I read the books this year because I wanted to feel pain, basically, and I wanted to be justified in disliking Harry Potter. I was not disappointed. However, I still don’t understand how the fuck the end of the book worked. It was so harebrained and convoluted and sloppy as fuck that I don’t know what actually happened. Am I stupid or was it a bad ending? And what the fuck happened? How did they actually kill Voldemort?
Been a long time since I read but IIRC:
- The final reveal from the Pensieve and Snape’s memories is that there are actually eight Horcruxes. When Voldemort tried to kill Harry as a baby, the murders of the Potter parents and love protection that caused the Killing Curse to backfire split Voldemort’s soul again, and it latched onto infant Harry. Harry is himself a Horcrux. So Voldemort can’t die until Harry himself is dead. So he goes to face Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest and is prepared to sacrifice himself. Voldemort “kills” him.
- Dumbledore actually lied again. Harry and Voldemort basically get stuck in limbo, where he has some kind of magical conversation with Dumbledore (I’m not sure this is ever explained). Voldemort’s Killing Curse once again failed to kill Harry, and instead destroyed the portion of Voldemort’s soul latched onto Harry (again I don’t think a Killing Curse was originally able to destroy a Horcrux and this is also never really explained). Basically, just as Voldemort was unable to die while Harry lived, so too Harry cannot die while Voldemort lived. But now the last ties between them have been destroyed.
- Thing is, there’s a problem: one more Horcrux still exists, the snake Nagini. Both Harry and Voldemort wake up. Harry continues to fake being dead. Voldemort parades Harry’s “corpse” before the remaining defenders of Hogwarts to try and break their morale once and for all. Neville defies him, so Voldemort tries to torture him by making him wear the Sorting Hat and setting it on fire. While everyone is distracted Harry disappears, and once this is noticed all hell breaks loose. Neville suddenly draws the Sword of Godric Gryffindor from the burning Sorting Hat and fucking kills the snake, because he’s the real hero of the entire series.
- Battle is joined (EDIT: I actually totally forgot about the “love protection” aspect of Harry’s earlier sacrifice - because Harry sacrificed himself under the impression he was going to die, his non-death still conveys love protection to literally everyone on his side in the battle and they wipe the floor with the remaining Death Eaters) and Harry and Voldemort confront each other one last time in the Great Hall. Voldemort, all arrogance, intends to kill Harry once and for all. Harry tries to I guess “redeem” Voldemort one last time by warning him that the situation is not what he thinks it is and if he tries to kill Harry, the curse will backfire. Why is this?
- The language governing ownership of the Elder Wand is deliberately vague. The parable implies that you have to kill the previous owner of the Wand. We (and Voldemort) have thought the chain of ownership of the Wand went Dumbledore-Snape-Voldemort. Snape killed Dumbledore at the end of the last book. Voldemort killed Snape earlier and this allowed Harry to get Snape’s memories, etc. But the truth is you only have to “defeat” the previous owner. This fundamentally changes the chain of ownership. At the end of book 6, when Harry and Dumbledore reappeared on the tower, the latter was confronted by Malfoy. Malfoy used the Disarming Spell on Dumbledore. In magical terms, this means Malfoy “defeated” Dumbledore. This actually screwed up an additional gambit by Dumbledore to destroy the power of the wand - he was already dying from the ring-Horcrux’s curse, so he colluded with Snape to allow himself to be killed by the latter; if Dumbledore was “defeated” by his own design, he theorized it would break the cycle and destroy the power of the Wand for good. But Malfoy’s actions threw a wrench into everything. Malfoy couldn’t bring himself to kill Dumbledore, so Snape stepped in as planned. This fooled Voldemort on so many levels.
- Halfway through book 7, Harry and co are captured by the Malfoys. In their escape, Harry used the Disarming Spell on Malfoy, “defeating” him. This means the actual chain of ownership for the wand is Dumbledore-Malfoy-Harry. Harry is the current master of the Elder Wand. If Voldemort tries to kill Harry with the Wand, the Wand will refuse to kill its master and backfire on Voldemort. Voldemort, all arrogance, refuses to believe this. He tries to kill Harry, the curse backfires yet again, and it kills Voldemort instead.
