Harry Potter 5: Old feelings, back again, oh the ship of lions

[timepiececlock]

Watched Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix tonight. Still my favorite of the movies. It made me want to reread The Halfblood Prince before the 6th movie comes out this year.

As I watched this time I idly kept an eye open for shipwatch. I saw the one look Ginny gave in the Room of Requirement (oh, the dramione smut fics I've read set in that room!), but that's all really. I think it's too bad they didn't have a bit more of her in this movie, even scenes of her looking at him fondly or them being friendly in the background. I fear that the sixth movie will make the same mistake as the book, and drop the romance on us like a pink brick from sparkly heavens above instead of building to it. I hope it's not like that; it'd be nice if they improved on one of the books most annoying subplots.

While watching OotP, however, I had the same experience as I had reading the book: I shipped Harry and Luna. I can't help it! It's like she popped into their universe just at the right time to be a love interest! Someone who rapidly becomes drawn into the group but is odd enough that she stands out from Harry's normal circle. That's what a love interest character often is: someone who fits in with your best friends well enough but isn't the same as your best friends. And whether the book intended it or not, Cho and Luna were the only two non-Trio females that Harry spent any significant time with in this book/film. One can't help but make parallels. Lots of parallels. Presumably Harry hung out with Ginny plenty as well since he's so close to their family, but we never see it. No screentime! These inconsistencies just make me gnash my teeth.

It's the same problem I have with Avatar and K/Z pairing, only for HP it's worse. Because with K/Z I could always understand that as clear as it is why they're shippable, there were also enough plot reasons to reasonably interfere with anything in-series, and Zuko did have an on-off girlfriend, so I understood why they weren't for other viewers. For Luna and Harry, in the course of the fifth and sixth books, none of that is evident. There's no betrayals or warring nations or anything to say they can't hook up, and they clearly got along (if anything, even moreso in the movie...I loved her barefoot in the forest). The same could be said of Ginny, except that Harry and Ginny have very little screentime together in the until halfway through book 6, whereas Harry and Luna actually seem to interact. And then when I see how his romance with Ginny was eventually written...it feels so arbitrary.

I still want to grab JKR by the shoulders, shake her hard, and say "Look, you can't play with your audience this way! Relationships are not like murder mysteries. The point isn't to be surprised at the twist ending, the point is for everything to fit together and the relationship to feelgenuine to those characters involved."

Anyway, it's an old complaint. It seems I still can't watch OotP without having the uncomfortable feeling that maybe something's wrong if the ship that seems so evident to me in the character-plot positioning, the themes, the camera's eye POV, and the acting isn't the relationship that's supposed to be the hero's true romantic love. Half my brain watches in amazement and says "Seriously? SERIOUSLY?" even still. Ah, well! Perhaps the HBP movie will fix it for me and sell the H/G relationship as something sweet.

Comments

[strange_quark]

I can definitely see where you're coming from on that. Harry and Luna did have possibilities. I never shipped them, but then again, I never shipped Harry/Ginny, or Ron/Hermione, or Harry/Hermione or basically anything involving Harry's generation. I could see why other people did, it's just that I never got the sense that any of these guys had a lot of chemistry with each other. Or maybe I just found the friendships more compelling.

I mean, I've read fanfics of various pairings and when an author writes them well, I buy it, but the only thing I ever shipped with any degree of regularity while reading the books was James/Lily. It probably helps that much of their relationship is imagined, but it's canon so I don't think I have to feel bad about that. I guess I'm drawn to the fact that she kind of hates him, but he obviously changes between his fifth year and the last and they grow to have this really sweet, if doomed, love for each other. I guess I like when couples start off hating each other? Katara/Zuko is the same way (plus I've got a couple of enemy!ships in Naruto).

Now that I think about it, James/Lily being only touched upon definitely helps. I hated the way JKR handled her other canon romances. Ron/Hermione was tolerable only because it actually got some degree of development through two whole books. The stuff she just dropped in? Awful. Even the flashbacks in The Prince's Tale drove me up a wall. Everyone else loved it, but I don't get that. I think it makes Snape into a woobie and even more of an asshole than anything. He did it all in selfish memory of a girl he refuses to call by her proper name. Well. Lovely.

