Dragons, Produced and Tickled, and Other Pleasantries

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, silmariel <silmariel at t...> 
wrote:

> Anne: having epiphanies
>> Holy cow, you're right.  Voldemort is just a red herring, a plot
>> device to drive the confrontation and resolution between the real
>> protagonists (and antagonists -- literally and literarily), Harry 
>> and Snape.  It's brilliant.
> 
> Oooh. Holy cow, indeed.
> 
> Seems we still could be greatly pleasured to have book 7 in hands, 
> after all.
> 
> Because, Volvemort is horrible and all the blabla, but, does he 
> interest readers as the Harry/Snape dynamic does? No. The hunt for 
> horcruxes + Snape's aid at last moment + let's defeat Voldemort, 
> strikes as a bit mechanic and boring. We need some bangs.

On the other hand, since when has JKR really cared about which 
dynamic her general readers found most interesting?  She loves 
Hagrid, who is always at the top of "should die" polls, and wrote in 
Grawp.  And what was the end of HBP if not BANG-y--we spent the 
entire book telling ourselves "nah, Snape isn't evil, he was just 
lying"--and then he goes and commits the murder.

I suspect, although I could be wrong, that the main event on is still 
Harry vs. Voldemort, and that's where the grandeur and emphasis are 
going to lie.  Snape is a character who Rowling continually writes 
with this sharp edge of the pathetic and the ridiculous lurking in 
the background, which frustrates his ability to be all dark and 
Gothic and brooding and reluctantly heroic (at least for me).  In 
some ways he's just too sad a figure to bear the weight of the 
denoument of a heroic quest.  It's continually amusing how he's the 
most romanticized and valorized figure in much of the fandom at large.

-Nora stays inside and out of the snow today