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@amerizsnyuri
Hey if you'd like to plese look at my (in progress) playlist for Eda! She's such an important character for me and i'm loving making this
Also! If you have any suggestions for a song about Eda and Luz i'd love to hear it, it's been difficult finding a song for their mother-daughter relationship
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Tjo9tM0b5v8t9SixMFaSX?si=buuY2OgBRHSNAU_g6Fm4mw
A little shot on how it could be in a few years (and yes, I always show up when I like a new couple)
Don’t you get it? I love you. I always have.
"𝒊𝒕'𝒔 𝒕𝒐𝒐 𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒎𝒆, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖, 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒔 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒚𝒐𝒖. 𝑰'𝒎 𝒔𝒐 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖, 𝑪𝒂𝒕𝒓𝒂"
Unpopular opinion: the Harry Potter epilogue was fine
When one of the themes of the last book of a series is instability and the abandonment of one’s family for their own good, having the book end with a nice scene of all your main characters grown up and happy with families and children of their own isn’t “heterosexual bullshit”, it’s a strong way to reiterate how the main theme of the series is that family and familial love are one of the strongest and most enduring parts of life.
Kings Cross Station is visited in every single book, coming and going, or the fact that it isn’t is emphasized, because it is a transition point - one from which Harry ceaselessly chooses the friends and family, love and acceptance, of the wizarding world. The thing Harry wanted most, when he was 11 years old and staring at a mirror of his innermost desires. The final shot of the series, in book and in film, is Harry doing the normal wizarding family thing - no dark wizards, no danger - with the family he has found and built.
One of the things that strikes me about the epilogue is that, while it is widely criticized as unrealistic and unbelievable, the “marry young to a teenage sweetheart, settle down and have a family” is the sort of happily-ever-after achievement quite well-known and common in a certain type of society/culture/community: specifically insular, small populations with a distinct cultural identity.
Which … most readers of the Harry Potter stories are not of, or at least not just of, but Harry Potter and his friends are of.
“Marry your high-school sweetheart at age eighteen” is the sort of dream you find in Midwestern American small towns where everybody knows everybody and nobody locks their door, and in 1800′s agrarian settler communities where the next town is a day or three away by horse and buggy, and in cultures where members are expected to marry within the group, and in places where higher education isn’t much of a thing, and in economic situations where setting up a household doesn’t require a major amount of startup capital.
The wizarding world has a population small enough that one school is sufficient to serve the entire population of Britain. There are functional barriers to intermarriage due to enforced secrecy and a nonmagical person’s poor ability to participate in a society where everyone is magical. Despite things like Floo, portkeys, and apparition, international travel doesn’t seem to happen very much, and travel across the island to Hogwarts is made into a full-day journey, contributing to a sense of distance. The culture is highly traditional and insular in many ways. And magic allows you to create a functional house for yourself even if you’re poor.
“Marry young, marry your childhood/teenage sweetheart, settle down, have kids” isn’t our thing, it’s unrealistic in light of the wider world of career advancement, romantic prospects, and expanded personal growth patterns, and it’s often financially out of reach for us. But it makes perfect sense in the context of the magical society and culture.
And it’s such a strange and astounding thing, such a weird effect, that we as readers find that a stranger and more inexplicable and harder-to-believe thing than, well, magic.
…I think that, though most focus on the 2.5 children part, that is not the core problem people have with the epilogue (at least afaik).
The books were about love and family, true, but they were also about change - the more we learned about the wizarding society, the more it was obvious something would have to happen to it for a truly happy ending.
The prejudice (of muggleborns, of creatures, of muggles) was, in the earlier books, mostly expoused by Draco and the other Slytherins - and once later books came out we saw that it wasn’t just entrenched in society itself (which we can deduce mostly from the sheer number of Death Eaters) but in its government, which clashes with Harry in the form of Umbridge.
Thus we see that the government as it was (bumbling Fudge, who agreed to send Hagrid to prison and was going to give Sirius the Kiss, Fudge again who refused to listen or even believe that Voldemort had returned for a second, the whole wizengamot who was going to condemn Harry for flimsy charges, Umbridge who saw enemies of the ministry even in children and treated them as that, even Scrimgeour who wanted to use Harry for his own means) was an enemy, was what our protagonists were going to go against.
