Crow With a Side of Crow (LOOONG)

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 172816

Gha!  I better jump on this merry-go-round before everything starts
coming up for the third time.  If I'm going to write something it's
just going to have to be rambling and not immediately responding to
the board as it is because I don't have two weeks to organize my thoughts.

Reading experience:  As a read I enjoyed this book more than any of
the others, right up until the last five chapters which is when I
started to realize the HP series I had been reading for the last few
years was actually in a parallel universe.  That said there are many
ways in which this might be my favorite book of the series.  Am I
insane?  Quite possibly.

First words on finishing:  Oh my god, it's the hyper-Calvinist Narnia!
To everyone I mocked for thinking the series would end with all the
sins sliding off the heroes Grace-coated nonstick souls, while the
Unelect were cast into outer darkness from childhood if not earlier..
wow, I'm so sorry.  You guys were totally right!  When JKR said these
were Christian books I assumed it was the part about humility,
let-he-who-is-without-sin, and love-thy-enemy.  Instead it's the part
of that's about smug, exclusionary clubbiness, 'hugging the promises
to him, and hurling the curses at his enemies'.  Holy crap.  Did not
see that coming AT ALL.

Do I sound bitter?  LOL.. I didn't realize how far off I was until
Voldemort started to light the Sorting Hat on fire and I was going
'Yay!' and then Harry saves the Hat and everyone cheers and I was
like, Oh. My God.

Overall:  I'm weirded out by everything, because I wasn't far off
prediction-wise, or even not cool with any of the actual stuff that
happened.  But Someone was following me around telling me what to feel
about everything, that Someone was the writer, and that Someone I am
seriously uncomfortable with and would avoid at cocktail parties.  And
yet it's not like she arranged her universe in a way either of us
found inconsistent.  We just had wildly different opinions about it,
as though she hadn't made it up and we'd both happened across it. 
This is, and always has been, her crazy genius as a writer.

Snape:  Guys, I'm sorry.  I was so totally, totally wrong.  Crow
flambe, right here.  I said Snape-loved-Lily would not be horrible,
and it so, SO was.  I just about crawled under the couch reading those
bits.  That said, I was so totally right about one thing, and that was
that once everyone finished the book they would come here and say,
"See!  I was right all along!"  At least about Snape.

If the Authorial Voice would shut up for half a second I actually
enjoyed the Snape stuff (what there was of it).  Every book has
layered something onto this guy. HBP gave us kick-ass, smooth,
super-healer fanfic Snape; DH gives us this shattered, desperately
lonely person who simply has no hope of any real human contact, ever,
seeing as Dumbledore is the only person on the face of the earth he
could be honest with, and he's... well, more on that later. My heart
just bled and bled for Snape in those memories.  I'm going to knit him
a six-foot afghan.  And then run away!  Because he would devote his
life to anyone who gave him the time of day without spitting in his
face.  If someone knit him something he'd, I dunno, paint them on the
ceiling with golden chains linking them together.  Oh, wait, that was
Luna.  Harry's a more open-minded guy than me, because if I came into
an aquaintance's room and saw that I would back out slowly before they
could complete the tableau with my mummified head.  Hang on, I was
supposed to find that heart-warming?  There's an Author at my elbow
and I think she's a little bit crazy.

Hey, there seems to be a little goal-post moving on whether Snape was
DDM or not.  Play fair, people, Harry practically gave a shout-out to
HPforGrownups.   "He was Dumbledore's [man]!"  Whatever his messed-up
psychology was, he followed Dumbledore's orders to the letter from
event X, so we win.  In exchange, our baby gets his throat ripped out
by a snake.  Everyone wins!

I was *staggered* at the lack of a Harry/Snape scene.  There must have
been a crazy scene where Harry went from "I hate Snape FOREVER!!" to
the final shot of the entire series being Harry naming a kid after
him.  For some reason JKR didn't think that was interesting enough to
put in the book.  What??!  I mean, what???!?!  Actually, I missed
scenery-chewing in general in the book, there was a hell of a lot of
explaining and summarizing and convenient flashbacks.  One of JKR's
greatest strengths had been her ability to sell plot with scenes, but
there was nowhere near enough of that here.

I just about dropped the book when Dumbledore said, "Sometimes I think
we sort too soon."  Because, he might as well have said, "Sometimes I
think it's a bit off to decide who goes to hell when they're small
children.  And then I think, 'nah.'  Or, "You almost had a chance at
having human worth. Oh well!"  He couldn't have thought of a fouler
thing to say if he'd thought about it for three months, which, knowing
Dumbledore now, he probably did.  Emo!Snape probably crawled into the
dungeons and punished himself with Sectusempra for his crime of
existing (now confirmed!).  I honestly have absolutely no idea how JKR
intended an audience to take that, and I don't have any intention of
asking her.  She kind of scares me now.

