whinlatter

[whinlatter]

Luna Lovegood writes to Newt about the magical animals be left out of his book.

[whinlatter]

How do you think Sirius felt about Lupin not reaching out to Harry before POA? Would he be angry or would he understand that Lupin’s condition (plus extreme poverty) would have made that difficult (along with his guilt and self loathing ofc)?

controversially... i don't think he gave a shit.

before i have the timeline up in arms, let me say that i'm an enormous fan of harry and sirius' canon relationship. the muddy paw-print good luck card - and the fact that sirius is the only person harry ever seems even vaguely child-like with, and the fact that harry knows that sirius is dead because he'd never disappear from his sight otherwise - lives rent-free in my head, and i understand completely why so many fans hate seeing the depth of their relationship devalued in service of a characterisation of sirius which is stupid, prissy, flaky, and fickle. because i'm one of them.

however... i must also be frank that there are some things which have emerged in reaction to this fanon devaluation of sirius' commitment to harry which i think are a little overblown. [and which have moved beyond "good godfather sirius black" to "flawless godfather sirius black".]

the reaction sirius is often written as having - within the canon timeline [alternate universes are alternate universes] - to harry's pre-hogwarts experience is one of them.

sirius is often taken as someone who's ready to murder the dursleys and whisk harry away from them at the slightest provocation. within such a characterisation, lupin's failure to check in on harry during his childhood - and, therefore, his failure to do anything about the neglect and abuse harry was experiencing - could be presumed to have sirius ready to tear his old friend limb-from-limb.

in prisoner of azkaban, sirius invites harry to live with him - not because he wants to rescue him, but because he's harry's legal guardian according to james and lily's wishes, and he wants to fulfil those wishes - but by order of the phoenix he takes the same view of harry living with the dursleys as everyone else does: that it isn't nice by any means, but that it is necessary.

that is, once sirius knows about the blood protection - which we can presume happens fairly shortly after prisoner of azkaban, since we know he and dumbledore write to each other - he's completely on board with harry staying where he is.

and this connects to something else i think the fandom has a tendency to overstate: the extent to which sirius intervenes in harry's favour against the rest of the order.

because - yes - sirius is absolutely right to say - on harry's first night in grimmauld place - that he should be updated on what the order have been doing while he's been in little whinging.

this is correct from an operational standpoint - and the primary flaw in molly weasley's argument is, as lupin points out, that excluding the children in the house only stops them learning accurate information about the order's mission, rather than information full stop.

and it also shows sirius' understanding of and respect for who harry is as a person. he's the only adult character in the book who explicitly recognises that harry objects to being infantilised, is frustrated with the information blackout to which he's subjected, and feels that his own contribution and usefulness to the anti-voldemort cause is being overlooked for no good reason.

but... even as we acknowledge this, we also have to acknowledge that - while he recognises that harry's feelings are valid - sirius never suggests that the order's treatment of harry is inappropriate, unnecessary, or unreasonable.

throughout order of the phoenix sirius takes exactly the same view as everyone else:

that harry should be subjected to an information blackout that he should remain in little whinging until told otherwise that he shouldn't be told he's being surveilled that he shouldn't be told about the prophecy and its contents that he shouldn't be made privy to the detail of the order's plans that he shouldn't be informed that he might be possessed and - above all - that dumbledore's decisions when it comes to harry are the right ones and dumbledore's interpretation of events which involve harry is correct

clearly, there's some tension in sirius and dumbledore's relationship in order of the phoenix. but this relates to sirius' view of his own experience - in particular, his struggles with seeing any non-active contribution to the order as valuable. when it comes to harry, he defers - like all the other adults in the order - to dumbledore.

and this is obviously going to affect how sirius understands harry's experience while he was in azkaban.

