Peg Kerr&#39;s Journal

It does indeed.

From:

aome.livejournal.com

But I still don't get why it had to be THEM. The Red King/White Queen could easily have been achieved by Bill/Fleur, for instance - perfect color match, in fact. :P Not that I'd want Bill to die, either, but it still doesn't really explain to me why it had to be Remus/Tonks as the representatives of this couple/leavers of orphan. There were so many other potential possibilities, IMO.

From:

Maybe because Remus and Tonks were a greater loss to us than Bill and Fleur.

From:

but it is precisely for that reason that they should have, y'know, died where we could see them. I personaly think they had to die (Remus at least), because of who they were in the story and to Harry, regardless of alchemy or whatever, but I was expecting Remus to have a throwdown. Pick a mortal enemy: Snape! Wormtail! Fenrir! Nah. she offs him without comment or chance to show the bravery he seems to have lost. If he was really so important a character, how did he get less than a sentence, really, and Dobby gets a chapter with a hand-dug grave, a homemade tombstone and flowers in a jelly jar? Sure, give us symbolism and another orphan and the purity of Harry's soul, but give it to us with honor to characters who have been around for three-five books!

From:

dreamcoat-mom.livejournal.com

I was an adamant Remus fan, and I identified with him on a lot of levels, but I never did see his or Tonks' death as "pointless" like so many others did. I had to roughly articulate how I felt about it in a friend's journal...

In the end, I think it was less a matter of gratuitous body count than full circle-type symbolism. Another orphan, raised in the shadow of his parents' sacrifice "for the greater good"--but this time with a Godfather who is whole, strong, free, and fully engaged in his life. THIS orphan will not go it alone in a dangerous world like our Harry did. Harry will see to it, having learned from the mistakes and examples of those he loved and admired. That, after all, is the point of a "coming of age" story. And the series was, above all, Harry's coming of age story.

Does that make any sense? I got swatted away like an annoying gnat for it, and thought it might help to run it by someone else.

From:

peacockharpy.livejournal.com

It makes sense to me -- that's how I read it.

From:

izhilzha.livejournal.com

That is EXACTLY how I saw it, which is why it crushed me with heartbreak and I had to go away from the book for an hour before coming back to finish reading. (Yes, Remus fan here--but I was more crushed by the effect the whole thing had on Harry, and by the mirroring of Teddy and his parents with Harry and his.)

From:

Yes, this makes sense.

From:

penmage.livejournal.com

That makes perfect sense to me - in fact, my first thought when Lupin make Harry the godfather was that Lupin and Tonks were now doomed, so history could repeat itself but with Harry as a present godfather.

From:

bordergold.livejournal.com

I slightly resented Remus/Tonks because I feel like it could have worked if JKR didn't seem to just shy away from romances. There's a legit conflict [Remus is a werewolf!] which was touched upon only briefly and rather half-heartedly.

Honestly, though, I feel like all of the romances could have worked [mainly I'm thinking of Harry/Ginny, though] if it was only written more carefully. They all had potential.

Doesn't mean I like them, though :) Thanks for clarifying all this.

From:

gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com

Have you read my review yet? (I said John Granger was going to be grinning like the cat with the canary....)

But I guess the overwhelming body of evidence just makes it worse for me.... because it's more indication that she's slavishly following a formula (any formula, be it Campbell or alchemical equations or whatever) and thus occasionally having to shoehorn her characters into plot points that wind up feeling forced as a result.

I think there's a lot in this book that could have achieved the same (major) results without having to waste lots of time or page space, and without being so derivative in the execution.

The books for me are in sum an absolutely infuriating mix of brilliant ingenuity and torrid eyerolling cliche. She constantly takes easy choices, surface choices, and the final book is no exception. While some of those choices result in a visceral satisfaction (such as fixing Percy), they are also by and large fairly cliche (Snape --> Lily) and many of them (R/T especially) are just gah. Blech.

When Remus showed up to try to help Harry and said he'd regretted marrying Tonks, I said, "Yes, because you're GAY!"

I also still hate what falling in love with Lupin did for Tonk's character. She was robbed, IMO, and also wasted. And so was he, because they were shoehorned into these positions not because of intrinsic character-driven attraction, but for plot reasons and, if John Granger is to be believed, because of JKR's reliance on her formula approach to writing.

From:

When Remus showed up to try to help Harry and said he'd regretted marrying Tonks, I said, "Yes, because you're GAY!"

ME TOO!!!!!

You say it perfectly. I am pissed about what their relationship did to the character of both Remus and Tonks. Each of them was so strong and yet flawed, complicated and beautiful and intriguing on their own. But the second they got together (earlier for Tonks), they lost that and became completely flat. I loved each of their characters (although I nver wanted them to be together), but JKR killed those characters long before they got to Hogwarts. grr.

From:

Take a look at this essay and let me know what you think.

