There are a fair number of people who complain about what they perceive as flaws in the Harry Potter series, many of which revolve around J.K.’s missed chances to wrap the plot up with a nice little bow on top. To those readers I feel obligated to ask, “Did you completely miss the point of it all?” The thing that sets HP apart from most other books is that, despite being part of the fantasy genre, they are often uncomfortably realistic. The thing that sets Rowling apart from most other authors is her willingness to write an imperfect tale if doing so will contribute to its truth. Sure, she could have had all loose ends tied up – and I admit that upon my first reading of HP7, I was deeply frustrated by her refusal to do so. But with further reflection, I’ve realized how much a “perfect” plot would have damaged what she was trying to say with the series. War is not fair. Life is not fair. Love is not fair. All of it, the good and bad, is a messy, complicated, convoluted affair that rarely ends up the way you would expect it to along the way. Perhaps more importantly, just because the books came to a conclusion, the story did not end. There are no neatly packaged endings in life either, no truly clean breaks. Rowling’s readiness to tell the truth about the way things are – about how imperfect they are – is what results in perfection by the end of the series.
One of the biggest, “NOOO SHE DID NOT WHYYYYY?!” moments in the series came when Fred was killed. Fred, everyone’s favorite character, one half of an inseparable pair, the comic relief – if anyone was supposed to be immune to the horrors of war, it should have been Fred and George. I doubt anyone wanted the Weasley family to have to deal with the death of one of their members, especially Fred. Fred and George were the unexpected success stories of the series, as readers watched them grow from immature pranksters to rebels with a cause to thriving businessmen to unrestrained warriors – and then to see one of the pair senselessly killed (by a wall collapsing, not even in the midst of an intense bout of combat) was painful and confusing. Everyone knows that Hermione, Ron, and Harry could not be separated, but if there was one other set of characters who were more indivisible than the Trio, it was Fred and George. It wasn’t fair for Fred to die, nor was it fair that George should never be able to rebound from his death in the future. After the Battle of Hogwarts, George was incapable of producing a Protonus forevermore, because every one of his happy memories was inextricably tied to Fred. I would have sacrificed nearly any other character in place of Fred, but war doesn’t let you pick and choose who it’s going to steal away, and neither did J.K.
Bellatrix Lestrange tortured Neville’s parents into insanity, effectively orphaning him, and when the opportunity arose, she taunted him about it. A significant portion of HP fans insist that it should not have been Molly who killed Bellatrix, as she had no intimate connection to Voldemort’s right-hand woman; most say that Neville is the one who should have slaughtered his parents’ destroyer. In an ideal world, Neville would have come face-to-face with his past and conquered it. But war doesn’t follow the rules of “should.” And when I think about it more, I realize that Molly was the perfect person to take down Bellatrix, in her own way: Molly is the ultimate mother-figure in the books, and Bellatrix is, well, the opposite of that. Bellatrix mocks Molly over the death of Fred, she was ready and willing to surrender the life of Draco – her own nephew – just to further the ambitions of Voldemort, and she was, of course, never a mother herself. In the face-off between Bellatrix and her antithesis, perhaps it would have been more satisfying for Neville to get direct revenge in his parents’ honor, but for the purposes of greater themes (rather than gut-level instincts crying for vengeance), Molly was the better choice. It’s also worth looking at that Molly, who is considered “good” through and through, out-and-out murdered another character. She may be a heroine, but that does not make her unsusceptible to rage and the desire to kill when she deems it necessary. The “good” people are not utterly untainted – war does not allow them to remain so.
Another note about Neville: he doesn’t end up with Luna. I’ve already stated that I happen to think they would have been utterly ideal together, and I’m always disappointed when I reach the epilogue and realize that love affair never happens. BUT. Sometimes it’s the girl in the background that the hero winds up with, not the one who has fought by his side. If Rowling had conveniently matched up all of the main characters into happy sweet relationships, any sense of realism that she had achieved in writing their romances would fly out the window (and not on the handle of a Firebolt into the moonlight…) The truth is this: nobody can help who they fall in love with, or who they do not. That in and of itself is a fact of life that most people – including me – find endlessly difficult to accept.