(And once Voldemort takes over it, they can go against it AND him at once quite neatly.)
One could argue that the house system itself was a generator of prejudice (”Hufflepuffs are all duffers, Slytherin all go bad”) - and tbh whatever bad things many Slytherins have done, it is still no reason to treat newly-sorted eleven year olds like potential enemies. (A passage that always gets me is the twins harassing some poor first year Slytherin who has just been sorted on his way to the table - it’s never addressed, not even given an explanation.)
If the series had ended with the main battle won, and the heroes just looking out with hope towards the future (as the chapter before the epilogue closes with), I think few would have had issues with it. One could even suggest a family in the future for Harry, with him and Ginny reconciling after the whole ordeal.
It’s not the family itself that is the problem.
It’s the repetition - or rather, the continuation - of all the things that led to the chaos and pain of the wars in the past. Things that we were promised would change thanks to our protagonists, but which are just reinforced.
We learn Ron has Confunded the hapless Muggle testing his driving, and the two derive mirth from it (thus showing not an ounce of respect towards a fellow human being, and continuing the trend of wizards being better than Death Eaters because they do not kill Muggles, and then turning around and treating them like witless children to be manipulated, as shown during the Quidditch World Cup from how the owners of that camping site were Obliviated so repeatedly that they were losing their minds, or when Harry’s actions on his aunt were brushed away quite easily, or when Hagrid cast magic likely to be permanent on Dudley, who had to have his tail surgically removed).
We hear Ron reinforce the Weasley-Malfoy feud, through the proxy of their own children. We learn that Draco has had pretty much no contact whatsoever with them, and that there is still tension despite the 19 years that have passed.
We hear Albus Severus scared that he would end up in Slytherin, and Harry consoling him by telling them that Slytherin can be brave too, and that in any case he can choose not to be in that house (and how comes he never heard of the “war hero Snape”, unless the image of Slytherin is still that of the evil house, Voldemort’s house).
…And sure, these aren’t the same as “Muggleborn registration” or “terrorist attacks on Muggles”, and it IS still kind of a happy ending by virtue of that not being there.
But the cracks are plain - there has been no actual deep change in the wizarding world, just a soft reset. And from that soft reset, another Dark Lord can rise again - and likely will.
I do think that most readers not identifying at all with the dream of a picket fence family helped the negative reception. Tbh it feels also like a generational thing - most people grew up alongside Harry Potter, and strongly identified with its themes of rebellion… And then he grows up and becomes the embodiment of the unrealistic dream of their parents’ generation. THAT sure wouldn’t sit well with most.
But the insidiousness of the epilogue is that it is that, coupled with the cracks under a peaceful facade - and, given the surface is already something many dislike, the aforementioned cracks (which, I grant, are tiny and could be easily explained away) show all the more and end up under close scrutiny.
Harry Potter was a very rebellious story, as I mentioned - the protagonist is first hounded by the (at the time legitimate) government, sees its corruption and flaws, and then fights against it.
To see that rebelliousness turned dormant without a clear resolution to it (as in, a significant change in the attitudes towards muggles, muggleborns and creatures, as well as perhaps a complete overhauling of the house system or it not mattering as much, since - as the Hat even said! - they are stronger together and shouldn’t be so divided…) turned many people sour, me included.
If the family had come alongside that societal change, then more power to Harry. But it almost looks like the trio turned a blind eye to the deeper issues and just… gave up.
(Also I am loathe to talk about the Cursed Child, but that Albus was treated so badly once in Slytherin, that Scorpius had his family maligned and a connection to Voldemort hanging over his head, and that Delphini so easily moved forces - and that Harry and Hermione would be so ineffective as to let them gather - shows that yep, society hasn’t actually changed at all and the whole thing will explode again as soon as enough fuel gathers.)
Given the chiastic structure of Rowling’s series, I fully anticipated (even as a young reader who could predict or sense developments based on the structure but was as yet unaware of how to identify the structure of a book or series) that the epilogue would end with Harry seeing off his own children at the Hogwarts Express. I instinctively knew that for a character whose greatest longing was for family, the series would end with him having found family. Everything about the structure of the series indicated it would lead up to that if Rowling intended for a proper “happy” resolution for his character.
