Yes yes! The thief was Grundlewold... Grendelwald... Grindle... fuck, can't spell it, you know, Magical Hitler, Dumbledore's Teenage BFF, who tortured D's sister. He won the wand from the fella who had it then by stealing it. Dumbledore won it from him by kicking his ass in a magical duel. Draco won it from Dumbledore when he disarmed D on top of the Astronomy Tower. Harry won it from Draco when he overpowered Draco and removed other wands from Draco - The Elder Wand knew that Harry had made Draco his bitch, even though it wasn't there at the time (perhaps because Harry was now holding Draco's own wand, the one with which Draco had disarmed Dumbledore), and thus it shifted its allegiance to Harry.

Meanwhile, further HP thoughts - God, it does just kill me, looking at Harry's life and Snape's life. Argh. There but for the grace of God, and all that - and back in HPatPS, Dumbledore tells Harry that Snape and James didn't get along, much like Harry and Draco, and Dumbledore's perfectly right - but the heartbreaking thing there is that Harry (and indeed Snape) assume that in that particular parallel Harry=James and Snape=Draco. And of course it's the other way round. Snape is the neglected, lonely and insecure little boy from a miserable home who's thrilled to go to Hogwarts. James is the thoughtlessly cruel, confident, well-loved little wizarding brat of good family who picks on him. There's almost the exact same line in HPatPS, when Harry encounters Draco in the robe shop, as there is in Book 7 when we have the flashback to Severus encountering James - Draco being contemptuous of Hufflepuffs, James being contemptuous of Slytherins. But comparing Draco and James, Draco actually comes out as the nicer of the two - he makes friendly (okay, we're talking Cordelia in 'Welcome to The Hellmouth' friendly, but nevertheless) overtures to Harry when they first meet, and he still tries to strike up a friendship with him on the train, and when he's rude to Ron it's only after Ron has laughed at his name. Whereas James is a total little shit, with the meanness and the mockery and the 'Snivellus' right from the get go.

It kills me. Harry imprinted on the Weasley family and Ron, and was dead set on Gryffindor for that reason, and implored the Hat to send him to the same house as the Weasleys; Snape imprinted on Slytherin and the proto-deatheaters, because (1) his mum was in Slytherin and (2) Lucius was the first person to show him any kindness when he sat down at their table. But if what it takes to be a Gryffindor is courage, daring and chivalry, and what it takes to be in Slytherin is ambition and the readiness to sacrifice others - what the hell was the Sorting Hat thinking?

Argh.

Also - did we all notice that towards the end of Book 7, Harry dashes into the Room of Requirement and encounters a maiden, a mother and a crone? Even the Fates are fighting against Voldemort! Fantastic!

...belatedly I'm supposing that all the Phoenix imagery and mentions really should have been Big Damn Clues that Harry was going to die and then come back again. But it didn't occur to me in the leadup to Book 7.

Snape certainly had courage, without a doubt, but that racism shit that he couldn't ever hide - that had been with him since the beginning - was probably his fatal flaw. Sure he loved Lily, but he didn't like any other muggle. That's probably what the sorting hat had to deal with.

I think Dumbledore's comment about the sorting hat was a nice one to Snape, but I'm not altogether sure the sorting hat made the wrong decision. Slytherin is where Snape wanted to go, so there it is.

Well, Snape's Muggle father was clearly a miserable bastard, whether simply neglectful or outright abusive, and his wizard heritage is the sole hope Snape has to escape his miserable homelife, so I can understand him having a somewhat jaundiced take on Muggles.

Snape called Lily Evans a Mudblood because he was lashing out with the most hurtful word he knew while her friends were dangling him upside down, with his pathetic tatty underwear on display with no provocation. In front of the girl he loved. And he was a teenage boy. He never despised Lily, and although he was parroting the same shit as the proto-deatheaters who'd welcomed him into their ranks, he sure as hell learned his lesson. (And he doesn't stand for Phineas Black calling Hermione a Mudblood even in the privacy of the Headmaster's Study - he's fully aware of how wrong that shit is.)

Slytherins are supposed to be defined by their ruthlessness and their ambition. Gryffindors are supposed to be defined by their courage and their chivalry. I don't see canonical evidence of Snape being ambitious, but I see a hell of a lot of canonical evidence for him being brave, and he does give up everything for love.

Er. Not that I'm overly invested, or anything. No sir.

I noticed also that Voldemort lures Snape to the Shrieking Shack, where he's killed by an animal. Sirius tried to do the same thing in their school days (where animal = werewolf, that time), and it was James who saved him then.

would've been nice if JK could've split up the tent-chapters by devoting one or two chapters to Hogwarts.

