Hermione the Vigilante?

[lunamk03]

No: HPFGUIDX 149338

-m wrote:
> So yeah, it's not just about Hermione considering herself judge 
> and jury of the WW for me, but just that putting someone in their 
> place doesn't mean they'll stay there.  Hermone begins the books 
> as the girl Ron says, "Has got to have noticed she's got no 
> friends."  
> She's made friends since then, but she hasn't lost the parts of 
> her personality that made her initially disliked.  I think 
> canonically we see that she likes manipulating people--when they 
> do what she wants and prove she understood them it's like getting 
> the right answer on a test.  But eventually that kind of thing 
> means you've got to watch your back.


Luna here:
This discussion about Hermione's decisions and right to impart 
punishments makes me remember other famous children stories, 
especially from European writers. They are not supposed to be 
politically correct and most of the time the characters are not 
supposed to be polite and controlled or do the "right thing". Yet, 
it is Harry Potter we are talking about and we all know that we tend 
to overanalyze it and to extrapolate our own values into these books.

In most children stories, the "bad behaviors" are ruthlessly 
punished. I see Jo following the same pattern. Jo already told us 
that Hermione and Dumbledore were the characters she used as her 
voice. I see Hermione as the character that Jo is also using to 
impart some level of justice or punishment to wrong doers. 
Hermione's actions are not isolated events or product of her 
capricious mind but rather the consequence of a series of events. 
Her punishments, although severe, do not seem to have a lasting 
effect (I don't agree with the idea that "poor Edgecomb girl" is 
marked for life. In HBP she could dissimulate her marks under make-
up, which means that the marks are erasing little by little) and 
seemed to be just the right dose to serve wrong-doers well. Seeing 
these punishments, I think it was very civilized of Jo not to have 
Rita smashed, or Umbridge cut into pieces or the Edgecomb girl 
dropping dead the moment she betrayed everyone.

Everything needs to be seen in the books context. Jo needed Rita to 
be free in book 5, so she didn't decide that Hermione should send 
her to Azkaban, for example. As I see it, there is a reason for 
everything in the books. Judging Hermione as a flesh and blood moral 
person instead of seeing her for what she is: a character in a 
children / young adult book serving the author to advance a plot, 
is, well, kind of interesting but not very constructive.

BTW, I don't see Hermione as being especially manipulative... Can 
you give me some examples of Hermione being manipulative? If you are 
talking about the centaurs, I see it as Hermione's impulse to stop 
her best friend from being put into a Cruciatus curse. She knew 
Centaurs disliked humans, but wouldn't hurt children. She wanted to 
get rid of Umbridge, this was a good way to do it, although, at the 
end, it didn't work exactly as she thought it would...

Luna