HBP thoughts three months later.

[amanuensis1]

What will my reaction be to Half-Blood Prince after the last book?

I still feel like the series peaked at OotP for me. Every volume has felt better than the last except for this last one--I'm still wigged that anyone, Rowling included, believes that Snape's motives are ambiguous, justifying leaving Harry in suspense at the conclusion of this book. I found Harry and Dumbledore's pensieve jaunts puzzlingly expository, and was waiting--am still waiting--to find out what was going on during those. Tom Riddle's history could have been related in two pages; what the heck happened in those pensieve jaunts that made them so crucial? I want there to have been more motivation on Dumbledore's part than exposition, or the idea that Harry had to see those moments for himself to gain understanding of Voldemort and of himself. It's not enough.

I loved the main plot of the book, the main plot being the Half-Blood Prince. Did I know who it was? Hell, no. The concept that "Prince" was a last name never crossed my mind--even when Hermione brought it up I couldn't see how that fit in. I didn't get it until I saw the chapter title "Flight of the Prince."

But I still believed that Slughorn gave him that book deliberately. Bah.

Will the last book draw it all back together for me? Will those unanswered questions finally fall into place? Or will I be happier admitting that HBP was the weak moment in the series for me and let it be?

Comments

[telepwen.livejournal.com]

I've long since come to the firm conclusion that while JKR is a fantastic world-builder and storyteller... she's an awful writer.

Which is not to say that she doesn't turn a fancy phrase, 'cause she does. It's not things like her vocab or her sentence structure; all that's fantastic. (Though if someone could kill those elipses for me, I'd send them undying love and offer to have their babies.)

It's things like Grawp, or GoF!Rita Skeeter, or Lockhart. It's things like scenes I can't stand to read again. Sure, it's fun to have characters you love to hate, but to have characters that you hate so much that you can't bear to reread any scene they're in?

It's things like having plotholes so big that you can successfully hide the entire house of Sparklypoo for safekeeping in them. (Hey, we had to get rid of all those Sues somehow...) Things that we can catch on the first reading? Not good. Why she doesn't have a small team of fandom nitpickers working for her (hell, we'd pay her to do it!) is beyond me.

I like all the twists; they're fantastic. And I can understand why a lot of people would think that Snape's evil; they've just not analyzed the books to death and then taken out the dead-horse-stick to beat the books some more. I've argued it with a lot of non-fandomers, and when I pointed out even some of the simplest of arguments, you could just see the wheels turning in their head. "Heh. I never thought of it that way."

She drags things out to build suspense, and sometimes it works, and other times, you get penseive jaunts. Those drove me fricken' batty. And the Gaunts. Someone kill the Gaunts for me. She steals so much from fandom, she couldn't take the illustrious Marvolo line? I mean, WTF. But I digress. What was she thinking? Half the point of her books is that who you're born isn't who you become. The new message is: Who you're born isn't who you become, unless you're the villian that a baby an eleven-year-old can beat. Just kill her me now.

</rant>

[telepwen.livejournal.com]

Also, I forgot one point. (Yeah, tell me about it. I'll shut up after this, I swear.)

We're so used to the high quality of some of our fanfic writers. Some of our writers are, yes, better than JKR is. It's a hushed over fact, but true. When you spend the intervening years digging for and reading fics of the highest calibre, you start to become disappointed with JKR's level, even if she's doing her best work.

At least, that's how it is for me.

[mereol.livejournal.com]

I want there to have been more motivation on Dumbledore's part than exposition, or the idea that Harry had to see those moments for himself to gain understanding of Voldemort and of himself. It's not enough.

I had the feeling that Dumbledore was trying to teach Harry how he was going to figure out the Horcruxes for himself. I think DD obviously knew he wasn't scheduled to be in Book 7 and knew Harry would be on his own so I'm not so sure that it was all exposition.

