Some People Claim that There's a Woman to Blame

Other than the anti-"all human behavior can be explained by describing the effects on the brain of a single hormone" manifesto, this is the only article on the page that's gotten me any mail at all (two whole letters!). Public opinion seems to suggest that I turned against Harry Potter because I once believed in it very sincerely, and so when its conclusion disappointed me I was desperately hurt and angry. Personally, I think I turned against Potter because it violates the tenth rule governing the creation of Literary Art: "[T]he author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of [her] tale and in their fate; and that [s]he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "[Harry Potter]" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together." But, you know, whatever flips your pancakes. If the Harry Potter series ever meant a great deal to me, I can't remember it now. When I think about my early days in the fandom, all I can really remember is wanting to bang Alan Rickman in his Snape costume. Or on the Snape costume. (I said I wasn't picky.)

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Years and years (and years) ago, I planned to write a giant flustered defense of Harry Potter and the on the model of the epic fantardian masterpiece that eventually became Cynn Corvus. Of course, Harry Potter and the turned out to be genuinely awful, and luckily I never actually managed to write anything about it. But, I did find this lying around recently:

The 'happy thoughts' appeared first, as themselves, in Peter Pan — a severely creepy novel which seems dedicated to immobilizing and then unnaturally preserving, like a fetal pig in embalming fluid, a state of idealized, imagined childhood — as the mechanism by which the fairy-chosen learn to fly. In Harry Potter, the same 'happy thoughts' device is used to drive back the torments of the Dementors, who represent more straightforwardly the depredations of abuse and mental disease. The happy thoughts don't help Harry to fly; they stop him from losing his mind. Harry is a potentially unstable and very powerful child. If he were overcome by the darkness of his past, there's no telling what acts of darkness he would be capable of committing in the future. The metaphor is more life-like, and therefore more honest.

What the hell does that mean? What is a "life-like metaphor"?

More recently, I wanted to write a giant flustered defense of how terrible I thought the last couple of Potter novels were, but I quickly realized that if I didn't want to make an even bigger fool of myself than I usually do, I'd actually have to go back and read the last couple of terrible Potter novels again, and thank you, but I'm busy right now. I've got this… thing… I'm doing. It'll take forever to finish. Right. 

Had I composed myself enough to describe it in words, my monstrous and chicken-feathered rage would of course have been centered on the fact that Potter turned out to be nothing but a series of vile and/or genuinely baffling cliches, most of which are completely useless and all of which had already been set down more lucidly and in prettier, less self-defeatingly spurious words by authors far more talented than Rowling.

But, here are some of the things that infuriated me most:
# The fact that Tonks, the least dreary of Rowling's awful, awful, awful female characters, was forced to sacrifice her life and her dignity for the privilege of making that wretched epilogue look like The Forsyte Saga for People Who Sometimes Have Trouble Remembering How to Work Their Thumbs.
# Ginny Weasley? Really?
# I think it would've been much more entertaining and instructive had Ron fallen in love with and married a copy of Hogwarts: A History.
# Ginny Weasley? Really? I mean, isn't that kind of, I don't know — incestuous or something? Not to mention fairly disgusting? And a bit like Harry married the specter of his mother and his actual sister at the same time? And: Yuck?
# That wonderful book Hermione received from Luna Lovegood's father, that book that looked like a simple children's book, sure — but it was secretly the key to saving the world???? That was not embarrassing at all.
# The moment near(ish) the end of the series when Harry rejected Lupin, live-action-Disney-movie-from-the-60s-style: "GET OUT OF HERE, YOU STUPID WEREWOLF! CAN'T YOU SEE THAT NOBODY WANTS YOU ANYWAY!!" [*THROWS ROCKS*] [*SOBS*]
# "Mudbloods"? Because that actually means something, out here in the dirt world.
# If you base 98% of the contents of your irrational, fable-congested fantasy series on Terry Pratchett novels, don't go stealing the end from Mitch Albom. Looks unprofessional.
# That's a rather small gene pool there at Hogwarts, isn't it?
# I think it would've been much more entertaining and instructive had Snape actually been in clandestine virginal love with a copy of Hogwarts: A History.
# What do you call an adult person named "Albus Severus"? Albus? Severus? Al? Sev? A.S.? The Albatross? (NOTE: I might try reading a mystery novel written by A.S. Potter. Just saying.)
# Ginny Weasley? Are you sure? Can you just check one more time?

