JK Rowling announced last week that she regrets pairing up Ron and Hermione. They didn’t make sense as a couple. Hermione should have hooked up with Harry.
I’m not going to weigh in on the nuances of the Harry Potter novels. The geeks have written enough on the plot and character development in these books, and I’m not a Harry Potter-geek. But I do think it’s interesting to see the variety of opinions on this topic from friends and strangers on social media.
Hermione is the stereotype of the smart, straight A girl, who is also humorless and unimaginative. Ron is the stereotype of the boy who struggles in school, probably is on ADD meds, plays too many video games, and goofs around with his friends. Parents of girls relate to Hermione. Parents of boys relate to Ron.
Sometimes it is difficult to be a feminist and a mom of boys. I have to cheer at the success that girls are finding in schools and college, but I do worry how the school system treats boys. I worry that boys, who lag behind girls developmentally, are traumatized by a school system that prizes perfectionism over other character traits.
Most kids aren’t a pure Hermione or a pure Ron. My oldest son is some days a Hermione, and other days a Ron. But on his Ron days, I worry.
Apt. 11d 
All of the SAHDs I know are Ron types. They are more than happy to stay home with the kids while their wives pursue big time careers. I do think Ron/Hermoine is probably a relationship with a longer shelf life than Hermonie/Harry because the personalities are just too big in the latter pairing.
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I really think Hermione with Snape was the natural pairing.
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It’s not anything about Ron and Hermione themselves, it’s that the relationship didn’t develop convincingly. It felt like a tacked-on ending without enough narrative heft behind it.
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Yep.
And it wasn’t as if there wasn’t plenty of room in that final book to fit some more relationship development…I would have sacrificed 1/2 to 3/4 of the moping-in-the-woods segment.
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I have to cheer at the success that girls are finding in schools and college, but I do worry how the school system treats boys. I worry that boys, who lag behind girls developmentally, are traumatized by a school system that prizes perfectionism over other character traits.
I guess it depends on your individual kid. My boy is more of a responsible-rule-follower/naturally-helpful type than his big sister. I get kind of annoyed by people in the school system who react to that kind of personality approvingly on a girl (while Sally is less like that than Newt, she’s enough like that for teachers to adopt her as a one of the star ‘good kids’ in the class), and kind of don’t get it coming from a boy: Newt doesn’t get anything like the strokes Sally does for similar behavior, and I think it’s partially because people are kind of stuck on how they think boys universally behave. He’s doing fine, but I’d really like to see an effort from teachers to deal with the kids as individuals.
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I would say the correlate is that girls are disproportionately punished for being “Rons.” We expect girls to be more mature and organized and able to keep it together in a way we don’t expect for boys, so girls who don’t aren’t given the same leniency.
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True story. We have left off weekly counseling with the psychologist for E, but my husband and I go once a month. Last month we were complaining about E’s self-help/organizational skills. Sometimes we have to wake him up in the morning! Some mornings he waits till the last minute to get dressed! He missed the bus once!
The psych laughed and laughed at us, then explained how many problems with morning routines most parents of kids with AS/ADHD have. We are so spoiled by our daughter that we couldn’t see how awesome E is.
That said, I was looking at the Honor Roll list for his grade, and it was striking to me how many of the Highest Honors kids were girls–only a couple were boys. There is *so* much emphasis on getting homework done on time and rules being followed. And yet the 10 kids who made it to the final school round of the geography bee were all boys.
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I think your middle paragraph would be true without “with AS/ADHD” in it. I never work up of my own accord until college and I only managed it then because my schedule had no classes before 10 a.m.
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I would worry more if boys weren’t recipients of Affirmative Action in college admissions.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/27/admit
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Hmm, our daughter had ADHD, but she was never late in the morning, and she didn’t forget more things than I did, or most other kids do, at her age. A lot of it may be normal teenage disorganization. (I can’t address the AS part from any personal experience.)
When I was in high school, I always dragged myself out of bed early, but that was because there was a girl I had a crush on that I wanted to eat breakfast with. (This was boarding school.) Amazing what hormones can do. If it hadn’t been for her, I might have slept later.
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I’m not sure that J.K. Rowling as a writer could do romantic relationship development. It’s not an easy thing to write, especially when third-party narrative prose is your medium.
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I don’t think any of the relationships were well developed in HP, but I like Ron & Hermione together. I can completely see Hermione off in the corporate wizard world while Ron takes care of the family and joins in with George (or Fred, which of them died?) in the family joke shop.
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I have a boy and a girl. I don’t think the happy go lucky boys (I know a girl who is kind of like that, she told me that she had a “talent for being happy”) will come of badly in the long run. Yes, they might not make honor role, but in the end I don’t think it’s being on the honor role that’s going to count for anything in life (not the least because it’ll be seen as simple swotting that anyone could accomplish, if they wanted to, and, if it’s all about filling in the forms, probably it’s true that simple swotting is enough). Isn’t that even a theme of HP, with Hermione dismissing her talents as “simple cleverness” nothing important somewhere in the book?
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Having your set point as “happy” will save you a lot of stress later in life. At least it’ll be a lot smoother than the same life with an Eeyore outlook.
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I have a Baby Eeyore at home. Actual quote (repeated on a number of occasions): “That wasn’t as fun as I thought it was going to be. (I have since stopped trying to oversell him on how fun things are going to be.) He is very conscientious, though.
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We are what we are in terms of temperament – it’s just learning to live with it.
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Yes, I don’t think that the basic temperament is changeable and all you can do is help the child deal with it. Also, the children with a talent for being happy are less willing to strive (which does drive their parents nuts, sometimes). I think in there somewhere is that we have to let the kids be who they are and hope that it all works out for the best.
I think everyone worries that their child’s unique talents aren’t going to be recognized in the bigger world because of arbitrary decision making about what is valued at any particular time.
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bj said:
“Also, the children with a talent for being happy are less willing to strive (which does drive their parents nuts, sometimes).”
That is very true.
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I have to admit that I saw Ron and Hermione bonding from very early on. Rowling also telegraphed the Harry and Ginny relationship from the first book (love at first sight on Ginny’s part, a shared passion for sport, bonding over the traumatic experience of possession). Her after-the-fact musing about their likely problems sounds a little silly to me. Of course they’d have relationship problems. Anybody who’d gone through the traumas they’d experienced would need some help reconnecting with normality. But they complement each other in so many ways and share some important values. I liked watching their relationship unfold over the books. Ron thinking about the house elves as the final battle loomed was a great way to show how much he’d internalized Hermione’s passion for SPEW, wasn’t it?
Ron gets so much guff from some commentators, fans or not, who seem to know his character mostly from a few of the movies. He’s the most individual and realistic of all of her major characters, because he has flaws, because he’s not perfect and still he strives to be there for his friends as well as do the right things. A boy could do much, much worse in life than aspire to be like Ron Weasley, let me tell you.
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