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DONE
My Harry Potter reread is now concluded! Or, well, mostly concluded, unless I dust off Fantastic Beasts or Quidditch Through the Ages or Tales of Beedle the Bard. And I didn't read the epilogue. BUT MOSTLY CONCLUDED, ANYWAY.
There is definitely something to be said for reading these books when my brain isn't cluttered with fanon and speculation and the immediate memory of a hundred fics that did different things with the canon pairings or Voldemort's return or the Horcrux hunt. I used to have the weird and definite feeling that nothing after Goblet of Fire was quite properly canon, but I have enough distance, or have had enough time to acclimate myself to that canon, or maybe it's that I've since picked up TV fandoms where the constant acclimation is necessary -- whichever. Anyway, I loved a lot more about the last three books than I ever have before.
Before this gets entirely out of hand, though, I am going to resort to bullet points.
THINGS THAT STILL BOTHER ME (in no particular order):
+ Slytherins, Slytherins, oh god. The only heroic Slytherins in the whole universe are Snape, Slughorn, and Regulus? No one else stays to fight? I mean, I absolutely understand that they'd be the house most likely to have Death Eaters in the family, and would want to get the hell out, but no one? Fuck interhouse unity, that apparently means interhouse unity EXCEPT SLYTHERIN. Damn right you Sort too soon, now do something about it.
+ The problem of Muggles and house elves, and basically all the other disenfranchised groups in the wizarding world, although those two are the most egregious. It does become a lot less hideous and glaring if you skip the epilogue, as I did on this go, but still -- the moral of the story with house elves does seem to be "Treat them right and they will love being your servants!" This is just -- so fundamentally squodgy and awful. I don't want SPEW to be a hilarious stupid thing Hermione did when she was fourteen; I don't want her greatest vindication to be that Kreacher becomes helpful when Harry's nice to him, because it's also slightly horrifying that Kreacher's loyalties are that ... infantile, maybe? I'm not sure what word I'm looking for, but the way they get Kreacher to be A Good Elf is pretty insulting. I don't want Dobby to be a crazypants anomaly. (Rowling's actually decent at writing non-human denizens of the wizarding world who are different but no better or worse than wizards, ie the centaurs and goblins, who have their own codes and versions of history, and it's pretty great. It's just -- man, she fell down hard with the house elves.) And meanwhile you've got Arthur Weasley, who's got the best of all stances there seem to be on Muggles, and he treats them like particularly charming and clever pets. Both Petunia and Dudley come off okay in the end, but it's not like they're shining examples; Hermione's parents never even get names or lines. So the moral of this story is actually that Muggleborns are no less than other wizards, not that Muggles are people. And just. Ick.
+ Possibly related to the house elf problem, I'm ... still not okay with some of the conclusions that Dumbledore, Hermione, and Harry reach about Sirius. Apparently Sirius could have prevented the events that led to his death if he'd just been nice to Kreacher! And -- I dunno, in the scheme of things it's not a big problem, but I'm under the impression that Kreacher was going out of his way to be nasty to Sirius for breaking his mother's heart by leaving, and that Sirius was a bit traumatized by being in Azkaban for twelve years and then shut up again in the house he hated. The narrative does understand this, but I'm still kind of angry about it. I suspect I'm angrier about what it says about Kreacher than what it says about Sirius now, though.
+ Lupin and Tonks, ohhhhh dear. I was actively looking this time for readings that were not awful to both of them, and -- I think what Rowling meant to do was write them a bit star-crossed: Tonks desperately wants love and hope and family, and Remus does too, but he's so bogged down by being a werewolf, and the stigma, and being undercover, that it takes Harry shouting at him about being a coward for him to finally snap out of it and accept the gift he's been given. This is my extremely charitable reading. If I don't make that effort, it reads very much like Tonks fell into depression after the battle at the Ministry, latched onto Remus as a solution, badgered him and finally cornered him in a public setting until he agreed to give it a go just to stop the constant pressure; then Tonks made sure to get pregnant as quickly as possible, which got them a swift quiet wedding, and then Tonks was perfectly happy again and didn't give a fuck about how Remus was doing, and Remus only stopped trying to get out of it in a panic once Harry yelled at him and his best avenue of retreat was gone. I like the extremely charitable reading much better! I don't want to be full of squirming horrified dislike at both of them! I just -- god, I wish it was excised entirely, I wish that Tonks had stayed young and colorful and gone down fighting, and that, hell, Remus couldn't come on the Horcrux quest because he was still desperately trying to get werewolves over to their side, and that he succeeded, before he'd gone down fighting too. I would have loved that story.
