#i never know if im being long winded & repetetive or if i'm being rushed & unclear

[skywitchmaja]

even before the transphobia came to light— jkr’s writing can be sooo cruel towards woman & girls for as much as she used to be celebrated as a ‘feminist’

like ginny is introduced as ron’s kid sister who has this big girlish crush on harry. this is mostly just very embarrassing for both of them. it’s fine, they’re middle schoolers.

then ginny has to be the damsel in distress for the second book finale which means she has to be vulnerable, she has to be manipulated (by voldemort’s diary), she has to do bad things (while possessed), and most of all, she has to be helpless and she has to be saved. this is some harrowing shit for an 11 year old to go through, but we don’t get much about it from her perspective bc it’s mostly there so harry and ron can be heroic and strengthen their friendship. ginny is still in the role of damsel by the end of this book.

a couple books later jkr decides to start setting up romances, so harry has a crush on cho chang bc she’s good at sports (which is cute). unfortunately for him, cho is dating harry’s cool seventeen year old crush friend & competitor, cedric digory, so harry is just crushing away, and cho doesn’t have much to do except for politely turn him down. ginny isn’t really important this book, irc i think she goes to magic prom with neville. ron and hermione have their own issues, but this book is mostly set up (both relationship wise & in the greater voldemort plot).

then in the fifth book, their relationship comes to fruition bc cedric died so now cho is single. she’s drawn to harry bc he was friends with cedric & he was there when cedric died , and she hopes that they can process their grief together. unfortunately, harry is having a lot of difficulty processing his grief, so he reacts badly when cho cries or wants to talk about cedric bc it reminds harry of his own feelings he’s trying to avoid. this would be fine on it’s own, except the fandom didn’t recognize harry as an unreliable narrator and began characterizing her as being “whiny” and “weak” and “annoying”. and it would seem like a fandom issue & not jkr’s misogyny, hermione even stands up for cho (although much of that grace is lost when cho/her friend narc to umbridge). meanwhile, ginny is getting cooler and cooler— joining the quidditch team, joining dumbledor’s army, dating boys to let us know she’s moved on from her childhood crush  on harry, and most importantly, joining harry & co at the climactic fight against voldemort, as a hero this time rather than a damsel. why is this a bad thing? it’s not, we love to see a girlboss winning.  but they way jkr writes romance puts these girls in opposition to each other.

in the sixth book, harry realizes he has feelings for ginny, and she is everything cho is not. actually, cho is what ginny used to be, and vice versa. to make sure we know ginny is no longer the vulnerable, emotional, “weak” girl harry saved in the second book, jkr gives these traits to cho instead, as she’s incredibly emotionally vulnerable after losing her first boyfriend, and was hoping that harry would be there for her when he couldn’t.  in dating cho, harry realizes that the reality of being in a relationship with someone is very different from crushing on them from afar, and while cho may be pretty & nice & good at quidditch, she isn’t someone he wants to date (again, mostly because they have incompatible ways of dealing with grief). which is fine, they’re kids, they’re still learning about themselves and other people.  except the fandom/jkr didn’t really delve into that complexity, and it was almost always reduced to saying that cho was “wrong” for harry and ginny is “the right one”.  she does this, proving one love interest is “right” by showing another as “wrong”, in an even shallower way with hermione, ron and lavender brown.  it’s exponentially worse because cho, and lavender in the first five movies, are non-white characters. 

harry starts to catch feelings for ginny, which has significantly more depth than his crush on cho because he’s known her for so long, but he still admires things like her skill at quidditch (lol), and how cool and popular she is, as well as her strong will and sense of humor.  but in order to be valid as a love interest according to jkr, ginny has to shed the traits that characterized her as a damsel in distress in the second book, ironically, a role that is often filled by the love interest.  this is actually kind of subversive, but not necessarily in a good way– rather than rejecting patriarchal lens of reducing women to “damsels”, jkr simply pushes this lens onto cho, (not with a rescue plot, but with character traits), saying that damselization is bad, not because it’s bad to objectify women, but because some women are badass and cool and “don’t need to be saved” and the ones who are weak and emotional and do need to be saved are worthy of derision. this pushes the burden away from the male gaze that sees women as damsels and onto women and girls who must reject “damselish” or “feminine” traits.  harry realizes his feelings when he sees how different ginny is now from the girl who had a huge crush on him, the girl he had to save from an evil snake, the girl who was sensitive and helpless, because she isn’t those things anymore.  but cho, from harry’s perspective, is. harry avoids her like he avoided ginny in the first few books bc their emotionality makes him uncomfortable. to be fair, harry doesn’t hate cho for these traits anymore than he did ginny early in the series, but the fandom certainly did (i use past tense bc the fandom now is… idek) and i believe jkr does too. 

by the end of the series, harry has cool, tough, funny, pretty, quidditch star, ginny weasley, and to be honest he really doesn’t share a lot of vulnerability with her.  even when he’s worried about being possessed by voldemort, he doesn’t think to ask ginny what that was like when it happened to her, because he “forgot”.  in the last book, harry even breaks up with her for several months “to protect her” rather than taking her on a dangerous camping trip with ron and hermione. this is reasonable enough, and i think it’s good that the series ends with the same trio it started with, but it does deny harry and ginny’s relationship opportunity to develop because they only really see each other at the very beginning and the very end of the last book.  so ironically, a lot of people don’t like harry and ginny as a couple (especially in the movies) because jkr was so sparse with vulnerability in their relationship.  both girls, both relationships, suffer from this “sensitive” vs “resilient”, or more shallowly, as it tends to be perceived, “weak” vs “strong” contrast between cho and ginny.  but ultimately, ginny is rewarded for shedding her girlish emotional sensitivity while cho is punished, not just for her own but for ginny’s as well, because she’s taking over ginny’s role as “emotionally sensitive girl” so ginny can rise to the “cool girl” pedestal now that someone else is being looked down upon for having feelings.

#tldr: jkr doesn’t just put ginny & cho against each other as love interests she uses cho as recepticle for ginny’s ‘flaws’(vulnerability etc #that were present when ginny was just a kid with a crush so ginny can be the perfect ‘strong female character’ love interest #oof #i love how you can tell i thought i was gonna be brief with this bc the first two paragraphs are pretty short but then. lol. #i never know if im being long winded & repetetive or if i'm being rushed & unclear #oh well no one wants to read harry potter criticism in 2022 anyway and i dont wanna go back & edit #also im reasonably confident ginny makes some derisive comments about cho at some point but im not looking that up #hp #jk rowling #character tags? sure i guess #ginny weasley #cho chang #low key this makes me wanna write a ginny & cho character study fic booooooooooooooooooooo 🍅🍅🍅🍅 #uh #hp critical #okay before the 'readmore' this makes it seem like its gonna be a laundry list but really its just a deconstruction of one example