Anise’s Note:
Welcome to the next installment of Creamtea’s wonderful essays! Here, we’ll delve into the stunning mysteries of the otherwise inexplicable nature of H/G in HBP. We’ll see the surprising evidence, and the shockingly logical arguments will be laid bare and made clear. And at the end, you, too, may feel that at last, it all makes sense. Ready? Then get your scuba gear on, and let’s dive fearlessly into…

GIRLS AND LOVE POTIONS: HERMIONE, GINNY AND HARRY
By Creamtea
(Notes and Addendums by Anise)

(In the following all quotes and page numbers are as in the Bloomsbury standard edition.)

A bit about my attitude to the HP books. I view them not as adventure novels but as detective/mystery novels in which the author is essentially lying to the reader and challenging the reader to see through the lie - that's the whole point of the books. JKR references detective novels on her site 'bookshelf' (Dorothy L Sayers - twice, front and centre,) plus one of her mates (Ian Rankin - detective novelist) flat out said in an interview that 'her books are practically detective mysteries'.

In hunting about for clues in the HP books I DO NOT deal in ‘symbolism.’ As far as I’m concerned the clues are in the text, directly embedded in what the characters say and do; if I can’t find clues there but instead have to resort to ‘symbolism’ to prove a case, then I assume I have no case and I drop it.

My first reaction on the ‘Love Potion’ theory, and the reaction I held for some time (even on my first read-through of the book), was that the theory was simply a desperate attempt by those against an H/G pairing to find some way – any way - to deny it: that it was a result of people desperately attempting to reject JKR’s clear expression in canon. As to my own attitude to H/G, I felt disgust at the pairing and annoyance at the poor writing of it, but I accepted it as canon. I thought several things about it: that it was subject to a stunning lack of proper foreshadowing, that indeed it went against the previous theme of the five books, being that he hadn’t noticed her - and no, I don’t buy ‘chocolate Easter eggs’ as symbolic foreshadowing, I don’t buy ‘symbolism’ full stop. I thought that Harry’s reactions were ludicrously ‘Harlequin Hero’, that Ginny as seen via Harry was ludicrously perfect, that the dialogue was laughably cheesy, like something out of a teenage girls’ hopeless romance novel. Most of all though, I thought the whole theme of ‘girl pines after boy for YEARS, until one day her Cinderella devotion is rewarded and SHAZZAM he suddenly sees that She Is The One’ was morally bankrupt. I can’t begin to tell you how angry that last made me – that an author like JKR, who is in effect in Loco Parentis to millions of girls the world over, could peddle tripe like that, encouraging impressionable girls to pine away waiting for Him to notice them (whoever He is – the quarterback, the football captain, the ‘cool guy’ at school, their best friend’s elder brother, Tom Felton, Dan Radcliffe, whoever). To see JKR peddle the fantasy that after FIVE YEARS of Harry seeing Ginny as his ‘little sister’ figure/not really noticing her at all, that he’d suddenly ‘switch on’ to her as his Twu Wuv made me pretty cross. Nevertheless, even though I thought the plotline was ridiculous, I still didn’t entertain the ‘Love Potion’ theory. I just forced myself to swallow H/G as canon and instead thought it was a spectacularly poor piece of writing on JKR’s part.

Anyway, I read the book and I uncomfortably note that the theme of Love Potions does keep cropping up on page after page, but STILL I won’t believe it – I STILL think H/G is meant to be taken seriously but that it’s just rubbish writing. I look again at the book but I keep getting sidetracked by what I came to think of as ‘that love potion crap’ which keeps cropping up in the story. Finally I throw up my hands and decide to look into it – however stupid the theory may ostensibly seem and however little faith I have in it – just so I can prove to myself it’s rubbish and get past it.

I fish around for a while. I see Love Potion mentions and inferences all over, but I still don’t see any discernable pattern. In fact, the ‘Love Potion’ theory seems totally gutshot by the following canon:

Page 174, the first Potions lesson: from the Amortentia cauldron ‘was emitting one of the most seductive scents Harry had ever inhaled: somehow it reminded him simultaneously of treacle tart, the woody smell of a broomstick handle and something flowery he thought he might have smelled at The Burrow.’ It is further canon that Amortentia is (page 176) ‘the most powerful love potion in the world’ … ‘it’s supposed to smell … according to what attracts us’ (all from Hermione, who knows a lot about it). Now that seems to slam the Love Potion theory to a halt before it’s even started, because Harry smells ‘flowers’ (a.k.a., as is established later, Ginny) during his first official encounter with a love potion, i.e. he was already ‘attracted to’ Ginny BEFORE he came into contact with the love potion, and thus the love potion simply indicated that he was already naturally attracted to her. I realised that any Love Potion theory must address this fact and explain it – you can’t just ignore it because it doesn’t suit your ideas.

I knew that if the Amortentia evidence were to be disproved, and that Harry isn’t naturally attracted to Ginny and there were indeed Love Potion dirty dealings involved, then there could only be one logical explanation for the Amortentia episode ‘flowery smell’: Harry must have been dosed with a Love Potion to engineer an attraction to Ginny BEFORE he is exposed to the scent of the Amortentia. So, I drag my weary ass back to the first chapter in which he meets Ginny – the chapter when Harry first arrives at The Burrow, ‘An Excess of Phlegm’ – and flick about looking for an explanation. I don’t really expect to find anything as I’ve got no real faith in the Love Potion theory anyway. Partly I’m only looking into it to prove to myself that he couldn’t have been dosed before, so that I can shut up that nagging voice at the back of my mind and get on with the rest of the book. I haven’t even got anything to really go on, all I’ve got is that if anything DID happen it’s somehow got to have involved the scent of flowers. I’m fiddling about with the chapter, not really expecting to find anything , when !BAM!, I see it. I see those little clues that are the loose threads that allow me to start pulling away at the Love Potion strand that runs through the book, and I pull and I pull and I unravel it, and what I unravel is this:

SUMMARY

The summary doesn’t give canon evidence (quotes etc) it just lays out the overall theory. I chose to give a summary first and then back it up with a separate detailed, quote stuffed, canon referenced ‘full’ section giving the ‘evidence’, as otherwise people might be hard pushed to keep track. If you like, the summary provides the overall picture, which is then ‘coloured in’ in the detailed section.

Summary: Hermione dosed Harry with a home-made love potion during his first night at The Burrow. It was designed to make him fall for her Harry-crushing, love-lorn best mate, Ginny. Two points right now: Firstly, Ginny has no idea about this and doesn’t know anything about Hermione’s plans. Ginny is innocent of the entire scheme. Secondly, Hermione is content to try and dose Harry only because she does not see Love Potions as Dark or dangerous, and besides, she is sure that Ginny is the ideal girlfriend for Harry, she thinks Harry just needs a little push, that’s all, that the situation just needs a ‘helping hand’. If Hermione had thought it was dangerous or damaging to Harry, then I am convinced from all that we know of her that she would never have done it.

Hermione thinks her potion has failed as the next morning she looks for discernable change in Harry’s behaviour but can detect none. She drops the plan. Then, a few weeks later, everyone goes to Diagon Alley where Hermione spots the WWW Love Potions and she decides to give it a second try using a ‘proper’ love potion this time. She either buys the WWW love potion there and/or orders a supply via the Twins special Owl Delivery.

When school starts she comes across the Amortentia in the first Potions lesson. It reminds Harry – among other things – of something flowery he thought he had smelled at the Burrow (the smell later associated with Ginny). In fact, he is not reminded of Ginny per se, but reminded of the smell associated with the first ‘dose’ of love potion that he was exposed to wherein he was ‘set up’ to be attracted to Ginny anyway. During the lesson, Hermione may have stolen some Amortentia (we never know for sure).

Throughout the school year Hermione is periodically dosing Harry with various combinations of WWW Love Potion (and stolen Amortentia?) trying to engineer him to fall for Ginny. Ginny still has no idea that any of this is going on. Hermione carries on dosing, not believing she is having any real effect because Harry is hiding his newborn and unsettling ‘feelings’ for Ginny. He internalises them and is largely able to keep himself in check (he is a boy who was good at throwing off the Imperius) but in actual fact, she is having an effect: Harry is periodically given to wild, infatuated longings for Ginny, and they scare him. I repeat that Hermione never has any idea that what she is doing is in any way dangerous or injurious to Harry, she does not believe that love potions are Dark or dangerous magic. If she did believe they were Dark or dangerous, or if she knew the turmoil she was creating within Harry, I believe her own actions would have horrified her and that she would have stopped immediately.

At a point just prior to the Quidditch Cup match, Hermione tells Ginny what she has been doing. Ginny is angry at Hermione, but yet … this is the one chance she has to get what she believes she has always wanted: Harry’s ‘love’. After the match the gives in to temptation and makes a move on Harry. Prompted by his repeated dosings and chemically engendered infatuation/obsession, Harry responds and they are officially a couple.

Things seem okay and trickle along in a tame fashion – there are no great dates to report of, it’s just comfy. Harry might still be receiving the odd dose here and there to keep him ‘topped up’. Then all hell breaks loose, the DEs attack, Bill is marred and suddenly we get one of the strongest gestures of true love in the book: Fleur won’t hear of leaving the marred Bill, she loves him – it is a proper love, the kind you can’t get out of a bottle. Both Hermione and Ginny see this at first hand and are startled by it. It is a wake up call. Under the pressure of events, Harry (who does not know that he has ever been potioned) decides to break with Ginny, he still ‘cares’ about her though and it makes him miserable to do it. Ginny flares up slightly, she can see it all slipping away from her, and yet … she accepts it with a form of grace as she realises it would never have lasted as it was based on a falsity anyway, and could she have really borne to go on dosing Harry forever?

The book ends with Harry ‘turning his back’ on Ginny and spending what precious time he has left to him with his friends Ron and Hermione. He does not think about Ginny from the moment her ‘turns his back on her’ at Dumbledore’s funeral.

For the future: I believe the love potion scheme with come out and that it will send a destructive shockwave through Harry’s ‘relation’ with Ginny, and will also send a shockwave through the Trio as Hermione’s culpability is revealed. Ron will be affected as both Ginny’s brother and Hermione’s boyfriend, and will sympathise with Harry as he was a sufferer of the devastating effects of a love potion himself: he knows what Harry went through. Ginny will go into an emotionally devastated decline when Harry reveals his anger at what was done to him and he rejects her. Her magical ability/strength will be damaged by it. She will also be targeted by Voldemort, who will still believe that Harry cares for her as she was ‘Harry’s girlfriend’. Not counting possible character deaths: by the end of the book, Harry and Ginny will never be a couple – Harry could never trust her no matter what – and their ‘love’ was never real anyway, but based on a potion.


THE FULL THEORY: EVIDENCE FROM CANON

This is where I go into detail and flesh out the summary – adhering strictly to HBP canon.

WHAT IS GINNY’S MOTIVATION?

Ginny never really gave up on Harry, ever, even though by the end of OoTP he still hasn’t made a move on her. Indeed she has heard it straight from the mouth of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Date Her that he didn’t even remember one of the defining events of her life – her possession by Voldemort.

Ginny was so keen to ‘get’ Harry that her behavior in OoTP – getting a life and going out with other boys on the advice of her friend Hermione – was actually directed at getting Harry to notice her. It didn’t work. She admits it at the end of HBP. Page 603: “I never really gave up on you … I always hoped … Hermione told me to get on with my life, maybe go out with some other people, relax a bit around you, because I never used to be able to talk if you were in the room, remember? And she thought you might take a bit more notice if I was a bit more – myself.”

Now, I take this to mean she was up to this behaviour in OoTP, because that is when she ‘takes off’ as a character with her boyfriends etc. As an aside I find the lay out of the end of that passage interesting. It’s the little dash between the main body of the text and the word ‘myself’, she pauses before she utters that word, almost as though she has to think about what to say. I think there’s a possibility that OoTP Ginny (and then Super!Ginny) may all a bit of an act on her part really – a persona she adopted. Because the phrase “And she thought you might take a bit more notice if I was a bit more - ” feels to me as though it might have naturally ended in a word like, ‘brash’, ‘sassy’, something like that, or maybe she was going to say ‘a bit more like Cho Chang’(whom Hermione knew Harry fancied), in any case she catches herself, pauses and puts in ‘myself’.

So, we have a Ginny who never got over Harry, so much so that she spent the school year in OoTP (and since?) affecting her behaviour to catch his eye, and using other boys to get Harry to notice her. She didn’t date other boys for themselves (Michael, Dean, and even Neville, as she admitted she only accepted his invite to the Yule Ball so she could attend it and presumably have a chance to get next to Harry,) she dated them to get next to Harry/ to get Harry to notice her. Indeed, it makes sense of the ‘I chose Dean’ comment at the end of OoTP. Too right she ‘chose’ him, she may have liked him but it certainly served her purpose to go out with a boy who was one of only four boys who shared a dorm with Harry, only three of whom were available to her as Ron is her brother. It is a trick used the world over by girls (and maybe boys too): if you fancy someone you think is a little out of your reach and whom you my have to ‘work at’, then go out with an ‘easier catch’ mate of theirs so at least you are in their social orbit.

Ginny is someone who is desperate. She is someone who’ll go to quite some lengths to get Harry. Someone in fact, who doesn’t stop to consider the real feelings of boys in her blind, desperate struggle to get Harry’s ‘love’. This strikes me as someone who could find it within themselves to take advantage of an already existing love potion situation as she won’t necessarily see/want to see that Harry has real feelings that she is messing with, she is just desperate to be ‘loved’ by him.

WHAT IS HERMIONE’S MOTIVATION? AND WHY DOES HERMIONE DECIDE UPON, AND CARRY OUT, THE LOVE POTION PLAN? – IT SEEMS OUT OF CHARACTER.

This is going to be quite a long section, as Hermione appears to be OOC in this theory, but within the setting of her emotional development in HBP, I don’t think love potion shenanigans are OOC for her …

Reason 1: She is a friend of Ginny’s (page 496 ‘Hermione and Ginny who had always got on together very well’). Ginny wanted Harry to the extent of altering her own behaviour in OoTP in order to try and get him, but with no success. Hermione was already engaged enough to have suggested Ginny’s previous tactics to her, so when those tactics failed Hermione decides to ‘help out’ by going a little bit further.

Reason 2: She sees no harm in using a love potion. We know this because when Harry and Hermione are discussing how the cursed necklace and the love potions could have gotten past Hogwarts security. Hermione says (page 288)

Hr: Secrecy Sensors detect jinxes, curses and concealment charms, don’t they? They’re used to find Dark magic and Dark objects …. and anyway, love potions aren’t Dark or dangerous -”
H: Easy for you to say.

Okay, so from the above it is securely established in CANON that Hermione doesn’t think the love potions are Dark or dangerous, and acknowledging that is crucial because if she thought they were she’d never have done it. Note Harry’s little reply ‘easy for you to say’; yes it is easy for her to say, because she is not the one being dosed.

Indeed, why should she think they are Dark or dangerous? Lots of other girls are buying love potions off WWW and are planning to use them on Harry prior to Slughorn’s Christmas party. Why shouldn’t Ginny have the same advantage? After all, she ‘loved’ him first, way before any late-comers like Romilda Vane popped up – if anyone deserves Harry, Ginny does. Besides, if it was dangerous surely WWW wouldn’t be allowed to sell it?

Furthermore, although the ‘Birthday Surprise’ (page 371) Ron gets from the Romilda Vane love leaves him horrified, Hermione doesn’t know about it: ‘Then, very slowly, his grin sagged and vanished to be replaced by an expression of utmost horror’. He then ‘collapsed into an armchair looking devastated’. Note the ‘utmost horror’ and ‘devastated’; love potions are not a happy experience for the dosee, however girly and ‘fun’ they might seem as a concept. The point relating to Hermione is that there is no evidence that either Ron or Harry ever mentions the incident to Hermione (or anyone else except Slughorn.) In my opinion, they keep quiet on it- partly because it’s a horribly embarrassing experience for Ron, and partly because they just plain forget in the aftermath of Ron’s immediate near-death from the doped mead.

An extra point is that during the Potions class where we ‘meet’ the Amortentia, Slughorn asks Hermione “I assume you know what it does?” Hermione answers: “It’s the most powerful love potion in the world!” She then goes on to describe it purely in terms of its physical appearance, but she didn’t answer the question in terms of its emotional effects, which is actually what the question was asking: what does it do? It is left to Slughorn to go into the emotional effects on page 177.

“Amortentia doesn’t really create love of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room – oh yes,” he said, nodding gravely at Malfoy and Nott, both of whom were smirking sceptically. “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love …”

Not only does Hermione not consider love potions dangerous, she hasn’t thought about them in terms of their effects and consequences properly at all.

Reason 3: Hermione shows herself of a mind to magically ‘tweak events’ to get things to go the way she wants them, especially when she thinks that the way she wants them is they way they ought to be. See the chapter ‘Hermione’s Helping Hand’ wherein she’s quite happy to Confundus McLaggan out of the running for Quidditch Keeper to ensure that Ron keeps the spot. She also states (page 484) re the use of Felix Felicis “The situation with Slughorn was different, you just needed to tweak the circumstances a bit.” This is banged home on page 486 when the line is essentially repeated in Harry’s thoughts: “surely this was a case for, as Hermione put it, ‘tweaking the circumstances’?” Hermione is thus established in canon as someone who is prepared to use magic to ‘tweak’ events/circumstances to get them to go the way she wants. The use of the word ‘tweak’ (which she uses herself, it is her spoken phrase) strongly implies that she doesn’t see her actions as serious or as carrying heavy consequences, and that she regards the changes she engenders as small. I.e. that she sees that events would/should have turned out her way anyway – she just helped them along with ‘Hermione’s Helping Hand’.

The known ‘tweaking’ with McLaggan can be directly compared to the conjectured dosing of Harry: she used magic to affect a person’s mind and judgment with the aim of arranging a beneficial situation for a third party for whom she cared (Ron and Ginny Weasley) – without the third party knowing about it or requesting it.

I find the actual chapter title, ‘Hermione’s Helping Hand’, important in itself – as under my theory ‘a helping hand’ is her role in the love potion fiasco. I see the chapter title as a huge clue to her overarching role in that aspect of the story.

Reason 4: emotional control. Hermione’s own love life is a mess. She can’t get through to Ron (not since the great Krum debacle of GoF) and she is frustrated. Ron, in turn, is hurting her by having taken up with Lavender to get some snogging practice in and to get revenge on Hermione’s own ‘Krum snogging’(prompted in both cases, ironically enough, by Ginny’s attack on his ‘poor’ romantic reputation and her revealing of Hermione’s confidence that Hermione had ‘snogged Viktor Krum’ – page 269). The extent of her frustration in HPB is shown in the quite shocking end to the Chapter Felix Felicis (page 283) wherein she sets a charmed flock of little golden birds onto Ron (having witnessed him with Lavender). She is ‘shrieking’, her expression is ‘wild’ and she sets them on him ‘like a hail of fat golden bullets’ and Ron has to cover his face as they are ‘pecking and clawing at every bit of flesh they could reach’. Hermione departs abruptly, and to the reader it is clear that she is sobbing. This strikes me as a girl who, if her own romantic life is a mess, would have the motivation to ‘sort someone else out’ in an effort to give herself the illusion that she is in control.

This ‘control’ motivation is also shared by Ginny. Ginny believes that Molly is scheming to put a stop to the marriage of Fleur and Bill, and says so in front of Hermione who does not dispute it. (Page 93)

“You don’t really want her around forever?” Ginny asked Ron incredulously. When he merely shrugged, she said, “Well, mum’s going to put a stop to it if she can, I bet you anything.”
“How does she manage that?” asked Harry.
“She keeps trying to get Tonks round for dinner. I think she’s hoping Bill will fall for Tonks instead. I hope he does, I’d much rather have her in the family.”

Ginny thus believes, and Hermione is a witness to that belief, that ‘love’ is something you can affect, even if it is other people’s love, and that you have a right to affect it if you want to.

OPINION: Hermione is a person who needs to feel in control – JKR has said in interviews that Hermione is insecure, and in canon Hermione is given to controlling behaviour as a character. She has a very maternal ‘bossy’ attitude toward Ron and Harry (mentioned frequently in canon) she is also an organised person – often using lists and having detailed written timetables of various sorts (also canon). I think that this kind of character in real life – a list-maker - is often prompted by a need for control, that such people feel that if they can organise things on paper then they can organise life. They are scared of being out of control. Hermione is scared of being out of control; using a love potion to ‘tweak events’ and make sure they go her way would be fine by her.

JKR has stipulated that she created Ginny as the ‘perfect’ and ‘ideal’ girlfriend for Harry - yes, so that Hermione sees that they are meant to be together and is of the opinion that surely Harry must really love Ginny anyway but he just doesn’t know it yet, he just needs that little extra push to get him started and then his real feelings will kick in.

Anise’s Note: That could explain a lot which I think is otherwise very strange about JKR’s Ginny comments in that Mugglenet interview. For the moment, let’s leave aside the fact that one paragraph before the “ideal girl” comments, JKR says she had always intended for Ginny and Harry to get together and then part. And let’s not deal with the way she says earlier that Harry will have to go on alone. Nope, let’s just look at what is seemingly the most damning thing JKR’s ever said or written for those of us who were profoundly uncomfortable with the H/G of HBP. JKR certainly does say that Ginny fits the description of “Harry’s ideal woman.” And yet there is so much more she could say that she doesn’t. Are they in love? (Not a word about that!) What’s really the nature of the emotions that Harry feels for Ginny, and she for him? Are these emotions genuine? Will they last? Are they strong enough to get them back together? What is Harry for Ginny, no matter how great she may be for him? And so on.

Honestly, it sounds more like JKR is giving us a laundry list: Ginny is warm, compassionate, tough, and so on. It’s almost as if we’re looking at a list of qualities that someone is checking off, and now that Creamtea brings up this point, the conclusion is pretty irresistible: someone actually was, and it wasn’t Harry. Back to Creamtea’s commentary…

As an aside: in communication with poster Lysette at FAP, Lysette commented that Hermione was like ‘Emma’ in Jane Austen’s novel of the same name. Emma is a gifted young woman who only has marginal control over her own life, particularly in its romantic elements. As a reaction to that she tries to ‘organise’ the love lives of those around her to give herself a sense of control, she attempts to engineer people to go against their natural inclinations and to instead pair off with people she thinks are more suitable to them. In her machinations she almost brings emotional disaster and irretrievable heartache upon those involved – including upon herself. Note that Jane Austen is known to be one of JKR’s favourite novelists and that ‘Emma’ is one of the Austen novels shown as a ‘standing book’ in JKR’s ‘links’ bookshelf on her website. JKR does not have all of Austen’s books shown on her bookshelf – possibly indicating that those she does ‘show’ have particular significance.


Reason 5: emotional ruthlessness re boys – the emotional ability to deploy and manipulate them as though they were mere chess pieces which lacked feeling. Page 293, prior to the Christmas party, Hermione (in Ron’s hearing), with false sweetness and coyness ‘announces with a most un-Hermion-ish giggle’ that she is going to the party with McLaggen. Harry surveys the situation thus: “Ron looked strangely blank and said nothing. Harry was left to ponder in silence the depths to which girls would sink to get revenge.” This phrase ‘the depths to which girls would sink to get revenge’ resonates with me, as given my love potion theory you could also see it as alluding to the depths to which girls will sink to get control over a situation which scares them precisely because they have no control over it (the romantic reactions of others). ‘Girls’ here includes Ginny too, if it’s taken as a general statement. In effect Hermione is trying to control Ron, she is trying to manipulate his emotions. That’s not too far off dosing someone with a ‘harmless’ love potion. We know in canon that many girls actually are ‘sinking to the depths’ of attempting to use a love potion on Harry to get control of him and get an invite to that very same party. At the party itself Hermione’s willingness to coolly manipulate others is brought home when she’s trying to escape McLaggen, and Harry remonstrates that it serves her right for bringing him in the first place. The scene runs:

“I thought he’d annoy Ron most,” said Hermione dispassionately. I debated for a while about Zacharias Smith, but I thought, on the whole – ”
“You considered Smith?” said Harry, revolted.
“Yes, I did, and I’m starting to wish I’d chosen him …”

This little scene is quite alarming, as we clearly see a Hermione who can be dispassionate and debate with herself about who to wind Ron up with. She is quite at home with coolly manipulating boys to get what she wants, and does not take their feelings into account. I think it is important to note Harry’s response to her: he is revolted. Not only is he revolted at Smith per se (following his Quidditch commentary) but I think he is revolted at Hermione’s cold-blooded attitude. I repeat my Summary assertion here: that if Hermione and Ginny have been up to funny business with love potions, then when Harry finds out there will be hell to pay.

In the party scenes (before and at) we see a Hermione who is quite able and willing to manipulate boys in a cold, dispassionate fashion. Indeed, we know from Ginny’s own words (page 603 quoted above) that it was Hermione who suggested the tactic of manipulating other boys (dating them) to get Harry to notice Ginny in the first place. So it is canon that she is the kind of person who can think of a tactic like that, and in recommending it to someone else obviously sees nothing wrong with it.

Given all these reasons, I find it completely within character for HBP Hermione to help Ginny with a ‘harmless’ love potion designed to ‘tweak circumstances’ with Harry.

Reason 6: Hermione has a limited ‘emotional intelligence’. Throughout SPEW she totally failed to understand that the House Elves wanted to retain the social hierarchy in which the felt secure, but to be guaranteed kind treatment within it. She believes they want ‘freedom’ and won’t hear any differently because she is ‘right’. She is wrong, they don’t want it and that is made clear by both Winky’s reaction to ‘freedom’ and by the House Elves’ refusal to clean Gryffindor Tower when they realise Hermione is trying to trick them into ‘freedom’ by leaving clothes lying about for them to ‘accept’. My point is that she is someone who has shown signs of low emotional engagement in that when she thinks she is right in knowing ‘what is good’ for someone, she ploughs ahead with it despite all evidence that she is wrong. She thinks she knows best in the first place and won’t even see any counter-evidence. Conjecture: some have commented on the lack of SPEW in HBP. Perhaps Hermione dropped SPEW because her new ‘project’ was Harry/Ginny.

Anise’s Note: This is such an important point that once again, I feel moved to comment on it. It certainly would explain the very curious fact that we see neither hide nor hair of SPEW anywhere in HBP. And this is a fact that I don’t think most people have paid enough attention to, largely because it’s an absence rather than a presence: SPEW just plain isn’t there, and we don’t know why. It was very much present for the past two books. So why don’t we see it again in HBP? This would be the first halfway logical reason I’ve seen for that strange absence.


HOW DID HERMIONE DOSE HARRY AT THE BURROW SO THAT WHEN HE COMES ACROSS THE AMORTENTIA IN THE POTIONS CLASS, IT SMELLS OF ‘SOMETHING FLOWERY HE THOUGHT HE MIGHT HAVE SMELLED AT THE BURROW’?

Chapter five: An Excess of Phlegm. Harry arrives late at night at The Burrow (though he was expected very early the next morning). At first sight of The Burrow, he thinks of Ron. On entering The Burrow he asks after Hermione to Molly, (whereupon it is established that she arrived ‘the day before yesterday’) but note that not once does he think about, mention, or ask after Ginny. He has not thought about her once all through the book so far. She is simply not a blip on his radar. Molly has already arranged for Harry to sleep in Fred and George’s vacated room which Molly has prepared for him: (page 87) “I’ve got Fred and George’s room all ready for you, you’ll have it to yourself.” Note that as he will be sleeping alone, any ‘scent potion’ will affect only him and not some other boy. Note also that as Molly has arranged his accommodation, Hermione (who is already at The Burrow), thus KNOWS what room Harry will be sleeping in. Then he goes to his bedroom. On arriving in the room with Molly he notes immediately that (page 87)

‘Though a large vase of flowers had been placed on a desk in front of the small window, their perfume could not disguise the lingering smell of what Harry thought was gunpowder. A considerable amount of floor space was devoted to a vast number of unmarked cardboard boxes …”

(The unmarked cardboard boxes are shortly identified as Fred and George’s spare stock.)

Now that the passage about the vase of flowers is the ONLY mention of flowers or a flowery perfume at The Burrow in HBP. Also note that the flowers passage is ostensibly it is a completely unnecessary passage. It is not there to introduce the boxes, as they are of no account. Narratively we need never have had mention of the vase, flowers, smell or boxes, and the story would have been just the same (Hermione could have picked up the punching telescope anywhere in the Burrow, and the story still would have worked). So why is the passage there? Let’s look at it in detail:

“Though a large vase of flowers had been placed on a desk…”

Note that the flowers ‘had been placed’, they weren’t ‘on’ the desk, they ‘had been placed’, the text indicating not that they just happened to be there, but that they had been specifically put there by someone.

“ … their perfume could not disguise the lingering smell of what Harry thought was gunpowder.”

The flowers were put there to disguise the smell.

The passage taken as a whole tries to imply that the gunpowder smell is coming from the boxes – that is the reader’s first assumption because mention of the boxes abuts onto mention of the disguise of something Harry thought was gunpowder. It is simply assumed that the boxes contain gunpowder (or something very like it) and that Molly has been very considerate and tried to disguise the smell for Harry. However, knowing what we know about Molly this does this bear up to any kind of logic. Firstly, Molly would never have the risk of gunpowder being stashed in the house in ‘box sized’ quantities – not when there are sheds and outhouses for them to be stored in. And Molly would NEVER then allow Harry to sleep in the same room as the boxes of gunpowder. She’d be up the wall with worry, imagining (quite rightly) that one stray spark from a wand and it could blow him to Kingdom Come. The concept of Molly allowing Harry to sleep in a room full of gunpowder is plain stupid. So – we are driven to the conclusion that whatever ‘Harry thought was gunpowder’ it was NOT in the boxes, and indeed may not have been gunpowder at all (note that Harry only thinks it is gunpowder, it is not stated that it IS gunpowder). Also, if a heavy gunpowdery smell was coming from the boxes, so much so that it was unpleasant and needed to be disguised, then Molly wouldn’t disguise the smell, she’d just move the boxes. When (in the same chapter) Hermione roots in the boxes and unearths the punching telescope, there is a loud bang and a heavy puff of black smoke is emitted – but no-one comments on the gunpowdery smell. In real life, if a quantity of gunpowder had gone off, there would have been a heavy acrid stench in the room, and Ron certainly would have commented.

If there was no gunpowder, but just a gunpowdery smell, then what could have been causing the smell that the flowers were put there to disguise?

Okay, look back at the flower vase passage and note the use of the word ‘perfume’ and the word ‘disguise’; the perfume, it is clearly implied, is intended to disguise the lingering gunpowdery smell. Now, think back to the passage I quoted from pages 287 to 288 when Harry and Hermione are discussing how the cursed necklace and the love potions could have gotten past Hogwarts security. Hermione says of the love potions: “Fred and George send them disguised as perfumes.” Fred and George use ‘perfume’ to disguise the love potions, the ‘perfume’ of the flowers disguises the ‘gunpowder’ smell. This, for me, is a very indicative link.

I conjecture that the gunpowdery smell was a home-cooked love potion whisked up by Hermione during her stay at The Burrow. Harry breathed it in during the night, and breathed it in all night during his suspiciously ‘deep sleep’. It was disguised by the aroma of flowers, and Hermione placed the flowers in the room for that purpose. It was designed to make him fall for Ginny. The potion DID in fact have an effect on him and make him far more receptive to Ginny (which I will cover shortly).

Note that between the ‘flower perfume’ at The Burrow and ‘the flowery smell’ of the Amortentia, Harry does not ONCE get any hint of ‘flowery smell’ off Ginny. Not at the Burrow, not in Diagon Alley, not on the train - although he meets her plenty of times. The flowery smell is thus not Ginny per se, it is the scent associated with the love potion that made him fancy her. So when he comes across the Amortentia, he DOES smell ‘the flowery smell from The Burrow’ which is what ‘attracts’ him; he smells it because the flowery smell is the smell associated with the love-potion, not intrinsically of Ginny herself.

A bit of a stretch you might think, from one mention of a vase of flowers. Well so did I, so that’s why I went looking for corroborating evidence.

There is no indication at all that Molly notices any funny smell – only that Harry does. I believe that Molly cannot smell it at all. She also doesn’t apologise for the smell – and I think she would if she could smell it. Furthermore, Harry gets into one of the beds after she leaves and finds something in the bed (page 88):

‘There was something hard in the pillowcase. He groped inside it and pulled out a sticky purple and orange sweet, which he recognised as a Puking Pastille. Smiling to himself he rolled over and was instantly asleep.’

He has a deep, unbroken sleep from which he awakes as though he feels he has not slept at all. Note that Harry is ‘knocked out’ practically the instant he touches the sweet which it is written ‘he recognised it as a Puking Pastille’ NOT that ‘it was a Puking Pastille’. Harry may have thought it was a Puking Pastille, but I think it was part of Hermione’s love-drug effort and something cooked up by her. Why? Because not only do we have the stunning coincidence of Harry being ‘knocked out’ practically the instant he touches the sweet (and the manner of his awakening next morning: see below) but also: we know for a fact that Molly herself made the room up for him. Part of this process of preparing a room for a loved guest would be to change the sheets and change the pillows (ask any woman alive). Molly would have changed the pillows, no doubt about it. But what do we find? – a sweet stuck inside one. That sweet MUST have been put there after Molly changed the bed. Harry had a choice of two beds – I conjecture that Hermione stuck ‘a sweet’ in each one, to catch him whatever bed he was in. She put the vase of flowers there to disguise the smell thrown out by ‘the sweets’. Why did she do it the night before he was due to arrive? Because the obtrusive smell would be something he was more likely to investigate/comment upon if it ‘turned up’ during his stay. If it was there at the start, he would just let it ride.

More evidence that Harry was drugged throughout the night by a scented ‘potion’: next morning he awakes – from his deep but unsatisfying night’s sleep – in a condition akin to someone with a hangover, or akin to someone drugged.

‘There was something hard in the pillowcase. He groped inside it and pulled out a sticky purple and orange sweet, which he recognised as a Puking Pastille. Smiling to himself he rolled over and was instantly asleep.
Seconds later, or so it seemed to Harry, he was woken by what sounded like cannon-fire as the door burst open. Sitting bolt upright, he heard the rasp of the curtains being pulled back: the dazzling sunlight seemed to poke him hard in both eyes. Shielding them with one hand, he groped hopelessly for his glasses with the other.
“Wuzzgoinon?” ..”
“We didn’t know you were here already!” said a loud and excited voice, and he received a sharp blow to the top of the head.
“Ron, don’t hit him!” said a girl’s voice reproachfully.
Harry’s hand found his glasses and he shoved them on, though the light was so bright he could hardly see anyway. A long, looming shadow quivered in front of him for a moment; he blinked and Ron Weasley came into focus, grinning down at him.’

The too-loud rasping noises, the painfully too-bright light that hurts his eyes, the ‘groping hopelessly’, the slurred speech, the inability to focus (on Ron), this all sounds like someone who has the equivalent of a bad hangover. (And note Hermione’s cry of ‘don’t hit him!’ as Ron hits him on the head, which is the very first thing she says in the book and will be referred to later.)

Could Molly have been behind it? Could she have stuck the ‘sweet’ under the pillow and put the flowers in the room to disguise the smell? Yes she could have as she had the prime opportunity: she prepared the room for Harry. Could it have been Ginny? – after all she had the prime motive and a great opportunity (the same opportunity as Hermione). Well I am convinced it was neither Molly nor Ginny (both of whom knew nothing about it) and that indeed it was Hermione, for the following reason:

Logically, ‘the doser’ would check with all haste the next morning to see how Harry had responded to the dose. And there is only one person who does that: Hermione. She closely watches Harry the next morning, when in contrast Ginny and Molly do not pay special, close attention to Harry in the ‘breakfast in bed’ scene. However, as soon as Hermione comes into the room Hermione perches herself on his bed and (page 89)

“was scrutinising Harry as though he were sickening for something.”

Harry assumes it is connected with his grieving period over Sirius’ death, and this is thus the explanation implied to the reader to explain Hermione’s scrutiny. Well, obviously I think Harry was wrong and the given explanation is misleading. Harry and Ron then have a quick conversation about Slughorn, during which Hermione does not speak. Instead she is watching Harry. The passage runs: (still page 89):

“Something wrong Hermione?”
She was watching him as though expecting strange symptoms to manifest themselves at any moment. She rearranged her features hastily in an unconvincing smile.
“No, of course not! So, um, did Slughorn seem like he’ll be a good teacher?”

Ginny then arrives, behaves perfectly normally (if like an annoying brat), does not look at Harry strangely at all, is not watching for anything special, and after several pages Ginny leaves. Immediately Ginny departs, Hermione ‘was peering into Fred and George’s boxes, though every now and then she cast sideways looks at Harry’. In other words Hermione is now watching closely to see Harry’s reaction to Ginny. Ostensibly, there isn’t one – not one she notices. Eventually she gives up staring and asks about one of the spyglasses she’s holding up. It punches her in the eye (not unreasonably considering what she’s just done). The conversation between Harry, Ron and Hermione shifts to matters concerning Voldemort, and then their OWL results arrive. Hermione completely forgets about ‘watching Harry’ (especially as nothing seemed to happen) and the inhabitants of the Burrow spend several weeks going about their business.

HERMIONE’S NEXT CONNECTION WITH LOVE POTIONS

This takes place prior to the start of school when the characters visit Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes and the Twins introduce Hermione and Ginny to the Wonder Witch love potion range (page 117), ‘the best range of love potions you’ll find anywhere’. Ginny is skeptical; she ‘raised an eyebrow skeptically. ‘Do they work?’” Hermione, who you would expect to be sceptical, says nothing. The Twins are on record as saying they won’t sell the stuff to Ginny, but they’re perfectly happy to sell anything to anyone else (Galleons are the bottom line) – so they would be perfectly happy to sell to Hermione (and every other girl at Hogwarts it seems!). The potions work for up to 24 hours once the dose has been administered, (but we also know from Slughorn’s comment on page 371 that love potions can strengthen the longer they’re kept).

