(no subject)
I'm sufficiently upset about this book that I'm about to the point where I don't care if I spoil it for anyone because I might save them the trouble of being horribly disappointed.
I cannot belive . . . simply CAN. NOT. BELIEVE. she just wasted Snape like that. Threw him away. Not a good death, not a heroic death, a COMPLETELY POINTLESS AND STUPID DEATH THAT DID NOTHING TO FURTHER THE PLOT.
WHY?
W-H-Y did she do that?
I am upset; crushed. Horribly disappointed. Depressed.
And it's *NOT* just about my favourite character dying (just the fact that he *actually* died, not how or why or whatever). True, there is some of that, but I can *clearly* differentiate where that is in my emotional state. It's intense, but at the same time minor and very very small. And confined.
This blanket cover of black fog over me is about her having a rich, wonderful, multi-dimensional, multi-layered, evocative, character who was so real to life that he could step off the pages, even more than Harry because Harry was the main character so of COURSE everyone's supposed to like him, but here's this guy in the background and nobody really knows what's up with him, but in the background he's got all this stuff going on, and she spent six books developing him so subtly in the background, and then just . . . turned his very EXISTENCE in the series at all into a near-complete accident.
Snapecast's July 15th episode contains an interview with Orson Scott Card who says that he thought Snape was going to die and that Jo had him (Snape) and didn't really know what to do with him, and that he was going to die because he didn't have a purpose other than to die. And I laughed when I heard that because I didn't think a character could be so fully developed as an ACCIDENT. Jokes on me, eh?
You know, he's her character, and I maintain she has the right to do anything she wants with him. But my problem is that I believed far more in her abilities as a writer. And obviously not all of that was unwarranted. You know, I had figured out that RAB was Regulus (along with 99.9999% of the rest of the fandom). I figured out that Dung had had the locket (along with 99.9998% of the rest of the fandom). I figured out-almost accidentally, granted-that Regulus was in the Lake of the Inferi. I figured out about the tiara in the Room of Requirement. Some of these things you really had to think about, theorise about, because the hints and whatever were layered in there, but they made perfect sense once you figured it out, and Snape himself was like that. There were little hints, scattered throughout. I could have handled it if Snape's death had a POINT-he didn't even necessarily have to die an heroic death or a martyr's death or anything like that, but there was JUST. NO. POINT to it. He died, much like Hedwig did, simply to get him out of her way. And there were at least a hundred and fifty other things that she could have done to accomplish the same end without LITERALLY tossing him in the rubbish bin.
In the Jean Auel fandom, when her book 5 came out, it was such a dramatic departure from books 1-4 (to the degree that some of the fairly major character's *names* were spelled wrong!) that some of the fandom grumbled about her son Kendall having written it. This is a lot the same thing.
I just got up. I've already had two drinks. Stiff ones.