How can you not like Harry? he is extremely kind hearted though he had an abusive childhood, brave, forgiving ,loyal and unselfish. The guy even walks to his own death. How brave is that! He is simply amazing

Hermione? I don't like her at all. I don't like her bossy, know it all, self centered attitude. She was ruined for me since HBP where she such a bitch to Harry since he was better in potions than her and didn't believe what he said about Malfoy and her "I was right you know" just after Dumbledore's death even though the bitch was completely wrong made me want her to die. I bet if Harry was a top student she would completely hate him. Ron deserves better than her.

Neville wouldn't have been a cool friend as Ron and Harry would have had to stand up for him all the time.

Ron was a great friend to Harry. His family let Harry stay with them many times and loved him like their own son. They were great allies and stood with Harry till the end. They let Harry marry their only daughter

 

"Being a good person" doesn't particularly appeal to me as a good trait in liking someone. If I see someone who works with the homeless, is conscientious about the environment, and gives to charity, I might go "oh that's nice, he's a good person" but I wouldn't like them more. Those traits are largely irrelevant into how I see them.

The biggest gripe I have with Harry is his lack of wonder. He's a fucking wizard. He should be shitting his pants in AMAZEMENT every single day.

I understand how if you grew up a wizard it wouldn't be special, but every fucking muggleborn should be going around screaming about how fucking awesome magic was. I mean can you imagine if YOU found out you were a wizard? Fucking life changing, not just in the sense that your life is now different, but suddenly fucking all that geek shit you loved is now YOU and you are gonna do FUCKING MAGIC. MAGIC PEOPLE, MAGIC.

Harry largely doesn't show that much wonder or curiosity about magic, its just another thing he adjusts too. C'mon bro.

That's not even counting the studying part. But just...how could you not strive to explore the shit out of magic if you found out you were a wizard.


As for personality...Harry's a bit bland. He's supposed to be, I mean he's supposed to be the "average guy" who can become a hero and he's fairly relatable to alot of people.

I don't like his temper. I'm a really laid back person and people who get actively angry over things (even righteously angry) bother me. Even petty stuff like Malfoy being an ass in the first book, he gets legitimately angry over ALOT.

He's not really outgoing. I was a theater major for a while and my big thing in highschool was my theater classes. Everyone I knew there was really really outgoing and had "that" type of personality. Even my other friends are all pretty damn sociable. Harry isn't. He's very polite, most shy people are, but his interactions with people all tend to reflect his introverted personality.

I mean fuck, he went to school wtih people for 5 years, and they show up and he has NO idea who the fuck they are. Luna Lovegood? How do you not know who the fuck that is. She's that fucking crazy girl EVERYONE should know. If you ever had someone in highschool like that (and I did) EVERYONE knows who that is. Just because they are fucking weird and awkward. Same with other characters. Cormac McLaggen? Hi, I'm the character whose only a year older then you in the same house, have the type of asshole personality who'd come and talk to you, super famous Harry Potter, yet how do you not know who I am. - Harry just doesn't have fucking flair man.



Harry Potter isn't clever enough, mentally anyways. Physically he's nimble and whatnot. He doesn't typically have the snappy dialogue. He's got a few moments but compared to other protagonists I like he doesn't have much.

He's not terribly inventive. I was trying to think of various ways he was clever. I thought of freeing Dobby - which was the most contrived, lucky thing ever. I thought of like...getting passed the stone. Does grabbing keys on a broom make you clever?

He just doesn't have enough pizzazz for me. He's bland and relatable but meh. He's just some average bloke, which was kind of the point. If Harry wasn't the protagonist, I woulnd't like him as much.

 

I like Ron for reasons that people have named, but most of all, because he reads real. With all the good and the bad.

---

Yeah, imagine that you get introduced to this wonderful thing. MAGIC. And then you're obviously excited with the prospect, high with the thought of bending the laws of physics and causing all manner of miracles.

And your first magical lecture comes.

They place before you a fat, dusty tome that reads like a treatise alike "Solving High-dimensional Linear Stochastic Partial Differential Equations via A Kernel-based Approximation Method" would read.

And they expect you to bring homework on the first twenty pages in a week.

You can scrape by somewhat - excitement and human determination does wonders. You might hole yourself up in the Library, learn it until your head hurts, ignore any possible friends you might make and if your'e lucky and push through, achieve something above average.

You could get the spells working - everyone do with lots of test and practice. But you have to repeat the wand motions, to dedicate hard work to it. And these spells can blow in your face. Can give your friend ears, or levitate rats. It's not that impressive at first, and after twenty hours of figuring out different ways you would use to kill the inventor of Wingardium Leviosa for coming up with a spell you now have to duplicate... The success would be exciting not because it's magic. But because you finally did it. Cast an useless spell. Where are your walls of fire and mystical powers? You can levitate a quill.



