It’s hard to imagine the Harry Potter series without the presence of Ron Weasley throughout the whole seven books and eight movies. But it has come out today that J.K. Rowling thought about killing Ron halfway through the famous series of books.
It is hard to imagine a world where Ron Weasley is dead but apparently he was once on the chopping block. This news is shocking, of course, and has the whole internet buzzing.
For me, it feels like when J.K. Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay, which seemed, as this does, as a way to grab a little more of the spotlight. I am interested in the secrets behind the well loved stories, but I thought that was what Pottermore was for.
What do you think about the news that Ron nearly snuffed it? You can read more about this story at Yahoo Movies.
I’m happy she didn’t. I’ve always felt that Ron and Hermoine were just as important as Harry himself.
I would hardly call it shocking news– that’s certainly a way the story could have gone, and I worried several times throughout the series that it might happen myself. I also expected Ron to have more moral struggles and temptations over to the dark side, what with his jealousy issues and worries about money and such, which also never really panned out unless you count when he ran off in Deathly Hallows Note: I do not mean this as a slight to Ron! I LOVE Ron. I’m just saying that he could’ve had– and I expected him to have– more of his own personal struggles become more prominent in the storylines. So, yeah, no surprise.
Then again, I wasn’t surprised by the Dumbledore is Gay thing either. Upon hearing that, I’d actually thought, “Oh I knew that already,” and it took me a moment to realize that, um, I COULDN’T have known that already. Which is why I’m sure it WAS in the back of her mind the whole time she was writing the character (as opposed to something she made up after the fact as some people have suggested), and the character, like the rest of her characters, just came THAT MUCH TO LIFE for me that I had unconsciously suspected just like I might of someone I knew in real life…
As the storylines got darker and the body count rose, I was sure Ron would be among the casualties. I speculated on the fates of many characters with my friends, and Ron’s death just felt inevitable to me. Not that I wanted it to happen, of course. But part of me was so certain that one of the three would not make it, and in my gut it was Ron.
@rockinlibrarian, You DID know Dumbledore was gay, like I did, by reading about his intense relationship with Grindelwald after matriculating out of Hogwarts (they don’t really graduate, do they? They just kind of finish going). It was really obvious in all the Dumbldore/Grindelwald speculation in the book that they had a love relationship.
And, I don’t think Rowling’s explicit reveal of it at a lecture in NYC was for shock value, either. Someone asked about Dumbledore’s love life and she elaborated. I doubt she was plotting the reveal of that *salacious tidbit* to increase exposure of her novels. It added so much depth to his character and, of course, makes so much sense.
Right, yeah, I couldn’t remember whether that announcement happened before or after Deathly Hallows came out. There was definitely a lot more to the Dumbledore/Grindelwald relationship then “good friends who went their separate ways” for sure!
Authors always have a lot of backstory and alternate plot ideas and things that don’t make it into the final book, and with most authors– at least the ones who have an online presence or do a lot of speaking about their work– they’ll share that information and it’s just an interesting discussion about their writing process. But when J.K. Rowling shares these things, suddenly it’s a MEDIA EVENT just because it’s J. K. Rowling. It’s not attention-seeking on her part, because other authors do it all the time and no one cares. It’s not her fault, it’s the hyperactive overblowing of everything that has to do with her or her work by fandom/the media.