Can someone please explain the end of Harry Potter to me?

[Tonight37]

Please explain it to me as though I’m 5.

Is Albus Dumbledore good or bad?

What about Snape?

Thanks

It was the fact he'd been starving in a cupboard that made me think Daniel Radcliffe was such a bad choice for Harry in the movie. He was too well-fed and healthy-looking to be Harry Potter.

I met someone recently who looks like the adult HP ‘ought’ to look.

Dan Radcliffe hasn’t grown up to look the way he should 🤣

most child actors probably look decently nourished tbf!

I think there had to be no contact to keep him safe (from Voldy's pals) until he was old enough to go to Hogwarts.

Remember Chesny in Coronation Street? Now he looked like he'd been hungry and neglected. Not handsome enough for Hollywood, though.

Same with Hermione. She was meant to be very plain, wasn't she?

Yeeessss... but Emma Watson at 11 was a fairly ordinary 11 year old, in look, I think?

And to be fair (IIRC), I think Hermione was meant to have got a bit of a glow up in the Viktor Krum era.

@SheilaFentiman jk Rowling wasn't pleased with the casting from a looks perspective because she was too pretty.

@MelodyMalone why though? Nothing special happened at 11. You still couldn't use magic outside of school and still had the trace. It isn't specified in the book that they had to leave him alone.

Which was much later on.

Not really, she was quite pretty even then. And Hermione had that problem with her teeth, which the director didn't tackle at all.

The books are SO much better!

I think the teeth thing is tricky, like not making DR wear green contacts for 7 years - if Emma had had prosthetics on her teeth to contend with as well as learning to act (beyond the odd school play) it would have been harder.

I object to those changes far less than me yelling at the screen “Snape is Lilly’s age! He should be 32 not 54!”

The reason all the adults were too old is that JKR wanted Alan Rickman as Snape. He was the only actor she could envision in the part, so the characters who were his contemporaries had to be aged up to match him.

Both pretty bad imo, albeit motivated by the greater good.

Dumbledore was always working towards the defeat of Voldemort but he left Harry in an abusive home for eleven years and then groomed him for sacrifice without ever telling him what he was doing.

Snape was very brave and worked for the defeat of evil but he was a sadistic bully who relentlessly persecuted Neville and Harry, both orphans who never did a thing to merit it.

Yeah... I mean Neville was not technically an orphan, but he might as well have been. He was clearly a vulnerable young boy, and Snape terrorised him.

There's also been a theory for years about the numbers of students at Hogwarts. There are all these empty classrooms mentioned, and why would there be empty ones all over if the school was at capacity? The suggestion is that because Harry's year, and the few above/just after were the babies born during the first war with Voldemort, their numbers were much lower than Hogwarts usually had because people hadn't wanted to have kids with him on the rampage.

true, I wasn’t thinking properly! I’d forgotten his parents hadn’t died. But yeah, poor kid. Reading as an adult and parent your heart just breaks for him.

They did try prosthetics on her teeth but once they started filming it was obvious she couldn't speak properly with them.

I don’t think this is true. When Snape finds out that Dumbledore’s plan is for Harry to die and objects to it, Dumbledore asks him if he has come to care for Harry after all. Snape denies it and shows that his patronus is still the shape of a doe, showing that it is Lily he loves. Dumbledore says ‘after all this time?’, Snape responds Always’.

Snape never loved Harry. He bullied him relentlessly, he refused to understand him or accept the fact that his nature was like his mother’s. He couldn’t get past the fact that Harry was the product of Lily marrying James. But because he loved Lily, and because she had died at the hands of a master Snape was serving, he dedicated his life to protecting her son as the one thing he could do for her after she had died.

Haven’t read the full thread to see if this has been addressed so sorry if it has already been explained, but Harry physically had to live with the Dursleys due to Aunt Petunia being a blood relative to his mother; it was an important aspect of the powerful magic that kept him safe and undetectable as long as he could call that place his home.

This is what is broken when Harry leaves Privet Drive in the 7th book.

This is true, but the dursleys are cowards. There are a couple of instances where they are frightened into being better carers by intervention from wizards. This could have been done much sooner so Harry at least had a bedroom and enough food (as well as, crucially, the knowledge that someone in the world cared if he lived or died)

Also this is inference on my part but my thinking re Snape being a nasty, almost unhinged bully at times (especially in the Half Blood Prince) is that he was always a social outcast and was heavily bullied at school.

He had to work at the school because of his dealings with Dumbledore and for his supposed role as spy for Voldemort. It’s clear IMO from the books that this didn't at all mean he was suitable to be a teacher and I think that being around the school was triggering and difficult for him, especially as ghosts from his past are always present in the form of Harry (the spitting image of James) and teachers like Lupin.

I think it's pretty clear that Snape disliked Harry because he resembled his father (though with his mother's eyes...) who he hated and resented. Not only did James bully him at school, he married the only woman Snape ever loved.

He came to, at best, tolerate him because of the part of Lily he saw in him, and because Harry was the best chance of defeating Voldemort. I definitely don't think he loved him.

This is very true!

When younger I always wondered about this, and the way my very Dumbledore loving brain has always justified is that Dumbledore genuinely didn't know; he was very busy being Dumbledore, one of the most important wizards alive, and the charm is supposed to completely veil Harry from the wizarding world, so no contact could be risked until he was part of it.

I believe this is kind of backed up when Dumbledore speaks to the Dursleys toward the end of the series, and he does say along the lines of “you did not take him in as one of your own like I asked you to”.