I believe that Hermione ordered WWW love potions for her use at Hogwarts. She may even have bought one whilst at the shop; Hermione could have dosed him up again at The Burrow, using a WWW potion, prior to school. We certainly know that she is fully aware of the WWW potions and of how to get them from what she says on pages 287 to 288:

H: But I thought all the owls were being searched? So how come these girls able to bring love potions into the school?
Hr: Fred and George send them disguised as perfumes and cough potions. It’s all part of their Owl Order Service.
H: You know a lot about it.
Hermione gave him the kind of nasty look she had just given his copy of Advanced Potion-Making.
Hr: “It was all on the back of the bottles they showed Ginny and me in the summer,” she said coldly. “I don’t go round putting potions in people’s drinks … or pretending to either, which is just as bad …”

Tackling something right now: if I am right, what do we make of Hermione’s flat denial “I don’t go round putting potions in people’s drinks” – because under my theory she did, she did not only put the pastille under Harry’s pillow (technically not a drink, so technically she was telling the truth on that) but she also liquid-dosed him later too (on at least one known occasion). What do I make of it? I think that she flat out LIED in the above, and that we can see her justifying her lies to herself in the end of the passage: “… or pretending to either, which is just as bad …”. At the above point in the story, Harry has already lied his way to Potions Class glory (riding along on the back of the Half-Blood Prince’s work), and Hermione is sick of it. She also sees Harry as someone who has already pretended to dose Ron with the Felix Felicis, which riled her at the time. In the above she was angry at Harry because they’d just been having another set-to over his Potions book, and so she knee-jerk defends herself as someone who doesn’t put potions in people’s drinks, and then she pauses (indicated by …) and recalls that actually she IS someone who puts potions in other people’s drinks, and then justifies it to herself by saying that Harry’s trick with the Felicis was just as bad. In other words, she knows she doses Harry, but lying about it’s okay because Harry’s just as bad.

The postage information is NOT the kind of information one would expect to see on the back of individual product ranges. We are also given a huge clue with Harry’s ‘you know a lot about it’ comment; Hermione knows all about the Owl Order Service and how the potions get past security because she herself has been using the Order Service to attain the potions.

In the Chapter Draco’s Detour (page 110) which also shows us events during the group’s visit to Diagon Alley, JKR slips in a cheeky little mention about Hermione’s black eye which Hermione got while spying on Harry in the bedroom the morning after his first dosing (she was punched by the ‘punching telescope’).

“Yeah, like you’d dare do magic out of school,” sneered Malfoy. “Who blacked your eye Granger, I want to send them flowers.”

No need to rub it in, is there? - both of the ‘out of school magic’ (which Hermione has been doing) and of the black eye (a direct referral to the drugging/spying), and of the mention of flowers? Indeed, apart from the ‘Ginny flower’ mentions, I think these two mentions of the word ‘flowers’ (in the ‘vase of flowers’, and the ‘send them flowers’,) are the only two mentions of the word in the entire book: one mention being a direct key to what Hermione actually did and the other being a referral back to that bedroom scene.

WHY I BELIEVE GINNY IS NOT IN ON HERMIONE’S PLAN – GINNY’S LACK OF FLIRTING TOWARD HARRY WHILST AT THE BURROW

My own logic forces me to believe that she is not in on it. Why isn’t she? Because if she was then she too would have been scrutinising Harry closely when she visits him the first morning at The Burrow. Furthermore, if she had known that Harry had been dosed up with a love potion to make him susceptible to her (and had colluded in the plan), then she would be flirting with him that morning. She is not flirting with Harry at all in that scene. In fact, if you look at it dispassionately you can see that throughout that scene she barely interacts with Harry, most of her interaction is with Ron and Hermione. In that scene Ginny comes in, vents about Fleur, then leaves. That is not the action of a scheming love-potion abuser. She is annoyed at the end of the scene where Molly orders her out of the room to help make lunch, but that is not from an urge to be with Harry, rather than an urge to stay with the group:

“I’m talking to this lot!” said Ginny, outraged.

And then a little later:

“You lot had better come down quickly too,” she said as she left.

‘You lot’, she is not fixating on Harry, she is cross at being forced to leave the group, not a being forced to leave Harry.

Indeed, if we look at Ginny’s behaviour toward Harry, she does not engage in active flirting behaviour toward him for most of the book – up until shortly before ‘the kiss’. There is no record of it in the weeks at The Burrow. Indeed, on the train into Hogwarts she turns down a chance to sit with Harry, sitting with Dean instead. I think her turning down his request was a form of ‘playing hard to get’, in that she was still playing the Hermione-suggested card of ‘look at me, I’m popular, I’ve got a boyfriend’ that had so ill-served her on OoTP (where Harry didn’t even notice that she was going out with Michael Corner for months, until he was actually told about it). I suspect
there is one further major point where she does this ‘boyfriend flaunting’ to try to impress Harry (the Dean-kiss scene, which I think she may have set up), but I do NOT think that she knew he had been dosed because if so then WHY would she play hard to get? She’s just wasting time instead of exploiting the finite window of opportunity (as potions do wear off).

For most of the time Ginny’s behaviour throughout most of the book (indeed, almost up until the moment she makes her move on him at the post-match party) is non-flirtatious toward Harry. She is simply there. Other characters refer to her prettiness, charm and attractiveness, she is canonically presented as popular and good at Quidditch and good with hexes (well, only one hex, the Bat Bogey), but she herself relates to Harry rarely, and almost right up until ‘the kiss’ she mostly relates to him with a functional straightforwardness. There is no strand of active flirting there.

HARRY AT THE BURROW – HIS REACTION TO THE DOSING.

Harry’s reaction is limited (recall that Harry is good at resisting ‘external control’ as he was with the Imperius) but it is there. Hermione can detect no difference in Harry’s behaviour toward Ginny, but we can – we can see the advent of what I’ve christened Prison!Bitch Harry, a Harry who reverses his often brusque attitude toward Ginny as shown in OoTP ( with no actual interaction between them after the DoM; they are in the same scenes but they are not speaking to each other) and instead starts (periodically) to increasingly hang off her every word.

It starts after a few minutes, Ginny arrives on page 90 of the ‘breakfast in bed’ scene and by page 92 of the same scene we see the first sign: Ginny calls Fleur ‘Phlegm’ for the first time in our hearing and Harry and Hermione laugh. Now Harry respected Fleur at the end of GoF, but now he is laughing at her? Then, on page 93, he rallies and tries to defend Fleur against Ginny and Hermione’s attack upon her:

“Fleur’s not stupid, she was good enough to enter the Triwizard Tournament,” said Harry.
“Not you as well!” said Hermione bitterly.
“I suppose you like they way Phlegm says “ ‘Arry”, do you?” asked Ginny scornfully.
“No,” said Harry, wishing he hadn’t spoken, “I was just saying, Phlegm – I mean, Fleur - ”

Harry ‘wishes he hadn’t spoken’, and then finds himself calling Fleur ‘Phlegm’ without meaning to, as if by magic; it is as though he is fighting for control of himself, feels impelled to agree with Ginny, but then he pulls it back by calling her Fleur. Over the next few weeks/pages we see very little Harry/Ginny direct interaction – we only get three instances. In effect we are given three snapshots of Harry and Ginny over the period prior to going to school – and they all revolve around Fleur, Ginny’s insults about her, and Harry’s changing reactions to those insults.

The first snapshot is the one we’ve just seen in the bedroom, where Harry fights back and regains control of himself. The second is the ‘vomiting’ incident at breakfast when Fleur strokes Bill’s nose (page 106)

‘Ginny mimed vomiting into her cereal behind Fleur. Harry choked over his cornflakes and Ron thumped him on the back.’

Note here that Ginny is puerile and unpleasant and is insulting someone behind their back – someone Harry traditionally liked. And Harry, though he says nothing, tacitly agrees. Ron does not laugh.

Then we have the laundry incident (page 126) when Harry bumps into Ginny on the landing:

“I wouldn’t go into the kitchen just now,” she warned him. “There’s a lot of phlegm around.”
“I’ll be careful not to slip in it,” smiled Harry.

Over the three snapshots Harry has traveled an arc from defending Fleur, to tacitly agreeing, to outright agreeing and even using Ginny’s insult of Fleur as an excuse to attempt to flirt with Ginny.

Note that the ‘flirting’ incident happens after the group visit to Diagon Alley where Hermione could have picked up a WWW love potion and dosed him again at the Burrow. Either way, Harry’s reaction to Ginny is growing stronger.

There is a fourth ‘Harry/Ginny’ incident in this section, where Harry specifically notices Ginny but does not speak to her. It is page 118 at WWW when Ginny defends herself against Fred’s statement that she is ‘moving through boyfriends a bit fast’. ‘Ginny turned to look at him, her hands on her hips. There was such a Mrs.Weasley-ish glare on her face that Harry was surprised that Fred didn’t recoil.’ In other words, Harry is projecting onto Fred a sudden fear Harry feels of displeasing Ginny.


HARRY AND GINNY – WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE BURROW? – FROM THE TRAIN TO THE SCHOOL.

Harry’s reaction to Ginny has grown stronger (see the Fleur insults argument above), and peaks on the train going into Hogwarts. He asks her if she wants to sit with him and she turns him down to sit with Dean. “Right,” said Harry. He felt a strange twinge of annoyance as she walked away, her long red hair dancing behind her.”

But then something happens: Harry meets Luna Lovegood and they share a compartment (also with Neville). Note that Harry’s reaction to Ginny (just prior to meeting Luna) was physical – he notes her physical attribute, her hair, and feels annoyance that she is physically rejecting him. In contrast Harry’s reaction to Luna is emotional, she makes him feel and his feelings are reported to us (admittedly written up as a squirming mixture of pity and embarrassment, at the embarrassingly honest things Luna says), but she makes him feel. He has ‘feelings’ for Luna, when we are not given any report of him having ANY feelings for Ginny so far apart from ‘a twinge of annoyance’.

Then Harry meets up with Ginny again in the Slug Club on the train. When he sees her there Harry evinces no emotional reaction at all to her, and shows no ‘physical’ reaction either, no mentions of ‘swinging red hair’, very surprising for a boy who ‘felt a strange twinge’ when he saw her moving away from him just minutes earlier. It’s as though he’s been cleansed of potion effects. Throughout that scene he doesn’t even speak to her, he only next speaks to her when they leave Slughorn’s compartment and only then to functionally ask her why she had been invited. Harry is then immediately concerned with Draco Malfoy’s actions, and breaks off from her to go and spy on Draco in his compartment. Harry is with Ginny and Neville in the train corridor, he issues a perfunctory goodbye to Ginny and Neville which does not differentiate Ginny at all: “I’ll see you two later’ and he is gone.

From a Harry/Ginny perspective the ‘Draco compartment’ scene is notable for one thing: Harry is there, he hears them discuss Ginny’s attractiveness to boys in a vaguely derogatory way, he hears Zabini directly insult Ginny, and his reaction is … nothing. It’s as though he now just doesn’t care inordinately about her – from the crescendo of asking her to sit with him and feeling a strange twinge of annoyance as she walked away, her long red hair dancing behind her, she’s just back to the status of ‘some girl he knows’.

For the whole of the next chapter (Snape Victorious) we only get one slight, and totally neutral, mention of Ginny: when she is in a group of Gryffindors ‘listening in’ on his conversation with Ron and Hermione (page 155). Harry has not spoken to her, or thought about her, since splitting off from her to track down Draco. Indeed he has not thought much of her since meeting Luna, at which point the potion effect wore off. Then we hit the infamous Chapter 9, ‘The Half-Blood Prince’, and the Amortentia.

HARRY AND GINNY AND HERMIONE – EVENTS FROM ARRIVING AT HOGWARTS UNTO THE ‘CLAWING MONSTER’ SCENE.

During his second day at Hogwarts Harry is exposed to the smell of Amortentia, which reminds him of ‘something flowery he thought he might have smelled at The Burrow’.
Shortly following the lesson he picks up a waft of ‘that flowery smell’ off Ginny. The reader is keyed to pick up that he is attracted to her as Amortentia smells like what you are attracted to, but no – I think he was smelling the flowers from back at The Burrow, the scent of which are now inextricably tangled up with the chemically induced attraction to Ginny that was imposed on him at The Burrow.

(ASIDE: AMORTENTIA – YOU SMELL WHAT YOU ARE ATTRACTED TO)

What you are attracted to is present tense: you can’t smell something you haven’t met yet and thus don’t know you will become attracted to. Also the smell has to remind you of the person, if not, it cannot smell like what you are attracted to.

We see that it works in this ‘present tense’ way from Hermione’s reaction to the scent of the Amortentia. Page 176.

“and it’s supposed to smell differently to each of us, according to what attracts us, and I can smell freshly mown grass and new parchment and -”
But she turned slightly pink and did not complete the sentence.’

Here I think that the ‘and -’ indicates Hermione abruptly coming to a halt, and then she goes pink with embarrassment. She halts and goes pink because she realises just before she says it that the next smell she was going to mention was one relating to a person she was attracted to.

To a person she was attracted to – she knew the connection from the smell instantly, because the smell reminded her of the person. Amortentia cannot give you the smell of someone you have not yet met, or a smell you do not associate with the person you are attracted to. And having said that I will say again, that the ONLY previous reference to a flowery smell (any at all) was to the vase of flowers at the Burrow. Between then and after the Amortentia lesson when Harry smells the flowery smell off Ginny, he does not smell any other flowery smell. The flowery smell is not Ginny per se, it is the scent associated with ‘being attracted’ in his dosing at The Burrow. We know that the flowery smell is not Ginny per se, as we can see directly inside Harry’s head in this scene: he does not associate the smell with Ginny. Indeed, the way we know Amortentia works (from watching Hermione’s reaction) we know that Amortentia gives you a smell which immediately links you to the person concerned: we do not get that with Harry/Ginny.

The Amortentia smell does not mean that Harry is attracted to Ginny.


After the Amortentia episode no great attraction is felt or evinced by Harry over the next three or four weeks, there are some inklings but nothing heated, they are slight mentions with no sense of Harry dwelling on Ginny. After the ‘Amortentia incident’ a week goes by and we get no mention of Ginny, or of Harry thinking about her/interacting with her. We see her next at the Quidditch try outs where it is established as canon that she is a good flyer – that is not Harry’s opinion, it is a fact. There are signs of some low level interest over the weeks – but they are mild and few and far between. Harry defending Ginny at the try outs against McLaggen’s accusation that she gave Ron an easy ride, Harry says that Ginny’s shot was the one Ron nearly missed, but this is proved to be a lie on the very next page (214) when Ron clearly states that Demelza’s shot was the one he nearly missed. At the end of the day (page 221) he glancingly notes that she is playing with Arnold, her Pygmy Puff. But then weeks go by and we get no real mention/thoughts of Ginny, except of a single neutral mention that Ron and Ginny and Harry together regularly laugh when Hermione gets stuck at Slughorn’s parties. It is all very tame and low key with no sense of fascination on Harry’s part.

Then we get the first Hogwarts weekend.

On the day of the trip, Harry casually asks Ginny if she wants to join the Trio for the Hogwarts visit, she turns him down saying she’s going with Dean (page 228). Harry does not react badly to this, in fact he does not react at all to it. Then the Trio leave for Hogsmeade and he has a drink in the Three Broomsticks, (page 232) bought for him by Hermione and given to him by Hermione:

“Go sit down, I’ll get you a drink.” …
‘Hermione returned to their table a few minutes later holding three bottles of Butterbeer.’

Then they quickly discuss Grimmauld Place and Mundungus’ thieving from it, and the very next mention of Harry’s drink (after having just been given it, so it might only be his first swig) is when Hermione says:

“Harry, I’d be annoyed too, I now it’s your things he’s stealing - ”
Harry gagged on his Butterbeer; he had momentarily forgotten that he owned number twelve Grimmauld Place.

Harry gagged on his Butterbeer, he gagged on the drink Hermione gave him, any ostensible reason JKR gives us is, I think, secondary to the fact that he gags on his drink. Ron and Hermione have one of their spats, this time over Ron’s attention to Rosmerta, and in the meantime Harry continues drinking. Hermione is keen to go because of Ron and Rosmerta.

‘The moment Harry drained the last drops in his bottle she said, “Shall we call it a day and go back to school, then?”
The other two nodded; it had not been a fun trip and the weather was getting worse the longer they stayed. Once again they drew their cloaks tightly around them, rearranged their scarves, pulled on their gloves; then followed Katie Bell and a friend out of the pub and back up the High Street. Harry’s thoughts strayed to Ginny as they trudged up the road to Hogwarts through the frozen slush. They had not met up with her, undoubtedly, thought Harry, because she and Dean were cosily closeted in Madame Puddifoots teashop, that haunt of happy couples. Scowling, he bowed his head against the swirling sleet and moved on.’

Throughout the whole of the Harry/Ginny arc so far, that is the first instance of Harry really dwelling on her and feeling irked/jealous and faintly bitter that she’s going out with Dean, when earlier that very same afternoon he had not even reacted to her direct news that ‘she was going with Dean’. In that passage, JKR does something tricksy: she puts in a lot of words between Harry finishing his drink (‘drained to the last drops’ you’ll note) and his thoughts on Ginny. That leaves the reader thinking that some time has elapsed, when actually only seconds have passed between Harry draining his bottle to the last drops and his thoughts about Dean/Ginny. All that business about pulling on their gloves etc. takes up a lot of words, but in real time lasts only seconds. So, that first instance of Ginny-thought happens IMMEDIATELY AFTER Harry’s been given a drink by Hermione. Do I really need to ram it home that I think Hermione had spiked the drink? As an aside here I can state that to my memory this is only one of two instances where someone explicitly offers Harry a drink, the other is on page 289 when Romilda Vane offers him a Gillywater which we know is spiked with love potion.

Following Harry’s scowling thoughts on Dean and Ginny, reality immediately kicks in and Ginny is driven out of his mind. Katie Bell is immediately poisoned and for he remainder of the day, and next day and then for a ‘few more’ days he does not speak to or think of Ginny at all. A cheeky little inflection which takes place during this period is the very next mention of Butterbeer (Hermione’s spiked drink) which comes when Harry is watching Ron and Hermione (who have fallen out a bit over Slughorn’s party):

‘Harry supposed he would just have to wait and see what happened under the influence of Butterbeer.’

The next time we get mention of anything Ginny-related is page 266 when Harry asks Dean to replace the ill Katie Bell as Chaser. Dean’s reaction is: “Right,” said Dean. “Cheers, Harry! Blimey, I can’t wait to tell Ginny.”

Here Dean has referenced Ginny, his girlfriend. And Harry’s reaction is … nothing. There is no reference to him being concerned by it. Even at the next Quidditch practice, Harry’s only reference to Dean and Ginny is that ‘… he saw Dean fly that evening; he worked well with Ginny and Demelza.’ In other words Harry only references them as Quidditch team members. This from a boy who, last time he was thinking of Dean and Ginny, he was scowling. The Quidditch practice sees Ginny factually shown as a good player, she scores most of the practice goals. There is an exchange between Ginny and Harry when Ginny has been criticising Ron.

H: “And Ginny, don’t call Ron a prat, you’re not the captain of this team -”
G: “Well, you seemed too busy to call him a prat and I thought someone should -”
Harry forced himself not to laugh.
H: “In the air, everyone, let’s go …”

In this scene Harry once more simply follows Ginny’s lead, even when he shouldn’t. He follows her lead because he does not shut her up in her continued criticism of Ron. Instead he does his best to just side-step the issue. Compare this to his abrupt quashing of McLaggan for the same offence on page 387. I think this scene does show some interest from Harry, but no-where near in proportion to his drink-spiked thoughts of Dean/Ginny: his ‘emotions’ have had tome to clear/fade.

Please note that throughout the above we have ‘spikes’ of Ginny-interest from Harry: the initial interest at The Burrow, peaking with his ‘twinge’ on the train, but then he meets Luna and seems to wipe clean of Ginny-interest. Then he is exposed to the Amortentia, and I believe ‘kick-started’ into Ginny interest again, but that tails off quickly. Then we have another spike after Hermione doses his drink at the pub. That tails away too. Harry’s interest is directly related to potions.

Then we have some interest at the Quidditch practice (though it does not reflect the intensity of his previous spike just after the pub, which if it were natural it should) and the scene continues with Ron and Harry walking back together to the Gryffindor Tower, and here we have the birth of the ‘clawing monster’

GINNY, HARRY AND THE CLAWING MONSTER

Quidditch practice had just finished, and Harry and Ron come back via their ‘usual short cut’ to find Dean and Ginny ‘locked in a close embrace and kissing fiercely as if glued together’ (page 268).

Harry’s reaction to this sight is instant:

“It was as though something large and scaly erupted into life in Harry’s stomach, clawing at his insides: hot blood seemed to flood his brain, so that all thought was extinguished, replaced by a savage urge to jinx Dean into a jelly. Wrestling with this sudden madness, he heard Ron’s voice as though from a great distance away.’ … ‘the new born monster inside him was roaring from Dean’s instant dismissal from the team.’

Ginny and Ron have a truly vicious brother and sister spat over her ‘behaviour’, in which gross insults are mutually flung and wands are drawn. Harry tries to mediate although ‘the monster was roaring its approval of Ron’s words.’ Ginny and Ron draw wands, and although Ginny draws first Harry only physically intercedes when Ron draws in turn. Harry forcibly stops Ron from hexing Ginny. Ginny storms off. The boys continue onto the Tower and Ron vents his spleen by roaring at a small girl who drops a bottle at his shout.

‘Harry hardly noticed the sound of shattering glass; he felt disorientated, dizzy; being struck by a lightning bolt must be something like this.’

‘Unbidden to his mind’ come thoughts of him kissing Ginny instead of Dean at which ‘the monster in his chest purred’.

Almost immediately we jump-cut to Harry in bed that night where he is fretting over his feelings for Ginny (page 271). He is worried about Ron’s reaction to finding out about ‘the monster’ feelings he has. Also:

‘They had lived, had they not, like brother and sister all summer, …he had known Ginny for years now … it was natural that he should feel protective … natural that he should want to look out for her … want to rip Dean limb from limb for kissing her’

He eventually gets to sleep, next day there is a single mention of Ginny at Quidditch practice (in the sense that Harry wants to get in the way of her possibly hexing Ron).
The day after, all have breakfast then Harry behaves OOC in the match – urging his Beater Coote to hit a Bludger at Zacharias Smith in response to Smith’s taunting match commentary. Then at the end of the match he laughs at Ginny’s startling physical attack on Smith (crashing into him on her broom and leaving him ‘feebly stirring’ under a ‘wreckage of wood’), and breaks free of the rest of the team to hug her.

Hermione then waylays Harry and Ron and accuses them of illegal potions use.

‘You know perfectly well what we’re talking about!” said Hermione shrilly. “You spiked Ron’s juice with lucky potion at breakfast! Felix Felicis!”

At the post match party, having been there some time Harry bumps into Ginny who makes unpleasant comments about Ron. Although he speaks to her he is not recorded as having any ‘monster’ reactions/obsessive indications/noticings of how pretty she is etc. Nothing in fact, until she touches him:

‘She patted him on the arm; Harry felt a swooping sensation in his stomach, but then she walked off to help herself to more Butterbeer.’

What do I make of all of the above? Well, a scaly monster clawing at his insides, hot blood rushing to his brain, savages urges, ‘sudden madness’, the roaring monster, feeling disorientated, dizzy; ‘being struck by a lightning bolt must be something like this’, ‘unbidden thoughts’ – lustful ones about a girl he sees as his sister. It is either the most laughably poor writing ever if it is supposed to state genuine romantic love or frighteningly good writing if it is evidence that Harry is actually under chemical effect. Remember, we are told that Amortentia creates infatuation and obsession, but not love, (and there is no evidence that other types of love potion can do any different), and what we have here is not love, it’s lust, it’s ‘thinking with your dick’. Given all the other evidence I’ve laid down so far, I go for this passage being a good depiction of chemical effect.

The effects are certainly not natural, as Harry knows. He regards it as ‘natural’ to feel protective of her and to look out for her, he does not use the word ‘natural’ when thinking about ripping Dean’s arm off. He doesn’t think it’s natural because it’s not natural.

What kicked off the birth of the monster? There is no particular reference to a dosing just prior, but at this stage we have no idea how many doses Harry has had – what we do know is that he was kick-started by the sight of his ‘chemically intended’ in a ferocious lip-lock with another boy. Oddly though, the monster was short lived. We get no ‘monster’ after the immediate impact itself. We do note though that when Ginny later touches him, he has a physical reaction.

Was Hermione dosing him throughout? We don’t know, she could have been. We do know that ‘breakfast’ (an eating and drinking scenario) is mentioned on the morning of the match, and that the post-match party was a drinking scenario and that Hermione was present. This is also the section of the book when we have Hermione’s shrill accusation that Harry ‘spiked Ron’s juice with lucky potion at breakfast!’ I think that is not only an authorial clue to people spiking others’ drinks at breakfast, but also I think that Hermione was very alert to potential drink spiking on the part of others precisely because she had been doing it herself.

NEXT

We are now at Chapter 15. Time passes and Christmas approaches. In this chapter we are directly introduced to the very real practice of girls slipping boys love potions (Romilda Vane’s efforts), and we have the passage indicating that Hermione knows a worrying amount of information about how to smuggle WWW love potions into Hogwarts. Prompted by Hermione to ‘invite someone’ (she probably intended Ginny) to Slughorn’s party to forestall being love-potioned by girls fishing for an invite. Harry’s response is:

“There isn’t anyone I want to invite,” mumbled Harry, who was still trying not to think about Ginny any more than he could help, despite the fact that she kept cropping up in his dreams in ways which made him devoutly thankful that Ron could not perform Leglimancy.’ (page 286).

Harry is obviously interested, but the monster seems to have shut up for the time being as we don’t hear from it. Instead of inviting Ginny however, Harry surprises himself by inviting Luna. Ginny is pleased for Luna, Harry ‘could not quite manage’ to be pleased at Ginny’s reaction. Harry goes to the party and has a good time. He doesn’t think of Ginny at all whilst he is at the party. Indeed, following that we have no text of him talking or thinking about her until Christmas Day at the Burrow (when he must have been there for at least a week prior) when she reaches across the Christmas dinner table and pulls something out of his hair, touching him (page 318):

“Harry, you’ve got a maggot in your hair,” said Ginny cheerfully, leaning across the table to pick it out; Harry felt goosebumps erupt up his neck that had nothing to do with the maggot.”

Immediately after that a nasty dose of reality descends: Scrimgeour visits with Percy and Harry has to engage with Scrimgeour.

We immediately jump to a few days after New Year, when the party leave for Hogwarts. Upon return Harry notes that Ginny does not sound very enthusiastic about sitting with Dean instead of Hermione and Harry, page 329, (after Hermione invites her). Our next mention of Ginny is a casual one on page 357 when Harry is checking up on Slughorn’s party invites, in which no conversation with or thought of Ginny is reported. We arrive at March 1st, Ron’s Birthday and realise that we have heard NOTHING of Harry’s thoughts or feelings toward Ginny since Harry’s arrival back at Hogwarts, two months earlier. On his birthday Ron is accidentally poisoned by the oak mead intended for Dumbledore.

At the hospital wing, all rally round. Harry and Ginny converse as part of the group but we get no mention of any ‘monster’ feelings for Ginny. There is no sense that Harry is especially interested in any romantic sense. There is no sense of concern or special sensitivity toward her. There is no other mention at all of Ginny (other than two purely functional mentions of her as a player at the Gryffindor/Hufflepuff Quidditch match) … and then at that match Harry gets knocked out by a blow to the head so hard it cracks his scull (page 389).

What do I make of this section? That the ‘clawing monster’ was a huge spike of interest, but its intensity fades. Admittedly, prior to taking Luna to the party Harry is ‘trying not to think about Ginny more than he could help’ and having dream/fantasies about her of a presumably sexual nature, but there is no roaring monster. He only gets an intense reaction when she actually touches him (at the post Quidditch match and at The Burrow). After taking Luna to the party we get no thoughts at all on Harry’s part about Ginny, until she physically touches him at Christmas dinner, when we get a physical reaction (goosebumps). Then we get nothing until she goes to sit with Dean upon the return to Hogwarts and Harry could not help noticing that she does not seem very enthusiastic about it. And then we get … nothing at all romantically. It seems to just fade away.

Is it the case that we get few mentions of Ginny in this period because the plot doesn’t allow interaction? I see no reason why this should have precluded JKR mentioning Harry’s feelings at any time, but she does not mention them. At the close of the ‘two month gap’ she could have made mention in a quick paragraph of how Harry had been thinking of Ginny all through the period, but she does not. I think she does not mention his feelings because they are not there. Indeed, I think it is important to note that we have not heard of the clawing monster at all since he saw her kissing Dean … and then, as I said, at the end of this long period of fading-to-nothing interest in Ginny, Harry gets knocked out by a blow to the head so hard it cracks his skull.

HARRY, GINNY AND HERMIONE FOLLOWING THE BLOW TO THE HEAD

This section was prompted by Anise of FAP.

Shortly after he awakes, Ron mentions that Ginny visited Harry when he was unconscious, and at the mention of her Harry is into full-on Ginny-mode.

‘Harry’s imagination zoomed into overdrive, rapidly constructing a scene in which Ginny, weeping over his lifeless form, confessed her feelings of deep attraction to him while Ron gave the his blessing …’

Note the use of the words ‘deep attraction’. This is very odd wording for a 15 year old boy, and JKR is very good at colloquialisms. By rights Harry should have said ‘confessed that she fancied him’, or if he was super-romantic, ‘confessed her love for him’, but ‘confessed her feelings of deep attraction’ – nah, that just doesn’t work. What it DOES work as though, is an authorial clue to direct us back to the affects of Amortentia/love potion: it smells according to what attracts us.

In any case Harry’s fantasy is quickly punctured by Ron stating that she actually queried why Harry had been late for the Gryffindor/Hufflepuff match. He and Ron leave the hospital wing on Monday morning (having been there Saturday night and all day/night Sunday). Hermione tells them that

‘Ginny had argued with Dean. The drowsing creature in Harry’s chest suddenly raised it’s head, sniffing the air hopefully.’

This is the first mention of the ‘creature’ we have had since the Ginny/Dean kiss, i.e. the monster only re-appeared after he’d been hit on the head. Harry is keenly interested to know the details of Dean/Ginny (page 397)

‘Yeah, well, there was no need for Ginny and Dean to split up over it,” said Harry, trying to sound casual. “Or are they still together?”
“Yes they are – but why are you so interested?” asked Hermione, giving Harry a sharp look.
“I just don’t want my Quidditch team messed up again!” he said hastily, but Hermione continued to look suspicious”

During the day it becomes clear that Ron and Lavender are running into difficulties. ‘Harry saw an inexplicable smirk cross her (Hermione’s) face. All that day she seemed to be in a particularly good mood’. But this was also the day when Hermione, for the first time ever, caught Harry’s interest in Ginny (her ‘sharp look’ and her suspicion), so she could have been happy for both reasons. Harry spends the evening with Dumbledore, ‘pensieving’ memories concerning Voldemort.

Time passes (at least a week, maybe two), the plot proceeds, and we get no mention of Ginny or any of Harry’s thoughts on Ginny. Then on page 441 we get the next reference to her when Harry’s thinking of taking some of his Felix Felicis:

‘The thought of that little golden bottle had hovered on the edges of his imagination for some time; vague and unformulated plans that involved Ginny slitting up with Dean, and Ron somehow being happy to see her with a new boyfriend, had been fermenting in the depths of his brain, unacknowledged except during dreams or the twilight time between sleeping and waking …”

In other words, here JKR specifically does what she DID NOT do at the end of the ‘two month gap’. Ginny is ‘missing’ for 44 pages of the story and about two weeks worth of time, but here JKR makes it fully clear that Harry HAS been thinking of her over that time, even if on a near subconscious level. This is different to how she wrote ‘the gap’ that occurred prior to his massive blow to the head.

That night Harry takes a swig of Felix Felicis as he goes on a mission (under cover of Invisibility Cloak), page 447:

‘Getting through the portrait hole was simple; as he approached it, Ginny and Dean came through it and Harry was able to slip between them. As he did so he brushed accidentally against Ginny.
“Don’t push me, please, Dean,” she said, sounding annoyed. You’re always doing that, I can get through perfectly well on my own …”
The portrait swung closed behind Harry, but not before he had heard Dean make and angry retort … his (Harry’s) feeling of elation increasing.’

He goes about his mission, and next day, Hermione tells him (page 481):

“Ginny and Dean have split up too, Harry.”
Harry thought there was a rather knowing look in her eye as she told him that, but she cold not possibly know that his insides were suddenly dancing the conga: keeping his face as immobile and his voice as indifferent as he could, he asked, “How come?”
“Oh something really silly … she said he was always trying to help her though the portrait hole, like she couldn’t climb it herself … but they’ve been a bit rocky for ages.”
Harry glanced over at Dean on the other side of the class-room. He certainly looked unhappy.
“Of course this puts you in a bit of a dilemma, doesn’t it?” said Hermione.
“What d’you mean?” said Harry quickly.
“The Quidditch team,” said Hermione. “If Ginny and Dean aren’t speaking ..”

Note that Hermione specifically tells Harry about the bust up – she’s fishing for his reaction. She has a ‘rather knowing look’ in her eye (she can see he fancies Ginny) and she puts him on the spot with a leading question: ‘this puts you in a bit of a dilemma, doesn’t it’. She can now see that Harry is interested in Ginny.

What have we had here? After Harry got hit on the head, his fixation on Ginny becomes much more intense. He melodramatically daydreams about her in the hospital, the monster is back ‘sniffing the air hopefully’, Harry is keen to get information about the state of Ginny and Dean’s relationship – particularly after they’d had a row. JKR makes it clear he has been thinking about her, if on an almost subconscious level, where he is hoping that she and Dean will split up. He is so interested that for the first time in the entire book Hermione finally sees clues in his behaviour and expression to suggest to her that he has an interest in Ginny. So far, i.e. prior to the bash on the head, Harry had successfully internalised any periodic turmoil.

Harry actually does cause the break up of Ginny and Dean, having drunk the Felix Felicis, when he brushes against her in the portrait hole (page 447) he gets what he had been wishing for earlier that day (page 441): Ginny and Dean split up, the direct cause being Harry brushing against her, as she thought it was Dean pushing her. As an aside, were Dean and Ginny ‘rocky for ages’? Maybe, but maybe not. They had rowed before, but Hermione might have only added that comment in the belated realisation that saying they broke up for a silly reason made Ginny look bad.

Ron split up with Lavender at the same time Ginny split up with Dean. At the end of this section (page 482) it is reported that ‘Hermione seemed cheery too, though when asked what she was grinning about she simply said, “It’s a nice day.”’ I don’t see any reason why Hermione could not have been smiling to herself at both Ron’s break up and Harry’s newly evident interest in Ginny, an interest which would please her as she has been campaigning for it with use of love potions.


HIT ON THE HEAD BY LOVE

I have obviously laboured the division of what Harry was like before he had his skull cracked, compared to what he was like after. Why? Because I believe we have some evidence that a blow to the skull affects the potency of a love potion. (This is a notion that Anise brought to my attention.)

What are the very first words Hermione speaks in this entire book, words she speaks after having dosed Harry with some love potion? (page 88)

“We didn’t know you were here already!” said a loud and excited voice, and he received a sharp blow to the top of the head.
“Ron, don’t hit him!” said a girl’s voice reproachfully.

‘Ron, don’t hit him!’ (and note the exclamation mark) as Ron has just given Harry a sharp blow to the top of the head. We then get the Twins teasing Ron about Lavender at The Burrow during the Christmas break. Fred is teasing him about what could possibly have happened to persuade Lavender to go out with Ron.

Fred: “No, what we really wanted to know was … how did it happen?”
Ron: What d’you mean?”
F: “Did she have an accident or something?”
R: “What?”
F: “Well, how did she sustain such extensive brain damage?”

Hermione dosed Harry, and she must have learned from her ‘love potion’ reading that you mustn’t strike the dosee on the head in the susceptible state. I think that is why she reacts so immediately and stridently to Ron hitting Harry. The fact is that knowing these two boys for five years she must have seen them ‘josh about’ like that countless times before, as ‘playful hitting’ is how boys actually touch each other: it is the excuse they use for touching their friends. Hence the hitting as such wasn’t the issue that concerned her – it was the exact timing of it that was the issue.

Fred teasing Ron that Lavender would have to have had an accident that gave her brain damage (i.e. an accident to her head) to get her to love him is a direct parallel to what happens to Harry. After a long period of waning interest (since the birth of the monster and the touching at The Burrow), he sustains a cracked skull and then wakes up obsessed with Ginny.


GINNY ON THE BRAIN – EVENTS UP UNTO ‘THE KISS’

Here I take up exactly where I left off when Hermione seems cheery and is grinning to herself (page 482). There is ‘a fierce battle raging inside Harry’s brain’, concerning his fear that showing an interest in Ginny could alienate Ron from him. It is also the case that ‘neither of them (Ron or Hermione) seemed to have noticed’ it; in other words Hermione still has no idea of the drastic and unsettling effect she has inflicted upon Harry. At this point Harry is obsessed with Ginny, so much so that only querying Katie Bell about the poison necklace ‘drove Ginny temporarily from his brain’ – and only then temporarily. It’s during this period that JKR lets us hear from Hermione that tweaking circumstances is okay (page 484).

Over the next two weeks life revolves around Quidditch practice and Ginny (page 485). “Ginny did not seem at all upset about her break up with Dean; on the contrary, she was the life and soul of the team’ – doing skits, imitations, joking. Let’s take an aside to discuss this. Ginny is the ‘life and soul’ of the team. There has been a lot of ire in the fanbase that Ginny was presented here as the ‘heart and soul of the team’. Well she wasn’t. It clearly states ‘life and soul’. There is a huge difference between the meaning and implication of ‘heart and soul’ and ‘life and soul’. Heart and soul implies that she was the spiritual core of the team, that she kept them going, that she alone kept up their spirits and had faith in their abilities when all else on the team doubted themselves. But that is NOT what JKR says, she says ‘life and soul’ which is a hugely different thing. In Brit-speak (I don’t know if it’s the same for Americans, if it isn’t it could explain the misunderstanding on this) ‘life and soul’ is a colloquial term, a reference to someone who is ‘the life and soul of the party’. This has NO spiritual import whatsoever. Instead it means someone who is a ‘party hearty’ the noisy, brash person in the party who keeps everyone laughing with their endless jokes and larky behaviour. This person can indeed be highly entertaining, but they are also someone who is somewhat self-consciously ‘being funny’, someone putting on a bit of an act, attention seeking slightly. This is what Ginny is doing here. She is being loudly funny, drawing attention to herself. Is she doing it deliberately to get Harry’s attention? Has Hermione told her that Hermione has been watching Harry watching Ginny, which we know she has been? It would certainly explain why she’s not bothered about losing Dean, and why she is drawing attention to herself. We know that this ‘life and soul’ of the team thing is a new thing for Ginny, as only now do we hear of it. Well, either way it works, because Harry is so busy looking at her in practice that ‘he had received several more Bludger injuries during practice because he had not been keeping his eyes on the snitch’ (page 485). Injuries to the head? The possibility is left dangling.