- Harry takes the Elder Wand, uses it to repair his old wand, and then basically sticks it in a secret vault in Dumbledore’s office presumably to sit there forever. He hopes to end the cycle his own way by dying peacefully in his bed (this is incredibly at odds with him presumably pursuing a career as an Auror/Wizard Fed, but w/e)
This shit was gripping when you were younger but if you step back and view the series with a wider critical eye it has a lot of gaping problems. Rowling basically introduced several incredibly important McGuffins crucial for resolving the entire series in the last book and retroactively tied them in with earlier events and foreshadowing. Voldemort’s final defeat was certainly thematically appropriate (he was so arrogant and unable to comprehend he was mortal he refused to listen to an honest attempt to warn him he was wrong) but Harry basically wins on a technicality. A better series, if it really wanted to end this way, would have spent a lot of time in the series setting up these McGuffins and the ambiguity of the language regarding ownership of the McGuffin. But it’s thrown in at the last minute like an Ass Pull.
Wait so, holy shit, no wonder it didn’t make any fucking sense to me. None of it was defined beforehand and it was revealed like all of her other sudden twists that explained everything but actually were held together with glue and spit in other plots of the other books too. The entire series is just fucking M. Night Shyamalan all the way the fuck down.
Alan Moore said that Rowling used ill-defined magical principles but you laid out precisely why he said that. He was written off as a crank for saying it, but he’s absolutely correct.
The seventh book very obviously ran into the dilemma of “oh god oh fuck i have so many loose ends and my protagonists are in such deep shit there is no way i can tie this all together”. AKA the Kojima/Lost dilemma. Deathly Hallows was an admirable effort but the cracks in foundation are extremely visible
I actually totally forgot about the “love protection” aspect of Harry’s earlier sacrifice - because Harry sacrificed himself under the impression he was going to die, his non-death still conveys love protection to literally everyone on his side in the battle and they wipe the floor with the remaining Death Eaters
The love protection magic seeming like such a rare and little known about thing always made me think that the HP universe was full of unfeeling callous lizard people for whom the thought of sacrificing themselves for others would never even cross their minds. With all the evil wizards running around murdering innocent people you’d think there’d be way more cases of people having the instakill spell bounce off them just by sheer probability. Then again, the series is set in Britain
Right that seems like such a fucking gaping loophole. Out of the thousands that Voldemort killed not a single one actually loved their child until the Potters?
It’s this elitist fantasy where even love is a commodity able to be enjoyed by a select few “good and smart” people of the caliber of the Potters. Disgusting
Dumbledore actually lied again. Harry and Voldemort basically get stuck in limbo, where he has some kind of magical conversation with Dumbledore (I’m not sure this is ever explained). Voldemort’s Killing Curse once again failed to kill Harry, and instead destroyed the portion of Voldemort’s soul latched onto Harry (again I don’t think a Killing Curse was originally able to destroy a Horcrux and this is also never really explained). Basically, just as Voldemort was unable to die while Harry lived, so too Harry cannot die while Voldemort lived. But now the last ties between them have been destroyed.
In order to destroy a horcrux, it has to be obliterated in such a way that it could never be brought back. If the horcrux is a living thing, you can just kill it by any method because magic can’t bring the dead back to life. So if Voldemort had killed Harry, he would have destroyed the unintentional horcrux he created.
I think technically speaking he did kill Harry, but the remnant of Lily’s protection saved him from dying all the way, and that’s what caused him to meet Dumbledore in limbo or wherever.
I think it’s fair to say that this plot point was kind of contrived and not really set up in universe, and although the specific magic that allowed it wasn’t set up, it was a recurring plot point throughout the entire series that Harry never asked to be the chosen one and didn’t like it, so the moment with Dumbledore represented him being “reborn” as a hero by choice rather than by random chance.
