the whole bit with the two Ministers was supposed to be about. I think it was also supposed to impress us with the gravity and importance of the situation- the battle is spilling over into the Muggle world now, too.
The detail about the school was much less; she just assumed (fairly safely) that readers were familiar with the mileu of the books and that they didn’t need a lot of that stuff for background. Reading the book, other than Potions I barely even felt the gang was in school!
Dumbledore’s behavior was annoying, but not out of the norm for the mystic, inscrutible wise leader stereotype. Yes, he said he wasn’t going to do it anymore, but did anyway.
The bait-and-switch with the locket/Horcrux bugged me. Can’t say why, unless it’s just that Harry and Dumbledore spent a lot of time/energy getting to that point and then… it was for nothing? Feh. Why didn’t Dumbledore know that someone else had been along that path?
I haven’t read your brother’s stuff, so maybe I’ll get off my duff and download those soon.
Paul
Seattle, WA
I didn’t like the book. Actually I hated the book.
I’d thought the book might spoil me for further fan fiction (I have a lot of pre-HBP stories yet to read). Instead it turned out the other way around; the fanfic spoiled my perusal of HBP. Several times I just *stopped* and shouted to myself “but it’s not supposed to go that way!!!”. Weird experience.
My greatest disappointment with HBP was in the complete emasculation of Hermione Jane Granger. I started out in fandom a year ago a firm believer that Harry would link up with Ginny, etcetera, but over the past few months I’ve really cottoned on to Hermione – she became my favourite character. The ‘real’ Hermione pre-HBP, that is. I still enjoy H/G stories but have come to also appreciate the allure incumbent in the possible evolution of that wonderful (platonic) relationship between Harry and Hermione into a full-blown romance. *sigh*
This … wasn’t … Hermione in HBP. Spending all her time pining uselessly after Ron. Breaking the rules and cursing a fellow student … just so Ronnie could claim the Keeper spot. For the first time failing to help Harry with any of his problems – “It’s not Draco, go away, I’m gazing at Ron” … “You just can’t get into the Room of Requirement, go away, I’m fixing Lavendar with a watery/stabbing glare”. Ugh. And so forth. Visit any H/Hr author’s blog to get the full details.
Ron/Lavendar as a caricature – oh, yeah. Did Lavendar say *anything* in this book? Just ‘Won-Won’? One of my many grievances is that we saw very little of regular classwork/Hogwarts in HBP; it seemed to be mainly filled with puerile Hermione/Ron nonsense and Harry following Dumbledore around saying “Yeah … right” in suitable places.
Occlumency. One of the *big* deals in OotP, and suddenly it’s not important. Gee, lucky Voldemort decided all of a sudden to stop the (successful) mental attacks on Harry, wasn’t it?
Complete lack of any sense of ‘danger’ from the war – *that’s* why we had that whole first chapter tucked away at the very beginning, otherwise it would have been a shock to come across the final battle. Just a few jocular “so who died today?” questions from Ron about the Prophet.
Right on about Dumbledore. At the start of the book he promises ‘no more secrets’ with Harry … and then it’s back to business as usual. I’m convinced there’s a whopper of a big ‘secret’ concerning Snape’s murder of Albus to which we are not privy because Dumbledore was, as usual, keeping things close to his chest.
Strolling down Memory Lane – when Dumbledore said he’d be ‘training’ Harry who guessed it would encompass the visitation of a whole – what, five? – memories spanning the full school year? And who cares what name Tom Riddle gave his teddy bear when he was eight years old? Bearing on story for most of it – nada.
So you’ve got a crucial memory that’s critical to the war effort and is the only thing that will stop the worst dark wizard in history from taking over the world and condemning us all to eternal servitude, hey? Oh … you don’t want to give us the memory because you’re … embarrassed? Okay … tell you what, I’m the world’s most powerful wizard, but I won’t press you, and see all those Ministry officials over there? They won’t hound you either … we’ll just leave it to the sixteen year old boy and trust to ‘luck’, Okay?
‘Luck’. Let the words ‘Felix Felicis’ never be mentioned again. What a bloody lousy plot device. Smacks of ‘deus ex machina’ from an author who can’t think of things consistent with the magic of the previous five books. I know it’s *rare* and takes *six months* to brew and is *dangerous* if you take it often, but why don’t all the wizards of the Order … the DEs … everyone … have a vial of it for emergencies, as just another method of protecting themselves? Hated it.
