It’s 2016 and I am still trying to figure out why in God’s name so many people hate Ronald Weasley.
Because just-
For a moment, just think.
Harry Potter and Ron Weasley both have what the other desperately wants and needs. It’s right there in the Mirror of Erised from the VERY FIRST BOOK.
Harry is desperate for a family, a loving, caring FAMILY.
Ron is desperate to just be freaking NOTICED for once.
Ron is a part of the most incredible loving family ever.
Harry is famous before he can walk and talk, and gets bowed to by strangers in a shop.
One of the things that makes their friendship so beautiful is this stupid IRONY, and how they are friends despite this.
But Harry cannot ever give Ron what Ron needs. All Harry can do is make the matter WORSE, however hard he tries to do the opposite, because he’s HARRY JAMES POTTER and any friend of his is not going to get a look in, no matter whether they deserve it.
And then we have Ron, who is able to provide for Harry the next best thing to a family of his own, a chance to become part of a family who will treat him as if the only difference between them and him is red hair and freckles.
And Ron knows that if he does this, if he gives Harry what he needs, it will make his own need EVEN MORE UNATTAINABLE.
Because the fact that he has so many brothers and sisters is what gives him that need in the first place.
And welcoming ANOTHER damn brother?
An extraordinarily FAMOUS extra brother?
Can we just consider how selfless an action that is?
And yet he still does it, he still writes to his mum for a Christmas present for Harry, he still invites him to his overcrowded, rickety house ever summer, he STILL flies a car to SURREY just to give his friend a family, the thing he so desperately needs.
Just-
How can you hate someone like that?
How?
Yes!!!
So now let’s talk about the event that most Ron-haters use against him, his leaving during the horcrux hunt.
Now, as much as Steve Kloves wants you to think that it was because of a warped love triangle, it was not.
Ron has shared his family with Harry, the most precious thing, the only thing, he has. This action has put them in even more jeopardy than they might have been in. Ron is sick with worry about them, but Harry seems to not share this concern (he does, but he is not showing it at the moment for a myriad of reasons).
To Ron this is the ultimate betrayal. Here is Harry, who risked his own life, and the lives of others, to save Sirius when he thought he was in danger, but now he is doing nothing to ensure the safety of their family. They are making no progress and Harry seems not to have no urgency to do so.
Does Ron have insecurities? Yes (who doesn’t? especially at 17?)! But he has always dealt with them far better than most; it is only under the influence of the darkest magic that he falters. But, despite it all, he returns. How can you not love someone who would do all that?
I LOVE MY SON
So people who are mad that Ron left… like, totally missed the point of that whole sequence? Like, the feeling of Ron leaving was not at all, “Ron, how dare you leave.” It was, “Ron, please come back.” The entire purpose of that whole business is to show how indispensable Ron is. To show that Ron is wrong to undervalue himself. Everything Harry and Hermione undertake in his absence is doomed. Without him they are brittle and prone to despair. When he comes back, hope comes back.
Depriving Harry of Ron is an incredibly successful attack by the Horcrux; he can’t be held responsible any more than Ginny is responsible for opening the Chamber of Secrets. But we hold him responsible, because he holds himself responsible, and sets out to atone.
Ron comes through like a Gryffindor in that entire business. Coming back and making amends is one of the bravest actions in the entire series.
Snape @ 37 years old: cringing 24/7 bc thanks to Potter getting his grubby hands on his old potions book he had to remember his dumbass teenage nickname with his own brain
anyway, harry potter Concept where down the road the boy who lived thing becomes less relevant and most people know him from the pictures of when he was a teenager, so by the time he’s middle aged all of harry’s interactions play out exactly like that tony hawk tweet
the whole yule ball thing in goblet of fire was so dumb and heteronormative
ok but real talk i am in full support of harry just asking ron to the dance with him and being each others “date” and having that be an ok thing instead of asking and then ignoring the poor patil twins who deserved better than that also i would have killed to see a yule ball scene where hermione’s talking with krum and turns around and sees her two best friends trying to do the tango (ron has a rose in his mouth and everything) and fucking tearing up the dance floor
there is absolutely no reason hogwarts couldn’t’ve been founded as a monastic school for the education of the clergy, with two houses for women and two for men, except that the hp fandom is full of bitter atheists and people who don’t know shit about paganism & religious history
@ofloveandmedea said: please talk about this headcanon it sounds Fascinating and you always have such good sources
here’s two things that i don’t think fanfic writers understand about pre-enlightenment europe:
first, there is zero evidence that paganism continued to exist as a practiced faith in western europe after about 900 CE. there is more evidence for demons. (reading on this, among other things) if you want to make the case that with the statute of secrecy, wizards erased all evidence of their existence as your justification for pagan wizards, that’s fine, but you’re then left with the question of where the stories about witches came from.