However, I have to agree that my greatest issue with the epilogue was the fact that Rowling seemed to have been trying to show the reader that wizarding society had deeper problems and that it was those systemic issues and biases that allowed for an environment where the Grindelwalds and Voldemorts of their world could rise to power, yet by the epilogue’s end it did seem as if Rowling had dropped those threads of her plot and left them unresolved (and given her chiasmus, these unresolved holes in her plot felt even starker because the evidence of how deliberate her plotting and structure was was on display throughout her series in every other aspect). I could easily have accepted that change might be slow, that can often be the case, however, the fact that there seemed to have been no change at all and, post-Voldemort, everything was “business-as-usual” was a much harder pill for me to swallow.
Realistically, systemic prejudice is not something that can be easily extricated from a government or society. So, I could have accepted if the epilogue had given us some indication that there were still problems in the wizarding world if not for the fact that Harry, Hermione, and Ron seemed to have settled and just become the next generation of adults who were blind or indifferent to it. Instead of being left with the sense the Trio’s generation would be the generation who learned from the mistakes of the past and had been actively working to really address systemic issues you are left with the sense that they were comfortable with just stepping into the same shoes of adulthood the generation before them wore, so to speak.
Certainly, they won the war against Voldemort but….that’s about it. They fought against the most extreme byproduct of what the systemic prejudices of their society can lead to but they’ve yet to do anything about core societal issues Rowling’s series gradually exposed (and in some instances, as the reader is shown with Ron Confuding a Muggle, joking about Love Potion with his children, or reinforcing the continued Weasley-Malfoy feud they even seemed to be complicit in blithely continuing their perpetuation). So, “in the end,” the reader is left with the impression that the extremists have merely been thrust back into the shadows and the disease they’ve grown out of remains and is allowed to continue, unaddressed and unchecked. For me, that was my biggest issue with the epilogue. That the Trio seemed to have found their “happy” resolution and damn the rest.
I think with just a few details the epilogue could have been more satisfying, even with the “married their teenage sweethearts” conclusion that always seemed an inevitability. Rowling could have left some of the imperfections or “cracks” of their society but had we at least seen some awareness of them or resistance towards them on the part of the Trio it would have painted a different picture. Instead of an impression that nothing had really changed after Voldemort, you would see the evidence of Harry’s generation trying to reshape their world into a better and wiser one who has learned from the prejudice and extremism of the past. Unfortunately, just as Rowling’s series seemed to have a low opinion of history if we’re to go by the running joke around Binns, her epilogue leaves us with this sour taste because her characters seem doomed to repeat history having not learned a thing.
Honestly, this touches on one of my biggest complaints about the series as a whole. Nearly every single character exists in a kind of arrested development. In some cases, it makes sense. Snape is driven by his grief, so rooting him to his teenage experiences makes literary sense. And Sirius was literally imprisoned since he was a young adult, so he didn’t have an opportunity to develop.
But almost EVERY character is like that. Arthur and Molly met at Hogwarts and fell in love. Dumbledore’s arc is rooted in his teenage obsession with Grindelwald that got his sister killed. Remus never makes any new friends or contacts after losing his group. Hagrid remained a groundskeeper at Hogwarts for years after being expelled.
The few people who do make a connection outside of Hogwarts (RemusxTonks and BillxFluer respectively) are still intrinsically tied to the school AND feature girls who just graduated getting wed marrying men five to fifteen years older than them.
Maybe this could have been decent social commentary about how war freezes the lives of those involved in it? That years of fighting left the older generation too scarred to emotionally develop?
But then she writes the epilogue and, as so many before me have so eloquently put, nothing changes for the characters. The same people who loved one another STILL love another. The same characters who hate one another STILL hate one another. The house dynamics are the same.
It flies in the face of everything that she was trying to write about being able to move on and that hatred can be overcome with love.
A better ending could have compared the two generations. Imagine, instead, that Arthur and Lucius helped escort their grandkids to the train, wanting to see them off. With decades of hate, they immediately get into a loud fight. It makes sense for both of their characters. They //hate// one another and Lucius isn’t one to eat a slice of humble pie.
As they fight, Draco and his wife approach Harry and Ron to apologize. Ron laughs it off because his dad kind of started it, at least this time. Maybe shoot a short story about the last time Lucius started it.
