Harry Potter Curiosities, Book Seven
For the final book, I've limited my notes to things that really stood out to me. This list will be under a cut, since obviously there will be spoilers.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

• "We now have several people planted within the Department of Magical Transport. If Potter Apparates or uses the Floo Network, we shall know immediately." (pg 6 US) Can the Ministry track Apparition? Based on evidence throughout the rest of the book, I'd say not.


• He had never learned to repair wounds... (pg 13 US) Didn't Harry learn in HBP how to repair broken noses, at least?


• What happened to Hermione's hold over Rita Skeeter?


• Can you take an entire car along with you when you Disapparate? (pg 37 US)


• I know I'm being too scientific about this, since we're discussing a series about magic, but it would appear the Polyjuice Potion functions based on DNA and therefore shouldn't be able to duplicate things like scars and tattoos.


• If the Ministry seized and examined Dumbledore's assets before passing them on according to his will, why didn't they do the same for the possessions of Sirius, an escaped convict with a house stuffed with Dark objects?


• Why do the Burrow's protective enchantments break when the Ministry falls to Voldemort?


• The protection on Grimmauld Place is pretty lousy. There's really no reason there wouldn't be Death Eaters waiting there. (On second thought, Snape was a friend all along, and he's the one who interrogated Mundungus the insider... so... okay, then.)


• The Fidelius Charm is a pretty lousy form of protection, for that matter. All you have to do is kill the Secret-Keeper and then torture everyone who's ever been to the place until one of them cracks.


• Why didn't Sirius's mother destroy, sell, or otherwise get rid of his stuff after disowning him? She burnt him off the family tree, but kept his room just as he left it?


• What was a letter written to Sirius when he was an adult doing in a house Sirius left when he was sixteen?


• Why does Voldemort leave his mind open to Harry?


• Kreacher's change of heart is sweet, but rather unrealistic. Just because Harry's forbidden him to call Ron and Hermione blood-traitor and Mudblood doesn't mean he's stopped believing them so. Years of prejudice don't disappear overnight.


• Not too smart calling each other by their real names in the Ministry when they're supposed to be other people, is it?


• The Slytherin common room is under the lake?


• Since when do Hogwarts students go home for Easter?


• How did Dumbledore beat Grindelwald in a duel if Grindelwald had the unbeatable Elder Wand?


• Did the entrance to Diagon Alley always open via spinning bricks? (pg 525 US) I thought that was only in the movie.


• Why would Voldemort plant a Death Eater in Ravenclaw Tower to wait for Harry? (pg 592 US) He didn't set extra protection around any of the other Horcruxes, he didn't think Harry could possibly know about them, and the Ravenclaw one was the most unknown of any of the set.


• Were there seriously only three Death Eaters at Hogwarts (including Snape)? I find it hard to believe the Dark side was able to control the school with only three agents there.


• Luna and Ginny are in the same year. Why is Luna allowed to fight and Ginny forced to stay behind?


• "Now let's get upstairs and fight, or all the good Death Eaters'll be taken." (pg 606 US) Upstairs? Aren't they on the third floor, and aren't they supposed to be going to the Great Hall?


• Why does it take Voldemort so long to get to Hogwarts? He should be able to Apparate to the gates as soon as he sets foot outside the locket cave.


• Why the hell would Riddle think he was the only one to find the hiding room (Room of Requirement)? It was filled with centuries of hidden items! (pg 627 US)


• Goyle seems unrealistically stupid for a 17-year-old. (pg 629 US)


• How did Voldemort get his original wand back after his ten years of bodiless exile?


• What is up with the U.S. cover? Most of the others have had something to do with the climax of the book, but this one doesn't seem to fit any particular scene.

"The Trace, the Trace!" said Mad-Eye impatiently. "The charm that detects magical activity around under-seventeens, the way the Ministry finds out about underage magic!"

Bullshit. The enforcement of restrictions on underage sorcery has been pretty confusing all through the series, but by this point I find "the Trace" nearly impossible to accept. I've always wondered why the Ministry can't tell the difference between a student using magic and someone else doing it, and as of the beginning of DH my best guess was that it was the student's area of residence being watched, not the student himself. HBP seemed to confirm that; Dumbledore clearly explains the enforcement of the ban is left to the parents in Wizarding households. A Trace charm just doesn't fit with the way it's been handled throughout the books. Besides, if there's a charm on the wizard in question, there's no logical reason why it wouldn't be able to distinguish between magic performed by him and magic performed around him. You'd get a hell of a lot of false positives with something like that in use, especially if it's universal and not only on those living with Muggle families. And when would they cast it on you?

Can't say I buy Tom Riddle reading about Horcruxes in the library and Dumbledore removing all the books about them when he becomes headmaster. There's no reason Riddle would've asked Slughorn for the spell if that were the case. Info about Horcruxes, sure, but not the specific spell. And why would Dumbledore feel the need to remove those books out of nowhere? He doesn't find out about the Horcruxes until much later. It seems more likely the books would've been removed ages and ages ago when Hogwarts became a firm opponent of Dark Magic.

"Recent research undertaken by the Department of Mysteries reveals that magic can only be passed from person to person when Wizards reproduce. Where no proven Wizarding ancestry exists, therefore, the so-called Muggle-born is likely to have obtained magical power by theft or force."

Again, bullshit. Even with the Death Eaters in charge there's no way in hell the Wizarding community would roll over and take this. There are just too many Muggle-borns out there. The world is full of people who've seen with their own eyes that Muggle-borns have natural magic, if they aren't Muggle-borns themselves or the children of Muggle-borns. There is no way it would be that easy for the Dark forces to go after these people with such an extremely outrageous lie, especially when they've only been in power a few days.

