... is way worse than I expected. Among other things:
Instead of Rowlings making the book possible by pulling something out of her ass that was always there but was somehow missed (like teleportation), we have THREE new things. The Deathly Hallows.
First is the Plotdevicium Wand. It's wielder cannot be defeated in wand duel.
Then we have the Amulet Of Immortality which imperfectly resurrects people unless your name is Harry Potter
The we have Death's Invisibility Cloak (yes, Death. Black robe, scythe, speaks in gothic letters?)
Various people die as the book progresses, including half the fucking cast.
Remus and Tonks die off-camera and their death is basically unexplained. A total WTF?! moment if I ever saw one
Voldemort dies in three sentences flat. He launches the Avada Kadavra but the Plotdevicium Wand yells "Harry, I choose you!" and then Harry uses Spell Reflection and throws it back at V. This takes, as I said, THREE FUCKING SENTENCES!
Harry marries Ginny and they leave happily ever after and have five children. A lot more space is given to the fact that Harry had five children than to the fact that he saved the world.
In short, I hate Rowlings with the fiery passion of a thousand sons. As far as I am concerned, a certain fan-fiction on my hard-drive is the end of HP. Fucking Rowlings
edit: and that 'stuff that was always there we just didn't tell you about it until now' pissed me off enough to not read the latter books (I'm still fucking ashamed for reading the first ones though)
It's her book. If she thinks people dying is an important lesson to young readers, that's her perogative. Death is important to life.
Even though I hate death, and think many books would be better without it... I wasn't the author and I'd hate for good authors to fall into the Piers Anthony trap.
On a Pale Horse is pretty decent, and each of the later ones is progressively bad. By the time it gets to With a Tangled Skein it's basically unreadable and the damn series keeps going. That's book three, the series is seven books long.
Xanth books are much the same way. The early ones are OK as juvenile fiction goes. The later ones get deeper and deeper into lame word play, furry-sex, and pedophilia. Reading them is not only a chore, it makes one feel dirty. By book 13 the author spends nearly a quarter of the book explaining why it's OK to have lots of sex with someone who by some measure or another is like 6.
Does anyone have a problem with Anthony's style? I mean... there's something about it, I can't quite put my finger on it, that just sits poorly with me. I think it's something about the pacing or the perspective... I don't know. On A Pale Horse just didn't read well (for me anyhow). The plot was alright I guess.
wrote:Does anyone have a problem with Anthony's style?
Sometimes, some of his books read almost like a different authors though.
So yeah, some of the older stuff and the incarnation series read, well, just poorly.
A lot of his Xanth and adept and other miscellaneous pseudo science fiction stuff is a lot more readable, on the basic "can you sit there and actually read it" level.
But the readability of his style is just one of the traps the poor guy falls into.
I mean you are still going to need a fairly high tollerance for all the alien/furry/were-unicorn/robot sex and nudity and to contend with. And thats outside of the perhaps more disturbing Xanth stuff.
But aside from that hey, I used to read Marion Zimmer Bradley so its all pretty easy enough to handle. I mean, wow, the Darkover series, whole damn thing was founded on a human-alien-cat-red head-pscyhic-drug fueled-mass orgy. And THEN it started getting kinky...
Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)
nova88 at [unixtime wrote:1186160620[/unixtime]] I also disliked the epilogue.I would have preferred them all to be standing on a terrace,quietly talking, with an east wind blowing..........
In my current mood, I'd prefer a thermonuclear airstrike. Or maybe Orbital Bombardment. But man, that ending was fucking lame.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
And as far as Anthony is concerned, i'm trying to read "Crewel Lye", a Xanth novel. It's impossible. I picked the book up, having read only A spell for Chameleon, and i seem to be missing some 400 pages of backstory.
The book does pretty well as an action/adventure story. It's faster paced and tighter plotted than I thought Rowling was capable of. And the big fight is much cooler and less nonsensical than I feared it would be.
But you would think it was written by a screenwriter. Seriously, they won't even bother hiring someone to adapt it for film; they'll just shoot directly from the book.
The result is that although the action is cool and there are lots of great moments (I love the development she gives Neville, Ron, and Kreacher especially) she really drops the ball on a lot of subtler points.
Unanswered questions include:
What the hell did book six have to do with *anything*? Setting aside the absence of plot, it's in a totally different place thematically from book seven.
What are the Dark Arts, and what's so dark about them?
Why, if Harry's power is the Power of Love, is he such a hateful little bugger?
--------------------------------
But never mind all that. Although the book does have all kinds of literary failings, it annoys *me* for a totally idiosyncratic reason: I was a devout Harry/Luna supporter.
The Dark Arts are so dark because people do bad things with them.
Ripping your soul apart through murder and shoving bits and pieces of it into junk? Dark.
Launching a curse that completely ignores magical defenses and kills instantly? Dark. (conversly, paralyzing someone and ripping out their throat with a sharpened bit of force and letting them bleed out is merely Grey).
It seems to me that the Dark Arts are mostly things that allow someone to easily take over. Look at what the three unforgivable curses are: Unblockable Killing Curse, Undetectable Mind Control Curse, and the Inflict Pain Without Damage Curse. Their medical magics are so powerful and pervasive, they don't even tell their parents when someone loses all the bones out of their arm. You just spend the night in the nurses office and you're fine the next morning, but the two damaging curses don't actually deal any damage at all, there's nothing to fix. So you have Neville's parents permanatly insane because their brains havn't actually been hurt, so it can't be fixed with a wave of the wand. The only reason I can think of that Avada Kedavra is banned is because there is no defense short of dodging it. Nobody seems to think anything of attacking with magical knives (the cutting curse) and letting someone bleed out, because you can block it, or fix the cut if it turns out to not be fatal. Avada Kedavra can't be fixed -- if it hits you, you're gone instantly. It can't be blocked -- shield charms do nothing. And, of course, the Imperious Curse is virtually undectable, so you can't have that being used.