After the Bludger injuries are reported, Harry is ever more obsessed. ‘The battle still raged inside his head: Ginny or Ron?’ He can’t stop himself from taking opportunities to be with her: ‘Yet Harry could not stop himself talking to Ginny … wondering how best to get her on her own.’ Hermione notices his attentions to Ginny and is pleased at them (page 485): ‘Once or twice Harry considered asking for Hermione’s help, but he did not think he could stand seeing the smug look on her face; he thought he caught it sometimes when Hermione spotted him staring at Ginny, or laughing at her jokes.’

At that point JKR gives us a second direct reference to Hermione ‘tweaking circumstances’ (page 486) to drive the point home. Hermione has obviously noticed Harry’s attentions to Ginny and is smug about it – of course she is smug, she is congratulating herself on the success of her efforts.

Time slides on, ‘the balmy days slid gently through May’, and Harry is still obsessively fretting about how to get Ginny alone. In his mind he has conflated the coming Gryffindor-Ravenclaw match with success or failure in his plans for Ginny. He’s only flung out of his obsession with Ginny by his Sectumsempra fight with Draco, but even after half-killing Draco (for which Harry is filled with a horrified remorse) not even that can get his mind off Ginny for long and he’s back obsessing again on page 495, scared she’ll get back with Dean, ‘the thought went through Harry like an icy knife’.

Ginny and Hermione have a falling out, ostensibly over Harry’s use of the Sectumsempra and Quidditch (page 496); Hermione is critical of Harry, and Ginny defends him. Ginny ends up snapping at Hermione. ‘Hermione and Ginny, who had always got on together very well, were now sitting with their arms folded, glaring in opposite directions. Ron looked nervously at Harry, then snatched up a book at random and hid behind it. Harry, however, though he knew he little deserved it, felt unbelievably cheerful all of a sudden, even though none of them spoke again for the rest of the evening.’

I think this falling out section is quite important for two sets of reasons. The first is that the strength of the falling out seems to be very high: it scares Ron, the two girls are violently not talking (arms folded and glaring away) and the resulting silence lasts all evening. This seems to me to be well in excess of what was warranted by the evident argument. Instead it seems to me that it was one of those instances where two people are ostensibly arguing about one thing, but in actuality the real sore point between them is something else, something they are not voicing ‘in company’. That something else, the real cause of the flare up, is often far worse than what they are using to cover it up. I think that prior to this Hermione may have finally confided to Ginny what she had been doing with the potions (thinking it was a fun girly thing for one friend to do for another) – and THAT would certainly have justified the level of anger. Ginny knows full well what being affected by an ‘alien force’ is like – she was possessed by Voldemort. She and Hermione obviously could not talk about it in public, certainly not when the ‘public’ is Ron and Harry himself. The second point from the ‘row’ is Harry’s reaction: ‘Harry, however, though he knew he little deserved it, felt unbelievably cheerful all of a sudden’. ‘Unbelievably cheerful’ even though he knows he doesn’t deserve it. He was horrified at having slashed Draco, but now Ginny says it’s okay, he doesn’t mind at all. This is one more evidence of ‘influence’.

Harry is then in detention and next sees Ginny at the post-match party, when they kiss and become a couple (page 499).

‘Harry looked around; there was Ginny running towards him; she had a hard, blazing look in her face as she threw her arms around him. And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry kissed her. After several long moments – or possibly several sunlight days – they broke apart.’ … ‘Hermione was beaming.’ … ‘The creature in his chest roaring in triumph,’

There is a lot going on here, so let’s look at it. Ginny comes running toward Harry and flings her arms around him – she moves in him, not he on her. She has ‘a hard, blazing look in her face’. Well, that is such a strange description; it doesn’t strike me as remotely romantic. Try and put what you feel would be a hard, blazing look on your face right now, and what does it feel as though you are expressing? – my effort feels like determination. I think Ginny is screwing her courage up and finally making her move. She may have been angry at Hermione dosing Ginny (and that is conjecture) but if she was, then not angry enough not to capitalise on her one best chance to finally, after years of crushing on him, ‘get Harry’. Can you really blame her? It’s the equivalent of a starving beggar finding a dropped purse stuffed full of money and not giving it back: it’s wrong but you can understand why they did it.

Note that Ginny touches Harry – fully embraces him – and I’ve earlier written about what I feel the effect of Ginny’s actual touch is on Harry. Harry kisses her despite any natural embarrassment he might otherwise feel. The kiss is equated to ‘several sunlight days’. This seems a cheesy description, but it does something else, it directs us back to one of the known effects of love potions in the only seen example of love potion use that we have: the effect on Ron (page 367). “Romilda Vane,” said Ron softly, and his whole face seemed to illuminate as he said it, as though hit by a ray of purest sunlight.’ Sunlight.

Hermione is beaming; of course she is, her little plan came to fruition. The creature in Harry’s chest is roaring in triumph; of course it is, after an almost nine month struggle (if we count from the first dosing at The Burrow), the monster finally won.

BUT WHAT DOES THE MONSTER WIN?

Not much really. Because we get one page of anything romantic, and that’s yer lot (page 500). Here Harry is reported as very happy, ‘happier than he could remember being for a very long time’. Ginny is seen sitting against Harry’s legs in the common room. She cracks a joke, ‘Ron and Hermione roar with laughter’, but Harry ignores them. As the joke continues he simply grins, although ‘Hermione rolled round laughing’. Ron and Ginny quickly devolve to their tedious sniping at each other. And then we immediately move into June.

In the above we get an easy familiarity between Harry and Ginny, but we see no passion. What we do see is Hermione rolling round laughing – because she is still elated that her plan worked out? Time passes and from half way down page 501, Ginny disappears as a ‘first person’ presence and is simply reported upon. Harry is happy to be with her, daydreaming, ‘reliving a particularly happy hour he spent down by the lake with Ginny at lunch time’; on page 504 he resents that Snape’s Sectumsempra detentions keep him from Ginny, with whom he only has limited time anyway because of her exams. ‘Indeed, he had frequently wondered lately whether Snape did not know this, for he was keeping Harry later and later every time …” I think that is JKR putting it to us that Snape does know and he is doing it deliberately. Why is Snape doing it? We can always factor in sheer spite in Snape’s case, but we can also factor in something else: on page 490 (during the Sectumsempra disaster) it is canon that Snape Leglimenses Harry – he looks into his mind and in so doing would see his emotional state (Leglimens allows the ‘looker’ to see what you are feeling). Snape does it again on page 494. Did Snape detect abnormal emotional instability toward Ginny, as brought on by the potion? As we know that Ginny was busy with exams, and that they had little time together, slicing down on the Saturdays as Snape does would cut their time together to the minimum. If this was the case then we have a cheeky little reference to Harry not wanting a Leglimens to see inside his head re Ginny(page 286):

“There isn’t anyone I want to invite,” mumbled Harry, who was still trying not to think about Ginny any more than he could help, despite the fact that she kept cropping up in his dreams in ways which made him devoutly thankful that Ron could not perform Leglimancy.’

On page 501 (at the bottom) we get another cheeky little inflection. Harry’s performance in Potions is suffering because he has ‘lost’ his Half-Blood Prince potions book. Slughorn’s reaction is:

‘Slughorn, who approved of Ginny, had jocularly attributed this to Harry being lovesick.’

Now bear in mind this is several weeks after Harry and Ginny are officially a couple, which is why I enjoy the ‘lovesick’ reference here. Harry CANNOT be ‘lovesick’ in the traditional sense as the ‘lovesick’ are those who pine for a love they do not have. Harry has his love, he is lovesick because he is literally sick – he is under the effects of potion.

The next report we have of Ginny is on page 516 when Harry is leaving on his mission with Dumbledore and is in a rush to say goodbye. He does not say goodbye to Ginny (his clawing monster of luuurve) but asks Ron and Hermione to pass on his goodbyes for him. Obviously in the narrative we have the excuse that Harry is in a great hurry, but authorially JKR could have put Ginny in the common room with Ron and Hermione for Harry to say goodbye to. JKR is NOT reporting reality, she is not writing up what has happened elsewhere, she is making up a story over which she has total control. If she wanted Harry to say farewell to Ginny, she could have easily had him do so in any number of ways even within the tight timeframe for goodbye. She does not have him say goodbye because she does not choose to. During the goodbye, Harry forces the Felix Felicis on Ron, insisting ‘Share it between yourselves (Ron and Hermione) and Ginny too.’ Ginny is almost an add-on extra. The fact that JKR did not have Harry say goodbye to Ginny is rammed down our throats as it forms the next mention of Ginny (page 530): ‘He suddenly wished he had said a better goodbye to them (referencing Ron and Hermione) … and he hadn’t seem Ginny at all ...’

Harry goes through the trauma and horror of the cave and the escape from the cave, he and Dumbledore arrive on the tower and Draco reports that ‘one of your people is dead’. ‘Harry’s heart thundered unheard in his invisible chest … someone was dead … Malfoy had stepped over the body … but who was it?’ I think this is notable for what it does not say: Harry gives no specific thought to Ginny at all.

We see her next on page 558 when Harry notices her hair ‘flying like flames’ when she is dodging the DE who is trying to hex her. Harry blasts the DE senseless and runs past Ginny, she calls out to him but he does not have time to reply as he passes. It is written that he ‘had no time to answer her’ and under the narrative circumstances that is true, but once again we must note that JKR is the author, only she decided that Harry didn’t have the time, she could have had Harry respond if she wanted to.

What do we see in this part of the book? That Harry is still besotted with Ginny, right until reality bites *the start of the Dumbledore mission). And then she is almost entirely out of mind. JKR also takes the authorial decision to ‘distance’ the reader from the romance, as she simply does not show it. The reader has no emotional investment in it, as it is not there.

HARRY AND GINNY – MOVING TOWARD THE END

Chapter 28 (page 571). Harry is devastated after Dumbledore’s death, he cannot find it within himself to leave the body. Then: ‘A much smaller and warmer hand had enclosed his and was pulling him upwards. He obeyed its pressure without really thinking about it. Only as he walked blindly back through the crowd did he realise, from a trace of flowery scent on the air, that it was Ginny who was leading him back to the castle.’

Harry and Ginny converse on their way to the hospital wing, but it’s pure exposition (i.e. JKR uses their conversation to let the reader know what has happened plot-wise).

The above quoted passage was the one passage in the whole book when I thought there might have been any true feeling between Harry and Ginny – I wondered if he had come to care for her naturally, although he had been ‘started off’ by the potion. And then I remembered that Harry’s peaks of response to Ginny prior to being knocked unconscious where when she touched him, and what does she do at the start of the passage? – she touches him. After that, if we are reading it from the perspective of someone ‘loved up’ then what are we seeing? ‘He obeyed its (her hand’s) pressure without really thinking about it.’ He obeyed, and without really thinking about it: indicative of love potion control. He walks blindly, there is a trace of flowery scent in the air – which is the scent this theory associates with The Burrow ‘potion’, and not with Ginny herself.

Until page 581 any conversation Ginny has with anyone is purely expositional. Then we get on page 581 what I think is another clue to events. Fleur makes her stand for Bill and won’t be driven away or put off: she loves him and that’s that, she will not hear of leaving him. This is the young woman whom Ginny certainly believed Molly was scheming to get shut of because it wasn’t ‘real love’, and Hermione never demurred against that opinion. Both girls are given a smart lesson about real love in that scene, and it startles them. When Molly accepts Fleur in their mutual tearstained hug: ‘Ginny and Hermione were exchanging startled looks’.

If there was ever a wake-up point when Ginny and Hermione were given abrupt cause to question the morality of what they were doing to Harry, then that was it.

‘The Quartet’ spend all their time together in the days before the funeral, and Harry is unhappy at knowing that in order to protect her from Voldemort he is going to have to say goodbye to Ginny: ‘it was too hard to forego his best source of comfort’. (I think that happens to make her sound like a pair of comfy old slippers rather than the love of his life, but we’ll let that one slide.) Harry still shows an unsettling tendency to reverse his opinions in the face of a critical Ginny; when Ginny announces that she supposes she’ll have to accept that Bill really is going to marry Fleur after all (which makes Ginny sound very petulant), Harry replies:

“She’s not that bad,” said Harry. “Ugly, though,” he added hastily, as Ginny raised her eyebrows, and she let out a reluctant giggle.
“Well I suppose if mum can stand it I can.”

Looking at it now, is this the pivotal exchange? Is this the point when Ginny admits that ‘you can’t buck love’?

The Trio engage in discussion over Snape and Voldemort – the big event – but far from being interested enough to get involved in this major aspect of Harry’s life, Ginny yawns and goes to bed.

HARRY AND GINNY – PARTING AT THE FUNERAL

At the funeral Harry sees Neville and Luna and feels ‘a great rush of affection for both of them’ (page 598). He gets a ‘wonderful, momentary urge to laugh’ at the tragi-comedy of Hagrid and Grawp (page 600). It’s as though here he is somehow starting to emotionally thaw, to come back to himself. These are Harry’s emotions, not something from a bottle.

On pages 602 to 603, Harry leaves Ginny. I will quote almost the entire section as I believe all of it is significant.

‘She met Harry’s gaze with the same hard, blazing look that he had seen when she had hugged him after winning the Quidditch Cup in his absence, and he knew that at that moment they understood each other perfectly, and that when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say ‘Be careful’ or ‘Don’t do it’, but accept his decision, because she would not have expected anything less of him.’

He says that they have to stop seeing each other.
“I can’t be involved with you any more. We’ve got to stop seeing each other. We can’t be together.”
She said, with an oddly twisted smile, “It’s for some stupid, noble reason isn’t it?”
“It’s been like … like something out of someone else’s life, these past weeks with you,” said Harry. “But I can’t … we can’t … I’ve got things to do alone now.”
She did not cry, she simply looked at him.’
“Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to. He’s already used you as bait once, and that was just because you’re my best friend’s sister. Think how much danger you’ll be in if we keep this up. He’ll know, he’ll find out. He’ll try and get to me through you.”
‘What if I don’t care?” said Ginny fiercely.
“I care,” said Harry. “How do you think I’d feel if this was your funeral .. and it was my fault …”
She looked away from him over the lake.
“I never really gave up on you,” she said. “Not really, I always hoped … Hermione told me to get on with my life, maybe go out with some other people, relax a bit around you, because I never used to be able to talk if you were in the room, remember? And she thought you might take a bit more notice if I was a bit more – myself.”
“Smart girl that Hermione,” said Harry, trying to smile. “I just wish I’d asked you sooner. We could have had ages … months … years maybe ..”
“But you were too busy saving the wizarding world,” said Ginny, half-laughing. “Well … I can’t say I’m surprised. I knew this would happen in the end. I knew you wouldn’t be happy unless you were hunting Voldemort. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”

Harry is miserable, he could not bear to hear those things, ‘nor did he think his resolution would hold if he remained sitting beside her’ (no it would not, due to the proximity effects of potion: touching). He sees Ron embracing Hermione and stroking her hair as she weeps, the sight of Ron and Hermione is one of great intimacy, but even prompted by that, ‘with a miserable gesture, Harry got up, turned his back on Ginny’… he leaves her without JKR even giving us one kiss goodbye. From the moment he turns his back he does not think of her or speak of her.

He meets Ron and Hermione and tries to leave them behind too, but they won’t hear of it and it is clear that the Trio will go on. They make arrangements to meet up at The Burrow for Bill and Fleur’s wedding, and to attend that before they go on to fight the good fight. The book closes with Harry happy at the thought of the coming wedding: ‘he felt his heart lift at the thought that there was still one last golden day of peace left to enjoy with Ron and Hermione’.

Note that although Ginny will quite obviously be at the wedding (she is a Weasley and a bridesmaid), he does not think of her at all.

The above is packed with meaning and foreshadowing of events to come.

Harry says: “It’s been like … like something out of someone else’s life, these past weeks with you,” too right it has – it hasn’t been a real experience at all in that his ‘going out with Ginny’ period was full of chemically induced happiness. He was as genuinely happy as Merope Gaunt’s husband was before she quit dosing him.

Let’s go to that ‘hard, blazing look’. That seems t be a fiery determination, a stubbornness, but to what end? We have Harry telling us that ‘he knew that at that moment they understood each other perfectly’, but then the following text shows that they clearly do not. He explains three times that they can’t be together and why not, and her response after all is: “What if I don’t care?” said Ginny fiercely.’ Harry has to then drive the point home by saying: “How do you think I’d feel if this was your funeral .. and it was my fault …” He has to keep on explaining again and again why he thinks what he does: this is not ‘perfect agreement’.

Ginny then looks away, as though she knows at that point that she has lost and that he will not be persuaded. We have the “I never really gave up on you’ paragraph, which we have gone over before, but this is followed by a cheeky little inflection: “Smart girl that Hermione.” Yes, smart Hermione, with all her scheming to get H/G together. We then have one of the most absurd lines in the book if taken at face value, where Harry bemoans that if only he’d asked Ginny sooner they could have had months or even years. I laughed out loud when I read that, because it is palpable nonsense. Yes, they could have had months because Harry was fighting the potion for months and he could have given in months ago – but years? They could not have had years because in all five previous books Harry was not interested in Ginny and did not ask her out because he did not want to! He felt no urge to do so! Only a Harry who was loved-up could imagine he had always felt that way.

Then we have Ginny’s farewell, when she realises she’s lost Harry. “But you were too busy saving the wizarding world,” said Ginny, half-laughing. “Well … I can’t say I’m surprised. I knew this would happen in the end. I knew you wouldn’t be happy unless you were hunting Voldemort. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”

‘Well … I can’t say I’m surprised. I knew this would happen in the end.’ Yes, she knew it would happen in the end, because she knew it was based on a potion and, from the evidence of true love in the hospital scene, that dosing Harry was wrong. She has an innate recognition that what is falsely induced cannot last. We have a full stop, and then her reason as to why she was not surprised. But the full stop differentiates the reason from her knowledge that he would leave in the end. If it was the genuine reason then JKR could simply have had a comma instead of a full stop, and it actually reads much better with a comma. Then we have her final sentence in the whole book: ‘Maybe that’s why I like you so much.’ Like? This is supposed to be the Twu Luv of All Time, and she ‘likes’ him? Where is ‘love’ where is ‘care for’? – Ginny herself seems to be viewing her emotion more clearly and realises she ‘likes’ him.

Note that he never tells her anything about The Prophecy (which he told Ron and Hermione about straight off the bat), he never tells her anything about the Horcruxes either, when he told Ron and Hermione all about those too.

The word ‘love’ is never used between or about Harry/Ginny in the entire book.


HOW EASY IS IT TO DOSE SOMEONE - COULD HERMIONE HAVE BEEN DOSING HARRY AT TIMES OTHER THAN THOSE STIPULATED (AT THE BURROW AND IN THE PUB)?

Yes, because dosing someone is easy. When Dumbledore is relating the tale of Merope Gaunt and Tom Riddle Senior he says (page 202): “I do not think it would have been very difficult, some hot day, when Riddle was riding alone, to persuade him to take a drink of water.”

Before the Christmas party (page 287) Hermione says: “Well just be careful what you drink, because Romilda Vane looked like she meant business.” In other words, Harry has to watch all drinks because any could be affected.

After Ron had been poisoned with the mead, Fred wonders if Slughorn could have contaminated Ron’s glass (page 375):
“Would he have been able to slip something into Ron’s glass without you seeing?”
“Probably,” said Harry.

So even Harry recognises that it’s easy to spike a drink and go un-noticed.

The most direct statement comes from Hermione herself (page 421) when Harry is wondering if a potion will get Slughorn to divulge his memory, she says: “It’s not a question of slipping him a potion, anyone could do that - ”. Well she should know, she’s the expert on it.

Hermione could have been dosing him at any time. All she needed was a situation when Harry was drinking, and she has meals with him practically every day.


HOW OFTEN WAS HARRY BEING DOSED? WAS HARRY BEING DOSED AFTER THE KISS?

We don’t know. What we DO know comes from the only ‘documented’ incident of love potion abuse: that between Merope Gaunt and Tom Riddle Senior, as related by Dumbledore.

Merope had a ‘secret burning passion’ for TRS (remind you of anyone?). She doses him up and gets him to run off with her. He leaves her when she is pregnant, saying on his return to normality that he had been ‘hoodwinked’ and ‘taken in’. Dumbledore says that he believes TRS left because Merope stopped giving him the potion. In other words, for ‘love’ to continue, the potion has to continue to be administered. This would suggest that Harry was still being ‘topped up’ after the kiss.

He is obviously still affected at the time of the funeral, but would appear to be coming out of it slightly.


WHY DIDN’T HARRY SHOW THE SAME SYMPTOMS AS RON?

One argument to refute a love potion theory is that Ron shows very evident signs that something is wrong the instant he has taken the Romilda Vane potion, so much so that Harry immediately suspects something is up. He has a ‘strangely unfocused’ look on his face, is ‘rather pale and looks like he is about to be sick’, he makes ‘desperate gestures’, he has a dreamy look about him ‘as though hit by a ray of purest sunlight’, he is instantly and openly obsessed with Romilda, he has glazed eyes and a pallid complexion, he turns violent when Romilda is insulted.

Harry evinces none of these reactions for two reasons. One, he is Harry and on current evidence Harry is a mentally tougher prospect that Ron (see Harry v The Imperius) but FAR more importantly than this is the second reason. Slughorn asks if the potion was within date (page 371), “They can strengthen, you know, the longer they’re kept.”

Romilda gives Harry the chocolates before the Christmas holidays, Ron ate the chocolates/drank the potion contained within, on his birthday: 1st March. By the time Ron drank it, the Romilda potion had been mixed up and raring to go for over two months. We don’t even know how ‘old’ it was when she got it out of the bottle. All told, the Romilda/Ron potion had strengthened significantly because if its age. Harry does not evince such dramatic responses because he will be drinking ‘fresh’. Hermione may be someone who is not concerned the consequences of what she is doing, but she is someone (we know for a fact) who will follow the ‘directions for use’ to the letter.


IS IT POSSIBLE THAT GINNY NEVER KNEW ABOUT THE LOVE-POTIONING AT ALL?

Yes it is possible. But I believe she did know by the time she made her move on Harry, if only because it gives a real reason for what I see as a disproportionate row between Hermione and Ginny, and it makes sense of Ginny’s farewell comments: ‘I knew it would end like this’.

Even if Ginny is not directly involved at all, I am convinced from the canon evidence that Hermione was in it up to her neck and that love potions were used to affect Harry/Ginny.


PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE

The love potion endeavours are bound to come out, and I suspect they will start to emerge at the wedding as that is the next telegraphed grand occasion where drinks will be being passed around. What will the reaction be?

People will be shocked and horrified and angry. Ron will side with Harry (knowing full well what being dosed felt like). Molly will be horrified and blame Hermione (and maybe Ginny too). Ginny and Hermione may fall out over it, each blaming the other.
Harry will break with Ginny (and he won’t be too happy about Hermione either); Harry is, after all, the person who associates love potion with something as serious as The Imperius (page 201):

DD: “Can you not think of any measure Merope could have taken to make Tom Riddle forget his Muggle companion, and fall in love with her instead?”
H: “The Imperius Curse?” Harry suggested. “Or a love potion?”

Harry relates a love potion to an ‘Unforgivable’, and ‘unforgivables’ aren’t called unforgivable for nothing.

We also have the foreshadowing of the Merope/Riddle Snr ‘relationship’ when she dupes him with the potion, which as DD says “would have seemed more romantic to her” (once again hinting that the ‘girl’ concerned didn’t see it as cruel mind control, but as a desperate romance). The love potion ‘stops working’ because (page 203) “Merope, who was deeply in love with her husband, could not bear to continue enslaving him by magical means. I believe she made the choice to stop giving him the potion. Perhaps, besotted as she was, she had convinced herself that he would by now have fallen in love with her in return. Perhaps she thought he would stay for the baby’s sake. If so, she was wrong on both counts. He left her, never saw her again, and never troubled to discover what became of his son.”

Do I think this foreshadowing is so precise that it means Ginny is now secretly pregnant by Harry? Of course not, these aren’t those types of books. But I do see it as foreshadowing of a ‘relationship’ in which a besotted girl with romantic notions uses drugs to get a boy to love her. When she stops drugging him because she cannot bear to carry on with it, he stops loving her and then walks out on her forever when he realises what she did. Okay, so Ginny wasn’t the one who actively potioned Harry, but she took advantage of it, and that will be as bad.

We also have the foreshadowing of the Celestina Warbeck songs from the chapter ‘A Very Frosty Christmas’. Extract the song titles and the song verses from the surrounding text, and what we are left with is this:

A Cauldron Full of Hot Strong Love

‘Oh, come and stir my cauldron,
And if you do it right
I’ll boil you up some hot, strong love
To keep you warm tonight’

The above clearly refers to the creation of a love potion, which when deployed:

You Charmed the Heart Right Out of Me

Stole the heart of the dosed one. We then have:

‘Oh, my poor heart, where has it gone?
It’s left me for a spell …’

Which is a lovely little play on the word ‘spell’ which means both hex, and ‘a period of time’. In other words, the heart may have been fooled by a charm, but the trick won’t last forever, resulting in:

‘… and now you’ve torn it quite apart
I’ll thank you to give me back my heart!’

When the dosed person wakes up from the effects and/or realises events, goddammit they want their heart back! They are NOT happy about it.

The Merope and the song foreshadowing give us the same narrative: girl gets boy by use of potion, girl gets found out/stops, boy gets angry big-style: well angry enough to march out.

When it all comes out there will be hell to pay all round, especially when you consider that between them Hermione and Ginny were messing with Harry’s one real weapon against Voldemort – his ability to love.

What are the consequences for Ginny apart from Harry dumping her? Well here we go back to the ‘break up’ passage I quoted earlier and look at one little bit of it, as quoted from Harry:

“Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to. He’s already used you as bait once, and that was just because you’re my best friend’s sister. Think how much danger you’ll be in if we keep this up. He’ll know, he’ll find out. He’ll try and get to me through you.”

I think Voldemort will find out about ‘the relationship’ in any case, he will think it is still current but secret, and he will snatch Ginny for use as leverage. I think Ginny will not be in much of a position to defend herself as we know from both Merope and Tonks that severe emotional trauma (romantic in both cases) cause a drastic loss of ‘power’.

What will happen to Hermione? Unknown – she owes a lot of karmic debt for pulling a stunt like this, and I expect to see authorial payback Ron and Harry may try to go on without her, and in turn she may try to go it alone and get into trouble.


Anise’s Note:
Wow! What a theory, huh? I would add some more content to the end, too, to be expanded upon greatly in my next essay. ;). As y’all know if you read my love potion essay, I theorized that Harry was dosed not by Hermione, but by Draco and Snape. I actually think that there’s a lot more evidence for Creamtea’s version, but I also think that Draco and Snape’s involvement with H/G will be tremendously important in the next book. Snape certainly knows about H/G, and it’s canon now that Draco was extraordinarily interested in the subject of Ginny Weasley. So let’s look at this possible Book 7 scenario.

It’s going to be very hard to rehabilitate Draco with Voldemort, since four Death Eaters saw that he wouldn’t kill Dumbledore (and JKR revealed in the Mugglenet interview that Draco absolutely would not have done it, no matter what.) Yet Snape has sworn to protect Draco’s life, and he’s still got street cred with the DE’s. One of the few ways Snape could persuade Voldy to keep Draco alive is if he could help with a plan to get Harry, and by kidnapping Ginny, he could do exactly that. Once again, I think we’re seeing here the quadrangle connections between Draco, Ginny, Harry, and Tom Riddle/Voldemort. H/G and D/G are intertwined (which may very well turn out to be a parallel to the way that Snape/Lily and James/Lily were intertwined.) And they will all play important roles in the final showdown.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tour through HBP H/G theories! And watch for Creamtea’s next essay, which has MUCH more to do with both Draco and Ginny…

Yep, here's Part II of this essay. Part III is coming and it's actually BY Creamtea-- that's the one that contains a lot of predictions for Book 7, and much D/G goodness. Since all three parts fit together, though, I've decided to post them as three chapters of this essay. So Parts I and III are by Creamtea; part II is by Anise (that would be me! :) You can tell by our different writing styles, and also the fact that I put punctuation inside parantheses and she doesn't (didn't you ever read Eats, Shoots and Leaves? ;)

+++

I have a confession to make.

I LOVE Creamtea’s potions essay. In fact, I love everything about it. And the reason is fairly simple: it explains so much that is otherwise inexplicable. Why the constant theme of love potions threaded throughout HBP? Why the even more relentless theme of hexes being used against people without their consent? Why the story of Merope and Tom Riddle? Why the vase of flowers in the twins’ room when Harry stays at the Burrow? Why does Hermione watch him like a hawk the next morning? Why the bizarre descriptions of Harry’s feelings for Ginny when they finally do emerge, from clawing monsters to roaring creatures? Why does he never seem to wonder if she will be interested in him, a vast departure from the agonizing about reactions we saw with Cho? For that matter, why did we get three books’ worth of buildup for Harry’s interest in Cho, and zero for his interest in Ginny, which Harry himself refers to as a “sudden madness”? Why does Harry finally dismiss Ginny and then spare not one single thought for her afterwards? Why does JKR tell us that she’d always planned for Harry and Ginny to part? Why does she say that she knows the hero must go on alone? Why does she never use the word “love” to describe their relationship, and why don’t they? Why and why and why, in short. In a court of law, no attorney could convict Harry and Ginny of loving each other. There’s just too much reasonable doubt.

And yet… and yet, there’s no way around it. Any love potion theory can seem to be just too hard to swallow whole, no matter how much proof exists for it. And I think that I’m finally putting my finger on the reason why. It isn’t really a question of proof, because there’s more than enough to entertain this theory as a serious possibility, at the very least. It isn’t exactly a question of what sort of plotlines it might create for Book 7, either, although that issue is related. No, it’s what we might properly call a metatext problem. A big secret to the amazing success of the HP books is their ability to be more than the sum of their parts. By the way they fit together, they become not just mystery novels but mystical texts. If the love potion theory is true, if Harry and Ginny will not permanently end up together, and are not in love—then these developments must be made to fit into the metaphysical Harry Potter, which is more than just the way that they might work in the plotline. How does all of this fit into the organic mass of all seven books? How can it feel right? What does it mean in terms of theme, of character arc, and of Harry’s search for final resolution? And finally, how could Hermione be responsible for this entire thing when it doesn’t seem to mesh at all with the way her character has been portrayed up to now?

This is a lot to tackle, but I think it’s necessary to at least try. Hold on tight… we’re in for a bumpy ride…

I think that first of all, we have to cut through all the shippy shippiness, and all the cheering and booing for one character over another, and all the weird plot speculations, and ask the most basic question of all: what kind of books are these?

We should perhaps start out by defining what they’re not. Most importantly, they’re not romance novels. This may seem like a dubious argument after HBP, when the themes of love and romance took up so much time and space. The truth is, at the end of HBP we’re left with a number of mysteries regarding these themes. We really don’t know what all the love and romance meant at this point, because so much of the information was so contradictory. Harry and Ginny get together, but Harry breaks up with her at the end of the book. Ron and Hermione are clearly going to get together by the end of the series, yet they spend the vast majority of HBP viciously fighting, and at its end they’re far from unequivocally being a couple. The love between Bill/Fleur and Remus/Tonks is clearly real, and yet what are we to make of the constant theme of obsessive, deceptive, and untrue love, from Romilda Vane to Tom/Merope?

One key is that we actually have more proof now of the nature of the HP books through JKR’s statements in the Mugglenet interview than we’ve ever had before. JKR engages in a lot of coy and clever evasion in this interview, but this is one area where she does not evade. She flat-out TELLS us what her books are: once when she points out the elements they share with mystery novels and also says they focus on character, and once when she very clearly states that in "this type of writing," "the hero has to go on alone." Well, there's exactly one type of literary structure fitting that description, and it's the hero's journey novel, which certainly can encompass both the mystery format and the character study. But this is always the type of writing that is the furthest from the romance novel. Romance was not the be-all and end-all in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first known hero's journey writing. And yet sex, romance, and the human feelings resulting from them were massively important to the plot; they were, in fact, what drove it forward. Without the wild man Enkidu having sex with the sacred prostitute, he couldn't have been initiated into civilization, and there's no plot. Without Gilgamesh turning down Ishtar, the goddess doesn't spend the rest of the story trying to get revenge on him, and there's no plot. So "romantic" relationships are central to what actually happens in Gilgamesh-- the thing is, though, that they're not written in anything like the way they would be for a romance novel. I believe that exactly the same thing happened in HBP, and this point is what causes so much confusion for a lot of people.

In hero's journey narratives, mysteries, and character studies, romance absolutely can exist. But it doesn't serve the same function that it does in a romance novel per se. In a romance novel, it's paramount that the romance works out, not that it serves the plot. In a hero’s journey narrative, it is always a plot point. In a novel based essentially around a character study, it illuminates the character, and provides a lot of the reasons why he makes the choices he does. A perfect example is W. Somerset Maugham’s classic Of Human Bondage. (There were a number of film versions of this—the best-known one had Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.) One of the central themes of the book is Philip Carey’s long, obsessive romance with Mildred Rogers, and after many agonizing chapters, it ends in disaster. But the reason it exists at all is for the same reason the rest of the romances in the book exist—to help us understand Philip and to give us a window into his character we can’t get in any other way. We understand who he is through what he loves, and what attracts him. In the HP series, that’s also a main reason why we see Harry/Cho (although, as we will see later, there were other reasons as well.)

In classic mystery novels, on the other hand, if romance exists, it’s either a complete throwaway (which I think we can rule out for H/G both because of how long Ginny’s been on the scene, and the sheer amount of space it took up in Harry’s head) or it’s a plot point, and I think we have to go further than the idea that it exists as such simply to camouflage characters’ motives, because there can be a whole lot more to it than that.

Agatha Christie is a good example. Nobody would ever say that she was a good romance writer as such; it was not a genre that came naturally to her, and the romance element in her writing generally took up very little space and had almost no importance. (Murder on the Orient Express is a good example, as are most of the relationships in Murder Under the Sun.) But—and it’s a big but—if Christie did include romance prominently, similar to the way H/G was handled in HBP, there was always a very important plot-related reason. Endless Night (a very underrated Christie book) is a good example. The central relationship takes up a large part of the book, and we learn that it’s because the romance itself holds the key to the murder that forms the plot. (I won’t give anything else away—go and read the book, if you haven’t already!) In other words, the romance was so uncharacteristically important for a Christie book precisely because it serves a vastly different purpose than it would in a romance novel.

If all seven HP books really WERE romance novels, that would be the only logical way for H/G to become permanent and meaningful: no matter how many awful problems it has, no matter how illogical it is, this is the point of this particular type of writing, and so the romance must work out. But if these books aren't romance novels-- and we KNOW that they're not; we've been TOLD what they are in no uncertain terms-- then we have to take a much closer look at what’s really going on with the relentless theme of love in all seven books, from mother’s love to father’s love to sibling’s love to romantic love. This is what opens the door to understanding the purpose that H/G really serves, especially for Book 7.

We know that the power of love is the overarching theme of all seven books. It’s the reason why Harry is even around for the first book, the reason why he lived past the age of one year old—and we also know that it’s the one sure weapon he has against Voldemort. Now let’s keep all that in mind as we examine a scene in HBP that most people overlook.

“But I haven’t got uncommon skill and power,” said Harry, before he could stop himself.

“Yes, you have,” said Dumbledore firmly. “You have a power that Voldemort has never had. You can—“

“I know!” said Harry impatiently. “I can love!” It was only with difficulty that he stopped himself adding, “Big deal!”

“Yes, Harry, you can love,” said Dumbledore, who looked as though he knew perfectly well what Harry had just refrained from saying.” Which, given everything that has happened to you, is a great and remarkable thing. You are still too young to understand how unusual you are, Harry.”

“So, when the prophecy says that I’ll have ‘power the Dark Lord knows not,’ it just means- love?” asked Harry, feeling a little let down.

“Yes- just love,” said Dumbledore. “But Harry, never forget that what the prophecy says is only significant because Voldemort made it so.”
- pg. 509, HBP, American edition.

This isn’t a shippy scene by any stretch of the imagination even though it deals with love, nor does it seem at first glance to have a lot to do with what’s currently happening in the plot, which I think is why it’s easy to ignore. But it’s a big mistake to do that, because in a way, it’s the heart and soul of the book- and helps us to understand why a love potion plotline would be more than worth a major chunk of page time in both HBP and Book 7.

Just to begin with, this is actually one of the most damning pieces of evidence against lasting/meaningful H/G, because Harry has had reactions to Ginny for months by this point. We’ve heard about the clawing monsters and the roaring creatures in his chest (which doesn’t seem like a very good example of the kind of love Dumbledore is talking about.) And we’ve seen references to his NC-17 fantasies about her. His feelings have already begun to intensify dramatically after the concussion incident. (In fact, he’s going to give into his feelings about forty pages later, and they’ll start to date.) At this point, we have a tremendous amount of longing and yearning and fantasizing on Harry’s part. Ginny would be the most logical person, thing, or concept to leap into his mind right now, when Dumbledore brings up love. But he doesn’t think about Ginny at all. He doesn’t spare a single thought for her or about her, and this, of all times, would be the time to do it. If love is the only way he’s going to ultimately defeat Voldemort, this is the perfect moment to think about someone he does love or might love. The fact that he doesn’t do this is some pretty major foreshadowing for the idea that love for Ginny is not going to be the love that defeats Voldemort. But there’s a lot more than that going on here.

Even more importantly, Dumbledore goes on to emphasize that the different parts of the prophecy are important only because the actions and decisions of human beings have made them so (which takes us right back to the theme that our choices make all the difference.) Voldemort chose to make Harry into his greatest enemy precisely because he tried to keep the prophecy from coming true (obviously, JKR has read Oedipus Rex .) Harry chose to defeat Voldemort, because after Voldemort killed his family, there was nothing else he could choose to do. But right before we see the references to these two choices, Dumbledore refers to the fact that Harry will defeat Voldemort because he has a power that the Dark Lord knows not, which is love. Harry’s mother first activated this clause when she sacrificed herself to save him. We are left with an interesting question, though: who else might have made a choice in this direction?

