Most of us have been Ginny Weasley at some point in our lives. We’ve had that special person on the fringes of our world that makes us awestruck, about whom we bore the pants off everyone we know, but around whom we can’t speak a word, for fear they might actually…y’know…hear us or something.
Ginny, when we first meet her, is just ten, and is the shy girl who knows all about the wonder that is Harry Potter, so powerful even as a baby that he could defeat the greatest dark wizard of the age. When Harry becomes best friends with, of all people, her brother, Ginny is both delighted and mortified, in the way only the young can be. When the great Harry Potter talks to her like she’s a normal person, even an equal, Ginny runs away, unable to cope with the wow factor and the sudden pressure of having to speak to him. You wouldn’t, perhaps, think of them as a natural-born couple.
When Ginny starts her schooling at Hogwarts, Harry remains an object of amazement and wonder to her, and Ginny has a desperate journey – writing all her feelings down in the mysterious diary that answers back, which, in a cogent metaphor of false friendship, uses all her secrets against both her and Harry. When he and brother Ron rescue her from a basilisk, Ginny’s mortification actively increases – not only has her hero had to rescue her (way to go, Girl Power!), but she’s the one who actually put him in danger in the first place by telling the false friend diary all about him and his story.
It’s not really until The Order of the Phoenix that Ginny Weasley and Harry Potter begin to seem like there might be something to them beyond her devastating girlish pre-and-early teen crush. After seeing something of the world, Ginny grows up a little, getting a non-Harry boyfriend, which allows her for the first time to talk to him as an equal. Where (to be fair, following her mother’s example) Ginny has always been one thing to her brothers – spirited and a devil with a bat-bogey charm, as is almost demanded of her by little sisters of brothers throughout the ages – and another thing entirely to Harry, in The Order of the Phoenix, while still too young to be allowed into the Order’s meetings, she’s able to be in a room with Harry without blushing and running away. In fact, it’s there that we get the first sense of Ginny having that most crucial of equalities, the equality of anger, when she tears the increasingly reclusive Harry a new one for having neither the balls nor the gumption to confide in her, given her history of being possessed by Voldemort and his fear that he too has been a vessel of the Dark Lord, used to attack her father. It’s in the quiet honesty of their shared emotions about that fear – the fear of being forced to do something against their will, of possibly hurting someone that they care about because they weren’t strong enough to fight off their attacker - that something new begins to form between Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, something not born of legends or objective adoration, but born of the bond of survivors. Make no mistake, the violation of them both by Voldemort has an analogue right there in the non-wizarding world, though it’s one that might spoil readers’ enjoyment of the books and movies. The idea of an adult using their bodies for his own ends, and of the inherent violation, the misplaced guilt, the sense of isolation, of believing no-one will want or need them around any more, is true, and real, and horrifying, and Harry and Ginny begin to bond over their ability to share those emotions, those feelings with each other, when they can’t make anyone who hasn’t been in that situation understand how it feels.
As Order of the Phoenix goes on, Ginny comes more and more out of her shell – giving Dumbledore’s Army its name, and showing a rare perspicacity in its choice: “It’s their greatest fear,” she remarks, cutting to the heart of the opposition’s weakness. She also surprises everyone, and impresses Harry, with some of her spellcasting prowess.
But none of this explains why Harry and Ginny end up as lovers, as partners, and as parents. That’s relatively simple, though. Apart from their bonding over what Voldemort has done to them, Ginny is removed enough from the strum und drang of Harry’s seven year fight against the Dark Lord that, when he needs a place of calm, of quiet, of simple understanding and acceptance, it’s not Hermione he turns to. Not Luna. Not anyone, but Ginny, who doesn’t demand explanations, who isn’t complicated by the fight, who knows the burden he carries, and only asks to share it for as long as she can, to lighten his life and bring his smile back to him. Peculiarly, by books six and seven, it’s Ginny Weasley who understands Harry Potter best of all, Ginny who sees beyond the hype he never asked for, and the name he makes for himself, beyond the aloof isolationism and the sense of responsibility, who sees Harry as just Harry, and knows what he needs. She never tries to push herself into the centre of the action, never becomes something else for Harry to feel he has to worry about, but she’s more than ready, come the Battle of Hogwarts, to do her last full measure of devotion in the fight. She has that simplicity of approach – some things must be fought, and she will fight them as she can. She’s invested in his battle, but separate from it too, the place in a crowded, complicated wizarding world where the would-be auror can find peace and an equal, a force of nature who’s always been there, but who stepped out of the crowd to change his world.
In him, she sees not Harry Potter the legend of her childhood, not the rock star wizard, but the man who does what he thinks is right, even when it’s so hard than any reasonable man would fail or buckle, would take the easy path. In a very real sense, it’s Ginny Weasley who shows us as readers or viewers the moral of the Harry Potter stories. She sees the boy become the man who does the right thing, not the easy thing, and loves him for it. And we love them both right back as a result.
Tony Fyler lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the 70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By day, he runs an editing house, largely as an excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book. With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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