A/N: The credit of the Harry Potter plot and characters belongs solely to J.K. Rowling. I own nothing of it but my own words.
Crybaby: In Defense of Cho Chang
Once upon a time, in a castle not too far from here, a girl fell in love with a boy who was kind and fair and gentle, and it was beautiful. They held hands and hugged, and they talked about spending the rest of their lives together.
But what you need to know is that not all stories are happy. For these two lovers were torn apart by death. The girl was forced to live without the boy, and every day was torture. People didn't understand why she was so sad, and they were mean to her, sometimes. They called her a crybaby, and they told her to get over it.
The girl tried; she tried so hard. She forced herself to keep going, to get involved, to find something to fight for that her lost love would have done. She joined a special club for people who wanted to make a difference.
This club did not understand her either, and it did not understand the one friend who had stayed by her. But the girl fought on their side anyway, because it's what the boy would have wanted. And slowly, she got a bit happier, but she still cried.
What these people didn't understand was that crying is healthy. It helps you get out all the fear and anger and sadness and loneliness. Never be afraid to cry. It's not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of strength.
This girl knew that, and she went on to lead a nice life and be content in it, and maybe she didn't live happily-ever-after, exactly, but happily-ever-afters are overrated anyway.
Cho Chang told this story to her two children every night. One was named Marietta, and the other was Cedric. Marietta didn't know her mother was the girl in the story until she was sixteen, years into Hogwarts, when she overheard some Hufflepuffs talking about Cedric and thought they were talking about her little brother. But her little brother was not magical, and so he had not gone to Hogwarts.
Marietta thought long and hard about what to say to her mother, about confronting her and hearing the story from her perspective, about asking why she had refused to talk about her past and yet had told it to them every night, but she was a Hufflepuff (like Cedric), and so she kept her mouth shut when she hugged her mother at the start of winter break, and the only indication that she knew anything at all was that she hugged her mum a bit tighter than usual.
Cho Chang was a sensitive soul in a war. She saw the cruelty of the world day after day, and she spent half her life fighting back against it, but she spent the other half crying. You see, Cho understood a harsh truth that her war-obsessed peers didn't. She understood that this world was too beautiful to be as horrible as people made it to be, and that was not right, so when she cried for Cedric every night, she cried for the world too.
People call Cho Chang pathetic. They call her sad and jealous and immature. She was only two of those things.
Cho Chang cried every day because she didn't get so swept up in a war that she forgot what was important. She cried every day, but she turned in her schoolwork on time. She cried every day, but she joined Dumbledore's Army, and she learned how to defend herself, even though her parents warned her not to act against the Ministry. She cried every day, but she tried to move on too, tried and failed. People weren't as understanding as she was.
So don't call Cho Chang pathetic. She was vulnerable and she was compassionate and she felt things, felt them deeply, but she was stronger than you could ever imagine.
And think about this: if the person you considered to be the love of your life was murdered when you were sixteen, would you cry? Would you want to talk about it? Would you try to get closure from the one who watched it happen? Would you take the people you love most and hold them close, so close they almost couldn't breathe?
Cho did.
But people didn't emphasize with her; they mocked her, deserted her, analyzed her. Hermione saw through her complex emotions, but did she do anything about it? Did she give her a hug? Did she do anything but help Harry understand her?
Don't get me wrong, that effort in itself was tremendous. It was more than most did. But for all that she saw what Cho was going through, she didn't realize that Cho didn't need a relationship to deal with it. To be honest, neither did Cho.
Let's not talk about the girl that was Harry Potter's first romance. That girl was clingy, distrusting, stuck in the past. That girl was a mistake. That's how we see her, anyway.
Let's talk about the girl whose life broke into billions of pieces at age sixteen, but she managed to put herself back together anyway. Let's talk about the girl who, after a string of failed relationships, after night after night and day after day of crying, after being told she was weak, realized just how strong she was. Let's talk about the girl who didn't spiral after a tragedy; she took this broken train she was riding in, and she fixed it, even if it doesn't move the way it used to.
Let's talk about a girl — a girl, not a woman — who faced tragedy after tragedy, mourned each loss, and kept going. Let's talk about a girl who fought and won a war before age twenty. Let's talk about a girl who was far too mature for her age, who knew suppressing your emotions was no way to live.
Cho was jealous of other girls (who isn't?), but not for the same, superficial reasons most girls had. She was jealous of girls that were happy, that could take the love of their life and hold them close, without six feet of dirt and grass in the way. She was jealous not for something she'd never had, but for something she'd lost, and can't you understand that?
Cho Chang thought her life ended after Cedric died. But that was his life, not hers. That was their life, but she didn't have to stay bound to it. Cho was a Ravenclaw, and proud, and she realized what it truly meant to be one after Cedric died.
So one day Cho stood before a fidgety Muggle, and she said, "I do," and she meant it, because Cho Chang was simply too beautiful for the world in which she'd grown up. She was a swan among owls.
"Crybaby" is not enough a word to describe Cho. Cho is not defined by any one word, but three just might do the trick. Cho is "Nevertheless, she persisted."