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I was not tagged, but I think this is fun!

Monstrously And Remarkably Variable Education Levels

Potters Look Quite Like Gingers Nowadays

Mixed Weasley Arts

The Lion with the Red Mane

Hermione Doesn’t Rhyme With Anything

For Love Of All Things

Our Weasley King

Lovers in a Wrong House

Playing It Cool

Bloody Constant Vigilance

The Rat with the Lion Heart

Blood Tracks

Anam Cara

Let Me Love Your Pain

I too don't think I have as many friends as I do WIPs, but I'll try and tag authors whose work I really like.

Tagging @simplyswooningk @mertronus @cheesyficwriter @reallybeth9

rules: post the names of all the files in your WIP folder regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them and then post a little snippet of it or tell them something about it! And then tag as many people as you have WIPs.

Hopefully it’s okay that I am going to consider a series as one even though I have multiple chapters. Also, not sure I have as many friends as I do WIPs.

A Touch of Mystery

Crack Fic

Work Husband

The Second of January

DINK Elope

How Long Was I Asleep

Voodoo

Eavesdrop

Elope 1

Amnesty

Pity Snog

MBMW

Tagging @adenei @accio-broom @voldemorts-tap-shoes @be11atrixthestrange @acnelli and encouraging any one else to join in!

Thoughts on Ron and Hermione as a ship?

thank you very much for the ask, @thesilverstarling!

i’ll state my position straight away: book ron and hermione are the best of the canon couples.

they will have a long and extremely happy marriage made rich by great and stalwart love, lust, fun, and faithfulness, rather than held together by duty and couples’ therapy like so many readers and authors (including jkr, who seems to have decided to spend the years since the conclusion of the series failing to understand anything about her own characters) tend to think.

i will state another position straight away: lest i seem like i’m just a fan with blinkers on, i think this even though hermione is, by far, my least favourite member of the trio. if she were real i would detest her, and i dislike how she is treated by the narrative as always justified in her negative characteristics. i like fanon hermione - perfect and preternaturally good - even less.

as a result, i think that it’s ridiculous that jkr has said that she thought ron needed to ‘become worthy’ of hermione. they belong together as equals - which is what they’re set up in the narrative as being from the off - and i hate seeing that undermined.

because ronald weasley? he’s an icon. and he doesn’t get anywhere near the respect he deserves in fandom.

there are multiple reasons for this - ron’s narrative purpose is to be the everyman sidekick, and so he is able to be less special than harry or hermione (the helper-figure); the amount of aristocracy wank in this fandom means that the weasleys’ ordinariness is less appealing to writers than making harry have twenty different lordships and call himself hadrian; the narrative interrogates ron’s flaws - especially his capacity for jealousy - much more intensively than it interrogates either hermione’s (cruel, inflexible, meddling) or harry’s (reckless, self-absorbed, judgemental) - but one i feel is particularly significant is that ron is such a british character that many of his traits are not understood as intended by non-british readers.

in particular - as is outlined in this excellent meta by @whinlatter - ron’s sense of humour isn’t indicative of immaturity or a lack of seriousness, but is, in fact, evidence that he’s the most emotionally aware of the trio.

ron is shown throughout the series to understand how both harry and hermione need to have their emotions approached - and i think there is no piece of writing which says this better than crocodile heart by @floreatcastellumposts:

That was what she liked most about Ron, she thought vaguely. He was very good at being suitably outraged on your behalf. For Harry, for her, for Neville. That sort of thing mattered, when you were hurt or embarrassed or wronged in some way. You needed to have someone else on your side, to be as emotional as you felt, maybe even more so, so that you might feel a bit more normal. It was very decent of him, and she was not sure he realised he did it.

ron’s inherent emotional awareness is an enormous source of comfort to other people. he does the work which isn’t flashy or special - he makes tea and tells jokes and is just there - but which is needed in healthy human relationships far more frequently than a willingness to fight to the death for the other person.

