A/N: Well, here's Part 2, y'all. This is the part that (I think) caused all Teh Controversy of Doom, complete with threats, although that was clearly based on some weird misunderstanding of what was actually going to be IN the essay. :P Anyway, read it and see what you think!
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What really helps us to see the answer is to look at the roles his partners either do play or might play in the hero’s journey narrative, and that’s what I’m going to do. What we’re basically doing is looking at four relationships in terms of the meeting with the goddess/other half, or the woman as temptress, and how this relates specifically in this HJ’s narrative to both love and knowledge. In fact, the four girls all have divine/goddesses’s names, as others have pointed out previously. Cho relates to Chomolungma, the Tibetan mother goddess of the world, and to the Chinese goddess Chang O. Luna is a Roman lunar goddess. Ginny’s real name, Ginevra, is a variant of Guinevere, who represents the Celtic triple goddess of maiden, mother, and death-crone. Hermione is the Roman messenger-god Hermes, the traveler between worlds.
.
Harry/Cho.
This relationship is not analyzed much anymore, and it’s easy to see why. J.K. Rowling has definitely sunk this ship. We know that Harry and Cho’s relationship is completely over, and that, in her words, “they were never going to be happy together.” However, his romantic interest in her wasn’t a brief fling. It lasted for three years, they did, in fact, have a relationship in OotP, and there’s one very important piece of information about what Cho represented to Harry. It is more than worth taking a good, hard look at this.
As we know, Dumbledore’s Army, (the student organization for the secret transmission of knowledge that Harry founded, and it’s very important to remember this specific definition) was betrayed by Marietta, who was Cho’s close friend. Cho then defended her friend for what she’d done, and for Harry, that was simply the last straw. He ended their relationship. In essence, Cho was the one who had betrayed Harry’s secret knowledge, and this was what he finally could not forgive. She became a false or failed Goddess figure as a result.
This betrayal became known because of Hermione’s spell; otherwise, Cho probably never would have been connected with it because Marietta wouldn’t have been caught. So in this situation, Hermione was the one who defended and protected knowledge for Harry, which puts her in a fascinating role vis a vis the theme of the entire series. No wonder Harry/Hermione was a popular ship! Yet it didn’t happen and was never going to happen, and now we know that it never will. This dissonance is very important to explore, because it helps us to understand what different kinds of relationships mean in Harry’s world. Also, it’s a good segue into Harry/Hermione.
Harry/Hermione.
The very first time we ever see Hermione, the first time she meets both Harry and Ron on that same Hogwarts train, she provides knowledge—she knows a spell that Ron doesn’t. And she also gives a lot of information—who she is, how much she knows about Harry, the books she’s read, the houses at Hogwarts, and so forth. This first meeting really sets the tone with Hermione Granger as much as it does with Ron Weasley, because her main role throughout the series has always been the provider of knowledge. She gives knowledge when she helps Harry solve the mysteries that face him in every book, from the Devil’s Snare and the Potion Riddle in SS/PS to her ceaseless struggle to find out the identity of the Half-Blood Prince. And she’s definitely filled many roles traditionally associated with the Goddess as well where Harry is concerned. It can honestly be said that she has a kind of unconditional love for Harry.
But the paradox here is that Hermione knows more about Harry’s inner life, his secrets, his torments, his quest, his destiny, than any girl he has ever dated, and she’s done more to help him. Yet she has never been and will never be Harry’s lover,( his other half in the “mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World,” as Joseph Campbell puts it (Hero With a Thousand Faces, pg. 109.)
Untold thousands of pages were written before the release of HBP, all trying to prove that the opposite was going to be the case. J.K. Rowling flatly sank this hypothesis with both her writing of Ron/Hermione in HBP, and also her statements in the 2005 Mugglenet interview. What J. K. Rowling says in interviews can be very ambiguous, but this statement, like her earlier sinkings of Draco/Hermione and Neville/Luna, was not. And yet, the people who believed that Harry/Hermione was going to be true romantic love cannot be described as “delusional” (to use a word that J.K. Rowling herself, in fact, refused to use.) Hermione has seemed to fit into the hero’s journey Goddess/Other Half slot in lots of ways. Harry’s relationship with Hermione really does contain a lot of the goddess material we see in other hero’s journey narratives, where the goddess provides aid and help. Hermione does this constantly, just as the Queen of the Danes does for Beowulf, or Vivian for Arthur, or Helen for Paris Alexander.
