Hermione does seem like the one whose adult life would be most interesting to read about.
Legolas Send a noteboard - 03/02/2014 10:50:59 PM
View original postWith the romances, she did a better job with the core of the series than with the epilogue, that's for sure. Harry-Ginny and Hermione-Ron worked as teenage couples. Ginny-Harry sounded like the type of relationships that could actually mature and endure, but Hermione and Ron had many earmarks of being a first love that would peter out sooner than later. I can't really think of a character in the series that would make a likely partner for an adult Hermione. So if Rowling missed the boat, for me it's perhaps by an unwillingness not to show Ron and Hermione no longer together as adults. Harry and Hermione wouldn't have worked any better for me.
I don't think anyone really took the epilogue very seriously, it was that over the top - based on what I've seen of HP fan fic back in the day, I would estimate the amount of fan fic authors who had a better take on the adult characters in the hundreds, literally. Whereas those who could claim to approach Rowling's level in the main series, well, that'd be a rather more select group.
But indeed, I don't think there's anyone in the series that Hermione would really work with - perhaps due to her less dysfunctional Muggle background, she's one of the few characters who feel genuinely modern, and who actually comes across as a teenager whose life is only just starting, with a great future still ahead of her. If Rowling can ever be persuaded to write a new series, she's by far the most obvious candidate for a leading role.
View original postFor much of the series she offered her non too subtle caricature of the suburban conservative mindset to which she opposed her more whimsical and excentric Wizards (cheating by having a whole lot of non conformist adult Wizards at the forefront of the story.. from Dumbledore to Hagrid, several teachers, Sirius and Lupin, the Weasley dad etc., the conservative ones from "the establishment" showing up as "bad guys" only later). Yet by the second half of her series, she scratched beneath the surface and started to criticize more and more a much deeper conservatism and inability to face necessary changes among the Wizards themselves (splitting them between the pro and anti Dumbledores). It was a little disappointing indeed that with the epilogue she showed her young heroes simply falling back in line with the old order. It's like her message is that only youth dare think differently and as soon as they're adults it's like a disease and they fall back in line, which I'm pretty sure wasn't her intent. It's more like she forgot her criticism of the conservative Wizards after the non conservative ones won against evil, and has not given much thought to how the Wizarding world should chnage in an era without Dark Wizards.
In the first few books, yeah, obviously there's the satire on the middle class in the shape of the Dursleys... but while many leading wizards may be eccentric, I'm not sure I see many of them being that progressive even in the early books. Sirius and Hagrid may have their rebellious sides, but at the end of the day it's only Dumbledore who really has any kind of vision and ability to bring real change - and he has other priorities than taking the lead in that regard. And in the younger generation - again, only Hermione and perhaps Ginny.
I don't think this outcome was her intent, either. But it's intriguing how it happened all the same. Mind you, there's not many fantasy series that have a particularly progressive ending, it often tends to be restoration of the status quo in most regards. Except maybe the ones that really aim for it, like His Dark Materials. And I would assume China Miéville's works, but I must admit I've yet to read any of them.
View original postIt's not that I expected her to bring massive changes to Wizarding thinking, it would have been unrealistic, at least in the short space an epilogue left her to elaborate on that. I guess it's really more a case where less is more and there was something to be said for an open ending without any epilogue set years later, leaving individual readers to decide what happens next...
Yeah. Or a more open epilogue, at least. Not that I'm begrudging her the right to indulge herself in finishing her magnum opus, but it would've been better off without it, for sure. Though on the other hand, by being as blatantly over the top as it is, it does give readers more room to dismiss or ignore it than an epilogue more in the style of the main series would have done.
JK Rowling says she got Harry Potter romance wrong.
- 02/02/2014 06:32:53 PM
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I think having schooldays romances continue into adulthood to be rather odd
- 02/02/2014 06:45:38 PM
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It fits in well in Rowling's universe in a way, though...
- 02/02/2014 08:08:44 PM
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I don't buy Harry and Hermione, really.
- 02/02/2014 08:25:56 PM
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Re: I don't buy Harry and Hermione, really.
- 03/02/2014 08:44:49 PM
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Hermione does seem like the one whose adult life would be most interesting to read about.
- 03/02/2014 10:50:59 PM
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Re: Hermione does seem like the one whose adult life would be most interesting to read about.
- 04/02/2014 04:26:49 PM
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