Word: plot
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...being male. That is, they are about that, thoroughly, organically, but not exclusively. (The shows befit the era of Hillary Clinton, who has enough political and personal backstory that--if she were a drama lead--her being the potential first woman President would be only her B or C plot.) Their women, like most women, like most people, have other things to worry about...
...readings, I'm often making rounds or sitting there writing in charts, listening. But I can never listen to line-up for long. The bureaucratic illogic of the messages I can ignore; the management's false concern and manipulative guile can be fun to trace out - like the plot in a bad TV show. But what's so repulsive about line-up is what they call the sick people in those rooms - the people on their backs with tubes in their noses, broken bones, cancers, strokes and infections, who can't dress or eat, or even empty their bladders without...
...That's a lot of plot, and there's more besides. This isn't the most elegant of the Potter volumes: the sheer number of Macguffins in play gives the story a lumpy shape, and Rowling's prodigious narrative imagination constantly tempts her to overstuff the story. That kind of thing can be frustrating on a first reading, when you're hellbent on getting to the denouement, but it's exactly the kind of thing you appreciate on later re-readings, when you can stop and let chance details catch the light, and groove on the richness and sheer high...
...then again, this isn't a lyrical interlude, this is the grand finale. It calls for big battles and high body counts, force majeure and not legerdemain, and Rowling leaves no stops unpulled. It gives nothing away to say that a final showdown occurs, and if the final plot twist is eminently satisfying but not all that surprising, it's only because fans have already worked through all the possible endings on the Internet with such massive rigor. If we'd spent all that energy on particle physics instead, we would have found the Higgs boson...
...Deathly Hallows is of course not merely the tying up of plot-threads, it's the final iteration of Rowling's abiding thematic concern: the overwhelming importance of continuing to love in the face of death. On this point, at least, we're not waiting for a new wrinkle. Dumbledore has been schooling us on this subject since Goblet of Fire, if not longer - when in doubt Rowling tends to err on the side of quashing ambiguity, both telling and showing when one would probably do. So we have known for a while that Voldemort cannot love, that...