Also, I really don't think Rowling intended for anyone to believe Snape's motives to be ambiguous, the "don't call me coward" line pretty much explained his entire position, but I think I wanted to see it that way and Harry doesn't. He has never thought anything good of Snape, with good reason I admit, but he needs to come around on his own.

I think Slughorn did it on purpose too. Harry is to be the jewel in his crown, his ultimate Mary-Sue.

Personally, I loved this book more than I loved GoF and GoF is one of my all time favorite books, any genre. Mostly it was the rampant humor ("and the fifth group were Hufflepuffs") and snarky Harry. Most people love PoA to death, I'm sort of meh about it.

[kagyakusha.livejournal.com]

I loved HBP -- granted, it's a conditional love based on how book 7 turns out but I did love it. I felt like she gave me a lot of things I had been hoping for -- I knew that Snape was the HBP the SECOND Harry saw the inscription in the book (actually, I stopped reading the book and turned to my friend who was also reading that page and said "are you thinking, what I'm thinking?" and we both said "SNAPE IS THE HBP" at the same time.) So the whole way through, every time Harry read the book, or followed instructions from it, I felt love for Snape.

Do I have criticisms -- of course. The book made me hate Hermione even more than OoTP had (and really that was TOUGH!), Ginny irritated the hell out of me -- OoTP had started to make me like her, and then HBP made me want to slug her. But overall, I felt like HBP was the only thing that could make me keep reading HP after OoTP CRUSHED MY SPIRIT.

[satanbaker.livejournal.com]

You might want the Pensieve jaunts condensed to two pages, but some Riddlefans are wishing there were even more flashbacks. Really.

That's basically what I'm thinking, really. The reason I like HBP so much is because she did those scenes. She actually explained him. And, you know, he's fairly human, for the most part. Because dude, people get way more fucked up than that just purely on natural brain function.

I found it kind of neat, though, that she left Lucius in Azkaban. It showed something about the workings of the Death Eaters, and that's really rather neat.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

Thanks. So am I.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

I liked how she killed off Karkaroff, as if to underline the point that Lucius, as someone else who has failed the Dark Lord (though unlike Karkaroff, didn't actively turn his back on him), probably would prefer to stay in the relative safety of a Dementor-less Azkaban than to risk being zapped by either the Dark Lord or a fellow DE eager to suck up to the Dark Lord.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

The whole point of the House of Gaunt was to kill off, now and forever (especially for those people who didn't get the hint with the almost-as-badly-decayed House of Black), the whole fanfic notion of "Oooooh aren't those evil purebloods sooooo SEXY! And such good dressers! They're much more interesting than all those boring good people!"

Now, there are well realized takes on this notion, such as McTabby's. But they are well realized precisely because the author doesn't flinch at depicting the not-so-nice things that go along with the velvet brocade. And McTabby does not soft-pedal the reasons why her society was doomed by modernity -- much as the Muggle aristocracy of the same period was doomed -- and the influx of Muggle-borns, among other things.

So instead of drawing on fanfic images of Those Wonderfully Cultured and Elegant Purebloods, she gives us a vision straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. And she's not going to apologize for harshing anyone's mellow over this. Just as she wouldn't want anyone admiring Nazis for having such cool uniforms, she doesn't want people oohing and aahhing over pureblood murderers for their fashion sense.

The big irony of the House of Gaunt, of course, is that its most "illustrious" member, after Salazar Slytherin himself, is the half-blood Tom Marvolo Riddle, Jr. It took an infusion of the hated Muggle blood to restore the potency of the decayed blood of the House of Gaunt.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

And what you said, right back atcha!

5. Blaise Zabini speaks! Aragog dies! Slughorn gives us another sub-genre of Slytherin! Yay!

Who here besides me wonders if Zabini might be lured to the side of the Light by the presence of a little red-haired girl currently between boyfriends? (Though I fear that if he does, he's toasty-toast by the end of the book.)