dumbledore explains to harry - at the end of order of the phoenix - that he was placed with the dursleys for his own protection. not only does the blood protection keep him safe from voldemort - indeed, it is the only thing [as both dumbledore and voldemort acknowledge] that does - but his separation from the wizarding world keeps him safe from voldemort's supporters. and while - yes - dumbledore is withholding certain, horcrux-related bits of the truth from harry here, the broader truth remains... harry is placed with the dursleys because it's the only way to keep him alive, and - regardless of whether the reader thinks this justifies what happens to him - canon is clear that sirius, whose only motivation is to keep harry safe, would.

which means that lupin wouldn't need to offer any explanation for not attempting to seek harry out beyond "dumbledore said not to".

i also think, as a post-script, that the fact that harry doesn't seem to be particularly bothered by his distant relationship with lupin - while sirius is alive, that is - is another reason why sirius wouldn't care about it.

sirius' priority - which i say not as a wolfstar-versus-prongsfoot thing but as a "these are the group dynamics in the canon text" thing - is james. lupin and pettigrew are both clearly his secondary friends while james is alive.

and so, while i reject the idea that he sees harry as indistinguishable from james - this is nonsense the films invented - sirius does nonetheless see harry as someone who takes the same role in society as james did [notice, for example, that he always imagines harry as a leader and the other child characters as followers]. this is the thing he perceives as the same across his relationship with harry and his relationship with james: that he is the only person seen as a peer or co-leader, rather than a follower. he can't envision harry feeling let down by lupin, because in this context lupin would have to have had power over harry to let him down.

if harry was angry at lupin himself - especially if harry framed this as being betrayed or shown insufficient loyalty - i think there's grounds to claim that sirius would share this anger. but i don't think he'd ever be inclined to manufacture it for himself.

[whinlatter]

Speaking of patroni, do u reckon Harry’s patronus would’ve changed after the war. Kind of like the symbolic loss of Hedwig. Prongtronus represents James as a guardian angel; would Harry outgrow that? Whinlatter’s beasts seems to be doing something like that imo.

I could see his patronus becoming a Thestral which would make for an interesting Hinny detail; the white horse (hero worship) and the thestral (communing with death, death as Harry’s guardian/the dead as Harry’s guardians). Tho I know u don’t particularly favour Hinny and I suppose the Stag/Snake duo fits for Tomarry

@whinlatter actually told me that the change in harry's patronus in beasts is because he's so gutted about the removal of the horcrux. snape's patronus became a doe to mirror the loss of his soulmate, after all, so harry's is becoming a raven stealing chips from a bin majestic basilisk.

[do not attempt to fact-check this. i definitely have proof that it's true - so jot that down - but it's - frankly - completely, unacceptably rude for you to ask me to produce it.]

[whinlatter]

Hi! I've noticed a couple of times that you mention that you think Voldemort wants to emasculate Lucius and I wondered if you could explain why you think this?

because i've parsed the extremely subtle meaning behind him:

forcing lucius to hand over his phallus wand whipping out his own cock wand to measure it against lucius' appearing to find that his dick wand is longer, which he considers pleasing mocking lucius for losing the ability to sexually satisfy his wife assuming that he will receive voldemort's wand in return, when actually he is going to go wandless calling forth his enormous snake snake and stroking it while looking the wandless lucius directly in the eye telling lucius that he doesn't deserve a penis wand because he's so incompetent that all he's good for is being a eunuch staying in the house performing the domestic labour of looking after the dark lord's prisoners making clear to lucius [and the assembled group more widely] that he's fucked bellatrix and she loved it he's so important they worship him as a god while he treats their devotion with casual disdain informing lucius, his wife, and his sister-in-law that one of his wayward female relatives tonks has been banged by the enormous monster shaft of married a werewolf [which is also what happened when the sister of the woman he's failing to sexually satisfy andromeda was bouncing and moaning on it for married a mudblood] [which shows that the other two black sisters can't be satisfied by posh, pureblood men, proving that narcissa isn't satisfied by lucius either reflects badly on them] calling lucius' son and heir a homosexual babysitter and using lucius' dong wand to murder charity burbage, thus demonstrating his superior sexual prowess that he is so magnificent he can make any woman his whore produce powerful magic from any wand, while lucius can't

[whinlatter]

omg wait when did Malfoy mimi wanking in hbp I do not remember this!

i direct your attentions to chapter 7, anon…

“What did he do when he saw you?”

