Canonalicious
So I was in the cab thinking about the powa of da canon to wipe out old prejudices. Namely, I was mulling over of all the times I'd seen Ron/Lavender in fanfic, and how I always turned up my nose at the very idea of it. It seemed preposterous. It had no place in the arc of the story. What did we know about Lavender, anyway? Why would Ron ever
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That said, however: R/L didn't bother me at all (except of course that their obsessive spit-swapping did get to be a bit much after a while). My own scribbled comment on first reading was, "JKR really loves her fandom, doesn't she?" Indeed-- especially given the other apparent fandom references in the book-- the R/L scenes read to me like a bit of a fandom mockery (not unlike Grawp's references to "HERMY!" in OotP). It was as if she was saying: "Okay, you people want to see Ron and Lavender as a couple? Here, I'll show you what kind of a couple they'd be. Tasteful, aren't they?"
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part of what's going on there is the annoyance of seeing a stupid theory turn out to have some truth to it.
But that's the thing... it didn't annoy me. I would have expected it to! But instead it just enhanced my enjoyment of both his character journey and Hermione's, and, as redwood7 put it, it "made the UST even more unbearable." In canon, R/L affected me in exactly the opposite of the way it had always done to me in fanfic. It made me grin, man.
In the pre-HBP fanfic tradition, R/L had been mostly (as far as I know) a desperate attempt to dispose of an inconvient (tall red-haired) character, so as to make way for The Perfect Spiritual Love Of Harry And Hermione.
Yeah. That's what had always bothered me about it - the fact that R/L was arbitrary; a device to Be Rid of Ron. But it was woven into the actual story in such a way that it was not at all arbitrary, and rather than getting rid of Ron, it brought him running back to Hermione, a sadder but wiser man.
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