Five by Friday: Top Five Harry Potter Characters

Welcome to Five by Friday! In honor of Harry Potter’s 35th birthday, this week’s topic is our favorite Harry Potter characters! Over the last ten years we’ve spent countless hours discussing themes, characters, storylines, and headcanons for Harry Potter. But even with all the time spent thinking though this universe, it was still incredibly challenging to narrow it down to our top five favorite characters from the series. But, narrow it down we did!

Join us in the comments or on your own blog–we’ve even provided a graphic for you, which you can either save to your own space or link from tinypic using the following HTML code: <*a href=”http://avengingforce.com”><*img src=”http://i59.tinypic.com/2d9318w.jpg”><*/a> 

Just remove the asterisks, and you’re all set!

Sarah

5. Remus Lupin

Remus is hands down my favorite of the Marauders. He’s so kind and intelligent and loyal. And he absolutely adores Harry. I can only imagine how difficult it was for him in third year to work with Harry and not be able to tell him who he was and how he knew his parents. i just really want to give Remus a hug and make him happy.

4. Ginny Weasley

Book Ginny > Movie Ginny. And Book Ginny just barely edges out Hermione as one of my top five characters. Don;’t get me wrong, I adore the hell out of Hermione, but Ginny just had so much sass and fire and I just absolutely fell in love with her. She’s an incredibly powerful witch, she doesn’t put up with Harry’s bullshit, and she refuses to be sent away during the Final Battle instead choosing to remain and fight with her family.

3. Minerva McGonagall

McGonagall is hands down the best professor at Hogwarts. She’s strict, but fair. She’s tough, but sassy. She’s fun, but fearless. She leads the school in battle against Voldemort without any hesitation and she does quite a bit of damage to the enemy herself.

I pretty much want to be her when I am grown.

2. Neville Longbottom

I just love Neville so very much. His development over the course of the seven books is amazing to witness, he goes from a small roly-poly boy who seems afraid of his own shadow, to the young man who takes down Nagini with one stroke of Godric’s sword. Neville is every bit the hero Harry is, he’s just quieter about it.

1. Fred and George Weasley

Yes, this is cheating, but the twins are a absolutely a package deal and therefore impossible to separate. I adored the twins from Book 1 and every time they appeared on page they put a smile on my face. Despite the devil-may-care attitude they project, the twins are incredibly intelligent and put a lot of effort into the spells required to create their joke products. The fact that they left school at 17 and managed to open their own, incredibly successful, joke shop only proves how smart they are.

Let’s not even talk about how I felt at the end of book 7. I’m still not over it.

Teija

5. Minerva McGonagall

 

Minerva McGonagall is an absolute inspiration. She’s headstrong, sure of herself, exceedingly intelligent, and an incredible witch. You know she also has the patience of a saint, having put up with the shenanigans of the students of Hogwarts for as long as she has. There’s no doubt in my mind that if McGonagall is on your side, you’re going to win your argument–or your war.

4. Molly Weasley

 

There are a lot of books and films out there, this one included, in which the main character has lost their mother at an early age. However, not all of them give you someone who, while she cannot replace the hero’s mother, can do a hell of a job standing in as a mother figure. Molly Weasley does not hesitate in welcoming Harry into the Weasley household as family, and provides him the care and support he was so cruelly denied at the Dursley house. Molly Weasley is protective of her family, fierce in her convictions, and as evidenced in Deathly Hallows, a Gryffindor through and through. Bellatrix never stood a chance.

3. Fred and George Weasley

 

It’s honestly a wonder I was able to choose between the Weasleys at all. With the exception of Percy, all of Molly and Arthur’s children are delightful and lovable. While we don’t get to know the older ones as well, since they’ve already grown and left Hogwarts by the time these books were written, we spent a great deal of time getting to know and love Fred and George. They’re wildly intelligent, incredibly mischievous, and aways hilarious (excepting, of course, the event in book 7, of which we shall not speak). As they are inseparable, I refuse to count them separately.

2. Hermione Granger

 

Hermione holds the trio together. She is, as they say, the brightest witch of her age–and you know without a doubt that had she not been there with Harry and Ron, they’d never have defeated Voldemort. As the resourceful one with all the answers, she shows time and time again that she really does know it all, but she lacks the arrogance that would make her obvious intelligence insufferable. Instead, she is charming, relatable, and very well rounded, often making the difficult decisions (like modifying the memories of her own parents) in order to do what is right.

1. Neville Longbottom

 

Neville Longbottom’s story is one that could very well have made him the hero of these stories, had Voldemort chosen him instead of Harry. Like Harry, his parents were stolen from him by the Dark Lord, though unlike Harry, he was not removed from the wizarding world as a result. We see him grow from an awkward, clumsy, and forgetful young boy of Philospher’s Stone into the confident and rebellious teenager of Deathly Hallows, and we root for him the whole way through. Things don’t always come easily to Neville, but he is determined and persistent, and it pays off big time.