Revenge on Rita was First lesson

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 185782

> Magpie:
 I don't remember anyone in canon ever 
> regretting Hermione's treatment of Rita or thinking for a second 
> they'd contributed to the "crazy Harry" story in OotP by it. 

Pippin:
It's in GoF. Hermione pulls out her copy of the Prophet, and Harry is
worried about what it might say. Hermione says that there's nothing,
just a small piece saying that he'd won the tournament. Not even
anything about Cedric. She guesses Fudge is forcing them to keep quiet.

"He'll never keep Rita quiet," said Harry. "Not on a story like this."
Whereupon Hermione announces that Rita has been keeping quiet since
the third task and isn't going to be writing anything at all for a
while. Hermione's a little scared of what she's done, judging by her
"oddly constrained" and "trembling" voice. 

At the time, they're expecting  a crime spree, and then Fudge will
just look stupid. But on re-reading, it's clear that they just shot
themselves in the foot. 

Harry is dispassionate about Rita's stories "Gone off me a bit, hasn't
she?" except when Snape makes it personal. Then he's angry at Snape.
But Hermione gets angry, not at the person who sent her bubotuber pus,
but at Rita, and unlike Harry, she seeks revenge. I wouldn't call that
dispassionate. All Harry does is call Rita a cow behind her back. 


> 
> Magpie:
> I have never seen that as being a theme of canon at all. How does 
> something working out well within the fictional world translate into
 a warning that this sort of thing doesn't work out well in that same
 fictional world? Storybook revenge is just fine plenty of times in 
these books. 
> 

Pippin:
It's like the Tale of Three Brothers. It can be read as a morality
tale, but Dumbledore prefers to see it as a bit of history, preserved
in the form of a morality tale. He still draws a lesson from it, but
not the same one. For him, it's not a story about death, it's a story
about three dangerously gifted wizards. The main point, that the cloak
can be used to protect others, is only a passing detail in the
morality narrative, but becomes very important when linked to other
events. 

Of course Beedle the Bard never expected his book to be read as
history. But JKR certainly expected Dumbledore to read it that way,
and wrote Beedle's work with that in mind. In the same way, I believe
that canon is designed so that one may read the books as feigned
history rather than as a morality tale, and yet still draw a lesson
from them. 

Hermione doesn't feel remorse, in the sense that she's sorry for the
pain that she caused Rita. Nor does she feel that she was a bad person
for indulging in blackmail. Nevertheless, she took a great risk, one
which frightened her, and produced very mixed results. We know it
wasn't worth it because she didn't try it again.

Pippin