Harry Potter #7: (SPOILERS APLENTY): Now that you've read it...

I realize this is a tangent, so I apologize for delving into it. However, this whole “Lily got a choice thing…” Is the idea that, if other parents had a choice, they’d run away? That they are only protecting their child because they too got backed into a corner? I just don’t see how being given a choice would make one whit of difference in terms of the parent-child bond, the degree of love, the degree of sacrifice.

Here’s an alternate, and arguably more parsimonious suggestion - the explanation for why it happened was an afterthought on the part of the author, and a poorly conceived one.

Totally relevant: it sets up the search for the Deathly Hallows.

Standard detective story trick: set up someone or something as the obvious culprit, then rewrite so that it’s another.

Because some people can see through the cloak. Dumbledore and Moody / Crouch have done so.

The idea is that other parents weren’t given a choice. How often would the Death Eaters have been looking to kill a child but not the parents?

I’m with you on the latter, however I’m also a fan so lets try to make the former work, shall we? Other parents were not given a clear choice – “Stand aside, girl”. Other parents protected their children, because that is what good parents do, but were not told that they (the parents) could live if they let their children be killed. Lilly had that choice. Lilly also did not fight back, as ** Revenant Threshold** say, she was not blasting curses or hexes at Voldemort. She just stood in front of Harry.

Excellent idea. We should give them a range of sensible reasons for going to Harry’s side. Let’s say that there are four Slytherins in the room. Maybe two of them could be half-bloods, who realize that the Death Eaters are going to target “filthy mudbloods” as soon as they’re done rounding up the Muggle-borns. The third one is a pureblood who has seen Muggle-born friends get kicked out of school, and can’t look the other way any longer. The last one is actually Muggle-born, and obtained a fake genealogy so he wouldn’t get expelled. Only two of these students are of-age, however. Later, when Blaise steps up, we learn that it was he who helped the Muggle-born guy get his fake genealogy. He forms the third Slytherin who fights. And Slughorn, as I suggested above, makes the fourth.

This would also help clear up the idea that you need to be pureblood to be a Sytherin. One of the half-bloods could make a comment like, “Yeah, the older families are major snobs about their bloodlines, but the Sorting Hat doesn’t care about that. Heck, Professor Snape is half-blood. So is You-Know-Who, although he’d probably kill you for mentioning it.”

Speaking of the Hat, how are they sorting the students now that Voldemort burned the Sorting Hat?

It sounded like there was enough of the hat left for Neville to pull the sword out of it. (Personally, I’m glad it didn’t start screaming or singing.)

No, that’s not the idea. I don’t know about anyone else, but i’m not suggesting the strange, uncommon thing about it is that Lily chose to stay. The strange thing is that she was offered * a choice at all. Plenty of people presumably have chosen to stay and protect their children. A less common situation, I think anyway, is one in which the parent is deliberately offered* the choice. The love is certainly important, but it’s not because the love is somehow greater.

Think of it like this; most times it happened, it would have happened similar to how it did with James; certainly, if offered the choice, he would have protected Harry. He loved Harry just as much as Lily (we assume). But he wasn’t offered it. He was just going to be killed anyway. It’s the existence of the choice that isn’t common.

There’s very little I can add to the thread. However, I’m thinking the epilogue was left thin on purpose. Can’t you just see a new version of the 7th book coming out in the future with an expanded epilogue? Rowling can sell new copies to many of the same readers by adding a chapter or two.

Probably just feeding all the fanfic writers/readers.

I can think of very little to say that hasn’t been said in the previous seven pages, but I’ll try.

First of all, some of you read this novel much faster than me. And in another thread, someone was amazed that the book sold over eight million copies in the US on the first day, but on his show Keith Olbermann mentioned that the book sold 72 million copies worldwide the first day, which is absolutely astonishing. (And Olbermann showed video of himself in line to buy the book at the Scholastic Book Store in Manhattan with Salman Rushdie, of all people, in front of him in line.)

Re: Fred’s death. I remember hearing that JK Rowling wept after writing the ending, and I think she wept over his death. (Supposedly she finished the book in a hotel room, and left a bit of graffiti to that effect in the room.)

And when Harry, Ron and Hermione were on the run and were camping out in the countryside, Hermione complained about how hard it was to find decent food. But when Dean and the others were able to locate good salmon immediately when they camped nearby.

And I was a little disappointed by the mention of Slytherin in the epilogue. Separating the students at Hogwarts into separate schools seemed negative at times, so I thought perhaps in the wake of the battle that they might eliminate the separate houses.

And I would have liked to have heard more detail in the epilogue about what happened to everyone. I even wondered where they lived. Did Harry and Ginny set up house in Number 12 Grimmauld Place, with Kreacher perhaps as house-elf? (And the fact that the house was invisibly between Numbers 11 and 13 indicates the difference between British and American house numbering, since in the US, 12 would most likely be across the street from 11 and 13.)

Diadem: I thought the diadem was hidden (like Poe’s Purloined Letter) in plain sight atop the statue in the Ravenclaw dormitory.