Honestly I don’t get why every leftist wants me to hate the Harry Potter books. JK Rowling may be a piece of shit, but that has literally nothing to do with the content of the books. It doesn’t matter if you’re the most despicable Nazi ever to Hitler, if you write a book that captures the imagination of millions of kids and doesn’t contain your ideology in it, you’ve written a good book. Hating everything associated with someone doesn’t mean you hate them more.
edit: ok, I don’t mean the book has to “not contain your ideology,” that’s impossible. What I mean is it has to not serve as a vehicle for your ideology, and it has to not contain so many problematic themes as to set it apart from other media in the same cultural context, which I believe applies to the HP series. I acknowledge the serious flaws in the books, but I think they should be looked at completely ignoring Rowling’s stated political views, which people clearly are not doing.
if you write a book that captures the imagination of millions of kids and doesn’t contain your ideology in it
You’re not wrong about a lot of the hatred of the books being overblown, but they ABSOLUTELY contain Rowling’s ideology in them
b a n k i n g g o b l i n s
if you write a book that captures the imagination of millions of kids and doesn’t contain your ideology in it, you’ve written a good book.
Her book is neoliberal as fuck though
Sure, but so is most media. The Lion King is pro absolutist monarchy, and it’s still a good movie.
Well yes, but that wasn’t the point you were making, at least I thought. You said that what made the book good was that it captured the imagination of millions of kids and it doesn’t contain your ideology. I was saying it does contain her ideology, which is why there was no real revolution or anything in it, and Voldemort lost on a technicality.
Yeah I kinda put my point wrong in that comment, I put an edit at the end since then.
Battle is joined (EDIT: I actually totally forgot about the “love protection” aspect of Harry’s earlier sacrifice - because Harry sacrificed himself under the impression he was going to die, his non-death still conveys love protection to literally everyone on his side in the battle and they wipe the floor with the remaining Death Eaters) and Harry and Voldemort confront each other one last time in the Great Hall. Voldemort, all arrogance, intends to kill Harry once and for all. Harry tries to I guess “redeem” Voldemort one last time by warning him that the situation is not what he thinks it is and if he tries to kill Harry, the curse will backfire. Why is this?
The “love protection spell” at the end was Harry Potter bluffing. If I remember correctly, after Neville showed his badassedness, Harry slipped on the invisibility cloak and ran through the battlefield casting shielding/reflecting spells while he went looking for Voldemorte and Ron and Hemione.
I’m pretty sure you’re not remembering correctly, the love protection thing was real.
There’s what he said when he faced up against voldemort…
‘– I meant to, and that’s what did it. I’ve done what my mother did. They’re protected from you. Haven’t you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can’t torture them. You can’t touch them. You don’t learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?’
and then there’s what he did.
Hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak, Harry cast a Shield Charm between Neville and Voldemort before the latter could raise his wand. (DH, page 733)
Voldemort raised his wand and directed it at Molly Weasley. “Protego!” roared Harry, and the Shield Charm expanded in the middle of the Hall, and Voldemort stared around for the source as Harry pulled off the Invisibility Cloak at last. (DH, page 737)
And that’s just from some quick googling. Pretty sure there were a couple more shield charms in between the two. Harry may have been protected by the Love spell, like during the crucio stuff, but the thing protecting his friends at the end was him.
I thought it was both, like he was protecting them AND they were shielded from all the Death Eaters, but maybe he didn’t realize in the moment that he didn’t need top protect them. Because why would Harry lie there? To psych Voldemort out? He’s about to die anyway because of the Elder Wand owner thing. IDK, it’s sloppy writing on Rowling’s part, some editor needed to tell her that it wasn’t clear at that part.
IDK, it’s sloppy writing on Rowling’s part, some editor needed to tell her that it wasn’t clear at that part.
lmao, no argument there.
