#dark ron

(I am lumping them all in together because I think they are a symptom of the same issue, which I will explain later).

I am equally guilty of this - in a fair number of my stories, Ron is one of the bad guys - not the Big Bad and certainly not a Death Eater, but a bad guy all the same. 

The scope of the badness runs from mild naughtiness all the way through to evil incarnate, with most authors (that I've read) coming in around the middle - he is definitely an antagonist, but not the arch enemy.

While he fulfills this role, most stories generally have him replaced with someone. They rarely leave Harry and Hermione (who, by the way, hardly ever gets this sort of treatment) as a duo, preferring to stick to The Golden Trio format by substituting Neville, Lavender, Seamus, Dean, one of the Hufflepuffs, Luna, Ginny or another of the first years that come along the year after.

So why is this? Why does Hermione generally (I'd say about 98% of the stories I've read) get to be Harry's best friend, while Ronald gets demoted to either a minor annoyance or the evil Gryffindor?

Well - I think there are two main reasons.

First - the seven stories of canon do kind of support this, to one degree or another. Ron was a bit of a tit in book one, a bit of a dick in book four, a total nob in book six and an utter prick in book seven. 

And yes - I know Hermione wasn't that good a friend in book 3, and kind of annoying in book 6 - but if you look at them, side by side, it is fair to say Hermione was far more of a loyal friend than Ron was.

Second - fanfic authors want to change things around. That is the whole purpose of fanfiction - it's raison d'etre. There is no point in writing a story where everything happens exactly as it does in the seven stories, because you might as well just cut and paste the text of the said stories in to an editor and post it as your own. 

(The fact you would have you stories taken down and probably be sued is a good reason not to do this, by the way)

So when you are changing things around, the first thing most people look at is The Golden Trio - can you modify it or change the members? What if you wanted to put Harry and Hermione together, rather than Hermione and Ron? 

I think there is also a general feeling that if you remove Hermione from The Trio, Harry and Ron wouldn't be able to find their way out of a paper bag. Neither of them are "book learning" types and while Ron is clearly strategically inclined, and Harry is clearly a good leader, having leadership and strategy without any intelligence (by which I mean knowledge, not smarts) behind it usually ends badly.

So generally, people keep Hermione with Harry because - as a character - she is far more useful than Ron is. And (I would suspect - this is purely a guess) since JKR started shipping Harry/Hermione, there are maybe more stories out there to support it. And it's very hard to put Harry and Hermione together as a couple if they don't talk or hate each other. 

There are a few stories that put Harry and Ron together as a couple, but these are not in the majority. (From a certain point of view this is a little depressing, but on the other hand these are established characters from a series of stories, and people might be reluctant to screw with them THAT MUCH).

But - that aside - once you take Ron out of The Golden Trio, the problem then becomes what do you do with him?

The seven stories are FILLED with characters. At a rough estimate (literally off the top of my head) I would say there are at least 1,000 different people, if not more.

Most of these are minor characters - they either appear in one story, and are never heard from again (Sally-Anne Perks, for example) or they are in more than one story, but in a background role (Susan, Hannah, Blaise, Vector and so forth).

Given the large number of characters, it is surprising how few main characters there are. That is characters that you can't really remove from the story without someone noticing. You could write six years worth of stories and never mention Blaise, or Mundungus or Charlie or Bill and no one would really bat an eyelid. (To some degree, I even put Neville in to that category. He is mostly just comic relief, used as a prop until Year 5 then he does come into his own somewhat).

But if you tried to write even a one story without mentioning Dumbledore, or McGonagall or Ginny or Molly or Arthur then people would start to wonder if you'd ever read any of the books or were just trying to write in a fandom you know nothing about. (Ginny, Molly and Arthur are more prominent later on, so you might get away in Year 1 but try writing a story set in Year 2 without mentioning Ginny - people will talk!)

Which is where Ron comes in again - of all the main characters that you can't not write into the story, I think that Harry, Hermione, Ron, Dumbledore, Draco and McGonagall are the biggest ones. If you completely ignore them to the point of not mentioning them, you will get reviews asking "where's Dumbledore?" or "What did you do with Draco?"

That's not to say you have to put them in your story - you don't. A series I am working on now has no Dumbledore in it at all, because he died on Halloween 1981. But I do explain HOW he came to die on that night, and why he is no longer in the story, because otherwise people would be asking "What's with you having a different Headmaster?"

So if you are going to remove Ron from The Golden Trio, you have to find something else for him to be, or at least you have to find an explanation as to why he isn't part of it. You can either write him out before he comes to Hogwarts ("We had a younger brother, but he got eaten by a dragon on a trip to Romania") or you have to manufacture a reason why Harry doesn't want to be friends with him. 

And given his characterisation in the books (somewhat jealous at times, easy to anger, quick to fly off the handle etc) it's not a very big leap to think that if he isn't part of Harry's inner circle, he is not going to be happy about it. Which sets him up perfectly as an antagonist or more.

Some authors get a lot of stick for Weasly Bashing - and it is pretty much split fifty/fifty between Ron being a bad guy, and Ginny being a crazy/insane Harry-obsessed Fan-Girl who won't let him go and thinks they will be wed come hell or high water.