It's finished!

I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows about an hour ago. I gave myself a little while to stomp around the house and have a little cry, and then went on the internet straight away, as you do.

Here are my initial reactions (GIANT SPOILERS INCLUDED):

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUU DUMBLES WHYYYYYYYYYY- basically I was totally fine with Dumbledore having a murky past, but I totally broke down at the chapter where we find out he was manipulating both Harry and Snape and was willing to sacrifice them both to defeat Voldemort. Fuck you, dude. Just... no. After all they did for you, this is how you reward them? I thought you were awesome and now I AM DISAPPOINT. and this has nothing to do with the fact that i totally heart snape, nope, not at all

Everyone from the Marauders generation is dead, except the Malfoys (Lucius being a prefect when the others were first-years, the Malfoys do count as being the right age). God damn it Rowling. These were my favourite characters and you killed them all off. BRB GOTTA WRITE A TON OF FANFIC TO EASE THE PAIN. No, really, this makes me sad more than anything else, because Harry has no real connection to his past now.

Oh Ron. You are the best. Everyone always said you were a loser and you proved them wrong, and you got the girl.

NEVILLE FUCKING LONGBOTTOM WINS ALL THE THINGS.

Oh Slytherin. Oh dear. Ahaha. You guys got what was coming to you in the end. I love you all for being so campy and ridiculous, but most of you deserved to be on the losing side for once and I relish every moment that one of you has an eye-popping, foaming-at-the-mouth temper tantrum *glee*

And, in my one coherent thought that came out of all this, I was relieved. I know it's silly, but this series really is hard going; it's not a difficult read in terms of reading age (especially for someone like me who has been reading since the age of three, yay modesty) but the subject matter is truly awful. There is so much loss and just plain horrible stuff that I sometimes wanted to put the book down and never pick it up again. The last three books in the series all feel like that for me, but this one is particularly hard because there is torture, a snake coming out of an old lady's corpse, an inanimate object playing on Ron's insecurities and the death of several well-loved characters, not just one at a time. I was glad to get to the end, and to know it was all over.

I appear to have channelled Mark Reads Harry Potter in this post with all the incoherent LOLWUT I DONT EVEN but my brain is mostly fried right now. Hopefully, I'll be back in the next few days with a structured and sensible post about the wizarding world.

Until then, I will leave you with this, because even though it's from a musical parody, it really does sum up Harry Potter better than anything else.