Slytherin Ginny - Tumblr Posts

So in the Changeling you describe how Ginny keeps the DA safe in her sixth year as part of her role as the Slytherin leader. In canon, however, Ginny is a Gryffindor like Neville and there are in fact no Slytherin leaders to advise caution. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how that changed the situation.

I don’t really, honestly. I made a decision with the Changeling to keep everything basically the same in terms of general events and deaths and outcomes. I wanted to show that it actually makes sense that Slytherin must have been part of the DA, that they would have been vital. And to show that canon wouldn’t have to fundamentally change to encorporate school unity. I wanted to give alternate explanations for how things could have ended up that way. Like the fact that it’s Ginny’s legiliemncy that keeps Neville from being killed. That it’s Hannah’s loyalty that keeps the room of requirement safe. That it’s Luna and Terry’s creativity that drives the DA’s successful rebellion. We knew the role Gryffindor leadership and drive and bravery of would play from the text. But the others are missing. I suppose I’m questioning the viability of the outcomes with a DA that wasn’t unified when it comes down to it.

i was really surprised that ginny and smita’s friendship faded bc i’m so used to characters becoming best/forever friends with the first person they become attached to. why did you decide to have smita exit ginny’s life? and do you think tobias and ginny would still have the same friendship they do now if smita was still friends with them?

I think that was the reason why? In fic things are always so ‘forever’ in ways that are not always true in real life. Considering we have Harry, Ron, and Hermione who have a rough start but are then besties for life, I wanted to show that not all friendships go that way. It’s actually much more common to have people in our lives who are so important for a period of time, but then not anymore. Whether that is moving away, growing apart, having a nasty fall out, or what, it does happen. And it’s natural and doesn’t have to be dramatic, and you can still love people deeply and have them just have a different place in your life than they used to.

I think Tobias and Ginny would have still been friends, but it would have been different. They went through the gauntlet together, so to speak. But with Smita still in the picture, I don’t think Tobias would have pulled the double agent thing. And he wouldn’t have been forced to open up to Ginny in ways he normally wouldn’t have. And the same goes for Ginny.

Hello! I’m rereading The Changeling and I can’t remember for the life of me what Ginny meant by ‘more like power is the weakling’s ambition’, Antonia’s pride and her own conclusions after that. Could you elaborate please?

She forces herself to tune back in to what Antonia is saying about a letter she just received from her parents. Apparently some wizards came by their bookshop to get her family to pay a “protection fee” in these unsettled times. Common enough in Diagon and Knockturn Alleys these days apparently.

Antonia scoffs. “They didn’t count on my Auntie Victoria.”

Ginny huffs. “Probably were just hoping your family would be too scared to do anything,” she says scathingly.

“Fear is the weakling’s power,” Antonia says, sash drawn dramatically across her chest.

“More like power is the weakling’s ambition,” she counters.

Antonia looks at her in surprise, delicately penciled eyebrow crawling up under her fringe.

“What?” Ginny demands, shifting uncomfortably under her gaze.

Antonia smiles then, a dazzling spread of red lips over perfectly white teeth. “So you’re learning at last.”

Ginny scowls at her, not liking to be spoken to as if an unruly child, even as she knows Antonia has a valid point. Ginny hadn’t understood when she first met Antonia, mistaking ambition for maliciousness, unconventional thought for something as simple as evil. There is no easy corollary to be found between ordinary –normal?—and good. An entire world of nuance and subtlety and extraordinary exists in the spaces between.

She can see that. She just wishes other people could too.

I assume this scene from chapter five is what you are referencing.

Ah, the great foible of Slytherin. Assuming that to be ambitious means to lusting after power. Ginny is at once acknowledging that ambition is much more complex than merely wanting to have power over other people, and also beginning to see how that thirst for power more than anything else is perhaps a sign, ultimately, of weakness. The weak hoping to not be weak, but also a weakness of ambition to see so narrowly.

Remember, this conversation around power started in the previous year in the context of Umbridge and her actions, as ultimately being about trying to have power over all decisions, over Dumbledore and his supposed 'army', and over the whole school--and what that mean and how it landed on the students in really disturbing ways. And in the scene you are talking about above, it's in the context of Harry and his narrow of view of Slytherin and her, and her anger over it. They've just had their big fight over Draco Malfoy that is really more about Ginny thinking Harry isn't capable of seeing nuance when it comes to Slytherin. That maybe all he can see is that they are all after power and therefore are all evil. That there is no difference between ambition and evil. When she knows very well that there is far more grey than that, that the grey is the entire point. Ginny, at this point, does not crave power over people. She never really does. When she does wield power over people, it is merely as a tool, not an end in and of itself. Controlling people itself is never the point. Her ambition is ultimately about being true to herself, to the knowing and accepting of her own strengths and weaknesses both. She just wishes she could be seen for them by others (Harry) too.

Craving power as an end in and of itself is both a weakness in understanding and in a weakness in ambition. True ambition would reach far beyond it.

