The problem with these patronus quizzes is they can't possibly predict the menagerie needed to represent the buffistas. Camels and badgers and monkeys! Oh my!

She only made minor tweaks to it for publication.

I think it was on the MSNBC website that she said she had a version that listed all the babies that had been born in the ensuing years but she thought it was too listy.

The Bonham Carter interview is online here: [link]

And here's Radcliffe talking about DH: [link]

That's Neville ? Whoa.

Matthew Lewis is going to be at DragonCon, so I'll happily report back on his hotness. He was supposed to be there last year, and almost all of the Harry Potter people had to cancel (because of filming, I think).

The thing that struck me about the ending was that it was very clearly not a "Never Again" sort of ending.

I thought it was ambiguous--Harry said "all was well," but the world didn't seem much changed--but I wasn't sure JKR meant for me to take it that way or not.

In general, I like non-"Never Again" endings because they are, after all, realistic. And I would've been happy with either type for this story--I just didn't like the epilogue we got!

I took the "all was well" to mean that Harry, personally, was more or less content. Not that goodness and justice ruled the land benignly, and we had entered a new Golden Age...just that, he had his family, his job (turns out, probably Auror) and that his particular bugaboo...Voldemort...was well and truly dead. I didn't take it to mean that JKR or Harry thought that a new ultimate evil couldn't come.

I didn't take the "all was well" to imply anything beyond Voldemort specifically having stayed gone -- it doesn't really tell us anything about the wizarding world at large.

That said, I wish that line hadn't been there. I still think the epilogue reads like bad fanfic especially compared to the rest of the book (BABIES FOR EVERYONE YAAAAAAY!!!!), but cutting out that one line would have improved it immensely. Because it's just so clunky and random. As if JKR realized at the last minute that she forgot to tell us what happened to Harry's scar and couldn't be bothered to work it into the story organically.

What Jessica said. That's what I meant, but she phrased it better.

I loved the epilogue. I thought it was beautiful and necessary.

(um not bright enough right now to defend it but just had to put it out there.)

I loved the epilogue. I thought it was beautiful and necessary.

Me too. I loved Harry telling his younger boy that he didn't have to accept what the Sorting Hat said. Not only did Harry say no to Slytherin, he didn't go through everything just to let people be ruled by someone else's destiny.

I found the epilogue clunky but I also loved it. I would have been very disappointed without it.