[as an aside, this normality - even though i think it is assumed rather than justified by the text - is also what ginny provides for harry. if you believe that hinny are a good couple but romione aren’t… i can’t help you.]

but let’s look at some specific reasons why ron and hermione belong together:

their communication styles mesh perfectly. ron is the only person hermione knows who feeds her love of being challenged and debated, and who is able to engage in this way of communicating without becoming irate when she refuses to back down. ron is good at picking his battles, but he’s also good at recognising that hermione’s tendency to argue isn’t intended to be confrontational a lot of the time - it’s just the way she works through feelings and problems. he’s far more easy-going about her tendency to nag, interrupt, try to provoke arguments, or speak condescendingly than he’s given credit for - and hermione evidently respects this, since when he does tell her not to push a situation (above all, when she’s trying to needle harry into talking about sirius), she listens to him.

that ron and hermione’s tendency to bicker is taken by fans to be a bad thing is because it’s something harry - from whose perspective the narrative is written - doesn’t understand. harry is extremely conflict-avoidant - he tends to take being pushed on views and opinions he has to be insulting; and he has a tendency to assume that he is right which is just as profound as hermione’s. he and ginny communicate not by debating, but by ginny having no time for his rigidity and refusing to indulge it - but ron and hermione bickering about everything is not a negative thing within their specific emotional dynamic.

[as another aside, this glaring chasm in communication styles is why harry and hermione would be a disaster as a couple.]

they each provide validation the other needs. it’s clear - reading between the lines - that hermione is a tremendously lonely person. the friendlessness of her initial few weeks at hogwarts seems to be a continuation of her experience as a child, and - outside of ron and harry - that friendlessness endures through her schooldays. i’m always struck, for example, by the fact that, when she falls out with ron in prisoner of azkaban, she has no-one else to spend time with, and that this is only avoided in half-blood prince because harry decides not to freeze her out. i don’t think her friendship with ginny is anywhere near as close as fanon seems to imply (ginny has no interest in being nagged either), nor do i think that she’s anywhere near as close to neville (not least because she is so condescending to him) as she’s often written to be.

and this loneliness seems to stretch beyond hogwarts. the absence of hermione’s parents’ from the narrative is - in a doylist sense - clearly just a device to maximise time with the trio all together, but the watsonian reading is that she doesn’t have a particularly good relationship with them. hermione’s obviously upper-middle-class background - the name! the skiing! the holidays in the south of france! - can be presumed, i think, to come with a series of expectations from her parents which she feels constantly that she’s not entirely meeting, particularly expectations attached to academic success.

[for example, the grangers - were she a muggle child - would undoubtedly have ambitions for her to attend an elite university and then go into a prestigious career. tertiary education of the type that they’re familiar with doesn’t seem to exist in the wizarding world - most careers seem to be taught by apprenticeship - and this, alongside all the other divides between the magical and muggle worlds which contribute to the distance between them, would be one very obvious area in which she felt the need to prove herself to them.]

ron, too, has quite a difficult relationship with his position in the family - voldemort’s locket is not wrong to point out that he seems to receive considerably less of his mother’s emotional attention than ginny or the rest of his brothers - and he too is constrained by expectations which he doesn’t know how to explain he has no interest in - above all, molly’s desire for her sons to achieve top grades and go into the ministry.

he also suffers while at hogwarts from being ‘harry potter’s best friend’, something which harry never appreciates. but hermione does. she recognises ron’s jealousy and never allows harry to minimise it (and she and ron are very much aligned on having no respect for harry’s saviour and martyr complexes). she appreciates ron’s strengths - above all his kindness and his sense of humour - and makes him feel as though he’s achieved things with them. and ron does the same for her; he is hugely observant when it comes to her, and he challenges and defends her.