Clues have always been present that, in another book, would absolutely have meant that Hermione was destined to be Harry’s love object. In this series, they didn’t work out that way, and it’s unfortunate that this tends to only be seen in a shippy way, because what this points to is which kind of love will be the most important in the series. Harry’s love for Hermione, and hers for him. is not eros, but philos and agape.
Yet another way we can see this is that a lot of Harry’s emotions and his inner life are directed towards Ron, in some ways more so than towards Hermione. So let’s take a look at that.
Harry/Ron.
From his very first meeting with Harry on the train headed to their first year at Hogwarts, Ron has represented companionship and close friendship. He plays a role similar to the one that Patroclus played to Achilles in The Iliad, or Enkidu to Gilgamesh in The Epic of Gilgamesh. These types of figures represent philos, or an affectionate or friendly love. Certainly, there are also times when Harry’s love for Ron also approaches agape, or self-sacrificial love. The best example of this has to be in GoF, when Ron is the thing that Harry will most miss. Clearly, at that point, he is the object of Harry’s greatest capacity for affection—and although Harry never spells it out to himself in quite the way that he does for, say, Sirius, it is still a strong emotion. Let’s just say that it’s easy to see where all the Harry/Ron slash comes from!
But Ron also imparts knowledge in his way, because he’s Harry’s source of information about the magical world from its inside in a way that no other character ever is. He’s really the only intimate Harry has who is both in his own age group and truly familiar with the wizarding world. Sometimes, though, Ron does represent ignorance as well. He’s lazy. He’s intelligent, but he doesn’t want to think through things too deeply sometimes. He doesn’t want to do intellectual work, and as we’ve frequently seen, he encourages Harry not to do it, either. Certainly, he offers Harry agape as well, but on balance, he’s not a great source of knowledge. In fact, there have been times when Ron has shown distinct disapproval when Hermione has shared knowledge with Harry. Since Ron plays the role of Harry’s best friend, however, Harry does share knowledge and information with him, and he serves as a valuable emotional repository because of this. We saw this more clearly in HBP than ever before when Harry told Ron about the prophecy, the Horcruxes, R.A.B., and so on. So again, the Harry/Ron relationship points up philos and agape love as being extremely important.
Harry/Luna.
Clearly, we don’t know if this will ever become a romantic relationship or not. In some ways, though, it’s more interesting to speculate on whether or not Harry will admit Luna into his circle of trusted friends in Book 7; whether, in other words, she will become a true object of both philos and agape. Luna represents esoteric and unorthodox knowledge, and in this way, she is truly the opposite of Hermione. The kind of knowledge that she offers to Harry is fundamentally different from what Hermione has given him. When she first meets him, for example, she is reading the Quibbler, a newspaper that contains a lot of strange information—but we have reason to believe that like Luna herself, it also contains “uncomfortable truths.” In OotP, she is responsible for getting Harry’s dangerous and secret knowledge about Voldemort’s return through this same vehicle. She also is the one who tells him the secret of the thestrals, and shared information about the possible nature of the veil behind which Sirius disappeared. On the whole, my money is not on Harry and Luna ever getting together romantically (it’s a possibility in an epilogue, I suppose,), but it will be fascinating to see what does happen between them in the future. I would bet that she’s ultimately going to have knowledge to share with him that he needs and can’t get from anywhere else.
Harry/Ginny.
This is, of course, the touchiest Harry relationship of all to discuss. The reason, I think, is that the H/G we got in HBP almost seemed calculated to please no one who really cared about it either way. Harry and Ginny did date, but they were only together for about three weeks before breaking up. Harry was extremely happy, but he finally admitted that the entire experience was “like living someone else’s life.” J.K. Rowling rhapsodized about Ginny in the Mugglenet interview, but literally a minute or two earlier, she had this to say:
“I had always planned for them to come together, and then part.”
The best way to handle the H/G question, I think, is to analyze what Ginny was and could be to Harry in terms of the themes of this particular type of hero’s journey. This strikes the middle ground of taking a realistic look at the actual quality of Harry and Ginny’s interactions throughout the series, including HBP.
