Oh, TV Tropes...!

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

Quite honestly, the Harry Potter stuff on that site has gotten to the point where I can't read it because just about everything is fawning over how great and super-special-awesome the series is, oh, and how Snape is an evil douchebag who wanted to get Harry and James killed so he could keep Lily. But this... this makes me want to scream:

"Hermione... [is] one of the smartest and more pro-active females in the whole Harry Potter canon and English literature in general"

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!

How could they make such a claim?! Hermione is a better heroine than, say, Tiffany Aching?! How about Eliza Doolittle?! And I'm sure you could come up with other examples.

No, no, in Harry Potter it seems fairly obvious that the most powerful women in the series are antagonists. Sure, Hermione's perfectly independent and capable, but in the last several books it's like she becomes Harry's servant because he's too lazy to do anything himself!

God damn it, Harry Potter wouldn't bother me so much if everyone didn't insist it was the greatest thing since sliced bread!

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

But by that logic, you could also say that any action which seems to show Hermione having empathy was also the result of bad writing one way or another (she wrote Hermione as teary-eyed at Plot Point X because it popped into her head as something girls do in the movies, or something), and therefore can't be used to say anything definitive about her character. She might have intended to portray Hermione as a troubled, highly-strung girl who very occasionally has some good impulses peek through, and you're just mpaping those incidents of bad writing - tears-as-cliche for a vague girly emotional reaction, juvenile self-important impulse to do Great Things and lead a Moral Crusade - straight onto real life, without adjusting for the bad writing, leading to an extreme position where Hermione is a paragon of morality.

You could read her consistently as a deeply troubled kid who occasionally has good impulses and suffers through lack of good guidance, in which case the good impulses would be the discontinuities, and then you'd have to consider tossing them out as writing mistakes ;-)

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

I think that the common denominator here is that JKR is not a good enough writer to clearly portray her one way or the other. I wonder if her cruel acts aren't more of a result of JKR trying to make her more edgy or badass, and her cliched tears added in because "hey, she's female, right?" On the whole, I'm starting to think that her characterization is too inconsistent to be able to make a case for her being either a sociopath or a warm, caring girl.

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

Agree with this. Personally I think of the first four and last three books as practically two separate series, featurning different characters who just happen to share the same names.

[sunnyskywalker]

That sounds about right, sadly. I mean, that Shrieking Shack scene bounces around between a very cold Hermione (upset that they'll be in trouble, not that they possibly badly injured someone who was trying to save their lives, and just turning away so a guy could be murdered), to a Hermione who might have some empathy (she maybe-kinda-sorta is interested in a fair hearing and justice, possibly, although it's hard to tell - see next point), to a Hermione who honestly seems like she's just there to ask the questions the reader is asking. It's like a bunch of different plot necessities (have to get exposition, have to have Harry look most empathetic because his name's on the cover, have to show Hermione being stressed like all year and worried about school rules because that's one of her tags) just got mushed together, and I really don't know how anyone's supposed to sort out an actual consistent interpretation of her character.

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/I wonder if her cruel acts aren't more of a result of JKR trying to make her more edgy or badass/

I think that that may be it. I remember JKR saying that Hermione would ‘loosen up’ in the last three books. Maybe Hermione’s behavior was a result of JKR trying to make her less of an uptight stick-in-the-mud.