second, there was no way for a non-christian organization to function. period. it didn’t happen. jewish groups, especially pre-1492, were very small and very quiet; islamic groups kept out of christian europe; there were no other options. if you were a guild, if you were a school, if you were a group of any form, if you were a government–you were christian. it was explicit. there wasn’t even a conception of how to organize without invoking christianity.
so when, in or about 950, hogwarts was founded, it had to be founded in a christian framework. there’s a big, huge, gigantic problem though: in 950, education happened one-on-one, through tutors or apprenticeships. the only, only institution educating in a group format was the church.
why? because clergy came from all classes, because clergy were required to be (at least partially) literate, and because the majority of the population (in some places and eras, from any demographic) was not literate. religious institutions were the only places collecting significant numbers of children and giving them an education.
there were two forms of this: cathedral schools, which produced priests, and monastic schools, which produced monks and nuns. (some reading)
couple of reasons why hogwarts would be monastic and not a cathedral:
the boring, the reasonable, hogwarts isn’t anywhere near anything that would be a cathedral, but monasteries were all over the place and the more remote, the better
priests were all male, which makes two of the founders difficult to explain
scotland was more connected to the irish monastic form of christianity than the mainland european bishop focused christianity
so. if you’re going to create a school in 950 in scotland that accepts students from all backgrounds with the goal of educating them, the most reasonable framework for this is the monastic school.
(monastic schools were also notoriously apolitical, which would go a long way to explaining some things in the books…)
but wait! you say. what about christianity and magic?
i’m so glad you asked. medieval catholicism didn’t actually have a problem with harry potter magic, as long as it was dressed up in the appropriate forms.
quote from holy feast and holy fast by caroline walker bynum:
By 1500, indeed, the model of the female saint, expressed both in popular veneration and in official canonizations, was in many ways the mirror image of society’s notion of the witch. Each was thought to be possessed, whether by God or by Satan; each seemed able to read the minds and hearts of others with uncanny shrewdness; each was suspected of flying through the air, whether in saintly levitation or biolocation, or in a witches’ Sabbath.
in other words, it’s not the things that people do that make them witches: it’s their relationship (or not) to God and the Church. things that we today would call magic–healing people by touching them, or saying incantations; turning one bread into many; transporting from place to place–all of these turn up in hagiographies of saints as miracles that they performed.
(complicating matters is that they did have a conception between good and bad witches, it’s just that all were damned. so you have good witches, who are doing good things, and bad witches, who are doing bad things, and saints, who are doing good things, and the quality of the thing…well it does matter, but it matters less than the position of the person doing it)
additionally, throughout the middle ages, you see records of people definitely doing magic which is contemporaneously acknowledged as magic who are…not getting burned as witches. the big easy example here is court alchemists & astrologers, who were all over the place telling the future and/or making things blow up and only really getting into trouble when their patrons did. (some reading)
there were also tumblr’s favorite women, the herbalist or local midwife (or, equally common, the wealthy widow). the line between “medicine” and “magic” was not all that well formed: if you knew that certain herbs with certain prayers would keep someone alive, who was to say that it was the herbs vs the prayers that did the heavy lifting? later there was a clear(er) distinction, but even then, the association of midwifery with witchcraft is not new and it is not unfounded. (more reading)
so there’s a deep, deep split here. because on the one hand, yes, people were (irregularly, but routinely) tortured and (less commonly) executed for witchcraft (under a variety of names). but on the other hand, people were socially rewarded for practicing magic within accepted forms, and while sometimes this was because the source of the magic was seen as different, sometimes it was not.
in this context, then, in this understanding that some people could (and did) work magic without being evil, in this society where education was the province of a very, very select group of people who were also (what a coincidence!) more likely to be workers of magic, in this situation that j.k. rowling seems to have absolutely no idea of–
hogwarts was a monastic school to produce good catholic magical monks and nuns.
(some more readings i didn’t have an excuse to share earlier: link (on merlin), link (on anglo-saxons), link (on things witches did), link (on what the witch hunters thought they were hunting and why)
I am a medievalist and damn it I am totally here for this headcanon because as stated above, a completely pagan school and society just doesn’t make sense in the medieval world, especially as magic was largely accepted during the middle ages to the point that scholastic magic was a big thing and often performed by monks (as they were the ones with an education).
I would fight so hard for a Pagan Hogwarts… if there were any indication in canon that it could ever have existed. Instead, we’re left with the vague impression that Hogwarts has always been quasi-atheistic, because it’s founded by wizards who “know the truth” about magic and that prayers, of course, don’t do anything unless they happen to be spells.