It sure sucks to be Snape, doesn't it? After a miserable childhood, he spends the rest of his life as someone's puppet, their tool or their toy - James, Voldemort, Dumbledore, and who knows who else all use him to further their own ends without a thought for Snape's own happiness in life. Sucks to be him, more than anyone else in the series, I think. Snape's far from an innocent victim, of course, but nobody deserves the kind of life he got stuck with.

Don't get me wrong, I fully enjoyed this book, perhaps more than I enjoyed any other in the series. I hadn't been this into a Harry Potter book since PoA. It was thrilling and enthralling from the beginning to the last chapter, and since it's the last book, I understand some things had to be rushed. The above items were all rather minor annoyances it was easy to push to the back of my mind.

There were two major things, however, that bothered me to the point of being full-on sour notes.

This is probably the most potentially fanwanky thing I've ever posted...

The character of Nymphadora Tonks has been on a steady decline since her introduction, and by the end of DH I'm finding her to be an example of the downside of falling in love. She's hung up on Remus to the point where she's unable to function without him, which, while lamentable, is possible to understand, but where I draw the line is at the point where she chooses Remus over her newborn child. I have several friends who are mothers and all of them have expressed at various times that their child will always come before their boyfriend/husband. If Tonks were simply trying to help in the fight, trying to make a better world for her son as Remus was, and was cut down by fate as a result, that I could accept, but from beginning to end in the Battle of Hogwarts she's obsessed with finding Remus, to be with him and protect him and ultimately to die for him. Yes, her child is in a safe place, but she sure isn't thinking about him in the least. After all Harry's talk about Teddy needing his father to help him face his difficult life, the kid ends up losing both parents for really no reason at all.

And of course, I think the offhand manner in which the deaths of Remus and Tonks were handled was lame as it was. Those weren't background characters. They deserved better.

I firmly believe including the "nineteen years later" epilogue was a mistake. It served no purpose worth serving and harmed more than it helped.

The epilogue serves only to communicate the following things.

• Harry/Ginny.


• Ron/Hermione.


• Teddy grows up okay.


• Draco and the Trio have a truce.


• Neville becomes the Herbology professor.


• Harry found respect for Snape.


• Harry's still a celebrity.


• Everything at Hogwarts is "back to normal" and nothing of dramatic interest happens in nineteen years.

That's really all there is, and except for the last item, all of those things are easy enough to guess without the epilogue. And the last item is a giant kick in the ass.

Essentially what we have here is a failure to know what the hell you're doing as a writer. We see Harry happy and healthy, with a peaceful, normal life and a family of his own. Good for Harry as a character, it's everything he ever wanted, and on a conscious level we know this - but it's a piss-poor ending for a book.

Because:

• It's boring. A giant, dramatic fight scene just ended and without any wrap-up aftermath we have a happy but humdrum scene.


• It's completely disconnected from the rest of the book. Nineteen years is a long-ass time. We're an audience that's been reading about teenage wizards doing all these exciting things that set them apart from the adults surrounding them, and suddenly they've become a bunch of run-of-the-mill adult parents just like the ones who were background characters for seven books.


• It's both too much and not enough. So many kids are stuffed in there that I started having trouble keeping all the names straight. At the same time, we're given precious little information about what's been going on besides the fact that everyone's been making babies. What about the main characters' careers? What about all the other characters in the series we've grown to know and love almost as much (and in some cases more) than the Trio? What happens to the Ministry, the Wizarding world, etc?


• It's both happy and depressing. Everything's back to normal for the next generation, yay! But nothing seems to have changed, boo! For seven books we've been reading about a world increasingly rife with corruption, have the Trio succeeded in turning any of that around? What about all the changes various people were aiming to make? Slytherin still sucks, apparently, and that's not a good sign. What happened to all the House unity, etc? Is the Wizarding world just as likely to fall again to the next Dark wizard to come along? Was all the buildup of the series, all the strides that were made, successful in any way or did it all come to nothing? Heck, besides Harry's new respect for Snape, even the characters don't seem to have changed as a result of their ordeals. Harry dabbled in Dark magic, for example, did he ever have to deal with that?


• It's a cheap author's out. Yay for Rowling, she's got the evidence of nineteen years of peace and happy couples to stand between herself and her readers' demands for more books. Lousy excuse for a poor ending.


• It's a giant roadblock for the fandom. In declaring nineteen years of peace and lasting relationships, a ton of fanfic potential is swept away. It's just too much empty time, and too thin to offer much more than next-gen fic inspiration.

All this to tell us a handful of things we already know. It's like surprising a child with an unexpected ice cream cone and then only letting them have one lick.

I'd probably feel better about the epilogue had there been more aftermath between it and the final battle, but as it stands... ugh. It's good for Harry, it's good for Rowling, but it's bad for the book. The epilogue actually spoiled the good feeling I had upon finishing the last chapter. Maybe I'll tape those few pages together and pretend they don't exist... ;3

Overall, though, amazing book! I'll be looking forward to the movie. :)

ETA: Ah, one more thing I need to mention that bothered me a bit, that rather ties in with a lot of the above. The general fade-out of nearly all the supporting cast. All these background characters have been gradually built up over the first six books, only to become completely unimportant in the final volume. There were numerous times when I felt jealous of Ron and Hermione on behalf of the other characters.