The Weasleys get a surprising amount of hate in the fandom, and unlike a lot of the other varieties of character-hate, it comes from all over the place.

For example, you have those who enjoy the Dark!Harry/Manipulative!Dumbledore cliché—very nearly all of them seem to think that Dumbledore was in fact paying the Weasleys to get close to Harry and that there’s no legitimate affection there; because, you know, they’re poor and… well, poor--and people with not a lot of money will do anything to get it, right?

Then there are the rabid Harmonians, to whom the mere existence of romantic competition for them Hermione is seen as an insult. You could argue the same of a lot of Harry/Luna shippers. There are also a fair number of Hermione-worshipers, many of whom have finally twigged to the fact that Harry’s not gonna ditch the Weasleys anytime soon, and thus lump him in with them to have their heroine save the day.

The Weasleys also get a whole lot of flak from Slytherfen and Slytherin apologists—apparently Harry is OMGSOMEEN for not immediately ditching Ron Weasley in order to hang out with Draco and the other “cool kids”. I have seen way too many fics where Harry gets sorted into Slytherin and Ron’s treatment of Harry makes canon-Draco look harmless (and in more than a few of them, the Weasleys essentially turn into Gryffindor versions of the Malfoys, only even more evil). And on and on.

The hate seems to focus on Ron and Ginny in particular—for the most part, it extends to the rest of the family via guilt by association. This seems to be mostly for shipping purposes, but apparently a fair bit of Hermione-worship (and sometimes Luna-worship) comes into play here. Many of them think their chosen avatar “deserves” Harry, pretty much solely because he’s the hero—matter of fact, I’d argue that Harmonianism is less about the OMGSOTRUWUV between Harry and Hermione and more about elevating Hermione to the point where she becomes the central focus of Harry’s life—in other words, turning her into a Mary Sue (in other words, what they accuse canon Ginny of being). Other typists either don’t like the Weasleys or can’t relate to them—or they think the Weasleys are too normal to relate to since these typists are all OMGSOSPESHULSNOWFLAKES—so they make them either irredeemably stupid, evil, or just plain jerks (except for Percy, and possibly Bill and Charlie; they’re no threat to these typists’ OTPs).

For people determined to read between the lines, they seem determined to ignore what a between-the-lines reading tells you about Ginny. Considering Harry is essentially the POV character—the infamous “Harry filter” is at work here—he sure notices her a lot for someone who “never notices her”, even before OP.

But anyway.


Ron Weasley is in many ways the “average” one of the Trio. He’s like Xander in the Buffyverse, or Wash in Firefly—sometimes he’s the comedy relief, sometimes he’s the voice of reason, but he is a character that a large portion of the fandom loves despite him not having any special powers or knowledge—they love him for who he is. A lot of people can relate to him—and I find myself among them. Granted, I don’t have a lot in common with him, but since when was that required?

He’s proof that you don’t have to be super-duper-OMGspeshul to be one of the good guys.

But, unfortunately, he (like Xander) gets an inordinate amount of hate. The fact that he treats Hermione with anything but adoring worship—he treats her essentially the same way he treats everybody—gets a large (or at least very vocal) portion of the fandom rather hot and bothered. To way too many people, Draco’s insulting Hermione almost non-stop is perfectly fine, but Ron? Unforgivable!

Why? Because Draco can insult Hermione all day long, and she doesn’t so much as flinch. She’s got him figured out. It’s only Ron who really gets through to her. Apparently that means he’s evil rather than that she likes and cares about him. (And let’s face it, Tom Felton plays a role in that as well, just as Alan Rickman with the Snapiacs.)

Ron gets it pretty bad in fic—but that’s like saying Hagrid is a bit on the tall side.

As a rule, I tend to stay away from deliberately Ron-bashing fics, but even then I’ve seen Idiot!Ron, WorseThanCanonDraco!Ron, Bigot!Ron, OnlyHarry’sFriendfortheMoney!Ron, GloryHound!Ron, Vindictive!Ron, and even DeathEater!Ron. I’ve seen fic that makes sure Draco gets to Harry first and somehow avoids putting his foot in his mouth, making Draco Harry’s BFF and either writing Ron out of the story—forcing him to remain a nobody, with the typist often going out of his/her way to make Ron as pathetic as possible—or doing a role-reversal between Ron and Draco—making Draco the loyal best friend and Ron the prejudiced bully… only more so. Apparently the goal is to make Slytherin!Harry sympathetic and to turn the reader’s sympathies against Gryffindor in general—and since the Weasleys are seen as in many ways embodying the Gryffindor character… This would be fine by itself, if they didn’t insist on being so ham-handed about it.

It’s insane. No matter how you slice it, it’s insane. I’ve seen fic that goes out of its way to turn the Malfoys into model parents (though to be fair, at least they love Draco, though they spoiled him rotten) and even further to turn the Weasleys into… well, let’s not go there. (More on the Harry-would-have-been-better-off-in-Slytherin cliché in another post).

JKR likes Ron. She likes Harry and Hermione, too, and there are bits of her in all of them. Ron has her hatred of spiders and her sense of humor—and she’s said he’s closely modeled after an old friend of hers. She was a swot as a kid—and head girl at her school—like Hermione, and she shares a birthday with Harry (and boy, is he ever a Leo), as well as a lot of his personality.


But the main charge even the relatively sane Ron-haters levy against him is that he’s “jealous.” Fanits’ indictment of Ron starts with the alleged jealousy and goes from there.

It’s pretty much fanon that Ron is jealous of Harry—practically canon to a lot of fans. It’s never expanded on, never sufficiently explained, but somehow accepted nonetheless. Even some authors I like seem to think he’s at least prone to jealousy.

And usually his jealousy motivates him to… well, it varies. Again, I’ve seen Ron’s alleged jealousy lead him to do everything from turn against Harry at the first opportunity to TAKING THE FRIGGING DARK MARK despite his family being notorious blood-traitors to the point where just marrying one got you blasted off the Black family tapestry (as happened to Cedrella Black for marrying Septimus Weasley). Hell, the pureblood fanatics in general seem to find the Weasleys beneath their contempt.

Ron joining the Death Eaters? Out of, what, spite? What a load of crap—especially considering that what we know in canon doesn’t add up to that.

Ron is the second wizard that Harry really connected with (after Hagrid), and the first kid Harry’s age. Even more importantly, Ron was the first person to see Harry as Harry, not some famous kid (like Hermione, who knew him only from her books) or as Lily and James’ son (like Hagrid, who remembered the Potters fondly). Sure, Ron had a few moments of “Holy crap, you’re Harry Potter”, and requested to see Harry’s scar, but no more than that. It was over and done with very quickly.

Ron’s loyal to a fault (there are definitely Hufflepuff tendencies in the Weasley brood, and I’m not just saying that because I’m decidedly Hufflepuffish myself), and is if nothing else willing to abandon even long-held beliefs when new information proves them to be mistaken. For example, he ditched his more illogical beliefs about Parseltongue when it turns out Harry has the gift, beliefs about werewolves after getting to know Remus—despite the fact that, by all appearances, werewolves are pretty much the boogeymen of the wizarding world (understandable, considering Fenrir Greyback)—and beliefs about giants after finding out about Hagrid’s lineage, then meeting Grawp. And those are just a few examples! Stupid people don’t do that, folks—again, he is able to adjust his own thinking quite a bit. And he’s willing to admit when he’s wrong. He’s become far more serious and learned to prioritize.

In short, over the course of seven books, he’s grown up. Some people never manage that.

Yes, Ron seems immature in comparison to Harry and Hermione, but Hermione and Harry are arguably socially stunted. Ron, by all accounts, had a loving—if somewhat chaotic—childhood, and was able to grow up at his own pace. His childhood was downright idyllic—even considering Fred and George—compared to Harry’s. Harry was abused and neglected—abused kids almost have to grow up in a hurry. Hermione… well, she only acts mature. But I’ll get to her later.