The answer, of course, is Hermione, who chose to give Harry a love potion. And we begin to see an incredibly important reason why she made that choice. It’s why she felt her choice was justified, and for a much better reason than simply her friendship with Ginny. This is the key to understanding both why she did it and its central importance to the plot and theme of all seven books.

A good way to understand this is to look at an incident that happened in Arthurian legend (and when the Weasley are involved, we always have to wonder if those legends are in JKR’s mind.) In this reading, Ginevra is not Guinevere, but Elaine, the Lady of Shallott and Guinevere’s cousin. Hermione takes on the role of Morgaine, the powerful witch who gave Lancelot a love potion so that he would fall in love with Elaine, who had pined after him for a long time. What’s especially interesting about this parallel is that the general consensus between accounts seems to be the idea that Morgaine dosed Lancelot because she liked Elaine and wanted to help her, but that she also did it for another reason. In the negative portrayals of Morgaine (Tennyson and Mary Stewart’s Crystal Cave series, for example,) she does this in order to further her own evil witchy plots. In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s more thoughtful Mists of Avalon version, Morgaine is trying to keep the kingdom together against evil foes. But however you interpret it, Morgaine clearly thought that she was helping the entire situation on a broader level, the one of politics, quests, and lofty goals—and doing it through use of a love potion.

From this point of view, Hermione’s actions truly begin to make sense for the first time. She wants to help her friend Ginny, yes, but there’s another reason why she would dose Harry with a love potion—a far more important one- and I think it’s the one that overcomes her scruples about it. One criticism often brought up against the idea that Hermione was responsible is that it’s just too hard to believe this obsessively rule-following girl would do such a thing. And it’s true that friendship for Ginny and Harry alone, and thinking that the two of them would be ideal for each other, are not really compelling enough reasons. But if we add on another, higher reason, Hermione’s motivations become a lot more understandable.

The power of love is the overarching theme of the books. But the key here is that this isn’t just an interesting metatext idea; it’s the actual weapon that the main character is supposed to use against the main villain. So it’s not just that the readers know it; some important characters know it, too. And I believe Hermione in particular knows this very well. We know how intelligent she is and how well she picks up on things; the “cleverest witch of her generation” would have no trouble at all in finding this fact out. When Harry tells her and Ron about the prophecy, he actually doesn’t say this part of it in so many words. But she’s already known for five years by that point that Harry survived because his mother gave up her life for him through the power of love, so she didn’t have to know the prophecy anyway in order to believe that love was going to ultimately save Harry. If Hermione convinces herself that Harry needs to feel romantic love in order to defeat Voldemort, then the last puzzle piece of her motivation falls into place. She’s not only helping her friends by getting Harry and Ginny together; she’s defeating the most evil wizard on the planet. For Hermione, there would no longer even be any question of the ends not justifying the means.

And this also fits in with the idea that Hermione didn’t want Cho and Harry to be together, and perhaps even worked against the relationship. Cho wasn’t Hermione’s friend, and Ginny was, but more importantly, Hermione could convince herself that Cho simply wasn’t the right person to be the love object that would enable Harry to defeat Voldemort. Not only is Ginny her friend, but she’s also the seventh child in her family and the first daughter in hundreds of years; we already know from interviews that JKR considers this to be magically significant. Hermione knows about Ginny’s significance and believes that she’s the perfect love object for Harry because of it.

So here we have the central reason why the love potion isn’t some kind of weird distraction from the plot, which is the biggest problem a lot of people do have with accepting it as what really might have happened in HBP. If it’s an odd side detour that takes us away from what’s really going on, then it’s very hard to believe it’s true no matter how much evidence we see for it. But a plot distraction is the last thing it is; instead, it’s absolutely central to the overarching theme of all seven books. Hermione and Ginny’s tragic fault is that they screwed around with love, even though they themselves did what they did out of love. They tried to force love to be what they thought it should be, but what they—and we—will discover is that the kind of love they had in mind is not the kind that’s going to defeat Voldemort. We’ve already seen major foreshadowing of this in Lily Potter’s sacrifice. Mother love, not romantic love, was what saved Harry the first time. Eros had nothing to do with it, yet that is the kind of love that Hermione and Ginny were both trying to push onto Harry sixteen years later.

And it fits with the fact that the central question of the series still remains unsolved: if love is going to defeat Voldemort, how will this happen? If it’s Harry’s secret weapon, what is the nature of this weapon, and how will he use it? What kind of love will work, and what kind won’t?

From this point of view, it makes all the sense in the world that love was such a major theme in HBP, and that we saw so many different kinds of it. For the first time, it truly makes sense that we saw so much page time devoted to everything from true love to denied love to frustrated love to lust to obsession to infatuation. We’ve already heard that Book 6 and 7 are like two halves of the same work, but I think this is really a main reason why. We’ve learned half of what the theme of love means in HBP, and we’ll learn the other half in the seventh book. We learned what love isn’t going to be for Harry in HBP, and in the seventh book… I believe that we have to learn what it will be. From this point of view, the nature of H/G in HBP also makes sense on a metatext level, and I believe that this is the only way it can happen. If we take H/G as a straight-ahead romance, it has problems so severe that it’s literally almost impossible to believe a writer even one-tenth as gifted as JKR is in every other area could have written it. But if we look at it through the lens presented in this essay—through love potion as not only plot device, but as a vital part of the overriding theme- it makes sense.

The best analogy I can think of is with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. It’s one of those plays on which critical opinion is divided. A lot of readers and critics feel that as amusing and well-written as it is, the biggest problem is the completely unrealistic way that all the romantic relationships in it are written. But Dr. Michael Hollander taught a class at Princeton a few years ago that turned the entire argument upside down, and it’s really worth understanding this in terms of HBP. If you look at the romance in Measure for Measure the same way that you’d look at it in a romance novel—where romance is the entire point—the only conclusion you can draw is that it’s hideously badly written. But Dr. Hollander argues that the play was never meant to be seen as a romance, but rather as an allegory about the Christian church, final judgment, sin, mercy, and the omnipotence of God. Romance plays a vital part in the plot and theme of this play, but it’s not the plot and theme in and of itself. Taken from this point of view, he makes a convincing argument that it’s the greatest comedic play ever written.

The lecture is available on tape or CD through the Teaching Company, and it’s worth checking out, as is Shakespeare’s play, of course. If you like convoluted theological arguments as much as I do, you’ll love it… (Anise waits. Crickets chirp. A tumbleweed rolls by.) But to understand how this relates to HBP, you don’t need to be familiar with the lecture, the theology involved, or Measure for Measure- because in essence Dr. Hollander makes the same argument that I made here, and that Creamtea has made. The way the H/G romance is written in HBP is bizarrely and inexplicably bad, unless you understand it in the way it’s meant to be understood. Then, it makes sense. Trying to understand where the H/G romance is going to lead in terms of plot and theme is confusing, and seems only to go in the opposite direction from where we’ve been led to believe things are going to end up- unless we see H/G for what it really was. Then, the puzzle pieces for Book 7 begin to fall into place. But I’ll let Creamtea make those predictions! :)

JKR AND THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE MISDIRECTED MUGGLES


At the start of this year I was a casual reader of the HP books; like millions of others, I bought them on first release, read them once, and then threw them away without giving them a backward glance - just absently picking up the next one whenever it might happen to come out.

Like millions of others, I had read the entire series but did not have a single Harry Potter book in the house.

I heard that Book 6 was to be released in the coming summer and that the previous books contained clues as to where the story was headed. So what, I thought - but it was then that I made my big mistake … I was passing a bookshop, popped inside, and saw that they had a reduced-price sale of Harry Potter paperbacks. Piqued at the thought of possible clues, and seeing as there was a sale on anyway, I bought all five. I didn’t expect much as I’d read them all before and hadn’t thought a lot of them – I’d bought them when they came out because of the hype really - hence I flicked through them and confirmed my previous opinion: there was nothing to them. I was about to ditch them for the second time when I had another flick through the first book, and then I saw it, PS page 22: ‘Dudley’s best friend, Piers Polkiss, walked in with his mother. Piers was a scrawny boy with a face like a rat. He was usually the one who held people’s arms behind their backs while Dudley hit them.’

I realised with a start that these ‘books with nothing to them’ were being written by a woman who had fearlessly foreshadowed Peter Pettigrew three whole books before he was due to take a bow. I knew then that JKR was writing these books like she meant it, so I’d better start reading them like I meant it too.

Anyway, seven months pass, Book 6 comes out and having gone from thinking she was an over-hyped lucky amateur, I now find myself defending her writing following the H/G melt-down of HBP.

What are the charges against her?

• From some emotionally over-invested Ginny-haters and anti-H/Gers: the H/G part of the book is unconvincing rubbish because she can’t write romance, and anyone who says otherwise is just kidding themselves.
• From some emotionally over-invested Ginny-lovers and H/G supporters: okay, so H/G part of the book is a bit wobbly, but just suck it up because H/G is canon and that’s that, and anyway – we won!

I saw a different take: that H/G was unconvincing because it was meant to be so, that it was a deliberately ludicrous portrayal of a ridiculous ‘relationship’, the very unbelievability of which was the big clue: it was not meant to be real. That, and all the Love Potion references which litter the book, saw me propound the canon-grounded Creamtea Love Potion theory.

A lot of the objection to the theory comes from people who want to believe it but can’t, because they can’t get past JKR ‘telling them’ in the Mugglenet Interview that H/G was ‘Twu Wuv, so there’. Well I don’t think she did say that, and here’s why …


JKR AND THE ART OF MISDIRECTION

Let’s get it straight as to what I mean by misdirection: misdirection is NOT lying. Instead, misdirection is what magicians do when they’re pulling a trick – they get you to interpret a series of events in one way, when actually something quite different is happening. It’s not only magicians who do it, but detective novelists too. In a detective novel, the novelist is showing you a series of events where it looked like X happened and Y did it, but no, at the end it is revealed that B happened and C did it – the clues to the reveal were actually all there, you just didn’t pick them up. You saw what you were supposed to see, not what was.

JKR uses misdirection in her novels: how many times have you thought that X was happening, when it was really Y? Come on, admit it, you thought Snape was the bad guy and not Quirrell, didn’t you? You thought Sirius Black was the killer and not ‘Scabbers the rat’. In the books, JKR regularly shows us one thing but makes us SEE it as something quite different (hence in my LP theory I claim that we SEE H/G, but what we are really being shown is Hermione doping Harry and the whole thing being a sham). JKR said it herself in the Mugglenet Interview:

“There's a theory - this applies to detective novels, and then Harry, which is not really a detective novel, but it feels like one sometimes …”

The Harry Potter books are not detective novels per se – there’s no detective for one thing – but the series ‘feels like one sometimes’ because in part it is being written like one. H/G is a misdirection. You might say that can’t be as it breaks the pattern of the previous misdirections in that the denouement was not in the book – but why should it be, as we’ve been told that Book 6 is really only the first half of Book 7?

But I go further and say that JKR may have misdirected in interviews.


PREVIOUS POSSIBLE INSTANCES OF MISDIRECTION IN INTERVIEWS

I’ll quote ones concerning Draco:

J.K. Rowling interview transcript, The Connection (WBUR Radio), 12 October, 1999
Hi, my question is who’s the next Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher?
JKR: I’ll tell you, it’s someone ---- he’s quite a scary character for the first time they get someone quite impressive as the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. I will tell you that for the first time you see a teacher who really takes on Draco Malfoy.

Author J.K.Rowling answers questions from students at a school in Montclair, The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), October 16, 1999
Q. Tom Houseman asked, "Do you think that anyone in real life is truly wholly evil like Draco Malfoy and Voldemort?"
A. Rowling said, "My instinct is to say that probably not, but I can t answer that question without ruining the series for you." Rowling said that in future books she will attempt to show "why Voldemort is who he is."

Fry, Stephen, interviewer: J.K. Rowling at the Royal Albert Hall, 26 June 2003.
Stephen Fry: …. you get boys dressed as Harry and girls as Hermione?
JK Rowling: Many boys dressed as Harry. Lately I’ve noticed people like dressing up as Draco a lot more, which I’m finding a little bit worrying. You’re all getting far too fond of Draco :o)
Stephen Fry: The dark forces are rising Jo :o)
JK Rowling: The dark forces are indeed rising!

JK Rowling's World Book Day Chat, March 4, 2004
Chibimono: Do you have any future plans in particular for Draco Malfoy?
JK Rowling replies -> I've got plans for all my characters. Actually, this is a really good place to answer a question about Draco and Hermione, which a certain Ms. Radcliffe is desperate to have answered. Will they end up together in book six/seven? NO! The trouble is, of course, that girls fancy Tom Felton, but Draco is NOT Tom Felton! (My daughter likes TF very much too, because he taught her how to use a diablo)

A lot of anti-Draco readers used these quotes and more like them to claim that JKR hated Draco and that he was an evil and worthless character who was going to be phased out. Well, that quite obviously didn’t happen, did it? With hindsight you can see that JKR never said he was evil, worthless and was going to be phased out. Not convinced? Need me to take you through it? Look at the first quote, one which came out presumably after JKR had finished writing GoF but before its publication. From the interview quote I’ll bet you thought that the new Prof of DADA was going to be some goody who was going to righteously stick it to a deserving Draco. But in the book, as presumably she KNEW at the time of her quote, the Prof concerned was actually a psychotic Death Eater hell-bent on killing Harry, a person who ‘really takes on Malfoy’ by trying to beat Draco to death/serious injury in a vicious physical assault (because of who his father is). Don’t think turning him into a ferret and hurling him repeatedly and with force against the stone floor/walls wasn’t a serious attack? Well McGonegall thought it was, irrespective of whether the Gryffindors thought it was funny.

Look at the second quote, where the questioner casually labels Draco ‘evil’, comparing him to Voldemort for heaven’s sake! JKR’s reply does nothing to contradict him, but yet cleverly does not actually agree either. IMO she skirts the issue as she knew that Draco was track-bound for redemption and that he did not have an evil soul. (And if you don’t agree with that, then go read the HBP tower scene again.)

In the third quote – angsted over endlessly by Draco fans – well IMO with hindsight what she is actually saying is that we are too fond of Draco as he was up to and including Book 5. I see Draco as the ‘Lost Sheep’ of the series, one who will be brought into the fold and about whom we quite rightly be fond of, but only AFTER HE HAS CHANGED. Similarly with her Mugglenet quote as follows:

“People have been waxing lyrical [in letters] about Draco Malfoy …. It’s a romantic, but unhealthy, and unfortunately all too common delusion of — delusion, there you go — of girls, and you [nods to Melissa] will know this, that they are going to change someone. And that persists through many women's lives, till their death bed, and it is uncomfortable and unhealthy and it actually worried me a little bit, to see young girls swearing undying devotion to this really imperfect character, because there must be an element in there, that "I'd be the one who [changes him]."

- I imagine anti-Draco readers will be claiming: ‘see, she’s saying he can’t change!’ No she is NOT. She is saying that a person cannot be changed, genuinely changed, by another person. What she is not denying is that a person can change themselves, and indeed that true change can only come from within (which is one of the themes of the books: choices, and coming redemptive choices).

The fourth quote (being after OoTP but before HBP) caused a lot of anxiety in Draco fans, being seen by them as ‘proof positive’ that he wasn’t going to be an important character and that JKR was phasing him out. But they did not interpret her comment properly – they simply read it as her ignoring the topic of Draco because he wasn’t important enough to talk about, when what I think what she did was give an evasive reply with her first sentence and then change the subject abruptly, all to ‘protect’ the topic of Draco so as not to give any clues away.

I actually spotted these possible misdirections before HBP came out and went to bat on the issue of the first, third and fourth quotes: it turned out I was right in that in HBP Draco was reinstalled as an important character, who is not intrinsically evil or worthless.

Well, let’s get cracking at that Mugglenet Interview, shall we?


MUGGLENET INTERVIEW JOANNE KATHLEEN ROWLING

July 16, 2005: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince publication day Edinburgh, Scotland.

An important point before we start is to note the following: between the publication of OoTP and the publication of HBP, JKR had two years to devise stances she might take to defend the confidentiality of future plot points, and to decide what she wanted to hint to the reader – hardly unreasonable in a writer of such a series. In contrast, the interviewers had only a few hours in which to read the book and to come up with questions; IMO no-where near long enough to digest the book fully and devise objective, searching questions on its content. I think it’s also important to note that JKR initiated the Mugglenet Interview, which was the interview most fans would read and one in which JKR could talk about the content of the actual book. She might have seen it as an opportunity to get across any particular points she wanted to make.

Although I’ve said I’m going to direct myself at the H/G elements, I have to start elsewhere in the interview: I have to start by looking at the ‘detective novel’ quote in full, and then I have to examine something which I believe pertains to Hermione. I cover the detective novel quote because IMO it tells us a lot about JKR’s attitude to the books (particularly to HBP), and I have to broach the topic of Hermione as under my Love Potion theory she is the one who dosed Harry and we need to be clear as to why.

Firstly, the ‘detective novel’ quote:

“MA: How much fun did you have with the romance in this book?
JKR: Oh, loads. Doesn't it show?
MA: Yes.
JKR: There's a theory - this applies to detective novels, and then Harry, which is not really a detective novel, but it feels like one sometimes – that you should not have romantic intrigue in a detective book …. there is no place for romance in a detective story except that it can be useful to camouflage other people’s motives. That's true; it is a very useful trick. I've used that on Percy and I’ve used that to a degree on Tonks in this book, as a red herring. But having said that, I disagree inasmuch as mine are very character-driven books, and it’s so important, therefore, that we see these characters fall in love, which is a necessary part of life. How did you feel about the romance?”

Hopefully you can see that JKR brought in the detective novel/ camouflage reference of her own accord– she wasn’t being challenged to say that, she wasn’t being questioned on it, IMO she said it entirely because she wanted YOU to hear it. IMO she likens HP to a detective novel so that we are tipped off to read it that way. Furthermore, what she says about romance in a detective novel scenario strikes me as very important, as in my theory there was a lot of camouflaging of motives going on, in fact motives were entirely camouflaged and that was the point of the H/G ‘romance’ plot. However, she goes on to say that hers are character driven books and that ‘it’s so important that we see these characters fall in love’ – and so you’re sitting there now masochistically wailing to yourself ‘she means H/G were Twu Wuv’, aren’t you? Well, IMO she HAS to say that last sentence as quoted above, as if she did not then even the most obtuse reader would be left wondering if all the romances had an ‘ulterior motive’ plot-wise. Secondly, which characters is she talking about when she says we see them ‘fall in love’ – she doesn’t actually tell us, does she? Does she mean Harry/Ginny, or rather does she mean Ron/Hermione (a genuine love, sorry H/Hr-ers) or even Harry/Luna (as IMO in HBP Harry does feel genuine emotion for Luna, in comparison to the stuff that comes out of a bottle which he ‘feels’ for Ginny).

The second point I wanted to touch upon refers to Hermione. In my LP theory, Hermione doses Harry fundamentally because she feels certain that H/G is what is best for him and that he surely must secretly want it, even if he doesn’t yet realise that. She doses Harry because although she is brilliant intellectually, she is ‘emotionally stupid’. And what does JKR feed into one of her answers? – the statement that intellectually brilliant people can be emotionally stupid.

“ES: I know Dumbledore likes to see the good in people but he seems trusting almost to the point of recklessness sometimes.
JKR: [Laughter] Yes, I would agree. I would agree.
ES: How can someone so -
JKR: Intelligent -
ES: be so blind with regard to certain things?
JKR: Well, there is information on that to come, in seven. But I would say that I think it has been demonstrated, particularly in books five and six that immense brainpower does not protect you from emotional mistakes and I think Dumbledore really exemplifies that. In fact, I would tend to think that being very, very intelligent might create some problems and it has done for Dumbledore….”

Yes, she mentions Dumbledore, yes she is addressing Dumbledore, but he was only an exemplar, an example of it – implicitly indicating that he was not the only case. Indeed, she refers us to ‘emotional mistakes’ in both Book 5 and Book 6 and who do we KNOW was being emotionally stupid in Book 5? – Hermione with her misguided SPEW campaign (conscientious aim, morally wrong methods – not unlike what she did with Harry). In the above quote, IMO JKR is not going to turn round and say ‘oh yeah, and Hermione too!’, but she clearly states that the intellectually brilliant can be emotionally stupid, and ‘intellectually brilliant’ includes Hermione.


TACKLING THE H/G ‘LUUURVE’ QUOTES

I will not quote the interview entire as that would take pages and in any case you know it already, instead I will quote excerpts and analyse them, but never out of context.

“MA: How much fun did you have with the romance in this book?
JKR: Oh, loads. Doesn't it show?
MA: Yes.
JKR: (She goes on about the detective novel and romance as already quoted, and then ends:) ‘How did you feel about the romance?’
[Melissa puts her thumbs up and grins widely while…]
ES: We were hi-fiving the whole time.
JKR: [laughs] Yes! Good. I'm so glad.
MA: We were running back and forth between rooms yelling at each other.
ES: We thought it was clearer than ever that Harry and Ginny are an item and Ron and Hermione — although we think you made it painfully obvious in the first five books —
JKR: [points to herself and whispers] So do I!”

I imagine that JKR did have loads of fun with the romance in the book – any author would have fun with the Love Potion stuff, particularly a writer who regards her characters as ‘hers to torture’. Also, note this is the first time H/G has been mentioned in the entire interview, and what does JKR do? – IMO she ensures that the discussion stays on R/Hr with an interjection, despite the fact that Harry is the Hero and thus his Twu Wuv should surely warrant the real discussion. The interview continues directly:

“ES: What was that?
JKR: [More loudly] Well so do I! So do I! …. I will say, that yes, I personally feel - well it's going to be clear once people have read book six. I mean, that’s it. It’s done, isn’t it? We know. Yes, we do now know that it's Ron and Hermione. I do feel that I have dropped heavy - hints. ANVIL-sized, actually, hints, prior to this point. I certainly think even if subtle clues hadn't been picked up by the end of “Azkaban,” that by the time we hit Krum in Goblet...”

It’s been said by others that JKR makes NO such ‘anvil sized hints’ claim for H/G, which ostensibly is the far more important relationship as Harry is the hero. IMO, makes no reference to anvil sized hints on H/G because there were no anvil sized hints – IMO H/G was not foreshadowed, and the whole point of H/G in HBP was that it came about abruptly because of Love Potion abuse. To those who claim ‘she kept H/G a secret to surprise the reader’, why on earth would she feel the need to do that, when she is quite content to drop ‘anvil sized hints’ about R/Hr? After this, the discussion goes on for the equivalent of pages without ever touching upon H/G. Instead the interviewers debate the non-canon H/Hr, whilst in turn JKR makes no effort to bring up H/G. In short, I am saying I think JKR is content not to talk about H/G as on H/G I think she has got something big to hide, i.e. the Love Potion involvement.

Fourteen pages (of a 34 page transcript) go by before H/G is brought up again; that indicates to me either that JKR doesn’t think H/G has any real significance or she’s hiding something on it, either way it doesn’t look good for the future of H/G. Then, in a question and answer session where FAQs are put to her, one is:

“MA: Did Ginny send Harry the valentine?
JKR: Yeah, bless her.
MA: Was it a Tom Riddle thing, or Ginny Weasley?
JKR: No, Ginny Weasley.
MA: Well, she got paid back for it.
JKR: [laughs] Eventually.”

I think Ginny got paid back for it ‘eventually’ as she finally got to be ‘Harry Potter’s Girl Friend’ – which was Ginny’s entire emotional aim for five/six years of her life. This doesn’t mean they loved each other though, does it? The interview immediately continues:

“MA: I think you set that up from the train compartment scene [in book one], where he was watching — all the relationships, that scene probably set it up.
JKR: I think so. I hope so. ….”

For, as regards H/G, me the pertinent question is precisely WHAT is the nature of the ‘relationship’ that was set up? The interviewers are seemingly querying from the perspective that H/G is genuine and is meant to last, but is JKR answering from that same perspective? Re H/G, the PS train scene runs:

‘The train began to move. Harry saw the boys’ mother waving and their sister, half-laughing, half crying, running to keep up with the train until it gathered too much speed; then she fell back and waved.
Harry watched the girl and her mother disappear as the train rounded the corner. Houses flashed past the window. Harry felt a great leap of excitement. He didn’t know what he was going to – but it had to be better than what he was leaving behind.’

I actually annotated that page as I read it, underlining the ‘running to keep up with the train until it gathered too much speed; then she fell back and waved’ section, and noting that it was a snapshot of the story of Ginny’s life re Harry: she could never quite get there no matter how fast she ran to catch him. Indeed, he views her simply as part of what he is leaving behind. Yes, ‘I think you set that up from the train compartment scene [in book one], where he was watching — all the relationships, that scene probably set it up’, it did set up the relationships, IMO it set up that Ginny was going to relate to Harry in some hopeless crush. Indeed, from the evidence from before the compartment scene (and again at the very end of the book when Harry arrives back at the station not having considered Ginny ONCE in the entire book) we KNOW she was crushing on him as some ‘popstar’ figure, not even crushing on the real Harry but on some version of him she had invented in her head. IMO that is the relationship that was set up: she is crushing on some unreal, mythical ‘rockstar’ figure, whilst he simply doesn’t note her romantically or respond to her romantically. The interview immediately continues:

“JKR: So you liked Harry/Ginny, did you, when it happened?
ES: We've been waiting for this for years!
JKR: Oh, I'm so glad.
MA: Oh my gosh, that kiss!
JKR: Yeah.
ES: It actually materialized!
JKR: It actually happened, I know! I felt a little bit like that.
MA: Had you been trying to get them —“

IMO with her ‘So you liked Harry/Ginny, did you, when it happened?’ JKR is fishing for their reaction to H/G, and their reaction is overwhelmingly positive with seemingly no doubts about it. MA goes on to query, ‘Had you been trying to get them’ (with presumably MA’s query predicated on a rock solid H/G), but MA is seemingly cut short by a JKR interjection and JKR delivers what is, IMO, the killer sentence of the entire interview:

“JKR: Well I always knew that that was going to happen, that they were going to come together and then part.”

‘AND THEN PART’! I think that my perspective on this - that they are going to part because they were never ‘real’ in the first place and that Harry is going to cut Ginny dead when he finds out what happened - makes just as much sense as anyone else’s opinion at this point. The interview immediately continues:

“ES: Were you always -----ing it? [We can’t figure out what Emerson actually said here.]
JKR: Well, no, not really, because the plan was, which I really hope I fulfilled, is that the reader, like Harry, would gradually discover Ginny as pretty much the ideal girl for Harry. She's tough, not in an unpleasant way, but she's gutsy. He needs to be with someone who can stand the demands of being with Harry Potter, because he's a scary boyfriend in a lot of ways. He's a marked man. I think she's funny, and I think that she's very warm and compassionate. These are all things that Harry requires in his ideal woman. But, I felt — and I'm talking years ago when all this was planned — initially, she's terrified by his image. I mean, he's a bit of a rock god to her when she sees him first, at 10 or 11, and he's this famous boy. So Ginny had to go through a journey as well. And rather like with Ron, I didn’t want Ginny to be the first girl that Harry ever kissed. That's something I meant to say, and it's kind of tied in.

One of the ways in which I tried to show that Harry has done a lot of growing up — in “Phoenix,” remember when Cho comes into the compartment, and he thinks, ‘I wish I could have been discovered sitting with better people,’ basically? He's with Luna and Neville. So literally the identical thing happens in “Prince,” and he's with Luna and Neville again, but this time, he has grown up, and as far as he's concerned he is with two of the coolest people on the train. They may not look that cool. Harry has really grown. And I feel that Ginny and Harry, in this book, they are total equals. They are worthy of each other. They've both gone through a big emotional journey, and they've really got over a lot of delusions, to use your word, together. So, I enjoyed writing that. I really like Ginny as a character.”

For most people the above was the final snapping point; all they can see is JKR telling them that ‘Ginny is perfect for Harry’. But remember back to her comments on Draco, where you mislead yourselves that he was worthless/evil/being phased out, when with hindsight she never said that – and she never lied to you once. So, let’s view her quote from the perspective that Harry was Love Potioned into H/G:

“….the plan was, which I really hope I fulfilled, is that the reader, like Harry, would gradually discover Ginny as pretty much the ideal girl for Harry.”

Well, he does ‘gradually discover’ her, in HBP, but IMO only in the sense that it takes ‘the monster’ nine months to wear him down. Let us concentrate on Ginny as ‘pretty much the ideal girl’. I’ll tackle it from a ‘meta’ angle, and then from the needs of the plot.

Meta: Ideals are an unobtainable abstraction, (Chambers dictionary):

Ideal: conceptual; existing in imagination only; highest and best conceivable; perfect, as opposed to the real, the imperfect; theoretical, conforming absolutely to theory. n - the highest conception of anything, or its embodiment; a standard of perfection; that which exists in the imagination only.

If you're a masochist you can wallow in misery and say - 'oooh, that means Ginny's the absolute ideal - she's perfect, JKR must mean H/G is real'. Me, I'm a realist and a woman about JKR's own age and what I see in 'ideal' is an unattainable standard, something which cannot exist in reality. I feel that JKR knows this because a little later in her Mugglenet interview she actually says about the Slytherins: “But they're not all bad. They literally are not all bad. [Pause.] Well, the deeper answer, the non-flippant answer, would be that you have to embrace all of a person, you have to take them with their flaws, and everyone's got them.” But having said that about them, IMO she's saying it about all people/relationships. At this point I’ll refer back to her (previously quoted) Draco piece where she says that women should not hope to change men. She quite clearly holds strong views on this and thinks that women are deluding themselves if they think ‘I’ll be the one who changes him’. IMO she is right in this, but then I find it very difficult to see how she can hold that view whilst genuinely expounding in canon that a girl should hold on for some boy for five years, in the belief that things will change, and then attempt to change herself to get the boy. From that I conclude that she was not genuinely expounding that view in canon – that H/G was not real.

From the plot angle as viewed via the ‘Creamtea Theory’, in my opinion JKR has to say that Ginny is ‘ideal’ for Harry in order to have Hermione’s actions (when revealed in Book 7) seen as those of a person concerned for Harry rather than the actions of an arrogant, controlling SuperBitch. IMO Hermione only doses Harry BECAUSE she thinks Ginny is the ideal girl friend for him – she wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Also, I think that JKR may be hoping to shore up H/G with the reader, to make the Love Potion reveal all the more shocking when it comes. JKR then goes on:

“She's tough, not in an unpleasant way, but she's gutsy. He needs to be with someone who can stand the demands of being with Harry Potter, because he's a scary boyfriend in a lot of ways. He's a marked man. I think she's funny, and I think that she's very warm and compassionate. These are all things that Harry requires in his ideal woman.”

I see the paragraph as a list of attributes or as Anise put it in a post, ‘it reads like a job description’. My essential point here is that in my opinion JKR is simply laying down a list of attributes, she says Ginny has them but we must note that in canon other potential Harry love interests have them too. I am not going to expand on whether Hermione has them (she does), as I feel that H/Hr has been shot down, but I will say that Luna Lovegood quite clearly has them and that we are SHOWN she does in the text rather than TOLD (as we are with Ginny). JKR is telling us that, sure, Ginny has the attributes, but I think that doesn’t mean she is destined to be ‘the one’ just because of that, as others have them too. Besides, you don’t love a person for their list of attributes, you love them for that mysterious mélange of things that makes up their self: we love who we love, flaws and all, which IMO JKR acknowledges in her quote, “Well, the deeper answer, the non-flippant answer, would be that you have to embrace all of a person, you have to take them with their flaws, and everyone's got them.”

(Anise’s Note: I would add something else onto here: namely, that this reads like a list of attributes that Hermione drew up in order to convince herself that Harry and Ginny were ideal for each other. And I do think this POV is supported even further by the fact that JKR specifically mentions people discovering/figuring out this list of ideal attributes.)

She goes on:

“But, I felt — and I'm talking years ago when all this was planned — initially, she's terrified by his image. I mean, he's a bit of a rock god to her when she sees him first, at 10 or 11, and he's this famous boy. So Ginny had to go through a journey as well.”

Claims that Ginny didn’t love Harry but was only crushing on her fantasy version of him, are given great credence with this quote. The question for me is for how long had she been crushing on her very own ‘fantasy Harry’ without engaging with the real boy? Note that JKR never gives us any timeframe, never even hints at one. Had Ginny been crushing on FantasyHarry right up until the moment she actually started going out with RealHarry? If that was the case then IMO ‘Ginny’s journey’ happened AFTER she started going out with Harry – her journey being that she gets free of her crush by the realisation that she never/loved fancied the real him at all, that she only ever ‘liked’ the real him, ‘like’ being the word she uses to describe her feelings for him in her final sentence in HBP.

To attempt to answer that question we have to step away from the Mugglenet Interview for the moment and retreat to canon, as that is the only place where Ginny and Harry actually exist. I think that for Ginny to really love Harry she would have to get to know the true Harry, and for this she would need to have a communication with him through which she could go on her journey to getting to know the real him. Does she communicate with him? And if so, how late in the series is it?


GINNY’S JOURNEY.

In PS, when Harry first meets the Weasleys at the station, although Ginny is holding Molly’s hand and is thus very present when Harry asks Molly as to how to get on the platform, Ginny does not bother to speak to him. In this instance she meets RealHarry, not The Boy Who Lived (a.k.a. FantasyHarry), and Ginny is not interested in RealHarry; only when Harry’s identity is revealed is Ginny interested, “Oh, Mum, can I go on the train and see him, Mum, oh please …” To this Molly replies with the stunning truth which reveals Ginny’s genuine ‘feelings’: “You’ve already seen him, Ginny, and the poor boy isn’t something you goggle at in a zoo.” It is thus punched home to the reader that Ginny has already met RealHarry and was not interested in him; she is only interested in FantasyHarry, but even then not as a human being but as some kind of exhibit. We then have Harry regarding her as the train exits – which I have already covered. Harry does not think of Ginny at all for the subsequent duration of the book. At the end (on the last page) they arrive back at the station, whereupon:

“There he is, Mum, there he is, look!”
It was Ginny Weasley, Ron’s younger sister, but she wasn’t pointing at Ron.
“Harry Potter!” she squealed. “Look, Mum! I can see - ”
“Be quiet, Ginny, it’s rude to point.”

Here Ginny is just a squeeing fangirl, screaming over her pop-idol. JKR even uses the word ‘squealing’. Ginny doesn’t even care abut her brother here, she’s just pop-screaming at FantasyHarry, and is quietly told off for it by Molly. Throughout the whole of PS Ginny does not speak to Harry and he does not speak to her. There is no two-way communication via which she could get to know him, hence in PS her crush is on FantasyHarry.

In CoS, at The Burrow she does not speak to him at all, nor he to her. In Flourish and Blotts she speaks to Draco about Harry, but not to Harry himself, and he does not speak to her. During the Valentine’s card incident she does not speak to Harry and he does not speak to her. On page 212 Harry speaks two lines of strictly functional dialogue to her as he tries to get her to open up about the Chamber, but she does not reply. In the whole book they only ever actually talk to each other ONCE, and that is in the Chamber itself when she comes round, and here it is a functional exchange of events with Ginny’s over-riding fear being that she’s going to be expelled. So, there is no communication there that would allow her an emotional journey toward having real feelings for RealHarry. As such, she is still crushing on FantasyHarry; even worse, after the Chamber she is now crushing on FantasyHarry, The Boy Who Saved My Life.

In PoA, in the text it is made clear (page 51) that she’s hero-worshipping him following events in the Chamber, and in the whole of the book Ginny addresses only one word to Harry (page 51): ‘she went very red and muttered ‘hello’ without looking at him.’ Throughout the whole book he, in turn, only addresses her once, when she stumbles into the Trio’s railway carriage in the pitch black just prior to the Dementor attack and tries to sit in his seat (page 65): “Not here!” said Harry hurriedly. “I’m here!” In other words, he’s telling her to shove off. The only other ‘exchange’ between them in the entire book is on page 137 when Harry is in the infirmary and ‘Ginny Weasley, blushing furiously, turned up with a ‘get well’ card she had made herself, which sang shrilly unless Harry kept it shut under his fruitbowl.’ There is no indication that she spoke to him, or he to her in that scene; we cannot make up dialogue that was not there and we know from canon that in many instances Ginny was too shy to talk to him. So, in the whole of PoA she explicitly addresses one word to him and he addresses four (negative) words to her, hence she still does not know RealHarry and is still crushing on FantasyHarry.

In GoF she actually does speak more freely in front of Harry, but not once in the whole book does he ever speak to her. Page 51 she goes scarlet when they first meet and he smiles at she and Ron, so yep she’s still crushing. She speaks to him on page 52 when he asks a general question of Ron, Hermione and Ginny, but he doesn’t respond to her. On page 54 Harry addresses a question to Ron, and Ginny jumps in and answers it for him, but he doesn’t respond to her. She speaks to others in front of Harry (pages 59, 64, 72, 135), but then drops out of the narrative completely until page 347 when once again Harry asks Ron a question and she interjects to answer for him; Harry does not respond to her. She speaks to Harry and Ron together on page 348 (Harry does not respond to her), and then is last heard from on page 349 when Ron suggests that Harry invite her to the Yule Ball, and before Harry can speak or not she says she can’t go. We see her in two lines at the Yule Ball, and that’s it for the remainder of the book. The above are the only times we ‘see’ her in the 636 page novel. Harry does not specifically speak to her once throughout the book, so she still is not making that emotional journey and getting to know the real him. We have gotten as far as GoF and she is still crushing on FantasyHarry.

To punch the point home we have covered four books so far, and the number of words Harry specifically addresses to Ginny (by which she could get to know him) is … 0 (PS) +36(CoS) +4(PoA) +0 =40. Yep, you read it right, FORTY WORDS!

