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!
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!
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