+ I HAVE A HUNDRED PROBLEMS AND ALL OF THEM ARE MARAUDERS. Fuck I wish Peter's redemptive moment was more than a hesitance in strangling Harry. That entire generation is a tragedy.
+ And to round it off, Snape! I think I hate "he did it all for love of Lily" just as much this time as I did when I first read it and realized that it really was as simple and predictable as that. This time I didn't have to deal with the crushing disappointment, so I also got to notice what a complete creepy loser Snape is. And I just -- I think I have some sort of weird ideal Snape in my head; he blindly loathes Harry because James was a dick to him, but he's still horrified at Dumbledore for using Harry and for using him; he went to Voldemort because he's fascinated by Dark magic, and he came back because Voldemort is bugfuck insane, and because -- seriously, Snape doesn't want to be a bully's minion, and he doesn't care about what kind of blood anyone has, the only reason he went to Voldemort in the first place is that his friends of similar interests chose Death Eater as a career path. Also, Snape likes playing both sides a little; it's the right kind of challenge. Basically I want anything but "unrequited love made him do it."
ALSO HERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT I LOVED (again in no particular order):
+ Wow, I have a lot of feelings. I got teary over Sirius, of course, but also over Dumbledore, Hedwig, George's ear, Dobby, Percy's return, Fred, the Resurrection Stone scene, Dumbledore again, and EVERYTHING LUNA LOVEGOOD EVER SAYS, dammit, Luna, I think you are specifically designed to make me smile mistily at you.
+ Can we talk about Dumbledore some more? I would like to do that. Let's be honest, he's every one of my bulletproof character kinks. He's a lying liar and he wanted to take over the world and he uses everyone and he knows exactly what he can do so he keeps himself as far from power as possible and he's highly eccentric on purpose and he never quite stops being an arrogant asshat and then in the afterlife he cries on Harry and desperately wants Harry to understand and forgive him. OH MY GOD I JUST. I CAN'T. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEAL WITH THESE FEELINGS. And all this is leaving aside that he also had a teenage affair with someone hot and evil, whom he had to defeat years later, and the subtext was intentional. I am so fucking frustrated at having all this subtext without any TEXT, and my frustration is being backdated so that it also applies to Dumbledore/Grindelwald, but I am still 60% delight that Rowling acknowledged it, even extra-canonically.
+ Flying birds of death aside, I am still pretty glad that Ron/Hermione is canon. Frustrating lack of page time aside, I am also still pretty glad that Harry/Ginny is canon -- and I know that there are people who are totally ambivalent about Ginny, but I'm quite fond of her. All of this said, HOLY OT3, BATMAN. I think I wanted it even worse in the DH movies, but I want it pretty bad here. There's this moment when they're hiding out in Grimmauld Place, and Harry's woken up before the other two; he sees them lying there with their hands almost touching, and wonders if they fell asleep holding hands, and has this brief flash of intense loneliness, and I just -- I need fic, is what I'm saying here.
+ MALFOYS. Oh my goodness Malfoys. I really loved Draco this time through, because I'm miles and years past trying to stop myself from liking antagonists, and because he's basically Harry, but raised with Malfoy values, and with a propensity to do hilarious impressions of people he doesn't like. Narcissa is still the Black sister of my heart, too. And at the end! They're all just sitting there awkwardly in the Great Hall! I LOVE THEM A LOT.
+ I still love all the backstory bits, too -- always and forever a Marauders girl, I guess. The Shrieking Shack sequence! Snape's worst memory! Sirius and Remus reminiscing about how James would ruffle his hair! I'd basically forgotten about Lily's letter to Sirius that Harry finds, too, but I love that she calls them all by their stupid nicknames too, that she was obviously in on it. Actually, I love Lily in general -- when I don't think about it, I sort of assume that she only appears as Love Object and Sacrificing Mother, but actually by the end I think we have a better idea of what she was like than James; we have letters from her, and Slughorn's reminiscing, and what she was like with Petunia, and everything. I can't even properly hate the chapter of Snape's tragic unrequited Lily love, because there's so much of the others in that one too. And I think it means I need to recalibrate the timeline on the Whomping Willow incident? Apparently it happened before they took their OWLs, so presumably it just means that Sirius turned sixteen halfway through fifth year. #timelines I devote way too much energy to figuring out
My paragraphing about things that bother me is much longer than my paragraphing about things I love -- and I realize that in my "things that bother me" I left out any elaboration on the epilogue, and my feelings on Gaunts/Voldemort's backstory generally, and probably a whole lot of other things -- but honestly, on the whole, the reread was wonderful. There aren't, in fact, that many books that make me tear up and clutch at my face. It was a great ride at the time, and I think in some ways I enjoyed it a lot more this time through, so -- I'm really glad I have Harry Potter in my life.
