For anyone else who doesn't enjoy a story unless they know what's coming

[baratron]

It transpired last night that Richard had already decided he was going to go & pick up my copy of HP6. Aww :)

This is the spoiler for HP6. Do NOT click on the link unless you want to know everything.














It's not too late to stop reading...



















OK, so you really want to know?




















Severus Snape is the Half-Blood Prince. He calls himself this because his mother's surname was Prince.
Dumbledore dies.
Snape kills him.
No one else dies, but Bill Weasley is disfigured by a werewolf.
Tonks is in love with Lupin.

That's about it, I think.

Eeep, no, I forgot - Harry & Ginny finally get together. But after Dumbledore dies, Harry tells Ginny they can't stay together, because Voldemort kills everyone he loves.

Also, the Ron & Hermione mutual love-hate relationship is even more infuriating than usual.



Keep scrolling down for my opinions on what'll happen next...















I don't think Dumbledore's really dead. A large chunk of the story is given over to something called a Horcrux, which is a charm that someone can put part of their soul in to prevent them from complete death. It seems very likely (imo) that Dumbledore has done this, and that he WANTS Snape to kill him, so that Voldemort thinks he's truly dead. It fits in with the whole phoenix mythology.

No, I haven't read the whole book, only the ending and the first 11 chapters, but it portends. I'll be surprised if I'm wrong ;)

Comments

[baratron.livejournal.com]

It's true that the / is where the name "slash" came from. But normally when people say slash fiction they mean m/m. The first acknowledged slash - in the sense of male/male pairings written by apparently heterosexual women - was by Star Trek fans in the 1960s. I did used to have a link to the history of slash, I'll have to try to find it again.

There's several different aspects to fan fiction. Some fans write extra chapters and backstory for the characters, some write new relationships, while others write erotica. Much fanfic falls into multiple categories ;) Generally, "slash" means m/m, but may mean f/f or m/f depending on who's saying it - but the implication of slash fiction is usually that it'll involve sex (although the sex may not be explicit). f/f pairings might be referred to as "femslash" to distinguish it from m/m slash. Also the Japanese words hentai, yaoi (or shonen-ai) and yuri are used:
hentai = adult (in the "adult movie" sense) - heterosexual
yaoi (pronounced "yowie") = male homosexual
shonen-ai = "boy love" - also male homosexual
yuri = female homosexual

Another convention that's found its way from doujinshi into English language fanfic is the use of colour coding to show how "extreme" it is in its depiction of sex: "lemon" means extremely explicitly sexual. I can't remember the other colours.

So Rivka's point is that, with Blaise Zabini having been mentioned by name in several of the HP books, but no other details given, many fanfic writers have assumed either that he's male or female. (I always assumed he had to be male, because the houses take 5 students of each gender in each year, and the other 4 Slytherin males are named). Some of these writers are now finding that they've written fiction that's different from what they'd intended.