And, while I’ve been beaten to the punch on this suggestion, the obvious follow-on is “Hogwarts: The Next Generation”, with Prof Longbottom, Headmaster McGonagall and their wacky students along with Peeves, the school ghost and comic relief figure.

I am confused as to how Voldemort could possibly have thought he was the only one to find the room of requirement filled with stuff hidden by hundreds of people over the years. For all that stuff to be in there don’t you think that at least one person per item in that room would have found it?

It’s true that it was amongst all the stuff that he hid it, but I distinctly recall (I can’t go check because Hubby is reading it right now) Harry thinking that Voldemort would think he was the only one who would have found that room. I hope I am not bleeding this thread into my memory of the book which I finished yesterday.

I was a little disappointed at how much of a sissy Fenrir Grayback was. I would have assumed that he was a match for some of the strongest wizards, but he and three of his buddies got humiliated by a crazy bitch that wasn’t even really paying attention.

I’m also a little upset about how weak Lupin’s death felt. It was like “castle being sieged, Harry decides to die, he’s very sad, oh by the way Lupin is dead, Harry slips the cloak on and sneaks past the badguys, and there’s Malfoy!” Wait, wait, what was that middle part? Oh Jesus, Lupin’s dead? Tonks too? They get four whole words in the middle of some unrelated exposition. Is that all they’re worth?

Lupin was a much stronger character than Fred or George or whichever twin it was that died. I mean, the twins are cool and all, but I felt like I got sucker punched by Lupin’s death and its complete lack of importance.

to address the business about Harry’s protection: nowhere in the books does it say that Harry is the only one to ever have this protection. Dumbledore says it’s an old magic and one that V. doesn’t know, but at some point it would have to have been invoked for Dumbledore to even know about it. We don’t know who or when because it’s thouroughly beside the point and not at all important to the plot. In other words, no, the circumstance of Lily’s sacrifice is not the only instance ever in the history of the wizarding world and Rowling never said it was.

oh and I loved the book. there are flaws, but Rowlings ability to capture emotion makes it very easy to look past them.

Man, that is masterful. Not only is it beautifully written and made me chuckle, that is definitely what should have happened. If only you had been JK’s editor and been able to put this version to her before it all went to press…

Another theory on Harry’s protection. There’s the previously mentioned sacrifice by Lily, but one thing that was different was Voldemort had already divided his soul making horcruxes many times. 6 if I recall.

Maybe someone with an intact soul doing the same curse wouldn’t have part of their soul ripped out and put in their intended victim.

When I read the first section, when Harry needed to hide his book, I thought the room had simply filled itself with junk so it could disguise whatever needed hiding. Later I found it odd that Malfoy and even Trelawney had found the exact same version of the room and hidden things there. The room had to have been full of junk before anyone needed to hide something, otherwise, how well would that first person’s secret item be hidden?

Harry seemed to understand Voldemort better than anyone, thanks to their connection, and his meetings with Dumbledore. He was always a vain and egotistical wizard. Rightly so, he discovered many things, even at Hogwarts, that had previously been secret.

strangely not that many people per year new about that room. then they didn’t talk about it.

harry’s dad and his mates didn’t know about it. it wasn’t on the map.

dumbledore knew about it but thought it was an odd bathroom. same with the twins, they saw it as a bathroom first.

it seems that dumbledore’s army was the first to use it as a large group. most of the headmasters were reasonable… unless during phineas black’s tenure there was an uprising.

It did, indirectly. If Voldemort hadn’t been passed (part) of the prophecy he would not have targeted Harry and have introduced a serious ‘flaw in the plan’.

But Malfoy knew about the room; he was using it as part of a plan while working for Voldemort. If I’m not mistaken, Draco Malfoy also knew that Harry knew about the room by the end of the last book. Shouldn’t this all have tipped Voldemort off that the “deepest secrets” of Hogwarts weren’t so deep?

Also, why would he leave it out in a particularly eye catching spot in the room? Surely there were less conspicuous places for a singular Hogwarts artifact. “Hmmm. I’ll leave one Horcrux in a hidden cave with remarkably convoluted security precautions around it. This one I’ll leave in the bank. This one I’ll just throw on a bust in the storage closet.”

No. The independent event of seeing Lovegood with the symbol led them to think of him later on. The search for the Hallows was set up by Dumbledore giving them the book, and the wedding was irrelevant to linking Lovegood with the symbol; that could have been done in innumerable other ways.

Yes, except that we’re not talking about culprits, are we? We’re talking about the quest/journey/challenge that the protagonist must go through to achieve his or her goals. It would be like having Frodo change course in Rivendell so that he has to catch the great pumpkin, and then after a while going, okay, no, you really just need to go throw the ring in the fires of Mt. Doom after all.

Then it was really stupid of them to use it for that purpose throughout the rest of the book, like in the Ministry of Magic, outside Grimmauld Place, or wherever they wanted to be completely invisible.