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Naval Battles: 'Shipping Wars in Harry Potter
Behold my Unit C honors thesis, which Dr. G has finally gotten around to grading and giving back to me. I'd like to register a polite complaint about her note saying my idea was taken from a fan site, and about her wanting me to use all forty-nine keystrokes to get "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" typed out in italics when, in all not-the-first mentions of the book, the book in question is identified perfectly well by the five keystrokes it takes to type "PoA". And for her statement that I did not include enough fairy and folk tales: one, the series is seven books long, six published. I am not, repeat NOT, basing my entire thesis on the parallels between the Chamber scene and the Snow White story. And two, in OotP and HBP especially, Ginny's role is not heroine and it is emphatically not damsel in distress. She is the hero's partner, friend, and love interest. How many stories do you know of that fall under 'fairy tale' or 'folk tale' where that sentence describes the female lead? I don't know many at all, and not a single one is actually centered around the male lead, not the female lead.

Anyway. Rant over. Here's the paper.


The Harry Potter story has captured the hearts of people around the world.  Some people merely read and enjoy the novels; others merely watch and enjoy the movies.  Some do both.  Some people, disliking a particular plot twist or wanting more detail on a scene skimmed over in the books or wanting to continue the story past the published works, write fanfiction.  Some people join Internet debates on a number of subjects, arguing about subjects as varied as whether Severus Snape is Dumbledore's man, ever-so-evil, or out for himself, whether Harry himself is one of the Mystical Objects of Doom that he must hunt down and destroy in the final book of the series, and to which House a character named only once in the series belongs.  The debates with the most possible differing points of view are those in which the subject of debate is “’shipping”, short for “relationshipping” or possibly “worshipping” and referring to which characters any given fan prefers to see romantically paired in fanfiction or, better, in the novels.  These are also the most acrimonious debates, having earned the term “’shipping wars” for a reason.  The best-known, the largest, and the single most vicious ’shipping war pits ’shippers of Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley and/or Ron Weasley/Hermione Granger against ’shippers of Harry Potter/Hermione Granger.  The HP/HG set were particularly infuriated after Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, complaining that Rowling sank their ’ship.  But it is my opinion that they should have seen it coming.  We all know the tempestuous nature of teenage relationships, so nothing but the final book will prove anything, but there is a great deal of evidence in the novels, including obvious and not-so-obvious motifs from fairy tales, folk tales, and mythology, that provide a strong indication that the major romantic pairings of the series are RW/HG and, focused upon in this paper, HP/GW.

There is an obvious instance of a fairy tale parallel in the first book of the series, titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the US, which flags the entire fairy tale genre as something to watch to help with analysis of this series.  In the story of Cinderella, the title character's childhood is spent doing all the housework for her stepmother and stepsisters, she dresses in rags, and she sleeps by the hearth, until a messenger from a castle arrives, beginning the chain of events that brings magic into Cinderella's life and takes her from rags to riches.  In the story of Harry Potter, the title character's childhood is spent doing all the housework for his aunt, uncle, and cousin, he dresses in his cousin's cast-off clothing, and he sleeps in the cupboard under the stairs, until a messenger from a castle arrives, telling Harry about the magic and the riches he had never known he had.  Cinderella and Harry both ride a magical form of transportation to the same castle from which their respective messages came.  At one end of this journey, they both meet someone who has eyes only for them, though Ginny Weasley, unlike Cinderella's Prince Charming, already knows Harry's name.

We see very little of Ginny Weasley in SS.  She has three speaking lines at King's Cross Station in September and two more in the same place at the end of June but not even a mention in between, not even when the narrative comments on her parents visiting an already-graduated brother (Rowling, Sorcerer's 92, 97, 195, 308).  This makes it difficult to find evidence pointing to any future relationship between Harry and Ginny, but just because the parallel between Ginny and Prince Charming does not jump off the page at the reader does not mean that it is not there.  Also, the place of their meeting is the same train station at which Rowling's parents met (“Harry Potter and Me”, par.  10).