“The usual,” said Ron indifferently, demonstrating a rude hand gesture. “Not like him, though, is it? Well — that is” — he did the hand gesture again — “but why isn’t he out there bullying first years?”

[whinlatter]

Are “prat” “git” and “berk” common British terms that people actually use or is it just a HP thing? If people do use it is it regional or class dependent? Why do you think it’s used so often in the HP world?

back at it with the ‘british nonsense’ series, is it! you know i live to oblige.

i can confirm, anon, that these are all words that british people could plausibly have used when HP was published. they’re all quite deliberately cross-class and multi-regional (perhaps a bit southern english, if anything). whether that’s by design or happy instance, i don’t know. they’re all very mild and look a bit dated now, though. ‘prat’ is still knocking about some extent, ‘berk’ remains one of my mother’s favourites, but ‘git’ has largely fallen out of use except for among those being deliberately archaic and whimsical (i can imagine boris johnson using it with little issue, as a case in point).

the reason they’re used so often in HP because they’re all considered a step below actually swearing, and so would be able to get past the very genteel bloomsbury press children’s book editor who would otherwise censor real profanity. in britain this used to be called the watershed test: there were words that were deemed unsuitable to be used in television programmes before the ‘watershed’ of 9pm (so after children are presumed to have gone to bed), so watershed words would be very much off the table in tv and most media either marketed at children or which children could plausibly consume. so all HP swearwords tend to be words that would have been allowed pre-watershed to comply with these pretty strongly held cultural norms.

it’s quite interesting to track the point at which HP becomes a bit more ok with meatier british swear words and insults. the movies were always ahead of the books on this - “bloody hell” in film 1! the scandal! - and i can vividly remember the gasps of mothers everywhere when ron dropped that infamous ‘piss off’ in GoF in 2005. when it comes to the books, OotP in 2003 has vernon saying ‘effing’ and harry is strongly implied to be dropping the f word in narration on several occasions (he’s in his feelings, angst ridden and foul mouthed to boot); by HBP, we get the first use of ‘slut’, and then of course we have our infamous ‘bitch’ drop in DH, which no doubt reflected a view of the editors that the audience was probably old enough to hear at least one good expletive.

(of course, the most accurate british insult wielded in the books is actually when ron, at the ripe old age of thirteen, canonically calls snape a cunt: ‘D’you know what that’— (he called Snape something that made Hermione say ‘Ron!’) — ‘is making me do?’’. it’s enough to make a girl feel deeply patriotic…)

[whinlatter]

Messy happy Gryffindors enjoying a quidditch match…

This whole thing came about just because I wanted to paint Remus absolutely cheesing to show his lil crooked teeth ☹️

[whinlatter]

Hello! I love your account and your posts are all so well thought out and clever! Are u taking asks/requests for headcannons and stuff atm?

[whinlatter]

Hiii. Hope you have not given up on beasts🥹 Its a lovely fic and i would love to see it grow more!

i promise i haven’t given up, anon. i’m just moving slowly, as is my wont and prerogative in turbulent times. there is much more to come and you will have it soon enough. but writing is something that brings me joy that i do in my free time, and when that free time gets swallowed up so does the writing (and the joy). hence no new chapter as yet. but i’m by the sea having a rest and doing some writing again, determined as i am to claw back some of the writing time and aforementioned joy from a busy bruising trudge of life this year. but there is no question of fic abandonment in my mind. that would mean giving up on the aforementioned joy — unacceptable.

