And why it was a terrible ship.

I can't seem to find it now, anyone remember where it was?

 

I think the two main ones that I've read are this one focusing on Harry's specific interactions from Books 1-5 and how Hermione is a mother figure(also includes why Ron is better for her):
http://www.sugarquill.net/index.php?action=goodshiprh&st=angua

And this one which points to Harry's appreciation of humor and why Ginny fulfills this better:
http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/features/essays/issue2/whyharrypickedginny/

 

Thanks for the comprehensive response!

 

Those Essays were a good read. I never liked Hermione, seeing it all put together like this opened my eyes. Weirdly cathartic: nine years after the last book came out and disliking Harry/Ginny for so long i feel like i have an understanding of what some people see in the ship now.

 

I've always been on the HP/LL ship, but Harry and Ginny do have a certain chemistry.

 

Yeah, I think the only real problem with Harry and Ginny as a couple was that Rowling just wasn't very good at writing teenage romance when she did Half-Blood Prince, resulting in Harry's Chest Monster rather than more natural growth and development.

And yeah, Harry and Luna had a pretty good dynamic throughout the books. Obviously nothing romantic, but he seems to understand her oddness and find it endearing. There are worse foundations to build off of.

 

My thoughts on HP shipping are this - it's not the main focus of the books, so of course we're not going to get a ton of hints/development for it. Harry has other things going on, like that Voldemort guy, so the plot isn't about 'who is Harry going to date' and more 'how is Harry going to deal with (Snape/Quirrel/the Chamber/Sirius/Triwizard...). I'm firmly in the OBHWF camp, but I can certainly see the appeal of HP/LL or possibly HP/NT.

 

Personally, I don't think Hermione was good fit for either of her two male friends. Any relationship between either her and Ron or her and Harry would likely end poorly. It's not even that I dislike her personally, there's just very low compatibility between the three on a romantic level.
Ron/Hermione seems like it would end in an extremely protracted divorce after irreconcilable differences, stemming from an argument that neither of the two can even remember. Harry/Hermione mainly seems like Harry would let Hermione boss him around and wind up being fairly miserable, but not being willing to speak up out of fear of risking his relationship. Harry/Ginny is problematic for its own reasons, mainly that Ginny is a very poorly developed character in the later books.

I've always preferred HP/LL but unfortunately in fanfic in recent times this seems to only happen in two circumstances.

Option 1: The author decides they want to have a ton of favorites and writes a three way "lunar harmony" (this is an awful, awful phrase for so many reasons) story of HP/HG/LL. This frequently uses the cliche of soul bonds to hand wave away the objections of HG to such an unusual relationship (the other two could probably go for it easily, but Hermione seems unlikely to actually go along with a polyamorous relationship).

Option 2: The author decides to bash the shit out of Hermione in order to justify Harry picking another girl instead of her. Frequently in these stories Luna becomes little more than a poorly written OC with all sorts of magical gifts who mainly exists as a mouth piece to bash Hermione for some reason.

I would love to see the essays cited earlier updated for after the DH (the one focusing on the flaws of Harry/Hermione is pre-HBP).

 

Option 1: Vomit.

Option 2: I personally have not encountered this. Then again, I set my filter to only look for fics over 40k words, and this kind of writing sounds like it would be abandoned wayyy before. Do you have a link to such a fic?

 

I have a few. They're never well written. I never managed to make it past 15k words into it, but this is the classic example of it that I recalled:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3226536/1/The-Blood-Tipped-Feather
(277k thousand words)

This fic too : https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11773199/1/Can-t-Rely-on-Authority

(These are both terrible, please don't actually read them. I'll read far further into HP/LL fics than is ever justified).


There are a smattering of HP/LL that focus more on her as a seer, but that's not really the canon version of Luna (though they are a guilty pleasure of mine). The vast, vast majority of HP/LL fics involve Hermione for some weird reason.

 

The idea that Harry would allow Hermione to boss him around is ridiculous and very much against what is seen in the books.

Throughout the entire series he has ignored her, disregarded her opinions, and even voiced his disagreement.

 

Yeah, I think a story trying to explain that Luna's not really weird after all ruins the entire appeal of her character in the first place.

 

I adore HP/LL and i've always been drawn to it. It's been quite a while since I've read the books or seen the films but from what I remember I've always felt that they had a silent understanding of each other in canon. Harry accepts Luna for all she is and Luna see's Harry as just Harry. I think they have a far better foundation for a relationship than Ginny and Harry.

 

I think if you want to write out a H/Hr you have to start it from the ground up and develop the characters in their own specific ways in order to keep them close to the !canon material but still fundamentally different in many ways. Starting a fic in the middle of their schooling or after the 5th year, you either have to state that the circumstances of the stories are different or your entire story can fall apart because it's being grown out of the already established !canon.

H/Hr fics can work, but it has to start organically and not play off of the original material at all basically.

 

They definitely don't have any romantic chemistry in the books, which leaves it all on the author to make it happen.

Granted, when your characters are hormonal teens the writer can take a few shortcuts for pairing characters up, but that doesn't actually do much to establish a full relationship. If physical attraction was the only thing needed for a relationship to work, romance would be much less complicated.

 

Very true and as such, many fics fall flat just based on that. I have had the honor of reading quite a few good ones that let it build naturally and with something other than hormones driving it. Not sure if I'm allowed to mention them as they pertain to other sites, so please correct me if I'm in the wrong here, but Searching for the Power does this relatively well, though it does begin to fall into the hormonal category for some of the relationships formed with Harry. The Curse's Cure does this well also but banks on many things taking place in an AU that could only happen in the AU as it deviated from the canon.

As for the presence in the books of romantic chemistry, they absolutely don't, though some writers, such as myself, knew it was originally her plan to have Harry and Hermione together and have ran with it. Though to save myself on this one, I'm building it all from the ground up.

 

To be honest, I see most of JKR's more recent (after 2008, certainly) public declarations to be a form of acting out, in an attempt to stay relevant within the public sphere.

 

Sounds like every other relationship on the planet to me.

As for if JK had HP/HG planned or HP/GW: I doubt even she knew at the time. They were eleven and I doubt at that point she had every detail of the books planned out.

But by GOF she was definitely set on RW/HG. I don't think she even had HP/GW planned until HBP but I think she was trying to choose between Ginny and Luna as evidenced by her choice to send them both with Harry to the DOM at the end of OOTP.

Damn that was a lot of acronyms.

As for Hary and Hermione...I know DLP hates this topic so I'll be brief. It's not that Hermione was the best person for Harry, it's just that she seemed to be the least bad.

 

Have to agree with the general analysis. I don't think anyone's going to dispute that JKR did a lot of writing by the seat of her pants with the books, given how many plot holes and general story oddities crop up if you ask why characters in the early books didn't do something later books established was possible.

So yeah, in the realm of shipping I can certainly buy that at some point early on she was considering Harry/Hermoine. After all, they're the male and female leads, so it's a fairly common default assumption. That said, by the time they were old enough for romance to actually figure into the story (GoF) she was clearly settling on Ron/Hermoine and setting that pairing up, while not doing so for Harry/Hermoine.

By the same token, I'd say it's pretty clear she didn't 100% settle on Harry/Ginny until HBP. Harry's Chest Monster and characters stopping every hundred pages or so to randomly talk about how beautiful and awesome Ginny was definitely feels like Rowling was scrambling to lay all the groundwork for her final pairing.