I'm gonna chip in with another reason Harry/Hermione would work more than Hermione/Ron, especially in the long run. Ron has issues with being overshadowed all the time; it's sparked off several bouts of jealousy and his greatest desire is personal glory. Hermione needs to be the best at everything she does. See a problem yet?

With canon!Harry at least we know that he'd strive more for mediocrity than excellence, which would mesh well with Hermione where Ron would clash horribly.

 

Q: How can you tell if someone is a Harmonian?
A: They'll tell you, and then devote the rest of the thread explaining all the reasons why their view of Hermione is the only right one (more valid, even, than Rowling's), why HBP sucked, how badly the Weasley's suck, ad infinitum, ad naseum.*

My irrational hatred of Harmonians is entirely due to their fucking whining after their ship went down in flames (and just what fucking books were they reading where they actually thought that Harry and Hermione would end up together in canon? You'd have to willfully misread the books to ignore Rowling telegraphing the 'ships).

Saying "I enjoy reading H/Hr stories more than H/G" is one thing. Saying "I'm right, Rowling is wrong" is just dumb.

Sure. In that case, do you know who was in-character in Book 6? Harry. He didn't fancy Hermione in Books 1-5, and he continued not to fancy her in Book 6 and 7.

I suppose that your interpretation has equal weight with Rowlings... in the same sense that my neighbor's medical advice has equal weight with my doctor's.

*Q: How can you tell a H/Hr hater?
A: I'll tell you, and then threadshit in your H/Hr thread. Sorry about that, although you did say that this thread could be used for flaming.

 

Why Harry/Hermione works:
1. Because everyone pictures Watson as Granger, and Watson makes our penises hard.
2. Because anyone who denies #1 is a liar or a boy-lover.
3. Because Rowling had a bit more restraint in terms of self-insertion than Stephanie Meyer, but would have paired them off had she not.

/argument

Seriously though, there's no way for the author to write their own characters ooc - unless it's an omake/parody of some sort. That makes not even the slightest bit of sense...

 

No worries, Nuke; I was just getting a little irritated at seeing that particular horse disemboweled even further. I wasn't reading fanfiction in 2005, so I missed out on all that fun. I have to ask, though - why were you hanging out on the portkey forums if you hate Hermione?

Fair enough, but you know who else Harry didn't fancy in any of those books? Luna, Fleur, Tonks, Parvati, Susan, etc., etc. No one was arguing that H/Hr did happen or should have happened in HBP, only that it was a viable ship like any other. The claims about Hermione being OOC were directed at those who (rightly) thought she was an absolute bitch in that book.

lol - I'm not saying I have the one true interpretation of the Harry Potter books, and everyone else is wrong. I'm saying that just because JKR interprets her own books in a certain way, it doesn't mean she's right. Once the books are finished, she's a reader just like anyone else. Her intentions mean absolutely nothing; only the words on the page count.

For instance, you can find multiple instances of her talking about her characterization of Ron. She calls him a 'regular bloke' who 'grows up a lot' during the books (especially during HBP), and is loyal, courageous, and funny. She called him 'the comic relief' on more than one occasion.

I think you'll find that at least a majority of the fandom (honestly, probably closer to something like 75% of it) disagrees with her interpretation of Ron. My personal take is that she didn't write the character she thought she was writing. I hated that fucker since book 3, and his douchebaggery increased exponentially with each new book. I was desperately hoping she would kill him in book 7, and I don't know anyone who's claimed to actually like him.

Fair enough; I only mean that an author can be guilty of poor or inconsistent characterization. If Harry had decided to leave the magical world and become a pimp in book 7, wouldn't you think that was OOC based on what we knew of him until then? (Although I think would have rather read pimp!Harry than book 7).

 

I really like H/Hr, but I never thought it was going to happen in canon until the kiss at the end of GOF. I mean seriously that was so out of no where. That, along with the way Hermione was described at the yule ball kinda made me think that Rowling was going to take it in that direction. I figured that Harry and Ron would both have feelings, and that it was going to cause problems in the fifth book. Obviously, I was wrong

haha I had to edit after reading JustBlaise's post. Yes, number one is a perfectly good reason for H/Hr to work.

 

If they had restricted themselves to the Portkey forums then I'd have no issues... unfortunately they were EVERYWHERE that year, and they were obnoxious.

A lot of people apparently took it very personally that Harry wasn't going to end up with Hermione.

(also, I never hated Hermione until a lot of butthurt Harmonians started defending her on the internet--whether I asked them to or not. I actually used to read a fair amount of H/Hr, back in the day...)

Emphasis mine, and that's not exactly true.

 

To our site's resident Harmonians, this'll probably be one of my last posts in this thread, because I know better than to stick around while a thread goes down in flames (if it doesn't, count on me checking in occasionally), but I want to make a point about something I've noticed about that particular branch of the fandom. In any case, tl, dr post ahead.