Ginny is a Hogwarts student in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and she is a central character to this book's plot.  Unfortunately, Harry pays little attention to her.  If he were not friends with Hermione, I would suspect he had not yet departed the “girls have cooties!  EW!” stage of preadolescence, but an equally good explanation is that Harry sees Ginny as his best friend's annoying kid sister, and notices nothing about her to make him think he should spend time with her anyway.  She spends too little time in his presence speaking and too much time blushing for him to think of her as a potential friend.  But even so, there are clear indications of their future romance, beyond the obvious fact that Ginny has a crush on Harry.  Everyone knows the folk tale of the knight who slays the dragon to rescue the fair princess and win her hand in marriage.  In the climactic chapters of CoS, Harry slays a basilisk to rescue the fair Ginny (1), and if they were older than twelve and eleven, this would earn him a thank-you kiss at the very least.  Dragons and basilisks are both mythic reptiles, and the Latin word for ‘dragon’, draco, can also be translated as ‘snake’, with the implication that we speak of a bigger snake than those for which we would use the word serpens.  The basilisk is described as a “giant serpent” and “enormous serpent” (Rowling, Chamber 318).

Another familiar story with relevance to CoS is the tale of Snow White, which is played out in modified form with Ginny in the role of Snow White and Harry cast as the handsome prince.  Snow White falls unconscious by eating an apple.  Ginny falls unconscious by writing in a diary.  In both cases, this is an innocent action which the girl had to make a conscious decision to do, and in both cases, she is tempted to do it by the villain of the piece, the queen in the fairy tale and the spirit of the diary in the novel.  Some versions of the Snow White story hold that her unconsciousness is caused not by the poison in the apple, but by the fact that her mouthful is stuck in her throat, and she wakes not when she is kissed by the prince who finds her asleep, but when some action taken by the prince dislodges the piece of apple.  There is a parallel between the apple poisoning Snow White's body and the diary poisoning Ginny's mind.  It is more likely, however, that the intended parallel is that both girls are unconscious while under the influence of an external object, and they wake when the object's influence is removed, which for Ginny is when Harry destroys the diary.  It would be more romantic if Harry were to wake Ginny with a kiss, but again, he is twelve and she eleven.

There is not much interaction between Harry and Ginny in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  These books comprise two-thirds of the series to date and therefore cannot be ignored entirely, but the strongest indication of Harry/Ginny romance is Ginny's ongoing crush on Harry, and the parallel between the three tasks of the Triwizard Tournament and the three tasks in innumerable fairy tales is irrelevant to the question of Harry's future love interest.  It is, however, perhaps worthwhile to point out that Harry has a crush on an older girl, Cho Chang, in both these books, and Rowling said in a 1999 interview that during GoF, Harry, Ron, and Hermione would all fall for the wrong people.  (Barnes, par.  44-45) This does not point toward Ginny as Harry's true love, but it certainly points away from Cho.

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ginny is a much more frequently seen character.  She is also much more assertive and much less inclined to blush and stammer in Harry's presence.  This combination of factors brings her to his attention far more often, allowing them to develop a friendship.  For those who are not fortunate enough to fall in love at first sight, and quite likely for most of those who are, friendship between lovers is an important factor in reaching something near the happily-ever-after of the fairy tale.  By the end of the book, the only other females Harry knows as well as he does Ginny are Ginny's mother, who is thirty years older than he is and taken, and Hermione, who is showing signs of romantic interest in Ron.

Another factor brought to Harry's attention and the readers’ in OotP and lightly foreshadowed earlier is Ginny's magical ability.  The heroines of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm may be content to let the heroes do all the work and have all the fun, but the world is less misogynistic than it was even a few decades ago, and the heroines of modern fairy tales are almost required to equal or surpass the heroes.  Harry is already known to be magically powerful, because “[f]or a thirteen-year-old wizard, even an indistinct Patronus is a huge achievement” (Rowling, Prisoner 246), and Harry has mastered the Patronus Charm well before Easter.  To be fair, then, Ginny must be, if not as powerful as Harry is, then certainly powerful enough to hold her own.  Early in OotP, one of Ginny's brothers compares her magical ability to her small stature:

“Yeah, size is no guarantee of power,” said George.  “Look at Ginny.”

“What d'you mean?” said Harry.

