Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186288

Magpie:
 Even his career choice seems designed to make himself miserable--becoming a probably mediocre auror to Harry's star head of the department before he's 30? Yipes. (Course there's the alternate scenario where he works at WWW, but that's just as bad--he's taking Fred's place with none of Fred's talents.)

Pippin:
Ron got to be a Quidditch star and a prefect, and probably would have been Head Boy if the war hadn't gotten in the way.  I don't see why it wouldn't be the same in the Auror office. Harry will always get the spotlight when he's around, but even he can't be everywhere at once.

Ron's not exactly content in the Epilogue, but then he never wanted contentment the way Harry did. He likes a bit of conflict, Ron does.

Ron imagined himself successful independent of his brothers, and that's how we see him in the Epilogue. He acquitted himself  well in the final battle -- didn't get himself killed or seriously wounded, and saved Draco's life twice. As an auror he may always be Watson to Harry's Holmes, but there's success (as a million police procedurals will testify) for the plodding but persistent cop who keeps getting it wrong but never ever gives up. That's our Ronniekins. 


And I wouldn't say he had none of Fred's talents. He's kept his sense of  teenage humor, with less tendency than Fred to do dangerous things for the fun of it. 

The recent thread made me think of something you referred to (in a part I snipped) about the characters never changing drastically. That's another way in which Harry is definitely not  Aslan. (Be patient, I promise I'll get back to Ron.)

Harry can tell people when he thinks they're making a mistake, he can sometimes get them to listen, but he can't reform people's hearts the way Aslan does.  In fact no one in the WW can do this, and no one is changed the way Edmund and Eustace change in Narnia, so that you can't imagine them ever doing anything seriously wrong again. 

 There's no character or source of wisdom that has all the answers, so that all you have to do is open your heart and Aslan, or the Force or Gandalf can always tell you exactly what you ought to do. Dumbledore seemed to have that kind of wisdom at first, but that turned out to be an unrealistic expectation, to say the least. 

And I think that's where a lot of people felt cheated.
Now maybe Rowling misjudged her audience or her genre and didn't think we'd expect this kind of character development. Or maybe she's saying exactly what she meant to say. Maybe she thinks that expecting some source of unimpeachable wisdom to reveal the answers to our problems and change people's hearts overnight *is* an unrealistic expectation, or at least one that doesn't really fit with a liberal world-view.  

Not that things (and people) can't get better. But the characters have to solve their moral and spiritual problems the way they solve other problems, by trial and error as well as research. It isn't enough to discover the wisdom of the past, because   the wisdom of the past sometimes needs to be superseded.   The answers aren't always already out there somewhere waiting to be found. 

The wizarding world hasn't discovered a cure for insecurity, and so Ron remains insecure. It hasn't discovered a cure for bossiness, and so Hermione is still full of herself. But they've learned they can live with each other.  That's called, um, tolerance.

Pippin