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.