Way to sabotage yourself, Rowling
Jul. 21st, 2007 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootSo, here's what I don't like about that epilogue.
There are two things, really. The most immediate one is the same problem I had with book six: the author has not done the work to convince me that all this is viable and plausible. We jump straight from a mood of "holy fuck, it's finally over, can we take a breath now?" to "domestic bliss, everyone is over everything and just fine". There is nothing addressing what would have to happen after it all ended. Nothing about how wizards deal with PTSD, nothing about how Harry and Ginny could grow close to each other, nothing about how Harry might deal with the aftermath of having saved the world for real, for good this time, nor what that aftermath might look like. Nothing about how anyone deals with all these incredible, traumatic, passion-filled events.
And that makes the abrupt domestic bliss completely plastic and unbelievable to me.
The other thing is a bit more subtle, and it has to do with that "for real, for good this time" part.
The epilogue brings us full circle, all right. It brings us precisely back to where we started, complete with the Slytherin = Bad Guys, Gryffindor = Good Guys rhetoric. Harry gives us about two sentences that run slightly counter to this, but he says them to his son (who is clearly having a hard time believing him), not to Ron, the other adult who is shaping the minds of the children. Nothing has changed in the underlying social structure. The house elves are still enslaved with nothing but a few thank yous for their work, there are no magical creatures shown even passingly among students or professors, houses, after one single moment of unity, are back to their old divisive selves, urged on by the generation who should have known better, who, theoretically, were the ones to break that division down and triumph thereby.
And this means the world isn't saved for good, nothing is actually fixed, and it will all be to do over again next time, because the unchanging hostilities showed to us by the epilogue guarantee there will be a next time, a next round, because the original causes are still lying there in front of us, stinking. By making a point of coming back to the beginning, with no changes, Rowling blithely erases any lasting effect that all the characters' pain and struggle and various heroism may have had.
That really disturbs me.
If Rowling had left the ending as it was, we would have had possibilities. We would have had the potential that this moment of unity might give rise to something just a little more lasting. But Rowling didn't leave it at that. Maybe she wanted to nail down the romantic closure. Maybe she thought we needed a happily-ever-after spelled out. The effect of her happily-ever-after, though, does not seem all that happy to me. It's an artificial cap on all the ferment she stirred up in the HP world, and it sadly flattens out all the potential that had been build up. Her epilogue denies her story, and I consider that dreadfully bad writing, as well as bad ethics.
And that is why I don't believe in this epilogue, any more than I believe in the Digimon Adventure 02 epilogue.
There are two things, really. The most immediate one is the same problem I had with book six: the author has not done the work to convince me that all this is viable and plausible. We jump straight from a mood of "holy fuck, it's finally over, can we take a breath now?" to "domestic bliss, everyone is over everything and just fine". There is nothing addressing what would have to happen after it all ended. Nothing about how wizards deal with PTSD, nothing about how Harry and Ginny could grow close to each other, nothing about how Harry might deal with the aftermath of having saved the world for real, for good this time, nor what that aftermath might look like. Nothing about how anyone deals with all these incredible, traumatic, passion-filled events.
And that makes the abrupt domestic bliss completely plastic and unbelievable to me.
The other thing is a bit more subtle, and it has to do with that "for real, for good this time" part.
The epilogue brings us full circle, all right. It brings us precisely back to where we started, complete with the Slytherin = Bad Guys, Gryffindor = Good Guys rhetoric. Harry gives us about two sentences that run slightly counter to this, but he says them to his son (who is clearly having a hard time believing him), not to Ron, the other adult who is shaping the minds of the children. Nothing has changed in the underlying social structure. The house elves are still enslaved with nothing but a few thank yous for their work, there are no magical creatures shown even passingly among students or professors, houses, after one single moment of unity, are back to their old divisive selves, urged on by the generation who should have known better, who, theoretically, were the ones to break that division down and triumph thereby.
And this means the world isn't saved for good, nothing is actually fixed, and it will all be to do over again next time, because the unchanging hostilities showed to us by the epilogue guarantee there will be a next time, a next round, because the original causes are still lying there in front of us, stinking. By making a point of coming back to the beginning, with no changes, Rowling blithely erases any lasting effect that all the characters' pain and struggle and various heroism may have had.
That really disturbs me.
If Rowling had left the ending as it was, we would have had possibilities. We would have had the potential that this moment of unity might give rise to something just a little more lasting. But Rowling didn't leave it at that. Maybe she wanted to nail down the romantic closure. Maybe she thought we needed a happily-ever-after spelled out. The effect of her happily-ever-after, though, does not seem all that happy to me. It's an artificial cap on all the ferment she stirred up in the HP world, and it sadly flattens out all the potential that had been build up. Her epilogue denies her story, and I consider that dreadfully bad writing, as well as bad ethics.
And that is why I don't believe in this epilogue, any more than I believe in the Digimon Adventure 02 epilogue.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 05:41 pm (UTC)Agh. I agree wholly with all of your points. One of my biggest beefs with Rowling has always been that she has this world which is full of amazing potential, these bits of her books which are full of amazing potential, and then she does nothing with them. It's a world which is scarcely thought out and full of holes. Full of them. Hogwarts itself as a school has always bothered me, for instance. The teachers don't actually teach, and they're allowed to terrorize their students (Snape). There are no checks and balances, no... ugh. But that's irrelevant -- holding off on the rambling for one moment...
The epilogue just... yeah. You have all this build-up to a wrecked and warn-torn and divided world, and then suddenly -- poof. Nothing. Just... a regression, as you said, back to the first book. I have to admit that I was especially disgruntled by the whole Ginny-Harry thing because I had been hoping that we'd finally get some development of their relationship. Because, you know, they barely seem to know each other. The whole "happily-ever-after" thing for both the teen romances bugged be, Ron and Hermione too. (Because that relationship actually... kinda ticks me off because it almost veers into abusive at times. It's actually scarily like the Molly-Arthur relationship -- men marry their mothers? When you think about it, the way Hermione interacts with Ron can be eerily similar to the way Molly interacts with Arthur, and how often have Molly and Hermione been aligned in attitudes etc.?)
The political and ethical dilemmas were just dropped. We get no hints, not even hints, as to what happened during those intervening nineteen years. Even just, say, something as simple as a little nod towards Harry having issues as a father (or issues in general) would've been something.
To be honest, apart from annoyance, the only thing the epilogue left me with was this: a burning desire to see or write a fic in which dear little Albus Severus gets sorted into Hufflepuff. Because I just love the immediate assumption that he'll go to Slytherin or Gryffindor -- after all, neither Hufflepuff nor Ravenclaw are important enough to even warrant a mention. ::grump::
As you said, nothing changed. It just... stagnated.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 06:19 pm (UTC)And, yes, if Rowling is going to insist on nailing down the romances, she should have actually dealt with them. Shown them developing, instead of just declaring them fait accompli. That was a dreadful cop-out.
The genres Rowling seems to want to write in really do clash, too. I mean, on the one hand, we have the British School Story, in which all the things that annoy you about Hogwarts are kind of de rigeur, but equally well in which none of the Tyrannical Professors or Evil Prats are supposed to be complex or have particular depth! Laid over that kind of caricature, we have a plot which does have depth and complexity (at least for some parts and characters), and the pieces just don't fit together. Not least because Rowling doesn't seem to put any effort at all into making them. She asks us to reflect on moral complexity and then fails to give us the story-tools to do it with. Bah. It's such a sad disservice to what could be a really wonderful story.