or Harry Potter and the Problem of Writing Ahead.

Warning: ginormous spoilers ahead. Also, Ron/Hermione and/or Harry/Ginny fans probably won’t like it either.

Let me just say it: I am a Harry Potter fan, I believe in Harmony, and I am not delusional. I know, I know, the Deathly Hallows has come and gone, and we all know how things end. But I’m not delusional, I’m really not. You see, J.K. Rowling knows how it ends, and therein lies the problem: she always knew how it would end, and therein lies her delusion.

First, though, let me relate my Harry Potter experience, for it is crucial to how I came to my perspective.

I had heard all about the Harry Potter phenomenon — how could you miss it? — but kept avoiding partaking of it for as long as I could. I had plenty of fandoms to worry about, thank you very much. But when Sorcerer’s Stone appeared in theaters, I happened to be visiting my oldest brother for the Thanksgiving holiday, and he insisted I go with him and his daughters to see it. Of course, I thought it was wonderful. I also immediately saw the future shipping potential for Harry and Hermione; it was just so blatantly obvious to me. But I still didn’t read the books.

This continued through Goblet of Fire. Each movie made it more clear how perfectly matched Harry and Hermione were, and while I began to sense (dread, really) some Ron/Hermione elements — primarily the cliché love/hate thing — I remained blissfully unaware of the shipping wars going on in the fandom. All shipping thoughts I had were entirely my own. Though I was tempted to read fanfic, I continued to refrain, as I knew the books were well ahead of the movies and had much more detail; I didn’t want half the details in the fics to sail over my head.

Somehow I missed Order of the Phoenix when it came to the screen — probably because I wasn’t visiting my brother at the time — but when the Half-Blood Prince film came out, my girlfriend and I did the three-night movie marathon, watching the first five before heading to the theater. Now, by this time I knew that both Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny were canon; Deathly Hallows had been in print for two years already, and try as I might, I couldn’t avoid all the scuttlebutt pouring from the Internet. Leaving the cinema and chatting with my girlfriend about Half-Blood Prince, she told me the same thing I’d been feeling myself: she’d seen RW/HG and HP/GW coming too, but was extraordinarily disappointed with how they came about. She also echoed my thoughts in that those couples made no sense. Harry and Hermione had so much chemistry and their relationship seemed so mature, while Hermione mooning over Ron was so out of character. The love/hate thing has been done in the movies so many times you know what to look for — those signs that the arguments have turned to playful banter, the little nice things the “enemies” do for one another, the jealousies and longings that the characters wake up to — and none of those were there. Okay, the jealousies and longings were there, but were so sudden they seemed wrong.

In listening to her opinions, I thought to myself, okay, the last few books were so long that all that build-up stuff must have been left out, trimmed to make the movie manageable. Being a writer myself, and knowing how things would end romantically, I put the movies out of my mind and said to myself, here’s how she probably did it in the books:

1. Harry/Ginny: Ginny would be that girl in the background that Harry is friends with but doesn’t think of in a romantic way at first. She’ll be way in the background at first, then more and more prominent. Along the way, Harry will fall for some other girl (Cho) out of pure attraction, but things won’t work out because they’re just not very compatible. After that is over, he will realize all the compatible qualities he’s looking for are there in Ginny, especially since, in his quest against Voldemort, Ginny will be the one person who is always there by Harry’s side and never leaves him.
2. Ron/Hermione: They will have, well, that love/hate thing going on. They’ll argue about this or that, usually the best way to accomplish something, but they will share a passion for doing the right thing that will overcome their differences. Eventually each will start seeing the value of the other’s point of view. Along the way they will each have some other relationship that the other will act strangely jealous about. Also, Ron will start doing little things for Hermione that will just confuse her, in a “Why are you being so nice to me?” kind of way. And vice versa. Eventually they’ll realize they are meant to be together.

The only thing left to do was read the books, and see how right I was in my assessments.

Boy, was I shocked.

Now, let me say that I love the Harry Potter series, and think J.K. Rowling is a writer of astonishing talent and vast creativity. She is brilliant. The detail of the world of Harry and Hogwarts is full of such minutia and charm that it is truly breathtaking to behold. Only such richness could explain the more than 400,000 HP fanfictions on fanfiction.net alone. No, I didn’t add any extra zeroes in there; I really meant four hundred thousand fanfic. Rowling is amazing to inspire that.