There is one theme of the relationship between Harry and Ginny that we see over and over and over throughout all six books and that is… he constantly rejects the knowledge she has to give him, and he does not share his knowledge with her, in very sharp contrast to the way that he does share it with both Ron and Hermione. And I honestly do not think that any other position on this question can be logically defended with any of the tools normally used for empirical reasoning. But it has to be understood and analyzed in a non-shippy way, by looking at the importance of this fact for the arc of the series as a whole rather than trying to twist it around into either extreme of “H/G= twu wuv foreva!” or “H/G sucks and is evil!”, to borrow a couple of fandom phrases.
First of all, how do we actually know that this theme exists? Well, Harry doesn’t respond to Ginny’s overtures of interest through SS/PS, CoS, PoA, and GoF, He actually speaks an average of ten words to her or less per book (and I have Creamtea’s list that outlines this fact) until after Hermione informs him that Ginny is no longer romantically interested in him (OotP.) But even more to the point, he doesn’t ever have any curiosity about who she really is,.or what she’s really been through, and he needs to have it for his own sake. That’s why it’s so remarkable that he never wants to know anything about what happened to her in the CoS, and even tells her (in OotP) that he forgot all about her being possessed. For all that he says he is sorry and “means it,” that really isn’t the point. He never wants to know anything about her experience with Tom Riddle. In HBP, she is alarmed when she finds out that he’s been taking instruction from a magical book. But it just doesn’t seem to occur to Harry that he needs to find out much more information on the whole topic from someone who did the same thing, as Ginny has.
The more we analyze this fact, the stranger it seems. His ultimate goal is to defeat Voldemort, yet he never asks advice or information from the only person in his life who has intimate knowledge of Voldemort, from the inside. And this is of a piece with the fact that he shares nothing about his quest or his goal with her at any point. This does not change after they start dating near the end of his sixth year. Harry never tells Ginny about the prophecy, the Horcruxes, his mission, the locket, R.A.B., the quest, or anything else—for all we know, he doesn’t even tell her he has a quest until the breakup scene. He doesn’t ask knowledge from her, and he doesn’t give knowledge to her.
Harry thinks about how happy he is when he’s in the relationship with Ginny, and we have no reason to doubt that he is, but the sad truth in the hero’s journey narrative is that when the hero tries to find personal happiness with a partner before the quest is fulfilled, it very rarely ends well. In fact, in many cases, such as Pilgrim’s Progress (Lady Vanity) and the Odyssey (Circe), the very fact that the hero finds temporary happiness with a woman means precisely that she is the temptress, who tries to lure him away from his quest with earthly pleasures. There is a paradox here too, however. While Ginny does play the role of the temptress in some ways in that she does distract Harry’s attention from his quest (getting the vital memory from Slughorn, for example,) she herself is not presented as a temptress character. J.K.Rowling made this point especially clear when she spent a remarkable amount of time in last summer’s Mugglenet interview in talking about Ginny’s positive qualities—warm, compassionate, tough, and so on. Whatever her ultimate role is in Harry’s journey, it has been carefully planned, as J.K. Rowling also made clear when she talked about her plan to have both the reader and Harry gradually discover Ginny as “pretty much the ideal girl for Harry,” and her plan to have Harry and Ginny “come together and then part.” Yet the very cognitive dissonance between these two statements means that we do not yet know the final nature of the entire plan.
The final clue as to the central truth about this relationship is, I think, what Harry actually decides to do in the end. He breaks up with Ginny right after seeing several examples of genuine love: Bill/Fleur, Tonks/Remus, Molly/Arthur, mother-son love as Molly/Bill, the beginnings of Ron/Hermione. And yet he does not try to stop Ron and Hermione going with him on his Horcrux quest. They are the only ones taken into his inner life, his emotions, his knowledge. This is why Harry/Ginny is something that needs to be understood in terms other than shippy shippy shippiness, she’s out of the way, now we’re going to get Harry/Luna, Harry/Giant Squid, or Harry/Hedwig! Harry spends a lot of HBP fooling himself about many different things. But here, he faces the truth about his capacity for emotion at this point. He does not have the capacity for eros, for romantic love, in him at the end of Book 6. That’s another reason why the evidence leans a lot towards the idea that romantic love is not going to be the love that Harry will use to defeat Voldemort, whether he’s with Ginny or with anybody else. In this way, the entire idea of Harry-shipping may well be a dead end.
