Samantha Chaffin
Editor-in-Chief
To those of you who have been keeping up with my editorial for the past couple of weeks, you may be noticing a bit of a pattern forming.
For that, I apologize—hopefully this will be the final piece of what I will henceforth refer to as my “uncertainty series.”
In any case, the fact remains that in a recently released preview of an interview from J.K. Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” series, the author questions a decision she made with a major plotline in the series. Non-Potter fanatics, please bear with me.
Warning: semi-spoilers ahead if you don’t know how the series ends.
In the interview, Rowling says it should have been Harry and Hermione, not Ron and Hermione, who ended up together.
Rowling said in the interview that her decision to put Ron and Hermione together in the first place was “a choice [Rowling] made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility.”
Rowling followed the above statement by saying she hoped she wasn’t breaking people’s hearts by saying this—now that’s some serious optimism!
Personally, I want to know who Ginny would have ended up with if not with Harry but that’s not the point.
Quite frankly, after reading the transcript, I feel like Rowling just cast a real-life Confundus Charm on me.
The “Harry Potter”-fan in me feels betrayed in a sense (though I’m a-okay with Ron and Hermione’s relationship, even if they do need counseling later on!) and full of questions.
If Rowling had doubts about such a major plotline, why didn’t she fix things sooner? Why would she deceive readers by publishing plotlines that she only wished were credible? Or, if those doubts didn’t come until after-the-fact, as the interview transcript leads me to believe, why tell us of her mistake at all?
As a reader, I don’t want my post-He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named fantasy to be ruined by “the facts” if they are different from how they are written.
I want to believe that after all of the struggles and heartbreak I lived through (yes, lived through) with Harry and his friends, things are finally good. Personally, I want that happy (ish) ending.
I don’t want to imagine Ron and Hermione unhappy, in counseling and arguing in front of little Rose and little Hugo. And I really don’t want to imagine Harry sneaking away from Ginny to see Hermione, or some other crazy, heartbreaking thing that could be happening in the unwritten aftermath of the series.
But before I get carried away with my heartbreak, I had a point:
J.K. Rowling, one of the most celebrated authors of our time, has publicly admitted to questioning a major decision she made in her work.
I’m sure most writers wish they could have done something differently, just like most people do but not everyone is willing to admit that like Rowling has done.
Regret, uncertainty and the question, “what if?” appear to be the way of the world.
In any case, it’s comforting to know that even people like Rowling make mistakes and question their decisions—it’s not just me, and it’s not just you. It’s all of us, just trying our best to get by.