“You've never been on the receiving end of one of her Bat-Bogey Hexes, have you?”  (Rowling, Order 100)

The implication is clearly that Ginny is quite capable of taking care of herself.  This makes her a poor fit for the damsel-in-distress role in the older fairy tales.  The most well-known fairy tales, unfortunately, are all of the damsel-in-distress variety, but there are a number of fairy tales in which the female lead becomes the hero of the story when the male lead is incapacitated in some way, for example “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” (Phelps, 69-78).  A parallel to this is Ginny taking Harry's place playing Quidditch for Gryffindor after he is unjustly banned from the game.  There are other fairy tales in which the female lead gives the hero aid, without which he would surely fail the task before him, for example “Maid of the North” (Phelps, 1-24).  This is not as strong a parallel, because these women offer passive aid, such as instructions for passing an obstacle.  Ginny's aid to Harry is far more active, for example when she tricks the other students into staying away from somewhere Harry needs to get to without being seen, and when she goes with him in the climactic chapters of the book, knowing she will be fighting by his side.

The parallel of the fairy-tale maiden aiding her lover is continued in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Ginny continues to play the role more actively than most traditional fairy-tale heroines, the way a modern-day fairy-tale heroine would.  Harry is again playing Quidditch in his old position, this time with the Captain's badge as well.  Ginny takes another newly vacated position on the team, one to which her skills are better suited, and one which is not significantly less important to attaining victory.  Ginny is also one of the few who respond to Harry's call for friends to defend Hogwarts Castle while he accompanies the wise old mentor figure of the series on an excursion that Harry fears will provide an opportunity for the antagonist's minions to invade the castle.  There is, however, little need to search for fairy tales in which the leads parallel Harry and Ginny in HBP, because Harry spends half the book watching Ginny and resisting the urge to eviscerate her boyfriend, and a few weeks after Ginny and her boyfriend break up, Harry kisses her in full view of nearly a quarter of the school (Rowling, Half-Blood 533-534).  So the indications of Harry/Ginny romance in HBP are not what one might term subtle.  Neither, unfortunately, are they conclusive.

There is nothing yet to analyze of the eagerly anticipated seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Speculation runs rampant, however.  Harry and Ginny break up at the end of HBP, and though he never actually says it, it is implied that he wants her to stay out of harm's way and out of the story while he, Ron, and Hermione quest for the Mystical Objects of Doom they need to find before they can win the final battle (2).  This separation of Harry and Ginny gives hope to those who cannot stomach the thought of Harry with Ginny in DH.  But Harry's stated reasoning for the breakup is to protect Ginny, so I cannot picture him pairing up with anyone at all in DH except Ginny, because Harry's significant other will certainly be in danger from the same people for the same reasons, and Harry would not risk anyone like that.  I also have difficulty imagining Harry and Ginny remaining distanced for very long once someone points out something he overlooked.  Given the reported speed of the Hogwarts grapevine, everyone and their cousin likely knew of Harry's kissing Ginny within five minutes of its happening.  ‘Everyone and their cousin’ is meant literally, because a significant number of Hogwarts students have relatives known to be minions of the Dark Lord, and it is the next thing to impossible to believe that not one of these students would have informed their relatives of something so important to someone of as much interest to the Dark Lord as Harry Potter.  This relative would then pass the news around that Ginny is Harry's significant other, and therefore a prime target.  What, then, was the point of his breaking up with her to keep her from being targeted on account of being his significant other?

There are, of course, counterarguments to the idea of HP/GW.  ’Shipping wars would not be so violent if there were not.  Of the arguments that are not merely declarations of unsupported opinion and do not reduce to argumenta ad homines, what seems to me to be the clearest of those supporting HP/HG is that Harry, Ron, and Hermione fit the movie stereotypes of The Hero, The Sidekick, and The Girl.  This is almost painfully obvious in the movies based on the first four books, the fourth in particular.  The Hero, of course, always gets The Girl in the end.  Also, Hermione, as strong a character as she is, fits the role of the traditional fairy-tale heroine rather better than Ginny does.  Ginny helps Harry by grabbing her wand and going to fight at his side.  Hermione follows the Maid of the North in the eponymous tale by advising him on his course of action, giving him instructions that help him through the trials he faces, and in CoS giving him the key to the Mystery of the Year, despite being a statue at the time.

