I don't like any pairing with Harry in it.

 

Oh, okay cool.

One second though, out of curiosity, you hardly mind maybe elaborating on that?

You know, for shits and giggles.

 

Th hardest one to write right: Harry/Luna.

 

Not really. If it's after the Battle of Hogwarts, writing them is easy. Just two people wanting to vacation around the world to divest themselves if stress

 

Interesting idea. I can see them going on a light-hearted adventure through the magical site of the world, chasing rare magical creatures. Any fics like this?

 

With Harry/Luna it's not so much the pairing that's hard to write, there are quite a few places where they could have become close.
No, the problem is that nearly nobody competently writes Luna. Except maybe Antosha.

 

My feelings regarding Harry/Hermione have basically been on a pendulum. When I first read the series, I was a huge Harry/Hermione fan. When Half Blood Prince came out, I was very irritated by Hermione and stopped supporting the pairing for years. Now that I'm older, I appreciate Hermione's loyalty to Harry a lot more. Fidelity is the chiefest of virtues, and Hermione's loyalty to Harry has made me a lot more appreciative of the pairing.

My fondness for Harry/Daphne is more about the archetype than the character. It's a desire to explore things like politics, pureblood culture, and the wizarding world. Harry/Daphne or any Harry/Slytherin girl is merely a mechanism to explore those topics. That, and the high heels.

Harry/Fleur, as I mentioned in passing in an earlier post in this thread, is more about the idea of her and the pairing than the reality. Making that relationship work requires Harry to rise to a challenge that he, in all probability, can't succeed in. My boy
@Lungs said it best here. Harry/Fleur has a ton of unrealized potential, which is why we're all so excited over Plothole's story in WbA now. Even if the romance doesn't live up to our expectations at this point, his Fleur is among the best which leaves it already near the top of the category.

Harry and Tonks has been a guity pleasure of mine for years, and I can still endure Summer of Change today. Tonks is a fun, attractive, older woman who nearly any young man would be thrilled to be in a relationship with at that point in life. Throw in her (presumed) competence as an auror, and we have a situation where Harry is forced, once again, to rise to the challenge and mature in order to stand with her as an equal in the relationship.

While these might be my favorite pairings, I've reached the point where I care more about the execution of the relationship than the particular pairing. I still read Strangers at Drakeshaugh, which is unapologetically Harry/Ginny. As mentioned, pairings are vehicles for a specific path to maturity for Harry rather than ship-bait. Daphne, Tracy, Pansy, hell even Narcissa serve as avenues to explore pureblood culture and politics. Fleur gives us an international flavor, as well as Harry being forced to become someone worthy of her interest. Tonks gives us a taste of the pureblood culture through her mother's side, along with seeing more of the Ministry. Hermione serves as almost my default thanks to the first half of canon, so hers is a focus on the things that made Harry Potter fun in the first place. Hogwarts and magic, rather than exploring new concepts. Depth of the setting we love, rather than breadth.

A lot of words to not say a lot, and for all I might think that I've evolved past pairings I still can't help myself. I'm a simple man, I see Harry/Fleur, I click Harry/Fleur.

 

I think Fleur/Tonks/Harry is good for a short term fling of an older girl showing him the ropes.

 

And tell me, why would an older girl be inclined to "show him the ropes."

 

As bragging rights, a conquest, etc.

Harry is the Boy-Who-Lived, one of the most famous Wizards in the world. Realistically, he would have plenty of older girls looking to seduce him.

Can you imagine a 15 year old Justin Bieber attending High School? Would probably fuck a few teachers on accident.

 

Weirdly, Harry/Fleur is my favorite because it makes me nostalgic. The love of my life and the girl I almost married is compared to Fleur by almost everyone she meets(provided they are fluent in HP, but I work in nerd circles), and I was told from day one that I was in way above my head when I pursued her. When we actually got together, I couldn't believe it. When we broke up 2 years later, every other girl was ruined for me.

Because of that, any story that features a HP/Fleur pairing and has a Harry that Is atleast slightly like me just instantly lets me suspend all disbelief.

But I gotta be honest and say I also think its the most interesting from a writing perspective. Not only are the Veela vaguely defined, which means there is a ton of interesting, but the fact that she is so easy to spin as above Harry's league means she's a natural stepping stone into a more confident Harry, which is where his character turns from boring to interesting in my opinion. Speaking from experience, being with a girl so beautiful you can hardly believe she exists in real life does wonders for your confidence.