the two of them clearly spend a lot of time together one-on-one while harry’s involved in his various shenanigans (including outside of school - hermione has often arrived at the burrow days or even weeks before harry, and they seem to write to each other frequently when apart). they do this within a relationship which is fundamentally equal. one issue with hinny is that, post-war, harry is going to have to get used to seeing ginny as a peer, rather than as someone he has to protect. but ron and hermione never have that issue - equality is baked into their relationship from the off.

because, to be quite frank, fandom overstates the role that jealousy plays in their relationship. it’s true that ron certainly doesn’t acquit himself brilliantly when it comes to hermione’s relationship with viktor krum (it’s because he’s bi and doesn’t know it yet), and a tendency to externalise his insecurity into trying to make others also feel insecure is one of his primary negative traits (hermione does this too, via her patented lofty voice when she’s trying to condescend to people). but this is often taken as the initial red flag for how the relationship would crash and burn, and ron’s toxic jealousy is often used in fan-fiction as the trigger for emotional and physical violence towards hermione which, frequently, seems to drive her into the arms of either draco malfoy or severus snape… who are, of course, the first people we think of when we hear the words ‘not prone to jealousy’...

but i think it’s important to point out several things in defence of ron’s jealousy over krum. firstly, hermione evidently regards his jealousy as ridiculous - she’s upset by it, yes, but her upset must be understood as being caused by the fact that she wanted him to ask her out. she doesn’t think he’s being possessive, she thinks he’s being stupid. secondly, hermione is equally as jealous over ron’s crush on fleur delacour and relationship with lavender brown. she behaves just as cruelly when it comes to lavender as ron does when it comes to krum - and the narrative only treats her actions as more sympathetic or justified both because harry dislikes lavender too, and because, by that point in the series, jkr has dispensed with any inclination to ever criticise her.

but, outside of this teenage pettiness, ron is never jealous of hermione over things which matter. he is never jealous of her intelligence or competence or ambition or success (indeed, he defends her constantly from attacks designed to undermine her in these areas). for someone who struggles with being overshadowed by harry, he is never upset at being overshadowed by her. he is clearly going to be happy to support her in any of the career ambitions she can be written as having post-war.

and, on this point, i think it’s worth interrogating why so many readers still seem to feel uncomfortable with the idea of ron and hermione having a dynamic where she is the more ‘powerful’ one. [it’s always a bit trite to say ‘but what if the genders were reversed?’, but actually that’s not irrelevant here]. if hermione ends up taking the ministry by storm and ron becomes a stay-at-home father or has a job which is just to pay the bills, what, precisely, is wrong with that? why, precisely, should hermione regard ron making that choice for himself as a negative thing? hermione so often seems to leave ron in fan-fiction because of a lack of ambition - something which seems to be particularly common in dramione - but, in canon, she is shown to not particularly care if ron and harry do the bare minimum when it comes to studying etc. she nags them to do their work so they don’t get in trouble. she doesn’t nag them to do it to the same standard that she would.

and, actually, i think that ron being less ambitious than hermione is something which is key to how well they work. because ron provides not only emotional support, but emotional clarity.

hermione is shown throughout canon to - just as harry does - have a tendency to become obsessive to the detriment of her own health. she is also often - as harry is - emotionally or intellectually inflexible, and finds it hard to move on when what she feels or believes is proven to be wrong. both she and harry are micro-thinkers, who lean towards knee-jerk assumptions and stubborn convictions (and, indeed, hermione has a remarkably hagrid-ish tendency towards blind loyalty).

ron is none of these things. ron is a big-picture thinker (it’s why he’s so good at chess). he’s a pragmatist. he’s the least righteous of the three. he understands that faith and loyalty are choices, and that sometimes these choices will lead to outcomes which are bad or hard. he is the one of the three most willing to own up to having made mistakes. he is the one least likely to act on gut instinct (and, therefore, the hardest to fool - i think it’s worth emphasising that he clocks that tom riddle is tricking harry immediately, the only one of the trio to do so). he understands that things are a marathon, not a sprint. he is the least obsessive.

