rynne | Weasley Is My King

Having spent about an hour several days ago making a Master List of Can't Stand and Debate Threads, and then looking at VENOM today, I have come to the conclusion that there are TOO MANY CAN'T STAND THREADS. There were four new ones today alone, and one of them has the audacity to be a Can't Stand Ron thread. Original poster talks about how Ron prefers fame and fortune over family and friends (What. The. Fuck?) and about how he's so jealous, and gaaahhhhh. When I first saw that, I wished like hell that it wasn't a Can't Stand thread so I could link her to Dicey's essay (posted by

narcissam here, for those of you who don't want to go searching HPfGU for it) and just generally go insane in defense of Ron. I don't understand how people can say that it's only because Ron is defended so often that there seems to be so much Ron-hate--he's the first of the Trio to get his own Can't Stand thread, and there's all these Ron hatelistings, and wah. I don't get it.

I love Ron. I adore Ron. I want to wave little "Weasley is my King" flags, ones with no sarcasm whatsoever. He's not my favorite character, but he's close, and the only reason I don't read fanfic about him is that no one can get him as perfect as JKR can, and he's prominent enough that I can always go back to the books for my Ron-fix, the way I can't with Remus and Sirius and James.

Every time someone describes Ron as average, I want to go ARGH NO RON IS EXTRAORDINARY! I mean, honestly. Ron is twelve years old, a first year, and he beats his seventy-year-old teacher's gigantic chess set. I assume that McGonagall is very good at chess, considering she makes it her defense for the PS/SS, and Ron, a twelve-year-old, beats it. And by sacrificing himself. He's been watching the white chessmen brutally hit the blacks practically the whole game long, and he knows what's coming if he does it, and he does it anyway, even though Harry and Hermione try to talk him out of it.

Obviously, yes, Ron is average with his schoolwork. But then, so is Harry, and when compared to Hermione (or Ernie MacMillan!), practically everyone is average, and you know, I can't really fault Ron for not being all that interested in much of his schoolwork (nope, no senioritis here. *whistles innocently*). Besides, it's not like being average in school equates to being average everywhere. Ron's average at school because he concentrates on other things, like, you know, his best friend who the most feared person in Britain (if not the world) is personally trying to kill. And making said best friend laugh, because Ron is quite good at that, and if anyone needs a laugh, it's Harry.

And of course, that famous line, "If you want to kill Harry, you'll have to kill us too!" That was what made me fall in love with Ron. There he is, trying to stand on a broken leg, facing the man who broke his leg in the first place and who is, to the best of his knowledge, a man able to kill thirteen people with a single curse and betray his best friend, his best friend's wife, and his godson to Voldemort without compunction, and he stands on his own feet, despite the pain he must be in due to his broken bone, and says that Sirius will have to go through him to get to Harry. My GOD. I like to think I would have been able to do the same, but I doubt it. Ron does it without thinking about it. That just amazes me.

Ron's just so human. He's passionate and loyal and eager and lazy and stubborn and has self-esteem issues and sometimes I can identify so clearly with him, and just oh my God I love him. He's not super-logical and books-smart the way Hermione is, and he doesn't have this scary destiny that Harry does, but how anyone can call him ordinary or average just because he's not what his friends are (and there's a reason for that, you know--it's the Trio, and each makes up what another lacks), but he's funny, and adorable (I've always found the belching slugs scene one of the cutest in the series, despite the slugs) and just...just...ineffably Ron, and I love him for it. There's a reason he's what Harry would miss the most, after all.

If I didn't have an eight am class tomorrow and a quiz in there that I have to study for, I'd go a lot more in-depth about how extraordinary Ron is and why I love him, but alas, there is class, and so maybe I will do it another time.