More DH thoughts
Jul. 22nd, 2007 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
merelynOkay. Now I appreciated the epilogue for the warm and fuzzy happy ending that it was trying to give to Harry. But there's much of fandom that would have been happier had Rowling left it out entirely, and I can see why.
Because while I think it was totally necessary for what JKR was trying to say to show Harry with a family and a rebuilt Hogwarts, by skipping forward 19 freakin' years there was no way she could have organically answered every question: Who raised Teddy? What about sad, twinless George? What about Luna? What about Neville and Luna? What jobs does everyone have? Is Percy married? Actually, as a P/O slasher, I DON'T want to know about the last one.
And that's the problem with the epilogue. It answered all these questions that we didn't want the answers to (bye bye, Harry/Draco, or even Harry/Luna). It didn't answer the questions we really care about. This is not to say that some motivated, talented person could write a Harry/Draco fic 19 years later where both of them end up leaving their wives (or one of them is widowed, probably Draco, 'cause I kind of *like* Ginny in spite of myself) but the point is that it's no longer easy. You can't do it without jumping several hurdles and dealing with a lot of serious consequences that wouldn't have been there if Rowling had stopped on page 749.
And this is kind of a pointless entry, but the whole kerfuffle just reminds me that what we wanted out of this book is not the same as what most people wanted out of this book. (Slashers, and those Harry/Hermione people- damn but did she blow that ship of out the water with the fandom equivalent of an A Bomb.) And that what we want out of books and TV shows seldom is what most people want. And that if JKR was going to ruin so many things, she could have at least done it in a way that wasn't so sappy and saccharine. And that open canon sometimes sucks. Hard.
And I think the only reason why I liked the epilogue so much is because I gave up on being really fannish about Harry Potter sometime in the wake of Book 5.
Because while I think it was totally necessary for what JKR was trying to say to show Harry with a family and a rebuilt Hogwarts, by skipping forward 19 freakin' years there was no way she could have organically answered every question: Who raised Teddy? What about sad, twinless George? What about Luna? What about Neville and Luna? What jobs does everyone have? Is Percy married? Actually, as a P/O slasher, I DON'T want to know about the last one.
And that's the problem with the epilogue. It answered all these questions that we didn't want the answers to (bye bye, Harry/Draco, or even Harry/Luna). It didn't answer the questions we really care about. This is not to say that some motivated, talented person could write a Harry/Draco fic 19 years later where both of them end up leaving their wives (or one of them is widowed, probably Draco, 'cause I kind of *like* Ginny in spite of myself) but the point is that it's no longer easy. You can't do it without jumping several hurdles and dealing with a lot of serious consequences that wouldn't have been there if Rowling had stopped on page 749.
And this is kind of a pointless entry, but the whole kerfuffle just reminds me that what we wanted out of this book is not the same as what most people wanted out of this book. (Slashers, and those Harry/Hermione people- damn but did she blow that ship of out the water with the fandom equivalent of an A Bomb.) And that what we want out of books and TV shows seldom is what most people want. And that if JKR was going to ruin so many things, she could have at least done it in a way that wasn't so sappy and saccharine. And that open canon sometimes sucks. Hard.
And I think the only reason why I liked the epilogue so much is because I gave up on being really fannish about Harry Potter sometime in the wake of Book 5.
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Date: 2007-07-23 02:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-26 04:42 am (UTC)