From:

It's a good essay. I have no issue with Remus' actions in DH, nor with his argument with Harry. As I said in some post/reply somewhere, I know the panic an expectant parent can feel; if I could have run off with someone much younger than I on a wild adventure to save the world rather than have a baby, I'd have been tempted! There's this moment where you think, I'm bringing a child into a world this messed up?!? I'd better save the environment or get Bush out of office (or defeat Voldemort) before s/he arrives, so I'm not condemning her to a life of misery! And that's without the abnormal dramic/magic stuff of werewolves and evil lords, and the mega baggage of old betrayals and rejections [and I also wasn't mourning my half-acknowledged lover's death ;) ]

The character assassination to which I refer is not seeing Remus's emotional unhinging or dramatic lapses in courage and family values (whatever those are). I mean that I think from a literary perspective it wasn't well written. I'm just supposed to buy that there's a reason this couple is together? I'm to take on faith that they have motives behind their courtship--or lack thereof--their decisions to marry, stay together, go to battle, etc? I get to see Remus come unhinged but not see him redeem himself by actually getting to fight? Did he take a curese for Tonks, the wife he's not so sure he should have married? Did he watch her die as he had the rest of his friends and go out in a blaze of glory? Did she say more than ten words? We get some of this about Bill/Fleur, Molly/Arthur, and several other couples, but the author did not have Harry witness enough of Remus/Tonks' relationship in HBP or DH to make it believable, in character, or moving. I get that their deaths were collateral damage and that makes a powerful statement about the evils of war. But I got that more powerfully from Colin. Remus/Tonks just felt like a poor job of a wrap up. As I say, I loved this book and this is my only beef with it. I really wanted to love Remus and Tonks, even love them together (hopefully in a way that still made Remus/Sirius possible...), but she just didn't give me enough to do so.

From:

and thus occasionally having to shoehorn her characters into plot points that wind up feeling forced as a result.

You know, you took the words right out of my mouth. It felt forced.

Not just the deaths of Remus and Tonks -- which, actually, I felt was simply an understated portrayal of how it really works when battle is going on, i.e., we don't always get a "gratifying" battle scene that shows how it all fell into place and somehow makes it all seem more, well, REDEMPTIVE. Sometimes people just DIE. And we're left with the bodies and no answers.

I thought the whole Remus-Tonks marriage felt forced. And unbelievable. Even if JKR was trying to make the characters fit an alchemical (or other) formula, that doesn't mean she's absolved of the need to DEVELOP the characters and the logic of their relationship so that it makes sense to the reader.

Besides, as you pointed out, I really, really felt she was strongly leading us in the direction that Lupin was gay (werewolf outcast = AIDS outcast). I kinda got the impression that in the last book she went way out of her way to all but shout that These Characters Are Not Gay. Lupin marries Tonks, with about as much passion as the Wall Street Journal's stock reports. Sirius has bikini-clad Muggle Chicks all over his bedroom walls. Etcetera.

Anyway. Yeah. I'm with you, on formula and on what-happened-to-the-gay-subtext.

From:

Take a look at this essay and let me know what you think.

From:

Well, I haven't been bashing Remus for the reasons she mainly discussed in that essay. And of course the "gay subtext" is purely interpretive, though it did seem that in the case of Lupin, and possibly Black as well, JKR was very strongly suggesting that.

But if what you mean is the marriage of Remus and Tonks, well, I just don't find it convincing. At the end of HBP I was thinking, hmmm, Remus finally caved in to dating Tonks to make her happy -- because that seemed like a very Remus thing to do -- and out of the burden of grief for Dumbledore, perhaps. And I thought that relationship might be addressed and further developed in DH.

But to leap right into marriage? I didn't even find the dating relationship convincing to be sustained as a dating relationship, let alone to find the characters are married, what, a month or two after Dumbledore's funeral. And I think that the whole shaky basis got glossed over way too easily.

From:

I assumed the shady elopement was due to an unexpected pregnancy.

From:

HOOT.

PS - Great icon.

From:

I kinda got the impression that in the last book she went way out of her way to all but shout that These Characters Are Not Gay.

I felt like Remus/Tonks was a bit of this in HBP already, and DH really cemeted this feeling. I have a long post here about the many things I don't like about HBP, but here's the most relevant paragraph where I try to express the same thing, in the context of the need for normal gay characters in fiction:

I felt sure, furthermore, that Rowling knew of the vast Remus/Sirius fanbase (I knew she read some of the fiction out there), and would, at least, leave an ambiguous space for that subtext, even if she never intended it. Why I felt we deserved such treatment, I can't say. My honest belief is that she didn't intend there to be subtext, but realized after reading fan fic post POA/GOF that there was that possibility, then strengthened the subtext in OOTP. Receiving negative reactions or chickening out, she then eliminated that ambiguity in HBP. But Tonks/Remus comes out of nowhere! It's as if--I really think this--it's as if she chickened out, or had pressure placed on her, and felt a need to crush the Remus/Sirius subtext rather than leave it in. It reads like a last-minute addition, a reaction to negative fallout or something. It's just so contrived and phony, I find it hard to believe that any author, let alone one I had trusted as much as Rowling, would choose to develop a relationship in such a way. I think she sold out.

Still feel that way.

From: