Ok, let’s talk about Ginny Weasley, wildly underappreciated character, and how, on a mythic level, she is an incredibly elegant counterpart to Harry Potter, even though she barely makes it onto the page.
I have a friend who really enjoys the fanfic work of my friend tozettewrites - he says of her work that she provides “deep reads on shallow characters”. I prefer to think that she sees the potential on the page or screen of the characters as presented in the original work, the way the characters would make sense within the narrative and the world if only they were properly explained and presented. She looks into the gaps and sees the sense, particularly, in Harry Potter, with characters like Tom Riddle and the Malfoys. I want to do the same with Ginny Weasley, because I think she makes an enormous amount of sense within the framework of the story and as a character, but she isn’t there on the page for us to see. I particularly want to pitch why I think Ginny/Harry makes an enormous amount of sense as a ship.
Ginny is the only girl and the youngest of seven in a house run by the tender velvet fist of Molly Weasley, with the input and love of an absentminded professor who loves the Muggle world. She is unbelievably comfortable within the magical world, has an amiable understanding of and comfort with Muggles thanks to her father, and understands completely what it is to be both loved and a little bit invisible. In that way, she is the counterpart and opposite of Harry, who knows what it is to be thoroughly unloved and also a little bit overly observed by a family who mistrusts and hates him, and who has no idea the magical world exists but takes to it almost immediately with wonder and delight, and has been dreaming of it all his life without knowing he was dreaming of it.
Ginny is the seventh child, which is sort of always a big deal, magically speaking - there’s all this cultural occult/story significance associated with being the seventh in a family, because seven is the number of nature in a few spiritual traditions (OK, I’m Jewish, I’m biased). She completely understands how to live in a sort of loving collective, and while she’s shy in front of Harry to begin with, we know from little hints that she’s always been a sort of playful precocious trickster, flying and pranking and connecting with Fred and George in a way none of the other Weasley kids do. We know she takes risks and does the kinds of things that proper young girls don’t do - she writes in the diary. This is a kid who feels the call of adventure and answers it, sometimes to her detriment. This is a kid who will one day co-run an insurgency with her friends Neville and Luna, her own magical trio, despite the risk of death, just because it is the right damn thing to do. She grows up in a familial position that could make her small or complacent or cowardly or just very comfortable, but she is made for adventure.
Harry is an only child, a really classic lone hero, and he just hasn’t been given the opportunity to have the kinds of familial experiences that make Ginny so comfortable within her family and within friendships. He has almost no emotional intelligence (see: the date with Cho), whereas Ginny has her entire family and later Hermione and Luna on her side when she needs to work through life troubles. But Harry, despite the fact that he absolutely could have turned out to be hateful toward Muggles given the Dursleys, despite the echoes of Tom Riddle in his background and the isolation he’s experienced in the years before getting his letters, takes to friendship and loyalty and heroism like a duck to water. He’s all for Ron, right away. He finds Hermione annoying but he still rescues her from the troll in first year, because it’s just what you do. He rejects Draco’s status-based and performance-based model of friendship almost immediately. (He knows poverty is irrelevant to goodness or worth as a friend, maybe because the Dursleys are nice and comfortable and have a fancy new kitchen and neat flowerbeds and are terrifically cruel. Listen, I’m pretty sure Rowling hates the rich.)
And both Harry and Ginny have the same trauma: they’ve had Voldemort in their heads. For Harry it’s been a subtle influence he’s had to carry that has grown, over time, into an unwelcome presence. Ginny, though, invited him in, not knowing she was doing it, just answering the call to adventure, the call of needing someone to talk to who was grand and understanding and interesting. Both have been terrifically lonely and made bad decisions as a result - the diary for Ginny and the events of the fifth book for Harry. (I bet Ginny and Dumbledore would have had a lot to talk about regarding being caught up in someone else’s charismatic personality until it’s nearly too late, given his experiences with Grindelwald. I’d read that fic.) They both know the feeling of being tripped up by their own heads, if not being able to trust what goes on in there, of impetuousness leading to pain and disaster, of feeling overly responsible for the suffering of others (the Petrification victims, Sirius going through the veil). That sense of responsibility drives them toward their respective roles in the final book, both fighting evil, one the human way (Ginny defending students from the harm inflicted by Hogwarts under Voldemort) and one the mythic, mystical, hero’s journey way (destroying the Horcruxes).
And they are both Gryffindor seekers, the kind of person who flies exquisitely, but isn’t interested in the bustle of the game or the point scoring or the beating, and is instead looking for the hidden small sparkling thing that will end the game, that will win the game. Both of them have always had within them the gift of easy flight.
ETA: usually, Ginny is a chaser in Quidditch, even though she substitutes as seeker, as a reblogger astutely noted. That makes sense - a lot of her journey is far more overt and ordinary and human than Harry’s, a journey that would suit a character leading a dystopian YA rebellion story.