[whinlatter]

:)

Do you reckon HJP is a Carrie, a Miranda, a Samantha, or a Charlotte?

this is a conversation i've actually had with the inimitable @whinlatter [real cool girl hours, who's up], and i'm therefore delighted to be able to post her excellent graphic design in support of the idea that harry - rich, impulsive, would absolutely get married on a whim and/or buy a vineyard on a whim and/or fly to paris just to deck aleksandr petrovsky - is mr big:

which works for me, because i'm a tomarry girly.

and if anyone in the series would bang their lover in his wife's bed, rummage through her fridge to eat her leftovers, chase her down the stairs, and then make literally everything about him for some reason... it's lord v.

[carrie would have murdered charlotte for that engagement ring if she thought she could get away with it, let's be real.]

[whinlatter]

Hi Dr. Whinlatter. I just wanted to say that Orchards is one of the best pieces of HP fiction I ever read, it fits so well into the canon, a lot of fics about that summer has them getting together or at least Harry being aware he has feelings for Ginny, the way you had those two idiots falling in love without even realizing was brilliant! I can’t wait to see what you have planned next, be it Beasts or anything else.

[whinlatter]

It’s that time of the year when seasonal Harry Potter spreads very easily and I happened to catch it. 

[whinlatter]

does anyone ever think about the fact that ginny is a huge animal lover and that’s a quality we see from her in many of the books, she plays with crookshanks often, she named ron’s owl, she tells fred off for being tactless about scabber’s ‘death’, she gets herself a pygmy puff and the fact that she must’ve been absolutely horrified when she realised she had murdered animals (the roosters) in cold blood even though she didn’t know she was doing it until afterwards??? like someone protect this girl this would have been traumatising to realise like. waking up covered in blood and feathers?? i want to cry for her. also beasts by @whinlatter perfectly captures her love for animals and i just think we should all think about this more because i do

[whinlatter]

Remus Lupin/Nymphadora Tonks, rated M, eleven 200-word drabbles. Warning for mentions of abortion.

 She must have fallen asleep. She thinks it’s a fly crawling up her neck, for a minute, and nearly swats it before she realises it’s his mouth. Her heart gives a squeeze that is aching at the same time that it is sweet—how little it takes from him, these days, to wring a few drops of nervous hope from that tired old thing. But she turns to him, anyway, and they don’t speak but he kisses her a little, and fuck, there goes her gormless heart again.

Read it on Ao3.

I wanted to say a few things about what went into this fic below - and I will be talking about abusive relationships and abortion from a secular, pro-abortion-on-demand perspective, so if that's likely to trouble you I recommend giving it, and the fic, a miss.

This story is set around chapter 7 of Deathly Hallows, "The Will of Albus Dumbledore," when Lupin and Tonks leave Harry's birthday party to avoid being seen by Rufus Scrimgeour. This period of canon gives us several glimpses into how Lupin & Tonks's relationship is going and it strikes me as a really scary and unsafe time for Tonks. Lupin's unhappiness is so evident even Harry notices it, while she's described as "radiant," - meaning pregnant, but also that they're clearly not on the same page. Around this time we see Tonks facing some of the disturbing realities of being married to Lupin: Bellatrix's pursuit of her in the battle of seven Potters, having to flee from her boss so he doesn't see them together. Tonks's mentor is dead (and we see when that happens that Lupin's not all that interested in supporting her as she's reeling from it), Tonks's family is pretty unhappy with her (according to Lupin), things are unraveling.

(I'd like to point you to two takes I really love on how off-kilter their interactions are right before this, around the time Mad-Eye dies: Fallen Warrior by @bikelock28 and Mandible by @saintsenara - both of these authors have had a huge influence on my writing and my thinking about hp canon.)

I've always been kind of obsessed with this particular moment between Lupin and Tonks - when we see Lupin seize Tonks by the wrist and haul her out of the burrow. It's an alarming interaction, to me, that suggests the possibility of a very frightening dynamic setting up between them. Tonks is an adult, she's aware of the consequences of being seen together. I'm not even convinced she had to leave in the first place instead of changing her appearance or just making herself scarce upstairs for a while. There's no argument that leads Lupin to grabbing her out of desperation - he just says bye to Harry and hauls her away. Not by the hand, like he's trying to keep her from tripping or something. By the wrist, so she can't let go, which seems even more likely to unbalance her. It's a dismissal of her autonomy at the very least, he's treating her a bit like a child, and it's probably quite embarrassing for Tonks. The way she makes excuses for it the next day, in the context of everything else we're seeing about this relationship, only makes it all seem unhealthier. If I witnessed this interaction between a friend and her new husband, I'd be checking on her.

