Seamus Finnigan is the half-blood prince of my heart.

[jlh]

Title totally not a spoiler, but a Thursday night tshirt idea from weatherby that I wished I had so I could wear it last night! Well, I'll wear it for book 7 perhaps, or at TWH.

It was a really good call on my part to go to bed and then read in the morning. I'm a morning person anyway. So I woke up at 6:30 and, with a few breaks to cook up some eggs and prepare my lunch, I finished around noon. Nice and leisurely, so much the opposite of our no-sleep-mad-rush reading of OotP.

I tried to write something earlier but it was too paragraphy. So I'll try again with bullets.

Characters first

1. Sardonic!Harry is so much better than CAPSLOCK!Harry. I am once again in love with this man. Expect my MarySue author-insertion fic shortly. Oh yes, I will be his transfer-student-time-turner lover. Best line that wasn't quite: "I know! I can love! Big deal!"
   
2. Well, maybe I'll be Remus's lover instead. OMG backstory, and I love his "You have GOT to be fucking kidding me" reaction to why DD trusted Snape. Remus, man, you have my heart once again.
   
3. Oh, Hermione, you are so seventeen. You are still my girl.
   
4. I continue to be whatever about canon!Ron. No, I'm no Ron-hater, so pull your claws back in. I just want him to get over the jealousy, find something else to do, stop being in everyone's shadows. I want that for him so much, not to let his frustrations get him doing something not that nice, as Luna pointed out.
   
5. I like Ginny, though she did let me down a little in the home stretch. I wanted her to punch him, or something, and not let him get away with his lonely!hero bullshit. Besides, Ginny is good in the clutch, as she just keeps proving over and over again.
   
6. LUNA. Harry randomly taking Luna to the party and deciding it was worth it just to hear her rattle off crazy bullshit. I love how at ease Harry is with women; I think it's a good character trait.
   
7. Oh, my Seamus. "I am a wizard, not a baboon brandishing a stick."
   
8. Poor heartbroken Dean.
   
9. I also liked Tonks. So there.
   
10. Oh, Draco, I just want to pat your ickle head.
    
11. I have no love for Snape. I have no idea if he's actually bad, or if he's going to triple fake us, though I will say that I'm not sure what the advantage is right now. But I don't like trying to predict canon, so I'm staying carefully neutral. That said, wow, he was even more of a loser than I thought he was.
    
12. Like many of you, I read "RAB" and immediately thought, Regulus.
    
13. Finally, DD. Man, he stepped UP, didn't he? Letting Harry think through things with him, that was excellent. I loved him again, and then he was dead, and I had to put on the "I'll Cover You (reprise)" from Rent.
    

Hard to talk about plot when you can't talk in paragraphs. Um, it was good? It made me happy? It was a pleasure to read? It was zippy and sleek and everything it ought to be?

Okay, ships.

1. Still not a canon shipper. My new icon? "My slash ship is Harry/Hermione"
   
2. JKR does H/G and R/Hr better than any fanfic author ever could. This is why I still don't want to read any H/G or R/Hr fanfic, much less write it. But in canon? Awesome.
   R/Hr I loved mostly for the determined!Hermione-gets-her-man (see my reservations about Ron above). H/G was sweetsexy, especially that first kiss and the walk. Let's go Harry!
   
3. And poor Dean goes for comfort to the bosom of his patient best friend . . .
   
4. Remus/Tonks ruled me. I love him so much, and I need him to be happy. I fully admit this.
   
5. In no way does this affect any previous possible Remus/Sirius action.
   
6. Bill/Fleur? Fleur fucking ruled me. As soon as she walked into that hospital ward I knew exactly what she was going to do. Serves you right, Molly. You keep judging books by their covers. Still, good for you to come back around.
   
7. HAHAHAHAH Ron/Lavender. HAHAHAHAHA.
   
8. And more laughter for the general, accurate, everyone snogging in the corridors.
   

This book satisfied. Mm-mm good.

Comments

[fiatincantatum.livejournal.com]

I loved the "you're very pretty, aren't you" scene...

[alas-earwax.livejournal.com]

driveby:

me too! it was creepy and kind of...i want him to say that to me.

[eibbil-libbie.livejournal.com]

Marry me?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Ah, m'darlin, luv you too. Care to be more specific? :D

[angiej.livejournal.com]

Much with the book, man. It was great.

(Deleted that earlier comment for spoilers, etc.)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Eb, this post is full of spoilers; there is no reason to read the comments if you haven't read the book. You are too sweet and too funny.

I love that you were playing My Boo, a song I liked before I heard it a billion times and had people asking me what a Boo was.

[evil-erato.livejournal.com]

5.In no way does this affect any previous possible Remus/Sirius action.

Precisely. :D And now we wait for the fresh wave of "Tonks metamorphs into Sirius" smutfics. *headdesk*

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I hope people have more imagination than that.

Okay. I wish, rather than hope.

[kitsune13.livejournal.com]

Your suggestion that Dean found comfort in the arms of Seamus MADE MY DAY. <3

And yes, Remus/Tonks IN NO WAY negates Remus/Sirius. in fact, the Remus/Sirius makes it perfectly plausible that the whole thing was so drawn out and angstful. *nods*

And Luna at the party! LOVE. Yeah, Harry seems very comfortable around women in general -- it's ones that he fancies that he gets all clammy around.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

The virtue to a minor ship is that no one cares when you ship it. The shipper in me is also willing to suggest that Seamus wasn't angry that Harry picked Dean as Katie's sub over him; he was mad because Dean was going to chase alongside Ginny.

