A Look Back was Re: 'Clue to his vulnerability' (Coming to a conclusion )

[severelysigune]

Carolyn wrote:
> > I'd personally prefer some of these sorts of more complex 
messages, though (naturally) ignoring their religious connotations. 
However, they seem at odds with WYSIWYG approach advocated by Neri 
and Nora. < <

Potioncat wrote:
> What I hear several of you saying (yeah, I studied a bit of 
psychiatry) is that "the books are beginning to lose some of their 
sparkle; things aren't going quite the way you had expected; is that 
all there is?"

Clarify something for me though, what first brought you into the 
books? Not, why did you start reading them, but what captured you and 
started you on this time consuming hobby of Harry Potter and the...
What about the story really got your attention? And then, what 
changed? <


Sigune delurking:

OK - I'm one of those people, and here is my HP boggart:

I was only drawn in after reading Order of the Phoenix. To be quite 
honest, I wasn't much impressed by the preceding four - meaning they 
hadn't sparked my imagination and I hadn't taken the trouble of 
buying the books or looking into fandom, much less subscribe to 
Potter Yahoo groups.

What did it for me was the Worst Memory. I was really taken by 
surprise when James Potter and Sirius Black fell off their pedestals -
 I never thought JKR would do that sort of thing, the series had 
seemed quite stereotypical in its good/evil splits to me. James was a 
hero, Sirius was charmingly irresponsible; Snape was just mean (and 
therefore entertaining); Peter was a traitor because he looks like 
one. To me, OotP was the Potter series' coming-of-age. Harry was 
obnoxious, Sirius had taken to drink and Snape got a little more 
background to him (the Occlumency, the schoolday bullying). Lily - 
well, she was obviously a girl that made use of a fellow student's 
humiliation to make her mark in her mating dance with Potter Sr. Hey, 
a number of characters had just acquired extra depth. Also, it was 
while reading OotP that I discovered that the series might be much 
more complex and well-thought-out than I had hitherto given it credit 
for. To give a small example, there were the order members who had 
been around all along without our realising it, like Arabella Figg 
and Dedalus Diggle. The older generation's background captured my 
attention and is essentially what made me peruse the books again and 
drove me hungrily to fandom.

I had great expectations of HBP, but my first reading quite shattered 
those. Harry's angst has disappeared into thin air over the summer. 
Lily is obviously a saint. Snape has killed Dumbledore - he's the 
badass Harry suspected him to be from the beginning, so Sirius was 
right: he deserved being werewolfed. Yuck.

I'm aware of the fact that this is a very simple surface reading; but 
what alarmed me about HBP is that it suddenly made this kind of 
simple black-and-white reading and ditto ending a distinct 
possibility. The book made me suspect I may very well have been 
expecting far too much from JKR, and what a letdown it would be if 
all the ambiguous material, all the little things that gave rise to 
fabulous speculations, turned out to culminate in, "Harry was right 
all along. He kills Snape, he kills Voldemort with the sheer purity 
of his heart, he marries Ginny and they live happily ever after." I 
really dread this - both the book and the interview that followed its 
publication made me feel as if JKR was preparing us for exactly this. 
I would be vexed for the simple fact alone that it would mean that 
with Snape what you see is what you get. I hate that in both books 
and films: greasy ugly black-clad git = villain. Sad, I call it. I 
don't *want* to believe it's going that way, but I'm not sure I have 
much evidence to back my denial.

Finally, HBP seems very much an unfinished book. For the one-but-last 
installment of a series, it has started a lot of new lines of 
inquiry. As Pippin's list of unresolved issues has shown, there 
really are a lot of things that need explaining, and I deem it 
extremely unlikely that all these questions will be answered in one 
final book. If that is so, the series should have been better 
monitored and edited. The last book has a lot of stuff that in my 
eyes was filler, whereas it abandoned a lot of lines about which I 
was curious. We got a lot of snogging when I wanted to know how Harry 
dealt with his most hated teacher teaching DADA, or what happened to 
SPEW.

My addition to Pippin's list would be: I hope JKR plans to make the 
relevance of the Half-Blood Prince stuff clear. I'm probably dumb, 
but I still don't get that.

Your severely,
Sigune