Harry Potter - love or hate it?

[rennyren]

Oooooh, very awesome. Much better than the movie thestrals.

Like I said, I've done...stick figures. My talents lie in the performing arts...I could do an interpretive dance to sum up the series for you if you like...

[emmasi]

lol, that'd be great!

But if you could leave

the horrific abuse of that poor Gringott's dragon

out of it, I think I'd be much happier. That was just not cool

I still haven't finished the book... getting there... slowly...

[emmasi]

Just did an image search of Equus for fun. Now no one can say I haven't seen Harry Potter's wang.

[rennyren]

Heehee. Now I'm tempted to do the same thing

I just had a thought that would please you, Emmasi. Have you ever noticed how the Dementors have only ever gone in for the Kiss with men? I can't remember an instance where we've seen them trying to Kiss a woman. Thus, Dementors = gay, which must be why everyone's so scared of Azkaban...it must be a pit of sodomy and sexual deviance.

Except Sirius didn't really seem to mind it...

[emmasi]

lol. Well according to all the fics I've read on the subject, yes that could very well be the case

But then, you're assuming that the Dementors are male. There was talk of them "breeding" so... maybe the ones that have gone in for the Kiss on Sirius and the like were female .

[Tasha]

I finally finsihed the book. Im a very slow reader, i know. But i stayed up till 3am last night finishing it off. I loved it. My second favourite book. Im sad its over now though. I couldnt sleep after i finsihed it either, and then i had dreams about it, but i guess thats a habit with me.

Anyways, great book. Great series, definitely my favourite. Ive even managed to get my cousins hooked back onto the book, and now they are both buying the last two books (since they already have the first 5), but one is just going to buy the books for her collection, whereas my other cousin is going to read them both. Ive put my 7th book up on my shelf with my other 6 books. So sad its all over. I am so going to buy all the DVD's when the last movie is released on DVD I'll be like 21 by then but oh well how excitement!!

Love Harry Potter

[emmasi]

I FINALLY FINISHED IT!!!!

AND YAY! SOMEONE AS SLOW AS MEEE!!!

*Goes back through the thread to read all the previously forbidden spoiler talk! Hahahaha!*

[emmasi]

Okay! I've read everything! Now here are my thoughts...

Explain to me why we were all so shattered by Hedwig's death, as was Harry, but when a girl near the end asked Professor McGonnagal what would be happening with their owls, she simply replied "There's no time for possessions!" ... Jeez. If that'd been my beloved pet up there in a tower about to smashed apart by giants, I think I'd be a little p*ssed with that response!

Rowling surpassed herself with the saddism in this book. Was there one page that didn't have the word "pain" on it? I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but after 600 pages it gets a little exhausting. I actually think that *I've* learned not to respond to pain after reading it! . Plus, if they leave all that in the movie, it'll be up to an R18+ rating. Which is possible, seeing as the ratings have climbed from General to M15+ in the space of four films.

That said, I think I'm in love with Bella. Her devotion to the Dark Lord is admirable. She's not a sicophant, clinging to him for reflected glory or Muggle-sport, she truly believed in him and supported him. Gotta respect that.

It's a shame she had to die, but seeing as she killed Sirius, I'm not too cut up about it, lol. I loved the parrallel that was drawn between their deaths. They were family, after all. It was nice to have that connection. I almost wish that Voldemort had have attacked Molly though - a little Crucio! to teach her for messing with his Bella, if nothing else.

On the subject of Death Eaters, what the hell was going on with the Malfoy's? Their "arch" was just... bizzare. I kept expecting Draco to turn and side with Harry. I kept expecting Voldemort to go too far and do something to Narcissa to set him off. When Draco said that he was using his mother's wand, I half expected Voldemort to have killed her, and Draco to be doing all he could to save his one remaining parent.

That said, Narcissa's devotion to her son was also admirable. The fact that she bold-faced lied to Voldemort about Harry's death was... awesome. (And a little sexy, if I may say so - clawing at Harry's chest and whispering in his ear... What? She's hot!) I must admit that I was surprised that Lucius cared enough to turn his back on the Death Eaters, mid battle. I would have thought him more likely to reject Draco for being too cowardly to finish off Dumbledore.