Again, Ron is arguably the most “normal” character in the books. And that’s probably a big part of why he’s hated so much.


So why is the whole Ron-is-jealous indictment so commonly accepted by the fandom?

The way I see it, it’s simple: Because Hermione says so.

For a large portion of even the mainstream fandom, it’s accepted that Hermione is at least almost always right (and she’ll tell you so, too). She functions as JKR’s in-universe voice on more than one occasion (though, to be fair, so do numerous other characters).

But think about it. Though she has some insight from time to time, she’s not exactly the authority on other people’s emotions and/or motivations. This is particularly true when it comes to the male of the species. In short, she has no room to talk about Ron—or anyone—having the emotional depth of a teaspoon. And she can’t be diplomatic to save her life—she’s frankly about as subtle as nuclear carpet bombing. Harry has learned to read people—and so has Ron, to a certain extent—but Hermione, more often than not, is left completely stymied when people do things she doesn’t expect. Granted, for Harry and Ron it’s a survival mechanism (Harry had to learn to read moods to avoid his relatives’ mood swings, and Ron just to get along in his family).

I’ll admit this is mostly conjecture, but Hermione’s actions and personality scream “only child,” especially in the early books, almost as much as Draco’s do. (You could make the argument that there are a lot of similarities there, but that’s for another post.)

Hermione was originally supposed to have a younger sister, according to JKR, but she eventually decided against it. She says it’s because introducing a previously-unmentioned family member that late wouldn’t have made sense, but I tend to think that JKR realized she’d pretty much written Hermione as an only child.

It’s clear that even before Hogwarts, Hermione was not terribly close to her parents—she hardly talks about them, and hardly spends any time with them in canon outside of the summer holidays, and even then she doesn’t seem to enjoy it. She seems the type who learned how to be perceived as mature early in life—or at least sound adult. Thus, her parents figured she could take care of herself—maybe she was unplanned, maybe they’re career-oriented people, maybe they weren’t sure how to deal with her, who really knows? I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t the latter, at least after she started Hogwarts—even she admits that she can’t really talk about her school life with them. By all indications they’re quite good to her—I seriously doubt that Hermione’s reluctance to discuss her parents stems from trouble at home—but by all indications they’re not really close. She cares enough about them to want to keep them out of harm’s way, but it seems like that’s all.

It’s also likely that Hermione was bullied quite a bit in primary school. She was probably a swot and a know-it-all there, too. Heck, she may even have a mild case of undiagnosed Asperger syndrome (it would definitely explain a lot, like her social awkwardness, her easy retention of facts, her... idiosyncrasies). But kids can be cruel like nobody’s business even under the best circumstances, and so it’s quite possible that Hermione just had difficulties with other kids. It’s likely that, as a result of this, her parents got used to assuring her that it was just jealousy on the other kids’ parts. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself—a lot of parents do that. Even mine did, despite the fact that it (probably) wasn’t true.

The problem is that when the bullying continued, Hermione never got an alternate explanation—never even considered that it might have something to do with her personality rather than the other kids’—and so she never sought one. That’s canon. That’s the way she is—once she finds a way of thinking that makes sense to her, she sticks to it, and usually has to be dragged away from it, kicking and screaming. I’ve met people like that. Dated a person like that. Ron is speaking the truth in PS when he calls her a nightmare—the movies don’t capture what an irritating, obnoxious know-it-all she is before the troll. Nearly getting your head bashed in can force you to rethink your priorities—if only a little.

So by the time we meet her in PS, Hermione seems to have internalized the belief that any negative reaction to achievement stems from jealousy. This is not a good way to think, obviously—bullying is one thing; legitimate criticism is something else entirely, and determining which is which is sometimes hard work. The way I figure it, if Hermione had never run into Harry and Ron, whether or not she ended up in Gryffindor, she might have gotten accustomed to dismissing any criticism of her actions and achievements as jealousy and thus ceased to even consider other people’s criticism as valid (in short, she would have become the Mudheart!Hermione pstibbons drools over). As I’ve said before, she was well on her way to becoming somewhere between Percy and Umbridge before Harry and Ron convinced her (bit by bit) to get her priorities in line.

It’s almost ingrained, really. She dismisses Fred and George’s reaction to Ron being named prefect as jealousy, too—to try and reassure Ron. But despite the beliefs of a large portion of the fandom, Ron is no dummy, and he knows his siblings about as well as one human being can know another. He knows that there’s no jealousy in the twins’ reaction—and so do we, since even a cursory examination of the twins’ behavior towards authority figures indicates that they’re not all that interested in becoming authority figures themselves. Maybe it bugs them that their mother seems to think that four out of six boys becoming prefects is “everyone in the family”—I, for one, can’t blame them—but I doubt there’s any jealousy involved. Molly’s blatant favoritism toward Percy—the one who practically worships authority—clearly bugs the hell out of them (and I can’t help thinking that if Molly hadn’t been so insistent on pushing Percy as a role model, they might not have rebelled so much), but I doubt they’re jealous of Ron. They had no desire whatsoever to be prefects themselves—Ron even points out their opinion that “only prats are prefects”—and one can’t help thinking their general impression of the office was spoiled by Mum’s Favorite, Perfect Percy rubbing their noses in it. And Percy became Head Boy the year they would have become Prefects. Can you seriously imagine either of them—since apparently the school appoints one male and one female prefect from each house—wanting to take orders from him?

But I digress.

If I remember correctly, Hermione also seemed to dismiss criticism of Lockhart as jealousy, refusing to take any of it seriously until the end—though it probably didn’t help that she clearly had an adolescent crush on him, also demonstrating her tendency to trust a little too much in the written word. It’s practically a stock explanation for her.


So when Ron gets upset at Harry in GF, and Hermione dismisses Ron’s attitude as jealousy… well, not to put too fine a point on it, my bullshit sensors start to go off.

First off, we’ve seen how Ron reacts when he’s jealous—in the same book, no less! Witness his reactions to finding out that Krum asked Hermione to the Yule Ball.

Ron goes from admiring and even idolizing Krum—who is, after all, a world-class Quidditch player who managed to make a professional team while still attending school, who Ron had seen in action at the World Cup—to absolutely hating him. Loathing him. He had a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease on the subject—he wouldn’t shut up about it. He kept pestering Hermione about who invited her to the ball, and during the ball it was one cheap shot after another. He pushed Hermione’s buttons, insulted her (and to be fair, she seems to have been doing the same to him), escalating the conflict until Hermione finally stormed off—which was exactly what Ron wanted. Ron and Hermione later ended up screaming at each other, and the Krum doll got blasted to bits. Hermione went off to bed in a huff.

That’s how Ron acts when he’s jealous, folks. And Hermione seems to know it, too—she continues to mention Viktor over the course of the next two books, trying to goad Ron into saying why her keeping in touch with Viktor bothers him so much—in short, to finally admit he has feelings for her. Hermione’s tendency to withhold information is apparently working in concert with her inability to understand other people and her insistence on expecting things from people rather than asking.

But I digress again.

The Yule Brawl is the first time in the entire series we see Ron act with jealousy. He acts similarly when Hermione gets invited to the Slug Club and he doesn’t—it looks like he’s going to start on a rant until Hermione admits she was considering inviting him.

And if Ron were the jealous sort he’s portrayed as in way too many fanfics, it probably would have come out a great deal sooner.


When Harry—and, through him, the reader—meets Ron for the first time, he’s already met most of Ron’s immediate family. Heck, Molly helped him onto the platform, and the twins even helped him get his trunk onto the train and into a compartment before they realized who he was.

In this context, we can get a better picture of Ron Weasley as a person. To get the full picture of Ron’s personality, as well as the dynamic between him and those around him, we have to consider Ron’s background.

When we meet Ron in PS, he’s spent pretty much his whole life being outshone by his brothers. You could even argue that Ron’s USED to being outshone by the time he runs into Harry on the Express:


Harry notices that Ron looks gloomy as he says this. This seems to happen whenever Harry shows interest in talking about Ron’s family—Ron’s probably used to hearing about how great everyone else in his family is, and sick of it, so this comes as little surprise.

Ron doesn’t seem to have any hope of living up to these expectations, and his behavior once he gets to Hogwarts confirms it. Not only are the Weasleys generally loyal to a fault (a trait Ron shows in spades), there’s a definite vein of ambition in that brood. Bill and Charlie ended up in rather prestigious jobs, and Percy (whose actions bring to mind Dumbledore’s words about how it takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to one’s friends) went pretty much right to the top in the Ministry. Fudge’s idiosyncrasies aside, Percy must have had an impressive résumé. Hell, even Fred and George have their own kind of ambition—which even Molly Weasley can’t steer them from, no matter how hard she tries.

Ron, however, is the apparent exception. He shows very little ambition—no going out of his way to be noticed; no even trying to earn top marks. Why should he? Someone in his family’s managed it before, right? Bill and Charlie were both prefects, Bill was Head Boy (Percy’s well on his way there), and Charlie is practically legendary as far as the Quidditch team goes (the team almost certainly won the Quidditch Cup more than a few times, if not the House Cup). Even the twins have become legendary in their own right, trying to live up to the legacy of their role-models, the Marauders. Ron’s pretty much accepted that he’s always going to be “so-and-so’s little brother.” Even Ginny stands out as being the youngest and the only Weasley girl in years—Ron can’t even be the baby of the family.

So when Ron looks into the Mirror of Erised, he sees himself as having achieved everything his brothers did. Think about it—becoming Head Boy won’t make him stand out from the crowd, but being Head Boy and Quidditch captain and winner of the House Cup and the Quidditch Cup? That should do the trick!
Seneca the Younger observed, “Mirrors were invented so that man might know himself.” JKR seems to agree. The Mirror of Erised is her way of showing, rather than telling, what’s going on inside these characters’ heads. One could argue that the boggart is similar—what someone is most afraid of can tell us a lot about them.

What one sees in the Mirror—nothing less than the deepest, most desperate desire of their heart—tells them a lot about themselves. Harry sees himself surrounded by his family. Ron sees himself no longer eclipsed by his.

Dumbledore observes that Ron “sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them.” Does that mean that Ron wanted to be Head Boy and Quidditch captain? Not necessarily. For starters, that kind of ambition would have been apparent from the first time we see him. (Hermione, on the other hand…)

Ron clearly didn’t expect to get picked as a prefect in OP, thinking Harry was the more likely choice—hell, everybody seemed to think that, considering Dumbledore’s apparent favoritism. Not to mention that Ron didn’t want Fred and George getting on his case. Ron just wanted to have his own personal type of greatness, and at the time he looked into the Mirror, being all those things was the only way he knew to achieve that. I think that Ron would see himself differently in the Mirror in later years—maybe standing beside Harry when Harry finally defeated Voldemort.

Some people might think that Ron’s desire to outshine his brothers is why he sticks with Harry. I don’t. When we meet Ron for the first time, he is—like Harry—a lonely boy looking for a friend. I get the impression that both of them have been lonely for a long time—Ron has no one in his family he can really bond with, and I get the impression that Molly Weasley didn’t let her children mingle with the other residents of Ottery St. Catchpole, wizard or Muggle.

Anyway, Ron and Harry hit it off right away. And Ron is not the fawning fanboy type, either. JKR goes out of her way to show us what such a person would act like in the person of Colin Creevey, who would happily become president of the Harry Potter Fan Club if such an organization existed, and who even snuck back into Hogwarts in DH just so he could fight beside Harry. You could argue that Colin is a counterpoint to Ron—one of many—set up so the reader can compare the loyal friend with the fawning fanboy and have a good picture of which is which. Hell, I’d argue that since Colin was introduced in CS, he might have been intended as a counterpoint to Ginny—compare her reactions to Harry with Colin’s. But that’s another essay.

And besides, as the narrator points out, Harry finds Ron as interesting as Ron finds him. There’s only a little talk about Harry’s fame and about Voldemort—it doesn’t dominate the conversation.

If anyone seems interested in latching on to Harry solely because of his fame, it’s Draco Malfoy—who is himself something of a counterpoint to Ron in his attitudes and reactions to Harry’s actions and good fortune. Draco only really notices Harry once he knows who Harry is, and spouts venom as easily as most of us breathe, even in front of the boy he supposedly wants to befriend. He insults the people Harry has already befriended right in front of them, and then has the gall to be surprised when Harry doesn’t react well.

Despite the Slytherfen ranting about how Ron supposedly started the feud with Draco by laughing at him—seriously, I’ve heard it from a couple, including the aforementioned fanfic author, who had Harry and Draco become BFFs and turned Ron worse than Draco ever was in canon—Draco seems to be rather insecure and trolling for a fight himself. And besides, though the Slytherfen may paint Ron as having burst out laughing at the sound of Draco’s name (he's eleven, folks!), Ron doesn’t do much more than cough, hiding a possible snigger. So Draco’s abuse comes pretty much out of nowhere. He goes out of his way to paint as unflattering a picture of the Weasleys as possible.

Draco probably had a very insular upbringing—he clearly takes it for granted that other people share his attitudes, and that they're lesser beings if they don’t. It’s clear that Draco’s overtures toward Harry are not sincere—remember, Lucius chides him at the beginning of CS for “appear[ing to be] anything less than fond of [Harry]”. But Lucius is a political animal who looked at Harry as either a possible asset or a possible threat.

My thought is that Draco decides to try to sway Harry by painting Ron—and Ron’s family—the way Draco and Lucius Malfoy see them, figuring this will be enough to sway Harry to his side.

But it doesn’t work—matter of fact, it backfires. Harry is a pretty good judge of character, and he figures Draco out at once.


But back to Ron. Did Ron resent Harry for getting the fame he’d supposedly always wanted?

Well, it’s one thing for your older brothers to be “famous”, like Ron’s were; it’s something else entirely if the famous person is your best friend. Ron sees his brothers as rivals, as the standard against which he is weighed, measured, and inevitably found wanting. But Harry isn’t his rival. Ron isn’t in Harry’s shadow; he is Harry’s shadow. If Harry sees Hermione as a sister, he might very well look at Ron as a brother.

And Ron shows every sign of being quite happy where he is. He is to Harry as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was to Robert E. Lee—Lee once called Jackson his “good right arm”, and I could almost see Harry referring to Ron as such. Harry does fine emotionally without Hermione, but he suffers without Ron. Hell, they both do—JKR almost certainly intended to show the fandom in DH that far from being better off without Ron—far too much of the fandom seems to think that without the Weasleys to hamper them, Harry and Hermione would have defeated Voldemort years ago—Harry and Hermione are worse off without him..

Ron never resents Harry for outdoing him. I personally get the impression that Ron EXPECTS Harry to outdo him—he never seems to suggest otherwise.


If Ron were the jealous git that the Ron-haters make him out to be, the books—especially the first three—would read very differently.

Ron is very frank with his emotions—he wears his heart on his sleeve almost as much as Harry does—you could argue it’s pretty much a Gryffindor trait. If Ron were the jealous sort, he wouldn’t have reacted anywhere near as well to Harry getting on the Quidditch team in PS—which he says “never“ happens to first-years—let alone getting a top-of-the-line racing broom. A broom from McGonagall, no less. And after Madam Hooch had said that anyone who went off on a broom while she took Neville to the hospital wing was likely to be expelled.


Note the reaction—”amazed” and “impressed”. If Ron were really the jealous sort, the combination of the spot on the team and the top-of-the-line broomstick would have been enough—more than enough—to end their friendship. Never mind that Harry completely avoids getting in trouble. At the very least, it would have triggered a lot of grumbling from Ron about how unfair it was—in short, Ron would have acted like Draco Malfoy.

