Ginevra Molly Weasley

Families

Married

• Spouse: Harry James Potter (m. 9999-12-31)

Parents

• Family: Married
  • Birth Father: Arthur Weasley
  • Birth Mother: Molly Prewett

Ancestors

Analysis

Ginny and the Diary

“Ginny!” said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. “Haven’t I taught you anything ? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain. Why didn’t you show the diary to me, or your mother? A suspicious object like that, it was clearly full of Dark Magic –”¹

I strongly believe that this single quote right here is responsible for half of the dislike that so many fan fiction authors and commentators on the series have for Ginny. At the same time, it is one of the single best examples of Arthur’s poor parenting that you could hope to find. Ginny has grown up in a house with things that thing for themselves and none of them are, at first glance, significantly different from the diary.

• Mrs. Weasley’s clock is the least of these. It isn’t really sentient, but does practice a really complex form of divination to know where people are, and in some cases, need to be (including settings such as ‘You are late’).
• Her father’s car has a personality, as evidenced by its behavior across book three. We don’t know how much the family realized this before the car ejects Ron and Harry after crashing at Hogwarts, but its a safe bet that the younger children saw more of this personality than the adults would have.
• The family plays with decks of ‘Self-Shuffling playing cards.’ Again, not a great deal of intelligence needed, but the deck has to know when its randomized. We might be able to figure out some speculative combination of charms and divination to do this, but would a child understand the difference between this, and the deck “being smart enough to know?”
• The mirror over the kitchen mantelpiece gives advice along the lines of “tuck your shirt in” along with appropriate insults. With enough interaction, Ginny would probably, eventually, realize that the diary is qualitatively different from the mirror. But not until after she has been writing in it for some time.
• And these are just a handful of trivially found examples from a casual read of chapters 3 and 4 of book two along with my memory of the car, already mentioned as enchanted by this point, having behaved oddly in book three.

There are probably others scattered around the house. Each of these are, no doubt individually far less intelligent than the bit of soul that Riddle stuck in his diary. The point is not to compare any one artifact from her childhood to the diary, but to consider the cumulative impact of these things. Her father may have told her not to trust enchanted objects, but he undermined his own teaching in critical, obvious ways such that of course Ginny, at first, thought this was some sort of unusually well charmed gift from her parents. Consider that Riddle no doubt went out of his way to encourage the idea that he/it was harmless. Further consider that while when we see him return to a body in book four he’s clearly a cartoon villain, we are told that he was charismatic, charming, and persuasive. Deluding a homesick eleven year old, overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy, was a trivial challenge. The many authors out there that casually dismiss her as an idiot for her mistakes in this book have either forgotten too much about pre-teens to understand or judge them fairly, are ignoring the evidence and deluding themselves, or both.

Ginny and Luna

“There’s room in this one, there’s only Loony Lovegood in here — ”

Neville mumbled something about not wanting to disturb anyone.

“Don’t be silly,” said Ginny, laughing, “she’s all right.”

She slid the door open and pulled her trunk inside it. Harry and Neville followed.

“Hi, Luna,” said Ginny. “Is it okay if we take these seats?”²

This is probably the most troublesome thing that Ginny says in the entire series. It is also the biggest counter example to trying to deal with the next quote. The only interesting thing is that while Ginny uses the name “Loony” outside the compartment, she switches to “Luna” as soon as they go in, and immediately strikes up a friendly conversation with the outcast girl. This is not in character for someone who uses derogatory names. The contradiction in Ginny’s behaviour is unexplained, to my knowledge, by cannon sources.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry, you can do better than her, ” said Hermione. “Ginny’s told me all about her, apparently she’ll only believe in things as long as there’s no proof at all. Well, I wouldn’t expect anything else from someone whose father runs The Quibbler.”³

When reading this keep in mind that this is filtered through Hermione. While it looks fairly harsh, as noted in Discovering the Truth, it possible that Hermione might be misrepresenting Ginny’s actual words (emphasis mine).⁴