YES!! I have my Harry Potter book **SPOILERS ABOUND!!!***

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by DaemonSeid

you know what...I ran across a slight parallell.....

Voldemort was a genocidal megalomaniac who only wanted purebloods in the world altho he was a 1/2 blood....

can anyone think of another real life leader who wanted the same.......?

Did you notice that Grindelwald was defeated in 1945? If bad things happen in the Muggle world when bad things happen in the wizarding world there are some definate parallels. You could almost take it to an extreme in saying that Hitler was no more than a pawn for the dark wizard...

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by Drolefille

Did you notice that Grindelwald was defeated in 1945? If bad things happen in the Muggle world when bad things happen in the wizarding world there are some definate parallels. You could almost take it to an extreme in saying that Hitler was no more than a pawn for the dark wizard...

JKR talked about the Hitler parallel in this 2000 interview.

An excerpt:

Interviewer: Some of the people that you satirize most in this book, the evil people, the Malfoys, they're very classist, they're racist against the Mudbloods. Is it fair to say that these are neo-Conservative or Thatcherite? (JK nods.) Is there a real political axe you're grinding there?

JK: I think in this book [GoF] too, you fully understand… With Voldemort, I didn't want to create this cardboard cutout of a baddie, where you put a black hat on him and you say 'Right, now you shoot at that guy because he's bad.'

Interviewer: Like the Dursleys are more of a cutout bad people?

JK: Yes and no. You will meet Dursleys, in Britain. You will. I've barely exaggerated them. Yeah, Voldemort. In the second book, Chamber of Secrets, in fact he's exactly what I've said before. He takes what he perceives to be a defect in himself, in other words the non-purity of his blood, and he projects it onto others. It's like Hitler and the Arian ideal, to which he did not conform at all, himself. And so Voldemort is doing this also. He takes his own inferiority, and turns it back on other people and attempts to exterminate in them what he hates in himself.

I do think she also said somewhere that conflict in the wizarding world can be reflected in conflict in the Muggle world.

[ASUADPi]

Was the consensus that Neville was the one who "came into their power late in life" because that just seems odd to me? Neville is only 17 years old, I don't necessarily call that "late in life". Plus, it's not like he hasn't been practicing for 6 years, unfortunately Neville just wasn't very good.

I bawled when he was walking to his death with Sirius, him mom & dad. I was like "boo". The only thing I kept thinking, peripherally (spelling issues on that word), was "yeah, I get to see Gary Oldman and his parents in the movie". LOL.

The whole time though I was thinking, OMG this movie is going to be hell to write (script wise). There was so much. You could cut out some of the traveling time of Harry & Co. You cut and make the wedding "boom" like the Quidditich world cup. It's going to be a lot of condensing and thinking "what can we take out". But in reality I think it's going to be more "how can we make this a shorter scene than it is in the book". I can't think of one "major" plot point that could just be cut out of the book completely. Yes, there are little plot points that don't have to be mentioned (i.e. Tonks pregnant), but I don't know. I'm glad I'm not the screen writer, they have a hell of a task in front of them.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by ASUADPi

Was the consensus that Neville was the one who "came into their power late in life" because that just seems odd to me? Neville is only 17 years old, I don't necessarily call that "late in life". Plus, it's not like he hasn't been practicing for 6 years, unfortunately Neville just wasn't very good.

It's definitely not Neville.

The statement from JKR that someone would do magic late in life is from an interview in 1999, before Prisoner of Azkaban was published. Here is what she said:

Q. Will there be, or have there been, any "late blooming" students in the school who come into their magic potential as adults, rather than as children? By the way, I loved meeting you, and hearing you speak, when you came to Anderson's in Naperville. I can hardly wait until you tour again.

A. Ahhh! I loved the event at Anderson's. It was one of my favorites. That is completely true. No, is the answer. In my books, magic almost always shows itself in a person before age 11; however, there is a character who does manage in desperate circumstances to do magic quite late in life, but that is very rare in the world I am writing about.

Magic showed itself in Neville before he came to Hogwarts.

The speculation I have heard is that the character she was talking about, if not a character or plot element that was eventually eliminated, was Merope Gaunt. Her father called her a Squib, but after he and her brother were in Azkaban, she created the love potion that made Tom Riddle fall in love with her and got her out of her father's house. She was desperate and she did magic later than the usual 11.

Granted, she wouldn't be called "late in life," except relatively speaking. So maybe it was a plot element that she decided not to use.