Harry Potter

She does say that, regarding using the Cruciatus Curse on a student, “what the Minister doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” implying that everything she’s done up to then was known and kosher with him, and it’s only something on the level of an Unforgivable Curse that is, well, unforgivable.

Still think Hermione would stand up for Harry in this instance.

How do you even bash someone meant to be the Hate Sink?

You bash them for problems they aren't supposed to be hated for. Like how Prime Minister Honest is a Hate Sink, but also The Scrappy because people hate him for being a useless Flat Character

Or invent flaws they didn't actually have on top of the flaws they did. Like how fanfics like to turn the already odious Vernon into a [redacted] - often to make Petunia more sympathetic - but sometimes just because hey, we already hate him, so why not.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 14th 2021 at 11:30:12 AM

The Dursleys are just terrible people in general, they don't need help in doing it.

Well, Dudley got better. Vernon and Petunia are probably their usual selves.

When Vernon gets the Ron the Death Eater treatment, it's usually to give Petunia an excuse to leave him. In canon, by all appearances they had a great relationship based on their mutual love of hating everyone else, but Petunia had one or two sympathetic moments and Vernon had none, so she occasionally gets redeemed in fanfics.

Honestly, Hermione should get this treatment based on certain Canon actions of hers like when she conjured those canaries to attack Ron in HBP. Or the whole business with the Firebolt in POA.

Edited by dmcreif on Jan 16th 2021 at 12:35:44 PM

What did she do wrong with the Firebolt? Harry got a mysterious package from an unknown source at a time when there was an escaped mass-murderer after him, and she concluded this was shifty and told a teacher because she didn’t want him to die.

The Firebolt was checked and found to be safe. A prudent decision and zero harm done.

That’s just Hermione having common sense.

Edited by Galadriel on Jan 16th 2021 at 1:05:20 PM

Yeah. Protagonist-Centered Morality and all of that comes into play because we see things from Harry's point of view, and Harry is angry at Hermione causing the Firebolt he just got to be taken away from him with no guarantee that it would be whole again when they were done examining it.

The whole DA scroll thing was a better example, really.

I had a random thought.

Since House Elves don't actually get paid, why are they only seen in Old Money aristocratic houses? Why can't the Weasleys have a House Elf?

I thought the DA scroll was fine, given the stakes. I don,’t see any indication that Hermione could have put a spell on the parchment that physically prevented anyone from talking - that would have been incredibly powerful and probably illegal magic - so the best she could do was a spell that deterred betrayal and clearly revealed the traitor.

Marietta’s actions directly led to Dumbledore leaving the school. Dumbledore was the only one Voldemort feared, so this left the school incredibly vulnerable to an attack by Voldemort. It also left it controlled by Umbridge, who was able to expand her actions into torturing any student who opposed her (prior to that, I don’t think she had targeted anyone but Harry).

Marietta exposed every Muggle-born in the school to risk of genocide. Pimples were mild.

I expect the elf would typically be inherited as part of a wealthy estate. The Weasleys have a tall cottage, not an estate.

Edited by Galadriel on Jan 16th 2021 at 4:17:05 AM

Hermione's got a sympathetic motivation in the Firebolt incident. Someone sends Harry a ludicrously expensive present and does it anonymously to boot? When there's a deranged criminal after him?

Where she loses sympathy points though, is that she comes off as self-righteous. Going behind Harry's back is bad enough, but to not even say why until after is worse. She forms her hypothesis almost immediately and she doesn't say so until it's already done, when Harry is too angry to listen to her.

And that's not the only time this happens where Hermione can and has been wrong, but Rowling does everything she can to soften the blow for her.

For example, also in POA, Hermione is dismissive of her cat attacking Scabbers. She does not take steps to make sure Crookshanks will not encounter Scabbers—even bringing him up to the boys' dormitory, effectively enabling her cat to attack Ron's rat.

Granted, it's a mystery series and an observant reader will have noted things that were peculiar about Scabbers in the first place, but the whole reveal that Scabbers is actually Peter Pettigrew doesn't change the fact that Hermione was being callous towards Ron in regards to his pet.

And then there's two instances of this in Half-Blood Prince:

The first is Hermione being jealous of Harry and weary of the Half-Blood Prince's potions book. I'm admittedly a little sympathetic to Hermione here. While experimenting with Potion ingredients is dangerous, and she's right to be cautious, it's also a very important part of the subject. Hermione dismissing it out of hand is narrow-minded. That said, she's not wrong that Harry is not actually studying the book to understand the ways the modifications actually work. What's really bad is that when things go pear-shaped, Hermione can't resist the opportunity to say "I told you so," after Harry critically injures Malfoy in self-defense. She's constantly trying to get Harry to follow the rules, but breaks them herself with no remorse (getting angry at Harry when she thinks he dosed Ron with Felix Felicis, yet actually confounding Cormac McLaggen so Ron can get the Keeper spot).