Do things get any better in OoTP? – yes and no. In the following I will refer only to instances where Harry specifically talks to Ginny, there are other instances (though surprisingly few) where Ginny is talking in his company, or where she addresses him and he does not reply. To instantly break my own rule, I will begin by referring to Chapter 4 wherein Harry arrives at 12 Grimmauld Place: Ginny introduces herself and says hello to him at length, and speaks to him during the group conversation. I refer to that as it sets the tone in that not only does Harry not say hello back, he does not speak to her specifically at all throughout that entire chapter! Not until page 163 does he actually mention her for the first time, when on the morning of the departure for school she gets knocked down two flights of stairs and he casually asks Hermione if she is alright. Not until page 167 does Harry address his first words to her: he and Ginny have been abandoned by Ron and Hermione on the train into Hogwarts and she suggests they get a carriage together, he replies, “Right” - a one word reply. He speaks two more words to her in the whole chapter (page 177): “oh yeah”, when she says they are blocking a carriage door. The next time Harry speaks specifically to her is on page 357, when Ginny asks Ron how he’s feeling prior to his first match as goalie and Harry answers for him: “he’s just nervous”. So, we have reached page 357 and Harry has addressed six words to her. He does not specifically speak to her again until page 441 when we have the ‘lucky you’ exchange in which they finally get to engage in a conversation, although it becomes painfully apparent from it that Harry has not bothered to remember the most defining incident of her life. Next, on page 450, Harry addresses a one line joke to Ginny about Lockhart in the Closed Ward. On page 507 he congratulates her on her Quidditch performance, with she saying he’ll be back as Seeker when Umbridge is gone. Then on pages 576, 77 and 78 we get the longest Ginny/Harry interaction yet recorded: the ‘chocolate in the library’ scene. Once again, as with the ‘lucky you’ occasion, they are conversing but it becomes apparent that they are not quite on the same wavelength as she is focused on he and Cho and he is focused on Sirius. He is brusque with her (canon). He does come away from the scene feeling better, but the reader is given two choices as to why: chocolate or that he unloaded, no matter who to; ‘Ginny’ per se is not one of the feel-good choices. The chocolate scene is the high-point of their exchanges, from now on in it’s downhill all the way, dwindling to nothing by the end. Their next exchange is on page 648 when Harry addresses two lines of dialogue to her ‘roughly’ and ‘shortly’. Next on 671 and 672 they snap at each other in the group-row over who is going to the DoM. Harry specifically addresses Ginny next on page 685 when they each snap one line at the other in the DoM, each accusing the other of wasting time. On page 701 Harry asks Ginny for info, but this time she doesn’t speak to him, being too stunned to answer. On page 714 Ginny asks him for intel mid-fight, he ignores her and moves on: ‘Slipping and sliding, he ran on towards the door; he leapt over Luna, who was groaning on the floor, past Ginny, who said, “Harry – what -?”, past Ron, who giggled feebly, and Hermione, who was still unconscious.’

I have quoted that in full, as that is the last exchange of any sort between them in the book. Yep, the LAST. Despite what you’re thinking: but surely in the hospital, on the train, at the station …? - no, from then on in neither addresses a word directly to the other. They talk to other people in each other’s presence, for example on page 748 they both talk to Hermione but neither talks to the other, but they do not even talk directly to each other on the trainride home. Ginny is not part of the group hug when Harry says goodbye at the end.

What we have in OoTP is a very shallow arc, beginning with nothing, hitting the ‘heights’ of the misfiring lucky you/chocolate exchanges, and then bitterly fizzling out to nothing again.

In HBP all bets are off, as from the first words he says to her he has already been jacked-up by Hermione. As such, with anything he says to her it is not the real him talking. Indeed, in HBP we see a Harry who simply approves/agrees with her – so she is still not meeting RealHarry.

To re-address JKR’s quote:

“But, I felt — and I'm talking years ago when all this was planned — initially, she's terrified by his image. I mean, he's a bit of a rock god to her when she sees him first, at 10 or 11, and he's this famous boy. So Ginny had to go through a journey as well.”

IMO, Ginny’s true journey took place AFTER she was going out with him as only then does she have enough contact with him to meet the real boy and not her fantasy figure. Ginny’s journey is learning that RealHarry is not FantasyHarry, and that she ‘liked’ RealHarry but did not love him – her journey is that of finally freeing herself from her crush by realising she is not in love with RealHarry. Once again JKR is not in any way lying to us, but IMO she is not telling us what we think she is telling us.


RETURNING TO THE MUGGLENET QUOTES

JKR continues directly with her statements about how she didn’t want Ginny to be the first girl Harry kissed – which has puzzled a lot of people. I think this puzzlement comes from the way it is written up in Mugglenet, as her statement is chopped up into two separate paragraphs. However, human beings do not speak in paragraphs, they speak with pauses, giving themselves time to consider their next statement which is connected to their previous one. Taking this into account, if we write it up with use of (Pause) instead of presented in paragraph form, it looks like this:

“And rather like with Ron, I didn’t want Ginny to be the first girl that Harry ever kissed. That's something I meant to say, and it's kind of tied in. (PAUSE) One of the ways in which I tried to show that Harry has done a lot of growing up — in “Phoenix,” remember when Cho comes into the compartment, and he thinks, ‘I wish I could have been discovered sitting with better people,’ basically? He's with Luna and Neville. So literally the identical thing happens in “Prince,” and he's with Luna and Neville again, but this time, he has grown up, and as far as he's concerned he is with two of the coolest people on the train. They may not look that cool. Harry has really grown.”

In my opinion, when we read the two paragraphs together as one series of comments (which I imagine is how they were in real life) then we can see that JKR is drawing a direct line not between what Harry felt for Cho and what he feels for Ginny, but between what Harry felt for Cho and what he feels for LUNA. “Harry has really grown”, yes he has; I think JKR is telling us he has grown, as he now sees that popular and pretty don’t really matter that much. I think that is how Harry has grown – it has nothing to do with Ginny. JKR immediately continues:

“And I feel that Ginny and Harry, in this book, they are total equals.”

Yes, but I am equal to my next door neighbour (a lovely man who is a paramedic) – and guess what? – I don’t love him and he doesn’t love me. Also, please note here that JKR is NOT telling us they are in love, she doesn’t use those words. She continues:

“They are worthy of each other.”

Yes, but I and my next door neighbour are ‘worthy’ of each other and we still don’t love each other. Note that JKR still is not using the word love, in fact that she never uses it with reference to them in the entire interview.

Harry and Ginny appear in order to encourage the reader to buy it and also to forestall Hermione from looking like a total bitch when the truth comes out –saying that they are equal and worthy would aid this view of Hermione as it goes some way to explaining Hermione’s actions. She continues:

“They've both gone through a big emotional journey, and they've really got over a lot of delusions -”

Yes they have: IMO Harry has gotten over his ‘looks and popularity’ phase and Ginny has gotten over her six year delusion on FantasyHarry.

“ - to use your word, together.”

Yes, together; IMO together in two senses: their growth arcs took place in the same timeframe and far more importantly from the angle of ‘Ginny’s journey’ she HAD to get over her Harry-delusion WITH Harry – she couldn’t do it any other way. She could only get free of her crush on FantasyHarry by going out with the real boy and realising that FantasyHarry never existed and that she only ‘liked’ RealHarry.

“So, I enjoyed writing that.”

I imagine she did, I imagine any writer would enjoy writing that.

“I really like Ginny as a character.”

Yes, as a character; but JKR likes all her characters irrespective of any factor of heroism or morality. To paraphrase another poster: I like Umbridge as a character, she’s good value on the page, but it doesn’t mean I love her or hold her up as a model of perfection.


TO FINISH:

If you think this is all willfully stretching what JKR said, I will remind you of her quotes on Draco and of how subtle and canny one had to be in order to get past them; IMO as subtle and canny as JKR herself.

Others have said that they think she was kosher in the Mugglenet Interview H/G bits because in contrast she was obviously concealing/withholding during other parts (e.g. the Snape/Lily/Lupin section). Yes, I think she was obviously hiding there, but more obviously so because the interviewers were actively trying to pin her down on that. Furthermore, I would argue that anything to do with Snape/Lily is very small beer in comparison to an LP reveal on H/G – so I think she wouldn’t have been trying so hard to protect the future plot re Snape/Lily.

As an aside I’ll quote something else she said in the Mugglenet Interview:

JKR: …. obviously, there are lines of speculation I don't want to shut down. Generally speaking, I shut down those lines of speculation that are plain unprofitable. Even with the shippers. God bless them, but they had a lot of fun with it.”

She shuts down on ships when they are ‘plain unprofitable’. It is a fact that she shut down on Neville/Luna. Why? – even if it was never actively going to happen, why not let it run as a harmless off book/invisible ship? I imagine she might be motivated to shut it down if she had very definite ‘alternative plans’ for one, or both, of the parties concerned.

If I were JKR, I would be concerned to protect my art, and for me that would entail protecting narrative ‘reveals’ as we sail into the final book. In the words of her sister (as given by JKR is the Mugglenet Interview):

JKR: My sister said to me in a moment of frustration …. "Well he's (Dumbledore) too detached, he's too cold, it's like you,” she said!"

‘Detached’ – exactly the type of skilful mind which would be able to protect the narrative via subtle misdirection, and the type of skilful mind to have cleverly enabled half the fanbase to choose to deceive itself over Draco.


Anise’s Note: I love this essay.  My only addition to it would be this: think about all of the things that JKR could so easily say about H/G, and does not. She doesn’t say that they love each other, or that they were ever in love. ( In fact, the word “love” is never used between them or about them—not in this interview, and not in canon; not even in Harry’s thoughts.) She doesn’t say that their romance is lovely and sweet and inspiring and heartwarming—in fact, she really doesn’t use adjectives and adverbs at all when she talks about H/G, as if she’s ultimately trying to keep herself and us at a distance from it. She doesn’t say anything at all about how ideal they are for each other; that is, what Harry has to offer Ginny rather than just what she brings to him. And she says nothing at all about Harry and Ginny getting back together in Book 7. In fact, her only comment that could even be related to that issue is that she’d always planned for them to come together and then part.

In short, this interview is very tricksy. It reminds me a lot of the famous optical illusion which consists of five words arranged in a triangle: “Paris In The The Spring.” Studies show that most people see only the first “the,” and it’s because they’re seeing what they expect to see. JKR crafted her words so that it’s very easy to reach just a little bit further and get a lot out of what she said that really isn’t there at all. So read carefully, and don’t be fooled. Illusions are fun… but it’s even more fun to be in on the mystery!

(Anise's Note: Yep, here it is... more great thoughts from Creamtea, with notes by me! And stay tuned for a special preview of my upcoming LP Theory Addendum Essay.)

HARRY POTTER AND THE HERMIONE GRANGER ANGER-MANAGEMENT PROGRAMME

This should be read as a follow-on companion work to the Love Potion essay. Page references are given in brackets and taken from the Bloomsbury standard version.

One of the problems I have as a reader with both OoTP and HBP is that such long gaps separate the publication of each from their predecessor (about two years in each case), hence I’ve not instinctively read the events of HBP as following mere weeks after the end of OoTP. However, I think that it helps us understand HBP more clearly if we do connect it directly to the events at the end of OoTP. When I do that, I can see a prolonged pattern of behaviour in OoTP which gives Hermione further major motivation for potioning Harry in HBP.

SUMMARY

This essay offers both a further motivation for Hermione love potioning Harry, and also an explanation for something which has puzzled many fans: why Harry does such little ostensible grieving or even recalling of Sirius, especially given how devastated Harry was by Sirius’s death at the end of OoTP. Harry does grieve in HBP, but it is in a stop-start way (mostly stop); I believe that Harry’s grief and closure-recall of Sirius is curtailed and stunted because Hermione uses potions to divert Harry’s emotional attention away from Sirius’s death and ‘miserable thoughts’, and onto what she hopes will be happy, anger-free, sunlit days with an obliging girlfriend. Why? – because Harry’s angry emotional state in OoTP nearly got himself and his friends killed in the DoM, and was a tipping factor in getting Sirius killed. Hermione sidelines SPEW in HBP because her imperative project is keeping Harry ‘emotionally stable’ (as she sees it), and to deflect him away from what she fears would be a titanic, destabilizing grief for Sirius (particularly as the logical Hermione knows that Harry was partly responsible for Sirius’ death). She feels she must do this for all their sakes – including for the sake of Harry himself. (Anise’s Note: Once again, this helps to explain why Hermione dropped SPEW completely in HBP, which is otherwise a remarkably inexplicable fact.)

This theory also offers a solution to the question posed by JKR’s claim that she had to kill Sirius. The fanbase has been focusing on finding a narrative reason as to why it had to happen, and there very well may be a future narrative reason why, but that would not alter the fact that there might also be an underlying structural reason why. Under this theory, and the closely associated Love Potion theory, Sirius had to die for the structural reason that his death would cause Hermione to predict a wave of grief for Harry. This wave (on the evidence of Harry’s CAPSLOCK behaviour in OoTP) is something Hermione feels it is imperative to deflect/defuse. She chooses the methodology of Love Potioning Harry to get his attention on a girl and off grief. When her actions come out in Book 7, as I believe they must, the consequences will drive a lot of the narrative of Book 7 (see my essay on Love Triangles). Hence Sirius had to die, as his death was the psychological pivot around which the remainder of the plot swung.

HARRY AND HERMIONE IN OoTP – SCARED OF CAPSLOCK HARRY

This section is dedicated to underpinning Hermione’s motivation; it will be a short section as I don’t think much needs to be said: Harry was snappish, aggressive and dismissive with Hermione throughout OoTP, and Hermione grew afraid of him and grew stressed when expressing contrary opinions toward him because of his aggressive reactions to such. She cannot curb or reason with Harry, and he nearly gets them all killed. She is thus motivated by a concern for the group, and by the fact that she cannot take another year of being yelled at by Harry, to ‘control’ Harry.
In OoTP in dealing with Harry, Hermione uses the tools which have served her well throughout the previous four school years: rationale, logic and a certain brook no objection schoolmarm attitude; with such, she attempts to control Harry’s temper in OoTP but she finds she can’t as the tools no longer work. Harry does not back down to her. Instead, in the face of her objections to his onrush of half-thought-through urges and reactions, he simply turns up the volume and browbeats her into submission. As evidence I will restrict myself to analyzing Harry’s CAPSLOCK arrival at 12 Grimmauld Place and his equally CAPSLOCK insistence that they pursue Sirius to the DoM in the face of Hermione’s sensible objections. The former is the first meeting of Harry and Hermione in the book, and the latter is toward the end. From comparing the two scenes we can see that their reactions toward each other did not improve throughout the book: Hermione never learned to accommodate to, or to handle, Harry’s temper.

At Grimmauld Place he notices upon Hermione’s hands the ‘marks of Hedwig’s beak and found that he was not sorry at all’. (62) He carries right on going in the same vein: short and attacking. In response to his attacks Hermione is ‘anxious’ (63), ‘on the verge of tears’ (64), ‘desperately’ (64), ‘sparkling with tears’ (64), she is appeasing, providing information quickly in an effort to appease his temper (65), she ‘winced’ (65), responded ‘nervously’(65), she is hasty to get information out to forestall his shouting. Harry is equally short with Ron in this scene, who is admittedly as shocked as Hermione by Harry’s behaviour, but that is not the point, the point is how Hermione and Ron differently react to Harry’s behaviour as the book progresses. I think that Ron reacts true to his nature as Hermione reacts true to hers: Ron learns to ride the wave, not generally seeking to corale, control or correct Harry in his outbursts; Hermione seeks to do just that. I think the scene of Harry’s insistence that they pursue Sirius to the DoM shows this, and shows that Hermione’s efforts to control Harry have simply resulted in his increasing aggression toward her, and her increasing trepidation toward him.

In the Chapter 32, Out Of The Fire, page 645 sees Harry informing both Ron and Hermione of his vision/dream that Voldemort is torturing Sirius in the DoM, and that they, mere schoolchildren, must immediately go there to save him. Ron objects ‘weakly’ (645), indeed he comes to see it from Harry’s POV and starts to provide reasons as to why, logically, Voldemort would be torturing Sirius in the DoM during work hours with hundreds of Ministry staff around. Only Hermione continues to resist and to oppose Harry’s faulty reasoning with her own correct reasoning. However, much good it does her. All that happens is that she gets another verbal beating from Harry as he browbeats her and shouts her down; indeed she is left to face Harry’s aggression alone as although Ron is present he does nothing to either physically or verbally protect Hermione from Harry’s wrath.
In this short scene (645 - 648), Hermione is persistently poses logical and reasonable objections, although speaking ‘in a rather frightened voice’ (645). In response Harry ‘bellowed’ at her and ‘shouted’ (645); on page 646 he progresses to ‘shouted in her face, standing up and taking a step closer to her in turn. He wanted to shake her.’ Visualize this: it is a boy – a trained, athletic boy, good at sports, good in a fight - who is physically squaring off against a smaller girl who is not sporty or athletic. It is a threatening situation. Although Hermione still objects to Harry’s faulty logic and responds ‘desperately’ she gets no support or protective interjection from Ron who simply says of Harry, ‘He’s got a point’, and then Ron actually makes arguments to back Harry up. In response Hermione is ‘persistent’, and in response to that ‘Harry yelled at her’ (646).

Things then get even worse for Hermione as Ron then completely sides with Harry in this threatening shouting session from Harry. Ron is ‘rounding on her’ as she sticks to her guns and continues to throw up valid reasons why Harry could be very wrong (as indeed he is). She continues to speak up against both Harry and Ron, ‘looking frightened yet determined’. She comes out with her ‘you’ve got a bit of a – a - saving people thing’ line, ‘looking more apprehensive than ever’. Harry’s response is ‘a wave of hot prickly anger’ (647) which we know showed in his expression as Hermione is ‘looking positively petrified at the look on Harry’s face’. Harry continues shouting at her and is verbally aggressive toward her. His speech is littered with exclamation marks. ‘Harry let out a roar of frustration. Hermione actually stepped back from him, looking alarmed.’

Harry goes on a rant (bottom of page 647), at the end of which he also rounds on Ron, associating Ron with the objecting Hermione. At this point Ron could have stood up to Harry, defended himself and objected to Harry’s treatment of Hermione, but instead he does not, instead he distances himself from the attacked Hermione with ‘I never said I had a problem!’. This spells it out that standing up to the unreasonable Harry in the only way she can – logically – has only gotten Hermione further attack from the physically and verbally threatening Harry and has isolated her within the Trio. Harry then goes CAPSLOCK, top of page 648.
When, shortly after, Hermione agrees to help Harry verify if Sirius is in 12 Grimmauld Place as a compromise against dashing straight to the DoM, the reader gets the strong impression that one of the reasons she does so is to placate a Harry of whom she is now afraid – even though she still thinks he is wrong and that he is leading them all into a trap. She is right of course, and Harry does lead them all into a trap. The DoM battle is a terrifying ‘near death experience’ for Hermione (nods to Lysette of FAP for that point), which nearly gets the ‘sextet’ killed and does get Sirius killed. It is hardly contentious to argue that Hermione would see the DoM disaster as directly linked to Harry’s uncontrollable temper, and to her own failure to control him through logic.

WHEN LOGIC FAILS, WHAT ELSE DO YOU USE?

Logic has failed Hermione, she thus needs a different anger-management tool to use on Harry if she is to prevent what she fears will be another CAPSLOCK year. Well, obviously I think she used mood-altering potions (Love Potion) in an effort to do two connected things: get Harry a suitable girlfriend and in so doing, get his mind off Sirius. I believe we can see this latter motivation expressed clearly on the page in HBP, as I will show in later in this essay.

In relating Hermione’s potioning of Harry to her basic motivation to steer him away from rage caused by grieving for Sirius, in HBP we have to look for evidence of a truncated grieving process for Sirius on Harry’s part, and a direct on-the-page link between an eruption of Harry’s grief/anger over Sirius and Hermione potioning Harry to deflect him from it.

TRUNCATED GRIEVING

Prior to Harry’s sleep the first night at The Burrow, the reader can clearly see that he is grieving for Sirius, though in a mature, non-angry and unhysterical fashion. Fanbase charges that ‘he never grieved for Sirius’ are not true; he did. True, he is not wallowing in grief or rage, as he does not believe Sirius would want that from him, but he is slowly accommodating to his loss in a quiet, internal way. What does happen is that this quiet, internal grieving is abruptly truncated the morning after That Night at The Burrow.
On page 52 Harry first hears that he has inherited 12 Grimmauld Place. He is not plunged into raging drama-queen grief, but quietly states to Dumbledore that ‘You can have it, I don’t really want it.’ He then thinks that he ‘never wanted to set foot in Grimmauld Place again if he could help it. He thought he would be haunted forever by the memory of Sirius prowling its dark, musty rooms alone, imprisoned within the place he wanted so desperately to leave.’ The conversation continues and Dumbledore points out that the house may have, in actuality, passed to Bellatrix Lestrange. ‘Without realising what he was doing, Harry sprang to his feet; the telescope and trainers in his lap rolled across the floor. Bellatrix Lestrange, Sirius’s killer, inherit his house? “No,” he said. He ‘said’, not he shouted, roared, yelled, but ‘he said’. Harry is angry, rightly so, but controlled and mature. We move onto the subject of the ownership of Kreacher, and Harry feels that ‘the idea of owning him, of having responsibility for the creature that betrayed Sirius, was repugnant’ (54).

On page 71 Slughorn casually speaks of Sirius and his recent death; at the mention: ‘It was as though an invisible hand had twisted Harry’s intestines and held them tight.’ Slughorn goes on to complain about being on the run and whines that Dumbledore wants him to stand up and be counted, the reaction is: “You don’t have to join the Order to teach at Hogwarts,” said Harry, who could not quite keep a note of derision out of his voice: it was hard to sympathise with Slughorn’s cosseted existence when he remembered Sirius, crouching in a cave and living on rats.’ In all this we can see that Harry does not lose his temper, but that thoughts of Sirius are never very far from his mind. On page 76 Dumbledore says how proud he is that Harry is bearing up so well ‘after everything that happened at the Ministry’ (i.e. Sirius’s death), and says that Sirius too would have been proud. We are then given a page (77) where we are given explicit, direct insight to how Harry feels about Sirius’s death. Harry does not want to discuss Sirius (which is NOT the same as not wanting to think about him), but Dumbledore gently does so to help Harry ease his burden. We are told that:
“Harry had spent nearly all his time at the Dursleys’ lying on his bed, refusing meals and staring at the misted window, full of the chill emptiness that he had come to associate with the Dementors’.

‘It’s just hard,” Harry said finally, in a low voice, “to realise he won’t write to me again.”

His eyes burned suddenly and he blinked.

Harry goes on to reflect that ‘now the post owls would never bring him that comfort again’. (Note the use of the word ‘comfort’.) Dumbledore acknowledges that ‘naturally the loss is devastating’ but Harry rallies and states that him cracking up over it is not what Sirius would he wanted. That instead he should attempt to bear up and get on, but that if it does come to it, he’ll go down fighting. Dumbledore approves of Harry’s attitude (78): ‘Spoken both like your mother and father’s son and Sirius’s true godson!’ Indeed, I think that on page 49 when Dumbledore first sees Harry and is ‘looking up at him through his half-moon glasses with a most satisfied expression’ and says ‘excellent, excellent’ Dumbledore has, via Leglimens, noted Harry’s grieving but controlled state and approves of it.

Over these initial chapters JKR has given us a picture of a boy who is mourning, but who is doing so in an undramatic fashion. He is someone who does not necessarily want to talk about Sirius, but he does think about him. Then, Harry enters the Burrow, Dumbledore leaves and after some conversation Harry goes to bed and crashes into a heavy sleep. I have covered these circumstances in my Love Potion essay, but I did not note then that Hermione’s need to suppress Harry’s grief for Sirius was just as important to her as provoking ‘happy times’ with Ginny Weasley. Indeed, it was more important to her as it was the main reason why she sets Harry up to fall for Ginny. I was not reading the scene, or indeed the book, with an eye to the effect of Hermione’s potion-efforts upon Harry’s grieving for Sirius, but when I do …
On page 89 – directly after Harry has woken up and has noticed Hermione ‘scrutinizing Harry as though he was sickening for something’, his reaction is: ‘He thought he knew what was behind this and, as he had no wish to discuss Sirius’s death or any other miserable subject at the moment, he said, ‘What’s the time? Have I missed breakfast?”
We already know from his conversation with Dumbledore (page 77) that Harry ‘did not think he could stand to discuss Sirius’, and on page 93 (breakfast scene again) when Hermione brings up The DoM in a row with Ron, ‘Harry’s heart sank. They had arrived at Sirius,’ he keeps his head down and stays out of it. Hermione goes on about ‘survivor’s guilt’ and depression in relation to Tonks. However, the fact that she was so ready with ‘survivor’s guilt’ means she’s been thinking about it – also in relation to Harry? What we note from Harry’s perspective is that not only does he not talk about Sirius that morning (no surprise there) but also, he does not THINK about him, when previously he did. Indeed from then on we get no thought of Sirius at all until page 151 when Harry is approaching the school with Tonks – six weeks later!

This sudden cessation of grief is weird. It is not true to life. People cannot shut off grief like just like that merely because they’ve decided they don’t want to grieve any more, so voila, they won’t. It is all totally unrealistic. Did JKR decide she did not want to devote page time to Sirius and thus decided to make Harry get over it because she was bored writing it? Well, how many words/lines would it have taken, spread throughout the book, to give us some semblance of a more realistic grief-recovery? Not many. Indeed, if JKR KNEW she did not want to be bothered writing ‘grieving Harry’, then why kill Sirius in the first place, when any specific plot contrivance stemming from his death could almost certainly be traversed with him alive, and she wouldn’t be laid open to charges of ‘crap writing’? Once again, as with the sudden, jarring advent of Harry/Ginny, IMO the readership is left with two possibilities: either JKR’s writing has gone down the pan, or … she is deliberately writing a warped, unrealistic grief arc as a clue that something is up. So far, many in the readership have voted for ‘gone down the pan’.

Looking at it from the Love Potion H/G angle, I thought the reference to Sirius by Harry at breakfast was just a red-herring on JKR’s part, as she has to give the reader some ostensible explanation of Hermione’s scrutiny seeing as she has deliberately drawn attention to it – in fact as the writer she has deliberately created it. Now, however, I think that mention of Sirius is a crucial pointer to the ‘missing half’ of the equation re Hermione’s motives for dosing Harry. Hermione desperately wants to forestall Harry going CAPSLOCK, and to do that she feels she must stop him from grieving over Sirius and start him chasing after Ginny, and after Harry’s night at the Burrow when he is exposed to whatever potion Hermione used, that is what happens … ‘he had no wish to discuss Sirius’s death or any other miserable subject at the moment’ … After ‘That Night’, miserable is something Harry wishes to avoid …

On the walk toward Hogwarts with Tonks, Harry feels that he is expected to talk about Sirius, but ‘did not like talking about Sirius if he could avoid it’. Furthermore, ‘he was quite keen to leave this new, gloomy, Tonks behind’. Since ‘That Night’, Harry doesn’t like thinking about miserable things, or being with miserable, gloomy people … it’s as though he’s been fitted with an aversion to misery. He then accompanies Snape up the drive and bitterly piles most of the blame for Sirius’ death onto Snape. He thinks about Sirius here, but once again not with any grief, but instead it’s as though in throwing the responsibility for Sirius’ death onto Snape, he is somehow throwing grief aside.

Since ‘That Night’, Harry has stopped grieving.

It is not until half-term, when Harry goes on the Hogsmeade weekend – approximately two and a half months after That Night - that Harry abruptly has ‘miserable thoughts’ about Sirius. And it is here that we also get something we need for the theory in this essay to stand up: a direct connection wherein Harry’s anger over Sirius prompts Hermione to dose him, with the effect that he forgets Sirius and concentrates on Ginny instead. We explicitly get that connection, and we get it in the Hogsmeade weekend scene.

TIME TO TAKE YOUR MEDICINE HARRY …

On page 231 Harry spots Mundungus flogging-off Sirius’s belongings, presumably having stolen them from Grimmauld Place. The abrupt sight of it sends Harry into a rage. He swerves into physical violence, pinning Mundungus to the wall by his throat; he is ‘shouting’, his speech is thick with exclamation marks, he ‘swears at the top of his voice’, he ‘snarls’, he is ‘yelling’. Mundungus ‘started to turn blue’ as Harry continues choking him. Hermione shrieks ‘Harry you mustn’t!’ but to no effect as Harry only lets go when someone (Tonks?) shoots Harry off Mundungus with a spell, leaving Mundungus to apparate to safety. Yes, we are back into CAPSLOCK Harry mode – literally, as JKR switches to CAPSLOCK for Harry’s line, ‘COME BACK YOU THIEVING -!’. Tonks leaves, and Hermione, Ron and a still-angry Harry go into the Three Broomsticks. And what happens next…?

‘The moment he was inside, Harry burst out, ‘He was nicking Sirius’ stuff!’ (and JKR uses italics for emphasis.)

“I know Harry, but please don’t shout, people are staring,” whispered Hermione. “Go and sit down, I’ll get you a drink.”

Harry was still fuming when Hermione returned to their table a few minutes later holding three bottles of butterbeer.

“Can’t the Order control Mundungus?” Harry demanded of the other two in a furious whisper. “Can’t they at least stop him stealing everything that’s not fixed down when he’s at Headquarters?”

“Shh!” said Hermione desperately, looking around to make sure nobody was listening; there were a couple of warlocks sitting close by who were staring at Harry with great interest, and Zabini was lolling against a pillar not far away. “Harry, I’d be annoyed too, I know it’s your things he’s stealing -”

Harry gagged on his butterbeer; he had momentarily forgotten that he owned number twelve, Grimmauld Place.

“Yeah, it’s my stuff!” he said. “No wonder he wasn’t pleased to see me! Well, I’m going to tell Dumbledore what’s going on, he’s the only one who scares Mundungus.”

“Good idea,” whispered Hermione, clearly pleased that Harry was calming down.

Then the conversation shifts to Ron and Hermione spatting about Ron gawking at Rosmerta, during which time ‘Harry was thinking about Sirius and how he had hated those silver goblets anyway.’ Hermione is drumming her fingers on the table, keen to be gone, ‘The moment Harry drained the last drops in his bottle she said, “Shall we call it a day and go back to school, then?”. Seconds later they are out in the street and Harry’s thoughts turn, for the first time in abut six weeks, to Ginny – dwelling on her and resenting the time she is spending with Dean. He forgets Sirius and forgets his anger.
Well, for me this is the PERFECT potioning scene in HBP because it has all the key factors strung together in beautiful order: Harry is angry, Hermione gets nervous, Hermione gives Harry a doped-up drink and it has the desired effect in that he becomes less angry, he forgets about Sirius and starts thinking about Ginny instead.

Let’s go over it to get the best out of it.

Harry is in a rage and is choking the life out of Mundungus – literally. Hermione tries appealing to him rationally, ‘Harry, you mustn’t!’ but fails to have any effect. They go into the pub, and Harry is still shouting-angry. Hermione is pleading and whispering for him not to shout as people are staring, and then she goes to get him a drink. Note that here Harry has not mentioned the Order at all, yet Hermione is still afraid in the face of Harry’s anger – she is vaguely appeasing and pleading and cowering. She is not just afraid of Harry endangering them by letting intel slip, but she is afraid of his anger full stop. When she comes back with the drink, and before Harry has taken any from the specific drink she offers him, Harry is ‘still fuming’, demanding and ‘furious’, though he is speaking in a whisper. Hermione shhh’s him ‘desperately’ and verbally tries to appease him, then … he takes the first recorded chug at his drink and gags on it. We are given the ostensible cause for his choking as ‘surprise’, but I think he ‘gagged on his butterbeer’ because there was something in the drink. His next sentence must be delivered in a more calm fashion, as we then see that Hermione is ‘clearly pleased that Harry was calming down’. As Harry drinks on, his anger abates: ‘Harry was thinking about Sirius and how he had hated those silver goblets anyway.’ Hermione waits till he’s drunk ALL of his drink, and then they go, with Harry then thinking about Ginny and forgetting about Sirius.

Cause, action, effect: the perfect scene.

(Anise’s Note: The very existence of this scene always bothered me before reading this essay. I really couldn’t figure out why it was there. Why spend all that time on Harry running into Mundungus Fletcher when , as Creamtea notes, it really isn’t followed up on at all? I actually spent time trying to come up with weird elaborate theories about why this happened, and none of them made any sense. But this one does!)

The very next day Harry is discussing the incident with Dumbledore; Phineas Nigellus is ‘incensed’ and ‘stalked out of his frame’ referring to Mundungus as ‘that mangy old half-blood’. Notably, Harry doesn’t even talk about it, despite Phineas’ appropriate wrath, and simply changes the subject. On page 312 we get one mention of Sirius from Lupin during the Christmas break: Harry does not react at all. On page 436, without thinking Harry mentions Sirius to ‘Tonks’ in the corridor by the Room of Requirement (Tonks? Huh! She’s either Imperiused in that scene, or it’s someone got up as Tonks!)

(Anise’s Note: Yeah, I think so too. Personally, I think it was really Draco Polyjuiced as Tonks. We already know he’s capable of crying, and Sirius was his cousin.)

Tonks’ eyes fill up and Harry is embarrassed, muttering awkwardly ‘I mean … I miss him as well’. But does he? We get the impression he says it because he feels he ought to say something, and then he promptly clean forgets about Sirius again. On pages 497 and 498 both Sirius and James crop up on the detention cards Harry is forced to sort during detention with Snape. At that time Harry is boiling with anger at Snape and seeing their names gives Harry a jolt in the stomach, but immediately he is back obsessing with Ginny and almost instantly after we get the Common Room Snog, and then that’s it – no more Sirius for the rest of the book, until … It is the last chapter and Harry determines to break with Ginny. Page 591 he knew he must break with her and ‘forgo his best source of comfort’ then on 595 he recalls that there was no body to bury for Sirius and on 596 that with Sirius he had ‘looked desperately for some kind of loophole’ that would have brought him back from death. Page 598, Harry feels a great rush of affection for Neville and Luna, on page 600 he has a ‘wonderful momentary urge’ to laugh at Grawp and Hagrid, and grins at memories of Dumbledore. Then he recalls all those lost to him: mum, dad, godfather, Dumbledore and realises there can be no comforting whisper in the dark that can say it is all safe really and sedate him. Two pages later he has broken with Ginny, and with a ‘miserable gesture’, ‘turns his back on her’.

MISERY AND COMFORT: AN EQUATION

Note that at the start, when Harry and Dumbledore are discussing Sirius in the broom-shed at The Burrow, Harry thinks of the comfort he has lost with Sirius’s death. He then gets junked up That Night and the next day he just associates Sirius with ‘miserable’ things, and more or less banishes misery and gloom from his company and mind. He comes to see Ginny as ‘his best source of comfort’ (given that Sirius is now dead), but chooses to break with her ‘with a miserable gesture’ i.e. to turn away from cotton-wool sedation and to embrace emotional truth again.

I think Hermione eradicated misery and replaced it with comfort: she eradicated that which should have been, Harry’s grieving for Sirius, and replaced it with something that should not have been: his ‘interest’ in Ginny. She wiped out an ‘uncomfortable truth’ and replaced it with ‘something that was making him happier than he could remember being for a very long time’ but which felt ‘like something out of someone else’s life’.

In the end Harry finds the strength to overcome the switch and returns, of his own volition, to reality. (Anise’s Note: There’s a special sneak preview of my upcoming addendum essay at the end, and it relates to this point, debunking once and for all the “happier than he could remember being for a very long time” fallacy.)

Saddest of all, unlike Hermione the reader can quite clearly see that in the early chapters of HBP Harry was grieving for Sirius in an emotionally mature way: he was not engulfed with irrational CAPSLOCK rage. Hence the tragedy is that Hermione needn’t have done her potioning of Harry at all, and thus in Book 7 when the truth comes out, the grief and strife it will undoubtedly engender for the characters need never have happened …

ADDENDUM : ANGER-MANAGMENT THROUGH POTIONS USE – WHEN DID HERMIONE START?

Here I’m going to revisit the much derided ‘Draught of Peace’ theory. Note this theory was not debunked or discredited by its objectors, it was derided. I think Hermione dipped her toe in the water of ‘anger-management by mood-altering’ back in OoTP by tampering with the chocolate egg – affecting it with the Draught of Peace - so when she hits HBP she has already broken through any taboo against dosing Harry. After that, in HBP it simply becomes a question of what she doses him with, not whether she doses him. In short, I don’t think that her potions use against Harry was something that exploded onto the scene in HBP, I now think it was simply a ramping up of a strategy she had already begun in OoTP.

I was vaguely aware of the Draught of Peace theory on my re-read of OoTP. When I first heard of the theory I dismissed it as desperate and fantastical, as originally I dismissed the Love Potion theories which ricocheted through the fanbase after HBP. However, it was impossible not to note the level of attention and detail which JKR shoves the reader’s face into on the initial mention of the Draught of Peace (210-211). Over two pages we are given close detail how to make it, what it looks like when being mixed, what it does (calm anxiety and soothe agitation), what the effects are of mixing it incorrectly (puts the drinker into a heavy and sometimes irreversible sleep – something I will touch upon later in this essay).

We also find that Hermione is extremely attentive to it ‘Hermione sat up a little straighter, her expression one of utmost attention’ and we find that although is it a very difficult potion to get right, Hermione can brew it perfectly. At that stage Hermione has every incentive to pay attention to the opportunity offered by the Draught of Peace as not only has Harry already gone CAPSLOCK on her personally, but his failure to control himself has already seen him in detention with Umbridge. All in all, this is not some idle, passing mention of a potion which is never to be seen again, this is a potion which is going to come up as a plot point later on.
When I re-read the ‘chocolate in the library’ scene I was not looking for evidence of the Draught of Peace theory as I actually believed that the Draught of Peace was, among other potions including Love Potion, used on Harry in HBP. I thought that was where it was first used and that was what justified its big introduction in OoTP. I idly thought that if the Draught of Peace theory as relating to the egg were true, then we would have to at least see clear signs that the wrapping of the eggs had been tampered with.

I sat up straight and, like Hermione, paid ‘utmost attention’ and read the scene again carefully when I realised that JKR shows us just that. We also see something extremely peculiar: the egg Ginny selects to give Harry (he does not have a choice, she decides which one he is going to eat) is a SHOP BOUGHT egg. It has professional packaging, as ‘according to the packaging’ it contains a ‘bag of Fizzing Whizzbees’. Uh? Since when has Molly palmed shop-bought anything off on Harry? She is a home-baker extraordinaire and an excellent cook with the skills to make her own Easter eggs. Home-baking, knitting; for her the time and effort and care she personally puts into the gifts are the real evidence of her love, not the gifts per se. She would regard shop-bought in such matters as an insult to Harry. She bakes her own cakes, makes her own sweets, knits her own jumpers and, we know for a fact, makes her own Easter eggs. In GoF we are expressly told this when Molly’s response to the Daily Prophet accusation that Hermione has been Love Potioning Harry is to send her a mean-sized egg, in contrast to ‘both Harry’s and Ron’s which were the size of dragon eggs, and full of home-made toffee.’ For them to be full of home-made toffee, they had to be home-made eggs. My guess is that the egg Ginny selects for Harry was not even one originally included in the box from Molly but one the girls had bought and doctored, slipping it into Molly’s box when it arrived.