Harry/Luna shouldn't work on paper, but almost all of the stories I've read featuring the pairing have been great.

 

She's not above Harry's league. She's a pretty girl, that's it

Harry is rich, famous and powerful.

 

I've recently realised that my favourite pairing is always, 100% the last one I've read that's written well.

 

Harry/Tracey

 

Isn't that basically heresy? Yours has to be Harry/Daphne. You're vlad!

 

I used to be a big proponent of Harry/Fleur because I imagined her being a thicc biddy, but realistically my favorite pairing is no pairing at all. When authors who can barely write a coherent plot try to shoe-horn in a pairing on top of it, everything else just gets lost.

 

Eh, I bitch about pairings more than I read them, but there are ones I kind of like, or at least like the idea of. Some of them actually exist, too. A few are even relatively normal. But I'll just list the ones that I've personally been thinking about writing or I'm actually attempting to write.

For Harry, I'm torn between Daphne and Luna. Harry/Daphne is easier to find and seems to have more good quality fics than most ships out there, but Harry/Luna is like the holy grail for me in that I've never found the real deal and I'm not quite sure that it exists.

For fem!Harry: Tom Riddle or Voldemort. Half because it's disturbing, half because genderbending pisses off a certain faction of the fanbase.

 

I like Harry/Hermione in theory but never in practice.

The first part of this is unrelated to the pairing per se: in general, Hermione is written very badly in the fandom, whether paired with Harry or not. Most writers (and readers) fail to see how Hermione develops over the books and they keep her as this bossy, rule-loving, know-it-all, book-obsessed, socially stunted, unadventurous and conservative character. Even where the author likes her a lot, they still keep these characteristics, only portrayed in a more positive light (basically they just make her always right in an attempt to justify her overbearing nature).

Now, while Hermione doesn't completely shed all of these characteristics (in particular, she maintains the characteristic of always thinking she knows best) she does develop significantly. In the early books, Ron and Harry are dragging a protesting Hermione along with them. In later books, Hermione is an equal co-conspirator. In the early books, Hermione lacks friends or much of a social circle. In later books, Hermione has the widest social circle out of the three of them, being the social locus of the DA i.e. the person who had the social connections to organise the first meeting.

Further, there's absolutely no sign that Hermione is socially conservative. I'm not exactly sure where this has come from -- an association of conservatism with respecting rules, perhaps? -- but it's rather absurd. So many fics depict Hermione as this naggy, hand-on-hip type mother hen who is obsessed with correcting behaviour to be more "proper": she corrects people's bad language; she dresses modestly; she has a conservative sexual morality. But all indications are to the opposite: she comes from a thoroughly middle class background, which makes her much more likely to have a liberal world view; she starts social justice campaigns; she joins counter-culture groups.

As a result of the above considerations, I often think the best Hermione characterisation can be found in well-written smut like A Boy and His Cloak. That is a sad state for the fandom to be in.

The second part of this is that I feel like Harry and Hermione are just not long-term stable as a couple. They're good friends, sure, and they're teenagers who aren't fat or ugly, so there's going to be some physical attraction there too. So I think there's a decent basis for them trying a relationship, especially if it evolves naturally out of the friendship e.g. they get drunk and hook up (the start of 95% of British relationships). But I just don't think that they would last. Both Harry and Hermione are "take the lead" types, and both of them hold extremely strong views on which they are completely unwilling to compromise. If you think Ron and Hermione argue a lot, Harry and Hermione as a couple would blow them out of the water. They would simply discover far too many fundamental incompatibilities.

 

Harry and Hermione is not a viable pairing because Harry is far too shallow, in the looks department, to consider her. Not that she's ugly, but Harry barely noticed Fleur, and didn't even know Ginny existed until she became the hottest girl in school.

Harry is a physical being, and not someone who wants ton be in a relationship where emotions play much of a role. One of the reasons he likes Ginny is because she doesn't cry ie. No emotional expectations.

 

I don't think Ginny in HBP was as pretty as Fleur in GoF, so how is he attracted to one and not the other, if he was as shallow as you say? Could it be her personality, or the time they spent together that made Harry see Ginny in a romantic way?