When it comes to the twist in a series, traditional writing techniques dictate that the author use it as a dramatic gasp-worthy climax, the literary version of a shot of adrenaline rushing through the reader’s veins. Yet Rowling takes this concept and turns it on its head during “The Prince’s Tale,” which is almost unquestionably that moment in the series. There is naturally that “a-ha!” sense when the truth about Snape is finally revealed in the Pensieve, yet when Harry withdraws his head from the surface, the reader feels only a sense of confusion and emptiness in the pit of his or her stomach , not a surge of adrenaline and triumph. Harry’s walk to the Forest makes Rowling’s revelation about Snape – a fact that had been heatedly debated since the very beginning of the series – seem almost meaningless, irrelevant. Then there is a second point regarding Snape’s life and death that I would like to raise: the atypical hero is nearly always recognized for his contributions prior to his death, if only as a sort of author-initiated amends toward a character who was somewhat unjustifiably reviled throughout the course of an entire story. But when Snape dies in Harry’s arms, he does so without anyone alive knowing the truth about him, the boy staunching the blood flow from his wounds looking at him not in sudden understanding, but only with horror at the brutality. Harry did not mourn the loss of Snape while Snape was still alive to see it. Nobody knew the truth about Snape before he died, and he left the world in the presence of the boy who had hated him since the day they met, fearing that he had failed his promise to protect Lily’s son, staring into eyes that reminded him of the love that he had lost years earlier, in a face that was the splitting image of the man who he believed stole that love from him. There’s no denying that J.K. knows how to write tragedy.
Another significant character twist came in the form of Malfoy, who many readers expected to befriend Harry upon his own inability to murder Dumbledore. In the Epilogue, Rowling makes it clear that the two never made amends, much less became friends, which is a significant departure from the classic portrayals of reformed antagonists. Some people will never like one another, and some history is not so easily smoothed over by a change of heart. Draco and Harry understand one another better by the end, and although that is not saying much for the relationship whose dynamics formed a consistent pressure and hostility throughout the series, it is the most that could possibly be expected from those two. Perhaps another writer would have seen the potential to fully reverse Malfoy’s character in another stunning turn-around, or would have used a reconciliation between Malfoy and Harry as proof that people can move beyond prejudices and preconceived notions. To me, doing so would have been just a bit too convenient, and while a “lesson” could have been spelled out, it would not be indicative of reality. The peace that comes at the end of a war does not denote the resolution of all friction that began it, it sometimes merely signifies that one or both sides are simply too weak or tired to continue fighting. Many times the best possible outcome would just be a degree of understanding between the two sides, and this is what occurred between Harry and Draco by the end of the series: not friendship or alliance, but a sense that both young men understood where the other had come from and why they had acted as they did, regardless of what those actions were.
There is a massive movement among the HP fandom that desperately wants J.K. to write a prequel to the series detailing the lives of the Marauders. I may be one of the few that strongly rejects such an idea. One of the most basic facts of life is that none of us know our parents fully, as we were not present for their youth before our births, and no amount of storytelling can allow us to feel that we understand their history inside and out. I know the concept of J.K. writing another book that delves into the dramatic narratives of the Marauders is tantalizing, but should we know more about the past of Harry’s parents than Harry himself did, the connection between us as readers and Harry would no longer be one of equality. Throughout the series we knew just what Harry did, and while there were a couple of exceptions in which we glimpsed happenings through the eyes of other characters, we never had a sense of knowing some grand truth that Harry did not. Harry desperately wanted to understand his parents and the lives that they had lived, but he will never be able to, just as we will never be able to with our own parents; while it is an unfortunate fact, it is vital that Rowling remained faithful to those larger realities about life, or else the whole purpose of the series would be jeopardized.
