the cursed child

[pauraque_bk]

I always used to post about new books before I'd read anybody else's reactions. Never thought I'd get to do it again!

I will say first, there were moments in the adventurey part where I was really getting quite excited, just like the first time I read the original series. She's still got it. It made me eager and hopeful for Fantastic Beasts.

That said, my feeling at the end was something like, "Well, yes, we already knew all that." I mean, maybe for people who aren't in the fandom and haven't spent a lot of time thinking about these characters and what effect the events of the books would have had on them, some of the character developments could have seemed surprising. But I really felt like we'd already worked out everything they were presenting as new, in terms of the characters. Even the next gen characters, who barely existed before!

The only one who seemed off to me was Ron, whose personality seemed more inspired by the movies than the books, and not in a good way. (I like the movies but they do portray Ron as less mature and less competent than the books do.)

As I said, I did like the plotty bits. Not that they were all that original either, and PoA did the time travel plot better, but I still got into it. It was fun to revisit JKR's quirky style of worldbuilding, which always works better when it's in the service of a story than it ever did in the context of Pottermore, where the bland factualness makes you think too hard about the logic of things that only make sense when they're passed breezily by.

I guess my big disappointment was how Delphi was handled at the end, and how close they came to doing something I had really wanted from the books, without actually doing it. I always felt the part about love defeating Voldemort because he doesn't understand it was a loose thread, because the way it was presented implied that he was born incapable of love and there was no time in the past when he could have taken another path. Of course, this is not actually true of real human beings, so it rang false to me.

So, when they start in again on how Tom was just a lonely boy, and then we have the revelation that Voldemort and Bellatrix's relationship was not completely one-sided and was in fact consummated, and this orphaned young woman really just wants a father to love her... It was like we were right there at the thing I always wanted the books to say, and then poof, never mind, the end.

Delphi is still young, and I wanted there to be hope for her. I wanted that to be the point, not this rubbish about Harry's feelings that we knew all along anyway. If she's just plain Evil because her dad was Evil and her parents didn't love each other because his parents didn't love each other... what was the point of even writing the play? To hammer in even harder on this totally incorrect view of how love and hope function in the real world? To come up with an interesting idea for a character, and then do nothing interesting with her?

But maybe it's just me! I don't know how many people have this problem with the books that I did, but it is something that really bothers me about the series, and it's frustrating to see this perfect opportunity to add some nuance to it go to waste.

I did appreciate the acknowledgement, though, that Neville is the one who actually saved the world. ♥

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.

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[drinkingcocoa.livejournal.com]

Voldemort in Godric's Hollow in book 7, remembering what happened when he looked into the face of a baby, wanted to watch, saw the baby cry, saw that the baby now felt the same way Tom Riddle felt as an infant when there was nobody for him, realized *he* had done that to the baby and made someone into a baby like he was himself, and then felt pain beyond pain because "he had killed the boy, and yet he *was* the boy." That was empathy and guilt and remorse. It was so painful that it would have killed him except that he had made horcruxes, so he was damned to live without a body in the forest for years, neither dead nor alive. He tried to possess other animals to regain a body, even getting Wormtail to obtain a rudimentary body for him, but he realized that he could only depend on Harry's blood to reinstate a body that could *grow* because he knew for sure that Harry had received love (oxytocin) and that is the element that makes the difference between abandoned infants thriving (as Harry did) and suffering without relief (as infant Tom Riddle did). Stark stuff. Really stark. So glad JKR works with orphanages to get kids into better situations where they get more human interaction.