Is Luna Lovegood the anti-Hermione?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 113791

Rob wrote:
> > I'm playing around with the idea that Luna has been introduced as
 an all-purpose opposition to Hermione. I figure this character is
required because Hermione's other nemeses (is that even a word?), 
namely Trelawney and Skeeter, don't seem to be taking anything more
than a bit part in the action, and Hermione definitely deserves 
better than that.
> > 
> > Luna, on the other hand, provides this opposition in spades. Luna
is  an... 'intuitive' thinker, shall we say, vs. Hermione's straight 
up rationalist approach to the world.  I suspect she will provide 
romantic competition for Hermione vis a vis Ron. And as flakey as she
presents, Luna is no pushover.

Pat responded:
> 
> I love Luna's character.  She does seem to fill in the missing 
> pieces of personality that Hermione lacks.  It was fun to watch 
> Hermione's attitude toward her change--at first she was entirely 
> annoyed with anything Luna did or said, but by the end, even though 
> she thought she was still a bit wacky, she refrained from making a 
> snide comment when Luna said where she and her dad were going on 
> holiday.
> 
> I don't know about anything romantic with Luna/Harry or Luna/Ron.  
> But I do think she will be the person who gives Harry permission, so 
> to speak, to open up about his grief as well as his anger.  Hermione 
> is very perceptive--as we saw with her explanation to the boys about 
> what girls are thinking and feeling.  But when Harry has a problem, 
> she's ready to jump in and fix it.  Luna seems more likely to just 
> let him talk, with a few comments to let him know that she 
> understands--such as their conversation at the end about ghosts and 
> about the voices behind the veil.  Right now, Harry needs a good 
> listener, and I think that is going to be Luna.

Carol adds:
While I don't "love" Luna, I think she's an important counterbalance
to Hermione. (I won't call her a foil because she doesn't have enough
traits in common with Hermione for the term to apply, and she's not a
nemesis, either, since they're not really enemies--more like opposing
forces in Harry's life.) Certainly she's intended as a recognizable
antithesis of Hermione, but I think she may also have a role to play
in helping Hermione to develop a more balanced view of reality. Even
if authors were infallible, books would not provide the answers to
every question in life. Some things have to be experienced, not read
about, to be learned or understood, and some truths defy rationality
and empiricism and can only be "learned" through intuition or a leap
of faith. I'm surprised that Hermione so readily accepted the
existence of ghosts, which her Muggle books must have taught her were
figments of the imagination. Luna almost certainly has a better grasp
of what death might mean than Hermione does. I'd like to see her in
Trelawney's class (although we won't, unless she skips a year and is
moved to Gryffindor). What would she see in the crystal ball, and how
would she interpret it? Maybe she's a Seer, the Heir of Cassandra
Trelawney. ;-)

In any case, I expect to see Hermione learn some sort of lesson
through Luna, something that makes her less skeptical and judgmental
and more tolerant of intuitive as opposed to reason-based thinking.
No, I don't think Luna's father's Quibbler articles are anything other
than the WW equivalent of the National Inquirer (a sensational
newspaper with headlines like "Alien Pregnant with Elvis's Twins"),
but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Luna and her father bring home a
crumple-horned snorkak over the summer and it ends up as the subject
of study in Hagrid's Care of Magical Creatures class. It would just
prove that books in the WW can be as mistaken in their ideas of which
creatures are real and which are mythical as the RW books Hermione
must have read as a child were about unicorns and dragons.

Carol