Thoughts on Ron and Hermione as a ship?
thank you very much for the ask, @thesilverstarling!
well, i'll state my position straight away... book ron and hermione are the best of the canon couples and they'll have a long and extremely happy marriage made rich by great and stalwart love, lust, fun, and faithfulness, rather than held together by duty and couples' therapy like so many readers and authors tend to think.
and i'll state another position straight away, lest i seem like i'm just a fan with blinkers on... i think this even though book!hermione is - by far - the member of the trio [and indeed one of the main characters of the series] i'm least interested in. i like fanon!hermione - perfect and preternaturally good - even less.
but - even though i do think it's ridiculous that jkr has said that she thought ron needed to "become worthy" of hermione [hence his flop era with lavender in half-blood prince] - i don't think that he's the superior one in the partnership either. ron and hermione belong together as equals - which is what they’re set up in the narrative as being from the off - and i hate seeing that undermined.
and i especially hate seeing it undermined by ron's icon status being overlooked. hermione's talents and skills are pretty thoroughly discussed - i'm not denying she gets unfairly bashed by parts of the fandom, but it's nowhere near the same level - but he doesn't get the same treatment...
there are multiple reasons for this: ron's narrative purpose is to be the everyman sidekick, and so he's required by the text to be less special than harry or hermione [the helper-figure]; the amount of aristocracy wank in this fandom means that the weasleys' ordinariness is less appealing to writers than making harry have twenty different lordships and call himself hadrian; the way he's written in the films is literal dogshit; the narrative interrogates ron's flaws - especially his capacity for jealousy - much more intensively than it interrogates either hermione's [cruel, inflexible, meddling] or harry's [reckless, self-absorbed, judgemental]. but one i feel is perhaps more significant than is often appreciated is that ron is such a british character - who draws on so many little culturally-specific quirks - that many of his traits aren't always understood as they're intended to be by international readers.
in particular - as is outlined in this excellent meta by @whinlatter - ron's sense of humour isn't indicative of immaturity or a lack of seriousness. it's the narrative's evidence of him being the most emotionally aware of the trio.
ron is shown throughout the series to understand how both harry and hermione need to have their emotions approached - and i think there's no piece of fanfic which says this better than crocodile heart by @floreatcastellumposts:
That was what she liked most about Ron, she thought vaguely. He was very good at being suitably outraged on your behalf. For Harry, for her, for Neville. That sort of thing mattered, when you were hurt or embarrassed or wronged in some way. You needed to have someone else on your side, to be as emotional as you felt, maybe even more so, so that you might feel a bit more normal. It was very decent of him, and she was not sure he realised he did it.
ron's inherent emotional awareness is an enormous source of comfort to other people. he does the work which isn't flashy or special - he makes tea and tells jokes and is just there - but which is needed in healthy human relationships far more frequently than a willingness to fight to the death for the other person.
[as an aside, this normality - even though i think it's assumed rather than demonstrated by the text - is also what ginny provides for harry. and so i do find the little corner of the fandom which thinks that hinny are a good couple but romione aren't… unusual.]
but let's look at some specific reasons why ron and hermione belong together:
their communication styles mesh perfectly. ron is the only person hermione knows who feeds her love of being challenged and debated, and who is able to engage in this way of communicating without becoming irate when she refuses to back down. ron's good at picking his battles, but he's also good at recognising that hermione's tendency to argue isn't intended to be confrontational a lot of the time - it's just the way she works through feelings and problems. he's far more easy-going about her tendency to nag, interrupt, try to provoke arguments, or speak condescendingly than he's given credit for - and hermione evidently respects this, since when he does tell her not to push a situation [like when she's trying to needle harry into talking about sirius], she listens to him.
that ron and hermione's tendency to bicker is taken by fans to be a bad thing is because it's something harry - from whose perspective the narrative is written - doesn't understand. harry is extremely conflict-avoidant - he tends to take being pushed on his views and opinions to be insulting, and he has a tendency to assume that he's right which is just as profound as hermione's. he and ginny communicate not by debating, but by ginny having no time for his rigidity and refusing to indulge it - but ron and hermione bickering about everything isn't a negative thing within their specific emotional dynamic.