First of all, I know I wasn't the only one pissed off major with the way HBP and DH turned out (for different reasons, though). Sure, there were the high points, but there were some seriously BAD points along the way. One of the bad points that many Harmonians acknowledge is that Hermione should have ended up with Harry in the books. The fact he didn't pissed off a shitload of people. Subsequently, you can pretty vividly tell the difference between Harmony fics started before HBP and the ones after.

Not gonna lie here, the place where I started reading and posting fanfic was at Mugglenet, and it took me a long few years to move my ass over here, but one of the most hotly and angrily debated topics over on their forums for a while was between H/G and H/Hr (hell, most of them didn't even consider the awesomeness of Harry/Tonks...). It's also one of the sites that has a pretty old romance section (or it used to - think a bunch of fics were wiped and not reposted) after fanfiction.net, so I found a fair bit there.

Early on, either just before or after OOTP, the majority of fanfic didn't even consider H/G that much - it was more of a conflict between Harry/Cho (and who here can remember when Harry/Cho was somewhat mainstream?). But then HBP came, and Harry hooked up with Ginny, and most Harmonians considered it a fucking slap in the face, because then we had the massive surge of H/G that everyone saw. DH didn't make things much better - if anything, the angriest of the Harmony fics came right after DH, when Harry and Hermione had a few months alone together, yet did not connect. Most of us considered it the canon death blow to the ship (just like Harry's breakup with Cho was a major killer to that ship).

Thing is, the Harmonians weren't willing to lay down and die, and thus we saw a slew of some of the worst Harmony fanfics that I've ever had the misfortune to read, including one of the stories that pretty much ruined the ship for me, Unsung Hero (that fic also did a pretty impressive job of destroying a lot of my liking of the Not-Boy-Who-Lived genre, though The Santi's doing a remarkable job changing that).

That was also the age of profiles with some of the most vehement and vindictive hatred of Rowling that I had ever seen. And it wasn't just of Rowling, but of her characters as well. The biggest culprits were Ron, Dumbledore, Ginny, Snape (of all people), and even Harry himself. Anyone besides Hermione, the one character that Harry should have ended up with, because according to the Harmonians, SHE was the real hero.

Now completely honestly, the Harmony fans on this site aren't like that - but the vast majority of them are. And for someone who has been the receiving end of their reviews with many of my fics, they tend to be the most bitter and vindictive of reviewers (even sometimes worse than DLP - and judging by my plan for Renegade Cause, I'm expecting them to get a hell of a lot WORSE). What I personally found worse was the tonal shift in many Harmony fics, particularly ones that were incomplete when DH was released and were completed afterwards. The tonal shift was jarring, and a few fics were even retconned by the authors to satisfy their own bitterness (Harry Potter and the Fifth Element is the biggest culprit here, and I can't say that the changes made the story any better).

Maybe it's just me, but I miss the age where H/Hr had a bit of a lighter tone, and wasn't overshadowed by the seemingly omnipresent bitterness that so many Harmony shippers have. If anything, the few Harmony fics I've enjoyed in the last few months have been those by cloneserpents, and those are far from quality pieces of literature. If anything, I'm agreeing with Pers here by saying that there is far less good H/Hr than even Harry/Ginny. And if anything, it's a damn shame, because with better writers and a more realistic grasp of the two characters, I suspect that some half-decent fics could come out of the ship.

But hey, can't really complain here - my preferred ship (Harry/Tonks) a lot of the same problems as H/Hr (a few different problems, though, considering one of the members in the ship is canonically dead).

 

Any of the ships could be construed as coming out of nowhere, since Harry didn't even pay attention to Ginny for longer than two sentences at a time in books 1-5. They are JKR's books, but I doubt there's one person on this forum who didn't have a WTF moment concerning the "chest-monster." Whatever their differences, just judging from personal experience, H/HR was the most likely ship in that book. She and Ron fight too much to have lasted more than a short while, because I have parents who have serious fights/arguments all the time...and that shit does not work. And it might be just me, but Ginny is little better than Romilda, in terms of both prior-friendship and fangirlism. Harry and Hermione, however, even though they aren't a perfect, cookie-cutter match (who really is?), tend to stick together, watch out for each other, talk to each other about what matters most to them, and have real discussions about legitimate matters without cutting each other's throats. They never really fight, and though Harry sometimes feels smothered by her, he is able to appreciate both her intelligence and her support. When did Ron ever tell anybody that Hermione was smart? And, as DarklordMike mentioned, there are clues that they at least find each other physically attractive in some sense, and friends become lovers all the time. I honestly think that Hermione could and would be the most significant factor involved when/if Harry became a "great" wizard (besides Harry himself). She was the first person to tell him that that's what he is, after all.

tl;dr: Realistically, if Ron had really left them all alone together in that situation the way he did (ultimate douchebag) in DH, Harry and Hermione would have banged the shit out of each other.