Harry’s a wuss in this book – I was so longing for a hero who was at least *adequate* to the tasks placed before him. Draco beats him in the train (which was well done, added tension and a dimension to Draco). He can’t block his mind, Snape and Dumbledore penetrate him easily (Draco is better at occlumency than he is). He has to be led everywhere holding Dumbledore’s hand. His proficiency in his classes – apparition, sub-vocalisation – is only average, or below. He can’t even *engage* Snape in a duel. And now he’s off on his (hackneyed plot we’ve all seen before) ‘quest’ to search for cursed artifacts, ostensibly on his lonesome? Big Head Percy had nothing on Harry!
(When Dumbledore said “I’m safe because I’m here with you Harry” I almost puked. Okay, exaggerating, but jeeze … was I reading JKR or a 13-year-old fan fiction writer?)
Unless Ginny has been drastically overhauled for the worse as well, she’s GOT to hang around and tag along in book 7. Something to look forward to at the least. And we need to see a lot more of Harry and Ginny together, please!
Tonks – loses her metamorphagus abilties because of the extreme stress and angst involved with her feeling responsible for the death of her cousin at the hands of his other cousin, one of the most vicious Death Eaters. Yeah, that makes sense, okay. No, hold on … she was just in lurve! Oh, how sweet. Arrrrgh!
No time spent in Harry transitioning from angry-at-Dumbledore’s-betrayal to a sudden reversal as “Dumbledore’s man”. Bleh. And Albus is still hiding things from him, like the Master Plan ™ that had been arranged between him and Snape. Harry’s still scrabbling around in the dark, not knowing what he’s doing … and HBP demonstrates he doesn’t have the power to survive either.
If you got this far you won’t be surprised to read that I found your brother’s books superior … a lot, lot, *lot* better than HBP. I enjoyed your parallel between Veil of Mystery and HBP re the announcement of the DADA teacher – very clever.
Your brother’s characterisation of the key players may have had them just a little bit too ‘goody goody’, you know, with few faults (if any!) between them – but darn, that was part of his books’ appeal, I *want* my heroes to be good guys! – but he was still so much more consistent than Rowling in their portrayl. Superficial caricatures, as you say, with HBP. I’m simply disgusted when I compare the Hermione of OotP with the one we see in HBP; fully half of that character was just pared away with a bloody axe to shoe-horn her into juvenile positions that the ‘real’ Hermione we know and love would have handled and closed in a split second.
“The Veil of Mystery was far richer in its coverage of issues and the exploration of philosophy and major themes of life. This is something that you tend to miss after having gotten used to it.”
Your brother’s books are UNIQUE among fandom in this respect, I would say. The way he merged such issues into his plot, and amalgamated the workings of the wizarding world with that of we muggles, was just excellent, and such a pleasure to examine time and again on the re-reads.
The whole Harry/Ginny romance left me feeling completely … empty. A page or two about Harry’s “scaly chest monster” (!) and that was it. Love via jealousy? I dearly hope that Ginny had her fingers crossed when Harry was going through the (hackneyed again) “we must break up for your own good” scene. The Ginny of Rowling’s series *or* your brother’s would never submit so easily. I expect to see her tagging along with the Trio in the retrieve-the-cursed-artifacts-by-the-numbers story that we’ll be seeing in the seventh book.
Another excellent parallel between Veil of Mystery and HBP was that of sub-vocalisation or ‘silent’ spell casting. That was a key element of your brother’s work and I found it most interesting that JKR went in that same direction in her sixth-year book. Follows on from the curse Hermione received from Dolohov even after she silenced him in the Ministry battle in OotP. Your brother did the idea so much better though, giving it detail with the ‘percentage effectiveness’ metric and such. It’s probably your brother’s fault that I was so disappointed in Harry’s inability to cast non-vocal spells in HBP!
Thank you for your analysis, very insightful and interesting.
Brad
I Totally and whole heartedly agree with you. I couldn’t figure out why I was so unsatisfied with HBP untill I realized the simularity between veil and HBP. Although I had a few things that I was unhappy about with Veil, it was no where near the things that I was unhappy about with HBP. The flippant way the characters just seemed to change their mind about the way they were supposed to act, annoyed me to no end. While I felt that Veil and the proceding book (haven’t read pheonix intuition yet) seemed to have more reiteration of subjects already discussed and decided, it at least let the characters grow at a more normal rate instead of a head first jump into a type of behavior that they had never expierenced before.