Let them chat and catch up a bit. In doing so it’s clear they don’t exactly talk daily, but they’re on good terms. Have Malfoy ask what house they think their kids will be in and Harry says he figures his oldest will either get sorted into Gryffindor or Slytherin. Let Malfoy divulge that, should young Albus get into Slytherin, he knows all of the best hidden spots in the common room and has already shared them with his boy. Maybe they could be housemates? Let Ron shoot back that he’ll bet a galleon that Malfoy’s son will be a Gryffindor.
Something like that. Obviously I’m too lazy to write it all out, but to me it flows so much better.
Yes, so much this! It illustrates my point perfectly. The problem in the epilogue for me was never that Harry married his childhood sweetheart and went on to have 2.0 children he named after fallen people who made an impact in his life, the problem was that Rowling chose to emphasize that and proceeded to write an epilogue where the most significant change is that Harry isn’t totally against his son being sorted into Slytherin.
Changes like the one you provided, which are appropriate given they conclude with a greater emphasis on Harry’s generation as a whole and not just the fact Harry and co. married and had children, could have made all the difference. Rowling could still have written the Trio going on to marry and have children but her epilogue needed some kind of evidence of resolution that went beyond just the happy-ending for them –we needed some indication that the Trio’s generation was also working towards righting some of the wrongs and addressing some of the issues of the generations that can before them.
Agreed. I don’t have a problem with the marrying and kids in the slightest. It’s the fact no one changes. I can’t look at Harry, who spent his life being hunted by Dark wizards and struggling against the government and was fantastic as a teacher for Dumbledore’s Army, meekly becoming an Auror and ministry man. Instead of y'know like the DADA teacher now that the curse is broken. In Deathly Hallows, Aberforth brings up and points out some things about Dumbledore that makes Harry start to question him but that is never explored more. Why would he just still lovingly admire him as perfect (and name his kid after him) when the 7th book spends so much time exploring how questionable Dumbledore really was. And his resentment against Snape for all those years the spiteful teacher bullied and abused him and his friends, just suddenly forgiven simply because he was obsessed with Lily?
Ron had been showing development of shedding his upbringing with built in prejudice by how he treated Dobby, like giving him a gift of socks. Hermione is all about justice and reform, I would’ve loved to see her greeting a clothed house-elf or a werewolf or a goblin as an equal. She was so indignant about house-elves treatment she created SPEW while being mocked and the treatment against Hagrid and Remus for being half-giant and a werewolf. (Also this is a personal thing but I can’t really see Hermione as a minister like Cursed Child says she is??? Like maybe, if she felt that was the only &/or best way to create change, but she always seemed more like Slughorn with being behind the throne, influencing things. Like she organizes and arranges the DA but she puts Harry front and center and in charge. Who has time to read and have side projects when you’re the busy leader?)
The continued bigotry and perpetuation of stereotypes against houses instead of going back to the roots of houses of equal respect and renown to put like minded students together with friendly competition? Ugh. Where is the change in society that they were fighting so hard for? Where is the struggle to fix what past generations messed up?
drew my friends’ MCs!!!
(tags under the cut sorry adhfhdf)
Continuar lendo
this speaks to me on all levels
guess its time for jam city to die by my sword, huh
I’m gonna cry
Me after finding out we can date someone in hogwarts mystery
“You’re with me, so I’ll make sure we have the best Valentine’s Day no matter what.”
[At their own wedding]
Camila: This song is dedicated to my now beautiful wife, Lauren.
Camila, strumming guitar: I LOVE YOU BIIITCHHHH
Lauren: Oh god, Camila no.
Camila: I AINT NEVER GON’ STOP LOVING YOU BIITCHH.
wlw ships are so fucking valid
“So what if you can see the darkest side of me? “ “I'll show you mine.“ “ You're so fucking stupid, Reyes, what the hell are you doing here? I told you to leave me alone.” “ You're not a monster, Merula, just shut up your damn mouth, hold my hand and understand bitch, I love you and I'm not going anywhere without you“
The day when your plan to bring your Slytherin girlfriend to bed with you in your dormitory cost you 50 points and a detention session (but in love you require "small risks").
FINALLY WE GOT THE COMPLETE CLIP OF THIS SCRNE DKSBJSSBA
