[dropcap]G[/dropcap]inny Weasley, the girl who waited. If you’ve ever heard anything about Harry Potter you know Ginny Weasley is Harry’s soulmate. As a kid I saw her as so much more. She was a force to be reckoned with and I couldn’t want to be her more. After seeing the movies I didn’t look up to her so much, she wasn’t as cool as I remembered. I had to dive back into the universe of Harry Potter, the literary version at least, to find my role model again. This is a common story for many young fans. People just see her as the girl who waited and waited for the boy she had a huge crush on to fall in love with her. She is seen as annoying. She is a girly girl, who has a boring personality. She is a terrible character. If you believe this you’ve probably only seen the movies. In reality, Ginny is the girl who waited, but she is also the girl who loved, protected, fought. Most importantly she is the girl who deserved so much more than the representation she got in the movies.

Like many book to movie adaptations things are left out because really, you can’t fit all 800 pages of a book in the span of 2 hours. Taking that into account, an important female roles personality should not be one of the things cut. So many things were lost in the movies, her kindness, her friendships, her toughness, her competitiveness. Said perfectly by blogger, Mihika Kulkarni, “They took away her defining characteristic – spunk.”

Romance

The first real way Ginny’s character was destroyed was her relationship with Harry Potter. Now I admire Ginny for actually ending up with her celebrity crush but the story of how it happened is different in the books than the movies.

Ginny had a huge crush on the boy who lived but he is really too oblivious to notice how amazing she is.

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She dates other boys and lives her own life, while becoming friends with Harry. In the books, you see Ginny become this amazing girl who is funny, smart, kind and can kick butt, who also can relate to Harry, in a way, after her traumatic experience during her first year. Yet in the movie, she barely dates one boy and never really becomes Harry’s friend. She says maybe one single thing to him through the whole movie that means anything at all. She is lifeless and has no personality.

Harry and Ginny’s relationship portrayal in the movies compared to the books really affects her character as well. In the books, they joke and date for quite awhile and it is a good, strong relationship. Their first kiss is actually after Ginny just kicked butt at a Quidditch match. In the movies though she acts like a mother to Harry. She even ties his shoes which is so weird and cringey. Their first kiss is even stranger. In a room all by themselves with a kind of creepy feel. It was all wrong, this was supposed to be the portrayal of soulmates, instead, it shows a weird girl who is mothering the boy she likes. “The kiss in the book just meant so much more.”

After the kiss, the books continue to build their relationship but in the movies, it’s just as Micheline says in her 2015 blog post, “The producers just relegate her to the background again until they’re ready for her to kiss Harry again.”

Friendship

People’s friends show a lot about their character. Ginny is shown to have no friends at all in the movies. In the books, her relationships with others define her.

Art by: WiebkeArt Used with permission

Ginny is friends with two other strong female characters in the books. Every summer Hermione and Ginny are together, giving Ginny almost a sister. Hermione helps shape Ginny, giving her advice about boys and allows Ginny to just be herself and honest. They were very close in the books but in the movies, their friendship wasn’t touched at all. Deanna, a fan who was also very upset about the friendship loss stated, “They were always so close in the books sharing secrets” yet none of this is seen.

Ginny is also friends with Luna Lovegood. This friendship shows so much about this amazing girl. Luna is very different and gets picked on by kids quite a bit. Ginny is a very good friend to Luna and somewhat of a protector. A journalist from Bustle reveals, “Ginny stood up for the underdogs.” She makes sure no one bullies her looney friend while also just being a good person to her and accepting everything about her.

Role Model Qualities

Lots of young girls who read the books, look up to Ginny. She was a very shy girl at the beginning, but broke out of her shell and became the girl who casted the best bat-bogey hexes that would make anyone scared to be rude to her, or insult her friends and family. She is a person that most girls dream to be like. She is smart, powerful, and kind. In the movies, none of these qualities were shown. To summarize this journalist, Chanel Vargas tells, “Ginny could have easily let herself be overlooked. But, she was her own person who made herself heard and came up with some great ideas.” Yet this Ginny was not seen in the movies.

It was seen that Ginny was a good witch, but that was the only quality that actually shown through. None of the things that made me and so many others look up to Ginny Weasley were in the movies.

The maturity of this girl is amazing and makes her into such an amazing role model. Harry

Art by: franception  Used with permission

breaks up with her at the end of the sixth book to fight Voldemort. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t beg him to stay, to not break things off. Instead, she understands. Put perfectly by J.K Rowling herself on Pottermore, “The way Ginny reacts to Harry breaking up with her shows how emotionally mature beyond her years she really is. Ginny has grown up now and accepts she doesn’t just like some boy, she likes The Boy Who Lived.”