In fact, eros in HP—erotic, sensual, lustful love-- can be and often is downright deceptive and false. We saw that with Ron/Lavender, and most certainly with Tom Sr./Merope. In fact, Molly Weasley believed for a long time that Bill/Fleur was eros alone, and only gave it her blessing when she saw that it wasn’t. Remus Lupin only accepted Tonks’s love once they had a genuine, meaningful exchange that proved her feelings for him were more than just eros. And even great romantic love in the Harry Potter series has no track record we have yet seen as far as actually saving anyone. (James/Lily certainly didn’t; Lily’s sacrificial mother-love for her son was what saved him.)
So Harry may get back together with Ginny, and he may not; he may fall for Luna, and he may not, he may be the Lone Hero (my favorite theory,) or he may not; he may swim off into the sunset with the giant squid, and he may not. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. All opinions need to be respected. But we don’t have the information we need at the moment to know anything for sure. The Harry Potter series partakes of the mystery genre to a very large extent. J.K. Rowling has not seen fit to inform us of exactly what aspects of the writing fit into that genre, and which do not and will be more predictable. When we’re dealing with a mystery, we’re not going to be able to figure out exactly what’s going on. And we can’t whip out 13th century Franciscan theologian William of Occam’s infamous razor to fix this little problem, because the entire mystery genre is designed specifically to subvert the idea that the simplest and most obvious solution is probably the correct one. (That idea is itself a serious misunderstanding of William’s actual philosophy, but that’s another essay!) So we don’t know. And since we don’t know, we might all be well advised to just try to get along and sing the Happy Shipper Unity song.
In summary, all of this is why the romantic, potentially romantic, and “gee, they really should have been romantic” Harry-ships have to be understood in nonshippy terms. Otherwise, we miss all the clues they provide to what’s happening with the narrative, particularly that Harry has often been reluctant to accept knowledge through them.
And now, let’s move on to the most intriguing set of ships of all: the enemies, and the adversaries, or shadows.
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What really helps us to see the answer is to look at the roles his partners either do play or might play in the hero’s journey narrative, and that’s what I’m going to do. What we’re basically doing is looking at four relationships in terms of the meeting with the goddess/other half, or the woman as temptress, and how this relates specifically in this HJ’s narrative to both love and knowledge. In fact, the four girls all have divine/goddesses’s names, as others have pointed out previously. Cho relates to Chomolungma, the Tibetan mother goddess of the world, and to the Chinese goddess Chang O. Luna is a Roman lunar goddess. Ginny’s real name, Ginevra, is a variant of Guinevere, who represents the Celtic triple goddess of maiden, mother, and death-crone. Hermione is the Roman messenger-god Hermes, the traveler between worlds.
.
Harry/Cho.
This relationship is not analyzed much anymore, and it’s easy to see why. J.K. Rowling has definitely sunk this ship. We know that Harry and Cho’s relationship is completely over, and that, in her words, “they were never going to be happy together.” However, his romantic interest in her wasn’t a brief fling. It lasted for three years, they did, in fact, have a relationship in OotP, and there’s one very important piece of information about what Cho represented to Harry. It is more than worth taking a good, hard look at this.
As we know, Dumbledore’s Army, (the student organization for the secret transmission of knowledge that Harry founded, and it’s very important to remember this specific definition) was betrayed by Marietta, who was Cho’s close friend. Cho then defended her friend for what she’d done, and for Harry, that was simply the last straw. He ended their relationship. In essence, Cho was the one who had betrayed Harry’s secret knowledge, and this was what he finally could not forgive. She became a false or failed Goddess figure as a result.
This betrayal became known because of Hermione’s spell; otherwise, Cho probably never would have been connected with it because Marietta wouldn’t have been caught. So in this situation, Hermione was the one who defended and protected knowledge for Harry, which puts her in a fascinating role vis a vis the theme of the entire series. No wonder Harry/Hermione was a popular ship! Yet it didn’t happen and was never going to happen, and now we know that it never will. This dissonance is very important to explore, because it helps us to understand what different kinds of relationships mean in Harry’s world. Also, it’s a good segue into Harry/Hermione.
