Harry and Cho. Who knew their relationship, of all things, would end up sparking such differences of opinion?? I've seen fan discussions, half of them saying they hate Cho and that her actions made no sense and she was a horrible girlfriend, and the other finding every scrap of evidence they can find to prove Cho, a character who barely appears in the story outside of Harry's fantasies, had all kinds of unarguable good qualities. (How do we know she's smart just because she's in Ravenclaw? If it's a quality every Ravenclaw student has, that doesn't tell us much. We never see enough of Cho to know where her particular smarts, skills, and talents lie.)
Honestly, I'm not sure either one of them was more to blame than the other. It's not like either one was the epitome of healthy relationship handling. But I am surprised how few of us remember that they were literally fifteen and sixteen at the time. The Harry Potter books always do an excellent job of portraying what it's like to be a teenager, with all the emotional highs and lows and feeling like everything is a big deal and no one could possibly understand you, and I'm kind of surprised how often that seems to be overlooked when the relationships are discussed. Yes, Harry and Cho were both handling their relationship pretty poorly. But maybe they were meant to be.
When Harry first meets Cho, the first time they ever play Quidditch against each other in Prisoner of Azkaban, his feelings are mentioned pretty much in passing. You wouldn't think it would necessarily come back, or that it means anything other than the Ravenclaw Seeker is pretty and maybe he'll find that distracting during the game. Honestly when Cho was first introduced I was getting pretty annoyed with her, the way she kept blocking Harry from accomplishing his goal and then grinning about it. But while Cho was annoying me it seems her talent was impressing Harry!
By Goblet of Fire it was pretty clear that Cho was the girl Harry had feelings for. He fantasizes about impressing Cho by winning the Triwizard Tournament (long before he realizes he'll actually be competing in it!) and he struggles to work up the nerve to ask her to the Yule Ball. Now, I admit, when I first read the books even I took this as proof we had met our Love Interest, possibly because not a lot of other books I had read at the time really talked about teenage crushes. (I always wonder why the heroines of oh-no-who-do-I-choose love triangles feel so strongly about choosing one of these two particular men to be with forever right now, when instead they could just be happy they're so popular and pretty in their teenage years.) I too was probably taking Harry and Cho's relationship a lot more seriously than it needed to be!
And yet, Cho was always Harry's fantasy more than any concrete part of his life. He noticed how pretty and talented she was, and he liked to dream about her being impressed by him. Did she bring anything to his life that had been missing before he met her? Did she ever inspire him to reach higher, beyond his idle fantasies about her being impressed if he won the Triwizard Tournament? Did they ever even talk??
We get an interesting insight when Harry finally does ask Cho to the Yule Ball. As we know, she turns him down because she already agreed to go with Cedric Diggory. But she “really does look sorry” – the impression I always got was that, if Harry had asked Cho first, she would have happily accepted and then felt disappointed and guilty when Cedric asked her and she had to turn him down. I think Cho, at the age of fifteen and not at a stage where she'd be choosing her forever life partner, had equal crushes on both of them. Cedric was tall and conventionally handsome and, no matter what any jealous guys said about him, intelligent and kind. Harry was a great hero, well acclaimed in the Wizarding World, fun and sassy. And both boys shared Cho's passion for playing Quidditch. They were even all three Seekers. It's easy to see how Cho would have had some admiration for both of them, possibly fantasized about both boys asking her out at different times, and then not known what to do when she finds herself in a real-life situation where she's been asked out by both of them.
I must say I do like the way Harry Potter handles the dreaded oh-no-who-do-I-choose love triangle. Yes, there's the obvious subversion that Harry and Hermione were never interested in each other, that the books were told from Harry's perspective rather than Hermione's anyway (and Harry doesn't just end up with the “girl best friend”, which would seem a little too clichéd and obvious, as well as denying us any representation of a girl and guy successfully being platonic friends). But what I really like is how the beautiful, popular girl who ends up pursued by two appealing guys and finds herself unable to choose between them – is a secondary character. She is not the person who's head we're stuck in for the entire story. Actually the person who's head we're in is one of the two guys, which is an angle I don't think gets thought of enough within the dreaded oh-no-who-do-I-choose love triangle.