Well, here seems like a good place to put my impressions of HBP, especially since my brother has been kind enough to host my stories here, and compare them favorably to what J. K. Rowling writes. (They’re also available at a fanfiction site called FictionAlley, but only here are they available in the more convenient PDF form. On that site, they’re under the author name ‘semprini’, a little joke for Monty Python fans.) I should say first, though, that I don’t attach my name to the stories only because I don’t want my name to be Googled and have them found like that. Just on general principle, I’d rather be able to tell people about myself than have them be able to find out anything they want with a search.
I read Half-Blood Prince with lowered expectations compared to other Potter stories, mainly because I was so disappointed with Order of the Phoenix. I felt it was utterly unrealistic that Dumbledore would emotionally abandon Harry as he did. The ‘Voldemort will leap out of Harry and attack Dumbledore’ was clearly something that JKR came up with so Harry would have to be isolated, but even so, Dumbledore could have done a great deal to be of help to Harry without looking at him, and if he cared about Harry so much, he certainly would have done so. She clearly wanted to write ‘angsty Harry’, and contorted the circumstances so she could, regardless of the fact that it made characters have to behave in unrealistic and out-of-character ways. Other things bugged me too, but that was the big one. This dissatisfaction is probably what made me want to write my own Harry Potter story, and why it’s a much happier story than OotP. When you write, you write the story you want to read, and that was what I wanted to read.
I liked HBP better than OotP, but not as much as Goblet of Fire or Prisoner of Azkaban, my favorite of all the books. Oddly, however, as time goes on, I find myself liking HBP less on reflection than I did as I read it. First, what I liked: I was gratified that Dumbledore is finally paying special attention to Harry, as he should have been all along. The story moved along at a nice pace, and the Tom Riddle backstory was interesting. There was JKR’s usual great creativity with the world of magic. There was some humor; my favorite bit was with the house-elves, at which I laughed out loud. Harry’s expedition with Dumbledore and the events that followed were very interesting and emotionally involving. I was also glad that she didn’t spend a few chapters having Harry painfully mourn Sirius, as some fanfiction stories did. We know he mourned, that’s enough.
Far more than any of her other stories, this had a ‘part 1 of 2’ quality; far more is left hanging than ever before, which makes it a little difficult to review. It’s hard to know if certain things make sense until you read the rest of it. The major question left hanging is regarding Snape’s loyalties, but I feel virtually certain that he is truly on the side of the good guys, and only killed Dumbledore because Dumbledore requested it (suggested by Snape’s earlier reluctance when talking with Dumbledore). I feel so certain partly because JKR drops so many suggestions that Snape is really with the bad guys; she has to be setting us up for a reversal.
My greatest problem with the story was the Ron/Hermione relationship. I’m fairly sure that even normal sixteen-year-olds don’t conduct their relationships so stupidly, never mind Hermione. It is, as my brother has pointed out, in the cartoonish vein in which JKR often writes. It was extremely disappointing; she could have written something more heartfelt yet still realistic. She might say that that’s what teenage relationships are really like, but I would say, only the really immature ones. The characters are presented in such a poor light that it’s hard for me to like them. Compounding the problem is that she devotes so much scarce book space to this misguided story. Also, I never got any sense of *why* Ron and Hermione like each other. Granted, the story is through Harry’s eyes, but to spend so much time on juvenile antics while ignoring the emotional center of the relationship seems unforgivable in a book that will be read by millions of young people. My expectations were low, but not this low.
Most of my other problems have been mentioned by my brother and Brad in their excellent reviews. Dumbledore still ladles out information to Harry with a teaspoon, when he should be telling him all he can. This, it seems obvious to me, is something JKR sees as a storytelling necessity: there are important things she wants to keep from the reader, and if Harry knows something, we know. So, she keeps Harry in the dark, even when it makes no sense to do so. My other big problem is that Dumbledore never tells Harry why he trusts Snape. The problem is, it’s hard to evaluate Dumbledore’s (that is, JKR’s) reason until we know what it is, so we have to wait for book 7. All I can say is, it better be good. The implausibility of the luck potion hadn’t occurred to me before, but Brad is absolutely right. Historically, however, JKR has rarely troubled herself to consider what it means to her previous stories when she introduces new elements into her universe. And I had also noticed the conspicuous absence of Harry studying Occlumency. I had him study it religiously in my story, because it seemed absolutely necessary. Why JKR ignored that, I can’t imagine.