We get Draco's reaction essentially right after Ron's, as if JKR wants us to compare the two. Draco crows about how Harry’s sure to be expelled, then reacts with anger when it turns out otherwise. Draco seems used to being the favored one—again, the insular upbringing; he is as much of an entitlement baby as many of his fangirls—so someone else being favored surely rankles. He even tries to get Harry expelled that very night!

And then when the broom comes…


Okay, Ron shows a bit of envy about the broom, but that’s understandable—remember, in Diagon Alley, a large number of boys had their noses pressed against the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies, gazing at it in wonder. And he's eleven.

Draco, meanwhile, acts like the spoiled brat he is. He immediately tries to get Harry in trouble, and lashes out when Ron points out Malfoy’s jealousy. But Ron is not jealous himself, despite Malfoy’s apparent belief that Ron should be. Draco gives us some insight into his mindset—in his mind, someone doing better than you is a rival, a threat. But Ron is happy for his friend. I have no doubt that Ron asked for a go on the Nimbus himself—Harry almost certainly would have let him.

If Ron ever was jealous, he got his reality check at the beginning of CS. Ron’s actions convinced me that there’s not a jealous bone in his body—Ron’s actions are those of a concerned friend. Harry never answers any attempts to contact him, and then there’s word of an official underage-magic warning at Harry’s house, despite Harry knowing that he’s not allowed to use magic outside school, so Ron apparently decides that there must be foul play at work. Twelve-year-old children are not prone to thinking ahead—witness the fact that Harry and Ron later decided that stealing the car would be a better idea than asking for help or waiting for Arthur and Molly to come back out (they were almost certainly looking for the boys)—and so it’s not surprising that Ron’s impulse is to rescue Harry and bring him home. Ron risks a whole lot of trouble to try and rescue Harry—probably why it wasn’t too difficult to convince the twins, who live for trouble, to help.

As far as we know, Harry has never discussed his relatives with Ron—or at least not at length—so it must have been a bit of a shock to have what amounts to first-hand proof that being the Boy Who Lived isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Ron was there when Harry had to be literally rescued from his relatives (far from wanting to be rid of Harry, I think it could be fairly well assumed that they got a kick out of tormenting him, and striking at everything they hated through him—we know that in GF, Vernon seems to be torn between his hatred of Harry and his desire to keep Harry as unhappy as possible before Harry brings his supposedly murderous godfather into the equation). I can kind of see Ron and the twins discussing Harry’s relatives before and after the rescue—they had to have seen the mattress on the floor of the cupboard under the stairs when they were retrieving Harry’s trunk. Harry must have left some evidence that that had been his room for almost ten years.

I can imagine Ron wondering if being famous was worth it if it meant you had to lose your family—Ron may complain about his family, but it’s obvious that he loves them and they love him. Wanting to be top dog in your pack is one thing; wanting to be the ONLY dog is quite another. Percy was perfectly willing to sacrifice family ties to his ambition—Ron, on the other hand, would sooner die than give up on his friends.

Ron definitely got a hint of what it meant to have the bad guys gunning for you in PA—first Sirius apparently tried to murder him in his bed (we know he was after “Scabbers”, but Ron didn’t at the time), then he dragged Ron down the tunnel under the Whomping Willow, apparently to lure Harry after them. And remember, folks, Ron stood up on a broken frigging leg to try and protect his friend. Does that seem like the actions of a jealous person? Of anything but a true friend?

Not to mention Ron’s reaction to the Firebolt—this is an international standard broom, and Ron reacts with happiness for Harry. He also crows about how jealous Draco Malfoy is bound to be:


Ron has grown up a bit—there’s no note of envy in his voice this time.

Does this seem like the reaction of someone prone to jealousy? Think about it—this is like an already very wealthy friend getting a brand-new Ferarri right off the assembly line out of nowhere …while you can’t afford more than a second-rate scooter.

And yet there’s not even an undertone of “boy, I wish someone would send me the best broom on the market” in Ron’s reaction. He’s perfectly happy just to have a go on the Firebolt—and to have a lesser broom for himself later on. That’s friendship, folks.