Pragmatist’s Response to J.K. Rowling Kerfluffle
I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, so like everyone else in the universe my eyes popped out of my head when I saw what she said in a magazine interview with Emma Watson.
The long and short of it? Rowling says she regrets putting Ron and Hermione together, that they wouldn’t have lasted, and that Hermione should have ended up with Harry.
My personal opinion is that it’s true that Ron and Hermione wouldn’t have made it Happily Ever After, but few high school couples do. Few high school couples should. 90% of the time, high school love is yes, real; and yes, powerful; and yes, dramatic and roller-coaster-y and filled with intensely wild joy and jealously and anger and tears… but it’s also a universe away from the kind of love that’s strong and steady enough to last a lifetime. The rare couples that I know who did last all the way through from high school would say the same — that their relationship changed and adapted and grew along the way.
Would Ron and Hermione have grown and changed enough to last forever? Maybe, maybe not. But I LOVE the way their story unfolds in the books, and I think they’re perfect for a relationship spanning ages 11 – 18.
Still, none of that’s my point. As I said in the heading of this post, what struck me the most wasn’t what Rowling said, or whether or not she’s right, but what my husband the pragmatist said when I told him about the bombshell.
“Wow,” he said, “that’s a great way to drum up promotion.”
Yeah. It’s true. And J.K. Rowling’s no fool. She knows when she says something like this, it’s going to make headlines. It’s going to make people buy the issue of Wonderland magazine in which the interview appears. It’s going to put her, not just her books, in the forefront of people’s minds, which can only help sales of her non-Potter books, and the new movies she’s writing that will take place in the magical world she created.
The “bombshell” is just brilliant marketing, and more power to J.K. Rowling for using the media to her advantage.
In the meantime, the story she wrote stands on its own, as is. Her later opinions on it don’t change what’s on paper; that lasts forever.
So your turn — what do you think of the Rowling bombshell? Do you agree that her motives for it are chiefly commercial? And what’s your opinion of Ron and Hermione as a couple? Do you think they’d last forever, or do you think his hairdo in the last shot of the movie would have turned her off forever?
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