By Order of the Phoenix, we can really start to see signs of trouble between these two. They haven't even been on one date yet, and yet the main reason Cho is now free to show interest in Harry is because – Cedric is dead. Finding out your boyfriend had died would be bad enough, as would watching someone perfectly nice, who just happened to be your rival, die in front of your eyes and knowing you were the one, however inadvertently, who got him into that situation. (This is a side note, but it always surprised me how no one ever thought that Harry was the one who killed Cedric. After all, there were already rumours he was disturbed and unhinged, even that he might be a Dark Wizard – and he certainly had a motive!) So, that alone makes any idea of a relationship between Cho and Harry kind of awkward. “Hey, awful what happened to your boyfriend – so anyway, you're single now, right?” “Hey, my boyfriend's dead – you know, you were the last person who saw him alive – anyway, I'm single now, wanna hang out?” They're trying to create a happy relationship, when the one reason they can be together now is something they both consider a personal tragedy.
I think possibly what Cho was doing was trying to force some normalcy back into her life. I think she was having a really hard time coping, keeping it together and acting like everything was fine, and trying to date the boy she would have been with if Cedric hadn't asked her first was one way she'd found of doing that. But I think another problem, which she hadn't anticipated, is that Harry was doing the same thing. Harry allows Cho to pursue him now that she's available, because if he doesn't, if he admits getting a date with Cho Chang just isn't so high on his priority list anymore, that's just another thing he's lost since the end of last year. I do think Harry still liked Cho, but what with everything else going on in his life, he just didn't have the space to care as much as he used to. It would be so easy for all of us – Harry included – to think he's still just dealing with nerves, the same way he was back in Goblet of Fire. But I don't think he was. I think what with everything else going on in Harry's life, he just didn't have the space for a girlfriend, at least not one who would need a lot of emotional support. Which sounds selfish, but bear in mind Harry desperately needed emotional support himself at the time, and he was getting it less than ever.
The only one who noticed it was Harry's best friend Ron. “What if Harry doesn't want to (ask Cho out)?” he says wisely, to which Hermione immediately replies that of course Harry does, he's liked Cho for ages. I think that was Harry's thought process too. I think he was trying to still want Cho, trying to keep things normal, but I think he already knew the relationship they would have if they started now was not what he had wanted or envisioned for the two of them a year ago.
Harry and Cho's disastrous first date – I don't need to go into everything that went wrong there, because Hermione already summed that up pretty well in the book itself. I will only add that both Harry and Cho's poor handling of things was really just an indicator of something much deeper. Harry never even managed to ask Cho out until he realized she was hinting at it – at first glance it just looks like “typical clueless male”, but I think what we've really got here is a classic case of “if he wanted to, he would”. Cho was already the one pursuing Harry, seeking him out to talk to him, hanging behind after D.A. and kissing him. It's very similar to the Yule Ball scene where Parvati has to steer Harry through the dance because he doesn't even want to be there. You can always tell when Harry doesn't want to be on the date because he withdraws and doesn't show any initiative, and at the age of fourteen or fifteen he isn't mature enough to either put in the effort for one night or politely tell the girl that he just isn't interested.
On his first date Harry continues this pattern, not putting in any effort at all to make sure Cho is having a good time. She chooses the time and place of their date, she chooses the activity (which ends up being something Harry didn't even like), and Harry doesn't even seem to want to hold her hand so much as feel he was “supposed to”. (He feels like Roger Davies at the next table is “setting a standard to which he would be expected to live up”, I mean yes, Harry, you are expected to pay attention to the girl you're literally out on a date with.) Honestly it's a perfect recipe for her feeling unwanted. Harry should either have not responded to Cho's hints that she would like to go out, or just told her outright he didn't want to. Cho should not have gone on spending so much of her time and energy on a guy who was putting in no effort to be with her. And in both cases it's very believable that they didn't choose those healthier responses.
