re: Harry should have ended up with Luna

I completely agree, though I liked Harry & Hermoine together. They had some yin & yang. Harry and Ginny had nothing. One of Rowling’s biggest flaws as a writer was her inability to write convincing romantic chemistry for her characters.

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One of Rowling’s biggest flaws as a writer was her inability to write convincing romantic chemistry for her characters.

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I was always told that you should write about what you know. Have you read about Rowling's love life prior to getting rich and famous? I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky the characters turned out this well.

VS

Always felt Harry and Luna matched well. Harry wasn’t really driven by ambition or a need to be first like Hermoine. He just knew what needed to happen and he was the only one who could do it. Luna related to him on many levels. Ginny was just a crush that they stuck with. I’m sure they weren’t very happy as time went on.

Ron and Hermoine never made sense either. Ron was a lazy bum with no ambition or drive. He was just the buddy of Harry who helped explain the magical world to him.

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Same goes for the Hermione and Ron relationship, although I feel their relationship is even more forced

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Rowling came right out and said Hermione and Ron had no business ending up together, and that she had only written it that way to give Ron his "shining moment".

In other words, she realized (like most readers) how boring and pointless his character had become after OOTP, and in order to give him something, anything meaningful to do, she had to push him into relationship drama.

Honestly, if your magical claim to fame is being the 4th best Quidditch player in your own family then are you even a wizard? A writer with balls would have built off his wizard chess win in the first book to make him a schemer/tactician, had him switch to the Death Eater side (with Percy), then given him a redemptive arc.

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Regardless, I don’t see an argument from anything but frothing fanboys on why Harry shouldn’t have ended up with at least one of these two.

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This!

The reason there are people who defend Hermoine ending up with Ron and Harry with his sister is because they want there to be nothing wrong with THEIR books and those books’ sacred (in their minds) author.

And look, I get it. As a Lord of the Rings fanboy, I’ll automatically defend those books from outside attack.

But as a Harry Potter outsider (I read the books and throughly enjoyed them, but I’m not IN LOVE with the Potter Universe) I have to say: it does seem to me that Rowling was setting the whole thing up for Harry and Hermoine to be together in the end but at some point she decided “frick the police! I’m not going to do what my readers have been lead to expect or want! I’m going to throw relationship curve balls into this bitch! You can’t tell me what to do!”

There’s no set-up for either relationship. You can’t go back through prior books and be like “Yep, that’s where she was setting that relationship up.” Because she wasn’t. It was a mid-stream course change on her part, I think out of pettiness and a desire to be contrarian.

I bet that 30 years from now if you ask people “Remember Harry Potter? Who does Harry end up marrying?” they’ll say “Hermoine, right?”