Draco himself... I got a little excited when Harry said that he WAS the true owner of the Elder Wand... but that little victory was snatched away all too suddenly; Harry reclaimed ownership through a random loophole in wand lore. Why have a reference to Draco in there at all if that was going to be the extent of the revelation? Why not simply have Snape give his wand to Harry, and say that he's been using Dumbledore's since he "killed" him? Rowling irritates me the amount of misleads and messes she crates in the plot. Stuff like this turned a 300-400 page book into a 600 page book. Slow readers do not appreciate such needless padding.

Anyway, I'm glad that Draco survived, grew up, and had a son. But what kind of a name is Scorpio? Surely some masculine version of Narcissa would have been more appropriate. Narcissus, I guess... Kid woulda been guarenteed pretty at any rate.

I was disappointed that Remus died, but I was expecting it from the outset as I'd accidentally read a spoiler on the internet . I do prefer to be prepared for these things though... and when Harry, Ron and Hermione were serveying the random casualties of battle, I was not at all surprised to see Remus lying there. I was okay with it, particularly since Tonks was with him. Not because they died together, but because that bitch didn't live to make his death all about her .

I have very little compassion for territory stealing whores.

On that note, Remus' death was more than acceptable when he appeared from the afterlife at Sirius' side. They're finally together, like James and Lily, and are evidentally happy to be so. Good for them

That scene in the forest with the Resurection Stone made me cry. The whole chapter was brilliantly written, as was Kings Cross (although Dumbledore's explanation of things did drag on - we already heard this information from Rita and Aberforth, we can piece together Albus' side for ourselfs in just a few paragraphs, can't we??).

Snape's story is a different matter, as we rarely heard anything of his life and motives. The memories he had of Lily were sweet as, and I can only pray they're not cut from the movie. One of my favourite scenes of the whole book is where he showed the doe patronus (Lily) to Dumbledore, and said that that's why he's fighting... And interestingly, is it common for friends to share he same patronus? Perhaps this showed that Severus and Lily were soulmates afterall. One wonders, if he had been put into Gryffindor and not Slytherine, would he have learned different morals and values, and been good enough for her then?

You have to wonder why they even have a Slytherine house if all the students that get sent there are apparently destined for evil. Is it wise to train such wizards to become stronger? If the sorting hat deems them to be too antisocial for all other houses, why not expell the poor kids on the spot? It's as good as sentencing them to hell if they're allowed to be instructed in the ways of Muggle-hating under Salazar Slytherine's tutolage.

Speaking of, I'd have liked a better explanation of why Dumbledore didn't do more to stop Tom Riddle when he was younger. He seemed almost resigned to letting the most powerful practitioner of the Dark Arts stroll out of his school and into an unsuspecting world. What's that about?

I liked at the end when Harry called Voldemort Tom, reducing him to a mortal man, and forcing him to therefore accept mortality and death as an inevitability - not something he could run from or hope to control. It was a nice touch.

The ending itself was almost too easy - a backfired curse... but then, that is how this all started, isn't it? So maybe it was simply an expression of the whole thing coming full circle.

Harry repairing his old wand and resolving to return the Elder Wand to Dumbledore's grave was nice, I thought. Not only did it show Harry's gratitude to the holly and pheonix feather that had kept him alive for 6 and a half long years, it showed that Dumbledore did deserve to own the Elder Wand, because he was a great man. Awesome.

So that's my thoughts on the plot. I shall disguss random lines and images next time, but for now I think this is quite enough

[emzyflower]

I would like to get somebody to do an official count on how many times Rowling described somebody lying "spread eagled" on the floor. Im not sure if this has already been mentioned but i havent read the 32 pages of this thread, and it is something that has been bothering me.

[emmasi]

No, she repeats phrases a lot, but after 600 pages it's hard to come up with new ways to describe similar scenes. Personally I don't think she's a particularly good writer. It's an excellent story, with very enjoyable characters and dialogue... I just feel she falls short on the technicalities. A lot of sentences in the book didn't seem to make sense to me (that could be my dumbness though) and others had typos and the like. Which is more the proof reader's fault than Rowling's, really.

A friend of mine won't let her kids read the books, not for any moral or religious reasons, but simply because she doesn't want them to learn bad writing, lol.

The others were all alright (with the obvious exception of book 5) but I get the feeling that on this book, no one was game to tell her to fix what needed fixing, or to edit the 200 or so pages worth of unecessary sitting, waiting, and repeating ourselves. It almost ruined the book for me, but luckily I pushed on to the end and found gold. "The Forest Again" is one of those rare reading experiences that may very well have changed my life... I'm not quite sure how yet, but it definitely felt like I was reading something special.