Hermione as Stategist (was: Harry as Leader (was: What has Harry learned?)

[phoenixgod2000]

No: HPFGUIDX 127470


Phoenixgod2000: I would argue that, at *best* Hermione is a 
competent but not great or even good strategist. And she won't ever 
be great because she lacks a fundamental understanding of humanity. 
See more below.
 
> Betsy:
> When Hermione sets herself to a task, she usually gets it done, 
and in 
> a rather efficient fashion.  There's the Polyjuice scheme in CoS, 
> where she figures out the goal, the components, and the method 
while 
> Ron and Harry are still throwing out random theories.

Polyjuice was a good plan. It was also a relatively simple one that 
played to her strengths at academia. And she still screwed it up for 
herself.

She does a 
> similar thing at the end of PoA with the time turner.  IIRC, 
Hermione 
> figures out most of Dumbledore's hints, and generally directs her 
and 
> Harry's path. (Could be some movie contamination sneaking in 
there.)

She was able to figure out DD meaning before Harry because, until 
that point, IIRC, Harry didn't know she had a time turner or that 
such a device even existed. And their success in the past was at 
least as much due to Harry as it was Hermione. More so, since he was 
the one to actually act and cast the patronus while she was still 
trying to figure out if it was a good idea to do that with the 
timeline.
 
> And of course there's the Rita Skeeter fun in GoF.

I'll give her this one. With the caveat that Skeeter is a canny 
reporter and it could bite her in the behind later. Which Hermione 
doesn't seem all that worried about.
 
> OotP is where Hermione's particular skills shine.

I would disagree. I would even go so far as to say that she was 
*worse* in OOTP than in the other books. Her best idea was the use 
of the Quibbler which was an unqualified sucess.

  She comes up with 
> the DA (a perfect way to take on Umbridge), and figures out how to 
> keep the group neatly under the radar.

The DA was a great plan, and much of the execution went off well, 
except that her SNEAK paper was a pretty stupid idea. It was a charm 
that was completely retroactive. It only worked *after* someone had 
already squealed. it didn't actually prevent anyone from talking. 
Not very smart at all.

She comes up with a plan,  
> totally on the fly, to get Harry out of Umbridge's 
clutches,<snipped> Her treatment of Umbridge was coldly ruthless - 
but efficiency and 
> ruthlessness often go hand in hand (at least in the books I read 
> *eg*), and Hermione was working under a pretty intense time crunch.

A sign that she can lie with a straight face quickly. A good skill 
to have, but very different from strategy.  Actually this is one of 
her worst plans. The only reason she and Harry survive it is because 
of Grawp, an X-factor she could not possibly have planned for or 
counted on. furthurmore, when I read the scene it seemed to me that 
she was absolutely shocked when the Centaurs (a violent race of 
human haters) wanted to actually *hurt* Umbridge.  She didn't read 
as ruthless to me at all.  

A good strategist doesn't plan a situation that they can only escape 
through dumb luck and without some understanding of how the others 
in the situation are going to react. Hermione did neither of those 
two things. she didn't understand centaurs, and used them anyway, 
and was caught totally off guard when they took offense.
 
> Even more impressively, Hermione recognizes the signs of 
Voldemort's 
> plan.  I think, because she's got a similar strategic way of 
thinking 
> she can tell that something's not quite right about Harry's 
dream.  
> She knows what *she'd* do if she was Voldemort, and so she gets 
> suspicious.

This shows that Hermione is smart, and she was able to put together 
what the scar connection meant. Thats not strategy, its at best pre-
strategy. A real strategy would have been figuring out how to use 
the connection for their own ends.
 
> What Hermione is *not* very good at is getting people to listen to 
> her. 

It's not a matter of her not getting people to listen to her, its a 
matter of understanding people. And she doesn't. That is why she 
won't ever be a great strategist. She has all of the elements a good 
one needs, but she lacks the key ingredient--the human factor. She 
doesn't really understand motivations. She doesn't get that people 
aren't going to always do the logical thing, that in fact people 
almost never do the logical thing. She can't read people or 
anticipate what they would do because she doesn't understand 
anything on more than a dry, academic level so thats what she bases 
all her plans around.  Her talk with Harry about Cho is a good 
example of this. when she was talking, it felt like she was reciting 
a psychological text on grief and what cho was feeling. It so 
happens that she was right in her case, but she doesn't really 
understand what cho was going through on an emotional level, she 
understands it on an academic, stages of grief, level. That explains 
why, for all her empathy, she never gets along with Luna. She 
doesn't fit any sort of lable or convention, and thats the only way 
Hermione knows how to relate to people. 
 
> SPEW is another perfect example.  Hermione's plan is a good one.

Actually her plan is a terrible one. She doesn't even have an 
overall plan. she has a goal, which is something very different.  
what plans she has involving SPEW are at best, haphazard. 

Hermione is a decent strategist when it comes to short plans like 
the polyjuice potion or 'the get sirius plan' becuse they are 
relatively uncomplictated and not cluttered by messy human 
components. It becomes a problem solving process and shes smart so 
shes good at those. To use a chess analogy, she can see three moves 
ahead, which is good for a short term goal, but if you want to win 
you have to see fifteen or twenty moves head. That goes beyond three 
step planning and enters the realm of contingencies and psychology. 

To use someone you brought up yesterday, Ender Wiggins is an example 
of a great strategist.  He beat his enemies because he understood 
them. He knew what they would sacrifice and how they would react to 
attacks. He knew what they would defend and how long they would do 
it for. and he knew what they would attack and what they would see 
as a threat. He knew the same things about his own people. He won 
his battles because he knew how to balance the conventional and the 
unconventional to keep his enemies off balance.

Hermione doesn't even know how to begin doing that.
  
> Betsy