If you have time, I'd love more insight into Harry's thought process related to these lines in "pick it up": "Is that as bad as it looks? he wants to ask. Only the truth is, a large part of him just doesn’t want to know." "He hasn’t really thought about what she meant by everything. Hasn’t particularly wanted to." Do you think his not wanting to know was related to what was going on at that point in time or that it's more on an ongoing thing?

One of the things that has been interesting to play with in the ArmisticeSeries is the ways people approach and react to trauma–both their own and thatof the people around them. Harry and Ginny in particular make a really starkpoint of contrast when it comes to this.

First, when it comes to trauma that they themselves have experienced, theypretty much have the exact opposite reaction. Take, for example, Harry at theForbidden Forest. Just weeks after having to walk into that forest and faceVoldemort, after dying and having one of the most traumatic experiences of hislife, what does he do? He volunteers to help Hagrid go back in there andpossibly track down a giant.

On the edge of the Forest, Harry feels a trickle of coldsweat work its way down his neck, and has to wonder if partly he just wanted toprove that he could. 

–pick it up, chapter 5

That very same chapter, Ginny is faced with going back into the castle whereshe suffered an entire year of trauma, all capped off by losing a brother andfriends and watching people die and nearly dying herself. She tries, but shejust can’t.

“Keep going,” she whispers to herself, thinking of her family in there. Thepeople who need her. Need her to be stronger than this. But, Merlin, there isalso this sharp, hot panic swelling in her chest, the feeling that the stonesthemselves are closing on her and she knows she can’t do it.

She can’t walk in there.

–pick it up, chapter 5

Harry reacts to his personal trauma by almost immediately throwing himselfback into those places and situations, almost as if to prove to himself thathe’s not scared, that he is still brave. Think about the Boggarts, how horriblythey affected him. But his first reaction was to get training to be able todefeat them or hold them off and not let them affect him anymore. This is a guywho runs towards danger. Ginny, on the other hand, is more likely to avoid thethings that have traumatized her. She takes space and time and has to processeverything before she can possibly face the castle again, and even then, ittakes her months to reconcile with it—or just find a way to cope.

Even their job choices in Armistice reflects this. Harry decides on theDepartment of Mysteries—a place that is home to arguably some of his mosttraumatic experiences—fighting Death Eaters, nearly getting his friends killed,and watching Sirius dying.

Down on the ninth floor, Harry steps out into the dark hall. He eyes thestairwell that he knows from far too much personal experience leads down to thedungeon courtrooms used by the Wizengamot.

But he isn’t going to think about that today.

Unfortunately the long dark hallway ahead of him holds more troublingmemories. His throat is thick with it for a moment, that frantic night runningdown the hallways, rushing off to save Sirius, wondering if he’s managed todamn his friends with his stupid mistake. Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and the otherswith Death Eater wands at their throats.

It’s possible this was a really terrible idea.

–in my head we do everythingright, chapter 5

Yet, Harry still does it. And part of that is proving that he can. He’s bigger than his traumas. (And,yes, the discussion of healthy processing of trauma is an entirely differentcan of worms.)

Ginny, despite having a highly developed set of skills that might set her upwith a lot of varying careers where she could make real impact, chooses insteadto distance herself from those things she associated with her personal trauma.She chooses Quidditch. Specifically because it’s safe.

Ginny catches her fingers, squeezing tight. “It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s allbehind me now. It’s over.” The DA, the things she learned and did. It’s alldone. Over. And she doesn’t have to find some way to use all that.

She can just be safe.

–in my head we do everything right, chapter 5

Now what is interesting is the flip side of this, how the two of them dealwith the trauma of others around them. The books spend a lot of time on thefact that in many ways love is Harry’s greatest strength, both the love peoplehave felt for him (Lily) and the general goodness and protectiveness he feelsfor people around him, what a good heart he has. Not to mention his willingnessto sacrifice himself for others—which Dumbledore might call an act of love,just like Lily’s. What is interesting though, is that Harry is not anempathetic person. That is not to say that he doesn’t care about people. He iswilling to throw down for them without hesitation. But he has a hard timeconnecting with people, particularly on a deep, emotional level. With hisbackground and experiences, that’s really not all that surprising. Emotionalliteracy is a real thing, y’all, and you have to learn it. Most people get thatby experiencing the empathy of people around them, but Harry had no role modelfor this. Not really. So he’s not great at empathy. Other people’s strongemotions can make him feel really uncomfortable as we see over and over againin the books, and not just his inability to understand Cho. He hates emotional conflict. (And I willargue until I am blue in the face that this is not simply ‘boys don’t doemotional empathy.’ Bullshit. It in no way has to be like that, and I willargue that RON of all of them, is the most empathetic and he develops this overthe course of the books so very clearly. So miss me with that girls are just inherently more empathetic thing.)

So in the context of that, we see the quotes you have from Harry’s internalthoughts in pick it up. Which come up again in later chapters.

Ron leans into Harry, voice low as their friends once again start laughingand talking. “Do you ever feel like we’re missing something? When they get totalking about that year?”