As many before me have pointed out, something weird is going on with the Easter egg in the library scene. ‘Perhaps it was the effect of the chocolate – Lupin had always advised eating some after encounters with Dementors – or simply because he had finally spoken aloud the wish that had been burning inside him for a week, but he felt a bit more hopeful.’ Yes, I think it was the chocolate, I certainly don’t think it was Ginny who had the calming effect, as after that Harry goes back to his default mode of indifference toward her when he isn’t snapping at her.

(Anise’s Note: Yes, this is a very important point. It’s not that speaking with a sympathetic, friendly person like Ginny wouldn’t have been capable of calming Harry down a little. The real problem is that Harry doesn’t treat Ginny even ONE BIT differently after this scene, supposedly so important to the development of H/G. His feelings and behavior towards her do not change an iota. Very odd. Actually, I think this scene is kind of sad, since it shows how Harry and Ginny’s friendship might have developed—and didn’t.)

As an aside: At the end of the book we note in the train ride home that Hermione (and Ginny) still consider that Harry has ‘feelings’ for Cho. At the bottom of page 762 Cho walks past the carriage and, prompted by Ron, Harry looks up at her. Harry says nothing is going on between he and Cho, but Hermione fishes: ‘I – er – hear she’s going out with someone else now.’

Stunned at Sirius’ death, the reader knows that in the train compartment Harry is actually totally indifferent to whether Cho is seeing someone else: Harry is over Cho but it’s a moot point as to whether this shows on his face as even Ron then tries to buck Harry up over Cho. It is Ron who asks Hermione who Cho is now with. Notably, Ginny jumps in with the name: Michael Corner, and explains that Ginny dumped Corner for sulking over the Quidditch match whereupon he promptly ‘ran off’ with Cho. It is debatable as to whether this is true as NEVER in OoTP or HBP do we get any objective evidence to support the claim, and we note that Ginny leapt in to answer instead of Hermione; we know that Hermione is a poor liar whereas Ginny lies ‘unblushingly’ (page 72).

Then Ginny makes her odd ‘I’ve chosen Dean Thomas’ comment, in which she actually uses ‘Dean Thomas’ instead of ‘Dean’, as though he’s a job applicant who has just been ‘chosen’ as the latest holder of the post of Boy Most Likely To Get Me Next To Harry. In this aside, I think the important thing to note is that up until May (the chocolate in the library scene) both Hermione and Ginny were unquestioningly convinced that Harry’s depression was due to his failing efforts with Cho, and not to his inability to contact Sirius. It is evident that they are still concerned that Harry may be emotionally adversely affected by the ‘Cho situation’, even as late as the train ride home. To be blunt: both girls were convinced that some of Harry’s depression was due to romantic difficulties with an unsuitable girlfriend. One logical remedy to that, to Harry’s depression/anger in general – and Hermione is nothing if not logical – would be to arrange a happy relationship with a suitable girlfriend.

ADDENDUM: THE POTIONS ARC THROUGHOUT THE SERIES.

Here I quickly cover the increasing use/reference of potions to and on Harry throughout the series, I am trying to draw a picture in which the stunning proliferation of potions use in HBP did not come out of the blue, but rather was a continuation of a pre-existing trend.

In CoS we have Lockhart telling the schoolchildren that Snape might brew up a Love Potion for them, if they ask nicely. In that book also, we have Polyjuice used by the Trio.
In PoA we have Molly giggling with Hermione and Ginny over a love potion she herself brewed up as a girl. We also have the first Divination lesson. In this we note, and are told repeatedly, that Trelawney always has her fire on no matter how hot the weather and that there is a kettle on the fire and that the fire kicks out a sickly, heavy scent. ‘The heavily perfumed smoke in the room was making him (Harry) feel sleepy and stupid’. (PoA 81). This fire, fume and effect is repeatedly written up throughout the following three books, the information is dinned into the reader’s brain.

In GoF we have The Daily Prophet falsely importing that Hermione Love Potioned Harry (444). We also have the first mention of Veritaserum (448), and of Snape threatening Harry that he might secretly dope up Harry’s evening pumpkin juice with it. Throughout the book, ‘Moody’ drinks only from his own flask as a Dark wizard could always dope up an unattended drink. This was an attitude the real Moody held to.

In OoTP we have: the detailed mention of the Draught of Peace; the (I suspect) actual use of it on Harry in the Easter egg; the ‘actual’ use of Veritaserum on Harry (following on from the mere threat of same in GoF) when Umbridge thinks she has doped his tea; we have Harry deciding not to drink the tea on Moody’s remembered advice not to drink something offered by an enemy as it could be doped. We also have the continued ‘administration’ of the mysterious scented fumes in Divination. I refer to this again, as in OoTP I think we are told what that ‘smoke’ is. Page 340 Harry is trying to read a passage from a textbook which will not go into his head and thus he has to re-read it, the sections from the textbook thus appear over and over again on the page, and in italics: ‘These plantes are most efficacious in the inflaming of the braine, and are therefore much used in Confusing and Befuddlement Draughts, where the wizard is desirous of producing hot-headedness and recklessness …’ Throughout OoTP Harry is referred to as hot-headed and reckless, and his actions are hot-headed and reckless. I think the stuff on the fire/in the kettle in Divination is a Confusing/Befuddlement Draught which Trelawney has habitually scented all her classes up with as she knows she’s a lousy teacher and fears that they only way she can get by is to con her classes by confusing and befuddling them. (And if you think this is a bit of a stretch and surely some teacher would have noticed, well, this is the school where a Death Eater posed as a rat for five years, Crouch posed as Moody for a year, an Auror was trapped in a trunk for a year, Lord Voldemort was growing out the back of someone’s head for a year, Gilderoy Lockhart actually got hired, oh and yes, there was a ruddy great Chamber underneath it with a great big Basilisk in it – and nobody noticed any of it. A bit of Befuddlement Potion? – not even a blip on the radar.)

The reason I’m going over this Befuddlement Potion as though it was a big deal is because, in OoTP, I think it is a big deal. We are specifically told the running order of Harry’s Monday lessons: Potions then Divination then DADA. We notice that in Potions, although Harry hates Snape almost as much as he hates Umbridge, he does not lose control/lose his temper in Snape’s lessons to any great extent. But he has Divination, comes out of it, goes into DADA, and all hell regularly breaks loose with Harry usually ending up in detention. Reason? – the effects of the Befuddlement ‘smoke’; I think it affected Harry more so in OoTP than before partly because of teenaged hormones and partly because Voldemort was in his head, pushing him to lose control.

In HBP we have a potions free-for-all. Love potions flung about left right and centre, Felix Felicis, people getting drunk, Amortentia, the Draught of the Living Death takes another bow, Polyjuice is back with a bang, Veritaserum is on the curriculum, poisoned wine, doctored Gillywater, the ‘misery juice’ in the locket font, sunshine-yellow Euphoria Elixir – and they’re just the ones I can think of without running to check. We also have That Night at the Burrow – where it all starts to go wonky.

ADDENDUM: WHAT WAS HARRY HIT WITH ‘THAT NIGHT’?

Of the vast array of potions and mood-altering substances, what was Harry hit with that night at The Burrow? The truth is we don’t really know, we don’t even know if more than one substance was ‘administered’ to Harry by more than one person over the duration of events. That night he accepts a drink off Dumbledore – we don’t know if anything was in that. He might or might not have been given a drink by Slughorn at Slughorn’s borrowed cottage – that section is very confusingly written, all we know is that Slughorn thrusts the drinks tray at Harry, we don’t know if there was a drink on it for him. What we do know is that Slughorn – a potions specialist – mixes the drinks with his back to the room ‘busy with decanters and glasses’, mirroring Umbridge when she was doctoring Harry’s tea in OoTP. If Harry did take a drink from Slughorn that night, chances are it was doctored. Harry drinks soup when he gets to The Burrow – given to him by Molly who has been offering ‘tea and sympathy’ to Tonks and who is aware that the Dementors are breeding and generally making everyone gloomy; would she be trying to cheer everyone up by slipping them ‘something harmless’? In the bedroom with have the mysterious ‘vase of flowers’ exuding a heavy, perfumed scent, and the ‘Puking Pastille’ stuck to Harry’s pillow.

There were thus at least five chances of Harry being ‘administered’ (either by ingestion, touch or scent) a ‘potion’ that night. I begin to suspect that he got hit by more than one, and it was the unfortunate combination of them that did for him. Whatever they were, I suspect that at least one was badly brewed Draught of Peace, as if you are heavy handed with it, ‘you will put the drinker into a heavy sleep’ and Harry conked out almost immediately his head hit the pillow: assaulted throughout the night by the sweet smell of the flowers and clutching the so-called Puking Pastille. If I am right about the ‘Divination Potion’ then we can assume that if we brew certain potions strongly enough, the mere scent of them is sufficient to have an effect. (Anise’s Note: This is standard knowledge in (Muggle) aromatherapy. The effect an essential oil has on the client depends on whether the oil is smelled, applied to pulse points, or ingested, the strength of the effect going up the scale in each instance.)

I think badly/strongly brewed Draught of Peace was in the vase of flowers – brewed up by Molly probably as a ‘harmless’ sedative for Harry to comfort him – if Hermione had done it she would have brewed it correctly. But Hermione did put something in the room, otherwise why would she be checking Harry for ‘symptoms’ the next day: so if the vase was Molly, Hermione put the Puking Pastille under the pillow. Hermione must have put something to Harry which she expected to have a discernable effect as she is ‘scrutinising’ Harry … ‘expecting strange symptoms to manifest themselves at any moment’. ‘Peace’ does not ‘manifest itself’, it is more of an absence than a presence: hence she had dosed him up with something other than the Draught of Peace. Hermione was looking for something to show itself that was new to Harry. Hermione: a girl with a deep knowledge of Love Potions and a girl with an over-riding incentive to Keep Harry Happy.

Whatever unfortunate combination of substances Harry was hit with That Night, one substance alone, two or even five, I can see the following pattern emerging as a result: an emotional distance from Sirius and ‘miserable’ things, and an unprecedented interest in Ginny Weasley with whom he comes to associate not just lust but to see as a ‘source of comfort’.

(Anise’s Note: More brilliance from Creamtea!  As mentioned above, I’m also writing an addendum to the LP theory, containing thoughts, info, and suppositions that have been worked out since the original chapters were posted. Here’s a sneak preview, as promised
+++
Even if we ignored all the OTHER evidence against H/G—which there’s no reason to do-- it seems to me that it would be sunk by the fact that when Harry relates to Ginny or even thinks about Ginny, he seems to go into this incredibly selfish and self-absorbed little world that might as well exist only in his own head. He only breaks out of it when he breaks up with her.

Now, in that context, let's take another look at an HBP quote that seems to support H/G, because it’s a statement that I don’t think we can ignore. Either it has to be taken at face value—in which case it really is a very strong argument for genuine H/G in HBP—or else it has to be explained some other way. And it’s here that we really begin to understand the subtlety of the journey on which JKR takes us. Page 678:
quote:
________________________________________
After all, it made a very nice change to be talked about because of something that was making him happier than he could remember being for a very long time, rather than because he had been involved in horrific scenes of Dark magic.
________________________________________


Of course, Harry's talking about being with Ginny. And a lot of readers have seen this and sighed resignedly, deciding that they're going to have to ignore the staggering problems with H/G, since, well, Harry's happy, so it must be true love! But let’s look at what happens when we dig just a little deeper and start making some comparisons.

Love potions have been specifically linked with and compared to the Imperius curse in HBP, and Harry himself was the one who did it. It happens when Dumbledore asks him if he can think of what might have caused Tom Riddle, Sr., to fall in love with Merope, page 269:
quote:
________________________________________
"The Imperius Curse?" Harry suggested. "Or a love potion?"
________________________________________


So it’s actually Harry who links the two, and note, also, that he thinks of the Imperius curse first.

Now let's look at the very first time that Harry was put under Imperius by fake!Moody, in GoF (pg. 151, hardcover American edition).
quote:
________________________________________
It was the most wonderful feeling. Harry felt a floating sensation as every thought and worry in his head was wiped gently away, leaving nothing but a vague, untraceable happiness.
________________________________________



Not only have Imperius and LP's been linked by Harry, but the effect they both have on Harry is described in canon in essentially the same way and by using the same word ("happiness".) “Every thought and worry in his head (is) wiped gently away,” just as in HBP, Harry’s infatuation with Ginny is his “greatest source of comfort” and keep him from worrying about anything else, including the things he should be worrying about—the loss of Sirius, the threat of Voldemort, and what Dumbledore asked him to do. Obviously, happiness may FEEL good in the HP-iverse; it would be silly to argue that it doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily IS good.

Honestly, I think that the belief that Harry and Ginny are experiencing and/or will experience true love relies ultimately on a serious misunderstanding of what these books are. They contain joy, but they are not happy little feel-good teen romance novels. Happiness is not guaranteed to anybody. Happiness is not always a good thing, and definitely not always the highest value. Actually, JKR’s attitude about comfort and happiness for her characters sometimes has definite Calvinistic overtones, and also reminds me of John Bunyan’s *Pilgrim’s Progress* enough that it’s worth spending some time on it.

Now, if you haven’t read PP, I’m not really sure I would advise anybody to suffer through it, but suffice it to say that it’s an allegory about a spiritual journey that the pilgrim has to take. On the way, he’s constantly held back by his traveling companion, Sloth, who keeps whining about how they should stop going because it’s getting too difficult, and it’s better to be comfortable and happy than to make this journey. Here’s a typical example of the way these comforts tempting the pilgrim were described:

Then they came at an arbor, warm, and promising much refreshing to the pilgrims; for it was finely wrought above-head, beautified with greens, furnished with benches and settles. It also had in it a soft couch, whereon the weary might lean. This, you must think, all things considered, was tempting; for the pilgrims already began to be foiled with the badness of the way: but there was not one of them that made so much as a motion to stop there. Yea, for aught I could perceive, they continually gave so good heed to the advice of their guide, and he did so faithfully tell them of dangers, and of the nature of the dangers when they were at them, that usually, when they were nearest to them, they did most pluck up their spirits, and hearten one another to deny the flesh. This arbor was called The Slothful’s Friend, and was made on purpose to allure, if it might be, some of the pilgrims there to take up their rest when weary.

And take a look at Bunyan’s description of Standfast’s encounter with Madam Bubble, here:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bunyan/pilgrim.htm#vi.ix-p0.2

STANDFAST: As I was thus musing, as I said, there was one in very pleasant attire… who presented herself to me, and offered me three things, to wit, her body, her purse, and her bed. Now the truth is, I was both weary and sleepy… Well, I repulsed her once and again, but she put by my repulses, and smiled. Then I began to be angry; but she mattered that nothing at all. Then she made offers again, and said, if I would be ruled by her, she would make me great and happy; for, said she, I am the mistress of the world, and men are made happy by me. (My emphasis!) Then I asked her name, and she told me it was Madam Bubble. This set me further from her; but she still followed me with enticements. Then I betook me, as you saw, to my knees, and with hands lifted up, and cries, I prayed to Him that had said he would help. So, just as you came up, the gentlewoman went her way. Then I continued to give thanks for this my great deliverance; for I verily believe she intended no good, but rather sought to make stop of me in my journey.

MR. HONEST: Without doubt her designs were bad….

MR. GREAT-HEART: This woman is a witch, and it is by virtue of her sorceries that this ground is enchanted.


It has some remarkable points of similarity with the way that H/G is written—the hero is tempted by a woman (a witch, even!) who promises to make him happy. Notice, too, that Standfast doesn’t try to argue that Madam Bubble *isn’t* going to make him happy; he *knows* that she can deliver what she offers. But ultimately, he doesn’t stray from his path of destiny. Of course, JKR doesn’t write in quite the misogynist way that we see in PP, and I’m not trying to say that she portrays Ginny as an evil temptress, but what’s striking about this is that it’s essentially the same theme.

So the pilgrims do keep going with their difficult journey, just as Harry kept going-- because otherwise you don’t have much of a book. PP doesn’t have much in common with the HP series in some other ways, most notably that PP was a specifically Christian allegory, and HP obviously isn’t. But the biggest thing they DO have in common is their themes. These books aren’t about being comfortable, or doing anything for the sake of becoming comfortable. Those aren’t the goals that matter. You may get to them eventually, but they will definitely be by-products of the real goal of the quest. In many ways, the HP series merits a careful comparison with PP, especially when it comes to the nature of H/G.

All right, y'all.. here's the long-threatened film essay I've been ominously talking about for weeks now. ;) Yes, it lays out the staggeringly enormous amounts of evidence for JKR's massive control over the content of the films. GREAT amounts of research and sneaking into the Vanderbilt library went into this. (Infinite thanks to ShutUpMalfoy for so graciously leading me into the hallowed halls of that Academy of the Old South.) And even infinite-r thanks to Creamtea for beta-ing and ruthlessly excising long, meandering film criticism blathering. Why is this Chapter 5 of her "Fall of H/G" theory? When y'all read Part II of this essay, it will make a lot more sense. That's the part that agonizingly dissects what all this means for H/G, H/L, and yes, D/G. The first part, however, lays the foundations. Flames will be used to roast fourteenth-century incunabula in the Malfoy library, while I cackle incoherently about just how much research the flamers have NOT done. But I have, because that's what I do. Warning: perilous logic lies ahead....


+++

Chasing Canon: J. K. Rowling’s Unprecedented Creative
Control Over Hollywood, and What It Really Means

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In terms of the Harry Potter fandom, ‘canon’ has been traditionally defined as the body of written works directly produced by the author, J. K. Rowling, as well as the literal words of her actual interview statements as published or broadcast. As anyone can promptly glean from a quick perusal of any fansite, canon is also the wellspring from which our myriad speculations flow. We can argue endlessly about differing interpretations of this canon, but what is and remains immutable is the source material itself. Defined in this way, the question of what is (and is not) considered canon material seems very simple. But is it?

There is another source of information about the Potterverse besides J.K. Rowling’s direct writings and statements, and universal confusion has always reigned in the fandom about how to deal with this source and define its nature. It is the visual body of work adapted from the books. While this has occasionally been taken to include Mary GranPre’s illustrations, it will here be defined exclusively and solely as the five films that have been produced by the Warner Bros. studios-- Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (The abbreviations SS, CoS, PoA, GoF, and OotP will be used when referring to the films. To avoid confusion, they will be differentiated from the book titles in always being italicized.)

And yet, what are the films? What relationship do they really bear to the books? When we see certain aspects of plot, narrative, and character interactions emphasized while others are downplayed—both to a degree that was necessarily nearly so clear in the source material—what do these changes mean? The release date of OotP is essentially one week before the release of the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. So if we see changes from the source material in the fifth film, are we justified in reading them as hints and foreshadowings for what is to come in the seventh book? In short, do the films represent a kind of canon—or are they only some sort of cinematic fanfic? Is expanding the fandom definition of canon to somehow include the films an action justified by the available evidence?

That is the question that will be explored in this essay. However, we will not only muse on possibilities; we will search for answers. And we will find that both direct and circumstantial evidence for a definite answer is startlingly strong—and that the answer is unquestionably a “yes”.


“When all is said and done, "canon” could perhaps be best and most accurately defined simply as material over which the author maintains control. So the central question is whether or not J. K. Rowling can be proven to have had considerable control over the content of the films from the very beginning. If she has, then we can justifiably apply some sort of canon definition to the films; if she has not, then we can’t. And what we find is that J.K. Rowling’s case represents a shocking departure in virtually every detail from the Hollywood norm (which is outlined in a separate and lengthy footnote to this essay for those readers who would like to see more detailed evidence of what the norm has actually always been.)

No matter where we look, we find evidence that Rowling has had a staggeringly large amount of creative control all along, and that this is shown in a multitude of provable ways, both in terms of factual news events, and in logical deduction from the actual content of the finished cinematic product. This phenomenon is not only unusual; its degree is probably also unprecedented. And it has been noted as such by the popular press, the scholarly press, the business press, the academic press, the film criticism press, and finally the film industry press. In short, as we shall see, my hypothesis that J.K. Rowling has continuously had remarkable creative control over the film adaptations of her books can be proven not only beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt. We will see that book content has been changed for the films only in order to streamline certain elements to meet the demands of cinematic narrative. However, no book content that actually materially affects plot, characterization, theme, or the relationships between characters has been changed for any of the films—except for two very specific, and recurring, instances. In one of the two cases, scenes, dialog, and character’s behavior have all been repeatedly changed in each film; in the second case, none of this had the opportunity to happen until the fifth film, when, from all reports, it most decidedly has. None of this has occurred in ways that in and of themselves shortened length or streamlined cinematic narrative, and so it could not have been required for the same reasons that the standard minor changes were required. Because of Rowling’s control, this means that the two major recurring changes cannot have been made without Rowling’s consent. As some people believe, this may well have some extraordinary implications for the content of her seventh and final book in the Potter series.

However, we have a long way to go before we can justifiably arrive at any of these rather shocking conclusions. First, let’s look at the evidence for the main hypothesis that comes out of the adaptation and filmmaking processes themselves. What is the history of the book-to-film process, starting with and concentrating on SS, and what can it show us?

To begin with, J.K. Rowling held out until she received a studio offer that included the creative control over film adaptations that she simply refused to do without, and she was already very unusual at the time (1998) even in having done this. Few authors are able to resist the pull of easy money when studios do offer to buy book rights immediately, rather than only purchasing an option. When Philip Pullman sold the rights to The Golden Compass to Northern Lights, he retained no creative control precisely because “it was at a time when I thought it might be the only money I made on the book.”(Kean) J.K. Rowling took a vastly different path. A large part of the reason was undoubtedly because by the time Warner Brothers bought the rights to the first four books (yes, only the first four, and this will be a very important point later on,) it was 1998, and SS/PS was already a bestseller. However, it also took remarkable determination on her part to make the choices that she did when it came to control over her work.

In the author’s own words: “We were inundated with offers from film companies and I said no to all of them—even Warner. But they kept coming back… The vital thing for me was that it should be true to the book. Obviously, there are some things that won’t work on screen, but I didn’t want the plot to change much at all.” (Conversations With J.K. Rowling.) Indeed, Warner Bros. did “keep coming back,” and as we know, she did decide to sell the rights to the first four books, and an option on the fifth, in 1998. The exact details of author’s contracts with studios are jealously guarded secrets. However, there is every reason to believe that without an iron-clad assurance of creative control, Rowling would never have sold the rights at all. Every piece of available evidence leads us to this conclusion. Therefore, it is safe to say that Rowling’s contract did, and does, specifically include such a clause, although we will likely never know its exact wording. One thing we do know is that Rowling has been an executive producer of the films since SS, and that in a legal sense, this is a very specific—and very large-- role. However, there is a great deal of evidence that her control went beyond the realm normally allotted to even executive producers. As we will later see, Warner had every reason to continue allowing this in later films, as well.

Indeed, all news sources unanimously agree on this central point. To pick only a few of the avalanche of available quotes: “The author’s unwillingness to compromise was also shown in negotiations over the first film… She initially rejected a number of offers from studios desperate to take on the books ….Ultimately, she changed her mind only because of Warner’s commitment to the books and, perhaps, because they allowed her an unprecedented level of control.” (O’Donnell) “The decision to allow a film wasn’t about money or power, but rather a desire to maintain the books’ integrity…. Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has cast a spell on Hollywood that rivals any wielded by the boy wizard. Authors are notoriously rebuffed by filmmakers and studio bosses eager to reshuffle storylines or change characters to fit their own creative or marketing vision. But Warner Bros. was eager to please the British writer, envisioning her Harry Potter series as a franchise of seven movies that could generate billions of dollars over the next decade. Rowling initially balked at all movie offers, and eventually parlayed that reluctance into power that may be unprecedented for an author.” (Simpson) “Warner Brothers acceded to Rowling a level of creative control that not even Anne Rice held when her first book was filmed.” (Nettles) Or, in short: “Of course, we all know who was really responsible [for the success of the films], J.K. Dopey Hollywood types may quarrel about ‘creative rights,’ but you’ve reminded everyone about ownership rights. You are not simply the author, J.K, you’re the proprietor.” (Bart)

And finally, this: “She [Rowling] is strong, she’s opinionated, she’s clear, she’s passionate,” said SS producer David Heyman. “We wanted to be good to her book. We wanted her involvement.” (Simpson) And whether the producers actually wanted her involvement or not, they certainly had it in spades.

According to all reports, J.K. Rowling had (and has always continued to have) considerable input—and in some cases, final input-- into choices regarding directors, cast, setting, set design, and script. “Author J.K. Rowling exerted an unprecedented degree of control over the film version of ‘Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone’… Rowling, who served as an executive producer, had a huge say in casting, production design, and which episodes from the book turned up in Steve Kloves’ screenplay... Rowling read every draft of the script and sat in on production meetings.” (Lumenick) “The author had input on virtually every aspect of the production, from the choice of director to the casting and scenery designs,” agrees Simpson. Most importantly of all, Rowling has always directed the scriptwriter in the writing of the scripts for each film (whether we are talking about Steve Kloves or Michael Goldenberg) in order to make sure that he didn’t and doesn’t write anything that will contradict what is coming in later books, and the process began with SS. Indeed, this level of control is well illustrated by her quote from 2003 in a co-interview with Kloves: “Because it's incredibly annoying of me when he says "Well shall we cut that", or "I wanted to do this" and I say, "Well no... because, you know, in book six, something will happen and you'll need that in" or "that will contradict something that happens" (Mzimba).

One of the most interesting ways in which the importance of this point has been shown lies in the recent Goldenberg interview hoax, as posted on April 9th on Mugglenet. It claimed to contain comments and observations made by Goldenberg to a UCLA film student in a private interview after a guest lecture, and included statements such as “J.K. Rowling was not happy with some of the omissions that were made that may "come back to haunt the next film adaptations,” and “he (Goldenberg) revealed that Rowling, in an email, seriously suggested that after she finished Book 7 she should probably take reign as co-screenwriter and/or become a serious player in the screenwriting process.” This certainly would seem to derail the entire idea that Rowling had control over the script of OotP. There is only one problem with that scenario, however. The article was a complete hoax from beginning to end. A genuine interview with Goldenberg surfaced one day later, in which he denied any input into, or knowledge of, the faked interview (as Warner Bros. itself had already done. Indeed, a cursory examination of Goldenberg’s lecture schedule shows that he had not given any talks at UCLA—or any other Los Angeles colleges—since October.) Goldenberg’s comments could not have been more different in the genuine interview, as we will see in more detail in the second part of this essay.

There are three fascinating aspects of the hoax that are worth pointing out now, however. First of all, the very fact that it was planned and carried out shows that the importance of the films—in a way, even the canon-ness of the films-- is, indeed, acknowledged in the fandom. The swiftness of Warner’s official denial also shows that a major studio takes this fandom seriously. And lastly, the information from the genuine interview shows that J.K. Rowling’s control over the content of the scripts for these films is as remarkable as it ever was.

Actually, this is where it is very useful to examine Alice Walker’s case in detail within the body of this essay itself, because she provides such a fascinating case for study by way of contrast. Walker was very reluctant to sell the film rights to her Pulitzer-winning novel The Color Purple in the early 1980’s, although Warner wanted to buy them. In fact, she seriously considered bypassing the standard studio system altogether and allowing an independent film production company and an independent director to film her work (ultimately, this is more or less what she did decide to do with Prahtiba Parmar and the Warrior Marks project.) She did finally sell the rights to Warner. The studio and director (Steven Spielberg) did give her a level of control that few authors had ever had up to that point (1983) over the adaptation of her work, including frequent consultations on the script, set design, costumes, casting, and even editing. However, her critical analysis of the adaptation process (The Same River Twice) shows that it still cannot be said that she had anything like true creative control. She finally came to terms with what had been done to her book in the filming process, but one retains a strong sense from reading The Same River Twice that she fervently wishes for a great many things to have been different, including the director.

About fifteen years later, Steven Spielberg showed a great deal of interest in directing SS for Warner. Reportedly, he wanted to change a large number of things, including combining elements from SS/PS and CoS into one movie, casting Haley Joel Osment as Harry, re-envisioning the film in an American setting, and perhaps turning it into a CGI cartoon a la Toy Story. Obviously, none of this happened, and analyzing why gives us a fascinating understanding of the vast differences between Walker’s and Rowling’s experiences. According to all reports, Rowling simply vetoed any and all of these changes. She insisted on live action, an all-British cast, and absolutely no butchering of the story. (Simpson, O’Donnell, Guest.) Rowling has always been extremely coy on the subject of whether she put her foot down in this way, and the studio, of course, has been completely mum. However, we know that she was an executive producer for SS (which is a fact well worth repeating,) and that veto power over directors is one of the powers that executive producers can indeed possess. So from all available information, Rowling stood up to one of the most famous directors that the film industry has ever seen—and won. In some ways, this is a more amazing victory than the control over scripts.

As we know, Chris Columbus stepped in for both SS and CoS, and Rowling accepted him without demur. As she herself said, “The first time I met Chris, he promised me two things: that he would remain as faithful to the book as he possibly could within the constraints of film and that he would have all British cast. And, he kept both promises.” (Rowling) As O’Donnell rather snidely notes, “Columbus was a lot more open to Rowling’s suggestions than Spielberg or any other first-rank director used to autonomy probably would have been.” He happily consulted her on set design. He asked her to draw him a picture of the exact location of Harry’s scar. (There has been some discussion regarding the fact that this location is not where Rowling originally sketched it for the books long before film rights were sold; however, she herself, from all accounts, is the one who decided to change the location for the films.) (Simpson) Columbus appears to have actually presented her with casting decisions, which is simply unheard of in the film industry. Directors don’t do this for authors, and they may not even do it for ordinary executive producers. Rowling herself blandly admits that Columbus asked her if there was “anybody I thought would be good and I said 'RobbieColtraneForHagrid' in one breath.” (However, all evidence indicates that her influence over the films extended light-years beyond this modest appraisal!) As Columbus said, perhaps a bit defensively, “It’s a very simple, logical theory. If the books are so popular with people, why would you change them?” (O’Donnell)

On that note, let us move on to the evidence from the films themselves, the final product of what was adapted. Why change them, indeed? Warner could not come up with an answer that was good enough to lead them to do so, and they did not. Of course, not every trivial incident in SS/PS was completely reproduced in its film counterpart, because that was not the degree or nature of creative control that Rowling had fought so hard to retain. Warner did not simply hire a DP to point a camera at Jim Dale or Stephen Fry sitting in a chair and reading the books aloud onscreen. Yet we see clearly by actually examining the films themselves that the only changes have been remarkably minor ones, made in order to adapt prose narrative to the mostbasic requirements of visual narrative. One review of SS sums the issues up perfectly: “Never before has a novelist had such complete control over an adaptation, and she has used her power to protect her readers’ sensibilities. Professor Quirrell’s turban may be a different color, Peeves the poltergeist (played by Rik Mayall) may be on the cutting room floor, some songs have been chopped and the more literate jokes don’t make it, but, for once, carpers won’t be able to say that the book and the film are completely different. With Rowling controlling the casting, too, everyone… steps seamlessly from the page onto the screen.” (Jardine)

In fact, Wikipedia maintains a complete and accurate list of precisely what details were changed in each film. For the time being, we will concentrate on SS, although evidence from the other films will be brought in for the second part of this essay. The remarkable thing we see when we read this list is how unbelievably minor these changes are when compared to the average adaptation (one of the two major changes, which involved characters, did appear here to some degree, and it will be discussed much later in Section II of this essay.) Some members of Dudley’s gang are eliminated, as is Madam Malkin, Peeves, two of the named centaurs, Professor Binns, and so forth. A hamburger restaurant near Paddington Station appears in the book, but not in the film. When the Dursleys leave Privet Drive to escape the horde of owls delivering Harry his Hogwarts letter, they travel to a hotel before going to a hut on a rock out in the sea in the book, but the hotel is skipped in the film. Harry meets Draco in Madame Malkin’s dress shop in the book; the two do not meet until they get to school in the film. Firenze has dark hair and dark skin rather than being blond and blue-eyed, as he is described in the book. And so on, and so forth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_book_and_film_versions_of_Harry_Potter_and_the_Philosopher%27s_Stone)

Only from the point of view of film—not of the book fandom—can we see how remarkable this really is (which is why I really recommend reading that footnote in order to understand the sorts of changes that are made in a normal book-to-film adaptation, and the minimal to no influence of nearly any other authors of an original work over the adaptation process.) In fact, film reviewers hardly seemed to know how to take the sort of adaptation that SS was. Although reviews tended on the whole to be more positive than not, a rather puzzled tone reigned supreme in them.

“Where the film falls short in not (for once in the history of much loved novels) as a version of the book, but as a film. So much has been crammed in, that for those who haven’t read it… the plot may prove baffling.” (Jardine) “The completed movie suggest the filmmakers took her ‘suggestions’ (sic) religiously enough that they ended up making a risk-adverse, strictly by-the-book adaptation rather than a classic.”

In fact, the most important piece of information revealing Rowling’s level of control had nothing to do with the actual content of the film. Her control over the adaptation of her work was tremendous, but certain
aspects of it have been seen before. However, she also wielded considerable influence in an area where no author hasever before held the slightest bit of power. As BBC news noted: “In an unprecedented move, Rowling also demanded that Coca-Cola, the victor in
the race to tie-in their products to the film series, donate $18 million to the American charity Reading is Fundamental, as well as a number of community charity programs.” (Forbes) She also vetoed the direct use of Harry’s film character on fast food boxes. Coca-Cola was Warner’s main marketing tie-in with the first film, so this means that Rowling was affecting the marketing moves of a major corporation. If the entire fandom truly understood how unimaginable this kind of control really is on the part of an author, how literally unique its scope, then there would be no need for this essay to be written. There would, instead, already be universal understanding and acceptance of its argument.

In the area of meeting Rowling’s standards for faithfulness to her book, SS formed a prototype for the later films, and what is true of it is also true of them. While this will be examined in more detail in Part II of this essay, it is worthwhile to take a quick look at just how unusual observers knew this to be. It was thought at the time of the release of the second film(CoS) that Rowling’s control might slip because of fading popularity in the near future. As Richard Perks, a senior analyst at Mintel Retail Intelligence, said “There is a risk of overkill with Harry Potter, and the hype is remarkably strong. There has to be some law of diminishing returns.” In 2004, Forbes magazine darkly predicted “But Pottermania may be too fantastic to last.” If any of this had ever come to pass, it’s possible that it might have led to some sort of diminishing of Rowling’s control over the films. However, as we all know, it’s rather an understatement to say that none of it happened. So other and far more talented directors stuck just as closely to the later books as Columbus had done. (O’Donnell, Watson-Brown.)

Regarding the filmed version of OotP, however, there is one more aspect worth pointing out in the first part of this essay. As the fandom now knows, an article was briefly posted on April 9th that claimed to be written by a UCLA film student who had supposedly talked with Michael Goldenberg, OotP’s scriptwriter. Goldenberg’s reported comments, which included such gems as “J.K. Rowling was not happy with some of the omissions that were made that may "come back to haunt the next film adaptations,’” stirred brief controversy in the fandom. This article certainly seemed to indicate that Rowling had somehow lost control over the filming process, and was also very unhappy with the specific changes that had been made. The only problem was that the article was a complete hoax from beginning to end. Goldenberg gave a genuine interview to Melissa Anelli two days later in which he expressed exactly the opposite views in statements such as: “[Rowling’s suggestions were] immediately put into the script. Tiny little things, for the most part, we could not have asked for more in terms of a collaborator” and “we really do want to make a movie that she's thrilled with. I mean, nobody wants that more than we do. So, it almost didn't need to be said, you know? It's just the baseline we're all starting from.” This puts the ingenuous “tiny little things” comment into correct perspective. Rowling has established such control by this point that she could more than afford to be gracious; she had already fought her battles and acted the Iron Lady. Her view of where the entire narrative is headed is simply “the baseline we’re all starting from.”

In addition, he made this comment: “Jo and I actually spoke about that [the adaptation process.] It was interesting, in that our processes are kind of the opposite, in a way. The joy of the books is that you can stop. You can just linger and pay attention to all of these wonderful details, and spend as much time as you want just immersing yourself in this world. But in the film, you really are translating it into another language.” In so doing, Goldenberg proves that both he and Rowling understand very well that cutting details and richness and embroidery in the book-to-film process does not change the basic narrative, themes, plot, characterization, or relationships between the characters. This point will be taken up in much more detail in Part II.

However, it worth emphasizing here that the producer (David Heyman) and the scriptwriter have both gone to a lot of trouble to publicly express their views on the fact that certain elements from the book simply had to be cut. Their comments are remarkably painstaking and detailed, very carefully explaining why specific changes had to be made. To see how extraordinary this is, all we need to do is to compare it with the attitudes surrounding the changes made in the average book-to-film adaptation. The producer in particular would normally never even have dreamed of actually giving interviews to point out how hard they worked at keeping to the source material, how regrettably necessary it was to cut a few things, how much effort and energy went into keeping to the theme and plot of the book, etc., etc., etc. The very fact that this has happened repeatedly shows just how anxious Warner is to keep Rowling happy, and to stick as closely as possible to her original work.

At the time of the first film, however, everything had not yet reached this level of graciousness. There was a great deal of commentary in the press about how Rowling was “making things difficult” for Warner. (Guest) So a central question remains: why did the studio—and its parent corporation-- put up with this process, so incredibly different from the way that books are and always have been adapted to film? This is a question that must be answered if we are going to accept the fact that this level of creative control by an author really did exist.