There is definitely something to be said for reading these books when my brain isn't cluttered with fanon and speculation and the immediate memory of a hundred fics that did different things with the canon pairings or Voldemort's return or the Horcrux hunt. I used to have the weird and definite feeling that nothing after Goblet of Fire was quite properly canon, but I have enough distance, or have had enough time to acclimate myself to that canon, or maybe it's that I've since picked up TV fandoms where the constant acclimation is necessary -- whichever. Anyway, I loved a lot more about the last three books than I ever have before.
Before this gets entirely out of hand, though, I am going to resort to bullet points.
THINGS THAT STILL BOTHER ME (in no particular order):
+ Slytherins, Slytherins, oh god. The only heroic Slytherins in the whole universe are Snape, Slughorn, and Regulus? No one else stays to fight? I mean, I absolutely understand that they'd be the house most likely to have Death Eaters in the family, and would want to get the hell out, but no one? Fuck interhouse unity, that apparently means interhouse unity EXCEPT SLYTHERIN. Damn right you Sort too soon, now do something about it.
+ The problem of Muggles and house elves, and basically all the other disenfranchised groups in the wizarding world, although those two are the most egregious. It does become a lot less hideous and glaring if you skip the epilogue, as I did on this go, but still -- the moral of the story with house elves does seem to be "Treat them right and they will love being your servants!" This is just -- so fundamentally squodgy and awful. I don't want SPEW to be a hilarious stupid thing Hermione did when she was fourteen; I don't want her greatest vindication to be that Kreacher becomes helpful when Harry's nice to him, because it's also slightly horrifying that Kreacher's loyalties are that ... infantile, maybe? I'm not sure what word I'm looking for, but the way they get Kreacher to be A Good Elf is pretty insulting. I don't want Dobby to be a crazypants anomaly. (Rowling's actually decent at writing non-human denizens of the wizarding world who are different but no better or worse than wizards, ie the centaurs and goblins, who have their own codes and versions of history, and it's pretty great. It's just -- man, she fell down hard with the house elves.) And meanwhile you've got Arthur Weasley, who's got the best of all stances there seem to be on Muggles, and he treats them like particularly charming and clever pets. Both Petunia and Dudley come off okay in the end, but it's not like they're shining examples; Hermione's parents never even get names or lines. So the moral of this story is actually that Muggleborns are no less than other wizards, not that Muggles are people. And just. Ick.
+ Possibly related to the house elf problem, I'm ... still not okay with some of the conclusions that Dumbledore, Hermione, and Harry reach about Sirius. Apparently Sirius could have prevented the events that led to his death if he'd just been nice to Kreacher! And -- I dunno, in the scheme of things it's not a big problem, but I'm under the impression that Kreacher was going out of his way to be nasty to Sirius for breaking his mother's heart by leaving, and that Sirius was a bit traumatized by being in Azkaban for twelve years and then shut up again in the house he hated. The narrative does understand this, but I'm still kind of angry about it. I suspect I'm angrier about what it says about Kreacher than what it says about Sirius now, though.
+ Lupin and Tonks, ohhhhh dear. I was actively looking this time for readings that were not awful to both of them, and -- I think what Rowling meant to do was write them a bit star-crossed: Tonks desperately wants love and hope and family, and Remus does too, but he's so bogged down by being a werewolf, and the stigma, and being undercover, that it takes Harry shouting at him about being a coward for him to finally snap out of it and accept the gift he's been given. This is my extremely charitable reading. If I don't make that effort, it reads very much like Tonks fell into depression after the battle at the Ministry, latched onto Remus as a solution, badgered him and finally cornered him in a public setting until he agreed to give it a go just to stop the constant pressure; then Tonks made sure to get pregnant as quickly as possible, which got them a swift quiet wedding, and then Tonks was perfectly happy again and didn't give a fuck about how Remus was doing, and Remus only stopped trying to get out of it in a panic once Harry yelled at him and his best avenue of retreat was gone. I like the extremely charitable reading much better! I don't want to be full of squirming horrified dislike at both of them! I just -- god, I wish it was excised entirely, I wish that Tonks had stayed young and colorful and gone down fighting, and that, hell, Remus couldn't come on the Horcrux quest because he was still desperately trying to get werewolves over to their side, and that he succeeded, before he'd gone down fighting too. I would have loved that story.
+ I HAVE A HUNDRED PROBLEMS AND ALL OF THEM ARE MARAUDERS. Fuck I wish Peter's redemptive moment was more than a hesitance in strangling Harry. That entire generation is a tragedy.
