this passage got me over-analyzing on main again, lol. this part right here, in the GOF, is pure ginny and it really kinda cements why i don't get HBP ginny (the book). because this ginny and the ginny we get from POA all the way to OOTP are the same ginny: she's concerned for the safety of others, fiercely loyal, occasionally bashful but also bold, kind of an outcast and otherwise ordinary.
first of all, i never had a problem with quidditch-lover ginny. if anything, i loved the idea of her becoming bold as a response to being (basically) raised by fred, george, ron and bill and pursuing quidditch in spite of them. before HBP, we see her stand up to ron and even harry. we know she's used to standing up for others especially when it comes to her brothers.
but then in HBP, all of a sudden, we get this super popular, super beautiful, snarky, petty girl that just seems out of left-field. the book relies more on telling us that ginny is all these things instead of showing us. we hear slytherins talk about how good looking she is, but harry himself at the height of his attraction to her never really describes her looks as much of anything but "blazing." there's so many other words he uses to describe characters looks, whether he finds them attractive or not (he describes cho's freckles and ponytail), but there's so little for ginny. but that's minor.
the big problem here is that we're supposed to believe ginny is suddenly popular because . . . she is. she makes mean spirited jokes and hexes people that merely irritate her. not being a pushover is one thing. being that petty is another.
this behaviour isn't a problem for me because i think ginny should be perfect and ordinary and a good girl, but because there's very little character development to warrant any of these changes, and what we know of her in other books is almost completely abandoned for hinny endgame.
and the best example i can use is tom riddle's diary.
in CoS (one of my top three, personally), we have a ginny who is responsible for the near-deaths of at least three students and then herself. so two important things to keep in mind is:
- She felt like an outcast and lonely her first year and so turned to riddle's diary for solace.
- She probably got a bad rep for nearly killing all those students, which couldn't have been easy for her (remember how strongly the kids reacted when they merely suspected harry).
- In OOTP, she felt traumatized about her experience in the chamber.
In book 5, we know that she felt some kinship with luna, even after initially calling her "loony" and regretting it, and it's likely because she knows what it's like to feel like an outcast. she didn't have a very good first year and we barely read about what she had to endure as a result of her actions in her second and third year (bc pov harry literally doesn't care until book 6), and she's also the only girl in her family who must stick up for herself and her own interests.
so it's disarming to see ginny suddenly popular in book 6, very mean-spirited and thoroughly unfunny, and so disloyal to her brother that she goes out of her way to publicly humiliate him. ginny may have fought many times with ron and the twins, but her defining trait has always been loyalty. not just to harry, but her friends and family.
furthermore, HPB ginny is VERY liberal with her hexes and jinxes. she even goes as far as to defend harry's use of sectumsempra against hermione! now one can say this is because of her loyalty to harry, and you'd almost have me there! but it's still quite a ways away from GOF ginny who stood up to ron and harry making fun of girls and literally tag-teamed with hermione in calling them out. ginny was loyal, but she usually stood up to her friends and family when they did something wrong because she had a soft-spot for the downtrodden.
and i speak of the curses because if ginny didn't have to be shoe-horned into a relationship with harry in HPB so that harry got Barrows citizenship, her character would have been grounded in the horrors she faced in CoS--meaning that she felt regret for all the trauma she caused others. or we could all just assume that she didn't ever address it, making her a profoundly sociopathic character. either she was badly written in HBP or just a terrible person all along.
i prefer to go with the first one.
i think ginny was terrified of what she did under the possession of tom riddle, and it's mentioned in OOTP that it traumatized her. why wouldn't she be afraid of becoming vindictive and hurting people? why would she all of a sudden become very liberal and nonchalant about performing powerful and painful hexes on people who simply annoyed her? why would she be barrelling into players during quidditch matches when she, at heart, values fairness and others well-being? why wouldn't she be scared, like harry is when he starts sharing voldemort's visions, of herself and hurting the ones she loves? wouldn't that have been a better basis for their eventual romance?
it annoys me that JK Rowling says that the reason ginny is harry's soulmate is because of their strength and passion rather than their shared care for the marginalized and their sensitivity toward the people they love. because the ginny that shared that with harry is gone in the book where she has to get with him.
and while i know the books aren't written to be romantic or focus on any romances, the fact remains that in stories, if anything is to be believed, it must be well-established, and hinny's romance isn't.
the failure of the relationship isn't that it isn't romantic, but that it isn't believable in the first place based on what we know of the characters. because when ginny was her true self, harry didn't notice her. and when ginny was with harry, she wasn't herself.
maybe what's romantic about it is it's practically a greek tragedy in that sense.