And in the midst of this rapidly-disintegrating relationship with this escalatingly-discontent and reactive husband - Tonks is finding out that she's pregnant, something that will complicate things even further and tie her to a man who does not really seem to want to be with her.

This fic came to be as I was thinking about the way Lupin talks about Tonks in "The Bribe," when he reveals that she's pregnant and they've split up, in a way that respresents this development as something abhorrent and humiliating but also downplays his culpability for it: ...then Lupin said, with an air of forcing himself to admit something unpleasant, "Tonks is going to have a baby." And how devastating that attitude might be for a Tonks who is happily pregnant.

But we don't really know how happy she is to be pregnant. We never hear about it from her. We see her as radiant in an early appearance, sure, and the baby ends up getting born, but that's all we really have to go on. And I have to wonder what options Tonks might have had if she didn't want to be pregnant or wasn't sure. She'd have had access to a legal abortion through the muggle health system up to 24 weeks, but there's evidence in canon that wizards are fearful of and disgusted by muggle medical practices (e.g. Arthur's stitches in OoTP). And wizarding society seems pretty regressive in some respects: people get married and have children young, there's no mention of divorce or blended families or out-of-wedlock babies - and yes, that's also because these are childrens' books (and books that privilege a certain kind of familial love above all else) but this is the text and the universe we have to work with. Notably, the immortal human soul demonstrably exists in this world and I think it's pretty safe to assume that most people believe in it - it seems to be pretty common knowledge that a dementor can remove the soul from the body and that ability is encoded into the wizarding penal system. What does that mean for abortion access in that world? Do wizards believe that an embryo or a fetus is an ensouled person and that it would be murder, or something like that, to terminate it? Even if a magical abortion is legal, what are cultural attitudes toward it like under this belief system? How difficult or inconvenient is it? I'll leave the particulars of how the wizarding legal and medical systems function to someone smarter than me, but... I work in health care, and I've seen the ways that even vague or minor barriers to access - stigma, embarrassment, misinformation, wait times or travel requirements, the levels of executive function and emotional regulation required to keep multiple appointments and talk to a bunch of providers about a sensitive issue - mean that some people who need care won't get it. We don't really know if Tonks unreservedly chose to keep her pregnancy, or if she just didn't have meaningful access to another option, or if access was just hard or unpleasant enough that she didn't make a decision until it was too late.

There's a tendency in some Remadora fic— including one of mine, in a way I didn't think much about until later—to frame the hypothetical of Teddy being aborted as a regrettable tragedy, thankfully averted by the power of true love, and not as a reasonable response to the difficult circumstances and something everyone might have moved on from and been fine - and I think that's understandable. Teddy's important to trajectory of Tonks and Lupin's lives. It's okay to love these characters and want everyone to be as happy and whole as their situations allow. And I think that we have some (at least mildly gendered) expectations that of course our faithful Tonks wants to stay married, wants a child with the person she loves. But I wanted to depict this slice of their relationship with sympathy for a Tonks who is seriously considering ending her pregnancy - who has at least as much reason as Lupin to just want shut of the whole thing. I would have, in her position. I have seen friends locked into horrible situations with abusive partners by pregnancy.  I think you could argue that not having Teddy and getting out of that relationship might have meant a different outcome for Tonks in the battle of Hogwarts. And I think that it's entirely possible for Tonks to have wanted an abortion that she didn't end up getting - for whatever legal, cultural, or psychological reasons - and for Teddy to still have been a welcome and loved child when he was born.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

[image: from francis bacon, three studies of figures on beds, 1972]