Harry/Hermione.
The very first time we ever see Hermione, the first time she meets both Harry and Ron on that same Hogwarts train, she provides knowledge—she knows a spell that Ron doesn’t. And she also gives a lot of information—who she is, how much she knows about Harry, the books she’s read, the houses at Hogwarts, and so forth. This first meeting really sets the tone with Hermione Granger as much as it does with Ron Weasley, because her main role throughout the series has always been the provider of knowledge. She gives knowledge when she helps Harry solve the mysteries that face him in every book, from the Devil’s Snare and the Potion Riddle in SS/PS to her ceaseless struggle to find out the identity of the Half-Blood Prince. And she’s definitely filled many roles traditionally associated with the Goddess as well where Harry is concerned. It can honestly be said that she has a kind of unconditional love for Harry.
But the paradox here is that Hermione knows more about Harry’s inner life, his secrets, his torments, his quest, his destiny, than any girl he has ever dated, and she’s done more to help him. Yet she has never been and will never be Harry’s lover,( his other half in the “mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World,” as Joseph Campbell puts it (Hero With a Thousand Faces, pg. 109.)
Untold thousands of pages were written before the release of HBP, all trying to prove that the opposite was going to be the case. J.K. Rowling flatly sank this hypothesis with both her writing of Ron/Hermione in HBP, and also her statements in the 2005 Mugglenet interview. What J. K. Rowling says in interviews can be very ambiguous, but this statement, like her earlier sinkings of Draco/Hermione and Neville/Luna, was not. And yet, the people who believed that Harry/Hermione was going to be true romantic love cannot be described as “delusional” (to use a word that J.K. Rowling herself, in fact, refused to use.) Hermione has seemed to fit into the hero’s journey Goddess/Other Half slot in lots of ways. Harry’s relationship with Hermione really does contain a lot of the goddess material we see in other hero’s journey narratives, where the goddess provides aid and help. Hermione does this constantly, just as the Queen of the Danes does for Beowulf, or Vivian for Arthur, or Helen for Paris Alexander.
Clues have always been present that, in another book, would absolutely have meant that Hermione was destined to be Harry’s love object. In this series, they didn’t work out that way, and it’s unfortunate that this tends to only be seen in a shippy way, because what this points to is which kind of love will be the most important in the series. Harry’s love for Hermione, and hers for him. is not eros, but philos and agape.
Yet another way we can see this is that a lot of Harry’s emotions and his inner life are directed towards Ron, in some ways more so than towards Hermione. So let’s take a look at that.
Harry/Ron.
From his very first meeting with Harry on the train headed to their first year at Hogwarts, Ron has represented companionship and close friendship. He plays a role similar to the one that Patroclus played to Achilles in The Iliad, or Enkidu to Gilgamesh in The Epic of Gilgamesh. These types of figures represent philos, or an affectionate or friendly love. Certainly, there are also times when Harry’s love for Ron also approaches agape, or self-sacrificial love. The best example of this has to be in GoF, when Ron is the thing that Harry will most miss. Clearly, at that point, he is the object of Harry’s greatest capacity for affection—and although Harry never spells it out to himself in quite the way that he does for, say, Sirius, it is still a strong emotion. Let’s just say that it’s easy to see where all the Harry/Ron slash comes from!
But Ron also imparts knowledge in his way, because he’s Harry’s source of information about the magical world from its inside in a way that no other character ever is. He’s really the only intimate Harry has who is both in his own age group and truly familiar with the wizarding world. Sometimes, though, Ron does represent ignorance as well. He’s lazy. He’s intelligent, but he doesn’t want to think through things too deeply sometimes. He doesn’t want to do intellectual work, and as we’ve frequently seen, he encourages Harry not to do it, either. Certainly, he offers Harry agape as well, but on balance, he’s not a great source of knowledge. In fact, there have been times when Ron has shown distinct disapproval when Hermione has shared knowledge with Harry. Since Ron plays the role of Harry’s best friend, however, Harry does share knowledge and information with him, and he serves as a valuable emotional repository because of this. We saw this more clearly in HBP than ever before when Harry told Ron about the prophecy, the Horcruxes, R.A.B., and so on. So again, the Harry/Ron relationship points up philos and agape love as being extremely important.