and these traits contribute to aspects of his character which are underappreciated. ron worries about hermione making herself ill during exams, or when she is using the time-turner, and makes an effort to get her to set healthy boundaries and redirect her anxiety. ron stands on a broken leg in front of sirius or goes into the forest to fight aragog not out of righteousness, but out of choice. ron takes over the burden of preparing buckbeak’s defence when it is clear that hermione is approaching burnout. ron is completely right that harry hasn’t done any long-term planning for the horcrux hunt, and his anger does force harry to tighten up after he leaves the trio. ron has a clear head in the middle of battle. ron makes harry and hermione laugh. ron is unafraid of human emotion. ron arrests harry’s tendency to brood over the little things by looking at the bigger picture. ron will always come back.

ron is bringing his politician wife regular cups of tea and making sure she doesn’t work all night. he is helping his lawyer wife to feel less upset over losing one case by reminding her that she’s won ten others. he is noticing stress creeping in and whirling her off for a dirty weekend, or even just a takeaway on the sofa. he is teaching his daughter to be proud of her ambition and his son to treat women as equals and both of his children that all you can do when you fuck up is apologise and try to do better. he is making hermione smile on the worst days of her life. he is helping her strategise her long-term goals when she gets stuck on the short-term ones. he is telling her straight when she needs to get it together. he is seeing a misogynistic head of department call hermione a ‘silly little girl’ and choosing to tell him exactly what he thinks of that.

ron is the ultimate wife guy. hermione is a very, very lucky lady.

For me both are alright. Some of the first fanfics I read had it as Hermione Weasley so I was a bit surprised when I found out it was Granger-Weasley canonically. So for me it could go either way, she choosing to keep her name or taking Ron's.

Although what I do think is that if she does hyphenate her name, she explicitly always corrects people when they call her only one of the names.

So if someone where to call her "Mrs. Weasley" or "Mrs. Granger" she'd correct them with Granger-Weasley

After Ron and Hermione get married, y'all prefer Hermione Granger or Hermione Weasley?

RWatHT - Chapter 21: Desertion

Ron rubbed the back of his head, his forehead against the table in his private dormitory. He was trying his hardest to stop himself from thinking, from existing, his head hurt like hell, and he did not know what to do. He wanted to stop himself from crying, he felt pathetic, lower than dirt, and the worst of the worst.

‘She would have never picked you,’ it was the voice in his head, the one that had always been there, ever since Muriel explained the pity she felt for Ron’s mother when Ron had turned out to be a boy instead of the girl his mother had always wanted. ‘She is the Brightest Witch of Her Age, she will be Minister of Magic one day or perhaps something greater. Why would she ever pick you?’

“Stop it,” he growled against the hardwood table, as he banged his head harshly. 

‘Look at yourself. Do you really think that her kiss meant anything?’

“Stop it!” 

‘She pitied you,’ it was like a whisper in his ear, but no matter how hard he pressed his palms against his head he could not stop the thoughts. ‘That’s why she said yes. That’s why she danced all night with you. That’s why she kissed you. She wanted you to feel what Krum felt, since no one else would ever want to.’

“Stop it!” His head banged against the table again. “Stop it!” And again. “Stop it!” And again. “Stop it, please!” And once more.

He was going crazy, he was talking to himself. His chest hurt so much. He felt like crying. He felt like screaming. He felt like punching, kicking, and vomiting all at once. He was begging Merlin for it all to stop. It was too much, his heart felt like jumping out of his throat.

He walked outside his dorm, and went to his Potions O.W.L. exams. He saw Hermione there, who seemed to be looking for him. He tried his best to hide behind Dean Thomas, who was ignoring Ron out of anger or fear. The written exam was not the difficult part of the day, instead it was the very end of it, Hermione had spotted him, and ran as quickly as she could towards him.

