Death of/to the Author: Nine and Three Quarter Thoughts on the JK Rowling Shitstorm

A quick disclaimer here: I know most of you have lives.  I know most of you don't care.  I know the extent to which this story has been reported as 'news' is the most trifling bollocks ever.  However, I feel something along the lines of "oh god hold me my world is crumbling".

For those of you who don't have Harry Potter as a Google Alert (like what are you, some kind of nerd) the furore is thus: Emma Watson has guest edited Wonderland magazine and interviewed J.K. Rowling*.  Quel horror, you gasp in sarcastic French.  Wait a minute, judgey, because there's more.  A sneak preview of this interview has been splashing about all over the shop because in it - buckle up - JKR says she should never have put Hermione and Ron together as a couple, apparently also stating Hermione should have ended up with Harry instead. (I have marked the crazy parts in italics for your convenience.)

Naturally, I have some thoughts.

1) UGH FUCK YOUUUUUUUU JK ROWLING LIKE WHAT DO YOU KNOW YOU ONLY WROTE THE BOOKS - oh my god, down Fifteen Year Old Me, get down - WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO RUIN MY LIIIIIIIIFE - like seriously shut the fuck up, you have an undergrad degree, you are doing a masters - IT'S SO UNFAIR - GET BACK IN THE BOX.

2) Rowling states that she wrote the relationship as a form of "wish fulfilment fantasy"and "for reasons that have very little to do with literature".  Rowling has perhaps revealed more about herself than she anticipated here, given that she has previously stated how much she identifies with Hermione, for I look askance at the woman who looks at the sulky, immature, petty, ginger sidekick and goes "sigh I guess that was just wish fulfilment" and then at the dark, brooding, angsty hero and goes "yeah, much more realistic".** But then I shrug because, whatever, I guess it takes all sorts to make a world.  However, if literally all that is going on here is that JKR's tastes have changed in the last seven years and she no longer craves the flesh of red-haired men, then bad form, madam, that is not worth my heartbreak.

3) Buried within this flippancy is a sort of serious point: I bet a sizeable chunk of the female readership identified with Hermione.  I did.  I was a school girl and I liked books and I had bad hair and I located my self-worth in my intelligence and not my terminally disappointing appearance so I obviously did.   This is important for two reasons: a) most of the time, fans who didn't want Hermione to end up with Ron meant "I don't want to end up with Ron" and b) most of those fans didn't want to end up with Ron because he was (apparently) stupid and poor. (What I am giving you here is a précis of the internet in 2006.) No book should have a duty to send a message of any kind, but in a series that was all about fighting arbitrary elitism, I find the union of muggle-born go-getter Granger and pure blood dependable Weasley much more positive than heroine-marries-lost-prince-of-fantasy-kingdom.  And by the way, self-insertion is a completely legitimate teenage response to fiction (hello Twilight) because it helps you figure out how you feel about the world.  Odds on, those Harry/Hermione shippers*** will go on to have a lifetime of polite, slightly boring relationships where they die a little inside each day and the Ron/Hermione shippers will have sparky, challenging, often difficult but also passionate relationships.  (Look, I never said I wasn't biased.)

4) Having said that, I cannot actually find a quotation suggesting that JK thinks she should have hooked up Harry and Hermione instead but since that's the headline everyone is leading with, I am forced to accept it due to the infallible integrity of the press (oh, just make up your own punchline).  This is what I find most upsetting (if you are not on board with me using the word 'upsetting' to legitimately describe my feelings towards a fictional relationship between fictional people, I feel this blog is not for you).  After calming down from my initial shuddering nausea, I was able to hear the small voice in my head saying, "Do you really mind if Rowling thinks Ron and Hermione shouldn't have ended up together? Maybe she just means they probably realistically wouldn't have got married and Christ knows, we all regret the Epilogue." Which, actually, is fair enough.  I'm not a huge fan of the Young Adult Fantasy trope of meeting your spouse at the age of twelve or whatever, and it's particularly egregious in the Harry Potter series.  There are so many teenage marriages I wouldn't be surprised if the next 'revelation' is that Hogwarts is located somewhere in the Bible Belt.  Also I hear if you don't get hitched literally right on graduation day you immediately become a spinster and have to live with Mrs Figg in a state of quasi-Sapphic tension.

