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Aug. 25th, 2005 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainSo I was in the library today thinking about various Harry Potter pairings, because I will do almost anything to avoid thinking about actual work, and I believe I've come up with a Grand Unified Theory about why certain pairings seem totally natural and intuitive to some readers, and totally wrong to others. Like most of my Grand Unified Theories, it's probably chock-full of holes, but what the hey.
What triggered this train of thought was stumbling across a few posts about Charlie / Tonks, and having the immediate gut reaction, "Oh no, Tonks doesn't go with Charlie at all; she might go with Kingsley if you think Remus has too much baggage, but not Charlie and certainly not Bill -- but she might be rather good for Percy, come to think of it..." After I finished astonishing myself by coming to immediate snap judgments about half a dozen pairings that I'd never thought about before, I tried to backtrack and figure out where on earth all this was coming from, and I came to the conclusion that I was looking for contrasts. The key question I was asking myself was "How do these personalities complement and counterbalance each other?"
And it struck me that this was quite different from the question that Mrs. Weasley asks about Bill and Fleur, and that a goodly percentage of the fans seem to be asking about one pairing or another in the wake of the new book: "What do these people have in common?" If you ARE asking this question, it's fairly easy to see how you might come up with Charlie / Tonks, or Harry / Hermione, or any of a number of other pairings that I'd never quite gotten before. And it's certainly not a bad question to ask about a potential partner in real life, so I can totally see where these people are coming from. But I'm firmly convinced that it wasn't the question JKR was asking herself when she came up with the canon pairings, so it's pretty much useless as a predictive question if you're trying to make an argument about how things are actually going to play out in the books.
What we get in canon: Harry and Hermione are both idealistic, ambitious introverts who take life too seriously and keep things close to the chest, so they get paired up with the expansive, down-to-earth Weasleys. Tonks, on the other hand, is not going to get matched with a Weasley boy because she's already got a Weasley-type personality; she ends up with a quiet, much-older professor. Hagrid lives in a hut and eats stoat sandwiches, so he gets paired with the high-maintenance French headmistress. (While I'm a contrastshipper myself, I have to admit that I'm not sure this was entirely a good idea. There are limits.) Molly, after twenty-odd years of marriage, still doesn't understand her husband's hobbies or see eye to eye with him on a lot of questions. Judging by the brief glimpse we get of James and Lily, they might have ended up much the same way if they were alive. Interestingly, the one big exception to this rule seems to be the couples we're not meant to like -- Petunia and Vernon are two of a kind, as are Lucius and Narcissa.
No wonder the commonalityshippers are frustrated. They're making perfectly sensible arguments that, through no fault of their own, simply don't lead to a payoff in the books. (You can, occasionally, use a commonality argument to justify a canon pairing -- I saw somebody refer to Ginny as a "female Harry" just yesterday -- but Harry actually seems to be attracted to Ginny because she represents things he doesn't have, like a normal happpy family life. I have a feeling that when this type of argument leads people in the right direction, it's by accident.)
As I've said, I expect this theory is probably full of holes, but it does tend to explain a lot of the places where some readers' reasoning appears to be out of sync with JKR's.
What triggered this train of thought was stumbling across a few posts about Charlie / Tonks, and having the immediate gut reaction, "Oh no, Tonks doesn't go with Charlie at all; she might go with Kingsley if you think Remus has too much baggage, but not Charlie and certainly not Bill -- but she might be rather good for Percy, come to think of it..." After I finished astonishing myself by coming to immediate snap judgments about half a dozen pairings that I'd never thought about before, I tried to backtrack and figure out where on earth all this was coming from, and I came to the conclusion that I was looking for contrasts. The key question I was asking myself was "How do these personalities complement and counterbalance each other?"
And it struck me that this was quite different from the question that Mrs. Weasley asks about Bill and Fleur, and that a goodly percentage of the fans seem to be asking about one pairing or another in the wake of the new book: "What do these people have in common?" If you ARE asking this question, it's fairly easy to see how you might come up with Charlie / Tonks, or Harry / Hermione, or any of a number of other pairings that I'd never quite gotten before. And it's certainly not a bad question to ask about a potential partner in real life, so I can totally see where these people are coming from. But I'm firmly convinced that it wasn't the question JKR was asking herself when she came up with the canon pairings, so it's pretty much useless as a predictive question if you're trying to make an argument about how things are actually going to play out in the books.
What we get in canon: Harry and Hermione are both idealistic, ambitious introverts who take life too seriously and keep things close to the chest, so they get paired up with the expansive, down-to-earth Weasleys. Tonks, on the other hand, is not going to get matched with a Weasley boy because she's already got a Weasley-type personality; she ends up with a quiet, much-older professor. Hagrid lives in a hut and eats stoat sandwiches, so he gets paired with the high-maintenance French headmistress. (While I'm a contrastshipper myself, I have to admit that I'm not sure this was entirely a good idea. There are limits.) Molly, after twenty-odd years of marriage, still doesn't understand her husband's hobbies or see eye to eye with him on a lot of questions. Judging by the brief glimpse we get of James and Lily, they might have ended up much the same way if they were alive. Interestingly, the one big exception to this rule seems to be the couples we're not meant to like -- Petunia and Vernon are two of a kind, as are Lucius and Narcissa.
No wonder the commonalityshippers are frustrated. They're making perfectly sensible arguments that, through no fault of their own, simply don't lead to a payoff in the books. (You can, occasionally, use a commonality argument to justify a canon pairing -- I saw somebody refer to Ginny as a "female Harry" just yesterday -- but Harry actually seems to be attracted to Ginny because she represents things he doesn't have, like a normal happpy family life. I have a feeling that when this type of argument leads people in the right direction, it's by accident.)
As I've said, I expect this theory is probably full of holes, but it does tend to explain a lot of the places where some readers' reasoning appears to be out of sync with JKR's.