The other is the whole bit with Hermione attacking Ron with the birds after she sees Ron making out with Lavender. The last image of that chapter is not Ron scattering injured, but a sob being heard from Hermione as she flees. And in the next chapter Harry and Hermione have nice conversation and don't even mention the incident. Then, later that chapter, Hermione laughs at Ron after he botches a spell, Ron imitates Hermione "jumping up and down" trying to answer a question in class and Hermione runs away in tears. All of this to reinforce that Hermione is REALLY the victim!

And that was just awful. Hermione had no right to retaliate to Ron's romancing Lavender with violence, especially since she never made it clear to Ron she thought of him romantically. And she doesn't apologize for laughing at Ron's mustache during the Transfiguration lesson—and I'm surprised Professor McGonagall tolerated their bickering.

Making it worse is that she uses the oppugno jinx to sic those birds on Ron, a jinx makes an object to follow the target and attack him no matter where he goes, and which was almost certainly what Dobby used to jinx the rogue bludgers in Chamber of Secrets ^note It's pretty clear that while house elves have their own magic, they can still use some wizarding spells. Note that at the Dursleys', Dobby used a hover charm to levitate and move the pudding. They may not utter incantation or use exact wand movements, but their intent is all the same. Even after knowing and seeing first hand how devastating an oppungo jinx could possibility be, if not used responsibly, Hermione still doesn't hesitate to unleash that jinx against Ron in that fit of anger, while on the other hand, the most Ron did when he was in a very similar situation during Goblet of Fire was to throw a temper tantrum. It shows that while Ron's "retributions" are usually harmless, Hermione's on the other hand are cold, calculated and disproportionate. In fact, this could've easily ended with the canaries pecking out Ron's eye.

Edited by dmcreif on Jan 16th 2021 at 4:45:11 AM

Don't get me wrong, Hermione is a great character, but as the series progressed, she sort of took on this "the person who accomplishes everything" role.

Partly it was for narrative convenience (don't know something, or need to do something? Hermione's read about it somewhere!) but I also think the movies subtly influenced the writing of the books in a number of ways. We already see to a degree how this happened with Snape because of Alan Rickman's portrayal of him. But you also see a lot more "Ron's a doofus" and "Hermione is perfect" moments in the later books, the ones written after the movies had started coming out.

There were moments where Hermione was presented as, if not in the wrong, then at least not handling things as well as she should have. She botched the entire house-elf liberation thing, because while her goal of ending slavery was noble, she spent all her time telling the house-elves what she thought they wanted instead of listening to them^note Sidenote, this is a big reason why a lot of black/PoC Harry Potter fans don't think Hermione can be read as black. Handing out badges, calling useless meetings and telling oppressed people how they ought to feel doesn't fit with Hermione being black IMHO. Not to say that black women/girls can't be bad at activism, but Hermione is shown as brilliant in so many things and for this to be the thing she sucks at, would be pretty bad. And Hermione also comes off as confused rather than offended or outraged at Draco Malfoy calling her a "Mudblood". She recognizes that it's rude, but she doesn't show much of a reaction other than observing "Draco is a bad person", instead of, "Wow, the wizarding world is prejudiced too", as you'd expect if she was in a minority in a 95%+ white Anglo-Saxon society. (which is why I love it when Hagrid flat-out refuses to join SPEW and tells her that she doesn't understand house elves. It's so rare we see anyone put her in her place in the series so that always stuck out to me). And of course, she was dismissive and at times directly hostile to Luna just because Luna had ideas that clashed with Hermione's. But nothing ever came of this. Luna has no problems counting Hermione as one of her closest friends even though Hermione didn't really do anything to earn this...

...and the story with the house-elves looks like it's going somewhere, but then it just sort of doesn't, and in Deathly Hallows, Hermione is suddenly the one who knows all about what it was like for Kreacher, and Ron thinking about the house-elves in the Battle of Hogwarts is treated like this big moment for Ron... except this doesn't really match with how things have been up until then, because Ron had been a lot better with house-elves than Hermione has. He gets along with the Hogwarts house-elves, he compliments their work, he gives Dobby presents. He even gives Dobby his socks to be buried with. While he hasn't been all "end the slavery," he's related to the elves on a personal level that Hermione plain hasn't done. Showing concern for them and not wanting them to be hurt in a war is perfectly consistent with how Ron has been with house-elves this entire time.