“Yeah,” Harry says. But maybe, he considers, noticing the way Dean iswatching Seamus, they’re better off not knowing.

–in my head we do everythingright, chapter 6

Harry shies away from hearing about other people’s trauma. Part of this ishis struggle to deal with other people’s emotions and personal traumas,especially when he is already so heavily burdened with his own like in pick it up. But also, I have to thinkthe experience of reading Skeeter’s book about Dumbledore has really impactedhim. Having everything he thought he knew about Dumbledore undermined andchallenged really threw him for a huge loop, and even though he reconciled withit in the end, I think part of him still thinks he would have been better offnever knowing any of that. (He struggles with moral ambiguity, as we haveseen.)

Now, compare that to Ginny. She is in a very different place, not justbecause she is more empathetic but because being empathetic becomes her armor.It becomes the one thing that keeps her from feeling like a monster. When sheis training as a Legilimens, Snape over and over again encourages her to remove empathy from the equation. Shefeels herself slipping towards very dangerous places when she does that, andgets pulled back by people like Hannah who reminds her that she needs people, she needs to care. So Ginny finally perseveres by humanizing the verypeople Snape declares she needs to objectify. It’s horribly painful for her,and I think she probably doesn’t see it as salvation as much as the painfulpunishment she deserves for wielding this skill, the cost of the thing. As muchas Ginny runs from her own trauma, she is continually opening herself to theexperiences and feelings of others—both through the things she takes frompeople through Legilimens and the emotional labor she does as a leader invarious spaces.

Ginny moves furtherinto the room, moving from person to person, hearing about their experiences,their losses. Collects them all up and stitches them together like a cloakshe’ll never really be able to take off.

–The Changeling, chapter 10

She does this because she cares, but also because, in many ways, she feelslike it’s her job to carry it all. She’s being necessary. And without it, she might wonder just how much humanity she has left.

So I read your thoughts on whether Harry and Ginny argue or not, and I was wondering what you meant by it would be different whether Ginny was in Slytherin?

I think the main difference with Slytherin Ginny is that her fuse is quite a bit longer. She’s mastered her temper, more or less. (The less being when she’s around Harry. He tends to shorten her temper more than anyone else, which is not just a sign of how he affects her, but also a sign of her trust and comfort around him, that she feels she can indulge that weakness around him.) Slytherin Ginny is also a bit more self-reflective, meaning she often needs time post-fight to process, which is not that great for Harry, because it gives him time to fume and stew and, worse, catastrophize. It’s an early hurdle in their relationship, one which gets better the longer they are together, Ginny both adapting to Harry’s need for quicker resolution, and Harry developing more and more faith in their relationship, in understanding that just because they’ve had a fight doesn’t mean everything is over. I think those are the main differences. Otherwise the dynamic is the same.

a writer from another fandom (shoutout to entirelytookeen) was talking about sorting characters and said, "[Gryffindor] will do the right thing even if it kills her, [Slytherin] will do the right thing even if it kills everyone else." what do you think of that take on the Gryffindor/Slytherin divide?

That is very interesting. I’ve been thinking about it ever since you sent this. I mean, if we look at Harry, yes. Definitely. This fits. And if we look at, say, Voldemort. Or even Draco. Sure. Yes. (Although we need to be careful with what is the ‘right thing’ here. According to who? I might say ‘do what is important’)

It can be argued that Harry represents in many ways the best of Gryffindor house, while Voldemort (and possibly Draco) represent the worst of Slytherin house. So it isn’t quite a fair comparison. After all, there are canonical Slytherin who sacrificed themselves, or were willing to put their own lives in danger. (Regulus, Snape, Slughorn, for example.) Alternatively, Gryffindor’s reckless nature can cause harm to others when they are at their worst. It may not be their intention, bit it is often the outcome.

So maybe I would revise and say: Gryffindor tend more towards sacrifice, and Slytherin tend more towards preservation. Gryffindor focus on ‘how might my sacrifice be good for others, how do my actions make things good right now’ while Slytherin might focus on ‘what can be done so no sacrifice is needed, and what parameters do I use to decide what sacrifice will be needed.’ At their worst, this can mean throwing everyone but themselves in front of the curse, at their best, this can mean keeping anyone from getting hit by the curse. Just like at their best, Gryffindor’s sacrifice impulse can save lives at the cost of only their own, but at their worst, even more lives are damaged because of their impulsive, short-sighted sacrifice and lack of understanding of the full implications beyond their own heroics.

Or, even that Gryffindor focus on saving everyone, and Slytherin focus on saving what’s important. Which might even be a matter of idealism versus pragmatism. Which may come back to your friend’s very well-stated point: if it came down to it, a Slytherin would be able to sacrifice others if it was necessary, whereas a Gryffindor might not. Which is rather exactly the kind of role I had Ginny play in The Changeling during that last year with the DA. She made the tough decisions she knew her Gryffindor (and Hufflepuff) counterpart may not have been able to make. She understood that there are far more kinds of sacrifice than your own life. That living with it can be even harder than dying for it.