+ And to round it off, Snape! I think I hate "he did it all for love of Lily" just as much this time as I did when I first read it and realized that it really was as simple and predictable as that. This time I didn't have to deal with the crushing disappointment, so I also got to notice what a complete creepy loser Snape is. And I just -- I think I have some sort of weird ideal Snape in my head; he blindly loathes Harry because James was a dick to him, but he's still horrified at Dumbledore for using Harry and for using him; he went to Voldemort because he's fascinated by Dark magic, and he came back because Voldemort is bugfuck insane, and because -- seriously, Snape doesn't want to be a bully's minion, and he doesn't care about what kind of blood anyone has, the only reason he went to Voldemort in the first place is that his friends of similar interests chose Death Eater as a career path. Also, Snape likes playing both sides a little; it's the right kind of challenge. Basically I want anything but "unrequited love made him do it."
ALSO HERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT I LOVED (again in no particular order):
+ Wow, I have a lot of feelings. I got teary over Sirius, of course, but also over Dumbledore, Hedwig, George's ear, Dobby, Percy's return, Fred, the Resurrection Stone scene, Dumbledore again, and EVERYTHING LUNA LOVEGOOD EVER SAYS, dammit, Luna, I think you are specifically designed to make me smile mistily at you.
+ Can we talk about Dumbledore some more? I would like to do that. Let's be honest, he's every one of my bulletproof character kinks. He's a lying liar and he wanted to take over the world and he uses everyone and he knows exactly what he can do so he keeps himself as far from power as possible and he's highly eccentric on purpose and he never quite stops being an arrogant asshat and then in the afterlife he cries on Harry and desperately wants Harry to understand and forgive him. OH MY GOD I JUST. I CAN'T. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEAL WITH THESE FEELINGS. And all this is leaving aside that he also had a teenage affair with someone hot and evil, whom he had to defeat years later, and the subtext was intentional. I am so fucking frustrated at having all this subtext without any TEXT, and my frustration is being backdated so that it also applies to Dumbledore/Grindelwald, but I am still 60% delight that Rowling acknowledged it, even extra-canonically.
+ Flying birds of death aside, I am still pretty glad that Ron/Hermione is canon. Frustrating lack of page time aside, I am also still pretty glad that Harry/Ginny is canon -- and I know that there are people who are totally ambivalent about Ginny, but I'm quite fond of her. All of this said, HOLY OT3, BATMAN. I think I wanted it even worse in the DH movies, but I want it pretty bad here. There's this moment when they're hiding out in Grimmauld Place, and Harry's woken up before the other two; he sees them lying there with their hands almost touching, and wonders if they fell asleep holding hands, and has this brief flash of intense loneliness, and I just -- I need fic, is what I'm saying here.
+ MALFOYS. Oh my goodness Malfoys. I really loved Draco this time through, because I'm miles and years past trying to stop myself from liking antagonists, and because he's basically Harry, but raised with Malfoy values, and with a propensity to do hilarious impressions of people he doesn't like. Narcissa is still the Black sister of my heart, too. And at the end! They're all just sitting there awkwardly in the Great Hall! I LOVE THEM A LOT.
+ I still love all the backstory bits, too -- always and forever a Marauders girl, I guess. The Shrieking Shack sequence! Snape's worst memory! Sirius and Remus reminiscing about how James would ruffle his hair! I'd basically forgotten about Lily's letter to Sirius that Harry finds, too, but I love that she calls them all by their stupid nicknames too, that she was obviously in on it. Actually, I love Lily in general -- when I don't think about it, I sort of assume that she only appears as Love Object and Sacrificing Mother, but actually by the end I think we have a better idea of what she was like than James; we have letters from her, and Slughorn's reminiscing, and what she was like with Petunia, and everything. I can't even properly hate the chapter of Snape's tragic unrequited Lily love, because there's so much of the others in that one too. And I think it means I need to recalibrate the timeline on the Whomping Willow incident? Apparently it happened before they took their OWLs, so presumably it just means that Sirius turned sixteen halfway through fifth year. #timelines I devote way too much energy to figuring out
My paragraphing about things that bother me is much longer than my paragraphing about things I love -- and I realize that in my "things that bother me" I left out any elaboration on the epilogue, and my feelings on Gaunts/Voldemort's backstory generally, and probably a whole lot of other things -- but honestly, on the whole, the reread was wonderful. There aren't, in fact, that many books that make me tear up and clutch at my face. It was a great ride at the time, and I think in some ways I enjoyed it a lot more this time through, so -- I'm really glad I have Harry Potter in my life.