“Ron!” Hermione called. “Ron, please. Please just talk to me!”

Her voice was pleading, she was begging, and he knew she was about to cry. He had heard that voice whenever Harry would scream at the both of them during the summer at Grimmauld Place. He didn’t want to scream at Hermione. He didn’t want to make her cry.

‘Why was she even crying?’

‘Because you’ve embarrassed her,’ the voice spoke. ‘Imagine having to take you as a date to the ball, when just last year she had been the date of Viktor Krum.’

“Just leave me alone!” he barked at himself. And when he turned, he saw her. Hermione had stopped short, her eyes were red, and were brimming with tears. Without a single word, she just walked quickly away from Ron.

‘Nice one, moron.’

Ron just went back to his own dorm and began to think about how he was feeling. Hurting. Crying. Screaming. Kicking. He wanted to do this all at once, all at himself.

And that’s how Ron spent the next few hours of his day. He walked around his private dorm, sometimes he laid on his bed. His head filled with images of Krum, and Hermione, but now Ginny, Harry and the twins were there, mocking him, laughing at him. Sometimes, he tried to drown them out by hitting his head against his desk, or pushing his head into his pillow. Sometimes he felt such a wrathful and fiery anger that he punched his walls, making sure to cause as much damage as possible with the Dragon Magic, other times he felt so small, and useless that his own body seemed to crumble. 

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RWatHT Master List

RWatHT - Chapter 20: Sweetest of Nightmares

Ron was nervous. How could he not be? Tonight was the Ball. In just a few minutes he would have to go down and dance in front of almost all of Hogwarts. It felt like the Yule Ball all over again, but a bit better. This time there were no ugly maroon robes, but instead deep burgundy velvet dress robes with golden lining. They looked good, far better than what he had last year. The design was immaculate with a sleek golden lion shoulder pad on top of one of his arms which held his blonde fur cape.

The robes had been a gift from Master Gryffindor that he had forcefully accepted. He almost rejected them, until he told him he was going to throw him in the middle of the Great Hall naked if he did not accept them. He was sure his Master was only joking. But not so sure as to find out.

His hair was managed as well, although he most likely still needed to cut it. Thankfully, Daphne had been nice enough to have given him some hair products to use. 

The Ball was any minute now. Ron descended down the stairs. Harry, Ginny, Neville and Dean were sitting on the couch waiting. Ginny and Dean were going together, and although Ron found the pairing weird he was sure it was quite harmless. Neville had been a surprise, Luna had decided to invite his blonde dorm mate, and the poor bloke had been clearly relieved of his constant search for a date. Harry was another story, he had also managed to put his date to the Ball till the last minute one more time. And now he was as stuck as one could get with a date he had no interest with.

“You look good for a change,” Ginny teased.

“Shut up,” Ron responded. He cleared his throat, before asking Ginny the question he wanted to ask. “Is… Is she…?”

“She’ll be down any minute now,” she said with a smile.

“I hope so,” he nervously checked his dress robes. “Do I look good?”

“You look great mate,” Dean said, most likely trying to assure him. Ron looked to Harry for confirmation who nodded his head. 

Then, Ron heard it. The subtle set of steps he had walked with for 5 years. He turned to look before anyone else. There she was. Hermione Granger. Her brown hair was up in a bun on her head, with some strands of hair falling down and reaching her neck essentially framing her beautiful face. She was not wearing the periwinkle dress she had worn last year, instead she wore a champagne-coloured dress adorned with red lining and an intricate red pattern at the bottom that matched his own dress robes. She looked even more beautiful than last year, perhaps she had grown or maybe it was because she had chosen him.

Her cheeks were a bit pink, although Ron did not know if it was because of her make-up or another reason. Although she was wearing some short heels, he was still nearly a head taller than her. 

“Hi,” he said with a smile on his face.