[as another aside, this glaring chasm in communication styles is why the canonical harry and hermione would be a disaster as a couple.]
they each provide validation the other needs. it's clear - reading between the lines - that hermione is a tremendously lonely person. the friendlessness of her initial few weeks at hogwarts seems to be a continuation of her experience as a child, and - outside of ron and harry - that friendlessness endures through her schooldays. i'm always struck by the fact that, when she falls out with ron in prisoner of azkaban, she has no-one else except hagrid to spend time with, and that this is only avoided in half-blood prince because harry decides not to freeze her out. i don't think her friendship with ginny is anywhere near as close as fanon seems to imply, nor do i think that she's anywhere near as close to neville (not least because she is so condescending to him] as she's often written to be.
and this loneliness seems to stretch beyond hogwarts. the absence of hermione's parents from the narrative is - in a doylist sense - clearly just a device to maximise time with the trio all together, but the watsonian reading is that she doesn't have a particularly good relationship with them. hermione's obviously upper-middle-class background - the name! the skiing! the holidays in the south of france! - can be presumed, i think, to come with a series of expectations from her parents which she constantly feels she's not entirely meeting, particularly expectations attached to academic success.
[her parents - were she a muggle child - would undoubtedly have ambitions for her to attend an elite university and then go into a prestigious career. tertiary education of the type they're familiar with doesn't seem to exist in the wizarding world and this, alongside all the other divides between the magical and muggle worlds which contribute to the distance between them, would be one very obvious area in which she felt the need to prove the value of her true self to them.]
ron, too, has quite a difficult relationship with his position in the family - voldemort's locket is obviously lying about a lot of things, but it isn't wrong to point out that he seems to receive considerably less of his mother's emotional attention than some of his siblings - and he too is constrained by expectations which he doesn't know how to explain he has no interest in - especially molly's desire for her sons to achieve top grades and go into the ministry.
he also suffers while at hogwarts from being "harry potter's best friend". harry never properly appreciates this, but hermione does - she recognises ron's jealousy and never allows harry to minimise it [and she and ron are very much aligned on having no respect for harry's saviour and martyr complexes]; she appreciates ron's strengths [above all his kindness and his sense of humour] and makes him feel as though he's achieved things with them. and ron does the same for her - he's hugely observant when it comes to her, and he constantly challenges and defends her.
[him agreeing with snape that she's a know-it-all in the film version of prisoner of azkaban is a crime.]
the two of them clearly spend a lot of time together one-on-one while harry's involved in his various shenanigans [including outside of school - hermione has often arrived at the burrow days or even weeks before harry, and they seem to write to each other frequently when apart]. they do this within a relationship which is fundamentally equal. one issue with hinny is that, post-war, harry is going to have to get used to seeing ginny as a peer, rather than as someone he has to protect. but ron and hermione never have that issue - equality is baked into their relationship from the off.
because, to be quite frank, fandom overstates the role that jealousy plays in their relationship. ron certainly doesn't acquit himself well when it comes to hermione's relationship with viktor krum [it's because he's bi and doesn't know it yet, i fear...], and a tendency to externalise his insecurity into trying to make others also feel insecure is one of his primary negative traits. [hermione does this too, via her patented lofty voice when she's trying to condescend to people.]
but this is often taken as the initial red flag for how the relationship would crash and burn, and ron's toxic jealousy is often exaggerated into the trigger for him being emotionally and physically violent towards hermione.
[which, frequently, seems to drive her into the arms of either draco malfoy or severus snape… who are, of course, the first people we think of when we hear the words "not prone to jealousy"...]
but i think it's important to point out a couple of things here.
firstly, hermione evidently regards ron's jealousy as silly - she's upset by it, yes, but she's upset because she wanted him to ask her out. she doesn't think he's being possessive, she thinks he's being stupid.
secondly, hermione is equally as pettily jealous over ron's crush on fleur delacour and relationship with lavender brown, and she behaves just as cruelly when it comes to lavender as ron does when it comes to krum - the narrative just treats her actions as more sympathetic, both because harry dislikes lavender too, and because, by that point in the series, jkr has become less willing to criticise her.
