![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarrenI have just queued to pick up our MCR tickets. There were only two people in front of me but they took FOREVER to choose their show or seating or whatever.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astolat pretty much sums up my overall feelings about the book - especially the epilogue. Much more coherently and thoughtfully than I could.
"Finally, on one level my schmoopy heart was warmed by the epilogue of them all putting their kids on the train -- really I feel it was intended as "And they all lived happily ever after" with a few fun details -- but on a meta level, I found it a real bummer. Not so much because she paired everyone off in the boring obvious heteronormative ways, because I knew she was going to, and also fandom can and will fix that in a second, but because of the awful sense of inertia. It's nineteen years into the future and they're all in exactly the same places they were nineteen years before, both in relation to each other and in relation to their environment. In fact, in the same places they were twenty-six years before, because all the friendships and pairings are basically as they were set up in the very first book. The kids are being put on the same train, to go to the same school, to what, re-enact their lives? Without Voldemort gumming up the works, presumably, but in the context of the backstory with Grindelwald, you sort of expect that hey, it's just about time for another Dark wizard to come along, who will have to be faced by Harry and Ron and Hermione's kids! and hey, we get to tell the whole story over again!
So the feeling I walked away with is, what Harry fought for was to lock them into this idyllic 1950s-esque suburbian status quo, where to me, his fight should have been all about diversity and progress, while Voldemort's side were the ones wanting to lock them into some kind of false-nostalgia for a time when wizards did things the Good Old Way. At least there should have been goblins in the train station putting THEIR kids on the train too; a tiny little house elf with giant eyes and quivering ears, timidly getting aboard. The kids going to Hogwarts on a high-speed maglev train in Muggle clothes with cellphones, rolling their eyes at Mom and Dad for still going on about that boring pureblood and muggleborn stuff, when everyone knows what's really important right now are ipods and environmental wizardry, etc. Or something -- just a sign that no, we're not frozen in time".
astolat pretty much sums up my overall feelings about the book - especially the epilogue. Much more coherently and thoughtfully than I could."Finally, on one level my schmoopy heart was warmed by the epilogue of them all putting their kids on the train -- really I feel it was intended as "And they all lived happily ever after" with a few fun details -- but on a meta level, I found it a real bummer. Not so much because she paired everyone off in the boring obvious heteronormative ways, because I knew she was going to, and also fandom can and will fix that in a second, but because of the awful sense of inertia. It's nineteen years into the future and they're all in exactly the same places they were nineteen years before, both in relation to each other and in relation to their environment. In fact, in the same places they were twenty-six years before, because all the friendships and pairings are basically as they were set up in the very first book. The kids are being put on the same train, to go to the same school, to what, re-enact their lives? Without Voldemort gumming up the works, presumably, but in the context of the backstory with Grindelwald, you sort of expect that hey, it's just about time for another Dark wizard to come along, who will have to be faced by Harry and Ron and Hermione's kids! and hey, we get to tell the whole story over again!
So the feeling I walked away with is, what Harry fought for was to lock them into this idyllic 1950s-esque suburbian status quo, where to me, his fight should have been all about diversity and progress, while Voldemort's side were the ones wanting to lock them into some kind of false-nostalgia for a time when wizards did things the Good Old Way. At least there should have been goblins in the train station putting THEIR kids on the train too; a tiny little house elf with giant eyes and quivering ears, timidly getting aboard. The kids going to Hogwarts on a high-speed maglev train in Muggle clothes with cellphones, rolling their eyes at Mom and Dad for still going on about that boring pureblood and muggleborn stuff, when everyone knows what's really important right now are ipods and environmental wizardry, etc. Or something -- just a sign that no, we're not frozen in time".