Or, you can actually be a kid. And relax. Rest. Play some Quidditch. Which doesn't need you to know how the broom works before you try it. Doesn't need you to check the twenty references of the essay before submitting them for grading. You just get your ass on the broom, and fly with your friends.

Immersing in magic, rather than studying it. Magic works - use it!

Even playing magical chess - MAGICAL chess - is a lot more interesting than researching into that magical theory.

Are you sure, that you, as a 11 year old kid, would forget to have fun and become Hermione?

I call bullshit.

p.s. Taure, I know you would be like Hermione.

 

Ron's role in canon is to give information on magical world, about how people think and how the world works. The problem is that in fanfiction you don't need that kind of exposition, and Ron really doesn't have much to offer to the story when you take his "normalness" away.

Ron is too well developed by Rowling for him to change into a new role, especially as you should try to limit the initial changes as much as possible to keep the story from going entirely AU. And that doesn't really leave Ron many roles to fill; we have the "asshole who abandons Harry and gives him a reason to get hold of himself" -role, and the "chessmaster/strategist" role, which are both frankly awful. The role of a buddy is simply unnecessary; the character development you get from everyday situations were already studied by Rowling in canon, and you really don't want to waste words on scenes of Harry and Ron playing chess in the Gryffindor common room and discussing the upcoming chances of Chudley Cannons.

tl.dr: Ron is good in canon, but doesn't have a place in fanfic.

 

This is the attitude that makes for fanfiction about power fantasies. 'If it doesn't show how awesome my character is, why keep it?'

If you're trying to write a story about human behavior in extraordinary circumstances, a grounded practical secondary viewpoint is essential. I'm beginning to think a realistic, non-spastic characterization for Ron is a litmus for determining good Potter fanfiction.

 

Why does it have to be that way? You aren't learning calculus at 11. Did you see their homework? It was pretty standard stuff, name some uses for this spell, how it originated, what's the incantation, maybe who invented it. Actual spell casting? Seems to me like it just takes a while to get the incantation exact precise movements right, + whatever mystical component there is to it. Try teaching a kid a complex knott. He'll get it after a while, the trick is getting him to remember it a year later.


and sure if you wanted to know EVERYTHING it might require the kind of work you are talking about, but being fascinated by magic and having fun aren't mutually exclusive, but that isn't what I'm talking about and its totally beside the point.


I mean look at some other characters in the books. Flitwick? The guy nearly creams his pants whenever a student casts an Aguamenti. He has a palpable sense that magic is fucking AMAZING, that the end result is something worthy of our awe.

Dumbledore? He obviously has some wonder. You don't invent a bunch of nifty magical gadgets without having the requisite curiosity and desire. He certainly had a whole quest for the great beyond and the search for truth beyond human understanding going on.

In fact most the teachers do. Snape? Obviously was fascinated by it before school, and he's got a big obsession for the potions part. McGonagall certainly has a visible passion for transfiguration.

and yes, even Hermoine has got it, and not in the library sense. She comes away all the time going, wow that magic stuff sure is fascinating. Hermoines problem is that she learns all the minutiae. She knows who Freddy the Troll and Elfric the Wicked are. That isn't fucking magic. She doesn't just learn about magic, she covers like...everything. I don't want Harry to care about those kinds of things, I'm talking about magic, ya dig?

These people all have one thing in common: Passion. Even Arthur Weasley has it, some innate curiosity about muggle things and how magic affects them.

Harry Potter doesn't...and I'm glad you brought up Quidditch. Flying and Quidditch is one of the things I love most about Harry Potter the person. It's probably the only thing in the world he has actual interest in. There's a reason nearly EVERY fic mentions it at some point. Harry has that intrinsic sense of wonder about Human Flight. It's very common and many people have experienced it. He truly becomes engrossed and interested in flying, but he doesn't seem to care about the magic that makes it happen, the same as normal people don't become interested in planes. You know because he feels the same when he rides Buckbeak.

Immersing yourself in magic doesn't mean you have a sense of wonder for it. Harry plays magical chess. He looks at it and goes, Oh the pieces move. Okay whatever, lets play chess. Nothing about the magical world fascinates him. It's just mundane boring things + some odd addition to him.

Even his career choices are boring. When asked what he wants to do his list is Auror, and thats only because of the vague sense that he's kind of already fighting Dark Wizards, and dark wizards killed his parents. He has a whole magical world of interesting shit, and he's got nothing.

