Favorite Characters: Ron Weasley (Harry Potter)

 

I’ve always had a tendency to gravitate toward supporting characters.  By narrative necessity, protagonists tend to get weighed down by extreme drama and hardship, and while that’s obviously a plus for storytelling, it can sometimes get a little heavy.  Supporting characters, then, are often allowed to be a bit more fun, since they don’t have as much plot to carry.  In good stories, they’re still given meaty material and opportunities to prove their mettle, but there’s more breathing space.  More variety, too – there isn’t as great a need to make them relatable to the Everyreader/viewer, so you get a wider assortment of traits and quirks.

 

There are oodles of interesting supporting characters in the Harry Potter series, many of whom I enjoy more than Harry, but Ron is a personal favorite.  With his average magical aptitude, academic performance, and athletic ability, he’s not the obvious Achiever that Harry and Hermione are.  In a way, he’s the Xander to Harry’s Buffy and Hermione’s Willow – to the untrained observer, he has nothing valuable to contribute and is perhaps, if anything, a liability in a serious fight (plus, he’s an eternal smart-aleck.)  Like Xander, though, he’s not one to be discounted.

 

Ron’s greatest quality is probably his loyalty.  From a young age, he falls in with Harry and remains at his side through all sorts of unspeakable danger.  In The Prisoner of Azkaban, he famously gives a more powerful, more notorious wizard the ole “if you want to kill Harry, you’ll have to go through us” routine despite his own serious injury.  Not that he’s Harry’s yes-man – they clash often enough, and both boys can be pretty stubborn when they think they’re right – and they do fall out on occasion.  Ron is especially susceptible to sulky overreactions once he becomes a teenager; Harry’s fame and seeming inherent specialness is the most common sticking point, since Ron is sensitive about his own perceived run-of-the-mill-ness.  When it really matters, though, Ron always has Harry’s back and puts his life on the line numerous times.

 

Aside from that, Ron has enough common sense to make up for his lack of book smarts (he’s been known to point out the important, obvious things that Harry and Hermione miss when they overcomplicate matters,) and as the only one of the trio to grow up in the wizarding world, his cultural knowledge often comes in handy.  When the situation is particularly grim, his wise-cracking brings some much-needed relief – there are probably entire months of Harry’s life in which he wouldn’t have smiled if not for Ron.  And for all that Ron can be oversensitive, obtuse (especially where romance is concerned,) and reckless, his default reaction is always to protect his friends.

 

Ron has a reputation for being something of a fraidy-cat – the movies really amplify this – but I don’t mind that he gets scared, because he still risks his life anyway.  I’ll leave you with the spider sequence from The Chamber of Secrets, to highlight how brave Ron is even when he’s afraid.  So, 12-year-old Ron enters the Forbidden Forest in the middle of the night, where he is confronted and pursued by dozens of supersized versions of his absolute greatest fear (that, by the way, want to eat him,) and all he has to defend himself is a malfunctioning wand.  In that state, he has wits enough about him to drive a severely-damaged car through an off-road, wooded area swarming with giant killer spiders.  In short?  Ron Weasley is a badass.