Harry/Luna.
Clearly, we don’t know if this will ever become a romantic relationship or not. In some ways, though, it’s more interesting to speculate on whether or not Harry will admit Luna into his circle of trusted friends in Book 7; whether, in other words, she will become a true object of both philos and agape. Luna represents esoteric and unorthodox knowledge, and in this way, she is truly the opposite of Hermione. The kind of knowledge that she offers to Harry is fundamentally different from what Hermione has given him. When she first meets him, for example, she is reading the Quibbler, a newspaper that contains a lot of strange information—but we have reason to believe that like Luna herself, it also contains “uncomfortable truths.” In OotP, she is responsible for getting Harry’s dangerous and secret knowledge about Voldemort’s return through this same vehicle. She also is the one who tells him the secret of the thestrals, and shared information about the possible nature of the veil behind which Sirius disappeared. On the whole, my money is not on Harry and Luna ever getting together romantically (it’s a possibility in an epilogue, I suppose,), but it will be fascinating to see what does happen between them in the future. I would bet that she’s ultimately going to have knowledge to share with him that he needs and can’t get from anywhere else.
Harry/Ginny.
This is, of course, the touchiest Harry relationship of all to discuss. The reason, I think, is that the H/G we got in HBP almost seemed calculated to please no one who really cared about it either way. Harry and Ginny did date, but they were only together for about three weeks before breaking up. Harry was extremely happy, but he finally admitted that the entire experience was “like living someone else’s life.” J.K. Rowling rhapsodized about Ginny in the Mugglenet interview, but literally a minute or two earlier, she had this to say:
“I had always planned for them to come together, and then part.”
The best way to handle the H/G question, I think, is to analyze what Ginny was and could be to Harry in terms of the themes of this particular type of hero’s journey. This strikes the middle ground of taking a realistic look at the actual quality of Harry and Ginny’s interactions throughout the series, including HBP.
There is one theme of the relationship between Harry and Ginny that we see over and over and over throughout all six books and that is… he constantly rejects the knowledge she has to give him, and he does not share his knowledge with her, in very sharp contrast to the way that he does share it with both Ron and Hermione. And I honestly do not think that any other position on this question can be logically defended with any of the tools normally used for empirical reasoning. But it has to be understood and analyzed in a non-shippy way, by looking at the importance of this fact for the arc of the series as a whole rather than trying to twist it around into either extreme of “H/G= twu wuv foreva!” or “H/G sucks and is evil!”, to borrow a couple of fandom phrases.
First of all, how do we actually know that this theme exists? Well, Harry doesn’t respond to Ginny’s overtures of interest through SS/PS, CoS, PoA, and GoF, He actually speaks an average of ten words to her or less per book (and I have Creamtea’s list that outlines this fact) until after Hermione informs him that Ginny is no longer romantically interested in him (OotP.) But even more to the point, he doesn’t ever have any curiosity about who she really is,.or what she’s really been through, and he needs to have it for his own sake. That’s why it’s so remarkable that he never wants to know anything about what happened to her in the CoS, and even tells her (in OotP) that he forgot all about her being possessed. For all that he says he is sorry and “means it,” that really isn’t the point. He never wants to know anything about her experience with Tom Riddle. In HBP, she is alarmed when she finds out that he’s been taking instruction from a magical book. But it just doesn’t seem to occur to Harry that he needs to find out much more information on the whole topic from someone who did the same thing, as Ginny has.
The more we analyze this fact, the stranger it seems. His ultimate goal is to defeat Voldemort, yet he never asks advice or information from the only person in his life who has intimate knowledge of Voldemort, from the inside. And this is of a piece with the fact that he shares nothing about his quest or his goal with her at any point. This does not change after they start dating near the end of his sixth year. Harry never tells Ginny about the prophecy, the Horcruxes, his mission, the locket, R.A.B., the quest, or anything else—for all we know, he doesn’t even tell her he has a quest until the breakup scene. He doesn’t ask knowledge from her, and he doesn’t give knowledge to her.
