What is Hermione afraid of?

[Richard]

No: HPFGUIDX 80416

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Jim Ferer" <jferer at y...> wrote:
> OTOH, I have no evidence whatsoever for this speculation, and
> Kirstini's got it there in black and white; but it troubles me.  It
> rang false from the first time I read it.  I have a hard time
> believing that, by this point in the saga that a bad grade is what
> frightens Hermione most.

moi (Richard) ...

Remember, we are talking about the Potter-verse as of the closing 
chapters of PoA, here, and it wasn't *A SINGLE* bad grade, but *ALL 
FAILING GRADES*!  Hermione is (at this point in the storyline) still 
more than a little insecure.  It is, after all, her self-doubts and 
internal insecurities that drive her to study harder than any other 
student.  If such insecurities can drive such a child to the lengths 
Hermione's drive her, the idea of such complete and abject failure 
can be believed as a "worst fear."

Jim Ferrer continued:
> Now what would it mean if Harry had another encounter with Dementors
> and his boggart was now a dead Hermione?

me again:

I think you got things a little confused, here.  Harry would have to 
have another encounter with a bogart, and if it presented itself as 
something other than a bogart, or specifically if it presented itself 
as Hermione's corpse, is what you are wondering about.  (A dementor 
is a dementor, and doesn't present itself as a bogart, after all.)  
If THIS happened, we'd know that Hermione occupies a more important 
place in Harry's heart than even Harry hypothetically realizes.

However, I don't think what we would see is such a presentation.  As 
Lupin pointed out, Harry was quite mature in his fear in PoA, since 
what he feared was fear ... or perhaps, more accurately and 
precisely, despair.  I think it likely that Harry would STILL cause a 
bogart to present as a dementor.  However, what Harry fears is 
changing.  He has now repelled real dementors repeatedly, and in non-
trivial numbers.  (A hundred in one case, and two in the other.)  
Dementors might well be so shorn or their terror for Harry that they 
would not be what a bogart would present itself as.  But, what then 
WOULD a bogart present as?

At the close of OotP, Harry isn't AFRAID of his position as LV's bane 
so much as he is rather depressed by the fact that he is truly 
isolated from others by his role, and that he dreads the idea that he 
must either kill (murder, in canon) Voldemort or be killed.

Dread isn't necessarily the same thing as fear, so I'm not even sure 
tha Harry would cause a bogart to present as something related to 
this fate (as Voldemort dead by his hand (admittedly quite 
paradoxical in its concept), or as Voldemort in immediate position to 
kill him).  I can't even say with confidence that isolation is now 
something Harry fears, as he IS isolated, so that has come to pass 
and is no longer a thing to fear.  What I am sure of is that whatever 
a bogart would present as upon encountering Harry would be extremely 
revealing, right now.  A truly bizarre result might be that, with 
Harry stripped of all things to fear, a bogart might become so 
confused as to either be incapable of presenting as anything other 
than itself, or die of the confusion and disorientation of such an 
encounter.

As regards the deaths of others, I also don't think Harry will truly 
fear this by the time we are well into book 6.  After losing Sirius, 
he knows that war means loss, and he likely now understands (or will 
shortly) that those around him are definitionally in danger, and that 
he will lose still more people close to him.  Knowledge of such 
things tends to have the peculiar effect of banishing fear of the 
event ... it becomes an anticipated, even dreaded, certainty, but 
accepted as unavoidable.

So, as I said, what a bogart would present as upon encountering Harry 
would be extremely revealing.  It might well still be a dementor, as 
proxy for the fear of fear, but even that would be terribly revealing 
now.

As for Hermione, I doubt that a bogart would present itself to her as 
McGonagall announcing complete failure in academics, now.  Having now 
faced death even more in earnest than in PoA, and having been 
seriously wounded in the process, AND having had close friends 
injured, *AND* having lost Sirius (who may not have been close, but 
was closer than Cedric, and by her close friendship with Harry an 
indirectly important person to her), her real fears may well be a 
much different form of failure: losing close friends, which she would 
presumably see as in some sense her fault.

I believe a bogart encountering Hermione would now do much the same 
as did the one Molly Weasley tried to banish.  It would present 
itself as someone close to her, or perhaps several people in 
sequence.  Both Ron and Harry are in the running, here, for all the 
reasons present in the SHIP threads.  The real question here may 
be, "Who else?"


Richard