Harry Potter and the Shitty Ending

For the past few weeks I've been reading through the Harry Potter septology again. I've gone through about half a book a day (on good days), trying to condense the experience into as short a time as possible while still affording myself time to do my schoolwork and wank off. After cramming through the series (to the best of my abilities) this is my assessment:

Deathly Hallows is a shitty ending.

Yes, the book itself is good. It has enough quality, compelling story to get one through the shit. And even though the story lurches between it's repetition of "lull - angst - action" the action is invigorating enough to have made the lull and angst worth the time spent reading the pages. Deathy Hallows has character development, fills out the story, has that one part where I have to put the book down and walk away because I'm crying too much, and an ending climax which is BEST.

But as an ending to the series? It blows more goats than Aberforth.*

The main story ends with that terrific climactic battle and a nice wrapping up of the titular devices. Fine. But then that's it. There are no more pages. Yes, we get that crappy "19 years later" thing but that is little more than a list of names. We don't really know what happens to the degree that we know what happened after the other books in the series. The best comparison I can think of is the difference between Return of the Jedi and Return of the King...which I've just now realized have strikingly similar titles.

Anyway, Return of the Jedi ends with the death star blowing up and Ewoks dancing. And in terms of an ending to the Star Wars Saga that's fine; the ending compliments the structure of the storyline. The entire character development, story, plot, and focus of the series was on blowing up Death Stars, on overcoming the Empire. We aren't ever really led to give a shit about anything given how narrow the narrative is.

Contrast that with Return of the King. After The One Ring is destroyed we still get a shit ton of pages flushing out the rest of the narrative. Checking quickly, I find that The One Ring is destroyed on page 249 and the story ends on page 347. And then Appendix A starts and goes on to page 481. So they destroy The One Ring and then we get 200 pages of more shit.

Now, Compare that to Deathly Hallows. The battle ends on Page 743. The story ends on 749. And then we get that "19 years later" bullshit chapter.

As a book? Deathly Hallows is fine. But as an ending to the story of Harry Potter Deathy Hallows is fucking abysmal. The manner in which the story ends does not cohere with the manner in which the narrative was presented throughout the septology. After investing so many pages in these characters, in fleshing out their relationships and motivations and characteristics the only real answers and ending we get is "what the fuck was up with that Harry - Voldemort thing" and "what the fuck was up with Dumbledore". That's it.

And it doesn't even match the other books in the series. In every other book we get that section which comes after the climax. The section in which Harry and Dumbledore have their little chat and the "going back to Privet Drive" section. The books end leading into one another. But Deathly Hallows just stops. We don't get to see the fallout; the consequences; the impact the climax had on the world at large. It's just "yup, he's dead" and that's that.**

Harry Potter is a narrative fleshed out to the degree of Lord of the Rings, but what we get at the end is Return of the Jedi, not Return of the King. And that is frustrating. After building up these characters and after spending all of this time reading about them I want to know what happens. To put it bluntly: I care about more than Harry, Voldemort, and Dumbledore.

That's really the problem with Deathly Hallows as an ending to the Harry Potter series: It only addresses Harry, Voldemort, and Dumbledore and those aspects of characters which impact the Harry, Voldemort, Dumbledore story. All of these other characters are simply brushed aside. And that's bullshit.

*I kind of cringed inside when I wrote that.
**I used a pronoun so that the "zomg spoilers" assholes couldn't bitch about me spoiling anything.