I can't believe Voldemort was living inside Ginny the whole time! I can't believe he decided to take the concept of the Horcrux one step further with the creation of the Morcrux, wherein a little bit of his soul lives inside every single person Harry has ever touched with his mouth! Mental, that.

I WARNED YOU.

I have made intimations along these lines previously but I wanted to say it once more, clearly and for the record: I am so damned grateful to every single Harry Potter fan whose life has crossed mine in the past month. I have traveled with many fanbases, so I can safely say that Harry Potter fans are the best in the world. Unfortunately due to the random and usually unfamiliar nature of these encounters, I can more easily thank the wind than thank them in person. But as I think I've said before, I've had more conversations - sometimes shockingly heartfelt, personal, emotionally supportive conversations - with total strangers in the past month than I ever have in my entire life. Most recently on Friday night at the Indigo where we got our books, where I was temporarily inducted into a small cadre of Potterphiles who had never met me before and will likely not meet me again, where yet another utter stranger joined our midst for the duration from outside and then melted away into the night to do what we've all just spent the last two days doing. We are all of us united. Or like the Coke ad says, "you give a little love, and it all comes back to you."

Love being, of course, the prevailing theme anyway. We won, gang. We won.

What I Liked (being a presumptuous list of excellences)

The greening of Dudley. The motherfucking X-wing dogfight (for all intents and purposes) in the sky over Privet Drive. The death of Hedwig, first soldier down. (I mean that's not a good thing, but damn howdy, it was effective. Cry my eyes out, part 1.) Second soldier down. The kiss. The wedding. Kreacher, now quite possibly my second-favourite character ever. Umbridge's eyeball and what came after. Indiana Jonesin' around the British countryside. The One Ri... er, locket. I can live with the sister thing. Boy-huggin'. Luna's bedroom (cry my eyes out, part 2). The Hallows, whatever they are, and wherever they're from. The death of Dobby. (See above re: Hedwig.) Riding the dragon (oh YEAH). Aberforth, in his entirety, vying with Kreacher for my eternal affections. The Ariana story. Minerva McGonagall. Neville Longbottom, Resistance Leader. The Children's Crusade. The suits of armour. "Is this the moment?" "Oi, there's a war going on here!" Continued magical interestingness (the Gringotts boobytraps; Crabbe's Big Mistake). The Battle of Hogwarts, part 1. Percy. McGonagall vs. Snape. Ron punching Malfoy ("and that's the second time we've saved your life tonight, you two-faced bastard!"). Snape and Lily and Petunia on the playground. Snape and Lily later. Looking into "Lily's" eyes as he died. Grawp vs. giants. Harry walking to his death (cry my eyes out, part 3). The Galadrielesque conversation in King's Cross. Neville beheading the snake. The Battle of Hogwarts, part 2. Buckbeak and the Thestrals. Kreacher and the elves. "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" The final duel. The portrait applause. The unremitting sense of joy of the thing, from about page 450 onward, even in the face of what must have then seemed certain doom.

What I Did Not So Much Like (being a list of quibbles that I will otherwise not give a fuck about ten minutes from now)

No Regulus, not really anyway. That damn mirror (that's two I owe ya, G). The strong Trio focus reducing the rest of the cast to cameo roles. All the frickin' Polyjuice. Harry Potter, Frequently Unconscious. Overuse of Rita Skeeter's various doings. Ron flippin' and runnin', again. The ghosts of Harry's family showing up, again. (We get it already.) Remus and Tonks - seems arbitrary and pointless. The explain-it-all convenientness of the apparent states of death. (If we could always just ask the portraits for advice, why didn't we do that from the frickin' get-go?) Knowing the future careers and lifestyles of literally everybody except the three people we care about most.

The one thing I was right about that I most specifically wish I was wrong about:

Fred.

The only "I Told You So" I shall utter:

Harry, the Horcrux. It's on page 568 spelled out in those exact words. To every single person who has declaimed to me with righteous defiance over the past two years that Harry couldn't possibly be a Horcrux, look it the fuck up.

Good shit from out and about:

"Speaking of people who are Like Jesus, In a Way, can I just say that it was like the fucking Beatles came out of those packing boxes when they opened at 12:01? I've never heard screaming like that in my life." - Cleolinda

"As the conflict with Voldemort comes to a head, Ron Weasley is suddenly and shockingly killed. Hermione responds with steely determination, joined by Luna Lovegood, who turns out to be a rare witch who has super-powerful martial arts skills." - If Joss Whedon Wrote Deathly Hallows

Adorable pictures.

"It's one of the key differences between Rowling and her great literary forebears. Rowling has been careful to build Harry up from boy to man, student to leader, but she has been equally attentive to the task of breaking Dumbledore down, from a divine father-figure to a mere human. Her insistence on this point is a reflection of the cosmology of the Potterverse: there are no higher powers in residence there. The attic and the basement are empty. There may be an afterlife, and ghosts, but there is certainly no God, and no devil. There are also no immortal, all-wise elves, as in Tolkien... there is certainly no benevolent, paternal Aslan to turn up late in the book and fight the Big Bad. The essential problem in Rowling's books is how to love in the face of death, and her characters must arrive at the solution all on their own, hand-to-hand, at street level, with bleeding knuckles and gritted teeth, and then sweep up the rubble afterwards." - Time Magazine

"Of course it happened inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Albus Dumbledore

Beyond the veil

One other thing worth quoting from that Time article, by the way: "We did something very rare for Harry Potter: we lost our cool." Boy did we. In this miserable age when irony has eclipsed sense, the entire world went blushingly gaga over the goodhearted adventures of a boy wizard and his friends. I suppose it can't truly be argued that Rowling's work is particularly supple or ingenious in the way that Tolkien and Pullman will forever be; the reason that none of that matters, the reason that all of this happened, is her nearly uncanny knack for characters. We loved them. We loved each and every one of them like (as I quipped in my Phoenix review) blood. There is a dexterity and dimensionality to the inhabitants of this gormlessly cheery alternaverse that leaves them like shadows on the wind long after the storm has ceased to rage. The storm is over, all right, but they're still glimmering behind our eyes, and my strong suspicion is that their mark will be with us forever.