Current mood:	nervous
Entry tags:	fandom witterings

Ginny Weasley Rocks!
My opinions have changed. Thanks to fandom, thanks to fanfic, Ginny Weasley is now a character I love love love and would like to see happy with Harry! (Or just generally happy, as long as she gets a POV that explains it and isn’t just randomly off somewhere while Harry finds true happiness with a superior model!) <3

Of course, her characterization did change a good deal between books four and five (yes, we knew her brothers were extroverts, but she didn’t really act like them, and going pale at injuries and falling asleep at the World Cup doth not make a keen plucky Quidditch-er willing to fly into commentators’ stands), and—well, yes, too many random people comment on her pretty neck and popularity and animals love her and she’s so totally the perfect girl for Harry. It’s true. She’s kind of a bit of a Mary-Sue. :( And she Bat-Bogeys people for asking questions and doesn’t mind Sectumsempra and brutally attacks commentators.

Except. She’s a teenage girl. She's bloody well not a slut or a whore, not least because no woman deserves to be branded as either. She’s a lively, impulsive, quick teenage girl who dated the boy she used to have a crush on after growing up a bit and enjoying herself and dating other boys, she’s attractive and popular and that’s not exactly blameworthy, she doesn’t always think things through and she sides with her friends even when they might be wrong, she’s not a perfect student or the chosen one but she’s brave with her own strengths, she’s temperamental but not deliberately cruel, she jokes and laughs and flings lightning-quick spells and words around as her Weasley hair flies and tosses, she’s—a spirited, vivacious fifteen-year-old girl. Harry likes her. He has his reasons.

She’s not supposed to be—and oh, this is *so* much more an emotional reaction than a logical one, I do disclaim for personal taste—deconstructed into the crude and bad-tempered parts of her.

I hate seeing her ripped into someone who’s falsely reconstructed herself but still remains this person who’s completely outside Harry’s world (though canon supports this), someone who put on the popularity and stole lines from Draco (though canon, again, can support this), who’s cruel and dreadfully-behaved and immature (yet again, all canon!). What I don’t like is that it’s usually in conjunction with Harry and Hermione and Draco getting away with the things they’ve done, Harry actually performing Sectumsempra and Hermione imprisoning Rita and scarring Marietta and Draco attempting murder and all the spiteful-teenage-boy things he’s done—it’s not fair. Of course, Harry and Hermione and Draco have all had so much more pagetime and good characterization to their credit that it’s completely understandable, and canon-supported, that Ginny can be criticized like this—and still. I want to cry: “Leave Ginny alone, it’s not the poor girl’s fault JKR wrote her that way, and anyway she’s only impulsive, she hasn’t done anything nearly as bad as some of the others!” (This is one of the reasons why I like Ron so much, and now Ginny: they’re not as ruthless as Harry and Hermione can be, though Hermione rocks because of how scary she can get.)

I still like EvilDore as an explanation for his canon inconsistencies, though. And this is terribly inconsistent of me, because I can’t stand just horriblyflawed!Ginny, but I think I might have a shred of reason in my defence: Evil!Dumbledore is still powerful. Shunting a fifteen-year-old girl into irrelevance is one thing; making a powerful male character immensely relevant even in that sort of capacity still respects the character’s importance. Incompetence is actually the worst thing you can do to a character, not making them evil—at least if they’re evil they’re achieving something and off being dynamic, while if incompetent they’re held in complete contempt. It’s the difference between bothering to hate something because it means something to you, and wiping it off the toe of your boot like it’s nothing: rivalry versus utter obscurity. There’s probably the feminism thing, too; I like female characters, and tend to feel more strongly about what’s being done to them.

A post I wrote some time ago talked about a character being said to deserve another character and what that might actually mean, that using that language might have more to do with the necessity to maintain the character’s role in the story than actually believing they’re entitled to keep their love interest tied up in their basement. And that’s what kind of bothers me about some Harry/non-Ginny fic, the breakup handling; she was important to Harry, and it doesn’t always feel right to have her disappear into the background, especially if accompanied by a deconstruction that no other character receives. (Not that I think every single one-shot should never ever commit the Vile Crime of not focusing on every important character, and even in longfics it's not hard to keep a character offscreen without proving them useless or vile.)

I like Ginny, though of course that’s a personal preference and not a critique of her critiquers, who I think are kind of right unless they're the Ginnyisawhore gang. (Disliking a fictional female character is not necessarily anti-feminist, as I’ve said before, and I hardly think often very good fanfics critiquing her canonical inconsistencies should be censored.) She’s a young girl who’s become a vivid character in a short space of time; what she was intended to be didn’t quite make it to the page, but it’s there in text and subtext that she’s not meant to be a horrible person. She’s feisty and bold and happens to be interested in the hero; she changed out of a cocoon, and her new wings are ragged around the edges and she’s a different subspecies entirely to her caterpillar form, but she’s still a dashing red-and-gold butterfly. Who knows? Maybe she’ll show more of herself in Deathly Hallows.

Writing this made me remember vitriol I’ve displayed towards female characters other than Ginny in the past; I’ve recently come across old posts of mine saying how nice it would be to drive a spork through another poorly written female character’s head or see her killed by another female character who seems to quite like her. And looking back at that makes me extremely uncomfortable. Violence towards women, what a wonderful yay that is. Female characters are often badly written because they’re often underrepresented in fiction because of sexism, and so overcompensate as a Sue or undercompensate to avoid that or draw on incompetent feminine stereotypes. So is it really appropriate to wish them dead in bloody ways and otherwise visit rage on them, promulgating yet more hatred of women? (Of course, fictional character != real person.)