j.k.

….the thrilling conclusion of the harry potter diaries!

SPOILER ALERT: there are spoilers. there are so many. please god don’t read any further if you haven’t taken a dip in potter pond yet. no, no, don’t tell me it doesn’t matter because you’re not interested and you’re not going to read them or see them, don’t tell me that, because you don’t know it yet but that’s a LIE. don’t be like me and think it’s funny when you’re hanging out with your friend on a lovely east village summer day and he’s walking around looking at people with their big fat green half-blood princes, going. “man, i really wanna go up to that lady and tell her that [CONTENT REMOVED].” it’s not funny. someday, you’re going to be that lady, and you’re gonna remember that day, and you’re gonna go, “oh, wait… damn.” so stop reading, now.

okay, are we all cool now? all on board? all down all the way to book seven, page 759? okay, let’s do this.

book 5: a whole lotta nothin’.

worst one. hands down. you can tell because i didn’t eat it up like candy. i ate it like, i don’t know, fig newtons. 870 pages just to let us know that no, really, that umbridge lady is, like, super mean. and what was with the lame suspense of hagrid getting beat up and taking like 600 pages to tell us why? obviously he was tangling with some grumpy creature, right, and then when it’s a giant, for some reason hermione acts like it’s the most scandalous thing she’s ever heard.

[and hermione is in no position to be scandalized by anything, because apparently something about her sure is giving people out there in internetland the impression that this

is a remotely feasible situation. you heard it here first (i hope): snape-hermione fan fiction is prevalent. no, i don’t know why. if you ask me, it makes no sense, and is way more upsetting and less entertaining than my ideal potter-inspired fan fiction scenario, alan-rickman-as-severus-snape-hosts-a-cooking-show.]

i know, i’m repeating myself. i think what may be in order is a reminder of mr. rickman at his snapiest. i dare you not to laugh- “misssssssster potterrrrr.”

speaking of snape!

book six: short and sweet.

i liked book six, a lot. nicely formatted into two or three clean storylines: voldemort’s past, the mystery of the half-blood prince, and… hella teen gossip! the best part, duh.

so, i never liked the idea of snape being evil. i thought it was cool to have a character who’s kind of a dick, but not, you know, pure evil. that’s how life is sometimes… we’d all love to think that the snapes in our lives have been stealing office supplies the whole time we’ve worked in the cubicle next to them, a little “told you so” to the world at large, but that rarely happens. people are dicks for dicks’ sake, i suppose, and i thought snape was that, too. so imagine my annoyance when book six suggested the all-too-obvious solution that, yup, bad people are as bad as you always suspected. it really rubbed me the wrong way. more on that later.

okay, so the ending. the bad news is, it was spoiled for me, over and over again. the good news is, i didn’t know how thoroughly dark the ending was, like all hope was lost and nothing good would ever happen again. also, not going back to hogwarts? i was not down with that. still….

book seven: jk.

all in all, this was a good ride. what am i saying, last night i stayed up til two to finish the last 120 pages. so, yeah. it was really good. tremendously satisfied with the snape resolution, and with the morally ambiguous dumbledore’s dark past stuff.

so, jk, kudos to you for having the balls to kill people we love in a crazy bloodbath… i mean that… she’s not afraid to go for the jugular, jk. still, that’s a can of worms that i’m not sure you fully dealt with as much as possible. like, fred died… so, where’s george? and realistically– since you’re usually so admirably concerned with realism in your characters’ emotions, i.e. harry never becoming desensitized to loved ones’ deaths, no matter how many of them pile up as the books go on; he always thinks, “this can’t be happening,” which i think is pretty accurate– i’m pretty sure the entire weasley family would be way more concerned with the death of a son or brother than with voldemort being vanquished. way more.

i have no complaints about a happy ending. as many have pointed out, “it had to happen that way.” and we got a cool eerie purgatorial dream sequence to boot, so bonus.

but.

jk, that epilogue sucked so hard. so hard. do you know how happy i was, how happy most of us probably were, to turn the page and see that “nineteen years later” staring up at us? and then what? do you even remember, or did you just totally phone that part in, which is kinda how it seems?

four people– out of the dozens we’ve come to know and love over the course of the seven books– got married and popped out some babies. the end. what? where’s luna? where’s george? what’s everybody doing with their lives, besides having wizard sex and giving their offspring really transparently nostalgic lame names? hermione should be running the country, for god’s sake. the epilogue gets a t for terrible, or whatever it is in the o.w.l.s., i don’t remember, i’m not some kinda nerd.