On their date, Cho and Harry end up talking about the only three subjects they have in common: a love of Quidditch, their shared hatred of Umbridge, and Cedric's death. Long before they get into any tense conversations or arguments, Harry and Cho find out they don't really have a thing to talk about. It's something they wouldn't have known before, since they never sat down for a one-on-one conversation until now, and honestly this is why people go on dates in the first place, to find out compatibility points like this. On its own, that might just have turned this into an “okay, we tried it, didn't work out” scenario. But both were expecting things from the other that the other was in no state to give. Cho needed someone to listen to and support her feelings about Cedric. Harry had his own trauma to deal with about that night, and even without the whole factor of Cedric's death, talking about Cho's ex-boyfriend on a date with her probably wouldn't make him feel all that great. Harry didn't want Cho to cry because he couldn't handle her painful emotions on top of his own, and because if he's taking a girl on a date he wants to think she's having a good time with him. Cho of course could hardly be expected to suppress her feelings – or to want a boyfriend who would belittle her emotions!
I was honestly shocked, when I first read the book, that Cho made another attempt to get back with Harry after that disastrous first date. Even if Cho realizes now what Harry ran off to do that day in Hogsmeade (and I'm not even sure she did), isn't there already enough evidence that she and Harry just aren't compatible?? It supports my theory, that Cho is just trying to hold it together and cling to some semblance of normalcy, rather than actually having such strong feelings for Harry. Actually I think, judging by what we hear of her always being surrounded by friends, she's afraid of being alone.
And Cho's fear of being alone is what eventually causes the worst trouble of all.
In the movie, Cho betrays the D.A. under the influence of Veritaserum. In the movie's version, I don't think Cho was to blame at all, and Harry's refusal to forgive her feels entirely unreasonable. In the book, Cho doesn't betray the D.A. at all – and yet, in a way she does. Her friend Marietta, whom Cho brings along to all the D.A. meetings even though Marietta makes it clear she never wanted to be there, eventually snaps and tells Umbridge about the secret meetings. And here, in this case, I actually do think Cho was to blame, for one simple reason: Cho, in her own words, “made Marietta come with her”. I can't help but feel sympathetic towards Marietta, knowing she was constantly forced to participate in an activity she wasn't enjoying and which felt morally wrong to her. Plus, the D.A. was supposed to be for people who wanted to stand up to Umbridge. It seems a really bad idea for a secret organization to have any members who aren't completely invested – and so, Cho was compromising the entire D.A., all because she was too scared to go to the meetings alone. I mean – was Marietta really the only friend she could have asked anyway?? If Cho is always surrounded by “giggling girlfriends”, surely there's at least one or two who would be genuinely interested in going. Now, once again, Cho is a teenager, so we can forgive, to some extent, her unhealthy way of handling both her friendships and her own nerves. But I don't think what she did is something we can just brush off and pretend it was absolutely fine. I can perfectly understand why this was something Harry and Cho could never come back from.
I think, right from the start, Harry was probably the very worst person Cho could have chosen to be her new boyfriend, for the very reasons she probably thought he was the best one. They both had shared traumatic feelings about Cedric's death, and both needed to deal with them in different ways. I think because they were so closely connected, Cho couldn't be with Harry without thinking about Cedric, and thus so long as she was trying to date Harry, she could never move on. We hear later that when Cho started dating Michael Corner, she didn't look so unhappy anymore.
Now the only question that remains is: do I like Cho? Well, I have this weird feeling towards her where she seems very flawed, not someone whose defence I would immediately leap to at all – and yet, I do like her. She's a cool character. Definitely worked for what the story needed her to be, at least – Harry's first crush leading to an incredibly messy teenage relationship.