Barrel of a Wand

I've always kind of thought that the problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was that Harry didn't die. Or failing him, someone else. Tony, in comments, has another interpretation that I find equally plausible:

 Harry needed to pull a trigger at some point. Even Voldemort's death was by way of accidentally-reflected-spell hokum--typical Disney BS, knocking off the villain but absolving the hero of responsibility. The tale of the series is Harry knocking off some peculiar challenges while everyone else does the dirty work. That suits him as a child; the grown-ups are protecting him and they say as much. But if the series was really about him becoming a man, there needed to be a moment of reckoning where he grew into it. He had to look down the barrel of a gun (wand) and finish somebody. It didn't have to be Voldemort or Malfoy or anyone in particular. It just needed to happen....

Heroes don't have an easy road. They don't get to be heroes all the time, and a real hero would have assumed some responsibility for the war that was, ultimately, his. He didn't and I maintain the end of Hallows is a hot mess.

We talked about it a bit, and I think the conclusion that I've come to is this: Harry needed to become either Jesus or a man, to either really, truly die, and if he comes back, to come back genuinely different, or to live, but to do something, affirmatively and not by accident, that makes him different. He could have, for example, killed Bellatrix Lestrange out of revenge, though Molly Weasley's stepping up is one of my favorite events in the series. But neither of those true transformations ends up happening. It's one of many reasons why the epilogue doesn't work. Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermoine don't actually grow up and change, at least that we get to see. We're just given them at 16 and 17, married, and with children. Only Draco Malfoy actually gets forced to grow up. But he's not the only one who needed it.