What if...
Neville was the one?
If that had happened, some things would be different.

1- Neville is not at all good at riding a broom, as he proved in his first flight class. Therefore, there's no way he could have played on Gryffindor's team. However, there is something he was good at from his first year: Herbology. Herbology was one of those subjects that few people were interested in, including book readers, but Neville looked like a different person when he entered the greenhouses. But if he had been the chosen child and famous throughout the magic world, all the students would have been interested in this subject, since fashions are born that way. Someone famous likes it, and then everyone else does. Maybe after a few years we would have a horde of expert herbalists, and all because the boy who saved the world liked plants. But you also have to admit that it doesn't seem like a fascinating prospect.

2- In the fourth installment, Harry has to find a way to stay underwater for an hour. He spends days and days searching the library for solutions to do this. In the book, the fake Moody wants to help Harry, and gives Neville a book about aquatic plants in the hope that he will advise Harry on which ones to use. But since Harry is totally ignorant of Neville, it is Dobby who gives him the gills, after listening to the fake Ojoloco Moody discuss their properties with Professor McGonagall. In the film, it is Neville himself who hands the magic plant to Harry.

3- Draco Malfoy was the anti-hero par excellence, and we all hated that he was a daddy's boy, that he thought he was better than anyone else and that he always made a face of smelling something disgusting. But at least Harry, Ron and Hermione stood up to him and made him look bad as soon as they could. But Neville was much more shy and had less self-esteem, so he was an easy target for Malfoy.

4 - Ron and Hermione are good people, yes, but they didn't pay much attention to Neville, especially in the early parts of the saga. In fact, Neville only knows what real friends are when he meets Ginny and Luna. Ravenclaw's always fitted in with Longbottom: Luna was comfortable with Neville and he was a bit protective of her, which is lovely. Admittedly, Ginny took advantage of him to go to the Christmas Ball, but presumably it was at that moment that she realized Neville's charm. Whether this trio would have been able to defeat Voldemort is something we will never know, although both Ginny and Luna showed great courage on several occasions, taking on anyone who touched them.

5- Luna Lovegood was a character loved by all, a strange girl but with a big heart. At the end of the saga, we can see that something is happening between Neville and Luna. How could they do that to us and leave it in the air? Let's face it, that story would have been a lot more entertaining than Harry and Ginny's romance. It would have been nice to see the relationship between the two Hogwarts geeks up close, but we can only treasure that moment when they were meant to be together.

6- Do you remember the cover of Attitude magazine made by Matthew Lewis, the actor who gives life to Neville, in June 2015? The whole world was amazed that that chubby kid from the first film had become a grown man, and one of the most attractive in the saga. If Neville had been a protagonist, he wouldn't have been made to wear false teeth in the films, and the change from boy to man wouldn't have come as a surprise. Of course, the weak, shy boy couldn't get more attention than the great Harry Potter.

7- Remember that the Dursley family only appears in the Harry Potter saga because they 'looked after' Harry. We hated them from the start, especially Dudley, Harry's nasty cousin whose only mission in life was to make our hero's summer bitter. We liked them a little better at the end of the story, when they seemed to show some affection for Harry. But we'd have missed all this if Neville was the main character. We would have known more about his family, his relationship with his mentally ill parents, and his grandmother, who by all accounts seems like a lady in arms. Who knows, maybe we would have hated this grumpy lady, who at least had much more interesting outfits than Petunia Dursley, judging by the clothes Neville showed us in the third film when he made Snape wear his grandmother's favourite dress.

~Erix_Ravenclaw