5) Anyway, what I'm saying is that there was a part of me that was always expecting Hermione to pack up her bags at the end of the series and go and study History or Law at Oxbridge because settling for wizard A Levels wouldn't be nearly enough of a challenge.  (And how much do you want to read the spin-off series 'Hermione Granger and the Cambridge Law Degree'? She battles Finals.)  And maybe while she's there she meets a nice muggle boy and they have two children, and one is magic and one isn't but they are both excellent at referencing and their footnotes are divine.  What I don't buy is that if you take Ron out of the picture then there is literally only one other option for Hermione, and that is Harry "Stop Trying To Help Me Hermione Oh No Wait I Really Need You To Help Me" Potter.  Harry, who always complained about Hermione being "shrill" and "bossy" and "dull as shit to hang out with" (one of these quotes is not real).  Who, every time he was forced to spend time alone with her, spent the whole time going WHERE IS MY MANLY MAN FRIEND RON OH I WISH RON WERE HERE I LANGUISH I PINE.  Like, if we're rewriting history here, maybe it's Harry/Ron we should be focussing on, if you know what I'm saying.  And I think you do.

6) Actually I could probably get my head around Hermione ending up with literally almost any other character in the series.  Any of the other Weasley children, including Ginny.  Pansy Parkinson.  Ernie Macmillan. Mad-Eye Moody, for frick's sake (it would be like Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch).**** Just... not Harry.   From the ages of seven to seventeen I enjoyed Harry and Hermione's friendship immensely, and I enjoyed it all the more because it was safe and loving and uncomplicated and without bullshit, and because it was different to the usual female-lead-hooks-up-with-male-lead-and-sometimes-there's-some-other-comic-relief-guy trope.  Which is something that His Dark Materials (a far superior series in many respects) did not do, to my eleven-year-old chagrin.  I don't know who Ron would end up with though.  Oh wait.  I forgot.  Harry.

7) On that note, let us face it, there are other relationships we could be regretting in the series.  If Rowling really wants to revisit the past then let's embrace this opportunity to find out what in the holy fuck was Harry and Ginny about? She pretty much decided to marry him the first time she saw him when she was a child.  She wanted to be a child bride.  Run, Harry, run.  Then come back and try to explain to me how vaguely Oedipal thoughts about sunlight glinting off red hair constitutes the basis for a marriage.  And let's not even start on Remus "Totally Heterosexual" Lupin, shall we?  (Except to say Professor Lupin, teach me about grindylows, I will be your best student ever, you patchwork, chocolate-eating hero.) All this is ironic because, of course, Ron and Hermione's relationship does work and, as someone who has never quite given up on the tactic of saying "I find your arguments unconvincing and you smell" instead of "I fancy you", I also always found it to be by far the most realistic. (Having said that, there is no greater turn-off than a poorly conceived argument.  I have standards.) It's mostly comprised of huffy silences and irritable jealousy, which is exactly how polite British teenagers who are attracted to each other behave, with the occasional outburst of sniping and just a few moments that, though simple, are unbelievably tender.  Brainy, overly intense self-starter with a propensity towards merciless observation of the rules seeks combative, insecure but quietly selfless funny man for argumentative but mutually supportive relationship.  It doesn't have to work, but you know that it really really does.

(I'll leave it there because Fifteen Year Old Me is clamouring for me to write another four pages about how Hermione constantly expects more of Ron than anyone else does, and how Ron makes Hermione laugh even when she's at her most disapproving, and how Hermione goes pink around him like a million times and how Ron's compliments are always a bit adorably too extravagant and also how Harry and Luna Lovegood were meant to be together in a holy union of weirdo outsiderdom and caps lock rage and - BACK. IN. THE. BOX.)