[whinlatter]

I wanted to thank you for talking about how uncomfortable it is when people feel the need to make the Dursleys worse than they already are. Any abuse was too many, and making it worse implies that what they were already doing wasn't *that* bad. Your explanation of how the cultural zeitgeist of the time would have influenced how the author was thinking and people were interpreting is really interesting, too. I knew there had to be a reason someone would write that and think it was okay, but I had no idea what it was. So thank you for both.

cheers mate, i really appreciate that. glad to be in good company with the ‘no need to exaggerate the abuse’ camp. i do understand where the impulse comes from fic writers and fandom commentators, and i get that it often comes from well-meaning people trying to reconcile the series’ strange and often incompatible registers on children’s suffering. but exaggerated depictions of the horrors of the dursleys’ abuse will never sit quite right with me, for all the reasons you suggest.

not to sound like a stuck record but i do think the second point - the genre tropes and reception history - is really crucial! not to abdicate the author from responsibility (i am her biggest paid up hater) but i do think we should always bear in mind that contemporary authors write, edit and publish within very clearly confined constraints set by — what else! — the market. publishing companies’ calculations of audience appetites, editors’ understandings of cultural tastes and norms, and the collective reinforcement of expected conventions and trademark staple features of lucrative genres by an industry with strong market awareness really dictate what ends up in stories as much as whatever sprung from an author’s mind in published fiction (to say nothing of how the author’s own story is conditioned and influenced by what they have read/been exposed to/seen find commercial success within their genre). and, in the mid-1990s, the market was really ok with a lot of comic depictions of child abuse. so that’s what the market got! that doesn’t mean we can’t be appalled by the dursleys’ treatment of harry — we absolutely can — but it does mean we should see the series in context and see it for what it is (a product of its time and circumstance, as all texts and ideas are).

[whinlatter]

a duo i'd love to hear your thoughts on: bellatrix & harry (or even bellatrix/harry)

thank you very much for the ask, pal! an extremely interesting duo to think about.

and, obviously, the thing we have to immediately acknowledge is that harry thinks bellatrix is hot. he's always going on about her heaving breasts and shiny hair [and shiny hair is something he does seem to have a thing for throughout canon - hence why he spends one of his owl exams staring at parvati's], and she's definitely his "hear me out" candidate...

[i think if he's forced by ron to play fuck, marry, kill about the black sisters... he's fucking bella. he's depressed for weeks when he realises.]

more seriously, though, the thing which really stands out in harry and bellatrix's canonical relationship is that he sees her primarily as a catalyst - and, above all, primarily as a catalyst for loss - but in a way which feels strangely impersonal given the profundity of this loss to him.

she kills sirius - but harry can't summon up the rage to use the cruciatus curse against her [even though he can against amycus carrow, whom he has never met and whose crime is the considerably more minor spitting at mcgonagall]. she almost kills ginny - and harry "changes course at once" to try and protect her - but the person who get there first and who finishes bellatrix off is molly.

and while i don't think this is strange because i think molly wouldn't have the skills to duel bellatrix, i do think it's fairly strange narratively. bellatrix's death mirrors sirius' to such an extent - right down to the fact that she dies laughing - that it would have been an interesting conceit to have harry avenging his godfather by standing in as sirius' surrogate for a repeat of the duel before the veil, which then allows sirius to be avenged when the outcome is reversed...

[although what i do like about the molly-bellatrix duel in canon is that voldemort ends up in the position his narrative mirror, harry, is in during the sirius-bellatrix duel - watching the one person he thought would never abandon him die.]

and so harry sees bellatrix as an agent of chaos - and he utterly loathes her - but he also sees the chaos she causes as, fundamentally, voldemort's fault. he views her as a puppet, a tool, a pawn - as so totally enamoured by the dark lord that she lacks any capacity for critical thinking - rather than ever seeming to understand her as her own person.