but we do need to bear in mind that, outside of this teenage pettiness, ron is never jealous of hermione over things which matter. he's never jealous of her intelligence or competence or ambition or success [indeed, he defends her constantly from attacks designed to undermine her in these areas]. for someone who struggles with being overshadowed by harry, he is never upset at being overshadowed by her, and he's clearly going to be happy to support her in any of the career ambitions she can be written as having post-war.
and, on this point, I do think it's worth interrogating why so many readers still seem to feel uncomfortable with the idea of ron and hermione having a dynamic where she's the more "powerful" one - it's always a bit trite to say "but what if the genders were reversed?", but actually that's not irrelevant here... if hermione ends up taking the ministry by storm and ron becomes a stay-at-home dad or has a job which is just to pay the bills, what, precisely, is wrong with that? why, precisely, should hermione regard ron making that choice for himself as a negative thing? hermione so often seems to leave ron in fanfiction because of a lack of ambition, but in canon she's shown to not particularly care if ron and harry do the bare minimum when it comes to studying etc. she nags them to do their work so they can pass their exams and they don't get in trouble. she doesn't nag them to do it to the same standard or with the same diligence that she would.
and, actually, i think that ron being less ambitious than hermione is something which is key to how well they work. because ron provides not only emotional support, but emotional clarity.
hermione is shown throughout canon to - just as harry does - have a tendency to become obsessive to the detriment of her own health. she's also often - as harry is - emotionally or intellectually inflexible, and she finds it hard to move on when what she feels or believes is right is proven to be wrong. both she and harry are micro-thinkers, who lean towards knee-jerk assumptions and stubborn convictions.
more positively, hermione has a tendency towards total, unshakeable loyalty. this is one of her really underappreciated traits, and actually contributes a lot more to her role in the series than her intellect, but it also comes with the negative that she can have a slightly hagrid-ish leaning towards blind trust, especially in authority figures, which is always interesting to think about.
but ron is a big-picture thinker [it's why he's so good at chess] and a pragmatist. he's the least obsessive. he's the one least likely to act on gut instinct [and, therefore, the hardest to fool - i think it's worth emphasising that he clocks that tom riddle's diary is tricking harry immediately, whereas harry feels an immediate kinship with riddle because he's an orphan and hermione trusts him because he was head boy]. he's the least righteous of the three, and the one who demonstrates that faith and loyalty are more often choices rather than innate powers, and that sometimes these choices will lead to outcomes which are bad or hard.
and these traits contribute to aspects of his character which are underappreciated. ron worries about hermione making herself ill during exams, or when she's using the time-turner, and makes an effort to get her to set healthy boundaries and redirect her anxiety. ron stands on a broken leg in front of sirius and goes into the forest to fight aragog not out of inherent righteousness, but out of choice. ron takes over the burden of preparing buckbeak's defence when it's clear hermione is approaching burnout, as a way of atoning for his role in causing her distress which actually has a tangible impact on her wellbeing. ron is completely right that harry hasn't done any long-term planning for the horcrux hunt, and his anger does force harry to tighten up after he leaves the trio. ron has a clear head in the middle of battle. ron makes harry and hermione laugh. ron is unafraid of human emotion. ron arrests harry's tendency to brood over the little things by looking at the bigger picture. ron will always come back.
ron is bringing his politician wife regular cups of tea and making sure she doesn't work all night. he's helping his lawyer wife to feel less upset over losing one case by reminding her that she's won ten others. he's noticing stress creeping in and whirling her off for a dirty weekend or a takeaway on the sofa. he's teaching his daughter to be proud of her ambition and his son to treat women as equals and both of his children that wanting to be the most famous person in the world isn't really all it's cracked up to be and that all you can do when you fuck up is apologise and try to do better. he's making hermione smile on the worst days of her life and helping her strategise her long-term goals when she gets stuck on the short-term ones and telling her straight when she needs to get it together. he's seeing a misogynistic head of department call hermione a "silly little girl" and - exactly as he did aged fourteen when a teacher called her an "insufferable know-it-all" - choosing to tell him exactly what he thinks of that.
ron is the ultimate wife guy with the ultimate wife. he's a very lucky man, and hermione is a very lucky lady.
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