[telepwen.livejournal.com]

It's just that when working within the message she wants to convey... it's taking two steps forward and forty steps back.

Sure, I get the whole thing within the story. Within, it's ballsy, it's great. (Except that it screws up so much good fanfic, but that's besides the point. Our bad for guessing wrong.) Without the story, though--when you start looking at it as a device--it not only doesn't help, it hinders.

It suddenly shows a man who is only what his ancestry made of him. Inbred and evil. Sure, it explains a lot. But, if we continue with this interpretation, we see that Harry grew up into a fairly well-balanced and kind boy because of good genes rather than through any choices he made. Draco is a power-hungry shit because he comes from a family of power-hungry shits.

All right, so I do want to give Draco a hug, but we're trying to stay within JKR's perception of canon here, she doesn't even see what a rich character she's created in Draco, and doesn't see that Harry ain't so well-balanced and kind as all that. But I digress.

It's frustrating as all get out that she's forgotten her own themes.

[telepwen.livejournal.com]

Yes, I loved the flashbacks for Tom's life, and I definitely wished there were more. (Still hate the Gaunts. But hey. That's not Tom!Background, really. Don't dissuade me from this.)

I loved watching him progress. I just think that Dumbledore handled passing on the information poorly. He could have sat with him in one day and showed him all that, and then packed him with all sorts of other information that he needs. *shrugs*

That might just be me, but I don't think it is.

[cleverthylacine]

I don't see anything wrong with being cunning or ambitious (but I'm v Slytherin), it was the creepy (borderline pedo) bits that bugged me.

Between Slughorn and Greyback there was a lot of pedo-ick in HBP. I write chan, but you know, I like chan to be honest about what it is and consensual, if that makes any sense.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Oh, I completely agree. A lot of his actions smacked of what mental health workers call "grooming," the deliberate softening up of youngsters by pedophiles. Quite icky.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

Agreed. For me the series couldn't go any lower than OotP, so anything was an improvement, and as luck would have it, I liked this more than any of the previous four books also.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

Patrick O'Brian was another one whose manuscripts apparently never felt a red pencil once he started hitting the New York Times best-seller list.

And of course, Stephen King, whose latest books out-bloat even Rowling's.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if the invention of the personal computer was a good thing; it made it far too easy to achieve typing speeds allowing for the creation of thousand-page books in the time a typewriter-bound user would take to create books half that size.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

No, she hasn't.

Remember the end of CoS? And why Harry didn't turn nasty like Voldemort? "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

Look at Draco. Look at Sirius. Look at Snape. Look at Harry.

They were all raised in situations that should have made them irredeemably nasty. Instead, JKR shows that they are, in fact, redeemable if they choose to be. Voldemort's situation was nowhere near as bad as Harry's, for instance. But he chose to be bad.

[whitealchemist.livejournal.com]

I can definitely still cling to the possibility that the Pensieve field trips are hiding clues that will only be apparent in Book Seven (if only because I was annoyed with these scenes for being such blatent exposition in the first place), as for why Dumbledore doesn't just explain the clues, if you bear in mind that Dumbledore confesses his own guesswork, perhaps he'd rather Harry follows his own guesses rather than lead him on with any number of guesses of his own (even though Dumbledore was clearly following up his leads already... 'the mouth-organ was only ever a mouth-organ', for example).

[whitealchemist.livejournal.com]

The fact that HBP is still at the front of my mind way too often makes me think that its strength is in its afterlife as opposed to its strength as a book in itself... I don't mind saying that parts of it annoyed me, aside from the superfluous romantic subplots and the Pensieve-as-exposition - although I should probably emphasise that my issue isn't with the flashbacks themselves, which I enjoyed and felt were necessary to give Tom Riddle/Voldemort some much-needed depth of character, but what I resented was Dumbledore's post-Pensieve moments of "Now, Harry, I'll break that down into its main points for you just so that you and the readers know exactly why this is significant." That sort of patronising behaviour made me sick.

