OOP Thoughts

[Lita]

Well, I just finished the book a few hours ago and have
been sitting around trying to digest it all. :) I have no
one to really talk to yet--my husband isn't even halfway
through the book yet and my brother is only on the fifth
chapter.

Obviously, there be spoilers here....

S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

J
U
S
T

A
H
E
A
D
!

Wow.

I found OOtP to be immensely satisfying, which I'm relieved
about. When I started the HP books, GoF was already out, so
I hadn't had a chance to do the anticipation thing. But I
wasn't disappointed (as opposed to what invariably happens
when, say, a new Wheel of Time book gets released).

My head is spinning with so many different thoughts right
now, so please excusing any rambling....

Harry really, truly pissed me off several times during the
book--he really does the whole righteous, self-centered,
knows-best, "oh woe is me" bit very well. Just like a
teenager. :) I swear, there were times I wanted to just
reach through the book and smack some sense into him. But
mixed up throughout that were several times, like with the
D.A. group, when I was so proud of him I could've burst. I'm
continually amazed at how "real" JKR has made Harry. IMO,
the boy has flaws--serious, serious flaws that I think
burned him badly in this book (and probably will again in
the future)....But I can't help but root for him. Just about
all of his comforting illusions were  brutally stripped away
from him; Hero!James, Invincible!Dumbledore,
Immovable!McGonagall, Quidditch. Then there's the loss of
Sirius, and with it, his only real sense of family.

That's going to cut deep, I think, especially when it
*really* sinks in. When it comes right down to it, Sirius's
death resulted from the culmination of those flaws I
mentioned earlier. While I think Hermoine's assessment of
The Rift in GoF was dead wrong, I do think she absolutely
hit it right about Harry's hero complex. Frankly, even if
Snape had resumed the Occlumency lessons, I doubt it would
have done any good. Harry had made little progress to begin
with. When you get right down to it, Harry had no desire to
learn--he was just too sure that going into the visions was
The Right Thing To Do--so he didn't learn. (The fact that
Snape was the instructor probably didn't help--Harry's as
irrational about him as Snape is about Sirius.) When (and
if, I suppose) this all sinks in, I think it's going to
really devastate Harry. Talk about a wake-up call. But I'm
pulling for his being able to learn and grow from it instead
of a further retreat into self-pity and angst.

I have to admit that it hadn't occured to me that JKR would
kill off Sirius. I don't think I gave her enough credit
(shame on me!) to think that she would flatten Harry's hopes
for a family so brutually. I really thought the loss of
either Dumbledore or Hagrid would be the Big, Angsty Death.
But I'm beginning to think that the tearing down of
Dumbledore is more effective than his death would be. (Even
though I think Dumbledore was a little harsh on himself.
Harry's hard-headed enough for events to have unfolded
similarly even if he had more information from the
beginning.)

And see--I'm rambling now. :) Just so much food for
thought....

Like Snape. While I was rather hoping for more about him,
what we did learn just fascinated me further. The whole new
spin on the James/Snape dynamic has got me wanting more. I
see The Prank in a whole new light now--instead of
Noble!James, I see the whole incident as James's wake-up
call. James may have been a bullying git, but he wasn't
totally lost. Although that whole "because he's there"
remark really chilled me....

But still. What the heck *has* Snape been doing? I would
think that personally spying would be out of the question
(Kreacher certainly would have ratted him out to Narcissa,
for one). Does he maybe run his own spies among the DEs?

And that's what I liked about this book--there was, I
thought, a good blend between questions that were answered
and which weren't. We learned more about ghosts, about
Neville's backstory, about why everyone believed Sirius was
a DE (an explanation which, in hindsight, was something so
simple that I never even thought of it), who the Fourth Man
was, just to name what comes to me off the top of my head.
Sure, I still want to know more about Snape, James, and
Lily--but I didn't get the feeling at all that nothing
happened or that questions weren't answered.

But waiting for the next book is really going to be
torture....

Lita, who thinks this is her first canon-related post after
eight or nine months of lurking