I am feeling like Thursday was a day where I had all of two spoons. One of them got used up in the unpleasant task of hanging up a small load of laundry that the dryer completely failed to do anything to the day before, and in negotiating for a date this weekend. The other one got used up on doing some very basic beginning stuff on the next page of Rita.
Any day when I don’t get out of bed until 2pm is probably going to be a wash, and Thursday was one of those thanks to this @#$% lingering concrud.
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A while back, I’d grabbed copies of all of the Harry Potter books and dumped them into the Kindle app. A week or two ago I’d idly read the first chapter of the last book; over dinner, I pulled that up, and started reading. And kept on reading until I was done. Really, it felt like it should have been named “Harry Potter And The History Dumps”, since a significant portion of the narrative drive was Harry wondering just who the fuck Dumbledore was when he wasn’t being Harry’s Cryptic Advice And Quest Dispenser, then wandering around and learning just that. Either that or “Harry Potter And As Many Dangling Plot Threads As I Can Wrap Up”.
I came to the book from a strange place: I’d read, oh, books 1-3? Maybe 4? not too long after they came out, and really not been interested enough to go any further. I never bought them; my mother had gotten them, and I read the ones I did while hanging around her place for a visit. Then later I saw the first movie when it came out. I was largely unimpressed by all of these. And then much later I read Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality, a lengthy alternate-history fanfic wherein Harry was raised by loving parents and taught to be a SCIENTIST! who then proceeds to question all the unquestioned illogic of the wizarding world. It’s no more realistic, but I could recognize a lot more of myself and my smart friends in a scarily smart Harry who’s thrown into a world full of adults who blithely accept what seems to be patently and obviously Wrong than in the original Harry who mostly seems to be good at getting people to do work for him and at playing the one position on an absurdly-imbalanced team sport that actually means anything to the score.
So throughout HP7 I was constantly surprised to see the characters acting like the official versions rather than the skewed fanfic versions I knew better. The biggest discontinuity involved Draco Malfoy; in the originals, he’s little more than a cipher; in HPMOR, he’s a main character, who grows and learns quite a lot as Harry attempts to cure him of his blood-purity beliefs by teaching him science and making him propose and execute experiments. And in a broader scope, Sytherin House as a whole felt really underserved; their mass defection in the big battle at the end of the book was a big eye-roll for me. And of course Harry? Depressingly a Hero. He’s got several artifacts of Ultimate Power at the end of the book and he doesn’t even ponder the thought of fixing this broken, fucked-up wizarding world for a page; he just sleepily does what he can to render them useless, and then he’s done.
(Of course I could also note that this really wasn’t a book with much room for any characterization. It was all about going down the list of every single dangling plot thread from the six previous books and tying them into a narratively satisfying package. I’m not sure anyone really felt like they had any volition in the face of that.)
And at the end of it all, I really felt like absolutely nothing changed in the canon world. Sure, Harry managed to defeat Voldemort. Or rather Dumbledore managed to defeat Voldemort with nothing more than his ghostly hand firmly lodged up puppet-Harry’s butt. But the wizarding world, at least as shown in the really quite unnecessary epilogue, seems to have returned quite firmly to the status quo as seen in the beginning of the series. Didn’t learn a thing.
Which I guess is probably quite depressingly realistic, isn’t it?
Anyway, that’s some early-morning thoughts on a six-year-old novel most of you have probably read, digested, and put well behind you.