If I had had everything I wanted out of the ending of the series, I would've gotten:
# A less ignominious death (and romantic history) for Snape.
# Harry living a realistically fractured Muggle life. Alone.
# A giant pile of dead Weasleys, topped with a big shiny dead Hagrid. (Really looking forward to that one.)
# Draco/Hermione. NON-NEGOTIABLE.
IMPORTANT NOTE: From the moment Draco Malfoy called Hermione Granger a "mudblood" in that third novel, I needed him to become the series' hero. (I determined at an early date that Harry would have to die or vanish from his own story in order to close the messianic biofeedback loop.) Draco's wickedness is motivated entirely by his birth and his station, which leaves him perfectly positioned for an ecstasy of cathartic redemption. And, since Draco's father is such an idiotic, shallow, immoral, and power-hungry fool, it was very important to me that Draco achieve the prestige and authority craved so desperately by Malfoy père, but by means exactly opposite to the traditional Malfoy method — being a sneak and a liar and a bully and a masked terrorist. I wanted Draco to forfeit his life for committing the inexcusable sin of baseless and fatal prejudice: not by dying, which would have been gauche and old-fashioned of him, but by living a long and happy life as the sort of wizard who would never, ever, ever call anybody a mudblood. And what sort of wizard would never call someone a mudblood? A wizard whose wife and children are part Muggle! KAPOW. I think Rowling instinctively attempted to achieve this reversal, in her incompetent and ham-handed way, by denying Draco his father's magnificent head of platinum hair in that egregious epilogue — but in this, as in everything else about the story, she failed miserably. And who actually gives a shit about the motherfucker's stupid hair, anyway? Was Rowling really reading her own fanfic?
# Characters who learned something from the unrelenting, divisive miseries of class warfare. Example: Maybe let's not sort our poor little bastard schoolchildren into retarded animal-cracker "Houses" which burden them — at age 11! — with inaccurate, arbitrary, pejorative, and enduring judgments of their moral fiber, not to mention saddling them with generations of baseless clan-oriented resentment and the seeds of social insurrection? The last survivors should've banded together and torn Hogwarts down, burned the stone, and salted the earth at the end of that final novel. It represents in three dimensions the wicked wizard-world hypocrisy that fueled Voldemort's evil, and it should never have been allowed to stand into perpetuity, inviolate in its amber gloss of everlasting, bigoted nostalgia.
# A point? Of some sort? I'm not picky.

If I had what I wanted out of life, I would've been bright enough at ages 19 through 27 to spend the time I wasted reading those worthless, idiot books on something potentially useful, like learning to shoplift or apply false eyelashes. Like, in the moment? Didn't even notice that Hogwarts is a fucking disgusting British boarding school. A BOARDING SCHOOL! FOR WIZARDS. IN BRITAIN. And that one's all me, and none of Rowling, and I have to carry it under my hat forever.

So, to borrow a useful trick:
SHORTER HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS:
When you're a real grown-up, you'll be just exactly like everyone else, and all will be well. You'll age out of your oddness and your inconvenient rage, not to mention the useful cluster of survival skills you currently have at your disposal. Life will stop hurting, and also things will stop being demanded of you. You'll get married to a person of the appropriate gender and have lots of adorably mediocre children, and you'll probably own a nice brick house and some ungainly means of transportation, and you'll never feel even one more pang of existential pain. Won't that be lovely? And quiet? And not entirely unlike clinical brain death? Oh, 1953 was such a fantastic year, wasn't it?
SUBTEXTUAL SHORTER SHORTER HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS:
Um. Have you just tried not being gay?