Harry thinks about how happy he is when he’s in the relationship with Ginny, and we have no reason to doubt that he is, but the sad truth in the hero’s journey narrative is that when the hero tries to find personal happiness with a partner before the quest is fulfilled, it very rarely ends well. In fact, in many cases, such as Pilgrim’s Progress (Lady Vanity) and the Odyssey (Circe), the very fact that the hero finds temporary happiness with a woman means precisely that she is the temptress, who tries to lure him away from his quest with earthly pleasures. There is a paradox here too, however. While Ginny does play the role of the temptress in some ways in that she does distract Harry’s attention from his quest (getting the vital memory from Slughorn, for example,) she herself is not presented as a temptress character. J.K.Rowling made this point especially clear when she spent a remarkable amount of time in last summer’s Mugglenet interview in talking about Ginny’s positive qualities—warm, compassionate, tough, and so on. Whatever her ultimate role is in Harry’s journey, it has been carefully planned, as J.K. Rowling also made clear when she talked about her plan to have both the reader and Harry gradually discover Ginny as “pretty much the ideal girl for Harry,” and her plan to have Harry and Ginny “come together and then part.” Yet the very cognitive dissonance between these two statements means that we do not yet know the final nature of the entire plan.
The final clue as to the central truth about this relationship is, I think, what Harry actually decides to do in the end. He breaks up with Ginny right after seeing several examples of genuine love: Bill/Fleur, Tonks/Remus, Molly/Arthur, mother-son love as Molly/Bill, the beginnings of Ron/Hermione. And yet he does not try to stop Ron and Hermione going with him on his Horcrux quest. They are the only ones taken into his inner life, his emotions, his knowledge. This is why Harry/Ginny is something that needs to be understood in terms other than shippy shippy shippiness, she’s out of the way, now we’re going to get Harry/Luna, Harry/Giant Squid, or Harry/Hedwig! Harry spends a lot of HBP fooling himself about many different things. But here, he faces the truth about his capacity for emotion at this point. He does not have the capacity for eros, for romantic love, in him at the end of Book 6. That’s another reason why the evidence leans a lot towards the idea that romantic love is not going to be the love that Harry will use to defeat Voldemort, whether he’s with Ginny or with anybody else. In this way, the entire idea of Harry-shipping may well be a dead end.
In fact, eros in HP—erotic, sensual, lustful love-- can be and often is downright deceptive and false. We saw that with Ron/Lavender, and most certainly with Tom Sr./Merope. In fact, Molly Weasley believed for a long time that Bill/Fleur was eros alone, and only gave it her blessing when she saw that it wasn’t. Remus Lupin only accepted Tonks’s love once they had a genuine, meaningful exchange that proved her feelings for him were more than just eros. And even great romantic love in the Harry Potter series has no track record we have yet seen as far as actually saving anyone. (James/Lily certainly didn’t; Lily’s sacrificial mother-love for her son was what saved him.)
So Harry may get back together with Ginny, and he may not; he may fall for Luna, and he may not, he may be the Lone Hero (my favorite theory,) or he may not; he may swim off into the sunset with the giant squid, and he may not. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. All opinions need to be respected. But we don’t have the information we need at the moment to know anything for sure. The Harry Potter series partakes of the mystery genre to a very large extent. J.K. Rowling has not seen fit to inform us of exactly what aspects of the writing fit into that genre, and which do not and will be more predictable. When we’re dealing with a mystery, we’re not going to be able to figure out exactly what’s going on. And we can’t whip out 13th century Franciscan theologian William of Occam’s infamous razor to fix this little problem, because the entire mystery genre is designed specifically to subvert the idea that the simplest and most obvious solution is probably the correct one. (That idea is itself a serious misunderstanding of William’s actual philosophy, but that’s another essay!) So we don’t know. And since we don’t know, we might all be well advised to just try to get along and sing the Happy Shipper Unity song.
In summary, all of this is why the romantic, potentially romantic, and “gee, they really should have been romantic” Harry-ships have to be understood in nonshippy terms. Otherwise, we miss all the clues they provide to what’s happening with the narrative, particularly that Harry has often been reluctant to accept knowledge through them.
And now, let’s move on to the most intriguing set of ships of all: the enemies, and the adversaries, or shadows.
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