And actually, I don’t even care if she does tell. I managed to avoid every spoiler for the other books, is all. I’d read the “guessing what might be” threads" but never touched the threads about the actual books. I avoided articles about it.
But the headline on Yahoo! news on the homepage was “Rowling says two characters to die in final book”. All I would have asked is they made it "Rowling talks about final Potter book: or something like that; then I could have successfully avoided it.
Harry and Ron will sneak out one night. The new headmaster (Bill O’Reilly) will point grimly to the curfew notice taped to the wall, and shoot them both between the head.
I think its great that we live in a world where a young single mother can become a billionaire just by telling a story. Regardless of what happens in the actual books, her story had the happy ending, and you can tell that to your kids.
I’d say that it doesn’t necessarily comment about your cynicism in the past, only that recent events have, over a period of time, confirmed that you are indeed a cynic. I guess it leans towards suggesting that in the past you were not as cynical as you are now, but it’s not 100%.
Apology accepted, jjimm. I jumped down your throat. I’ve been sitting on a rant about dialectic snobbery for a long time, and that just set me off.
Because apparently Harry Potter wouldn’t understand my dialect.
But honestly Anaamika, is it really a spoiler to reveal that, yep, 2 main characters are going to die?
Have you read the other books? Characters die like flies. Characters suffer monstrous injustice all day every day. Harry’s parents died before he was born. Neville’s parents were tortured into catatonia. Hagrid was kicked out of Hogwarts as a kid. Voldemort running around. Quirrel ripping out a unicorn’s throat and drinking its blood. Sirius spends years in Azkaban. Lupin. Dumbledore. Snape. And on and on and on.
The Harry Potter series is DARK. I didn’t need to see a teaser announcement to know that some characters are going to die. And neither did you. It’s a CERTAINTY that there’s going to be some tragedy in the last book. 100% guaranteed, given the tragedies of the earlier books.
And this doesn’t mean the books are hopeless! Of course good will triumph, Voldemort will be banished. But evil EXISTS in the HP universe, evil is powerful, evil must be fought, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll win, and even if you win you’ll have to pay a price. And that’s why the HP books are so popular, that’s why they resonate with kids and adults. They’re not great literature, but they’re darn good. And removing the tragedy, removing the danger would remove everything that makes them worthwhile.
I heard that Jack T. Chick is going to be (holy) ghost-writing the last Harry Potter book. Expect a very high body count. Also expect Voldemort, in his high, sinister reptilian voice, to say HAW HAW HAW!.
Right. Because American English doesn’t preserve any archaic features lost in British English. Nope. No syllable-final Rs. No use of “mad” to mean “angry” or “fall” to mean “autumn”. Nothing like “gotten”.
It’s easier to write a tragic ending than a happy one. And frankly, a lot of people aren’t terribly sophisticated in regard to literature, and will mistakenly believe that a story must be good since it’s a tragedy. Look at the undeserved popularity of Titanic, as mentioned above. There’s plenty of great literature that’s tragic, but there’s also plenty of people - particularly children - who think that tragic endings are somehow automatically “deep”.
I have no patience for that sort of thing.
Have no Disney movies ended in tragedy? I’m honestly curious; I don’t enjoy those things, so I don’t see them, but I’d be surprised if none of them had tragic endings.
Oh, God. Did they change the ending of The Little Mermaid to make it happy?
To me, Titanic follows a particularly long-engrained conceit of western myth (love stories in particular) where most the great romances end in tragedy and lovers are never destined for happiness except, perhaps, in death. The Arthurian Triangle of Lancelot, Gwuenivere and Arthur. (Not to mention sister/lover Morgan LeFey.) Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde. Carmen could not stop cheating. Orpheus looked back.
