How can I possibly have a thought about Harry/Hermione at this late date?
The whole premise of Harry Potter, starting from book 1 chapter 1, is that most people are just Muggles, while some people are Wizards.
The tension in the series comes from its insistence that discrimination - arbitrary and cruel - against a wide range of groups is wrong, wrong, wrong. E.g. you should not indiscriminately murder Muggles, much less Muggleborns, and you should even (maybe) have a more egalitarian attitude toward other magical beings like goblins and house elves, even if their True Nature is to be greedy Jews or servile servants.
And yet, Book 1, Chapter 1: There are Muggles. And then there's Harry Potter. Who is as special as special can be, aka a very powerful, special, and chosen Wizard. And the egalitarian impulses of the vision are never actually realized, except in something like equality for Hermione the mudblood. Because the inherent superiority of some people over other people is the basic premise of the book.
So when some fans were savagely angry at Harry/Hermione shippers for thinking that some people were better than others - the exact hope/fear that haunts Ron in Book 7 -, they were kind of ignoring the fact that that was THE central premise of the book.
To step back into a more meta position, I think this was one of the biggest and most fundamental things that ever happened in HP fandom, and I'm not neutral about it, though I don't really have a stake in it either - that is, the trio was never the center for me, and I was more of a slash fan anyway. But I got H/Hr, and found the ship wars kind of poignant.
(Another note, re H/Hr - of course there's also the genre confusion that I among many others succumbed to, that expected a different sort of novel to be lodged in there than the one that was actually there. In fact, I'm still not sure I understand what genre HP's teenage romances belong to - how it makes Ron/Hermione central while keeping Ginny/Harry peripheral. Shouldn't it all be secular, by which I mean Platonic, at the center? I get an allegorical reading - Ron and Hermione represent warring opposites that must be reconciled for happiness - but I don't see what genre it belongs to, unless Ginny is made more central, as she would be in a more conventional teen ensemble piece.)
The tension in the series comes from its insistence that discrimination - arbitrary and cruel - against a wide range of groups is wrong, wrong, wrong. E.g. you should not indiscriminately murder Muggles, much less Muggleborns, and you should even (maybe) have a more egalitarian attitude toward other magical beings like goblins and house elves, even if their True Nature is to be greedy Jews or servile servants.
And yet, Book 1, Chapter 1: There are Muggles. And then there's Harry Potter. Who is as special as special can be, aka a very powerful, special, and chosen Wizard. And the egalitarian impulses of the vision are never actually realized, except in something like equality for Hermione the mudblood. Because the inherent superiority of some people over other people is the basic premise of the book.
So when some fans were savagely angry at Harry/Hermione shippers for thinking that some people were better than others - the exact hope/fear that haunts Ron in Book 7 -, they were kind of ignoring the fact that that was THE central premise of the book.
To step back into a more meta position, I think this was one of the biggest and most fundamental things that ever happened in HP fandom, and I'm not neutral about it, though I don't really have a stake in it either - that is, the trio was never the center for me, and I was more of a slash fan anyway. But I got H/Hr, and found the ship wars kind of poignant.
(Another note, re H/Hr - of course there's also the genre confusion that I among many others succumbed to, that expected a different sort of novel to be lodged in there than the one that was actually there. In fact, I'm still not sure I understand what genre HP's teenage romances belong to - how it makes Ron/Hermione central while keeping Ginny/Harry peripheral. Shouldn't it all be secular, by which I mean Platonic, at the center? I get an allegorical reading - Ron and Hermione represent warring opposites that must be reconciled for happiness - but I don't see what genre it belongs to, unless Ginny is made more central, as she would be in a more conventional teen ensemble piece.)