But, alas, she isn’t perfect. In particular, her sense of romance seemed as mature as that of a thirteen year old girl... which is to say, not at all, whatsoever.

Ginny wasn’t just in the background, she was freaking invisible. A couple of chapters into Order of the Phoenix and I already knew more about Tonks than I’d learned about Ginny from the previous four books. Harry had the purely-from-attraction relationship — Cho — and pleasantly it was much more detailed in the books than the movies. Heck, it spans three whole books. And Harry also had that friend who was always there for him, with all those qualities he wished for in Cho... but it was Hermione, not Ginny.

Then in Half-Blood Prince, there is one tiny bit of foreshadowing about Ginny, from Harry’s reaction to the smell of the love potion as he enters Slughorn’s potions class for the first time. One hint. Suddenly, a few chapters later, he’s head over heels in love with Ginny. I thought, seriously? Are you fricking kidding me? He pines for a few chapters, and is jealous of Ginny and Dean for a bit, and then, boom!, they’re just together. Then five minutes later, he breaks up with her at the funeral.

For a little while my Harmonious heart was palpitating. Particularly when Ron leaves in Deathly Hallows, leaving just Harry and Hermione alone in the tent. For weeks. I shook my head. What was Rowling thinking?!? Just as I had predicted, everyone left Harry’s side but one person. But it was not Ginny. Ginny is more invisible in Deathly Hallows than any book since Chamber of Secrets. What the ^%$^#@??????

And Ron/Hermione? The movies hadn’t overstated Ron and Hermione’s antagonism and dislike, they had understated it. I was shocked with how vehement Ron’s dislike of Hermione is in Sorcerer’s Stone. It gets fractionally better after the troll attack, but Ron’s affection for/interest in Hermione is dwarfed by Harry’s theoretically platonic affection. It’s utterly ridiculous.

Ron and Hermione don’t just argue about ways to overcome Harry’s challenges, they argue about everything. Their perspectives are so fundamentally different as to be irreconcilable. Ron may be Harry’s best mate, but he can be an ornery asshole.

As to the jealousy I was expecting, well, sure, it seems to be there, right? Ron gets all bent out of shape when Hermione is “seeing” Victor Krum, doesn’t he? Well, I thought so too... except that he says the same things about Ginny and Dean, in almost exactly the same words. When an author does that, it means something. And all I can get from that is either:

1. Ron has a very unusual affection for his sister (if you know what I mean), or...
2. Ron thinks of Hermione as a sister.

There’s nothing else to conclude. Well, or that Rowling didn’t notice the similarities, which I found hard to believe.

As to the little nice things that hint us in on the affection between them? I can think of one: Ron’s defending of the house elves before the final battle. The one where Hermione gives him the big kiss. And that’s it. That’s the only one I can think of. Anything else is so minor as to be unnoticeable.

And how about their “relationship” once they’re “together”? Sorry, had to use quotes there because for all I can tell, it’s purely imaginary. We don’t see that moment of realization, we don’t see them get together, we don’t see them be together. I heard of an interview where Rowling says they are supposed to be dating in Deathly Hallows, but I’ll be damned if I can see it. It’s just insane.

Insanely bad writing actually. Inexplicably bad, given how monumentally good everything else is.

And then, to top it all off, there is... the Epilogue.

I cannot express how shocked I was at the Epilogue when I read it. It seems so totally incongruous to the rest of the work. The characters all seem so... I don’t know, off, maybe? What’s with Harry and Hermione barely acknowledging one another? What’s with the group acknowledging Malfoy at all?

Speaking of Malfoy: I thought, from the sheer volume of Malfoy fanfic out there, that somewhere in the seven books Draco Malfoy would stop being such a twat. Nope, never happened. I never saw a hint of redemption or anything like that in the books. In the movie version of Half-Blood Prince, we’re led to believe Malfoy has doubts about killing Dumbledore. Not in the books though; in the books he’s merely afraid that he can’t do it and that he’ll be punished, not that he doesn’t want to. Once an asshole, always an asshole. In fact, why isn’t he in Azkaban in the Epilogue?