It can best be summed up by an article in Variety, the industry press. It described SS’s first screening in New York, which was introduced by Richard Parsons, COO of AOL Time Warner. This was not an artistic event in any sense of the word, but an utterly corporate. The author, a film industry insider, states that SS was such a milestone precisely because it “helped to reinvent.. the ‘tentpole,’” or a film that is part of a series that automatically, by its very nature, contains a great number of sequels (as Lord of the Rings did.) Whatever these films mean in artistic terms, this is what they mean to the studios, and to the megacorporations that own them: dazzling cash cows.(Bart)

This point becomes even clearer if we begin to follow the money:
[i]SS[/i]: $317.576,000
[i]PoA[/i]: $249.539
[i]CoS[/i]: $261.980,000

[i]GoF[/i]: $290.013,000

In other words, well over a billion dollars have been grossed to date just from U.S. domestic theater release of the Potter films. This does not count foreign release, and all of the films have made about 2/3rd’s of their total gross overseas. This does not count DVD sales. This does not count any type of merchandising tie-ins at all—from action figures to games to Halloween costumes to Draco’s wand to Hermione’s Yule Ball earrings to Harry-shaped cake pans. (All Time Top Grossing) Indeed, Forbes magazine laid it out quite a bit more clearly. “The first two flicks have grossed $2 billion worldwide at the box office, fetching another $500 million in video, DVD and rental sales….Of course, Harry Potter is a toy-merchandising machine, helping Mattel unload an estimated $150 million worth of Potter paraphernalia so far. Video games by Electronic Arts generate even more. The half-pint wizard is emblazoned on Johnson & Johnson's Band-Aids, cologne, even gross-out Jelly Belly beans infused with such Hogwarts flavors as earwax, dirt and booger.” (Forbes)

As Tibbets and Welsch note, “For motion pictures in America… the only failure is commercial failure.” And by that standard, Rowling has created dazzling success. No matter how radically different from the norm her adaptation process has been, it has made large amounts of money for the studio and the parent corporation, and any amount of authorial control will be tolerated if that is the result. So Warner continued to allow the freakish process to happen, and it has kept happening in the subsequent movies. Later directors were more gifted than Columbus, and more skillful at creating a final film that had truly artistic and cinematic qualities, but the reality of Rowling’s unprecedented creative control is still the same. For once, the result is precisely what sells. The films that Warner has made from the original HP novels don’t need to be “made more accessible” by being made more cinematic. The books themselves represent a literary phenomenon so unique that the closest possible things to literal renditions of them on film are exactly what the audience pays to see.

But there is still a central question here that remains unanswered, and that is exactly why JKR was able to keep the creative control she had fought so hard to win. The point is not only to gain this control in the first place, but to be able to keep it. And there is one very curious piece of information on which this entire phenomenon turns. When Warner first acquired the rights to produce 'Harry Potter' movies from J.K. Rowling, they only bought the first four films, with a "first look" option on this fifth in the 7-part series. (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/preview/1808475611 Greg’s Previews.) If they had known how phenomenally successful the series would really turn out to be, they would certainly have fought harder for all of the rights—but at the time, they did not. So as time went by, there was every reason in the world to placate J.K. Rowling by giving her anything she wanted, both in control over films that were currently being made, and in contract negotiations for her level of control over future ones. Otherwise they could very easily lose their stupendous income source for the last two films (not to mention the tremendous value of future work from her.). And so the studio found that it was completely worthwhile for their bottom line to do this. In a total reversal of the normal rules, the studio, investors, and corporation actually made more money by giving the author what she wanted and staying faithful to the book.

And so we have reached the conclusion of this portion of the essay. We have seen massive amounts of evidence for the hypothesis that Rowling has consistently had unprecedented control over the contents of the film adaptations of her books. So for all the reasons that we have seen in the first part of the essay, that contention has been proven—not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond any doubt that can be based in reason and logic. While minor details may and do differ from book to film, plot, narrative, characterization, and relationships have not changed and do not change—unless Rowling wants them to do so. To indulge in considerable paraphrase of Mathew 18:18,
whatever things Rowling bound in the books are bound in the films, and whatever things she released from the books have been released from the films. The films are not the books, but neither are they separate from the books in the way that any normal film adaptation may be said to be. Because of this, it is not a question of bringing the films into canon, but rather of expanding the definition of canon to include them.

Of course, this begs an immediate question: since there are differences between book and film, how do we decide which are significant and which are not? Are some of those differences important enough to foreshadow the developments that we may see in DH, the final book in the series? In a print canon which has yet to be completed, these questions certainly have special weight. However, it is definitely possible to come up with answers based on evidence, and that is what we will do in the second part of this essay.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Footnote 1:

However, this answer is a vast departure from the Hollywood norm. Indeed, we will get a different answer to this question if it posed in relation to probably any other book-to-film adaptation in the hundred-year history of mainstream studio filmmaking itself; it is only a question of how large a degree of difference there is. This is vital to understand, because only in the context of the norm can we appreciate how revolutionary J.K. Rowling’s creative control truly is, and how unprecedented her situation vis a vis the Warner studio. In fact, the intricacies of this situation relate not only to the unique set of facts surrounding the Harry Potter books and their author, but also to the changing nature of the fight for corporate profits in a world where the public’s entertainment dollar is spent in a far more fragmented way than ever before.

Before dealing with any of these questions, however, we must first understand what the Hollywood norm has traditionally been. J.K. Rowling’s radical departure from it cannot be appreciated without first knowing exactly what “it” is. Which factors define the most common translation of book to film? How faithful is the average adaptation? Which parts of the original book are retained, and which discarded? Why is this done? And most importantly of all, where does the original author stand in this entire process? What type and degree of control, if any, do they normally retain?

The answer to this last question has certainly varied throughout Hollywood history. There can be no doubt, however, that the most common answer is “very little” to “none,” and this has consistently been the case from the very earliest days of cinema. Book-to-film adaptations have always been incredibly popular precisely because they use source material with which the audience is already familiar, and the work of developing plot and characters has already been done. However, few tasks present less of a challenge than proving how minimal the original author’s control virtually always is over any and all aspects of a film adaptation—unless we are talking about J.K. Rowling

As Danuta Kean notes, “Hollywood is not kind to writers. If you are the author of a novel adapted to film, the experience can be even more brutal... Often, what makes it to screen bears little resemblance to the original.” (Kean) Normally, what is sold is only an option to a producer to develop the book for a fixed period of time, not the rights to do so, although rights certainly have been sold first. If the option is exercised, the financial rewards for the original author can be considerable, but he or she has always quickly found that it is almost always impossible to retain even the smallest degree of creative control over the adaptation that results. If the rights do end up selling, which means the book will almost certainly make it to screen, studios normally exercise iron control. It’s hard to even begin to pick and choose from all the specific examples that prove this point.

However, the 1987 filmed version of John Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick is considered to be a classic case for many reasons. The rights were purchased from Updike, and that was literally the end of his involvement with the production. The original plot, theme, narrative, and characterizations were all vastly changed. As Updike himself said, “The movie bears, all reports agree, little resemblance to my text.” (Updike) The director, George Miller, never even read the original book. Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top Beelzebub, in particular, had very little to do with Updike’s character in the novel.

All of this is remarkable only in how utterly typical it is, but one aspect that was quite unique was the fact that it drove John Updike to write a piece reflecting on the nature of film adaptations in the New York Times in the summer of 1987, and it is more than worth examining his analysis of the entire issue. “Movie makers, like creative spirits everywhere, must be free; they owe nothing to the authors of books they adapt except the money they have agreed to pay them,” he flatly states (Updike) He draws the lines between film and book, and not only as separate entities, since they can hardly be otherwise (and this is an important point, since J.K. Rowling herself has made the “separate entitites” statement about HP adaptions.) He makes it clear that cinema and literature are entirely separate realities that may have nothing at all to do with one another beyond a common title and a bit of shared source material, which is quite a different thing to say. “The text is always there, for the ideal reader to stumble upon, to enter, to reanimate. The text is almost infinitely patient, snugly gathering its dust on the shelf; until the continental drift of language turns its English as obscure as Chaucer's, the text remains readily recoverable and potentially as alive as on the day it was scribbled,” he rather loftily writes. However, all of this is really only to say that the book exists separately from its film adaptation no matter how vastly it is changed in that adaptation, and that this vast change is the norm.
And the list goes on ad infinitum. As Updike himself notes, 1907’s Ben Hur not only played havoc with every aspect of Lew Wallace’s original novel, the producers tried to get away without even acknowledging Wallace’s original copyright. The resemblance that D.W. Griffith’s 1913 Birth of a Nation bore to Thomas Hart Dixon’s novel The Klansman existed chiefly because Griffith and Dixon shared so much political ideology, as did the white population of America at that time (unfortunately.) The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Remembrance of Things Past, Being There, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Scarlet Letter, Mildred Pierce, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even Gone With the Wind-- only a few moment’s thought summons up a panoply of film adaptations throughout history that were changed from the original source material in order to suit actors, directors, producers, studios, and investors.

Specific examples are almost literally unending. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is considered to be a classic example of a disastrous book-to-film adaptation in which the original author played no part. (Tibbetts and Welsch) The heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien sold the rights to The Lord of the Rings in the 1970’s, and had no creative control at all over Peter Jackson’s version. Robert K. Massie wrote bitterly about his experience with the film adaptation of his historical novel, Nicholas and Alexandra. “After I had signed my contract with him, Sam Spiegel [the producer] had disappeared from our lives. We heard rumors that this or that actor or actress was being hired; we read in the papers that three directors had been fired. People at cocktail parties knew more about what was in the script than we did.” (Massie) Philip Pullman sold the rights to the first book in the His Dark Materials series without retaining any creative control whatsoever. As Danuta Kean tellingly notes, “Writers should expect darlings to be killed, stories simplified and plot twists changed to make them accessible to the widest audience…. If a storyline does not play well in Des Moines or Detroit, it will be ditched and only the J. K. Rowlings and Dan Browns have the power to stop them.” (And even Dan Brown did not have anything like the sort of creative control over The Da Vinci Code that J.K. Rowling has had over her works.)

In a way, every film adaptation ever made from a book other than those by J.K. Rowling could be used as an example here. Of course, there certainly have been examples of a very limited number of authors with a greater degree of control over the way in which their works are adapted to film. But the most notable aspect of even these rare cases is the degree to which the creative control is still limited. The making of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a wonderful case study in this regard. However, her situation will be discussed in detail a little later, when we see which critical elements of J.K. Rowling’s adaptation experience were the same as—and which were radically different from-- Walker’s experience with the same studio about fifteen years earlier. Michael Crichton has served on a producer on several films adapted from his novels, for instance, but he still had very little say over their specific aspects, including the content of the scripts. Director Wayne Wang worked with Amy Tan in adapting The Joy Luck Club, but Tan was still, at the end of the day, only an advisor.

And if we start thinking of extremely recent examples, such as Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising or Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terebithia, we would do well to remember that these occasions arose after J.K. Rowling had broken the glass ceiling for novelists in Hollywood.


+++

Works Cited and Consulted

“All Time Top 100 Grossing Films.” http://www.movieweb.com/movies/boxoffice/alltime.php

“Author Called the Shots on Flick.” Lou Lumenick. New York Post. New York, N.Y.: Nov. 18, 2001. p. 003.


“Coke backs Harry Potter literacy drive.” BBC News, 09 October 2001. Accessed 26 July 2006.

“False Report Regarding OotP Scriptwriter Michael Goldenberg.” Posted April 10, 2007 at http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#article:9689

“Film adaptations: Shoot to kill.” Danuta Kean, The Times October 15, 2005.
“First Review of Order of the Phoenix, from Chicago Screening.” Melissa Anelli - March 4, 2007, 11:08 pm. http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/?articleID=9592

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/preview/1808475611 Greg’s Previews.

“Harry Potter: the Storm Breaks.” John G. Nettles. http://www.popmatters.com/features/011115-harrypotter.shtml, accessed 3/31/07

“Harry Potter and the children who can turn to him for solace”:[1 edition.] Linda Watson-Brown. The Scotsman. Edinburgh (UK): Dec 8, 2000. p. 15.

“Harry Potter and the secret of translating book to film.” Cassandra Jardine. The Daily Telegraph. London (UK): Nov. 7, 2001. p. 23.

“Heyman Talks Potter V Cuts.” Patrick Lee, posted April 11 at http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=41032

“Hit film adaptations for young audiences a 'mixed blessing' expert says”Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor. http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/06/0302kidfilms.html, accessed 3/26/07

“Introducing Michael Goldenberg: The OotP_ Scribe on the Harry Potter films, franchise, and fandom.” Posted April 10, 2007. http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#article:9691. Note: This was the genuine interview.

J.K. Rowling And The Billion-Dollar Empire. Julie Watson and Tomas Kellner. Forbes Magazine. New York, New York: 02.26.04. Author’s Note: This article may also be found online at: http://www.forbes.com/2004/02/26/cx_jw_0226rowlingbill04.html

JK Rowling's World Book Day Chat, March 4, 2004. Transcript from http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2004/0304-wbd.htm, accessed 3/31/07.

“Keeping her grip on Harry”:[Final Edition.] Frank O’Donnell. The Scotsman. Edinburgh (UK): Nov 5, 2002. p. 7.

Massie, Suzanne and Robert K. Journey. Alfred A. Knopf; New York, 1975.

Mzimba, Lizo, moderator. Chamber of Secrets DVD interview with Steve Kloves and J.K. Rowling, February 2003. http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2003/0302-newsround-mzimba.htm

“New OOTP details from Michael Goldenberg.” Posted April 9th at http://www.mugglenet.com/app/news/full_story/774. Note: this was the hoax article.


“Rowling used leverage to control Potter film”:[Final Edition] Bruce L. Simpson. The Ottawa Citizen. Ottawa, Ont: Nov 15, 2001. pg. E.4

“Seen the Movie? Read the Book!” John Updike, The New York Times, June 28, 1987, Late City Final Edition.

Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsch.The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film, Second Edition. Facts on File Press: UCA, 2006.

Walker, Alice. The same river twice : honoring the difficult : a meditation of life, spirit, art, and the making of the film, The color purple, ten years later. Accord, MA : Wheeler Publishing, 1996.

“What hath Rowling wrought?” Peter Bart. Variety. New York: Nov. 26-Dec 2, 2001. Vol 385, Iss. 2, p. 5(1 pp.)

“Who Owns Daniel Radcliffe: Harry Potter and the Curse of Child Fame.” Katy Guest. The Independent on Sunday. London (UK): Mar 4, 2007. p. 54.

Wordnet, a lexical database for the English language. Cognitive Science Laboratory. Princeton University, 221 Nassau St. Princeton, NJ http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=canon

A/N: Yep, here it is, y’all, the long-promised Part Two of the film essay series. Elegant writing and flawless MLA structure will not always be found in this essay, I’m going to warn you right now. This was the only way to actually get it out BEFORE the OotP film. However, the time that has not been spent on polishing style and structure has indeed been spent on the arguments herein contained, so if I were you, I’d read it for that.

Infinite thanks to the wonderful Creamtea for her insightful beta! Only the mistakes are mine. :)

And, oh yeah. When we get to the END of this essay, you'll see the D/G relevance.
+++

In Part One of this film essay series, we went over the evidence supporting the theory that J.K. Rowling has always had an extraordinary level of control over the adaptation process of her Harry Potter books, of which five have now been filmed by the Warner Bros. studios. We saw that this was true in terms of script, characterizations, director choices, set design, editing, casting, and sometimes even product placement and advertising campaigns. We saw the vast difference between this and the normal author’s amount of control over the normal process of book to film adaptation (that is to say, virtually always none.) We saw why this is so—not only because the HP series is the most successful fiction series in publishing history, but also because Rowling fought shrewdly and hard for creative control, as she has repeatedly stated and as all news sources agree without exception. The final capper to this argument is the fact that there were five years (1998-2003) when Warner had not yet bought the rights to the entire series, and had every reason in the world to give J.K. Rowling everything she wanted in order to get her to sell them the rights to the last two books.

What remains to be seen is what the actual differences were between book and film in this unique situation, and then to analyze why they are there. My hypothesis for this essay is that the very few significant differences exist only because J.K. Rowling has agreed to them, and actually believes that these few important changes in the films for Books 1-6 are completely congruent with her planned denouement in Book 7. The question we are really asking is whether we can separate out the changes that are significant and cannot be explained only by any exigency of film or cinematic necessity—in other words, the changes that must exist because they foreshadow plot developments and emotional arcs to come in DH.

The answer to that last question is yes. As we will see, this is true because film speaks in a distinct cinematic language that operates according to very strict rules. The key, really, is that changes from book to film are always done for a reason. The question at hand is to figure out what that reason is. If we understand the rules of cinematic language, then we know which changes are necessary in order to be comprehensible in this language when translating from book to film. In other words, we can logically figure out what changes have been done for that reason. We then know that any changes that absolutely cannot be explained in this way are there for another reason. Because J.K. Rowling has creative control, she must approve of that reason. This entire essay is based on this chain of logic.

In order to best accomplish this task, we will rely on Jon Boorstein’s well-known paradigm of the three ways in which a viewer experiences films: the vicarious, the visceral, and the voyeuristic. Doing this can clearly separate what makes a film great, good, mediocre, or bad from what makes it simply work as a film, no matter what its quality might be. In other words, we have gotten away from the realm of goodness or badness as film to a certain basic definition of the essence of film-ness itself. One is a matter of opinion; one really is not. As Boorstin succinctly states, “when it comes to movies, people tend to agree on what’s right.”

When Boorstin talks about these three ways of experiencing film, he is referring very specifically to Hollywood films produced under a distinctly American aesthetic. All of the HP films fit into this category. They are very big-budget movies produced by a major studio, which are the kinds of films that Boorstin is talking about. When he compares these kinds of films to the ones produced by the rest of the world, he states that “art aside, Hollywood-style quality pays. Audiences want to see Hollywood movies. Why? What do we do that makes a difference?” He concludes that the Hollywood language of film is always constructed to cause the audience to “derive three distinct pleasures from watching a film… the voyeuristic, the vicarious, and the visceral. Each has its own rules of time and space, its ways of judging reality.”

When changes are made in the adaptation process of book to film, they are made in order to fit one of these three categories—except in a few very unusual exceptions. As Boorstin states, these exceptions occur only because of star power. The demands of an actor with extraordinary box office draw (or more rarely a director) have occasionally superseded certain elements of even the basic language of Hollywood film. He wrote several years before the first HP book had been published, of course, but the idea still holds true. In this case—and for the first time in recorded film history—the author was the one holding the star power.

However, the changes mandated by J.K. Rowling occurred in the context of a myriad of minor changes that were made for the normal reasons of film. In order to understand the difference between the usual and the decidedly unusual, we must first look at why the vast majority of changes were made from book to film in the case of HP. To do this, we will define each of Boorstin’s three terms and then analyze how almost every change fits into one of the three categories. After we have fully explored the norm, we will then look at what is not the norm: the extremely few major changes that cannot be fitted into the categories. Before we can be sure that these changes were not made for the normal reasons, however, we first need to fully understand those changes that do fit into those categories, and exactly why they do so.

The first category is that of the “voyeuristic eye.” In Boorstin’s context, “voyeuristic” refers to the creation of a consistent world in film that allows viewers to suspend their disbelief, and to enter into the created world on the screen. The fatal criticism of the voyeuristic eye, therefore, is “I don’t believe it, I don’t buy it; I don’t think that would happen.”

In one way, this involves the most technical crafts of film: composing, lighting, editing, continuity, cinematography. Conceptually, this means “watching events steadily unfold in rational, explainable sequence, creating a credible flow of time and space and creating a story.” To the voyeur’s eye, credibility depends on plausibility. Some of this comes from technique that is—or should be—invisible. Viewers only notice Foley sound, editing, and continuity, for example, if they’re badly done. The world of spectacle falls into this category too, especially the computer-generated, and this is particularly true of the HP films. As viewers, we delight in the richly and fully imagined Hogwarts we see onscreen, complete with breathtaking vistas, talking paintings, moving staircases, giant pumpkins, werewolves, hippogriffs, and Dementors. All of this is a huge part of why we fall under the spell of the narrative.

However, there is a much more subtle way that we must experience a film voyeuristically if it is going to work for us as viewers. Pacing and timing have to feel right. The emotional storyline has to be structured in a tempo that feels believable, and the way this needs to happen onscreen is just not the way it can happen on the page. The most noticeable difference we see when we compare book to film is that plotlines are severely condensed, dialog shortened, characterizations simplified, and motives and behavior made more obvious. A lot of subtleties are deliberately lost. Most of the changes made in all five of the HP films fall into this category.

The second category is that of the “vicarious,” which refers to the emotional identification the viewer has with the characters. As Boorstin states, “the vicarious eye sees with the heart.” We, the viewers, invest ourselves in the emotions, decisions, choices, and behavior of the characters. The actors’ performances are obviously pretty key to this, although the editor is the truly unsung hero here. Because credibility for the vicarious eye depends on emotions, its fatal criticism is “I just don’t buy that he/she/they would act that way. I have not been pulled in this film convincingly enough to make me care about them as characters, or believe what they are doing.”

The third category is the “visceral,” which refers to scenes that evoke a particular gut reaction from the audience—terror, anger, disgust, arousal. These shine on film rather than in print; in fact, they are what film does best. Action sequences are the clearest and best examples of what stirs the visceral eye, although suspense also belongs to this category. The fatal criticism of the visceral eye is, “That doesn’t get me. It’s actually kind of boring. It isn’t making me feel scared, or excited, or apprehensive, or anything.”

When we analyze the changes that have been made from book to film in the HP series, we find that virtually all of them can be placed into these three categories.

The visceral content will be dealt with first, as it is the easiest kind of change to see. In a way, it can be summed up by the fact that the books were filmed in the first place, with every visual and sound component that film entails. The most obvious examples would include any scene that involves action, suspense, and/or danger, such as Harry’s vastly expanded battle with the Hungarian Horntail for the golden egg. However, visceral change in these films has nothing to do with emotional or characterizations arcs, and so we’ll move on.

The largest category is that of voyeuristic change. It’s important to emphasize that the vast majority of the changes through all five films were clearly made in order to better suit the voyeuristic eye through condensation and simplification. What follows is not a completely exhaustive list, which would be tedious indeed. That’s available elsewhere, and the high points are hit. First of all, let’s look at SS. In particular, the “condensation argument” applies to the way that several characters don’t get all the filmed scenes that they have in the books. In SS, for example, Draco Malfoy’s character doesn’t get the introductory screen time that he gets on the page. Harry doesn’t meet Draco until they get to school, and the scene at Madame Malkin’s is lost. So Draco’s character isn’t set up as thoroughly as a lot of us would like, but his function as a character remains the same. We really don’t see anything in the robe store scene that isn’t conveyed by what is on screen. Neville appears onscreen when he is Sorted, rather than on the Hogwarts Express with Hermione, so the same argument applies to him. A lot of time is saved by condensing the introduction of these two characters into what is actually shown. In fact, a lot of characters specifically named by the Sorting Hat in the book aren’t named or shown onscreen, because they’re not important enough to merit that screen time at all. Peeves was filmed (performed by Rik Mayall,) and then cut, and it’s easy to see why. He would have been a fun character to watch, but he really added nothing vital to the plot. The same argument applies to condensed scenes, such as the way that only the first three tasks are shown as Harry, Ron, and Hermione attempt to reach the Philosopher’s Stone.

However, there are significant changes in Ginny Weasley’s scene at the train station, and these greatly downplay her reaction to Harry (and his response to her.) Since these weren’t a matter of shortening the scene but of changing its emotional thrust, they will be examined later on, when we begin to delve into the few controversial changes.

In CoS, more minor characters are cut, such as Peeves, Professor Binns, Terry Boot, and Lavender Brown. We certainly know we’ll be seeing Lavender again in HBP, but there was really no plot reason for her to be in the second film. J.K. Rowling certainly knew this and didn’t insist that she be cast. A number of locations are cut. Some plot elements are mildly simplified, such as the flying car incident, the destruction of Tom Riddle’s diary, Percy’s relationship with Penelope Clearwater, and so forth. A few scenes are omitted, such as the physical fight between Arthur Weasley and Lucius Malfoy. The scenes showing clues that Ginny Weasley was being possessed by Tom Riddle were shot, but were cut from the final film and included on the DVD. They really didn’t add anything significant to the plot, so they were exactly the kind of scenes that were going to end up on the cutting room floor.

However, the vast majority of the scenes showing Ginny’s interest in and interaction with Harry were never even shot, and this fact is significant. It will be taken up in a later section.

In PoA, several characters were cut who had been cast in SS. Examples include Oliver Wood, Nearly Headless Nick, Katie Bell, Poppy Pomfrey, Colin Creevey, and Hannah Abbott. Because we have the advantage of reading the next two books, we know that it just wasn’t important to the series to show these particular characters in this film. Some have never been particularly important in terms of plot; some have played notable roles later on (as Katie Bell did in HBP,) but it can’t really be said that they’ve had great importance as characters. (The case of Cho Chang will be considered a bit later, since it really falls into the vicarious category.) A number of unimportant locations were cut, and all classes taught by recurring teachers were cut. A few scenes were cut, and several others mildly condensed. None of these changes made any difference to the film narrative.

Again, however, a scene involving information about Ginny—and Harry’s reaction to it-- was never shot, and it will be analyzed later on.

In GoF, other characters are cut who appeared in the book, including Bill and Charlie Weasley, Ludo Bagman, Narcissa Malfoy, Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange, Bertha Jorkins, Pansy Parkinson (aside from one long shot,) Sybill Trelawney, and so on and so forth. In fact, this is the film where the largest number of characters and scenes are cut to date. The entire Ludo Bagman and Bertha Jorkins subplots are cut, as are virtually any mention or appearance of house-elves, all classes taught by recurring characters, the opening scene with the Dursleys, any detailed explanation about Veelas, Moody putting Imperius on students in class, any mention of Bellatrix, Dumbledore’s detailed explanation of Priori Incantatem, and all the details of the Quidditch match. Because so many little subplots were lost, it’s important here, I think, to understand why it isn’t necessary to include what was cut. Some elements certainly did have to be cut if GoF was going to be released as a single film, but the choices were made deliberately. In the case of Neville/Ginny—which will be examined in detail—screen material was actually added that was not in the book.

Some subplots clearly just weren’t necessary-- Ludo Bagman, Bertha Jorkins, lots of details about the Quidditch World Cup. Some would have been very nice to have, but weren’t absolutely vital, so out they went. Narcissa Malfoy is certainly an important character later on the series, but it wouldn’t have added a great deal to introduce her character at this particular time. Cutting the normal opening scene with the Dursleys saved a lot of time, and it just wasn’t necessary to have it. Cutting house-elves meant that this aspect of Hermione’s characterization was lost, but the director and scriptwriter clearly decided that it was being reinforced enough in other ways. It might have added something to show Harry resisting Imperius in class, but again, I think that when push came to shove and some material absolutely had to go, the filmmakers decided that they were getting the point across well enough without including all of that extra screen time. The same is true with detailed explanations of Fleur being a Veela; she’s clearly a very alluring and attractive girl, and the male response to her is the same in any case. There’s just no need for a long explanation.

Once more, there are some major changes in the scenes between Harry and Ginny. The way they were rewritten does not necessarily save any screen time at all, and considering that Neville/Ginny material was actually added, it’s easy to see that all of these changes need to be analyzed in detail. Since the situation here is not nearly so straightforward, however, these will be dealt with in the Ginny section.

Obviously, we don’t yet have the opportunity for truly detailed information about OOtP. However, an advance screening was previewed quite some time before the film’s release, and we do have several reviews available from that. The details of their information are very consistent, and they come from both hard-core fans and at least one person “who has never read a Harry Potter book.” Of course, we’re undoubtedly missing quite a few subtleties here, since we can’t yet see the film for ourselves. The fact that none of the reviews have been posted by professional film reviewers also needs to be taken in consideration, and a final edit of the film clearly did not yet exist at that time. Yet it’s still possible to draw some conclusions about the similarities and differences between film and book. In order to do so, we will stick to the factual information available from the reviews as much as possible.

Simplification and condensation seem to have played at least as large a role in OotP as in any of the first four films. Since a great deal of source material had to be fit into a single film, this makes sense. The “young Marauder’s scene,” for example, was reportedly narrowed down to fit into a shorter time slot. While one reviewer described this as a “disappointment” and “such a letdown,” it does sound as if all the vital information in that scene was communicated. While it would have been fun to see a longer version (as evidenced by the fact that the same reviewer called it “one of my favorite chapters in the book,”) it really wasn’t necessary to the narrative. As another reviewer noted, “Harry’s teenage father is portrayed as being a total bully to young Snape.” This is the information that needed to be shown in this scene, and it was.

Fred and George’s exit scene has been described by some in the same terms (“the most disappointing scene in the entire movie,” for instance) and yet the same point is even more applicable to it. It just wasn’t necessary to show the swamp, the pinwheel fireworks, the brooms zooming up from the dungeon, etc. Screen time had to cut somewhere, and the extended version of this scene would not have added anything to the plot. The same thing was true of the entire O.W.L. test preparation and test-taking process, which got very little screen time. It wasn’t vital, either, to show the entire storyline with Neville’s parents, since Neville did mention the basic facts to Harry after one of the DA meetings. It wasn’t necessary to show all the times that Harry was in detention with Umbridge, and these were also not shown.

However, the scene involving the Harry/Cho kiss was apparently given a great deal of screen time. While we don’t know all the precise details of the way in which the H/C relationship was shown onscreen, it certainly doesn’t seem as if it was condensed, skipped over, or skimped on. This point will be taken up in further detail later on. There are also two other cases that merit more consideration, and those consist of the missing scenes involving Harry/Ginny, and the added scenes containing Harry/Luna interaction. They, too, will be discussed a little later in the essay.

Overall, there’s one quote from a reviewer that sums up much of the entire situation regarding the changes in OotP: “This movie actually followed the books better than the other ones did. There weren’t really any major differences. There were just left out scenes that fans of the books would have liked to have seen.” In short, nothing was cut that would have substantially changed the thrust of the narrative. Both producer David Heyman and scriptwriter Michael Goldenberg have said exactly the same thing in their recent interviews.


To be continued...

A/N: All right, y'all, here's the second part of three... it REALLY starts to get interesting here, I think. ;)


+++





After we’ve looked at the changes that were made for the sake of the voyeuristic eye and the visceral eye, we’re still left with the category of the vicarious eye. It really needs to be explained before we can move on to the few changes that cannot be put into any of these three boxes. When we look at what was changed in order to better and more clearly appeal to the vicarious eye, we’re really talking about the way that characters are written for film so that we, the audience, become emotionally invested in them to the greatest degree possible. This is a rather tricky category because it does contain a few changes that have seemed to some to be “non-canon.” If they actually do represent major departures from the books, then the argument that the few remaining changes must have been approved by J.K. Rowling is weakened to some degree. After all, if Warner made Hermione over into a Pink Power Ranger just because they felt like it, then there might not be any decent rhyme or reason to anything that was changed. However, we will see that the vicarious changes do not represent any real difference from the book characterizations. They have only changed in order to better translate print into the language of film.

First, let’s start with the non-controversial changes. For example, James Potter is not revealed to have been an Animagus in PoA, as was the case in the book. Instead, this is revealed in GoF.. This delayed revelation causes a greater and more dramatic impact on Harry, which causes us to have a greater emotional identification with him. Also, Harry apparently doesn’t get as many opportunities in OotP to get to know Sirius as he does in the book, since some Harry/Sirius scenes are cut. On film, however, it really isn’t necessary to keep them all. The emotional bond between Harry and Sirius is shown in the same way, but it can be done more effectively in fewer scenes because this is the kind of thing that film does best.

Cho Chang was cut entirely from PoA, and she certainly plays a role in the next two films. But since we know that she’s not going to be the final love interest, putting her in PoA as well would really have been overkill. It seems to have been a balancing act with Cho, and cutting her from PoA was part of the choices that were made to bring her character’s importance into just the right equilibrium.

Neville’s character has always been highlighted in the films, particularly in GoF. Apparently, this is more true than ever in OotP. Certainly, he has appeared prominently in promotional material. His role has also been changed subtly in previous films to make it more significant, such as in GoF, when he, rather than Dobby, gives Harry Gillyweed before the start of the second task. This isn’t really a departure from the books at all. On film, however, this places greater emphasis on Neville’s character, and to cause us as viewers to be more emotionally invested in him. This is an interesting issue, and will be further taken up in the Ginny Weasley section.

In PoA, the backstory of the Marauders is told much more clearly and in more detail in the book than onscreen. While some of this is undoubtedly for condensation reasons, I don’t feel that this reason is the whole story. It’s still hinted at in PoA, and that did take screen time. If the entire story is revealed in OotP, however—which does seem to be the case—then its emotional impact on Harry is greater. He learns it all at once, rather than piecemeal, and we will feel what he feels.

There is another issue operating in the vicarious realm, though, and it’s very important to understand its implications. Since the HP films are mainstream Hollywood productions, there are definitely times when this means that characterizations become simpler and more “black and white”. There have been chances that Warner is simply not willing to take with some of these characters, and an independent film company might very well have chosen differently. However, since we are talking about the Hollywood aesthetic, we need to know that it informs many of the choices that were made. It explains the changes that have seemed to some fans to be “non-canon,” and it reveals that they are really no such thing.

The most obvious of these issues, of course, is Hermione’s film characterization, which has received a certain amount of criticism from hardcore fans. Certainly, Hermione’s character has been steadily glamorized since the second film. She somehow seems to be prettier, better groomed, better dressed, and perhaps even more self-assured than in the books. At GoF’s Yule Ball, her appearance is not a startling change from the way she looks every day by her fourth year. Her pink dress, complicated hairdo, and earrings that were later sold in the Skymall catalog all seem made for Hollywood—and they are. This is the key to understanding how Hermione is portrayed onscreen, and why.

In canon, Hermione is an incredibly important character, but not in terms of any romantic relationship she has with Harry. This is just as true onscreen as it is on the page. The difference is that these films are mainstream Hollywood productions, and as such, they follow very specific rules about the ways in which characterizations are visualized. The way to show that a girl is important is to make her prettier, spunkier, “pinker,” and this is what happens to Hermione. It makes sense in terms of the convergence of print and film techniques used for getting across the same idea. However, this is why it has always been a little confusing to both audiences and professional reviewers.

We normally expect that a girl who has been built up onscreen as Hermione has been is being prepped for the role of the hero’s love interest; that’s part of how the vicarious eye sees things. But this is not what’s happening in the HP narrative. Hollywood frankly doesn’t know how to deal with a female character like this, and never has. How to show a major female character who is young, attractive, and important to the plot, but does not end up with the hero? The only way to do it was to show H/Hr interaction juxtaposed with a lot of R/Hr romantic foreshadowing. And that’s just what Warner did, although viewers can almost see studio executives scratching their heads in befuddlement. Given this conundrum, it was inevitable that this kind of confusion would occur over Hermione’s character. It certainly happened with the books as well, and it really can’t be said that it was illogical to theorize that Harry and Hermione were going to be a romantic couple at some point. Many clues were there that normally would have meant exactly that. In this case, however, they did not, and that was because of the choices that J.K. Rowling made.

Seen from this entire point of view, the subtle changes in Hermione’s characterization from book to screen make sense. None of it is a departure from print canon, but rather an emphasis of certain aspects of it. We know that Hermione can be very attractive if she takes the trouble to make herself so; in the films, she simply looks a lot closer to her “Yule Ball self” much more of the time. Onscreen in PoA, Hermione worries about her hair; although this line is not in the book, we do know that there are times when she has cared about her appearance. In the films, Hermione gets more of the lines, but in the books, she has already been established as the sort of character who likes to know everything and to provide information, so it’s not really much of a stretch. In PoA, Hermione punches Draco Malfoy, whereas in the book, she slaps him. This has seemed like much more of a departure to hardcore fans than it actually is, since onscreen, the more dramatic punch is more effective and carries greater dramatic weight. We feel the emotional truth of this scene more strongly, and the vicarious eye is satisfied. To us, this may feel like overkill. But Warner knows that the average viewer, while familiar with the books, is not a hardcore fan. And so on, and on. The main point, of course, is that J.K. Rowling herself has repeatedly stated that she is very satisfied with the film portrayal of Hermione.

This is one of the reasons, though, why the film portrayal of R/Hr is more than worth taking a very detailed look at as well. Whether or not all of the clues for R/Hr should have been obvious in the books, they definitely were very clear onscreen. In fact, we’ve seen R/Hr foreshadowing in a romantic sense for several films now. In many cases, material has been added that was never even on the page.

In PoA, a rather crucial change was made, and it’s often overlooked. Ron and Hermione do argue over Scabbers being supposedly eaten by Crookshanks, and their bickering is ongoing. However, in the book, Harry also is angry with her for this and several other reasons, and onscreen, he isn’t. Ron and Hermione’s interaction is thus made much more obvious, and in a way that reads as film foreshadowing. There are even clearer examples than this, however. When the Trio hears the axe falls after leaving Hagrid, Hermione suddenly begins crying and hugs Ron. When Harry tries to approach Buckbeak, Ron and Hermione reflexively grab each other’s hands, glance down, and look nervous. In addition, there is some suggestive conversation when the two are alone outside of the Shrieking Shack and Hermione asks Ron if he wants to “move a bit closer.”

The interaction between Ron and Hermione in GoF is even more obvious than in the third film. The scene after the Yule Ball is changed in ways that recast it into a Hollywood mold of romantic foreshadowing, and it’s a good example of the kind of thing that was done overall with R/Hr. We may believe that it’s rather OOC for Hermione to break down and cry uncontrollably on the steps after this scene, but for film, it makes more sense—if it’s meant as R/Hr foreshadowing. These observations do not constitute either criticism or praise of the R/Hr relationship as such. But it’s impossible to avoid the fact that on film, it is massively foreshadowed.

Once again, of course, we come back to the contrast between all of this and the onscreen interaction between Harry and Hermione. It has sometimes been read as a kind of weird foreshadowing for a relationship that is clearly not going to occur, but I believe this interpretation to be a serious misreading of what H/Hr actually is. These two characters interact as genuine friends who communicate their thoughts and feelings to each other, as in the added scene in GoF where Hermione tells Harry about her relationship with Viktor Krum. In fact, the screen portrayal of their interactions forms a remarkably faithful adaptation of their friendship in the books. It’s true that showing a relationship between a teenaged boy and girl onscreen without sexual undertones coming from the boy is rather unusual, but that’s precisely what it is in print, as well. When we see how much non-canon material is added to foreshadow the R/Hr relationship far more clearly onscreen than in print, the distinction becomes obvious.

