Second!

I love the way your mind works, Nilly. A lot of your points I'd thought of myself, but you've given me some new ones, too.

t stares at Nilly's post

You're just brilliant. So much I hadn't thought of before. So much to ponder over again.

So much in fact, that the only coherent thought my under-caffienated brain can make right now is "FREE STAN SHUNPIKE!"

I finally got a second to threadsuck and read, but haven't yet read Nilly's post as I realized I'm going to have to think about it.

What I was going to say was this: Gandalf still fulfills the death-of-mentor trope because Frodo never knows Gandalf has been returned to Middle-Earth until after he, Frodo, completes his quest.

If DD comes back as Dumbledore the White, but rather than helping Harry deal directly with The Big V, goes off to rid the Centaur leader of the influence of Lucius Malfoy (and incidentally forcing Malfoy to lock himself in a tower with Peter Pettigrew, while the Forbidden Forest surrounds it), then collects Lupin, Hagrid, Hermione, and the Aurors and heads to the defense of London, while unifying the armies of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang to come help also....okay, then you've got a Gandalf Syndrome.

Oh, and based on Wolfram's links, I'm a Gryffindor. Which I was afraid of. Damn.

Wahey! Book VIII, in a nutshell. (But you forgot the House Elves.)

I was all kinds of happy to talk HP with Buffistas, but have realized that this is a conversation I can't dive into without some serious catching up, as anything I can think of to say has doubtless been thought of by someone brighter than me, written about, and already been debated and put to death.

Off to read! Will hopefully be back with coherent thoughts.

Wahey! Book VIII, in a nutshell. (But you forgot the House Elves.)

Do they revolt? I know they are kind of revolting...

From the Leaky Cauldron interview:

MA: Has Snape ever been loved by anyone?

JKR: Yes, he has, which in some ways makes him more culpable even than Voldemort, who never has.

Possibly taking it too much at face value to say that if she refers to Snape as "culpable" then he is in fact guilty. Of something.

I am also embarrassed to admit that I never clued in to the four houses representing the four elements (or even that Slytherin's common room was under the lake). Although I have been wondering if anybody's done a Harry Potter tarot deck.

JKR also said that she's sure some careful re-reader has already identified one of the remaining phylacteries Horcruxi.

Tying those two concepts together, the one that RAB got to before Harry and DD would be a "water" Horcrux. The diary...shrug... So can we think of earth, air, and fire Horcruxi? Or am I over-engineering?

Possibly taking it too much at face value to say that if she refers to Snape as "culpable" then he is in fact guilty. Of something.

Or she could have been talking about his Death Eater work during Voldemort's first uprising.

With HP talk slowing down (well, a little), is there any consensus on how we're going to pick the next book?

Signed,

Looking for yet another way to avoid the work I should be doing

Nilly, that was fascinating to read. I especially loved the parallel drawn between Voldemort's solitude and Harry's strong friendships. As a certain blond vampire once said, "A Slayer with family and friends. That sure as hell wasn't in the brochure."

I forget who mentioned this upthread, but I now really want one of the major showdowns in Book 7 to be Harry defending the Dursleys from attack by Voldemort or the Death Eaters. It would make sense to have one of the final conflicts be over Muggles, given the sharp good guys/bad guys split over how Muggles and halfblood wizards should be treated. (As a side note: am I being weirdly oversensitive in feeling that "halfblood" is a kind of derogatory term itself? Is there a more positive term in the Potterverse for a witch or wizard of mixed ancestry?)