As we anticipate the next movie to appear in a few days, and after a romp through London, HP has been in my mind lately. I mentioned at the dinner table last night a key bit of foreshadowing/irony in the movie of HP and the Chamber of Secrets that may have been unintended: Harry's last line is to ask Dobby never to try to save his life again. And of course, Dobby did so one last time and paid the ultimate price, producing perhaps the most moving death scene/funeral in a book series chock full of such scenes. My wife's response--JK Rowling is evil. Why? Because the death toll in the last book was, ahem, excessive.Which spawns the following survey? Which death or deaths in the last book (or the entire series) were the most gratiutous?
None. The deaths highlighted the stakes involved. This was fight between good and evil for the fate of the magical world, not pattycake.
ReplyDeleteI didn't say she was evil. I said she is a "mean" lady. She is "mean" because she calculated the deaths that would cause a high level of damage for readers and killed those people en masse in the ending part. I don't mean Dumbledore or Dobby or Sirius. Those were target deaths to provide story climaxes and important plot movements, and not that unexpected. The most gratuitous death was Tonks', although gratuitous only in the sense that it was extra destruction, not that it was added on without thought. It served a thematic, structural purpose, but it could be argued that she didn't need to pursue that purpose.
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