OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Heidi wrote:

This, of course, leads me to the "meta" question I always have about SHIPping. I read the books individually - in other words, I read PS, and had to wait for the release of CoS, then the release of PoA, then GoF and am, of course, still waiting for OoTP. And it took involvement in the fandom for me to see that Ron had a crush on Hermione in GoF - and I still can't see it anywhere before that.

Huh. It's an interesting meta-question, to be sure.

I first read the books right after the release of CoS.

I thought it clear that Ron had a crush on Hermione in GoF, but it had not occurred to me before then. Looking back on it now, I do see signs of that interest beginning in CoS, but it's "reading through hindsight," as it were. It did not occur to me at the time, and it is only in retrospect that I interpret certain events in CoS and PoA as indicative of romantic foreshadowing for Ron and Hermione.

As for Draco, I do think that he has a crush on Hermione, but this reading was only suggested to me post-GoF, by the conversations of adolescent boys on whom I was eavesdropping at my workplace. (Is that as pathetic as it gets, or what?) As with Ron and Hermione, I now see signs of it beginning in CoS. But again, this is reading through hindsight. I didn't notice any such indications before GoF.

I do find Draco's behavior towards Hermione suggestive of a certain immature and ambivalent crush-y fascination. I find it interesting that in all those scenes when he's pestering and harassing and baiting Ron and Harry, he so very rarely addresses Hermione. He very rarely speaks to her at all, in fact, and when he does, I think that he does come across like a rather disturbed and nasty little boy who has a bit of a crush on a person he knows he's supposed to want dead.

"Oh very funny," Hermione said sarcastically to Pansy Parkinson and her gang of Slytherin girls, who were laughing harder than anyone, "really witty."

Ron was standing against the wall with Dean and Seamus. He wasn't laughing, but he wasn't sticking up for Harry either.

"Want one, Granger?" said Malfoy, holding out a badge to Hermione. "I've got loads. But don't touch my hand, now. I've just washed it, you see; don't want a Mudblood sliming it up."

Nasty, yes. Very nasty. But surely a proper little pure-blood shouldn't have initiated a conversation with her at all? Far less gone to all the trouble to cross those carefully established gender lines along which the Slyth/Gryff conflict had been being conducted right up to that point?

I read a twisted little crush there, myself.

I don't think that we're ever going to see D/H in canon. I do find myself suspecting, though, that if JKR does have a Redeemed!Draco scenario in mind, then Hermione very likely will have an important role to play in that plot development.

In fact, even if we don't see a Redeemed!Draco scenario, I still think that Hermione is going to have a part to play in Draco's role in future canon, as I do think it likely that JKR plans to give him some further development in the upcoming volumes.

For one thing, if the author were ever to grant Draco any degree of self-reflection (which she really is going to have to do, one way or another, I think, because whatever narrative utility Draco in his current state ever had as a peer rival for Harry has pretty much been exhausted at this point in the series), then Hermione would be the obvious hook to hang that on, not least of which because of our main characters, she is the one who is Muggle-born. In many ways, the DEs as a group are far more firmly established as her antagonists than they are as Harry's.

Harry's enemy is Voldemort himself, and it is with Voldemort himself that he is both most strongly textually linked and ultimately concerned. Voldemort's mionions serve only to deliver Harry to his final showdowns with Voldemort in these books. when the novel ends with a Voldemort confrontation (as it does in all of them so far save PoA), then Harry winds up facing Voldemort himself and Voldemort alone. Even at the end of PS/SS, Quirrell is shoved out of the way in the final conflict, allowing Voldemort and Harry to face each other unimpeded.

Ron and Hermione, on the other hand, strike me as more strongly pitted against the DEs -- and particularly against the Malfoy family. Draco is in many ways established more as Ron's enemy than as Harry's. Both Malfoy vs. Weasley and Draco vs. Hermione take center stage in CoS. In GoF, it is Hermione who receives Draco's ambiguously stated gloat at the QWC, and it is Hermione who is pitted against Rita Skeeter (who is textually linked to the Malfoys by virtue of receiving her information from Draco). At the beginning of GoF, JKR goes out of her way to establish Lucius Malfoy's revulsion towards Hermione at the QWC, just as she went out of her way to show him responding to the Grangers as well as the Weasleys at the beginning of CoS.

I find all of this very suggestive, particularly in light of what seems to be a developing R/H ship in GoF. What it suggests to my mind is that in some way, the Malfoy family is being textually established as the designated enemy for both Ron and Hermione.

But surely that would be redundant, wouldn't it? What would be the point of aligning Malfoy vs. Ron and Malfoy vs. Hermione?

Well, the obvious answer, to my mind, is that Ron and Hermione are not in fact going to wind up in precisely the same relationship to the Malfoy family. There will be some subtle difference in how the drama of those interactions will play out.

A Redeemed!Draco or BlowsHisChanceForRedemption!Draco or even a BetraysOurHeroes!Draco scenario in which Hermione plays the supportive/sympathetic/sucker role, while Ron plays the antagonistic function, does seem a likely possibility to me.

Especially since, as Heidi wrote on a different thread:

1. Hermione has occasionally been more concerned with What Is Right than How Her Friends Feel (the firebolt, for example) - thus, if someone on the Bad Side like Draco put up a pretense of Moving Towards Good she would likely be the first of the three to be willing to give him a chance, which could lead her into a trap if Draco turned out to be Not So good After All.

Yup. She keeps Lupin's secret for him. She founds SPEW. She holds no truck with the wizarding world's prejudices. She flouts the Common Wisdom. She's a sucker for lost causes.

As, you know, am I.

—Elkins