[him taunting her in order of the phoenix by pointing out voldemort's a half-blood always stands out to me when thinking about this - lucius malfoy isn't shocked at all by the revelation, but bellatrix is. it underlines the point made by her behaviour at her trial, which harry witnesses in goblet of fire - that her loyalty to voldemort is so absolute that it makes her deluded, and that she exists for him rather than for herself.]

equally, bellatrix clearly sees him as just a thing - an annoyance which voldemort just needs to eradicate - rather than a person.

and so i think that one of the very interesting "harry and bellatrix actually having to get to know each other" questions is what journey they would go on in order to understand the other as a real person. my favourite iteration of this - as i've said here - is to write bellatrix's non-battlefield personality as surprisingly similar to tonks', and to have harry having to face the fact that a woman he hates could be so much like a woman he adores. you can also obviously do the same with him having to realise she's very like sirius.

and her having to realise that harry is very like voldemort.

because the other thing which i think is fascinating about thinking about harry and bellatrix is that the best parallel for hinny in the text isn't ron and hermione, and nor is it james and lily...

it's bellamort.

i believe that harry's canonical love for ginny is completely genuine - and i accept that by the epilogue they will have settled into a relationship with a more equal dynamic - but it's very striking in the pre-epilogue canon that the power dynamic between the two is very much unequal.

harry's narrative purpose means that he has to be set apart from all others - even ron and hermione - in order for him to properly function as the encapsulation of all that is good [and as the series' allegory for christ]. as a result, he tends to interact with other characters either as people he needs to protect, or as people he needs to protect others from.

and we see this in his relationship with ginny at the end of half-blood prince, when he breaks up with her for - what he sees as - her own protection, in the belief that being associated with him will put her at risk from voldemort.

harry believes that separating himself from her is sufficient to bring ginny this protection, he never considers her to have the talent to fight voldemort herself - even though he acknowledges her as a skilled fighter elsewhere in the text - and he spends much of deathly hallows believing that he has guaranteed ginny's safety. he thinks of hogwarts as a safe-haven throughout his time on the horcrux hunt - and he is genuinely shocked to discover how bad the carrows' regime has been when he arrives at the castle immediately prior to the battle - and he treats ginny's role as a resistance leader in her own right [such as her attempt to steal the sword of gryffindor] as, essentially, a bit of a laugh.

for her part, ginny is set up in the text as ferociously loyal to harry - "i never gave up on you" - and as someone whose company he desires and values in a distinct way, but whose relationship with him is unbalanced by the paternalistic vibe of their power dynamic. harry is more honest with her than with many other people, for example, but he still doesn't tell her anything about the horcruxes, the prophecy, or the fact that he has to walk into the forest to die.

and this is exactly the same as bellatrix and voldemort.

bellatrix is clearly justified in saying that voldemort considers her his "favourite" - and he does behave towards her in ways which are meaningfully different from his treatment of his other death eaters. but their dynamic is still hugely unbalanced by the fact that voldemort is also required by the narrative to be singular - the literal embodiment of evil - and that this drives his secrecy about his true self. bellatrix is also treated by voldemort as someone whose role in his mission against harry is his to dictate, safe in the knowledge that she would never give up on him either, and who can be similarly kept in the dark about the horcruxes or the prophecy [although he clearly views this as for his, rather than her, protection].

deathly hallows, in particular, is full of explicit comparisons between the two couples. ginny trying to steal the sword leads to bellatrix giving away that there's a horcrux in her vault. ginny living while bellatrix dies [because of motherly love!] is the opener to harry living while voldemort dies [because of motherly love!]. and - of course - there's this in the forest...

Everything was waiting. Hagrid was struggling, and Bellatrix was panting, and Harry thought inexplicably of Ginny, and her blazing look, and the feel of her lips on his. 

as i've said elsewhere, i think it's entirely possible to write voldemort as quite fond of ginny on the basis of her canonical similarity to bellatrix. and so the reverse must apply - harry can be written as fond of bellatrix on the basis of her similarity to ginny.

which means i also think - if you're so inclined - that the toxic wife-swap would genuinely work.