#maybe she's born with it; maybe it's the complex product of interwoven sociocultural systems of knowledge & performance that shape the ways

[amorremanet]

okay so I just read your entire post on m*lly and a*thur weasley and I have to say I agree with you on pretty much everything and, while I knew they were bad people, I didn't even realise a lot of what they did were bad and since I don't just JKR's narration as far as I can throw her so I was wondering what your view on the other Weasleys are, since I don't particularly like Ron. I'd love to hear another perspective.

Hey, nonny!

I'm sorry to disappoint here, and I really don't want to be rude when you've been so nice? But anymore, engaging with HP anything mostly makes me feel nauseated and ashamed of myself for how much time and energy I put into the fandom, only to have Joanne end up going full on T3RF and perpetuating bigoted garbage that actively makes the world more hostile toward and dangerous for several people I love.

[sorry for the L1ndsay Ell1s video link, and ftr, I'm not co-signing everything she's ever said; I just think this particular video is solid. Watch it with an adblocker on if you don't want her getting any adsense from your view]

So, again, I'm sorry, and please don't feel like you did anything wrong here; I'm rarely on tumblr anymore, and when I am, I don't talk about HP, so you had no way of knowing any of my thoughts or how much I'm still in the fandom or not. But the only real perspective I really feel up to giving here is that Percy is my favorite, Fred is my least favorite, I probably wouldn't like Ginny even if she weren't done dirty by Joanne's internalized misogyny but that's just down to "Ginny isn't my personal cup of tea, character-wise" rather than anything being bad or wrong or whatever about her, and Ron……………is fine.

idk, I used to hate Ron, but it was mostly the overcompensation of a twelve-year-old who hadn't realized that she was allowed to ship Hermione with girls, just like she was increasingly shipping W0lfstar, because apparently, girls being with girls was NOT just something that Takeuchi Naoko-sensei made up for Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune (in my defense, it was 2002, and I was raised Catholic).

So, the HP fandom that I'd seen by that point made me feel like I had to pick some kind of side in the "who should Hermione get with" debate, and out of the most popular ships for her at the time, I didn't personally like her with Draco (my favorite Draco scene was and still is the one with the Amazing Bouncing Ferret), Ron (it seemed like the obvious endgame, which annoyed the part of me that was a bratty tweenager and being pointlessly nonconformist, but also I projected onto her and I didn't want to get with Ron—which, in retrospect? is just because I was a lesbian and didn't know it yet, but……see previous point about being sheltered), or Snape (teacher/student just isn't my thing and usually squicks me)

Which meant that Harry won by process of elimination, which meant that I had to vitriolically hate the other ships and think they were all stupid and bad because I was twelve and the culture on the message boards at the time really led me to believe that being consumed with hatred for the ships you don't like was, like, normal, or a good way to be, or a recipe for happiness. (It's not any of those things, and I don't recommend it, but……blah blah, 12-year-old Kassie was a sweet summer child who didn't even know she was gay yet, despite how the highest praise she could give to any of the famous boys she crushed on—Orlando Bloom, Hayden Christensen, Enrique Iglesias, I could name more—was "he's almost pretty enough to be a girl.")

(also, that video in the link is about the sordid tale of MsScribe, which is definitely well beyond the normal scope of drama in Ye Olde HP Fandom of the early naughts………but although Eldena Doubleca5t doesn't make this point, I personally believe that one of the reasons why MsScribe got away with her elaborate, massively convoluted sockpuppetry for so long? was that she weaponized the anti-Harry/Ginny sentiment that a lot of Harry/Hermione shippers held, and spending as much time hating the other ship as you did actually loving and appreciating your own ship was so normalized as part of How To Be A Shipper In The HP Fandom that nobody questioned why a bunch of ostensibly random alleged H/G shippers would come out of nowhere to harass an H/Hr shipper who was basically a nobody, at the time.

It wasn't even exclusive to these ships. I remember when a fan-artist who I liked from Sailor Moon stuff started making HP art, they did mostly spend their time drawing Remus/Snape, but they made more than one piece shitting on Remus/Sirius just for existing and had multiple friends and fans supporting them in that. Because the whole concept of "just don't talk about the ships you don't like" was totally foreign to A LOT of Ye Olde School HP fan forums, LJ comms, etc. and bashing the ships you didn't like rather than actually enjoying the ships you DO like was treated as Essential for proving that you really loved your ships.

It was a toxic, bullshit culture that hit SEVERAL boiling points, over and over and over again, with several different ship wars because all of us collectively learned jack with a side of squat from every single instance where this happened. But……this jaunt down fandom history lane is way, way off-topic and not what you actually asked about, so. Sorry for that.)

A N Y W A Y.

TL;DR: I used to hate Ron, but it was grounded in fandom bullshit (and more specifically: ship war pissing contest bullshit), and he didn't actually deserve how much I hated him. But I also don't really have strong feelings on him. Y'know, he's fine. Not my cuppa, but I don't find him, like, grotesquely offensive or anything?