Divination Class: Deathly Hallows

In approximately 8 hours, this post will be entirely foolish in retrospect, but I had to have a bit of fun. Anyway, with the pending release of the the final Harry Potter book tonight, I thought I would have a bit of fun trying to predict some of the outcome. Please note that in an unusual move for me, I have not tracked down all of the spoilers, even though I am aware they are readily available. All predictions are guaranteed to be either true or false or possibly some grey area in between.

HARRY
J.K. Rowling has been hinting for many years now that Harry would die in book 7. There is all sorts of internal evidence to suggest that he will die and Rowling loves to throw that idea out there in interviews. All of this leads me to believe that Harry will not die. As far as his fate is concerned, I've always thought he would become the new (permanent) Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.

RON & HERMIONE
One of them will die. My money is on Ron. Harry has saved the lives of members of the Weasley family for years now, so I think this is the book where that may end.



VOLDEMORT
I think it is fairly obvious that he will meet his demise, but the method of that demise is very much up in the air. In the tradition of super villains dying, I don't think that Harry can/will kill him directly. I have several possibilities: 1. Harry kills him indirectly, perhaps through some sort of trap or accidental "old magic," 2. Snape kills Voldemort (he did kill Dumbledore, so this would make sense in a dorky math-major type of way), 3. Wormtail is somehow involved in Voldemort's death, but I can't say exactly how.

SNAPE
I don't think there is any way on earth that Snape is a legitimate bad guy. I am more convinced of this after Book 6 than ever before. He probably dies though.




R.A.B.
There certainly seems to be enough evidence to suggest that this is Regulus Black.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Rowling is big fan of the Red Herring. She loves to give you fake clues and then introduce something in the end that makes everything make sense. Of course, she provides a few real clues along the way to keep the reader honest. I think we are in for a MAJOR deux ex machina revelation in book 7. Otherwise, I think that there are enough crazy fans dedicated to this type of thing that it would have already been figured out if there were enough "honest" clues along the way. Furthermore, this is my way of copping out of further speculation, which is just as bad...