JKR and the boys (and girls)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 161548

Betsy HP
> Hermione doesn't tell Ginny about figuring out Rita Skeeter's 
> secret, capturing her, or her big plan to have Rita write Harry's 
> story up.  Ginny seems to find out about the DA club along with 
> everyone else (after Ron and Harry).  There's nothing to suggest 
> Ginny knew about the contract being hexed.> 
> Ginny wasn't involved at all in Hermione's attempt to save Buckbeak, 
> even after Ron and Harry bowed out for a bit.  Ginny isn't involved 
> in Hermione's SPEW (wasn't Neville the only other person Hermione 
> was able to get involved?). 

Pippin:
SPEW's not a  secret. I suspect Ginny didn't want to have anything to
do with it and said so, for all the reasons enumerated by the other
characters. But as Harry wasn't paying much attention to Ginny's
opinions in GoF, we didn't get to hear about it.

There were long stretches in PoA when Ron and Harry weren't talking 
to Hermione at all, and that might have been when Ginny and 
Hermione got to be close. 

As for the other examples, I don't think Ginny's interested in the
detective stuff.  If she was, being excluded from the Trio's activities
would be unbearable.  Ginny isn't into it, just like
Hermione isn't into Quidditch. I'm sure that both Ginny and Harry
 think the ideal life would have a lot more Quidditch and a lot less
people trying to kill you, thank you very much.

Also, Hermione's intellectual isolation is part of the story, and
it would cut across it if she had Ginny to bounce her ideas off of.
Hermione hasn't learned to bounce her ideas off *anyone*, and
that's one of the things she has to learn to do. She's just too
insecure to attempt it. 

 But the girls must be close, IMO, not to resent the time Harry 
spends with the other, even with no romantic rivalry. 

JKR can be a very economic writer, so one giggly conversation about 
love potions has to stand in for six years of girl talk, just like canary 
creams and levicorpus have to stand in for six years of rough-housing. 

But that doesn't mean JKR hasn't noticed how boys and girls behave. 
Ron makes a few off color jokes a year or so apart, and that has to
stand in for a phase that was probably just as annoying and
intensive  as SPEW. But civil rights has more to do with the story
than sex does, so we get more about SPEW than we did about Uranus,
thank goodness. If Voldemort was recruiting from the sexually
repressed we'd have a different story (or a very smutty fanfic <veg>)


> Betsy Hp:
> I was thinking more of Hermione's disdain for Harry and Ron worring 
> over who they were going to take to the dance.  Hermione didn't 
> really care all that much about it.  She didn't work to get Krum as 
> a date, he worked to get her.  And while she did take some time to 
> doll herself up, she was also very careful to point out that this 
> was not her normal behavior.  It was just not all that stressful for 
> Hermione, relative to Harry and Ron.

Pippin:
Yeah, Hermione was so cool over it all that she got into a screaming,
shouting, hairdo destroying brawl with Ron. She never gets worked
up about that stuff, except when she sends killer canaries to peck
someone's eyes out. Are we reading the same books?

Pippin