 

Fix'd but otherwise QFT.

 

Afrojack said about exactly what I wanted to say.

The only other thing is this: just because I say I like Harry/Hermione, doesn't mean I'm a Harmonian.

First page on google with 'Harmonian' in the search bar... Read the common tenets.

 

I find it increasingly odd that a group of 'shippers that can somehow find deep, symbolic meaning in a Hippogriff flight can't grasp that constant bickering may have been a pretext for mutual attraction between two people that may not have been confident enough to express their feelings in a romantic sense.

Anybody reading above a 3rd-grade level should have seen that plot twist coming a mile down the road (or by book 3 at the latest), Rowling was about as subtle as a tank when she was setting it up.

 

Woah, woah. I'm no shipper, and I didn't say shit about a Hippogriff either. Constant bickering may be a pretext for mutual attraction, but it's certainly not the basis for a successful relationship. That lack of confidence in each other only feeds into their personal insecurities, making the situation worse, instead of having some method of handling issues like in a normal, functioning partnership (i.e. discussions that don't turn into vicious, highly personal fights about nothing). JKR's lack of subtlety is because that's the only way their attraction could make any sense, and guess what? It still didn't make sense. It ended up looking just as contrived as it actually was, though perhaps less so than with Harry and Ginny. Why would you marry someone who betrayed you at perhaps the most pivotal junction in your life?

You have a nasty habit of grouping everyone who sees H/Hr as a viable option into the same group of rabid fangirls that you seem to hate so much.

 

Please to be pointing out the "vicious, highly personal fights about nothing" in canon, kthx.

Also, I may have already mentioned that I have an "irrational hatred" of H/Hr. If I lumped you in with the retards it's because you're making the same lame arguments that they do... on the internet all I have to judge you on is your words, so you'll have to forgive my presumption.

 

I'm going to break common protocol in attacking the idea, but not the person.

Your a whore. Stop being one. Every time people would say something against you, this is what you end up saying. "YOUR WRONG, YOUR AN IDIOT, AROIAN BIOAEIA GWIG AWROGAG. /rage"

Also to be more wrong, I am going to say I don't mind this ship. There is no damming cannon evidence against it and I feel it is more realistic than other ships would be.

 

Um, thanks for sharing?

 

0_o

You're just trolling for amusement now, right? Was it the 'about nothing' part of the statement that you're disputing? Because Ron and Hermione fight like cats and dogs in every book, and Ron's jibes are always cruel and sometimes, yes, vicious.

In fact, I'd say that canon establishes pretty clearly that Ron is good at four things only: eating, chess, abandoning Harry when the going gets rough, and being deliberately cruel to Hermione. Do you seriously need evidence for this?

 

The only fights they had that were actual fights were over:

1. Firebolt (which Harry participated in)
2. Crookshanks/Scabbers
3. Yule Brawl

And the only "deliberate cruelty" was prior to the troll incident when he said she was a nightmare (and it's not as though Harry jumped up to defend her honor at that point, or even disagreed).

Go back and re-read canon, the fights were nowhere near as "vicious" as you're recalling them.

 

It seems to me that he goes out of his way to hurt her feelings/insult her in the three instances you mention. Even if 'vicious' is too strong, they are certainly not bickering like an old married couple. Ron is extremely insecure, and isn't satisfied until he's belittled her enough to assuage his wounded ego. These fights always end with her in tears, and he is unmoved by them.

The most egregious instances of Ron's behavior, though, are in 6th and 7th year. When Ginny tells Ron that Hermione snogged Viktor, he goes out of his way to punish Hermione for this horrific infraction. He takes up with Lavender, and deliberately makes out with her in front of Hermione whenever the opportunity arises. He knows that he's hurting her and he just doesn't care. How they got together after that I have no idea.

Then, of course, there's his constant and insufferable whining on the horcrux hunt. He selfishly hoards their food, then blows up at both Harry and Hermione before abandoning them. He is deliberately mean to both of them while wearing the horcrux, but here's the important point: the horcrux didn't alter his personality. It just 'sapped his self-control,' as the Lexicon puts it.

There are other instances, but I don't have time to go through the books right now. I understand what you mean about two socially awkward people expressing their feelings through bickering, but Ron's behavior goes beyond that.

EDIT - yeah, jblaise, I don't want to imply that he's some sort of monster. He does have his good qualities, and JKR always tries to redeem him. I was just pointing out how nasty he can be in his fights with Hermione.

 

Given how much he's done, I think you're significantly downplaying how significant Ron's coming back really was.

 

[CITATION NEEDED]

Because outside of the 3 examples here there isn't much to support your conclusion (ooh, 5 instances in 7 years. They do nothing but viciously fight!)

Also, you can't really cite the Firebolt thing if you're not going to paint Harry with the same brush; he was hardly a disinterested bystander...

And Hermione was sort of a bitch about the Scabbers thing, as well...