(btw? Ron/Ginny? Hello?)

OMG, that all that angsty Remus/Tonks post-Remus/Sirius was canon? I feel they get the James/Lily love-hate prize.

You know, part of that comfort might be that he's a jock in a gender-neutral sport. Josh also pointed out that Harry seems to have inherited Dumbledore's love of harmless chaos.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Sort of an interesting undercurrent of S and D being a little hostile to the Trio. There are depths here . . .

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It's there from something like GoF on—from when Harry becomes a more obvious hero. They're more than happy to take in a clearly pissed off Ron, there's the whole Seamus Harry thing. Though I will say, the Seamus Harry thing was equally Harry's fault, which may be the point. Up until the founding of the DA, Harry wasn't very good at working on how he appeared to others or what they thought of him, and just expected people to be on his side. I think Seamus and Dean are mostly in their own little space, and sort of annoyed with Harry being hero boy. Unlike Neville, for instance, who clearly wishes that he were part of the trio (poor lamb).

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

It's there from something like GoF on from when Harry becomes a more obvious hero.

Interesting -- I remember Seamus having issues from OOTP, but I want to look back at GoF now. This was the first time I had noticed them bonding over it. But it would definitely make sense, within that 5 person dorm, for them to split along the lines you indicate over "hero boy." It's a shame we don't get more of that particular perspective, though I guess the fact that Harry!POV is almost oblivious to two people he spends every night with should tell its own tale. I hate to complain about anything in this wonderful book, but: I felt, a little bit, like JKR had just remembered, after two or three books, that Seamus = sloppy wandwork, and was tossing that lines incident at us almost as a downpayment for neglecting these "other roommates" so badly.

Harry wasn't very good at working on how he appeared to others or what they thought of him

I'm startled by Harry's lack of social skills/effort sometimes. On the train in OOTP, I thought it was a bit of a shock how isolated he was when Ron and Hermione went off to the Prefect's car. And I thought the DA had potential for making him better connected with this classmates. But that all seems to be dropped in HBP, and the only connection he keeps up is, oddly, Luna. I was especially disappointed about how Zach was handled. Not that Harry doesn't have other things on his mind in HBP, but still, it's odd.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, I think that OotP was the "Seamus is in Harry's way" book, and HBP was the "Dean is in Harry's way" book, but for very different reasons, and he "prevails" over each of them. Interestingly, Neville was quite literally in Harry's way in book 1, wasn't he? And at least Seamus and Dean have each other. Who does Neville have?

I was really disappointed the extent to which the DA was completely dropped in HBP—serves Harry right that when he called on them they weren't really there. But he was back at Quidditch so I think he sort of didn't really care. And now he wants to wander off on his own. I think Harry really keeps himself isolated. It's almost as though his grammar school experience means he doesn't really know how to make friends with anyone, which is really too bad.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Well, I think that OotP was the "Seamus is in Harry's way" book, and HBP was the "Dean is in Harry's way" book, but for very different reasons, and he "prevails" over each of them.

He really doesn't have any neutral relationships, does he? Everybody is either incredibly tight with him or someone he's vaguely (or overtly) antagonistic towards. It's kind of dysfunctional that this applies to people in his own dorm, as well.

Who does Neville have?

Well, JKR insists that he doesn't have Luna, but they seem awfully friendly in this book. Although I suppose given this book's definition of "friendly" you'd expect them to be rolling around on the tables in the Great Hall if that were really the case. ;)

serves Harry right that when he called on them they weren't really there.

Oh, I hadn't thought of that! Cool point.

But he was back at Quidditch so I think he sort of didn't really care.

Well, I don't know -- I was struck by how much the tone of the whole Quidditch obsession changed over the course of the book. Not that it suddenly stopped being important in any really clearcut way, but it's sort of like this was the book where step by step he passed beyond childish things, Quidditch included. It's interesting that Draco is the first to get to this point -- blowing off the first match, as though he simply no longer cared about the rivalry at the level of a game. And then the second game gets all messed up for Harry, and in the third game he's in detention, so it's Harry's role as a general, as the guy behind the scenes who puts the team together but not someone who actually plays, that results in the win. And the payoff from the win is not its own satisfaction -- it's become more instrumental, a means toward his goal of hooking up with Ginny.

So, it's a gradual separation from what Quidditch used to mean to him. garlandgraves has a wonderful observation about how the broken Gryffindor points indicator (smashed during the DE attack) sort of emphasizes the loss of an innocent, childish world, and the need to move beyond that.

I think Harry really keeps himself isolated. It's almost as though his grammar school experience means he doesn't really know how to make friends with anyone, which is really too bad.

Yeah, this is definitely true. I was gratified to see JKR call him "damaged" in her recent interview. I think that's a central thing about Harry, his relative health, relative purity (in Dumbledore's terms) despite the very real damage he's undergone, and the very real ways it continues to limit and skew his character. But it's sad about the friends thing. Again, he seems able to form intense connections, but the ordinary day-to-day social connections (that can develop unexpectedly and happily into intense ones) seem beyond him, and this isolates him.