I think it could work once they were both older, giving Harry time to live a little, and her to... relax a bit?

If you started at a point when they were both 25 or so you could keep existing cannon. Enough time has passed for feeling to change/mature.

 

And just like that, the last of my innocent/childish thoughts of Harry and Hermione getting together die. A moment of silence, please...

Moment over.

It's such a wonderful thing to see how skewered someone's memories can become just by reading fanfiction. I had forgotten how much an idiot Harry and Hermione could be at times. I really wish the story had been told from different point of views now, because reading this just gave me a bad taste in my mouth about how true all of this is.

I still love the Harry Potter series, of course, but looking at this makes me wonder just how much of an idiot I was as a teenager and I really need to go back and look at those books. I must thank the movies cause it makes it seem like everything just sort of goes with all of their relationships. They still have flaws of course, but it is way easier to look them away when you see it on the big screen.

I really need to stop reading Harry Potter fanfiction and then stumbling across things like this. Whenever I find things like this and I remember the things that I have forgot about series really makes me glad that the focus was never on their romantic relationships, because they would be so broken and I would hope to the Ruinous Powers that they end up with various different people.

 

I would also add that interactions between these two were not done well. Interactions are obviously the most important part of romance, since when people want romance they basically want two people to interact. Harry & Ginny’s problem is that firstly there was not many interactions between them and secondly, the few scenes that we got were bland and forgettable. While I am not a fan of Harry & Hermione, it is no wonder to me that plenty of people got pissed off and kept preferring Harry with Hermione, who has more interactions with Harry than any other girl.

 

Agreed—what scenes we had with them didn't really show much in the way of chemistry and relationship development. Which would've been fine if it was a teenage fling, but that means that at best their relationship gets most of its growth off-screen, which is far from ideal.

Harry and Hermoine might not have had romantic chemistry, but their relationship did have incredible depth. For that matter, Harry and Luna had very natural chemistry, even if there was never any romance in canon. I think part of why Ginny got so much character shilling in HBP was to try to make up for all the development between them that we missed out on in earlier books ... which didn't exactly work.

 

On top of what's been said already, JKR didn't really show any interest in writing Harry and Ginny together - they had their moment after she won the Quidditch Cup, and then they're yanked apart again by Harry's detentions and Ginny's exams, and then the following year she doesn't accompany him on his Horcrux quest. Ginny was always more of the finish line for Harry then someone who would be with him on the journey itself, which was Hermione's role. That doesn't make Hermione romance material necessarily, but she and Harry undeniably have a relationship, just a platonic one.

 

It's because Hermione is JK Rowling's self-insert, and like most self-insert's they tend to hog all of the glory.

 

This runs counter to pretty much everything JKR has had to say on the subject since the beginning... not to mention contrary to what a lot of writers will tell you about the writing process.

JKR has a truckload of notebooks full of information about the plot and characters, most of which we'll never see. Early on, she talked about Dean's backstory and how she had to cut it from the books because there was just no room. She knew a lot of the main story right from the beginning, it was just the details that got changed or made up along the way (and caused plot-holes). As far as she was concerned, H/G and R/HR were locks from the start, and it was only after the books were finished that she started thinking maybe she should have gone the H/Hr route.

Whether Harry lived or died when Voldemort was defeated was more up in the air than the pairings.

You may or may not have been around for the "Delusional" controversy, but the interview that started said controversy took place right before HBP came out. Rowling made it clear then that she was under the impression she had made it obvious what the pairings would be from the start.

From the start. Especially H/G.

This is patently ridiculous; and I mean that in the original sense of the word: Worthy of ridicule. I suppose she was considering Neville for Harry, too, then? He went to the DOM, as well.

Anyway, refer to the statement above about controversy: H/G was her plan from the beginning.

JKR's writing isn't perfect (especially where romance is concerned), but she sure as hell isn't going at it like a bad fan fic writer*, with a plot so flimsy and mutable that she can run a poll for the pairings and let the readers decide, halfway through the story. Luna's even less of a blip on the radar, in the books, than Ginny. Next you'll be saying Daphne was in the running.

No, JKR had the main pairings decided before the first book was ever published. This just makes it a bigger shame that Harry and Ginny's relationship wasn't illustrated better in the series, given that she had it locked in from the start; she had seven books to do it and yet it's barely there, except to essay writers examining the series under a microscope for information.

That, at least, makes some sense.

Because a fan wrote an essay? Considering no less a source than JKR, herself, later said that maybe she should have gone with H/Hr, I think it's safe to say it doesn't really matter. Dream what you want to dream and write what you want to write. Harry and Ginny hooked up in the books and, yes, that decision was made very early on in the writing process, but if a few things had changed it could have easily gone the other way... and been just as poorly conveyed, and then people would have been clamoring for Harry/Myrtle, instead.

*You know, like Jack Thorne and John Tiffany.

 

Harry and Hermione would be interesting as a couple, in their later years. But what usually makes these stories fail is that the author is too lazy to write from the ground up.

Instead it's always "I was secretly in love with you" or "I loved you, but I didn't know it".

Wouldn't be nice to read a Harry/Hermione story where they are not, and have never been, in love with each other but their age and life experiences have changed things?

Considering that Harry and Hermione work so closely together, and their spouses work in jobs that have nothing to do with politics, I'd imagine that Harry and Hermione would have something in common that could bring them together.

Unlike A Sister is the only story, along with Folie A Deux, that really does this.

 

The first Essay is, of course, assuming that the narrator's description is Harry's description of events. When in reality, we do get Harry's internal dialogue as separate from the narrator's dialogue, multiple times. Like I say all the time with this story, she built a good world, great even. But the dialogue is anything but organic, and the feeling of the characters as well as the relationships feel the same. But, I feel that this is more on the fault of JKR's world view, rather than her actual writing prowess. She, herself constantly views the world in Black and White, even if you don't notice it. Her twitter clearly shows it (constant insults on a certain political candidate, completely leftist POV despite being a practising catholic, and her insistence that love conquers all, and her insistence that hard work is the least important quality a person can have (think of Hufflepuff, the house of hard workers, also considered the house of "duffers")).

 

Ha. Not planned? We knew H/G was going to happen from the moment that Ginny stuck her elbow in the butter dish. JKR practically had a glowing neon sign behind Ginny spelling out 'UNFORTUNATELY, THIS IS INEVITABLE'.

I found the entire slew of plot romantic plot lines irritating. I understand their function; the characters were growing up and starting to explore their sexuality. But it was clumsy and took valuable page time away from more interesting things (consider, for example, the amount of time spent on paragraphs that involve the word 'snogging' and time spent on Snape as DADA professor, something that should have been WAY more consequential), and poorly written.

 

Well... I don't think she ever said this directly. IIRC, she had Ron say it.