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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

entry arrow8:02 AM | Hermione Gets It?

Possible spoiler alert about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows... I just scanned the Book Section of the The New York Times and it reports that a hacker named Gabriel -- in the name of Christianity -- claims to have gained access to the computers of Bloomsbury, and gotten the Holy Grail of the Harry Potter world: its ending. The rest of the Muggle world roll their eyes. In stupid English (what can you expect from an evangelical?), Gabriel writes that Voldemort kills Hermione, and Hagrid gets killed by Snape while the latter attempts to ambush Hermione and Ron as they flee to Privet Drive. Voldermort surprises them, and attacks through the Imperius Curse, and Hermione -- to protect Ron -- fights hard and then finally dies. Then, quoting Gabriel, "Harry came up, killed all the bad guys and Hogwarts against became a good place to stay and have fun." Yay.

I'm still buying the book. Stupid Gabriel.

UPDATE:

I'm quoting a passage from the brilliant article by Time's Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs on the secrecy surrounding the release of the last Harry Potter book:

On this point, both hacker and publisher share a key misunderstanding of what reading is all about. People read books for any number of reasons; finding out how the story ends is one among many and not even the most important. If it were otherwise, nobody would ever bother to read a book twice. Reading is about spending time with characters and entering a fictional world and playing with words and living through a story page by page. The idea that someone could ruin a novel by revealing its ending is like saying you could ruin the Mona Lisa by revealing that it's a picture of a woman with a center part. Spoilers are a myth: they don't spoil. No elaborate secrecy campaign is going to make Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows any better than it already is, and no website could possibly make it useless and boring.

Amen.

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