Now, of course, we come to the most controversial part of this essay: the very few major changes from print to film that cannot be explained away by any of Boorstin’s three categories, or by any book-to-film necessity. Nearly all of these center around one character: Ginny Weasley. In this case, we actually have five films’ worth of evidence. Many, many scenes involving Ginny were eliminated or changed, even as others were sometimes added. As we will see, there is a very consistent pattern to the way in which this was done, and the purpose it served.

In SS, Ginny’s character is introduced. Since she is not yet attending Hogwarts, her role is not large, although it was not written out of the script, either. Yet the subtle ways that her role was changed in this film are important to look at, since the later films only continue and expand on what began here. In general, Ginny’s interest in and crush on Harry is not nearly as clear as it is in the book; her behavior at the train station is actually rather different. In the book, she runs after the train, “laughing and crying,” clearly quite emotional. In the movie, she says “Good luck,” and the way she does this is cool and collected when compared with the print scene. In fact, this is her only line in the film, so we do not see her detailed conversation with Molly Weasley about Harry. We really don’t know why these changes were made. It’s possible to argue that they saved time, but J.K. Rowling had fought tooth and nail in the first place to keep the first two books from being condensed into one movie. If the H/G content was important enough to keep in the film, it would have been done. (Conversely, however, if Ginny had been completely unimportant as a character, she would not have made it into the script at all.)

In CoS, we begin to see major differences in the scenes involving Harry and Ginny interaction, but not necessarily in the ones focusing only on Ginny. Virtually all of the foreshadowing clues showing that Ginny is being possessed by Tom Riddle were filmed, but left out of the final cut. It’s not hard to see why; they really didn’t add anything to the film and they did take up time. However, they were at least filmed in the first place, and so did make it into the script. Ginny’s discussion with Dumbledore where she was afraid she would be expelled is also missing, but it could be argued that the same thing was true of this scene: it didn’t add anything vital to the film, and it took up too much time.

In this way, these Ginny-only scenes were completely different from the missing book scenes involving Ginny and Harry. At the Burrow, Ginny sees Harry briefly and runs back upstairs. Ron mentions that she’s been talking about Harry all summer. The rest of the content, however, is cut. Harry does not ask Ginny if she's going to Hogwarts, Ron does not say anything more about her, and Ginny does not put her elbow in the butter dish. All we really get in the film besides this is Draco’s line, “Potter, you’ve got a girlfriend!” and Ginny’s answer, “Leave him alone.” We do get just enough clues to piece together that Ginny is interested in Harry, but we absolutely do not get the amount we saw on the page.

One more very interesting omission, however, is the scene where Harry notes that Ginny seems to be perfectly happy after her possession. We really don’t know why this was cut, but the possibility remains open that it wasn’t only in order to save time. For one thing, it’s about Harry’s reactions to Ginny, rather than only being about Ginny as a character. This is echoed by the way that even Tom Riddle’s lines in the CoS were changed, leaving out any reference to how Ginny had been afraid that Harry would never notice or like her. The important difference here is that several of the scenes that were only about Ginny and her importance as an individual were indeed in the script, were filmed, and were only cut because of time. The scenes showing her crush on Harry—and his reaction to her-- were clearly severely trimmed for some other reason, since those were never even shot in the first place.

In ]PoA, Ginny barely appears, which is completely faithful to the book. However, there is one missing scene involving her that is more than worth examining in some detail. In the book, she is present in the compartment during the Dementor scene. In the film, she is not. This means that Ginny’s reactions to Dementors is not shown. This is important because it’s a scene that seems as if it could have focused only on Ginny. On further analysis, however, it really couldn’t have, and this has a great deal to do with how the vicarious eye sees things. We will look at this point more closely a bit later.

In GoF, we see that the changes start to become truly dramatic. Onscreen, Ron does not offer Ginny as Harry’s date to the Yule Ball, as he does in the book. Ginny does not get upset because she already agreed to go with Neville, since she has no onscreen opportunity to do this. All those mentions in the book of Ginny going “scarlet” and looking “extremely miserable,” with “her head bowed,” fail to appear in the film. A scene that has been repeatedly trumpeted as “H/G foreshadowing” is simply gone. Neither does Harry specifically notice that Ginny is at the Yule Ball with Neville; unless the viewer freezes on that exact frame, it’s impossible to see it. We do not have a POV shot from Harry, so his reaction to seeing Neville and Ginny together is not being specifically pointed out to us at all. However, it’s important to see that in print, Harry has no reaction to learning that Ginny is going to the Yule Ball with Neville, either. The only difference is that he doesn’t find out in the same way. From Harry’s point of view, the emotional center of this scene is exactly the same. So cutting material in this way was exactly what caused the scene to work as it did in the book with less screen time. And because we can see what deleted scenes were included on the GoF DVD, we know that no Harry/Ginny scenes were ever shot at all. They do not exchange so much as one single word or glance in the entire film. She is in scenes with Harry where she looks at him; he does not look at her. She speaks when he is present, sometimes actually to him; he does not reply to her.

And it’s vital to understand that the “simple condensation” argument simply does not work if applied to the omitted Harry-Ginny interaction in GoF. The biggest reason is that another scene is actually added after the Yule Ball, and was kept in the final cut of the film. Neville returns to his room and happily rhapsodizes about dancing with Ginny Weasley “all night long.” This scene was not in the book, and it certainly took up extra screen time in a film where every second was at more of a premium than ever before. Anything that could possibly be cut, was cut—and then this scene was added. (For that matter, Ginny’s comments about robes are included in the film, but not in the book. Once again, they get no response from Harry, although he’s in the scene.)

The way in which H/G interaction was portrayed in GoF is especially strange when we take one more factor into consideration: this film had not yet been finished when HBP was released. In current Hollywood films, the digital editing process continues literally until the final release of the film. It would have been extremely easy to re-edit scenes so the entire emotional thrust of H/G was brought in line with the supposedly “genuine H/G relationship” in HBP. In fact, it would have been necessary—if this were the true meaning of HBP’s H/G.

And now, of course, we come to the curious case of OotP. Several scenes in the book had been broadcast far and wide as “foreshadowing H/G.” Also, they supposedly constituted final proof that H/G in HBP had to be genuine and lasting—after all, it had been “foreshadowed” by the meaningful emotional content of these exact scenes. These scenes were the foundation of lasting H/G, the centerpiece, the linchpin on which the emotional heart of the relationship supposedly turned.

And then they were all completely cut from the film.

Specifically, two major “H/G foreshadowing scenes” were definitely cut, and almost certainly a third. The first involved Ginny bringing Harry chocolate eggs in the library, and trying to get him to talk about Sirius. The second was the infamous “Lucky You” scene at Grimmauld Place, where Ginny tried to talk to Harry about her possession by Voldemort. (The third is the final scene on the train, where Ginny revealed that she had broken up with Michael Corner and had now “chosen Dean Thomas.”) There is every reason in the world to believe that these scenes were not simply cut in order to save time.

As many reviewers have noted, OotP’s Harry “is a much darker Harry than we’re used to seeing.” He becomes more and more withdrawn from his friends, and is plagued by constant nightmares about Voldemort. This is really only a faithful onscreen portrayal of what was in the fifth book, but there is a fascinating point here specifically relating to the lost Harry/Ginny scenes. The filmmakers have chosen to show all of Harry’s emotional turmoil, and to vicariously draw us into his anguish. Because of this, the deleted Harry/Ginny scenes could have so easily been used to show Ginny comforting Harry, or alternately, challenging Harry to pull himself out of his misery, and showing that she understood him as no-one else did or could. Indeed, this is precisely what many pro-H/G arguments claimed was the real meaning of these scenes in the book. This was a huge reason why they supposedly “foreshadowed meaningful H/G.” Untold amounts of bandwidth were spent on making exactly that argument.

However, the “chocolate in the library” and “Lucky You” scenes never actually did any such thing. Instead, they very pointedly showed Harry ignoring, brushing aside, and at most casually and momentarily acknowledging Ginny’s attempts to reach out to him. When read for the content they actually contained, these scenes were painful. If they had been shown onscreen exactly as they were in the book, they would have been much more painful to watch.

There is an extremely literal and unambiguous quality to emotional scenes in film, which is one of film’s great strengths. In this case, though, it would have been more of a weakness, just as it would have been in the missing Ginny-Dementor scene in PoA. As Boorstin writes, “We’re proud to feel what stars feel.” Dan Radcliffe works in the role of Harry Potter because he pulls us into Harry’s emotional center, and he makes us want to feel what Harry feels. However, as Boorstin also notes, “Our vicarious eye scans our environment for emotional beacons. When we find one, we lock in.” We’re watching to see how Harry reacts to the behavior of other characters; this is one of the main ways we define him as a good and admirable person. If we saw Harry’s lack of reaction to Ginny’s temporary breakdown over the Dementors, his casual brushing off of Ginny’s eager attempts in the library, and his callous ignorance about her possession by Voldemort, it would all come across completely differently from the way it does on the page. Frankly, he would look like a jerk. There isn’t room for that kind of ambiguity in a mainstream Hollywood film.

Even more importantly, we, the audience, might have become distracted in a different way. We might have been struck by just how much of an uncaring jerk Harry seemed to be, but we would have seen Ginny as the underdog and rooted for her to eventually “get her man,” because we have been conditioned by the structure of Hollywood scenes that foreshadow romance to expect exactly that from scenes just like this.

This is actually even more true of the third missing scene at the end of the book. Hermione says that Cho is dating someone new, Ginny reveals that she has broken up with Michael Corner, and Ron makes it clear that he’d love to see her dating Harry. It has certainly been claimed that this was clear “H/G foreshadowing.” Because of the way that the language of mainstream film works, there is no way on earth to shoot this scene without making it look like foreshadowing for H/G; audience expectations simply won’t permit it. And it was almost certainly not included in the film. No reviewer has mentioned seeing it.

One very easy way to shoot all three scenes, of course, would have been to treat them like scenes that actually did foreshadow meaningful, lasting, romantic H/G. It would have been extremely simple to write, shoot, and edit them this way. But this choice was not made. Actually, no matter how these scenes were shot, they were all going to seem to foreshadow this particular kind of H/G. This was not because they ever actually did so, but because viewers expect these kinds of scenes to carry certain emotional meanings when seen in mainstream films. It was probably impossible to include any of these scenes and not imply “genuine H/G” foreshadowing. So they were not included at all. As David Yates stated in a recent interview, “The thing that was so obvious and right to every single one of us on the creative team was what we felt we wanted to keep in and what we wanted to move out.” And getting rid of every single scene that had been so ballyhooed as “H/G foreshadowing” simply was one of the plot choices that seemed “so obvious and right to every single one of us… to move out.”

But there is a clear onscreen corollary to this omission. As one reviewer stated, “Bonnie Wright, though hardly in it, did a great job. Ginny is a powerful witch and Bonnie knows how to play a powerful character.” Another reviewer remembered only a “redhead girl smashing a library full of crystal balls.” Although he seemed to be able to recall the name of every other character he saw, he did indeed remember something about her as an individual. This is fascinating because it actually sums up the entire situation with Ginny’s portrayal onscreen. So many of her scenes have been cut since SS, and yet this absolutely has not been done randomly, and she has appeared as a character in every film. Virtually all of the scenes that have disappeared in translation from book to film throughout the last five films have been the ones that showed her interacting with Harry. Yet going by all the information we have from the OOtP preview, Ginny does appear onscreen, and it seems to be either in conjunction with her brothers or hurling hexes on her own.

The door has been very much left open to show her as a powerful character in her own right in the final book. But the films have not left this option open for Ginny as Harry’s final love interest. In short, we can literally see for ourselves that powerful Ginny does not equal H/G foreshadowing, and it’s an extremely important point to make. H/G foreshadowing would equal H/G foreshadowing. It does not exist onscreen. Once again, the scenes involving Harry/Ginny interaction were the exact ones that got cut from OotP, and in that sense, it only followed the lead of the four films that came before it.

And it’s not as if romantic foreshadowing was simply eliminated from this film altogether. A number of reviewers noted the same phenomenon, and one summed it up as “the only relationship foreshadowing is Ron/Hermione.” This reviewer goes on to describe “subtle hints” in dialog, shared glances, attitudes, and behaviors. And we already know that R/Hr was clearly foreshadowed onscreen in both PoA and GoF, often adding extra material that was not in the books in order to do so. This is exactly the kind of foreshadowing that film handles so well, because it relies on the visual language of editing, and it really does not take extra time. It would have been incredibly easy to do the same thing with H/G, the supposed final, true, and genuine romance for the hero. However, this has apparently not been done.

The most interesting part of all is that there reportedly is one “H/G” scene, and only one. (Of course, this doesn’t include Harry addressing a word or two to Ginny, and vice versa, which we will probably see since she’s in the DA.) Furthermore, this scene was added to the film, and was never in the book at all, so it’s worth at least examining what we do know about it.

There are no specific details as of yet. However, it supposedly consists of Ginny looking sadly at Harry blithely going off with Cho. There is every reason to refrain from twisting this into an “H/G foreshadowing scene” similar to those that we know do exist for R/Hr. First of all, there’s no way to know the actual content of this scene, and it’s significant that the reviewers who weren’t interested in shipping one way or the other simply do not mention it at all. If it exists as reported, however, this is anything but positive foreshadowing for H/G. There is no reason to believe that the existence of the relationship in HBP will be cut from the sixth film, whatever its filmed nature may actually be. (And the final nature of H/G will, of course, be known by then.) So it makes sense that there should be some kind of “H/G foreshadowing.” In fact, it would make no sense at all if there were not, which is what at first seems so mystifying about the omission of all meaningful H/G interaction from OotP.

If this scene exists, it is apparently all the “foreshadowing” that we have, so its content is more important than ever. Showing miserably one-sided interest from Ginny while Harry simply ignores her is probably the most negative type of foreshadowing that could be done. And it is significant that this is the “non-canon” scene that seems to have been added, while all other scenes that actually showed real Harry/Ginny interaction were cut.

Finally, we get to the reason why it matters that H/G isn’t foreshadowed in OotP, and hasn’t been in any other HP film.

+++

To be continued...

A/N: All right, y'all, here's the last piece of the essay...

+++


Finally, we get to the reason why it matters that H/G—meaningful, mutual, lasting H/G, that is-- isn’t foreshadowed in OotP, and hasn’t been in any other HP film. As Boorstin states, “the director and the producer may get caught up in their art, but studio executives are implacably committed to their audience.” If viewers are going to believe that the H/G relationship is meant to be genuine, lasting, real, and the final pairing, then it needs to be foreshadowed that way onscreen and in publicity materials. In particular, actual interaction between Harry and Ginny needs to be shown, which it has not been.

This has nothing to do with art, and everything to do with commerce. The audience will feel both cheated and confused by H/G that comes out of nowhere in the sixth film. Audiences that feel this way don’t spend as much money on tickets, DVD’s, merchandising, action figures, Lego re-creations of Hogwarts, admission to theme parks, fiberglass copies of Harry’s wand, and cake pans shaped like Dobby’s head. This is a situation that studios do everything they can to avoid. At this point, however, H/G has nowhere to come from. Filmmakers can’t pull a believable rabbit out of the hat when there is no rabbit in the hat.

From this point of view, the entire controversy and confusion over the Harry-Hermione content onscreen truly makes no sense at all. Warner could have easily and simply avoided any hint of it by doing only one thing: clearly foreshadowing Ginny as the love interest by showing Harry’s choices to interact with her, particularly in GoF and OotP. There is no logical reason for this not to have happened if Ginny is the true final love interest, and if all of the supposed “literary foreshadowing” actually means what pro-H/G arguments have constructed it to mean.

So there is one way, and only one, in which the massive viewing audience for the HP films will not feel cheated and confused by the H/G the films have set up. This will be if H/G is not meant to be genuine, lasting, real, or the final pairing. If the H/G we saw in HBP was none of these things, and the H/G in the sixth film will be none of these things, then everything about the way that H/G has been shown onscreen to date makes perfect sense.

The really remarkable thing is that there has been a recent steady procession of “information leaks” that supposedly do show that there’s somehow H/G foreshadowing material in OOtP after all. These include the calendar picture that showed Harry and Ginny together, the first “interview” with Michael Goldenberg, the rumor that Ginny’s Patronus was a Phoenix, and the supposed Ginny/Cho “poster.” However, each and every one of these “leaks” was soon revealed as a hoax. The two pictures were fan manipulations. Ginny’s Patronus, as we now know, is a horse. Both Warner and Michael Goldenberg debunked the faked “interview” within days. (As a bonus, the supposed Scholastic employee who leaked information about H/G in DH was outed as a fake who had made up the entire thing for a sociology project.)

In addition, Yates’s comment in a recent interview at Ain’tItCool about the “Ginny’s miserable look at Harry” scene clearly only confirms just how one-sided it is, and that it is coming only from Ginny’s side. This has been known for quite some time; the only question was whether it could be said with 100% accuracy that this scene actually was in the film. Absolutely nothing new has been added to the information we already had about its content. For some strange reason, however, the actual words of the director on the subject are being constantly misquoted to say that this is a mutual look between Harry and Ginny. Not so.

quote:
________________________________________

Quint: Another thing that I really loved about the movie, especially now that you’re coming back for the Sixth, that you laid so much bridgework. Just little things, like Ginny’s looks to Harry and Ron and Hermione’s relationship starting to show the first signs of growing to something more than friends… Was that intentional on your part to make sure all that was included?

David Yates: Yeah, no. Some of them weren’t really scripted. You’re on the floor and you suddenly go, “Oh ****! As they’re all walking out, wouldn’t it be really really cool if…” you know that Ginny moment? I was just there and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great?” You always want to keep that tension alive.
________________________________________


Quint called this "Ginny's looks to Harry" and Yates, the director, remember, called it "that Ginny moment." That's what it is-- a Ginny moment. It's not an H/G moment. All of the “H/G” moments (and in fact all Harry-Ginny interaction as far as we know) have been cut from both the script and the film. But since H/G will be shown in the sixth film exactly as it was on the page, what matters is what kind of H/G, and what kind of relationship, it actually is.

David Yates knows what's coming in the sixth film, and that's what he foreshadowed in the fifth film. That’s what is, in his words, “really, really cool,” and that’s what he shows us. If he had wanted to foreshadow meaningful, lasting, final-pairing H/G, then H/G interaction, SHARED looks, conversation, emotional connection, the chocolate in the library scene, the Lucky You scene, and the "I've chosen Dean Thomas" train scene would have been included. Since the film needed to cut a lot of material in order to fit a running time, maybe only some of them could have been included. Perhaps two could have been selected. In the last extremity, it might have been necessary to settle for one. But that’s not what happened. Every single scene from that list was cut. What clinches the whole thing is that Yates specifically tells Quint about the exact scenes that were shot and then not used, and that will be included on the DVD. None of them were Harry-Ginny scenes in any way, shape, or form. So it wasn’t even a question of Harry-Ginny scenes being shot and then discarded for time; they were never included in the script in the first place.

The only real reason for this extra-canon scene to be here when so many canon H/G scenes were cut has got to be that it accomplishes something important in less time than would have needed for those scenes. But the problem with trying to make this into an "H/G foreshadowing" scene is that it has no interaction, and the cut scenes did. The only logical conclusion is that the lack of interaction, of response from Harry, is exactly what David Yates wanted to show us.

The latest piece of silliness along these lines is the story that a “film extra” somehow miraculously recalled pages of the script, word-for-word (yet could never produce a scanned copy of it.) In this script re-creation, Harry and Ginny hold hands while fleeing from the DoM at the end of OotP. (Apparently, the creator of this story has seen Titanic one too many times.) Sadly, this footage didn’t make it into the preview of the film, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that it was never actually written or shot and existed nowhere except in the hoaxer’s head. However, the sheer amount of time and energy put into all of this nonsense does show that there’s a tacit understanding of just how important the portrayal of H/G in the films really is.

Finally, of course, we come to the OotP portrayal of Luna Lovegood, which is very much tied up with the portrayal (or rather lack thereof) of H/G. She does seem to be emphasized in OotP. She is mentioned by name and said to be a high point of the film by virtually all of the reviewers, including several who freely admit that they are not book fans and couldn’t care less about shipping. While her role has apparently not actually changed in any substantial way from the book, emphasis has been shifted so that she seems more important, more vital, and above all more connected with Harry than she did on the page.

While we can’t know the subtleties of what we’ll see with Evanna Lynch’s onscreen Luna, we do know that she is apparently very prominently featured in this film. Considering how much had to be cut from it in order to release it as a single film, it does seem that there had to be some kind of reason for this choice. Indeed, as others have noted, all of the publicity about the dramatic audition process and “search for the perfect Luna” seemed on its own to hint at this character’s importance. (Nothing like this was done in order to find “the perfect Fleur,” for example, or “the perfect Bellatrix.”) We know that certain lines have been left in that seem rather pointless, such as Harry’s statement to Cho about nargles in the mistletoe, although we don’t know if this means that Luna’s scene with Harry just before the H/C kiss remains in the film or not. What we do know, however, is that two major scenes involving Harry-Luna interaction have been changed from what they were in the book, and that in both cases, this caused extra screen time to be added.

In OotP, Harry does not learn about thestrals from Hagrid, as he did in the book. Instead, he is told by Luna as they walk together in the woods. We don’t know why Luna tells Harry this information onscreen; Hagrid has certainly imparted information to Harry in films before. And from what reviewers have said about the preview of the film, there seems to be nobody else around during this walk. It has become a Harry/Luna moment, which is decidedly was not in the book.

The second scene, of course, is the one that takes place between Harry and Luna very near the end of OotP. Harry feels some kind of emotion towards Luna when she tells him that other students have stolen her things, and they talk about his grief over Sirius’s recent death, Luna relating it to the death of her mother. We don’t know the exact emotional tone of this scene on film, and we won’t know until we see it for ourselves. However, we do know that Luna holds Harry’s hand at some point. The film frame that showed this was leaked quite some time ago, and it’s significant that many claims were made that it had to be some kind of Photoshop hoax. As I argued at the time from past professional experience, the level of talent needed to fake this particular kind of imagery ranges far beyond a proficient use of Photoshop, and indeed beyond almost any home computer system. Anyone with this ability is highly unlikely to put in that kind of time, effort, and computing power into this sort of project. As we all later learned, of course, the film still was absolutely genuine. This scene exists in OotP. It was kept in when every unnecessary plot element had to be cut for time, and it was clearly expanded beyond the content on the page.

While Luna’s portrayal in the film and her greatly expanded presence in Warner publicity materials have certainly pleased H/L shippers, it’s important to remember that this information does not, in and of itself, prove that Harry and Luna will end the series as a romantic couple. In strict truth, Luna’s film role works a little better as evidence bolstering arguments against H/G than for H/L. It simply makes no sense to cut virtually every shred of interaction between the hero and a female character and then suddenly spring her on the audience as the love interest in the sixth film of the series, if her role in that capacity is meant to be seen as anything genuine. But it’s infinitely worse to go one step further and also show the hero bonding with a new female character, while ignoring the first one. If we’re applying the strictest possible standards of logic, however, it still hasn’t been proven that this means that the hero is 100% guaranteed to end up with the second character, either. What it really means is that the chances of the hero ending in a romantic relationship with the first character in any permanent way have become infinitesimal.

A good example of how this technique seems to have been used in OotP is its treatment of Harry/Cho. We certainly know by now that H/C isn’t going to be the final pairing. The filmmakers would have been justified in treating that relationship very dismissively and lightly, or perhaps even cutting it altogether, simply from that point of view. But that apparently isn’t what has happened at all. The Harry/Cho kiss is described as “an intense make-out session” by one reviewer, and is mentioned as being very long and detailed by several others. The relationship is given a pretty fair amount of screen time, at least as much as it had in the book, and proportionately even more (since so many other plotlines were cut, such as “Weasley is our King” and Quidditch.) Its ending now carries more obvious emotional weight than it did in the book, since Cho is now the unwilling betrayer of the DA to Umbridge through the use of Veritaserum. The drama and emotions surrounding Harry/Cho have been made more obvious onscreen, not less so.

We really don’t know why these choices were made, but their final effect is to show that the filmmakers aren’t exactly afraid of showing Harry’s emotional involvement in relationships. And yet the choice was made to show absolutely no true interaction of any kind between him and Ginny, the supposed “final love interest.” These are two choices that simply would not go together in that case. And has already been pointed out, the one-sided miserable look from Ginny to Harry and Cho is even more fatal to that point of view. This is all especially important because one point has been emphasized over and over again in the books: that Harry’s power to defeat Voldemort depends on his “power to love.” If we see him emotionally involved in a relationship that has been clearly foreshadowed in the previous film—which is the case with onscreen Harry/Cho—then we see that he does have that power. But the filmmakers still made the choice to cut virtually all Harry-Ginny interaction to date, even as they punched up a romantic relationship that crashes and burns in the fifth film, and showed Harry interacting a great deal with yet another female character besides Hermione.

All of this having been said, the preponderance of evidence right now, if taken simply from the films, does point to the idea that if Harry has a final pairing, it will be with Luna. It’s true that there is a precedent for the extremely unusual step of showing a female character as very important without building her up to be the hero’s love interest, and that’s the treatment of Hermione’s character. However, there is one crucial difference between onscreen Harry/Hermione and onscreen Harry/Luna. Hermione has had her own romantic foreshadowing with another character for several films now, and H/R has been very clearly and pointedly shown onscreen. Luna has not been treated in the same way at all. She isn’t linked with any male character besides Harry. (In fact, as we know, J.K. Rowling went out of her way to specifically sink Neville/Luna.)

In the end, the reader of this essay must decide for herself or himself how all of this evidence fits together. My opinion has not exactly been excised from this writing, but then again, I’m not getting paid to do that. When I do get paid for non-fiction and essay writing, my personal opinions may not have any proper place at all. If not, then they’re fair game. However, I have also tried not to bash the reader over the head with my own conclusions, and above all, I have tried to use strict logic in all of my arguments. (It may surprise readers to know, for example, that as a matter of personal preference, I do not ship Harry with anyone at all. I’m Lone Hero all the way! However, this essay isn’t about personal preference, but about the places where logical analysis of the films lead us.) In addition, I have applied the same rules used by FictionAlley Park, even though there is no requirement here to do so: I may heap scorn upon illogical arguments, but not upon the shippers who make them. Ultimately, we are really only talking about the fate of fictional characters in a book, and none of it is worth insulting other human beings who hold different opinions. Every day in every way, however, we can choose to create arguments that are either logical, or illogical. What we choose for the little things, we will also choose for the great. And as Dumbledore might say… choose your arguments wisely.

+++

Addendum:

Since this essay is being posted on a D/G site, I’ve added some D/G film material just for FIA readers. (Now, don’t y’all feel special?) We know that we’re sailing a fanon ship, and few of us really expect D/G to become a pairing in DH. Yet Creamtea has made some fascinating arguments that canon D/G does indeed exist as a one-sided obsession from Draco. I firmly believe that material from all five HP films foreshadows plot developments and character relationships at the very end of the series. So basically, the question is this: do the films support this “canon D/G” point of view at all? The truly interesting thing is that when film material is thoroughly analyzed, it actually might do just this. However, all readers should be warned that this section should be read just for fun. While the foundation of these ideas is built on logic, it branches off into speculation rather soon.

To be more precise, CoS can be seen as supporting this particular view of canon D/G, which mirrors the fact that this is the only book that has been filmed to date that can be said to contain material that does this. The filmed changes in D/G interactions are more than worth examining, since what was kept in may very well be just as significant as what was left out.

As we can see in the film, Ginny’s singing Valentine to Harry was omitted. What this means is that we also lost Draco’s spiteful response to Ginny (“I don’t think Potter liked your Valentine much.”) There are a number of reasons why this might have been cut. It certainly saved time to get rid of this scene. Yet it’s interesting to speculate on how differently the emotional arc of the film might have read if this one scene had been kept in. It served the vicarious purpose of keeping Harry from looking like a jerk for ignoring Ginny, which he otherwise would have done. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this filmed scene would indeed have read very clearly as Draco being unwillingly interested in Ginny, because that’s how the vicarious eye reads scenes like that on film. By omitting it, the viewing audience doesn’t see that at all.

Or do they?

The Draco/Harry/Ginny scene at Flourish and Blott’s was certainly retained onscreen, and it has some very interesting content when analyzed from an editor’s point of view. One of the main ways we understand things both visually and emotionally when we see them onscreen is through eyetrace. In other words, we know what to look at by seeing what the characters look at, and we generally know why it’s important to them. Sometimes the way this is done is extremely obvious, as in a point-of-view shot. We see Harry’s eyes move so that he is looking at something offscreen, for example. The next cut shows us Hermione, or Ron, or Hagrid, or Dumbledore. We now know who and what he was looking at, so we know this person is important to him at that moment, for whatever reason. If Hermione/Ron/Hagrid/the giant squid/whoever then says something, we that it’s important to hear what they say, and that since Harry was paying attention, it, or they, or both, are important to him as well. This relationship between two shots is completely created in the editing room (as I know very well!) So this is an editing technique that shapes our emotional understanding of characters’ relationships, often in a very subtle way.

We see Harry unhappily standing next to Gilderoy Lockhart at the book signing. But the very next thing we see is that the camera pans up. We don’t yet know why, but we quickly figure out that this doesn’t make a lot of sense unless this is a POV shot as seen by some other character. We then see a reverse of Draco Malfoy standing on a balcony, watching the scene.

The first really significant thing is that a very deliberate choice was made to temporarily switch to Draco’s point of view of this scene, rather than Harry’s. This choice is virtually never made in any of these films, since we’re seeing the story through Harry’s eyes. Whatever we see is almost always what Harry is seeing. (In fact, in the opening scene of GoF, Harry’s POV dominance was made far more obvious onscreen than it was in the book. Everything we see was clearly framed as Harry’s vision, rather than as a separate narrative.) We certainly switch to other characters’ views of Harry when they look at him, because that’s been part of the visual language of film since the days of D.W. Griffith. But what the films don’t do is to change to the POV of another character when this character is not interacting with Harry or being watched by Harry—except for this scene.

It would have been extremely easy to show only Harry’s POV of Draco coming up to him and starting the sneering comments, and this would have been by far the most obvious and natural choice. It would have matched the way that POV’s were shot throughout the rest of this film series. In the Borgin and Burkes scene, for example, we see Lucius and Draco Malfoy through Harry’s eyes, since he is watching them. No other character gets a matching scene where we see his or her POV of Harry. Yet that choice was made here, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this aberration must have happened for some kind of meaningful reason. Even if the Flourish and Blotts scene can be put under this category, however, there’s one huge issue left to deal with.

Gilderoy Lockhart happily tells his audience that Harry had no idea he'd be leaving Flourish and Blotts with Lockhart's entire collected works. Next, we cut to Hermione applauding rapturously, then to Ron, looking rather disgusted. But then the edits stop, and look at where the camera goes next. It becomes a POV pan, and it very clearly "sees" Ginny. The very next thing that we see is Draco in the balcony, watching... what?

If we follow where Draco’s eyetrace actually leads in this scene, we can see what and who he’s actually watching. The most obvious choice would seem to be Harry. But that isn’t where his eyetrace leads at all. Instead, Draco is looking at Ginny, who is standing in the audience across from Harry. Draco watches Ginny, and Ginny watches Harry. If we follow all the characters’ eyetraces, those are the only places they can possibly be going. Draco’s eyetrace is especially obvious because she is the last thing the camera sees before showing us that Draco is unobserved, unseen by any other character, and watching her.

Draco certainly looks at Harry when he’s talking to him a few seconds later (“Potter, you’ve got yourself a girlfriend!”), but again, his eyetrace shifts very quickly back to Ginny. Hers goes to Draco as well when she replies (“Leave him alone!”) and then shifts away. But the most fascinating part of all is that Draco’s eyetrace never really moves again. Lucius Malfoy joins the scene and begins his altercation with Arthur Weasley, insults are traded, things happen, there’s a lot of dialog, Harry certainly speaks again, and so on, and so forth. It’s quite a long scene, but Draco never really stops looking at Ginny. He keeps his eyetrace on her even when other people are speaking, right up until the very end of the scene, when his father takes him away.

This scene really constitutes Draco’s filmed interaction with Ginny to date, but then, there would have been no real opportunity to have more unless non-canon material was added. This choice obviously wasn’t made, and yet the interesting thing is that the filmed D/G situation is very similar to the way in which Ginny’s crush on Harry has always been treated onscreen in the HP films. Just enough material has been retained so that perceptive viewers know her obsessive interest in him does exist—but no more. Yet there is no reason to believe that their HBP relationship will not be shown in the sixth film, whatever its actual nature may turn out to be. For all we know, filmed D/G may have certain parallels to this.

We don’t yet know if Ginny’s Bat-Bogey hex of Draco in OotP was retained, and it almost certainly wasn’t filmed, since it didn’t happen from Harry’s POV in the book at all. It will be interesting to see if it gets mentioned, however. It’s also fascinating to speculate on whether Draco’s reaction to news about Ginny in the train compartment in HBP will be retained. By the time this sixth film is actually shot, of course, the final pairings and final storyline of the series will be known. If one-sided interest from Draco to Ginny really does exist in canon, then my guess is that it will be foreshadowed onscreen in HBP.

As Creamtea has argued, this kind of canon D/G really might exist, and the idea could be bolstered by the fact that we see this kind of content onscreen. Even if this is the case, of course, it’s highly unlikely to constitute romantic D/G in any successful sense in DH. But what could be a better setup for tortured, angsty, miserable D/G after the end of the series? Just think of the fanfic we could all get out of that! 


P.S.: BTW, a word to the wise, which is sufficient.... if y'all leave an "anonymous" review, your IP address is logged and viewable, which is a fact of which everyone may not be aware. On the web, there is no real anonymity. Flames will be used to roast marshmallows.

P.P.S. 7/11/07: Quick, quick addendum before I have to go and paint my house... I just saw the film, so if y'all don't want to read a couple of spoilers, it might be a good plan to turn back now. I was... ahem... VERY happy with it. How could I not be? Everything I talked about in this essay was in that film, and even more. Harry said exactly two words to Ginny in the entire movie: "Fantastic, Ginny." This was after seeing her Reducto curse. And he was only speaking the truth; it was pretty impressive. Ginny truly is being set up as a powerful character in her own right, not as some appendage of Harry.

There are even MORE scenes of Ginny looking sadly at Harry than we knew from the early reviews. In each and every case, he does not notice her. He does not make eye contact with her. He does not acknowledge her in any way at all, and this is only made more obvious by the fact that she is in these scenes. The first time she does it, in fact, she has just directly addressed him, and he's simply ignored her. Her crush is certainly set up, but we already know that Ginny has a crush on Harry at this point. We know that they dated in HBP. None of this is a mystery, nor a matter of debate. The question is what happens after the part that we currently know about. Everything about the specific manner in which H/G interaction is depicted onscreen points only one way-- and it isn't to lasting, genuine H/G at the end of this series. As for the H/L, well, I really DO have to go paint that house... so I'll let y'all analyze that if you care to. ;)

However, Draco's line about Neville getting caught because he was trying to help Ginny was left in, which certainly was interesting. Whether it was significant or not, only time will tell... ten more days, to be exact. ;)

+++

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED



Boorstin, Jon. The Hollywood Eye. Perennial, New York, New York: 1990.

Boorstin, Jon. Making Movies Work: Thinking Like a Filmmaker. Silman-James Press, New York, New York: 1995.

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#article:9691

“False Report Regarding OotP Scriptwriter Michael Goldenberg.” Posted April 10, 2007 at http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#article:9689
“First Review of Order of the Phoenix, from Chicago Screening.” Melissa Anelli - March 4, 2007, 11:08 pm. http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/?articleID=9592
http://www.harrypotterfanzone.com/?ID=ootp-review

http://scribbulus.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/exclusive-brand-new-ootp-film-review/

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/31863

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_book_and_film_versions_of_Harry_Potter_and_the_Philosopher%27s_Stone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_book_and_film_versions_of_Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_book_and_film_versions_of_Harry_Potter_and_the_Prisoner_of_Azkaban

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_book_and_film_versions_of_Harry_Potter_and_the_Goblet_of_Fire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_book_and_film_versions_of_Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix



“Harry the Fifth: David Yates Makes $200 Million Debut With Potter’s Phoenix.” By Harry Haun. http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/features/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003600960&imw=Y

“Heyman Talks Potter V Cuts.” Patrick Lee, posted April 11 at http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=41032

“Introducing Michael Goldenberg: The OotP_ Scribe on the Harry Potter films, franchise, and fandom.” Posted April 10, 2007. http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#article:9691. Note: This was the genuine interview.
+++

Notes
Since the faked interview was pulled very quickly, everyone may not have seen it. So here it is, for your reading pleasure. Enjoy… but remember, it’s made up from beginning to end!


New OOTP details from Michael Goldenberg
MuggleCast listener Matt e-mailed us the other day with some interesting news. He is currently an undergraduate student majoring in Writing For Screen and Television in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and was recently treated to special guest lecturer Michael Goldenberg, who is the screenplay writer for Order of the Phoenix.

Matt sat down with Goldenberg for an hour to talk about writing the fifth film, and some very interesting details were revealed. Here's a summary of what was said:

- He and J.K. ROWLING have never officially met beyond emailing each other during the first month he spent outlining the screenplay.

- He will not be involved in any way with the last two films.

- He feels that in terms of plot elements, characters, locations, and dialogue, OOTP will be the most lenient in keeping true to the source material; he reasons that because the book was so dense, it was amazingly difficult to try and find the structure of a 2-and-a-half hour movie without having to combine character roles and places in order to maintain a sense of narrative drive.

- His favorite HP book is Sorcerer's Stone.

- He personally nicknamed the third draft of the screenplay "Harry Scissorhands" because he went through the 168 pages and excised any scene that did not directly involve Harry and/or Voldemort.

- The last updated shooting draft ended on page 139.

- He candidly predicted that this would probably be the least favorite of the films because most of the fun, non-Harry material was left out.

- J.K. ROWLING was not happy with some of the omissions that were made that may "come back to haunt the next film adaptations."

- He revealed that Rowling, in an email, seriously suggested that after she finished Book 7 she should probably take reign as co-screenwriter and/or become a serious player in the screenwriting process.

- He mentioned that in late 2004 he took the liberty to write a new scene between Harry and Snape that eerily predicted events in both Half-Blood Prince and, according to Rowling's notes, Book 7; so much so that he felt it be best to leave it out of the final shooting script.

- Overall, Mr. Goldenberg came off as a sweet and humble person who genuinely enjoyed his partaking in Potter Mania.

Thanks again to Matt for providing us with these details!