Neville Longbottom: We can’t all be sidekicks

Even before I started reading the Harry Potter series, Hermione Granger was by far my favorite character. An overachieving goodie two-shoes who’s constantly plotting and scheming some ridiculous plan, her nose firmly burried in a book that weighs more than she does? A girl after my own heart! But now that I’ve read Goblet of Fire and find myself a little over halfway through Order of the Phoenix, I think my allegiance is shifting. Not that I don’t still love Hermione, whose role as a “nerdy female” in a group of guy friends strikes me as remarkably familiar. It’s just that my attention is focused on a different Hogwarts student, who I feel may be offering a more interesting story right now.

Don't hate me cause I'm awkward...really awkward...I mean, impressively awkward...

Neville Longbottom is my new favorite Harry Potter character.

He is, without a doubt, the ultimate tagalong. Ron and Hermione are sidekicks and at times, heroes in their own right. But Neville isn’t one of the Three Musketeers. He doesn’t help Harry get to the Sorcerer’s Stone. He never enters the Chamber of Secrets. He’s never there at the climax of the story, though he is always there otherwise.

It’s easy to toss Neville to the side as nothing more than a tagalong character. The books are chock full of interesting wizards. Why pay attention to this one?

Of all the background stories that have unfolded over the course of the last four books – from Hagrid’s expulsion and Sirius’ wrongful arrest, to Harry’s own tragic past – the story that seems to tug at the heart strings the hardest is Neville’s. Unlike most of the Hogwarts students, he is reminded daily what Voldemort is capable of. And in what I think is a really interesting choice, he is one of the few students who can see the Thestrals.

For the first three books, he’s a bumbling klutz. One of the first things we learn about him is that he is so forgetful and unremarkable, his family was almost convinced he was a squib. As the stories unfold, Neville proceeds to get hurt in practically every class, lose his pet toad an absurd number of times, and find a comfy position as the butt of an unending littany of jokes.

It’s not until the fourth book that he seems to matter – and I’m going to say from that point forward, he matters more than most of the other Hogwarts students. The second Moody-Crouch Jr. performs the Crucatious curse on a spider and Neville reacts, he becomes a sympathetic player in the larger story. We don’t find out why for quite some time (almost the end of the book), but from then on, he’s in the game.

Yesterday, I read Chapter 23: Christmas on the Closed Ward, when the Three Amigos encounter Neville visiting his magically mentally damaged parents, and I’m currently reading Chapter 25: The Beetle at Bay, when the prisoner escape from Azkaban is announced. Those two chapters have pretty much solidified my feelings toward Neville as a character. Over the course of only a few chapters, we see him go from vulnerable to powerful in a way that doesn’t seem to happen with any of the other characters.

I find his story heartbreaking, which says a lot for the storytelling since again, he’s not one of the three leads. Unlike the previous books, though, I think this time he’s going to be right in the thick of it when shit hits the fan. He will encounter Bellatrix Lestrange. He has to. I figure that’s only about 300 pages away or so.

ONLY 300 pages…ha!

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The Readers Poll (located off yonder) will be closing on Friday, to be replaced by a slightly more interesting one. Cast your votes now, or I will forever assume that Deathly Hollows is the best of the series. Don’t agree? Vote for one of the other six (Sorcerer’s Stone is looking mighty unloved right now, just saying…)

~ by Jess on September 2, 2009.