Dream Come True, A Ficlet

[terri_testing]

Summary: Being rescued by Harry Potter was Ginny’s secret fairy tale come true.

Comments

[stgulik]

I loved this. Never would have thought of it that way, but it really fits.

... fits...

[terri_testing]

Thanks for your comment! Yes, when I thought about it, it fit for me. Glad it worked for you too.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Excellent! Much deeper than the fandom perception of Ginny.

I think this was the last mention of Ginny being awkward around Harry, yet it is more than a year before the Yule Ball, which Ginny attended with Neville and where she met Michael Corner, her first known boyfriend.

When do you think did her conversation with Hermione about dating take place? How much did Hermione understand of Ginny's emotional state?

Ginny & Hermione

[terri_testing]

Well, how much did GINNY understand of Ginny's emotional state? In the years just after I was molested, I had a lot invested in being fine, just fine; it took until I was 21 or so to admit I was messed up about sex, and until I was 23 to enter therapy to try to do anything about it

[oryx_leucoryx]

So how much of this did Molly understand? Is this why your Molly decided to dose Ginny too? Thinking that if she felt unworthy of Harry she would end up with an even less promising boy? (What would Molly have thought of Neville?)

Molly's reasoning

[terri_testing]

More, I think, that if Potter were objectively the best match for Ginny, no sense leaving anything to chance.

I suspect that, in fact, most Pureblood marriages were still arranged by the families involved, not the principals. Separation occurred a LONG time ago, and this idea that marriage is the union of two people in lurve with each other is a VERY modern idea, comparatively speaking.

And if Molly, who eloped, had been, at the time, frustrated by the results of her own headstrong love-match, she might think she was doing Ginny and Ronny a favor by ensuring their choice should land on someone pre-selected by older and wiser heads.

As to Neville--at that point in canon, he was the Longbottom's near-Squib disgrace.

[jana_ch]

Ginny’s apparent lack of trauma over being psychically violated by a psychopathic sixteen-year-old is one of the many mysteries of Ginny’s wildly inconsistent character.

I definitely see the transformation into “new Ginny” as deliberate. “Natural Ginny” was quiet and shy. Her defiance of her family over learning to play Quidditch was done in secret, whereas “spunky Ginny” would have acted boldly and openly. (Perhaps, like Percy, Ginny was not a natural Gryffindor, and had to persuade the Hat to put her into the House of Jocks as a legacy.) But acting according to her natural inclination was not getting Ginny what she wanted, so starting in her fourth year she intentionally modeled her behavior on the twins, without the (marginally) mitigating factor of their sense of humor.

And it worked. She became one of the “popular girls” (like Lily), and eventually snagged her prince.

[vermouth1991]

There's this lovely, lovely dark!fic about Ginny's diary entries told in 1st person, but I can't for the love of God remember the link anymore. (I'm pretty sure it's not on fanfiction dot net) It evolves upto the point where Ginny sensed the diary was evil and can't let go, and diary!Tom acts like a chillingly accurate abusive boyfriend. Does it ring a bell to anyone here? Because that and this fic of terri's make great companions of one another.

ETA

Found it, Ha! It's called "The Very Secret Diary", and is available on archiveofourown dot org.

thanks

[terri_testing]

Thanks for the rec!

[mksolomon]

It all makes sense... Whatever canon says of Ginny's real experience is between the lines, but her close encounter with Tom had to be traumatic. I also like what marionros says--that maybe New Ginny was a sort of over-compensation for guilt and shame.

Thanks for this!

Over-compensation, yes

[terri_testing]

there's a sci-fi novel my sister gave me, by Elizabeth Moon, in which a brilliant (but insecure) young woman warrior goes into therapy and realizes that her obsessive perfectionism and, indeed, her being a warrior (from a culture in which that's a masculine profession) grew out of her compensation for a childhood rape. Little Esme Suiza transformed herself from trying to be a good girl by her culture's standards (which she couldn't have been, since good girls are protected and she WASN'T) into a good not-a-girl, applying all her ferocious energy and intelligence to being the best-ever not-a-girl to prove her worth. I.e. the perfect warrior, but with catastrophic internal penalties for anything that fell short of utter perfection in her chosen role of warrior