#roncissa

[saintsenara]

hear me out on this one: ron/narcissa

thank you very much, anon!

and i certainly will hear you out.

i am invested in the plausibility of all malfoy/weasley ships because the two families are narrative mirrors - and narrative mirror pairings are my jam.

and i'm invested in this one specifically because i adore the concept of narcissa/molly so much - especially the way that their narrative confinement to the domestic sphere, and the loneliness this causes in each of them, is simultaneously very different and yet so very similar.

ron is the one of the weasley children who seems to be the most like molly - in that he's the one who expresses love most obviously through domestic and pseudo-domestic tasks. he clearly likes to take care of people who matter to him - in a way that narcissa, who occupies that caring role within her own family, has probably never experienced [while i think lucius is a good husband, he is so clearly bound up in his role as the family's "leader" and "protector" that he isn't going to ever take that more feminine-coded caring position in his relationship with narcissa].

and he's also clearly a little bit lonely, just as molly is. while the sibling who is least aligned with the rest of the family in terms of personality is obviously percy - and while i reject the common weasley-bashing sentiment that molly and arthur are bad parents - ron's position in the order of children means that he does seem to receive less of his parents' emotional attention than his older siblings or ginny. this is then compounded by his position in the golden trio. he's harry's everyman sidekick - not special like the hero, and not clever like hermione, the helper-figure. and this affects his status in the eyes of all the people who look to harry to be their saviour - the order don't care about ron, the ministry doesn't care about ron, ron is shocked to discover in deathly hallows that dumbledore even knew who he was - and in the eyes of all the people who consider harry the scum of the earth - voldemort would, i am certain, be hard-pressed to pick him out of a line-up.

narcissa has that unstable social position too. both the order and the death eaters consider her less important to the arc of the series than bellatrix - and i think we can also imagine that she was the sister who received the least emotional attention from her parents, given how shocking both bellatrix and andromeda's behaviour was, and that this explains why she is the most conformist and staid of the three.

and two unlikely people realising a similarity which takes them on a shared journey of self-discovery is a hot trope.

and one that i will go in for every time.