No kidding! But I figure by leaving so much "offstage" as it were, it leaves the door open for lots of fanfic!

I felt like the epilogue was bad fanfic, though--it seemed not the same as the rest of the story. Ah well.

When did Draco disarm Dumbledore? Was that in this book and I was reading too fast? Or in a previous book and I should've re-read before picking this one up?

It was at the end of HBP. When Draco bursts through the door at the top of the Astronomy Tower.

Boy I'm looking forward to the fic Fay writes.

Plus all the "How do Harry and Draco resolve their differences during those few years between the end of the war and the raising of families."

What ho, I'm the friend Cindy mentioned. I lurk mostly, but obviously HP needs some discussing.

I think the major issue would be that the more people who knew what they were looking for, the greater the chance would be for Voldemort to find out.

I agree. Voldemort specialises in torturing and Legilimensing the truth out of people. Anyone who knew what they were doing was automatically in mortal danger, and Harry's far too used to the Hero Walking Alone role to do that to them. Ron and Hermione had to show that they'd taken it seriously enough to make sure their families would be all right if they died before he would let them come, and they'd been at his side for 6 years already.

Yeah, I was one of those people who never bothered to differentiate the two in my mind, and apparently, Fred is the worse one to have killed. I'll pay more attention to him on the re-read. Stopped me right in my tracks, that did.

Oh man, Fred and George. One of my main predictions for this book was that Fred was going to die because he's always been the dominant twin, and George is always in his shadow, so to kill him would leave George less than a person. I was so hoping J.K. wouldn't be cruel enough, though. At the 7 Harrys bit when they said the Harrys on brooms were in the most danger I flicked back and yep, Fred was on a broom. I actually cried "Damn you, J.K.!" and raised my shaky fist to her because I was sure he was going to get it then.

Wrt Remus and Tonks, I thought the way their deaths was written was really effective. The Weasley family gathered round Fred, la dee da, you start to relax into their grief and then BAM. I had to close the book and sit at the end of my bed for a few minutes to take it in, it was so unexpected and affecting. And good people do die in war, and they don't get a dramatic death scene and speeches and no one knows what happened to them, they're just found afterward and no one knows how they died or if they were alone at the end. I thought that made it far more realistic than all the big deaths happening to occur when there's someone around to witness them. It made it more like a real battle than a fictionalised one being seen through the eyes of a teenage protagonist (in so far as that's possible when people are fighting giant spiders and being killed by flashes of green light, like).

But I've been going with the basic assumption that the books are targetted at a readership basically Harry's age--is that wank or meta-canon?

The problem with that is that Harry's age hasn't kept pace with the real world, so people who were Harry's age in the beginning aren't anymore. I'm the same age as Harry -- I started first year in 1997 too -- but I'm 21 now and would be going into 4th year at uni if not for my gap year. So I think each book has had to skew downward to younger readers than the book before. I agree that the best age to be reading this book probably is mid teens -- I'd say 15/16 -- but those people were only 5 for the first one. Man, I'm old.

Speaking of, there was a group of 8/9/10 year old kids behind us in the queue, and I realised they probably weren't even born when the first book came out. That's just wrong.

Yes yes! The thief was Grundlewold... Grendelwald... Grindle... fuck, can't spell it, you know, Magical Hitler,

Wasn't he? My sister just did a History GCSE about the Nazis and apparently DH was like being hit over the head with a spanner in terms of Nazi analogies, both for Grindelwald and Voldemort. I particularly liked that Grindelwald took an old mystical symbol that meant nothing evil and made it a symbol of his new order. Nice.

Also - did we all notice that towards the end of Book 7, Harry dashes into the Room of Requirement and encounters a maiden, a mother and a crone? Even the Fates are fighting against Voldemort! Fantastic!

Who/when was this? I didn't notice at all.

Hi, Margaret! Welcome to posting!

IIRC, Harry came upon Ginny, Tonks, and Mrs. Longbottom in the Room of Requirement after everyone else had scattered to begin the fight and he had to ask everyone to leave so he could change the room to the storage warehouse to find the diadem. Tonks left to find Remus, Mrs. L left to soldier up, and Ginny was ready to join them when Harry ordered her to return to the Room after he was done.

The other thing I noticed when reading this book is that Harry is in his skivvies once, naked once, and the multiple Harrys are said to be having a disregard for his modesty. I bet Daniel Radcliffe read this thinking, "I better keep working out."