8) I've see a quite a few comments on various articles talking about Rowling's 'right' to say what she said.  Let's be clear: of course J.K. Rowling has the right to say she would do some things differently if she could.  She wrote the series, I think she is allowed.  As a writer, it would be strange if she hadn't developed in the intervening years.  Even Shakespeare re-wrote King Lear, y'know? Dickens gave Great Expectations a whole new (sappier but better written) ending.  Rowling is invested in her work as  - I'm gonna say it - an artist, and I'm sure wanted to discuss her writing as an artist in that magazine interview.  BUT (because you knew it was coming), should she have?  I spent most of the Literary Theory sections of my degree drawing cartoons of Tony Harrison from The Mighty Boosh but I'm pretty sure some guy (was it Derrida? It's usually Derrida) said that once you put your work out there you cease to have agency over it.  It exists only in the minds of your readership.  The author ceases to have a say.  In other words, sorry JKR but you wrote Ron/Hermione so shut up and deal.  But that doesn't take into account the relationship Rowling has always had with her readers, which is to say she's active, she engages, and it's not the first time she's revealed information about the world of the series after the fact.  She knows that she can't comment on any part of the books without it having significance to the readership (in the interview she says she can "hear the rage and fury") - in the wake of 'Dumbledore is gay', Pottermore and the attendant books, Rowling has a track record of expanding her universe in interviews and more, building herself up as the divine (and perhaps only) authority on the series, and ultimately that just picks the pocket of the reader's own imagination.  So, knowing that anything she said about the series would have its own kind of truth to it, and knowing how loved her characters and their relationships are, I think yeah, it was a bit of a dick move.

9) And that's the big takeaway from all of this.  The word to describe the series that has come up most frequently in all the articles I've read is "beloved".  Harry Potter mattered to a hell of a lot of kids (and continues to matter to a hell of a lot of young adults).  I fell in love with those books not because they are perfect (spoilers: they are not) but because my reading experience of them was treasured and brilliant and intense.  I fell in love with them as they were, and though I may have grumbled about things here and there, it was with the affection that one uses to complain about a sibling.  I never really wished anything to be different - even the things I would have changed were part of my deeply unique relationship with the series.  For the same reason that I never wanted to see it on film, I don't want that world to shift.  And if Rowling says it, some part of me will take it as gospel, and it will change the characters and relationships I grew up with.  So I hope Rowling does not, in future, choose to share her doubts with us - or at least phrases them in a more equivocal way.  I hope she acknowledges that, whether she meant to or not, she has created something that has a life of its own, that means a lot to its readers, that was always so much more than a franchise, and that, in all its imperfection, is perfect to me, and to so many others.  And that, if you're looking for tips, Jo, is true love.


Three Quarters)
*I am lucky Internal Feminist Me has powerful slapping hands to beat down Jealous Bitch Me who frequently screams "GODDAMMIT WATSON GIVE ME BACK MY LIFE".
**Ron is one of my favourite characters, FYI.  Don't be all up in my grill.  I'm just saying it's whack, is all.
***Shipper = internet slang for a fan who is a proponent of two characters entering into a sexual or romantic relationship (the internet is clever this way).  Can also be used as a verb, as in "I kind of ship the Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor but don't tell anyone because I think that might technically be either incest or masturbation". Or "I very much ship Me/Ice Cream." Use it in a sentence today.  It'll make you feel better.
****I originally put a whole spiel here about how Dorothea and Casaubon's relationship plays out and then I realised that was major spoilers for Middlemarch, so if you have read it then high five, you know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't then now you'll have to in order to understand that joke, and I will have done a little bit of good today.  (Fred Vincy/Mary Garth = OTP.  You can look that one up on your own.)