half blood prince
Jul. 21st, 2005 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aleathielSo I finished HBP. Random thoughts under the cut. Will contain spoilers, as will, I expect, the comments.
Firstly, I thought it was better than OotP, but I wonder if that was only persepective. I was waiting so ardently for OotP and read it all in about the first 12 hrs I got my mits on it (brief breaks for sleeping and eating only) and nothing I read was going to satisfy me. This one I was less fussed about, I didn't get a copy until Monday.
I was going to try and organise this into positive and negative, but actually you're just going to get it as I think of it:
I'd forgotten, having read much more complex things since, quite how simplistic they are. And at one level, that's a fundemental problem that JKR can't get around. While it works in the first couple, and even three and four, the childish tone doesn't keep working when she wants her characters to grow. I know the later ones are less childish, and obviously that fits, but it's a vicious cycle because while we'd like to see them grow and so the plots have to become darker and so on, so she loses the charm that was so integral to the earlier books.
Also, there's the slightly unplanned feeling. In that she wrote bits in the earlier books that she is now endevouring to explain. There are blatently obvious examples of this, such as the failure in OotP to explain why Harry couldn't see the thestrals at the end of GoF. But also more fundemental things - things like the idea that the fact that there's a new DADA teacher every year which I'm sure is not an explanation that she had before she started.
This one was also quite divorced from the patterns of the the previous six, something which I did actually quite like. While we got the end of holiday start and then the school time, there wasn't really a big showdown in quite the way there was in the others (yes, there's the Dumbledore quest and the bit on the roof, but nothing along the lines of the end of GOF and OOTP) and, most significantly, no 'hopeful' ending.
This is, pretty much, the coming of age tale, isn't it? Harry has realised that the adults aren't infallible and they won't always be there to protect him. While yes, Harry as an orphan never had the family safety thing, he's always gravitated towards it: the Weasley fmaily practically adopting him, Sirius, Dumbledore... And now he's making the decision that he can't rely on anyone else.
Partly I wish I hadn't read so much fanfiction dealing with some of the very same issues because I have to admit that the canon is rather predictable and disappointing after some of the fanfics which deal with it in a much more interesting and more adult way. I almost groaned aloud at Harry's "I can't be with you because I have to do this alone and you will be a target if Voldemort ever finds out about you" line to Ginny. Coming from a non-fandom background that might be reasonable. But when you've seen every angle of that played with already...
Cheesy as it was, I quite liked the Fleur staying with Bill bit. It was nicely timed to put a bit of lightness in the end. Overdone, perhaps, by the Tonks and Lupin bit. Although I'm sure that's because my most active time in the fandom was post GOF and pre OotP and so I see Tonks as an unnecessary interloper character being that she was introduced to late. I feel the same way about Luna and Zacharias and Mundungus Fletcher etc. They irritate me irrationally simply for not having existed before and being late inventions.
The Snape decision, while I'd always been slightly annoyed by the fact that he was bound to have a plotline that revealed him as "good" or "bad", was satisfying. Having seen that early scene with Narcissa I was expecting a reversal, this is JKR after all, in which he was actually doing it for some noble purpose. I was thrilled that he wasn't and I hope that the final book doesn't try and bring him back to the fold.
If she wants to redeem Draco though, that's okay. In fact, it's actually more plausible now.
That's all I can think of right now, although there's more I'm sure.
Firstly, I thought it was better than OotP, but I wonder if that was only persepective. I was waiting so ardently for OotP and read it all in about the first 12 hrs I got my mits on it (brief breaks for sleeping and eating only) and nothing I read was going to satisfy me. This one I was less fussed about, I didn't get a copy until Monday.
I was going to try and organise this into positive and negative, but actually you're just going to get it as I think of it:
I'd forgotten, having read much more complex things since, quite how simplistic they are. And at one level, that's a fundemental problem that JKR can't get around. While it works in the first couple, and even three and four, the childish tone doesn't keep working when she wants her characters to grow. I know the later ones are less childish, and obviously that fits, but it's a vicious cycle because while we'd like to see them grow and so the plots have to become darker and so on, so she loses the charm that was so integral to the earlier books.
Also, there's the slightly unplanned feeling. In that she wrote bits in the earlier books that she is now endevouring to explain. There are blatently obvious examples of this, such as the failure in OotP to explain why Harry couldn't see the thestrals at the end of GoF. But also more fundemental things - things like the idea that the fact that there's a new DADA teacher every year which I'm sure is not an explanation that she had before she started.
This one was also quite divorced from the patterns of the the previous six, something which I did actually quite like. While we got the end of holiday start and then the school time, there wasn't really a big showdown in quite the way there was in the others (yes, there's the Dumbledore quest and the bit on the roof, but nothing along the lines of the end of GOF and OOTP) and, most significantly, no 'hopeful' ending.