Ginny has such a fiery personality and fights for what she wants and knows is right. She acts and looks like a strong, powerful girl. In the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-blood prince Ginny is described as having a “hard, blazing” look on her face. Harry later on in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, thinks back on her “blazing look” when about to die. She not only physically fights for what she believes but also always has a look of determination. She is an unmovable force that girls aspire to be.

Book Ginny is such a strong girl. She is good at her schooling, becoming one of the most powerful witches. She is also very good at sports. She is even able to take over for Harry, who is considered really good at Quidditch. She is a powerful girl. Her older brother even says, “‘Yeah, size is no guarantee of power,’ said George. ‘Look at Ginny.'” Any person in their right mind would look up to this girl. The girl in the books at least.

Humor

Ginny is really funny. She is the younger sister of Fred and George, how could she not be. All of that is removed from her in the movies though. She just sits back and lets all the perfect joke opportunities slip by. This is summed up with this remark from Bustle journalist, Chanel Vargas, “Book Ginny rolls her eyes, pipes up when her brothers pick on her, and slings out witty comebacks like there’s no tomorrow. Movie Ginny, on the other hand, has none of that spirit and spunk that the true Ginny Weasley embodies”

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“They took away her defining characteristic – spunk.”[/perfectpullquote]

All the jokes that left readers smiling or actually laughing out loud were gone in the movies. No more remarks about Fleur or about the Hungarian Horntail tattoo. All of it gone, in its place, a girl who barely knows how to tell a knock-knock joke.

Representation Throughout Books

The second book shows more of the youngest Weasley. She proves to be a tough little girl and all events in this book help her become who she is. Not including the part where she is dying in the Chamber of Secrets she literally is only given eleven minutes of screen time which is not enough for this young girl who goes through so much in the books.

Ginny is not seen a lot through the first movies as much as she was mentioned in the books. She was not a huge roll in

Photo credit: Evelis Santos via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

some of the first books yet she was still there. Mihika Kulkarni says it perfectly in her article, “Even in the first few books, there was still a sense of liveliness about Ginny that the books expressed but the movies utterly failed to capture.”

Now one thing that really bothered me in the Goblet of Fire movie was when at the Quidditch world cup Ginny asks her brothers who Viktor Krum is. Now if you’ve read the books you know how much Ginny loves Quidditch. There is no way book Ginny would ever ask who one of the most famous Quidditch players was. This is very disappointing as it seems the directors gave her this line just to clarify to the audience who this was. Instead of taking another detail about Ginny they could have given the line to literally anyone else.

If you saw the movie, Deathly Hallows, then you know the during the Battle of Hogwarts Ginny Weasley didn’t fight a whole lot, mostly just against Bellatrix Lestrange. In the books, she has a much more important role that shows how amazingly though she is. There are Death Eaters in the school who give out very inhumane punishments and teach terribly but Ginny Weasley stands up against it all. Continuing Dumbledore’s Army, her and the others do all they can to put a stop to the injustices and take on even worse punishments. So while the movie just tells of Harry, Ron and Hermione’s troubles, the books show Ginny’s battle and how tough and courageous she is.

Throughout all the movies she was shown as a minor character yet she has a major role throughout the whole book series.  

Movie

I can’t possibly imagine anyone liking her in the movies better yet there are still a few who believe so. I conducted a survey with 20 people, 2 out of the 20 thought she was better in the movies than the book. Of that two only one has actually read the books. The surveyed described Ginny: “She is overall a badass. She may be underestimated by men but she shows that she has a voice.” They aren’t wrong, but they are forgetting about all the other amazing things Ginny does in the books.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Book Ginny is such a strong girl. She is good at her schooling, becoming one of the most powerful witches.   [/perfectpullquote]

The movies put off such a bad portrayal of her that one of the surveyed who had only seen the movies described her as, “Kind of annoying and could have used a little more character development. She felt like an annoying little sister that just hangs around with your friends when you ask her to go away.” Those who have only seen the movies just don’t get the gist of her character and how important she is to the story.

Deserving More

Ginny Weasley deserved so much more than what she got in the movies.  Entertainment voices their opinion that “while Book Ginny was a dynamic, feisty character, Film Ginny is a Manic Pixie Wallflower.” In the books, she is a girl who is tough, funny, kind, loving and a role model.

She went from the girl who said, “anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve” to the girl who fed a boy treats and tied his shoelaces.

Featured Image: Photo By Rhino Neal