I mean I understand why he's boring. He's supposed to be the average kid. He wants to be normal, its his main goal and life. If it wasn't for Voldemort being a dick, he actually would be normal. He'd be the most boring fucking kid in that school.

But the question was subjective: Why don't you like Harry? So yes, I understand why he is the way he is. But I like him less because of it.

 

I like Ron. He is, in fact, my second favorite character in the entire series (after Hermione), mainly because he's a likable and loyal friend. Sure he has his faults (the incidents in Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows, though I pretty much discount the last book entirely), but that serves to make him human, perhaps the most human character in the series.

 

I think that Ron gets a lot of bad rep because of how easy it is to turn him into a 'bad guy'. And it does feel like he's dragging the Trio down some, not because he's below average. Ron is, in fact, the most painfully average and human person in canon. It's that Harry and Hermione aren't. Neville, who comes out of the closet in book 5 and turns into a BAMF, would make a much better third person in the Trio than Ron because, as book 7 shows, he's also something more than just the average guy.

That being said, my like/dislike of Ron varies depending on what fanfiction I'm reading. Canon-wise, he's just not remarkable enough to really shine when we have someone like Harry in the foreground. Like I said, Neville is a much better 'best friend' candidate than Ron because he's Harry's equal.

 

He's an underrated character.

 

Ron is okay, and is good for Harry's first friend, but he doesn't make a good protagonist character. He just isn't heroic. With almost the sole exception of the chess challenge, Ron is only along for the ride during the adventures, not actually forwarding the plot.

As far as fanon is concerned, most writers just bash him for the heck of it. Which is sad, because he really does make for a great villain. He could easily be the Peter Pettigrew of his generation. But with all the anti-Ron stories out there, it wouldn't be as impactful as if it came out of the blue.

 

Peter Pettigrew was a great villain?

 

How could Ron be the Peter Pettigrew of his generation?

He would rather die for his friends than betray them.

From the Prisoner of Azkaban;

Ron, however, spoke to Black."If you want to kill Harry,you'll have to kill us too!" he said fiercely, though the effort of standing upright was draining him of still more color, and he swayed slightly as he spoke.

"Lie down," he said quietly to Ron. "You will damage that leg even more."

"Did you hear me?" Ron said weakly, though he was clinging painfully to Harry to stay upright. "You'll have to kill all three of us!"

 

I'll admit that this is the first scene that I usually associate with Ron. Given that everyone thought Sirius Black was Voldemort's right hand man and a dangerous psychotic dark-magic-wielding murderer, what Ron did took some serious guts.

It wouldn't have had the same impact if Harry did it, because that's the kind of shit that Harry does, but for Ron it was a CMoA.

 

Ron's character just...didn't go anywhere at best, degenerated at worst, as the series went along.

To be blunt, if Ron was killed off during the fifth book, at the DoM whilst taking a curse meant for Harry, it would have made an epic and emotional impact on the reader.

Instead, he just sort of muddles along in the last two books.

 

Has that been done? Where Ron dies at the MoM instead of/as well as Sirius?

 

I think Harry should've killed him when he returned in Deathly Hallows. I get teenage insecurity and immaturity, but abandoning your two best friends to fight and probably die, that's just unacceptable.

 

If the two lines in PoA are The Crowning Moment of Awesome for Ron, it pretty much tells everything about the character. I mean, Ron says the words and Sirius is all like "be silent stupid boy, you don't know what you are talking about", and that's the only contribution Ron has to the whole scene besides being told to get out of the way by Harry.

In the same scene we have Harry wrestling with Sirius, Hermione explaining her reasoning about Lupin being a werewolf, Lupin telling Harry more about his father than he learns anywhere else in the books and Sirius revealed to be a good guy. Ron's moment just doesn't shine very brightly through all that, especially when Harry and Hermione then go and do the final rescue mission by themselves.

 

Wow. Overreaction much?

 

No. You do not abandon your friends. Period. After all the shit Harry's done for him, saved his sister, his father, etc... It's just something I personally could not have forgiven if it had been me.

That said, it might just be me. xD

 

Not forgiving someone for that is one thing. I'd say that it says that the person is an asshole for not recognizing that humans make mistakes and is generally someone that doesn't make a good friend in the first place, but at least it's somewhat understandable.

Straight up killing somebody for doing that? That's overkill and says that the person is a psychopath who has no business being the protagonist of a young adult story. That's is the type of shit you see in bad indy!Harry fics that bash on Ron because... reasons?

If you think that doing what Ron did in DH is worthy of death... you have issues, man, and I'm not even joking.