But I digress. The Epilogue just didn’t seem right to me. It seemed strangely off.

At this point, though, I was free to jump headlong in the fandom world, where I saw others with the same feelings about the Epilogue — in fact, about how the relationships were handled in general. One person wrote that he felt Rowling wrote the Epilogue just to settle the shipping wars once and for all. I also read plenty of Harmony fanfics that detailed the very concerns and questions I’d had right along.

I also read some of the Rowling interviews I’d avoided before. There was, of course, the dreaded “deluded” interview, but there was also another, seemingly more innocuous one I stumbled across. In it, Rowling said she’d always known how it would all end. In fact, she’d written the last chapter way back in 1990 or so, when she was writing Sorcerer’s Stone.

I read that, and bang! It suddenly became so clear to me. Rowling had fallen prey to that dreaded but all too common writer’s problem of writing ahead.

So there you are, you’ve been struck with brilliant inspiration for a story, or novel, or series of novels. Even better, your inspirational thunderbolt not only gave you the best idea you’ve ever had, but it was crystal clear up to and including how it all turns out. You sit down to sketch things out, and knowing that inspiration can be fleeting, you hammer out that finale because the wording sounded so good in your head you need to get it on paper before grinding out the rest makes you forget exactly how it went.

Then, as you go on with all the nuts and bolts that’ll get you to that terrific ending, you discover the characters your thunderbolt gave you are so vivid they practically write themselves. You fill yourself with them, and out flows this magnificent, believable dialogue and action, and you ride along on that high page after page.

But there’s a problem. You go along, those three dimensional characters filling out the work, and they begin to take you in these unexpected directions. The directions are plausible, true to the characters, but it starts to dawn on you that maybe the characters you’ve created won’t logically get to that ending you’ve already committed to paper.

What do you do? You love that ending. But you also love these characters, and the ending they will lead you to is different. Good, great even, but different than that ending you so adore.

You are the writer, and however it goes, it’s your story. Making a good story great is about letting things progress, be natural, but never letting it out of your control. Never let what you love destroy what you need to achieve. Kill your darlings, they say; don’t be afraid to sacrifice even your favorite things for what the story needs.

But which is your favorite, the characters, or the ending? Which is important, and which is just your darling?

I think this is exactly what happened to J.K. Rowling.

She started Harry Potter with the idea practically whole cloth, including the ending, the last chapter, that dreaded Epilogue, which she wrote down as she made her first drafts of Sorcerer’s Stone, maybe even before. She had the epic quest, the cast of characters, the morals and themes, even some of all those beloved details of Hogwarts and the wizarding world. She even drew up the relationships in her outlines, which she’d already put down in the Epilogue: Harry/Ginny, and Ron/Hermione. It was simple, it was done, it was on paper.

It’s so obvious to her at that point: Ron is going to be Harry’s best mate, and Ginny his girl. Hermione doesn’t say much to Harry in the Epilogue because her relationship with Harry wasn’t going to be all that important, just this platonic friendship. There is Draco Malfoy, the young villain, whom they grudgingly respect because he had the change of heart at the end. There’s Albus Severus, named after the two great wizards, one good, the other... also good, though the readers don’t know that until the end. All very clever.

I suspect she even had my numbers 1) and 2) above, written in her outline almost exactly as I have them. Cliché, yes, but the relationships aren’t going to be of any great focus in the books anyway, not compared to the quest against Voldemort. And they are children’s books, after all, and you don’t need the messy reality of how relationships really go in children’s books, do you?

Then she started writing the books.

The characters came alive, just as any writer hopes they will. It’s such a wonderful feeling, barreling along through a work and the story practically writing itself. The characters seem realistic because they are truly alive in the writer’s head. The conversations flow out as if by magic. All these little details and subtleties appear and enrich the work, and the characters take you places you never meant to go. Rowling herself said in one interview that Luna Lovegood took her completely by surprise, and I’ve been there, so I know how it must have all gone for her.