This is, pretty much, the coming of age tale, isn't it? Harry has realised that the adults aren't infallible and they won't always be there to protect him. While yes, Harry as an orphan never had the family safety thing, he's always gravitated towards it: the Weasley fmaily practically adopting him, Sirius, Dumbledore... And now he's making the decision that he can't rely on anyone else.
Partly I wish I hadn't read so much fanfiction dealing with some of the very same issues because I have to admit that the canon is rather predictable and disappointing after some of the fanfics which deal with it in a much more interesting and more adult way. I almost groaned aloud at Harry's "I can't be with you because I have to do this alone and you will be a target if Voldemort ever finds out about you" line to Ginny. Coming from a non-fandom background that might be reasonable. But when you've seen every angle of that played with already...
Cheesy as it was, I quite liked the Fleur staying with Bill bit. It was nicely timed to put a bit of lightness in the end. Overdone, perhaps, by the Tonks and Lupin bit. Although I'm sure that's because my most active time in the fandom was post GOF and pre OotP and so I see Tonks as an unnecessary interloper character being that she was introduced to late. I feel the same way about Luna and Zacharias and Mundungus Fletcher etc. They irritate me irrationally simply for not having existed before and being late inventions.
The Snape decision, while I'd always been slightly annoyed by the fact that he was bound to have a plotline that revealed him as "good" or "bad", was satisfying. Having seen that early scene with Narcissa I was expecting a reversal, this is JKR after all, in which he was actually doing it for some noble purpose. I was thrilled that he wasn't and I hope that the final book doesn't try and bring him back to the fold.
If she wants to redeem Draco though, that's okay. In fact, it's actually more plausible now.
That's all I can think of right now, although there's more I'm sure.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 10:20 am (UTC)I refuse to read HP fanfic so the bits that you've seen overdone were absolutely wonderful to me.
Though I must admit, too much of the teen romance read like extremely bad fanfic, for any fandom.
Also, 'Cissy? Tell me I wasn't the only one annoyed with that. I almost threw the book away there and then.
:snuggles GoF: It'll always be my fave.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 12:03 pm (UTC)I'm sure you must have a reason for an anti-fanfic decision and given that it's altered my views of the books, you might have a point. But I have to tell you that I think you're missing out: some of the fanfic is better than the canon. Better written and more intelligently plotted with, to be honest, more depth of character.
PoA is my favourite, but GOF is second.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 12:42 pm (UTC)I have a number of diliking HP fanfic that mainly stems from the fact that the only two people online that I dislike are obsessed with Harry/Draco. that and the thought of people writing anything smutty about underage HP characters squicks me.
In all honesty, all HP romance [besides James/Lily] squicks me.
All of the above, paired with my loathe of writing not in the style of the original author, pretty much puts me against HP fanfic.
I love the character development and backgroudn in PoA but GoF was the first of the books that I eagerly awaited. It did not disappoint me in the slightest.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 10:59 am (UTC)I also thought that Tonks' constant appearances in HBP were pretty redundant, especially since, once she appeared, she didn't really do anything. The same with Lupin, it was almost a couple of token appearances so you didn't forget that he was a character.
I also found it a bit irritating that Ron and Hermione kept up the whole 'but Harry, there must a reasonable explanation, stop allowing your hatred of Draco to cloud your mind' thing, until the 'I told you so' moments. You would have thought they'd have learnt by now.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 12:06 pm (UTC)It was a bit "remember me?" every time they popped up, wasn't it. I thought that about Percy too - it was a sort of "remember my plotline? Yeah, I'm still around". I'm surprised Charlie Weasley didn't materialise at some point.
Also yes, and I know we've been getting Ron/Hermione hints for ages but that also annoyed me. A trio of friends is bound to suffer under that. And their treatment of Harry as overly paranoid is something that, in the circumstances, I agree that you'd expect them to have grown out of.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 12:19 am (UTC)Yep, I felt like she invested soooooo much time to basically say 'Percy glowered'.
I did love hearing that Fred & George were doing well, because I always loved them, a lot more than I liked Ron, who was always a bit whiny.
LOL You would think, reading this book, that JK had just discovered teenage hormones for the first time. Yuck!
no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 03:50 pm (UTC)Snape is not evil.
No, wait, before you have me commited, listen. Read on. If he hadn't killed Dumbledore, what would have happened?
*He would have "failed to help Draco" and so would have died because of the Unbreakable Vow.
*Draco would have been killed, possibly tortured.
*Dumbledore would have been captured, likely tortured, and killed.
*Harry would probably have been found, tortured, and killed.
Also, we know Dumbledore pleads with him. But for what? And it would explain the "Don't call me a coward" thing, because it was possibly the hardest thing he could have been forced to do.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-23 12:40 pm (UTC)<3