Dumbledore:  While the House thing hit me silently from behind like an
electric bus, Dumbledore's true character's totally unexpected reveal
had a great rumbling buildup and was one of my favorite shockers in
the series.  The smug, icy-cold Machiavellian liar both seemed to come
out of nowhere, and make perfect sense of everything that came before.
 What a fascinating monster he is!  I'm not usually a hater, but if I
wasn't such a chicken I would totally haunt Dumbledore threads with
spittle-flecked posts about how much I hate him.  Oh, wait, I wasn't
supposed to feel that way?  There's me, and then there's the author,
and then there's a whole universe of WTF in between?  I got a lot of
that in this book.

I'd pictured the scene where Dumbledore has to ask Snape to kill him a
lot of different ways.  I hope to heaven I never have to ask that of
someone, but if I do, I hope I won't do it like this:

ME: So, when the time comes, you'll blow my brains out. Of course we
can't tell anyone that it's consensual, so everyone will think you're
a loathsome murderer and you'll probably get thrown in prison.
VOLUNTEER: I'm kind of uncomfor... ME: *Christ*, so I guess what you
want is to watch me die a horribly painful death, is THAT IT?!? God,
you're so selfish.

He's like a passive-aggressive mother in a Sam Shepard play!  OMG,
remember in Book 1 when he said he wasn't sure if Abeforth could read?
 I want to beat him to death with a shovel.

Harry: is a Horcrux!  I predicted that, but I wasn't sure because I
thought, surely Dumbledore would have figured out, and there's no way
he'd lie in that effortless, remorseless way that he would have to
have done at the end of HBP.  I mean, he'd have to be some kind of
frigid manipulator.  Well GUESS WHAT!  Your epitome of goodness, right
here folks.  JK ROWLING ARE YOU ON CRACK??!

Random things I didn't like:

-- Nothing making sense.  Seriously, the whole wand thing?  I was
drawing diagrams in the margins and I'm not quite sure it works.  Was
this a first draft??!  Up till now what I've loved about the series is
that it never seemed to give a fig for the usual
fantasy-world-building magical structure, it just did what worked for
the story.  The tail started wagging the dog in this book, and it was
a broken, mutant tail.  If you find yourself typing, "Draco Malfoy was
the master of the Elder Wand!!" you should realize something's gone
horribly wrong.

-- insufficient Draco, and payoff?  what payoff?  Magpie turned me
into a Draco fan just in time to be disappointed.

-- the heavy-handed Nazi thing.  I thought that was kind of in poor
taste, but maybe that's just me.  Of course if they'd been fighting
anything short of Nazis it would be hard to tell our heroes were heroes.

-- so, Crucio proves you're evil if you're in Slytherin, but kind of
cute if you're in Gryffindor.  If you're the other two houses, please
fill in a questionaire and we'll get back to you.  What. The. Hell?


Random Things I Dug, of Which There Was a Surprising Amount
Considering I Think This Series Is Evil:

-- Harry polyjuicing himself into a little bald man for the visit to
the graveyard.  That was a weird and fabulous image.  Doesn't he
polyjuice himself into a younger kid for the wedding at the start of
the book?  That was some very nice imagery compressing a human life. 
Props.  And then the old lady with the Alien!snake moment was every
kind of cool.

-- LOL old lady at Bill and Fleur's wedding.  I think she was at my
wedding.  She's at every wedding.

-- I liked the scene with bambi!patronus and the sword and everything,
for bits it was the nicest writing in the series, even though my soul
died in me as I recognized that that must be Snape's. Dude, laaaaaame
patronus.

-- Ahahaha, Harry yelled at Lupin for being a coward. 

-- Ron/Hermione, while cheesy, worked for me. (Absence of ginny's
personality gratefully received)

-- I was actually interested in Harry for the first time. Ever.

-- *crawls out of woodwork* I liked the epilogue.  I just like
epilogues. *crawls back into woodwork*

-- there was some sort of bit Alchemical structure going on (let me
guess: there's some kind of Deep Meaning to a snake in a ball,
right?).  You could feel it going on and it was kind of cool.

-- The Hallows fairy tale.  I wish there's been a wizarding fairy tale
for every book.  Although, it would have been even better if it was
earlier in the book and not about some randomly introduced plot
element that ate the story.

So, yeah... head spinning a bit.  Why was this my favorite book in a
way?  Because it's so many kinds of messed up, but in such a vivid,
brain-eating way, we'll be talking about it for YEARS!!  Its
philosophy is downright ugly.  I don't know, maybe she's right, and
people's personalities do get fixed that early and it would be great
if there was a magic hat so we could segregate out the Bad Children. 
What am I talking about, that's just evil.  I actually think this book
could do a lot of harm, if its poisonous lessons are absorbed by a
generation of children.   Still, fanfic playground!!  Evil!Dumbledore,
my favorite character ever!

-- Sydney, who has heard that Rowling is a friend of Gordon Brown...
*sidles out of country before the Crucio for Slytherins bill gets
through parliament*