And then she got about halfway through Order of the Phoenix. She pulls out that Epilogue, and reads it, and goes, “Oh...... shiiiiiiit.” Because the characters she’s written there are not the characters in the first four and a half books.

Ron and Hermione, yeah, they had their arguments and all, but we haven’t seen the second phase where they get that respect because, well, the characters didn’t turn out that way.

Ginny, yeah, she’s supposed to be that background character who gets more and more prominent, but, uhm, didn’t, because she wasn’t very interesting, it turns out, and Hermione was filling that “always by Harry’s side” role so well and then there were Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil to think about as classmates and Katie Bell and Angelina Johnson and Alicia Spinnet for the Quidditch angle and then, wow, Luna Lovegood came out of nowhere but was really interesting and Ginny just, well, wasn’t.

And Draco Malfoy, well, he was such a good asshole that putting in some redeeming qualities didn’t seem quite right, and hey, the rest of the characters were so interesting that it was becoming less important to bother focussing on him anyway.

And yet... Rowling really loved that Epilogue.

What to do? The Hogwarts Express was barreling down those tracks and the castle was not exactly in the direction of motion, but instead way off the side somewhere.

Rowling looked at what she had, and decided she really, realllllly loved that Epilogue.

What happens when you have a train going somewhere at high speed, and there is suddenly a right angle in the tracks ahead, leading it off in a completely unexpected direction? That’s correct, you get a trainwreck, and it’s called Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

This is what the Harry Potter shipping wars come down to:

The Ron/Hermione fans have the ending, and the details Rowling set up because she was intending R/H before she began.

The Harry/Hermione fans have everything else, because that’s where the characters were actually going until Rowling realized it and ran the train off the tracks.

Heck, she couldn’t even really stop the Harry/Hermione momentum when she wanted to. How completely bizarre would it have seemed to have Ginny in that tent with Harry instead of Hermione? The Harry-Hermione bond was so strong Rowling even had to get Ginny out of the way at the end of Half-Blood Prince by having Harry break up with her after they’d just barely gotten together.

All the Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione stuff in the last few books seems awkward because it is awkward. It’s out of character for the wizards and witches we’ve gotten to know. And that Epilogue... it doesn’t feel right because, given the way story and the characters ended up, it isn’t right. It’s how things were supposed to end up, but it feels completely tacked on for how they actually end up.

Yet, what happens if you drop it?

That really changes things, doesn’t it? There is almost no evidence of Ron and Hermione dating in Deathly Hallows, despite what Rowling has said in interviews. (By the way, I’m of the distinct opinion that the only things canon in a work are what’s in the work itself. Even if the author/director/creator says X is so, if X isn’t explicitly in the work in question, X isn’t necessarily so, dammit.) They certainly aren’t together when Ron abandons Harry and Hermione, are they? And that kiss? Well, that’s kinda weak in isolation, isn’t it? As for Harry and Ginny, well, as far as we can tell in DH, there really is no Harry and Ginny. Harry doesn’t even bring Ginny with himself and Ron and Hermione after the post-battle celebration. Why wouldn’t he if he was still so gaga over her?

The Epilogue wasn’t the final nail in Harmony’s coffin... it’s the only nail. Everything else is up for debate.

Which is why I am starting a campaign, here and now, to ignore the Epilogue. Okay, I’m hardly starting it; look on Portkey.org, or fanfiction.net, at all the Harmony stories that say “spoilers for Deathly Hallows, ignores the Epilogue”. What I am doing though, is coining a phrase for all my fellow Harmoniacs to adopt: “The Epilogue is Apocryphal”.

Catchy, huh? R/H’ers can call us deluded if they want to, but I claim that Rowling was delusional first. Delusional that she could make us swallow that Epilogue which was written before anything else, and as such, makes no sense with the rest of the books. That Epilogue which is, clearly, apocryphal. While I don’t doubt the Epilogue’s authenticity of authorship, I do question that it belongs in the canon of the Harry Potter world as Rowling wrote them in the seven books leading up to it, as should any clear-thinking reader.

The Epilogue is Apocryphal™.

Feel free to use it as you wish, it’s not really trademarked. But if you put it on a T-shirt, be sure to send me one.

Tags: harmony, harry/hermione, harrypotter
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