[gojira007.livejournal.com]

I think, when I started the books, I was a Harmonian (well before I knew anything about that term and the controversies attached to it) but yeah, once Luna showed up, and ESPECIALLY after the movie, I kinda jumped over to that (not least of which because the Ron/Hermione stuff was getting fairly evident at that point, if I recall).

I too felt like the Ginny thing was just...there. It didn't add much to the story proper, showing up and dissappearing all within the space of a few chapters, it definitely didn't feel developed properly at all, Ginny's early crush on Harry notwithstanding, and most of all the relationship itself is "they love each other" and nothing else. Literally, nothing.

I've heard it argued that this is a more realistic Teenage Romance, and there's an extent to which I can see that, but the story tries to have it both ways: it treats the Relationship both as a "realistic" Teen thing AND as an epic, "Twu Wuv" thing at the same time. It's a bothersome dichotomy, and particularly given how much more interesting Harry's other relationships to the rest of the Cast are, it felt like a rather poor choice.

[rasielle.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I knoooow. I'll never get it either. Not to mention that, at the end of the fifth book, Luna was the only friend Harry could speak to about death without walking around some great wall of pretense and discomfort; she was the only one who could alleviate his anxieties about Sirius; she reacted from isolation very differently than he did, and he knew it. They had development! Accidental development! Their personalities are so magnetic that they had relationship development with romantic potential and the author didn't even know it. Even the movie writers gave them an extra scene!

And then she did it again in Book 7, too, when Harry spoke to Luna alone, post-war, about the serious things he couldn't say with the Trio nor with Ginny. To be honest, in Book 6, while Luna's personality remained the same, I felt like JKR took a different tone with her; she had tremendous potential as a block to Harry's angst a personal-philosophy-changer, but in the Slug Party chapters, it felt like she was being played up as comic relief, over and over and over again. It felt like she was being written so that we'd pity her and love her like a puppy and know the pains odd people take to make friends, etc etc, rather than to seriously share any of her insights. So much potential! ><

Let's not forget that Ginny's actress still looks about 13 years old, and Radcliffe looks about 20...

[zoeandluna.livejournal.com]

Guuuurrrlll...you're talking my language. When I first read OotP, the final scene with Harry and Luna in the Great Hall sealed the deal for me. I was like "those two are going to be the cutest couple EVER!"

And then HBP came along...and that ginger whore came in and ruined it! I mean, I never really cared for Ginny either way but then this relationship was just fabricated out of no where and it really made me hate her. So much.

That being said, I'm still really excited to see HBP. I'll just try to ignore all the Ginny/Harry stuff like I did when I was reading the books.

[zebeckras.livejournal.com]

I came away from the later books with the strong sense that JKR just can't *write* romance. I never actually shipped anyone, but in the earlier novels I could see the wind was blowing Ron/Hermione and thought that was okay - but by the whole ridiculous business in HBP the fact that it wasn't even *resolved* yet made me go crazy. And although I never shipped them, like you, I actually did read OotP and interpret Harry and Luna's interactions as potentially relationship-bound. Since it was obvious the Cho stuff was screwed up, and he wasn't going to end up with Hermione, and Ginny was NON-EXISTANT by that point (or at least she appeared to have entirely moved on and be completely off the radar), I did think "Huh, wonder if he's going to end up with Luna? That would be cute." HBP was pretty evident that she didn't register that way, but on the other hand, it didn't telegraph any Ginny-longings in the slightest, either. So that book kinda did it for me, where I just tossed my hands up and decided that JKR is an amazing idea-machine, can come up with tight stories, has at least one plot twist that kills you in each book, but she cannot write romance and shouldn't try. On the other hand, since I never read the books for the relationships anyway, it didn't impact me at all. *G* But it's disappointing to realize that you're never going to get invested in something that is, apparently, very important to the main character.