Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Let's talk about the Half-Blood Prince! Or no, actually. Let's talk about Ron. His arc is classic high school - entirely focused on sports and girls. Rowling presents his woes as a sympathetic battle of man vs brain as Ron’s anxiety repeatedly bests him, but it’s his impact on others that stood out to me. Ron ends up a textbook case of toxic masculinity. His self-worth is entirely bound up in his quidditch performance and dating success. Ron’s quidditch anxiety is so bad it repeatedly impacts his performance on the pitch, preventing his true skill from showing. The only time Ron lives up to his potential is when Harry tricks him into believing he’d taken luck potion. The rest of the time his anxiety translates to him snapping at his teammates constantly, to the point that Harry threatens to remove Ron from the team if he doesn’t improve his attitude.
Outside of sports, Ron seems emotionally stunted in an all-too familiar way. He deals with his crush on Hermione by picking fights at the drop of a hat. He dates Lavender for a large portion of the book but never says anything good about her. Our culture tells young men daily they are only worth their athleticism or ability to get girls. At this point in the series Harry and Hermione have both had relationships, and it seems Ron felt emasculated by the dual hit of quidditch stress and lack of dating experience. It’s unclear if he ever liked Lavender, or if he just needed to be on ‘equal footing’ with Hermione before he could pursue her. I don’t begrudge Ron his anxiety. I judge him for making it everyone else’s problem. In a world where boys are teased by friends and enemies alike for showing too much emotion, anger becomes the only ‘safe’ outlet of expression. Half Blood Prince is a good look into why so many young men find themselves starting down a path that leads to radicalization and the alt-right.
I wish I believed this was a conscious choice, but JKR's treatment of other characters indicates she’s just steering Ron down the ‘default’ course. We get the Strong Female Character moment from Ginny reading Ron the riot act when he tries to slut-shame her at one point, but otherwise he’s portrayed as a victim of his circumstances. Even when Ron is making remarkably mean-spirited jokes about Luna everyone laughs with him instead of calling him out. By contrast, Lavender is given virtually no redeeming qualities despite the fact that she doesn’t do anything to deserve the derision with which she is treated. This felt like a real miss in a series where Rowling intentionally sets up the trio as role models.