But somehow Deathly Hallows had to twist this to Hermione having been right all along and Ron needing to learn another lesson. Huh.

The biggest takeaway from instances like this and the Firebolt incident is that Hermione was never actually forced to confront her own flaws like Harry and Ron were. Either the flaws were quietly ignored, or she turned out to have been right all along.

There's an old saying, "Just because you're right doesn't mean that you're correct." And Hermione's biggest and most consistent flaw is that she does not consider other people's feelings. It's more important for her to be RIGHT than it is for her to be considerate. The narrative does include a few token scenes where people rightfully get upset with her because of this (no, Hermione, when Lavender is crying because her pet rabbit has been killed, that is NOT the time to "logically" point out that Divination is flawed; or when Harry's devastated by Dumbledore's death, he's going it alone, they didn't even get one Horcrux, and he's leaving his only home, while Hermione's like "but yeah anyway I was still technically right about the whole Eileen Prince thing"), but beyond those token scenes there really aren't any consequences for Hermione whatsoever. On the occasions when there are, it's usually turned around so that Hermione is presented as blameless or at least in the right.

While all of the important and recurring characters had some character development, I would say that Hermione only learned a bit of tact (or resignation) while dealing with others. Honestly, I sometimes feel that Crabbe and Goyle had more character development, going from Malfoy's mute bodyguards to arsonists for Voldemort (even if, granted, most of that character development is off screen).

Edited by dmcreif on Jan 16th 2021 at 4:43:16 AM

Yeah, Hermione if anything can also be used to illustrate why she's in Gryffindor and not Ravenclaw. She's very smart and clever, yes, but at the same time she can be very headstrong, overly confident, and always sure that she's in the right and refusing to hear a word against her.

The DA scroll was just vindictiveness. An actually effective method of deterring any attempts to sell them out would have been a Tongue-Tying Jinx or whatever was at Grimmauld Place in Hallows, which seems to make it impossible to talk about the secret. Or, hell, even just telling people that there were security measures to fuck over any traitors. Marietta would have been a lot less likely to spill if she'd known doing it would get her disfigured.

That was at least a thing that the movies fixed. No scroll or disfigurement.

Really for me the biggest dick-move about it was that apparently those blemishes don't come off.

This is what should have happened to Hermione for jinxing Cormac McLaggen.

And this for the canary incident.

Edited by dmcreif on Jan 18th 2021 at 12:12:21 PM

The blemishes being permanent even with magical treatment is actually kind of impressive in a horrifying way.

Also, if you're going to make more Wall of Text posts, it'd be a good idea to put them in folders. Especially if you double post (which you should also try to avoid in the future).

Edited by M84 on Jan 19th 2021 at 3:36:14 AM

4x

On the flipside, considering DA was kept a secret specifically because there was a sadistic tyrant going around who gleefully tortured students for defying what she saw as the will of the Ministry, it's hard to feel that sorry for anyone deciding to go and screw everyone else over by snitching to Umbridge. :/

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jan 19th 2021 at 10:15:42 AM

The series in general isn't kind towards cowards who sell out people to tyrants.

Marietta got off light compared to, say, Wormtail at least.

Edited by M84 on Jan 19th 2021 at 5:48:52 PM

Plus the idea that she only did it because she thought she'd get away with it is... Not great. In the HP world, pretty much all contracts come with some sort of repercussions if broken. It seems to be an unwritten law of how magic works.

Marietta still broke her word and sold out her friends. However sympathetic her motives may havebeen and whatever she expected to happen next she gets no real sympathy from me for actually suffering consequences for it.

Even without the jinx, betraying the trust of others having supernatural consequences for the traitor wouldn't be too hard to believe.

Remember this is a setting where magical bonds are formed when one magic user saves another's life, and where one's sacrifice forms a powerful magical counter-charm that can stop the normally unblockable Killing Curse.

Heck, maybe the taint of betrayal is the reason the jinx's effects are permanent. Normally, inflicting permanent damage like that is the hallmark of powerful Dark Magic like sectumsempra or the curse Voldemort put on the Gaunt Ring.

Edited by M84 on Jan 19th 2021 at 8:02:17 PM

Wasn't Marietta also later Obliviated by Kingsley? Meaning the poor girl has no idea what she did that led her to be branded as a snitch?