Reflection and Analysis

Harry Potter - Shipping Bias Much? (1/17/25)

This is a direct response by "10 Harry Potter Romances the HBO Reboot Needs to Explore (That Didn't Get Enough Attention in the Films)" by Cameron Kelly. (It's linked below.)

The article starts with the following premise. "The film adaptions did a stellar job at bringing the books to the screen, a lot of the relationships between the characters were underwritten in favor of the central plot. Unfortunately, this means that the films missed out on the potential for the romantic relationships portrayed in the novels."

What does this mean, though, given that Harry Potter gets a lot of flack about the romance department? Fans recognize the books didn't handle romance well, to the point one might argue they were underwritten in favor of the central plot, so the real question should be, why would any adaptation be any different? However, in saying this, there were relationships that were completely cut, such as Remus and Tonk's relationship or Bill and Fleur, which in turn means what the article says about these ships.

Unfortunatly, the writer decides to start off with what they call the best developed relationship, the one between Hermione and Ron, to which I say -- it wasn't. It's a super toxic relationship within the books and the movies actually do the ship justice. Ron is at his heart a womanizer, someone who was neglectful of both of his girlfriends. Hermione gets a lot of flack for attacking him, only for Ron stans to outright ignore that someone else was involved both times, Lavender the first time and Harry the next, while she never once defends herself from the way Ron treats her.

And he treats her poorly, ignoring her after finding out she got a kiss from Krum and using Lavender to get at her, while having openly mocked her for being book smart and smarter than him while begging her to be able to copy her homework. He left her and Harry and only came back because he got a lecture from Bill, though he tries to play it up that he came back of his own free will.

This isn't a well developed relationship, but a poorly done one, but in the case of Lavender, Hermione flipped out on Ron because Ron was ignoring Lavender just to get at Hermione, which to her hurt more than simply being ignored, because one of her dorm mates was also getting hurt in the process.

And then they make make the claim that, "the relationship between Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley is arguably the most popular relationship in the series (at least of the canon relationships)," which the latter seems like a correction because it's not actually one of the more popular pairings, but even then, there's an even more popular pairing than this one.

Over on A03 as of today

- 75,876 - Draco/Harry
- 59,062 - Sirius/Remus
- 36,062 - Hermione/Draco
- 30,616 - James/Lily
- 23,934 - Hermione/Ron
- 20,233 - Harry/Ginny

James/Lily is far more popular, having 5-6k more stories than Hermione/Ron, and Harry/Ginny only has 3-4k less. And when I browse for stories and actually see the story tagging Hermione/Ron, it is often a background ship that is there simply because the ship was made canon in the first place.

However, if one were to search the stories on ffnet using the pairing feature which shows later trends within the fandom...

- 236k - Harry
- 176k - Draco
- 196k - Hermione
- 59.7k - Ginny
- 51.7k - Ron

In recent years, Ron has become one of the least ship characters within the fandom among the five characters from Harry's generation listed in the pairings noted above.

- 7.5k - Hermione/Draco
- 6.2k - Draco/Harry
- 3.4k - James/Lily
- 3.3k - Hermione/Harry
- 3.1k - Hermione/Ron
- 3.1k - Harry/Ginny
- 2.6k - Sirius/Remus

And it's still not the most popular canon ship, with these stats actually more likely to favor the ship, so where is the writer getting this idea that Ron/Hermione is popular? The order remains the same over on A03 in 2005, 2010, 2015, with Harry/Ginny maintaining a 3-4k gap, but then when we get to stories updated after 2020, things start changing.