Well, I guess that I should introduce who I'm talking about, because it will get really confusing if I just say "the boy" and "the girl".
The girl's name is Hermione Granger, and as I said before, she's not a beautiful princess and she doesn't have a jealous stepmother. Maybe she's just not particularly beautiful because she doesn't care all that much about beauty in the first place, but whatever opinion you want to have on that, you can't argue about her not being a princess.
The boy's name is Ron Weasley, and I really feel that I need to say, once again, that he most certainly isn't a prince. I don't think he's very charming (and believe me when I tell you that I've had plenty of chances to decide that for myself), but if you tell that to Hermione, she'd just say that he's 'charming in his own way' or something of that sort.
If this were the real fairy tale, then I'd have one more person to introduce – the wicked, jealous stepmother. Well, Hermione doesn't have a stepmother. If you want to get into all of that "literary symbolism" rubbish, then you might want to argue that some kind of jealous stepmother figure is in the story, but I'm not bothering myself with that.
Ah, but there is one more person to introduce, and that would be myself, the oh-so-helpful narrator with their own…interesting…observations on the story. I'm not revealing myself just yet, though, because that would ruin the fun. You'll just have to guess.
Now comes the difficult part of actually starting the story, because there are so many places that I could begin. That's the trouble with "once upon a time" – it's always a different time, with all of the different stories that start like that. I could start at the beginning of their lives, but that would be very slow and boring because they wouldn't even meet each other for eleven years. I could start then, when they met, but I won't, because I have a feeling that anyone who's reading this came here for a love story, and that wouldn't start for quite a while.
Maybe there should be two beginnings: one for him, one for her. Yes, that would make the most sense, I think.
The beginning should be when one fell in love with the other, but the problem with writing Ron's beginning is that he never really knew when he fell in love with Hermione. I guess you could say that it was in first year and that that's why she annoyed him so much. You could say that he fell in love with her in second year, when she became Petrified and he realized how much she meant to him. It could have even started in third year, but I don't really know when that would have happened.
It was probably somewhere around there, but I'm going to start with a better event. It may not have been when he fell in love with her, but it was when he definitely knew – in the middle of their fourth year, at the Yule Ball. You could practically see the envy radiating off of him when she walked into the room with Viktor Krum. He practically ignored his date, Padma Patil (much to her annoyance – I don't think that I remember seeing them ever speak to each other again).
He watched her the whole night. I should know – I was watching him. Not in the romantic way (never in a million years would I consider that, and I had a perfectly nice date, thank you very much), but in the 'what's-up-with-you' way. I thought that something romantic might happen between them after the ball, but that didn't happen at all. Well, it only happened if you call yelling at each other romantic, and I don't think that most people do.
That is Ron Weasley's beginning to this story – now for Hermione Granger's.
Do you remember when I said that the beginning should be when one fell in love with the other? I lied. Hermione's beginning to this story wasn't when she fell in love with Ron Weasley; it's when she admitted it to herself.
I don't think that anybody really knows when Hermione fell in love with Ron, least of all Hermione. It was just a fact that was there, but nobody ever really acknowledged it. She didn't even admit it to herself until they were both in their sixth year.
That was when that Ron started dating Lavender Brown. I don't know why he even started dating her in the first place – they were never a good match. I think that everybody else knew it, too, even though nobody admitted it.
One problem was that there were no other Gryffindor sixth years that really understood. Harry couldn't pick a side between his two best friends. Parvati was wholeheartedly supportive of her best friend's relationship. Neville succeeded in remaining comfortably detached from events. Seamus was consumed by his own jealousy, and Dean was busy keeping Seamus from punching Ron in the face for dating Seamus's longtime crush.
Seamus could have understood, and to some extent, he did. He and Hermione considered dating to try and make Ron and Lavender jealous, but they both quickly agreed that it wouldn't work.
And so Hermione was left on her own to deal with the new and slightly unsettling realization that she really had fallen for Ron Weasley.
And so we have two people, in love with each other but not admitting it to anyone but themselves. So tragic, so romantic.
Let's move on, shall we?