The Love Life Of 'Harry Potter's Professor McGonagall Needs A Movie

If there's one thing the Harry Potter community can agree on -- and one step into any fan-fiction forum will tell you there isn't many -- it's that the Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts is a catch. Brains, beauty, a withering glare that can reduce you to a puddle of contrition even if you've done nothing wrong: Professor McGonagall is the total package.

Yet she lives such a solitary life that even her cat is herself. Not that it's not a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, but how has no one in the wizarding world managed to lock that down? Well, whenever J.K. Rowling gets bored of oppressing trans people, she publishes an elaborate history of one of her characters, so there's a story there, and that story is Bewitched. 

It's a tale as old as time: Boy meets girl, girl is a witch, girl's book of etiquette doesn't exactly cover when to reveal this information to a potential suitor, yadda yadda yadda, baby witch forces the issue. Young Minerva (or Minnie, as she was hopefully called) appeared to have a great relationship with both of her parents. Still, there was no mistaking the tension in the McGonagall household once her father, a normal pants-wearing reverend, found out he'd not only married a witch but that this fact doomed him to a life of secrecy. It wasn't a great deal for Mrs. McGonagall, either, who was relegated to playing the dutiful wife without so much as those amazing self-washing dishes to lighten the load. Minerva vowed never to let a man stop her from realizing her magical ambitions, and then she almost let a man stop her from realizing her magical ambitions.

All girls turn into their mothers eventually; it just happened a little earlier than usual for Minnie. She was barely an adult when she fell in love with the muggle son of a local farmer who "shared her sense of humor" and "argued fiercely" with her and otherwise radiated big dick energy, and she found out firsthand just how hard it was to have the "So I can make shit fly" talk. Before she knew it, he was proposing, and she was accepting. When the time came to tell her parents, however, she snapped back to reality and realized, with a job offer from the Ministry of Magic in-hand, she couldn't stay with a man committed to farming in rural Scotland. It seems like anyone who wasn't willing to move mountains was never worthy of Minerva McGonagall, but they have actual laws against telling muggles about magic and following the law is pretty vital for a prospective government employee, so it's not like she could have just invited him to London for her wizard job. She broke it off, never told him why, and never got over it, although she was pursued relentlessly by one of her colleagues at the Ministry of Magic.

Then, in the First Wizarding War, the erstwhile fiance she'd spent 30 years pining for happened to be killed in one of Voldemort's random muggle attacks. Inconsolable, Minerva finally accepted her Ministry colleague's proposal, and it worked out a lot better than it usually does when men take advantage of grieving women. She eventually fell in love with her husband and lived happily ever after ... for about three years. Then he died, too.

No wonder she decided to live out the rest of her days as a spinster. She's basically Rosa from Orange is the New Black.

Images: Warner Bros.