Common Pairings

I think that nearly all writers fall into one of a very few categories when dealing with pairings, especially when pairingHarry and Hermione with nearly anyone.

The Torture Writers

There are the “Lets see what sort of twisted torture we can put him/her through” group out there. They come up with bizarre situations and pairings mostly just because they want to see the characters suffer.

Harry/Hermione Paired

There are a ton of people who really wanted Harry to end up with Hermione. Some of these are simply lazy; Hermione is the only female with true character development in the series. Some of these identify with her, and so the pairing is essentially wish fulfilment. I have more sympathy with the latter than the former philosophically, but since I do not share the desire, little desire to read these stories unless exceptionally well done. Occasionally one of these is really good at exploring something interesting, more usually I find it distorts Harry’s character too much.

Slash Pairings

There are people who write Harry/Draco or similar stories. Some of these are reacting to Mrs. Rowling’s unpopular opinions. Some of these are doing the [wish fulfilment] thing — they have these types of attraction, and so need Harry to have them also. Some of them are doing the “lets torture the characters” thing, and really belong in the first category.

No matter which is happening, frequently my thoughts parallel those of Jeconais, a well known fan fiction author known for his fluffy stories in which Harry enters a relationship with a girl and in doing so finds the confidence to become Super Harry. While he wrote about Harry/Draco pairings, I find the same is true of many of these improbable “slash” stories.

If he didn’t have Ginny, if by some quirk of nature, he didn’t like girls, if he lived in a world where water flowed uphill and he was actually gay, there was still no way at all that he could ever be anything other than polite to the ferret.¹

A number of authors will pair Sirius with Remus. For most of these, I believe it is a way to make a statement of disagreement with Mrs. Rowling’s unpopular opinions without drastically changing central characters. The exception is where it becomes a focus of the story and we start to see lots of scenes about their relationship. Then I think it is a case of the author exploring his own situation but trying not to stomp all over Harry as a recognisable character.

Older Women, Harems and Marriage Contracts

Most of the writers that pair Harry with Fleur, or Nymphadora are essentially the same as the ones that write harem stories. I tend to avoid these. While a 3 year age gap is negligible in your late 20s, it is a wide chasm between teens. Harry may have needed to grow up fast in some ways, but he is not ever really going to be ready for a relationship with a much older woman while still a young student.

An exception to this generalization can occasionally be the time travel story. There Harry really is mentally older. I personally find the stories that explore a different take more compelling. The other possibility is that even with greater life experience, the eleven or twelve year old body, with a great deal of physical maturation still pending, would effectively “de-age” the time traveller. They would find themselves remembering emotions and desires that they can’t really appreciate any more. Experiencing impulse control, temper, and patience issues they thought they had conquered years ago. It would confuse the time traveller. The confusion would help him or her reconnect to his or her peers as they share growing up (in one case again) together.

Harem stories vary in sophistication from pure smut to something that can be surprisingly worth reading. Except where the harem is intentionally used as a vehicle to explore the negative effects of magic on characters (I have seen this at least twice), there is generally an underlying immaturity. Even where both smut and immaturity are avoided, they are setting Harry up for a situation that is fundamentally unrealistic because they are not really dealing with real girls. Perhaps the author is doing that because these are fictional characters, and so this is a safe outlet for something the author knows full well is not real. Perhaps it is because the author is actually immature. Occasionally, as I said, it is because Mrs. Rowling has created a world in which it is implied that characters might in fact be forced into these situations. The story forms a sort of extended reductio ad absurdum, demonstrating that magic as described in the book(s) is flawed. Sometimes as a reader you can tell, other times only the author could truly say which (sometimes there are several overlapping motivations).

As this site, taken as a whole (not any single page) demonstrates, the magic Mrs. Rowling gives us is flawed. Fan fiction provides an incredible platform for both exposing those flaws and exploring their implications. In book four, Harry is forcibly conscripted into a competition. The phrase “binding magical contract” is used.² How easy is it to do this? Could Harry use that same mechanism – forced contractual actions with dire penalties – to defeat Riddle? Fan fiction makes it possible to follow this down the rabbit hole and see what might be.³ But contracts aren’t just useful to the good guys, and if it is fun to explore ways that Harry might use them, the full magnitude of the issue, the fact that Harry is bound to a contract he did not agree to in book four, is not really felt in book four. We do not really appreciate it there partly because Harry embraces his role as champion to a certain extent, and partly because he is in fact able to (mostly) hold his own despite the disadvantage being several years younger should pose. To really expose why magical contracts are a really bad idea, we need a contract that the reader really dislikes. That, inevitably, is going to mean putting one or more of the good guys in a bad situation, probably an bad situation from which he, she, or they cannot be rescued.

Marriage contracts are almost guaranteed to have this visceral response. Even if the contract is between two people who we ultimately like and do not mind seeing married, the forced aspect of it is at best distasteful. It provides a fairly simple way to demonstrate why magical contracts ought to be difficult to create, require personal consent, and perhaps have other restrictions and/or limitations. Why there ought to be rules on magic that are mostly missing in the Harry Potter universe. A marriage contract fan fiction, however, is going to mean putting our characters in a situation that simply should not happen, and could not happen without this really poorly defined magic. It is going to create an unnatural relationship with unnatural parameters where our normal, natural reactions might spell death and disaster for the individuals bound by the contract. We will find ourselves in the kind of situation that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote about:

Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgement.⁴

The right call will be unclear. But that’s rather the point – we should not be in that situation, the true crime happened earlier, when the contract was formed.

The magical contract and the harem story are here in the same section for several reasons. One, because the writers motivations overlap so much, both on the positive side, and on the negative side. I’ve seen contract stories that are just as much an exercise in setting up preconditions for the author’s own immaturity as any harem story. I’ve also seen harem stories that are about the fact that no sane person wants to have one, but magic was poorly constrained in some way. Secondly, because frequently the two are in fact the same. The harem results from magical contracts, whether it is about these contracts or not. Thus most of what is here written about either can apply to both.