A monastic order makes much, much more sense than “secular apprenticing institution for a guild that can’t say its name in public in most places.” (B’sides, guilds had strong ties to the church. They usually had a patron saint, and a chapel at the guild-hall, and if they looked like they were getting too powerful, the church would take action to limit that.)
As mentioned, the church was EVERYWHERE and into EVERYTHING. There was no aspect of government and no community organizations that did not have ties to the church. (Think of it as similar to the modern internet… sure there, are people with only a little connection, but anyone with no connection at all is a bit weird, and you certainly can’t operate a business like that, other than a very tiny, very locals-only shop.)
I would love a Pagan Hogwarts. I cannot believe it existed; Hogwarts was established in a time and place where the Catholic church was the absolutely unifying meme for humanity.
And then The Reformation comes in and mucks everything up. What happens to Hogwarts when Scotland goes Presbyterian? That would have been (pardon the pun) an ungodly mess.
My favorite thing ever is how Ron just sent Charlie a random letter like “hey yo there’s an illegal dragon at hogwarts, could you come and smuggle it out of here, please?” and Charlie was just like “yeah sure, I’ll trespass into the castle and steal a dangerous magical creature, of course, lemme just hit up my friends”
It’s better if you imagine Charlie and co as a group of Grad Students trying to avoid their other responsibilities.
Charlie is drunkenly revising the third draft of his thesis on proper care and feeding of greenhorns when his family owl slams into the window.
Three of his friends jump and look around. Glinda doesn’t raise her head from her folded arms; only groans, “Is that Baines coming to do me in?”
Charlie totters to the window and fetches Errol from the window pane. “No such luck,” he says. “You’re still going to have to take the exam.” After some consideration, Charlie lays him on a clear patch of floor to recover. “Do owls take firewhiskey?” he asks the room at large.
“It’s not fair,” Glinda wails into the tabletop. “I swear he didn’t say anything about Bridgewort’s handling practices when we did the review in class.”
“Oh, Merlin,” says Ali, freezing over their notes like a Medusa wyvern had bitten them. “Oh, Merlin’s sweet saggy socks. Is he covering Bridgewort?”
“That’s what he said when I went to his office hours.” Glinda sits up. “You know his lapdragon singed my new sweater?!”
Charlie decides not to give Errol a nip of whiskey. Flying under the influence is really not done. He unties the letter from Errol’s leg. Ron’s childish spiky handwriting spells out Charlie’s name on the front. Inside is a hastily scrawled message.
“Yes, we know it ruined your sweater,” snaps Ysabelle. “You told us twenty times. Why didn’t you tell us Baines told you we’re going to be tested on Bridgewort?”
“I meant to,” says Glinda. “Sorry.” She flicks her pile of notes. “I was lost in the miasma of gloom and desperation.”
Ali puts their head back and groans. “I’m gonna die. I’m gonna say ‘fuck it’ and just fucking walk into a dragon’s mouth so I don’t have to do this.”
“Hey,” says Charlie. They don’t hear him.
“How much is this worth again?” Glinda asks her bottle of butterbeer.
“Twenty-five percent,” Ali and Ysabelle chorus. Ysabelle adds, “and the thesis is fifty percent of our total grade.”
“Hey!” Charlie repeats. They look at him. He waves Ron’s letter. “My littlest brother at Hogwarts has an illegal dragon he needs to get off campus. Anybody up for a midnight flight?”
Ali slams their hands down on the table and stands up. “Fuck yes,” they say decisively. “Maybe I’ll fly into the Whomping Willow and die a quick death.”
I took my meds too close to bedtime again and I need you all to know the dream I had last night involved Robin Williams becoming the new Defense Against The Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts. Not, a character portrayed by Robin Williams, just Robin Williams as himself running around Hogwarts doing wandless magic and being as loud and big as possible because and I quote before I forget:
“Listen, children, I’m not saying all this bad shit that is happening isn’t scary and you shouldn’t be concerned–because you should!–but I’m telling you this now for free. Life is a boggart, it’s the biggest boggart of them all. You never know what it’s going to look like one moment to the next. And sometimes you just gotta laugh. It’s okay to laugh. It’s part of the grieving process. You need to grieve before you can heal. But it’s okay to laugh while you’re doing it.”
I didn’t wake up right after that, some more stuff happened in a hazy sort of way as the dream began to dissolve into conciousness, but I remember him yelling Expecto Patronum as he punched a Death Eater in the face. Because sometimes, evidently, you have to make your own happy memories.
I think Robin Williams literally visited you in your sleep from the beyond in order to pass this message on to the world.
Loki is the Philosopher King 