I used to think the novels were heading towards a Harry/Hermione romance.  Hermione is, after all, the girl Harry knows best.  I changed my mind for some of the same reasons that this theory fails.  In PoA, when Harry first notices females as different from males, he is interested in Cho, whom he barely knows, not Hermione, whom he knows well.  In GoF, when Harry's and Ron's attempts at getting dates to the Yule Ball fall through, it is not Harry who thinks to ask Hermione (Rowling, Goblet 398-400).  When Hermione's mysterious date is discovered to be from a rival school, it is not Harry who gets jealous (Rowling, Goblet 414, 420-424).  When Hermione kisses Harry on the cheek at the train station, he thinks nothing of it (Rowling, Goblet 734).  We literally never hear another word on the matter.  Harry has never looked at Hermione as a potential love interest.  In fact, her role in his life seems to be a blend of ‘sidekick’ and ‘bossy big sister’, which would preclude any possibility of HP/HG romance in the future (3).

Other counterarguments to HP/GW revolve around various other potential love interests for Harry, though not, oddly enough, for Ginny.  Frequent choices are Luna Lovegood or Susan Bones, both of whom have common ground with Harry that was pointed out during OotP (Rowling, Order 549-550, 862-864), and if Ginny were removed from the picture then I could very easily see Harry pairing off with Luna, but I have seen people ‘shipping Harry with just about every character under the sun.  Most of these ‘ships can be shot down easily enough on the grounds that the character paired with Harry is not someone who has had much ‘screen time’ in the novels, if any, and DH is highly unlikely to provide enough screen time to the lesser-developed characters for Harry to fall in love with anyone.  In fact, the only popular ‘ship involving Harry and someone not Ginny that I can think of that does not crash and burn upon being hit with that argument is Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy, though I must confess complete inability to figure out who thought of this ‘ship, what makes it so popular, and why HP/DM ‘shippers feel that it is possible for two characters who hate each other's guts as much as Harry and Malfoy do to fall in love with each other.

In writing the Harry Potter series, J. K.  Rowling has drawn heavily on legend, folklore, and fairy tale, notably the Cinderella and Snow White stories.  Harry is everywhere cast as the hero.  Ginny's role changes over the course of the series from that of the traditional fairy-tale damsel-in-distress heroine to that of the modern-day fairy-tale heroine, the hero's counterpart and helper, as she grows from Ron's rarely mentioned and barely noticed little sister to Harry's friend and from there to Harry's love.  The only conclusion I can draw, though many of my fellow readers disagree, is that Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley are meant to be together, by J. K.  Rowling if not by Fate.


Works Cited

Rowling, J. K.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  New York: Scholastic Inc, 1997.

---.  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  New York: Scholastic Inc, 1999.

---.  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  New York: Scholastic Inc, 1999.

---.  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  New York: Scholastic Inc, 2000.

---.  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  New York: Scholastic Inc, 2003.

---.  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  New York: Scholastic Inc, 2005.

“Harry Potter and Me” BBC interview transcript.  Accio Quote!.  12/28/2001.  2/27/2007. http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2001/1201-bbc-hpandme.htm

Barnes &Noble chat transcript.  Accio Quote!.  9/8/1999.  3/8/2007. http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1999/0999-barnesnoble-staff.htm

Phelps, Ethel Johnston.  The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World.  New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.

Angua.  “D'you Really Think They're Suited?”  The Harry Potter Lexicon.  10/28/2004.  3/8/2007. http://www.hp-lexicon.org/essays/essay-hh-suited.html


(1) ‘Fair’ literally means ‘pale’, which Ginny certainly is behind the freckles, whenever she is not blushing.  The term acquired the meaning of ‘beautiful’ because pale blonde hair has often been an indicator of great beauty, as demonstrated by Helen of Troy.  Also, ‘Ginny’ is short for ‘Ginevra’, which is a variation on Guinevere, which means ‘white one’.

(2) I find myself wondering whether, as a friend suggested, DH will more obviously parallel “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” or the myth of Cupid and Psyche, in which the female lead disobeys instructions from the male lead, then has to go on a quest to rescue him.

(3) This is explored more thoroughly by the fan essayist Angua in “D'you Really Think They're Suited?”.  The essay was written before HBP, but HBP does not contradict Angua's conclusion.  In fact, the soap-opera drama over the course of HBP in which Hermione plays the female lead supports Angua's conclusion very well.  Harry only concerns himself with Hermione's romances when they interfere with his friendship with her and with Ron.  If Harry and Hermione were meant to be together, then she should at least have invited Harry to Slughorn's Christmas party, rather than McLaggen.  Hermione's unsubtle intention is to make Ron jealous by going to the party with a better Quidditch player than Ron is, and Harry is both a better player than McLaggen and someone whose company Hermione would not spend three-quarters of the party trying to escape.