This will not likely be my favourite in the series when all is said in done, but what I loved about it (and what has been keeping me taking notes three months later and continuing to analyse the crap out of it) is its potentiality in terms of the threats that these characters will carry with them into Book Seven. Those moments when JKR teased out potentially horrific situations without building them to dramatic excess (the full extent of Snape's sacrifice, Lupin's implied relation to Greyback) made this book more engaging at times than any other book prior to it. If that makes this merely a transitional book in the series, fair enough, I'm willing to withhold judgement until Book Seven and just hope to hell that a lot of the juicy outcomes in my head end up being right ^_^

[glockgal.livejournal.com]

*hee* You're such a writer, when it comes to how you look at the books - plot and subtext and story arcs - I love getting a different viewpoint (mostly cause I and my pals totally disliked OoTP and totally loved HBP, so now it's all 'Hey! Lookit that! Others think differently from my little insular mindhive, yays!).

Although I'm a totaly loser at analysis and meta, I can't wait to yap about the books with you. But I can't guarantee that you'll get anything more from me than "Harry lurves and values Ron and Hermione, woohooooo!!" *G*

[sinick.livejournal.com]

As I've said before, there was NO choice: Harry HAD to be left in suspense, because - as his fight with Snape shows clearly - he still can't Occlude for shit.

If Harry _were_ told Dumbledore's reason for trusting Snape, then all Voldie (or any other skilled Legilimens among the DEs) would need to do is take one look at Harry, and Snape's cover would be blown wide open.

[telepwen.livejournal.com]

(I'm also wondering how McTabby got brought into this. Where did I mention her or suggest that she was soft-pedalling anything?)

With that out of the way...

Tom finds out what his ancestry is pretty early on. He meets Morfin, even, when he's still a teen. He sees the pit that his family comes from. He sees it, he scorns it, and he moves on. And then he becomes it.

So the good guys can overcome their pasts, but the bad guys can't? Is that what makes someone a bad guy, then, is following familial traditions? (At this point, I'm seriously playing Devil's Advocate. I think you made a fantastic point.)

[telepwen.livejournal.com]

Is that different than regular toast?

I have this vision of Ginny turning all of her old flames into toast so that there can be no conflict between them and her current fuckbuddy paramour.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

Yup, and then Evil Ginny and Evil Neville marry (after Trevor meets with a tragic accident) and spawn the next generation of Dark wizards.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

HBP is actually a reinforcement of her biggest theme: That it is our choices that make us what we are. Not our genes, not our upbringing, but our choices. I personally think she is selling environmental influences short, but that's just me.

And that makes me think not so much of Snape, but of Wormtail: He could have chosen one way, but he chose another. Why? And will he repent his choice?

Note Rowling's contempt for astrology, as expressed through Firenze and also by her in interviews, IIRC. Why? Because she doesn't want people saying "well, of course Voldemort went bad, he's a Capricorn". She apparently feels that denies the power of choice and free will.

Note how Dumbledore tells Harry that the vaunted Prophecy -- the thing that was given such weight in OoP -- only has meaning because Voldemort thinks it does. Again, Voldemort's own choice -- not "destiny" -- made Harry into his chosen bane. I'd been wondering why JKR spent so much time setting up that red herring in OoP only to smack it down in HBP. Now I understand -- I think.

Note her refusal to give Voldemort what to her might seem the "easy out" of a childhood more difficult than Harry's (while Tom had no parents, he also didn't have the Dursleys, and the orphanage staff did their honest if imperfect best to care for the sprogs, so Harry beats Tom hands down in that department). Hell, Sirius grew up in Pureblood Dark Wizard Central, for all intents and purposes, and he didn't go bad. He never really grew up, but he didn't go bad.

Do I necessarily agree with JKR in all of this? Again, no. But so much of what she's done in the books only makes sense when you look at the prominence she gives to free will over pretty much everything else.