I just finished; I'll read the thread and then edit this post with my thoughts.
[hide]Alright: as with most things in life, I agree with Ben almost across the board here. I've been pulling for Snape ever since book 2, when it turned out Rowling was really going to follow the "mean but still a good guy" thing that makes his character so fascinating. There had to be a very good reason for him to want to help Dumbledore, and a very important role for him to play in the plan. I felt that the former was handled rather well--he wants to protect Lily's daughter--although to some degree that cheapened his motives for me to know that he was doing it because he loved Lily, and not because he loved goodness and had an inherently noble heart (mind you--I do think that he had an inherently noble heart, I just don't like the way it was explained, if that makes sense). The latter, Snape's role to play in the grand plan, was a complete and utter let down. There's no two ways around it. Dumbledore's grand plan for Snape was twofold: he would tell Harry that he was a Horcrux, and he would protect the Hogwarts students from the worst excesses of the Carrows. Snape was highly positioned in the Death Eaters, second only to Voldemort himself in the end, and perfectly positioned for a treacherous blow at an opportune time. The fact that he never got to make that heroic move, and instead died in humiliating ignominy, really, really bothered me. Knowing that he brought the sword to Harry in the forest, and the fact that Harry called him "the bravest man he ever knew" and named his son after him, made me feel a little better, and may even have brought a little tear to my eye, but overall I thought Snape's arc was a huge letdown.
While we're talking about redemptions that never paid off, I, like someone else mentioned earlier, kept expecting Draco to turn. He had a perfect opportunity in the Malfoy's house (though I have to admit that I liked that scene a lot, even when it didn't go the way I wanted it to), and he had another opportunity at the end in the Room of Requirement, but instead we got, as with Snape, ignominy in the place of heroism. Draco has been Harry's foil throughout the series, and his ending should have been as meaningful, whether for good or evil, but instead of learning his lesson or going down in a blaze of evil glory, all he did was drift into insignificance. Again, the epilogue did a little to assuage this, by turning Draco into the new generation's Snape (picked-on-boy who hates the Potters) and passing his hatred on to the next generation, but generational cycle sagas are why I read Isabel Allende, not J.K. Rowling.
Those two paragraphs are a long way of saying that this series ended up being way too light on redemption for my taste. It was far too deterministic--the good guys got rewarded, the bad guys got punished, and very few people ever crossed the line between them. Anything that looked like a sudden switch of allegiances was actually presaged by several decades of prehistory, and the closest thing we ever got to redemption--a bad guy seeing the error of his ways and becoming good--was Kreacher. This was a moral series in that good triumphed over evil, but it was not a series in which people made life-changing moral decisions.
(That's not true, actually, because Xenophilius went from good to desperate and sold out the heroes, but I still think my overall statement applies. Nobody ever moved from one camp to the other except Snape, which is why he was the most interesting character, and why his ending was so grossly disappointing.)
Moving on: I also agree with Ben in that the Deathly Hallows thing ended up being inconsequential to the plot. It was very important to the character development, I think, but I can't find a good plot reason for Dumbledore to have passed along the clues to Harry. It's a little unfair to compare them to midichlorians, because they made perfect sense within the world, but the book could have happened almost identically without them.
I've mentioned the epilogue a few times already, but let me say clearly that I thought it was an excellent end to the series. The only thing missing was finding out who the new headmaster is--I thought for sure it would be Harry, but then when it apparently wasn't him I figured it would be Hermione, and then when it wasn't her I became ever more desperate to find out who it was. I assume McGonagall, maybe, but come on, book, throw me a bone!
I have one final comment in this ginormous essay, and I will begin by saying that anyone who complained that the deaths in the book didn't mean anything (ahem, Steve) must have read a different book than I did. I thought that every single main character death in the book was given proper reverence. What I did not like was the very cursory treatment given to the child of Lupin and Tonks. Harry's outburst with Lupin near the beginning stemmed from the fact that he couldn't stand the thought of another baby losing his parents the way he did--and then that's exactly what happened at the end, and all of a sudden we had another orphan who's parents were killed by Death Eaters, and I expected more from that--some emotion, some worry, some solemn promises that he would be raised in love and so on and so on, and instead, we got less than nothing. Grr.
There were a lot of things I liked about the book too, I promise, but I'm out of time. I'll get back to you.
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