(no subject)

[heidi]

This is no happy ending. I'll try to rise above, cause, baby, I still believe in love...

Last year, I posted about the absolute rawness I still felt regarding OotP and especially Sirius's death, and in the last few weeks, watching PoA on cable (and various other Gary Oldman films where he ends up dead, just to make it more meta and complicated). And a year on, the rawness has become numbed, either by time or by hapenstance, I really don't know. It makes me think of ari_o's The Five Steps, but I know this isn't real grief, although it is definitely a real emotion. Watching my friends who spent years with Dogstar and their very real loss of at least a year of writing and communicating and communing in that universe is like re-experiencing a shred of the horror and shock that I saw all over my friendslist on that June day exactly two years ago. I wish there was a way to recapture the flist-posts from that day, because it would still be interesting reading, and it's one of the things that the FA forums have going for them - there's a whole section of threads of first impressions, whereas to read all the first impressions from my flist would require me to go to about 700 journals and I love you all but not that much, sorry. If someone ever wrote an LJ tool that would allow you to pull posts from a certain day from your whole flist, it would be Very Useful.

So, anyway, I'm not here so much to look back as I am to look forward, although I'm not sure that "let's look forward to HBP" is the real mood I'm expecting or generating here. Here I am, watching TLC's work on Potter Parties, pulling together volunteers for Spellbound outside Chicago, organizing stuff for Books of Wonder, and planning to cover the showing of Sorcerer's Stone in Santa Monica for WizardNews.com...

And I'm not sure I'm really looking forward to reading the book itself.

In fact, I sort of fear it. Honestly, I'm not sure how I can end up more devestated than I was at the end of reading OotP. But I'm concerned that she may take the easy or obvious approach on things where PoA and GoF led me to believe she had a more deft or subtle approach. Or it's possible that my One Big Expectation will be fulfilled and Voldemort will be defeated and end this book dead, dead, dead, and thus, Book Seven will be filled with the attemted recovery of the wizarding world and the realisation that Lucius was the Big Bad all along, and that evil never truly leaves us.

But somehow, I don't think so anymore.

Those, I think, are my two questions for the night:

1. What do you fear in HBP?
2. What do you look forward to?

Anon posting is allowed, and although I'm not turning off IP logging I'm not really interested in correlating IPs with, well, anything.

---

And just so I don't spam my flist with two posts a minute a part, I wanted to note that you can see the FictionAlley wristbands for the Katie O'Brien Scholarship Fundraiser here, and you can, of course, purchase yours here. I'm thrilled to announce that we've sold out our original order of five hundred bands, so we're about to order more to sell at the HBP parties that Team FA members will be at - if anyone wants to market the bands at a party they're going to, please let me know via comment or email. I can't send an unlimited number to everyone as FA has to prepay for the bands, and we don't have unlimited funds, but we can send "order information cards" to anyone who wants to hand them out at a party, and may be able to send a few to sell on the spot.

Comments

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

I'm with fearsclave and dragongirlg. I fear that JKR's ability to tell her story may not match her vision. I also fear that while the first four books kept expanding the world she's building (and so did OoP, but with a different focus/feel), she has now begun to narrow, rather than keep widening, the circle. Because I fear that the story really is about a boy, and not a world, after all.

I look forward to more Snape, though that too is tinged with fear. All my hopes are so backlit by fear I'm not sure what to expect. Again, what struck me about OoP was that she consistently made easy, easy choices. I've come to expect a little more from this world, and I fear that in the end, canon may be limited by JKR's ability to manage her world beyond the corners she has shown us.

Regarding the comments about not really being involved in fandom anymore, and also about rejoicing that fanon exists in order to fill in the cracks or change what disappointed: I think that once the whole story is completed, people will re-enter the fandom, and they will feel more comfortable mucking with the given timeline. But during the transitions, there's always angst over whether people will continue to be interested in "alternate" directions. I think the answer is that some fans will; some fans won't. Some will leave the fandom and find new and exciting things to obssess over. Not a bad thing at all! Some will remain, but become very selective about where they hang out and what they read. And I think some fans, who have resisted delving into the alternate points of view, preferring to confine their speculation to what appears canonically possible, will find themselves free to explore in ways they never considered important before.

At least, I hope so. Because in my mind, Sirius is always going to be a little boy from Netherend, Remus's middle name will never be "John", and Lucius Malfoy is always going to be 48 in OoP. ;^) yarrrgh!