orichalcum

So, I've already talked about plot stuff, so I want to take a moment to articulate some thoughts about the character development in this book, which was interesting in a lot of different ways.

The Trio: So, in many ways, it was terrific to get back to the Trio of the Philosopher's Stone - 3 kids, all with their own sets of skills and talents, defined by their friendship and loyalty to each other. The problem was that it felt very alien and startling after four books in which those relationships were so strained - Ron or Hermione was on the outs with the other two, or Harry was pulling away from both of them. This was especially a problem with Ron - all of a sudden, Ron is cool and competent and thoughtful _and_ speaks Parseltongue? That's not the feckless git I know...I like this Ron better, but I'm not sure where he came from. It would also have been nice for Hermione to have to face some negative consequences for her high-handed actions, but she barely even gets scratched.

Harry: One thing that struck me about this book was how much of a passive pawn Harry was in many of the scenes. He's always getting rescued by Hermione, or Ron, or another adult. He's an observer character - he watches Voldemort, watches Snape die, takes time off in the middle of a battle where he's one of the most capable fighters around to watch Snape's memories, etc...He has only two active moments - one of which is surrendering passively to death (after which he spends much of the next 30 pages pretending to be a corpse) and then casting one spell which causes Voldemort to kill himself through his own magic. I don't quite know what JKR was going for here, but it felt very odd.

Ginny: Besides Remus/Tonks, one of my biggest gripes with this book was the utter sidelining of Ginny. Ginny gets _one_ proactive moment - in which she gives The Hero a Kiss to Remember - and the rest of the time she's being shoved into the metaphorical cupboard under the stairs and told to wait until she can come out as his reward. We _hear_ about Ginny doing cool stuff like breaking into Snape's office and geting tortured, but we never see it. Even more unforgivably, Harry's reaction is not to be proud of her but to want her to obey her irrational mom and stay put and quiet. I desperately hope Remus and Tonks died saving Ginny, but I would have liked to have seen that.

Kreacher: Had trouble buying his character metamorphosis - he still ought to hate the halfblood/mudblood scum.

Dumbledore: Yes. As someone said, the inverse of Snape - Nice But Not Good. The line from the whole book that is sticking with me most comes from the Snape-Dumbledore conversation. Snape: "I thought all these years we were protecting him for her. For Lily...Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter."
Ddore, "seriously": "But this is touching, Severus. Have you grown to care for the boy after all?"

Dumbledore may harbor some guilt about his sister, but he still believes in the Greater Good, and that people, ultimately, are pawns. We see no evidence that he actually really loves anyone - note that he's extremely irritated to have to take care of his little siblings after the death of his parents, because it interferes with his tour around Europe. Also, there's some indications to me that the Ddore at King's Cross is not quite a real ghost and may just be a figment of Harry's psyche - he doesn't seem to know anything that happened post his death, at least.

Snape: Too little Snape, but what there was was cherce. Snape is a true believer in Voldemort's cause. But now we know what it was criminal for the OOTP movie to edit the flashback into Snape's worst memory. It's not his worst memory because he got publicly humiliated by James Potter and Sirius Black. It's his worst memory because he said something unforgivable to the woman he loved and caused the destruction of his relationship with her. Snape believes, somewhere, that if he hadn't said "Mudblood," Lily would have married him, not Potter. And that's his guilt and his sin. Note that Snape is not in fact gratuitously cruel, either - as headmaster, he assigns the same punishments Dumbledore did whenever possible, and the other teachers mostly worked with and for him. But he does believe in the pureblood cause - and given his family background and witnessing the harm caused to Lily by her sister's jealousy, he has every motivation to.

I'm still refusing to believe that both Remus and Tonks are dead, largely because it would have been so much more interesting if only one were, and I feel cheated.