I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Linda

As for JKR, I’m not sure she’s ever offered a full apology to her fans for the Interview that must not be named. Certainly she can’t control what Emerson said, & he seems like a, well, I should be nice I suppose. And she can’t retract what she said in response, but she could jolly well apologize for it directly.

Otherwise, the impression is given & left on the table that H/Hr shippers were indeed delusional & that they were so delusional that they kept trying to tell her, the author, how to write her own characters! (John Updike & Stephen King did the same thing! Begging her not to kill Harry, but she didn’t slap them down.) The impression left is that the main problem in all this was the H/Hr shippers & not their just reaction at some asinine remark made be a teenager & left uncorrected by an adult.

And if you, John, & I feel this way when we didn’t even have a hat in the shipping wars ring, then I can only barely imagine how H/Hr shippers felt & still feel about it. I’m very sorry for Linda, that to this day this whole incident affects her reading of the series.

On the other hand, the author has a point to express and she does it firmly. Now, she gets held to the TEXT ONLY as does anyone else. An impaling sword if ever there was one.

When Harry and Ginny got together in HBP, it felt so right to me and made perfect sense. Harry needed someone entirely different from Hermione, a woman who was healing, who could bring laughter and fun (not to mention, permanent family); who shared his interests and personally understood his most harrowing moments (possession by LV), but could bring a light, loving touch to his heartaches and bring him out of himself. Ginny was a refuge Hermione could not be to Harry, by nature of her personality. He needed someone, in fact, very like his mother. R/H and H/G both demonstrate the “guys marry their moms” thing.

Whether the H/HE was a red herring or not, Rowling’s artistry showed the messiness of human relationships and romance. However, for people to feel demeaned–I agree it would have gone a long way to soothe feelings and acknowledge publicly, as she did in the interview quoted above, that there was a canon basis for believing in H/HE.

And there goes Hairy Plotter following Ninny down the hall…

All I was attempting to do was draw attention to the fact that JKR has more recently made amends.

To seaJay’s assertion and evidence that my call for an apology from Ms. Rowling was a “little harsh,” I plead guilty and apologize. I have not read Harry: A History and missed these comments in defense of seeing a H/Hr relationship that the author has made. As is probably inevitable in a post accusing someone of being uncharitable and self-important, I fell to those exact failings.

Having said that, I wonder how a reader like Linda feels seeing Ms. Rowling acknowledge that serious readers did think an H/Hr relationship was in the offing right through Deathly Hallows? Does this amount to an admission that the story was crafted with ambiguity about Hermione’s ultimate affections — or is it just another “some of my best friends are H/Hr shippers, mistaken as they were in understanding what I was after” bit of bone throwing to appease the mob? Only the offended Pumpkin Pie shippers can answer that one. Certainly if Ms. Rowling wanted to clear the air she could have been more explicit about the shipping design.

I should be very clear (and will be) that this kind of revelation is exactly what I do not want from this author or any other. I don’t want to see the witch or wizard behind the curtain or hear from him or her the meaning of their artistry. Such explanations, besides being risibly undependable, shut down meaningful discussion both of individual reader’s experience and a multivalent or layered understanding of text.

I’m happy that Ms. Rowling has shown the restraint she has in discussing her artistry and very impressed by her good works and adjustment to wealth and fame. I do think her comments in 2005 were unfortunate, if understandable (as Janet Batchler has explained elsewhere) in the context of the red carpet night of HP5′s publication. Rather than complain about the mean letter letters she received then in response to her behavior, an apology would have been the gracious thing to do then as it is now.

I apologize for the lack of charity in my post and for the hyperbole consequent to being ill informed (I will need to read Ms. Anelli’s book someday if I’m going to descend to this sort of discussion…). Thank you again Seajay and Linda for your comments and correction.

“I tried very hard to soften it, I suppose,” Jo said. “Just because someone had a view on Harry/Hermione didn’t mean they weren’t genuine, or that they were necessarily misguided. In fact, I will say this, Steve Kloves who has been the script writer [on the Potter films], who is enormously insightful on the series and a very good friend, after he read book seven he said to me, ‘You, know, I thought something was going to happen between Harry and Hermione, and I didn’t know whether I wanted it or not.’

“I had always planned that Harry’s true soul mate, which I stand by, is Ginny, and that Ron and Hermione have this combative but mutual attraction. They will always bicker, there will always be rough edges there, but they are pulled together, each has something the other needs.”

…….

“[Kloves] felt a certain pulll between them at that point. And I think he’s right. There are moments when [Harry and Hermione] touch, which are charged moments. One when she touches his hair as he sits on the hiltop reading about Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and [two] the moment when they walk out of the graveyard with their arms around each other.”

….

“Now the fact is that Hermione shares moments with Harry that Ron will never be able to participate in. He walked out. She shared something very instense with Harry.

“So I think it could have gone that way.”

I know that you had only an academic interest in shipping and were without emotional attachment as to how the romantic subplots resolved themselves.

I engaged in the ship wars because I thought that Harry’s romantic love would prove the key to his survival against Voldemort and that solving the shipping question was integral to the overall underlying plot.

That is why I was a H/Hr shipper and spent many hours analyzing the text looking for subtle clues. Because I thought she was being oh so clever and not patently obvious. I had mentioned many times during those online debates that I could be wrong and that only JKR knew for sure where she was going.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

One thing that I have never seen JKR asked is whether or not she intentionally wrote the text in a manner that could be read with ambiguity as to Hermione’s true romantic feelings.

Did we all just imagine things that JKR never intended or was she trying to sow seeds of doubt just to keep her readers guessing?

Regardless of authorial intent, I was offended by Emerson’s callous remarks and the commentary embedded in the transcript of that Interview from Hell.

To this day that interview colors my appreciation of the series as a whole. Not because my shipping predictions were proved wrong, but because I felt mocked and insulted by the author.

It is nice to know others recognize that as well.

Linda McCabe