I don't understand why the Polyjuice Potion isn't considered Dark. It is virtually undetectable, and worse, a first year who's good at cooking could make it.
technomancer wrote:The Dark Arts are so dark because people do bad things with them.
I thought the Dark Arts were so dark because bad people did bad things with them. My impression of HP Land was that wizards tend to have a trademark spell. The trademark spells of wizards who did bad things are those that became Dark Arts.
Polyjuice may have come from the restricted section of the library, but I think because of things like what happened to Hermoine -- she accidentally used cat hair and became semi-permanently transformed into a half-cat creature. Presumably, if it's made badly, or if you just use non-human material samples, it can do bad things to you, which may or may not be easily reversable. On the other hand, it is taught in the NEWT potions class, so it's still something students are expected to be able to make.
-----------
Here's a fun challenge: Why is Knockturn Alley such a bad place for kids to visit? Only one store is ever mentioned, and it's kinda tame. Sure, it has some dodgy stuff in it that is just barely not Dark enough to be banned, but it's not really dangerous. The only thing I can think of is that it's a Redlight District. Think of the possibilities with shapechanging magics available.
IIRC, the chase scene at the beginning mentions red and green boolts colliding in the air; I could be wrong, but that's my recollection, which implies that actuall yhe Unblockable Curse can be blocked by, well, *any spell*
That's stupid, but so is most of her magic system.
As for the Dark Arts, I really, really wanted the term to mean something. Let's look at it like a School of Magic.
D&D has kind of schizophrenic schools, since they cna be defined in one of three different ways.
Thematically: Necromancy, for instanc,e is made up of "anything creepy". In other words, the Dakr Arts is just any spell that's *unpopoular* That's logical, but, in my personal opinion, kind of lame.
Functionally: Divinations reveal information; Abjurations protect. "Dark Arts" might just mean harmful/dangerous magic. In This case one wonders about "Hexes" --are they dark? Grey? Presumeably, in this worldview, Defense against the Dark Arts isn't a school of magic, it's an interdisciplinary approach to self-defens, eincorporating charms, transfigurations, potions, and all the rest.
Mechanically: Some schools are defiend by *how* they do things. Evocations create energy; conjurations create matter. Either can deal direct damage. (And don't get me started on "conjured fire")
This is the one I was leaning toward. The only thing we really know about the Dark Arts proper is one quote from Bellatrix. "You have to *mean* them." She was talking about the Big Three, but maybe it applies to all Dark Arts. Notice something else. The three heroes each have a different high mental stat. Ron gets stuck with Wisdom, which has few direct magical applications. Hermione gets Intelligence. She's good at *rational* magic: anything where getting the words and gestures precisely right is the key. Harry, on the other hand, clearly has a high Charisma. Beyond that, we're told he's got the innate potential to be a great Dark Wizard. Maybe those are really one and the same.
The magic Harry excels at is anything they *don't* learn in class, and often dependent on state of mind or force of will, like the Patronus. Maybe "Dark Arts" are "dark" because they're chaotic and dangerous. Under this paradigm, Defense Against the Dark Arts class probably teaches the actual Dark Arts, which *include* the Patronus charm, and probably the Fidelius Charm as well. Plus whatever Lily did to save Harry in the first place.
Of course, I also had predicted that the Big Three were bad news. When Bellatrix told him that one needs to *mean* the Big Three, I figured that Harry would do well to stay far away form them. If his power is love, than cultivating that kind of hate is probably not the way to go. The complete failure of Sectumsempra to *ever* help him in Six seemed to confirm that he needed to "turn loose of anger."
But no! He and other good guys just start chucking Unforgiveables all throughout Seven and it never once gets them into trouble or even moral conflict.
shirak at [unixtime wrote:1187557704[/unixtime]]Fuzzy: Go read the Book of Exalted Deeds. It will clear up a lot of your questions about Rowling's "morality". Fvcking Harry Potter
It's a trap!
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
]
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
I would tell my dying mother to read the Book of Vile Darkness before I told Pol Pot to read the Book of Exalted Deeds.
But for serious this time, she probably wanted to explain this concept with the revolutionary Dark and Light Side of the Force theory. I wonder why she didn't.
Lago_AM3P at [unixtime wrote:1187571486[/unixtime]]
Go read the Book of Exalted Deeds.
I would tell my dying mother to read the Book of Vile Darkness before I told Pol Pot to read the Book of Exalted Deeds.
But for serious this time, she probably wanted to explain this concept with the revolutionary Dark and Light Side of the Force theory. I wonder why she didn't.
Probably didn't want to labeled a Star wars ripoff/uncreative.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
]
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
I've only read the fourth and fifth books and seen the third movie. I liked it. I might read the sixth and seventh books, but only if they pretty much fall into my lap.
Call me a cynical, snarking hatemonger spawned by Portal of Evil and Something Awful, but would I be wrong in speculating that a lot of the discontent with the ending of the 7th book is sour grapes on the part of the fans?
And by sour grapes, I mean Harry Potter not hooking up with Hermione. Hurr.