Another lapse in continuity occurs when Harry finds out that Snape has been made the DADA teacher. C’mon, what’s the first thing Harry would do upon finding out? He would re-start the D.A.! Partly out of fear that Snape would teach it badly, and partly out of spite towards Snape, a way to say ‘I can do this better than you can.’ Of course he would do that; I don’t think a reasonable argument could be made that he wouldn’t. Yes, he’s busy, but it’s only once a week. He’d do it. Why did JKR ignore this? I imagine it’s because she has Malfoy using the Room of Requirement, and didn’t want Harry and Malfoy butting heads in that way. She still could have had Harry do it publicly, some other place, but she didn’t. Maybe it didn’t fit into the story, but she still could have included it as a throwaway. This is one of my major problems with JKR as an author: she doesn’t follow the story’s internal logic, especially when it conflicts with what she wants to do. She manipulates the characters with a heavy, unsubtle hand. Another example of this is at the end, when Harry tells Ginny they can’t be together anymore; she reacts with the verbal equivalent of a resigned shrug. Um, really? She’s loved him from afar for years, finally gets him, then seems undisturbed when he, however kindly, dumps her? I don’t think so. She’s not the type to keep her feelings to herself. Even if she understood his reason, she would have reacted differently. To treat it so casually demeans the whole relationship, not that the story spent much time on it anyway. She’d been hinting at Harry/Ginny for so long, then when it finally happens, it’s quite a letdown.
I’m sure, however, that it’s not over. In book 7, they will get back together, only to have something terrible or tragic happen, to remind them of why they shouldn’t have done it. Harry will consider Snape his sworn enemy, and make a mistake of great magnitude because of it, probably costing a chance to get rid of Voldemort. Maybe, just maybe, Harry will realize the truth about Snape before it’s too late, but I doubt it. This will clearly be one of the major story arcs of book 7. Dumbledore will have left memories for Harry in a Pensieve, and/or talk to him as a portrait. As for whether Harry dies, that’ll all depend on whether it’s foreshadowed. I think that if we learn early on that he might be a horcrux, he won’t die, but if we find out only near the end, then he will. One thing I have decided is that before I read book 7, I want to be spoiled as to whether Harry dies. I guess this means that while I enjoy her storytelling, I don’t have enough faith to think she’ll get where she’s going without the same kind of character manipulation she’s done before. I really wish she’d kept the tone of the first four stories going, but I suppose that’s what fanfiction is for.
I see my stories as a continuation of what I wanted to see, a projection of where the Trio seemed to be heading in the first four stories. They weren’t perfect, but they were good, noble, and not stupid or immature (mostly). I decided to see them as getting more mature, not less. I had what I thought were interesting ideas about love being the ‘power the Dark Lord knows not’ and how it relates to magic, and the Snape/Dumbledore backstory, so I was motivated to write. It’s not perfect, for sure, but I was happy with it, and I’m very glad that some people have enjoyed it. JKR created a terrific universe and likable characters for us to enjoy, and has been very generous in allowing fanfiction to flourish when she could have tried to inhibit it through legal means. Whether we like or don’t like a particular story, whether we praise or criticize it, we have to appreciate what she’s done. It had never occurred to me to even think about writing fiction, but her stories inspired me to try to do so, with better-than-expected results. So, my thanks to her for that, to my brother for hosting the stories, putting them into PDF format and highlighting them, and to Brad as a representative of those who’ve enjoyed what I wrote and said so.
I actually don’t agree. I don’t agree at all. I don’t know why people hate HBP like they do. I’m sorry to say it, but I think ‘shipping’ (whether you want to admit it or not) has a lot to do with all this ‘hate’, because IMO, it’s just one more great book from the great Harry Potter series.
“Harry’s a wuss in this book – I was so longing for a hero who was at least *adequate* to the tasks placed before him. Draco beats him in the train (which was well done, added tension and a dimension to Draco). He can’t block his mind, Snape and Dumbledore penetrate him easily (Draco is better at occlumency than he is). He has to be led everywhere holding Dumbledore’s hand. His proficiency in his classes – apparition, sub-vocalisation – is only average, or below. He can’t even *engage* Snape in a duel. And now he’s off on his (hackneyed plot we’ve all seen before) ‘quest’ to search for cursed artifacts, ostensibly on his lonesome? Big Head Percy had nothing on Harry!”
So you want Mary Sue!Harry? I want realistic characters, definitely not Mary Sues. And if Harry was everything he already is and even more, he’d be a Mary Sue.