Did J.K. Rowling Botch the Ending of the Harry Potter Series?

(image via Wikimedia)

When author J.K. Rowling says she made a mistake, it makes news.  Supposedly, the author of the Harry Potter books claims she has second thoughts about how she ended the series, stating that maybe Hermoine and Ron shouldn’t have ended up together.  This has started a firestorm of fans arguing, with some proclaiming that they knew all along that the couple was a mismatch and others saying… Actually, everybody I know who has read the series believes that the couple was a mismatch.  This debate has been pretty much one-sided.

Personally, I don’t care.  I’m one of the few people who hasn’t read any of the Harry Potter books or seen any of the movies.  I started the first book but stopped after running across the name Dumbledore a few times.  That name really annoys me.  I don’t know why.  It’s not rational (and I’m usually a rational person), but I knew I couldn’t finish a book with a name like Dumbledore being used constantly.  I also don’t like the word “share.”  I cringe whenever I hear the word “share.”  If there’s a sentence in the Harry Potter series with both “share” and Dumbledore,” I don’t know what I would have done.

I couldn’t watch the movies either because if I can’t read the word “Dumbledore” silently, there was no way I could hear it constantly during a bunch of movies.  So I don’t have a dog in this hunt.  I don’t care if Hermoine ended up with Ron, or if she dumped him as soon as the credits rolled or when the reader put the book on the shelf.  All I know is that a girl who looks like Hermoine doesn’t end up with a guy who looks like Ron unless the girl grew up poor and the guy has a lot of money (or is in a position of power).

J.K. Rowling says that the ending is a kind of “wish fulfilment.”  She wrote the books.  She can make up any ending she wants.  But my theory (without any proof to back this up) is that she wrote the Harry Potter series too quickly.  That was a lot of books with a lot of pages in a relatively short period of time.  I understand, there was a lot of money to be made.  But I bet if she had taken more time for each book, Rowling wouldn’t have these regrets.  And if she really regrets it, she could just write another book and end it with Hermoine breaking Ron’s heart.  That book would make a lot of money.

Even if J.K. Rowling botched the ending of the Harry Potter series, it was at worst a minor mistake.  There have to be other authors who regret how they ended their books or series.  For example, I wonder if Suzanne Collins has second thoughts about how she wrote Mockinjay.  Those Hunger Games books came out even more quickly than the Harry Potter novels.  And I thought Mockinjay was a borderline travesty that didn’t resemble the first two books (and I don’t just mean the plot.  I also mean pacing, character development, and logic).  I wouldn’t mind if she simply asked for a do-over and wrote a different Mockinjay.  Maybe the movie version will make more sense.

I have regrets about my entire first six months of Dysfunctional Literacy.  I’ve even gone back and deleted a bunch of posts under the category “Dysfunctional Grammar.”  This idea was so embarrassingly bad that I don’t even want to explain what it was.  The “Dysfunctional Grammar” posts were so stupid that I almost fired myself from my own blog.  Luckily, I’ve seemed to find my voice/niche recently, but I’ve still left one example of “Dysfunctional Grammar” buried somewhere at the bottom of this blog just to remind myself.  I can do that.  But famous authors can’t go back and delete their regrettable words once they’ve been published and then hope that nobody notices.  I guess that’s the advantage of being an unknown writer.

I had a writing teacher who said that once a rough draft is done, the writer should put it away for six months and then come back to it.  The guy was kind of a hypocrite because he’d assign a composition and expect the final draft within a few days.  To be fair, he explained the difference between reality and ideal situations, but still, six months would have helped. Then again, there were a couple assignments where six months wouldn’t have mattered.  Six months wouldn’t have mattered with “Dysfunctional Grammar.”  And when an author writes a prolifically successful series like Harry Potter, there might never be enough time to truly get every detail perfectly right.

But enough about me!  What do you think, especially those of you who have actually read the Harry Potter books?  Did J.K. Rowling make a mistake with her ending?  What other authors should have second thoughts about the way they ended their books?  Have you ever written something that you regretted or had second thoughts about?