If you don't want clues to what is going to happen stay away from it.
They are talking about over half a dozen of the characters dying.
I have to hand it to Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet. They have completely refrained from spoilers. Melissa Anelli and Emerson Spartz (the Webmasters respectively) are class acts.
Hopefully most of them will be the bad guys.
Thanks for the heads up on the review!
Go figure, the old grey hag has to spoil it for everyone.
Mugglenet had on interview JKR did on a British talk show and she said, “It’s a bloodbath! {pause} Well, not a ‘bloodbath’, but a lot of people die.”
I've given up worrying about the numbers game. There are just too many candidates and the plotting is essentially arbitrary, it being a magical world. Six hardly scratches the surface. My theories, just to get them down before the release:
I assume Voldemort is destroyed. Peter Pettigrew, Fenrir (if he counts as a "character"), and Bellatrix are all good candidates for a trip to the graveyard. Lucius Malfoy is too important to the story to be left dangling. He either needs to be redeemed or killed. (Interesting twist if Lucius should break with Voldemort to save Draco or Narcissa -- again, the plotting is arbitrary.)
That gets me to five corpi delecti without even starting on the good guys, of whom Snape is the obvious first candidate for an untimely end.
One of the curiosities of the whole Potter universe, in my mind at least, is that a 21st century female author has created such a heavily masculine storyline. FWIW, that's the main reason I'd bet on Hermione surviving. JK Rowling has said that one character she had originally thought to kill got a reprieve. I'd bet that is Hermione. JK doesn't have enough major female characters to be throwing them away carelessly.
Hermione in particular is the anchor character for future generations of little girls; if JK wants the series to stand the test of time, that's a factor. Also, Hermione hasn't really been built up enough to be worth killing. Like Ron, she's a sidekick but isn't really central to any of the deeper plot designs. Tonks, Luna or Cho could die heriocally -- having killed off Dumbledore and Sirius Black, JK needs to sacrifice someone who lacks a Y chromosome, lest she be thought a chauvinist -- but Professor McGonagall is my guess. She is a heavyweight in the series, she's old enough that her death won't shock the nine-year-olds, and besides, how else can Remus Lupin become headmaster of Hogwarts?
What the heck: everybody's entitled to one nutball theory, and that's mine.
Ron is in a little more jeopardy than Hermione -- there are plenty of both boys and Weasley's to spare -- but plotwise he's also hardly worth killing, unless JK is going to do a "slaughter everyone close to Harry" routine. If one of the kids is to be sacrificed -- and I'd guess one will be -- Neville would be the most interesting choice.
Harry lives.
Dobby and Filch die.