“Hi,” she almost whispered, as if they had a secret. The two remained in silence only staring at each other, when Harry cleared his throat.

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RWatHT Master List

Here's the thing.

No, but also yes?

The way Ron is treated by his siblings is very specific. It's not like how they treat Percy where they all get annoyed by how pompous he is. Or the twins where they just roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders because what are you going to do? They're the twins.

Bill and Charlie seem like the most respectful, and my personal headcannon is that Ron is Charlie's favorite brother. Percy just acts the way he always does towards everyone else, the twins, Harry, Ginny, etc... So one could say his behaviour is quite normal. Up until OoTP that is, because we see how he genuinely worries about Ron's future in his letter, even if it is quite condescending and misguided, so I venture to say that the eldest siblings cared for Ron quite a lot.

Ginny and the twins is when things start to get complex. We don't see their treatment towards Ron become super aggressive or even downright bullying until Percy leaves, in his absence the twins find Ron to be their next target, notice how in GoF whenever Percy was not around it was Ron who they teased a lot more.

Then, Ron becomes a prefect, a couple of weeks after Percy, their own brother who was also the most recent prefect in the family, ditched them. Their association with prefects still relates to Percy, and this is not only for the twins and Ginny, but also for Ron himself. Ron is quite clearly scared to become the twins' new favorite punching bag (metaphorically).

And the reason he doesn't fight back is a big reason as to why Ginny acts the way she does. She sees the way the twins treat Ron, which is pretty harshly, and as to not be perceived like Percy, he does nothing to defend himself. Ginny sees that Ron becomes the punchline to every joke and decides to join in.

No matter, how you see it. Ron was in the right to be mad with Ginny in HBP for kissing Dean in a public place: she was in a place where she could've easily been found; she would've been a victim of gossiping, bullying and mockery; a professor could've caught them as well. Ron might've not used the words correctly, but he only tried to do what he thought was best for Ginny. She in turn virgin-shamed him, told him the girl he liked had already snogged the guy he was jealous of, and that he was pathetic. All in the span of a couple of seconds, and in front of his best friend.

Ron himself had been a victim of bullying throughout every single school year, wether it was because of his robes, his financial status, his quidditch skills. He knows how rough other students are, more than any of his siblings probably.

Ginny is very similar to the twins, she is very alike in the way she's assertive and has a mischievous vindictiveness to her (Zacharias Smith, Malfoy, etc...). She thinks it doesn't affect Ron, because they're only jokes, but sometimes those jokes are a bit too mean, and she doesn't care for it. She called Luna, who was her friend, Loony a nickname after her weird antics. She said Ron had a Pygmy Puff tattoo, because it was emasculating.

But she also cared about him, because at the end of the day they were siblings. They grew up together, but she was not the best sibling she could've or should've been.

Is Ginny a bad sibling to Ron?

I saw this discussion today on reddit and I want to know what others think.

Heart attacks symptoms are different for women. I recently learned this. 

Reblog if you are Team Ron&Hermione

sometimes the right opinion is unpopular (lol, jk, not trying to start any ship wars)

BUT, I AM!

Romione supremacy! Long live Ron and Hermione's superior love.

No idea if this is still unpopular opinion but romione is the best developed relationship in books. They had a genuine love for one another as friends and respected one another and they were truly in love. Even after all these years, they are still my favorite couple because their relationship wasnt built on lust but pure love ❤️

Hey, sometimes the right opinion is unpopular (lol, jk, not trying to start any ship wars). But yes, it was clearly evident that there was a path and a side story for these two and is such a shame that it is often overlooked. Romione will always and forever be my favorite literary couple (even if the movies did them dirty).

Ron Weasley and the Hogwarts Tournament – Master List

Five years after Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had been founded the four founders had found themselves in a dispute. A tournament involving their students was planned, however according to a Seer it wasn't their current students who could inherit their will and responsibility. Their true heirs shall reveal themselves in a thousand years.

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