Unpopular opinion time: fandom edition.

Hermione Granger. Too good for Ron. Too good for Harry. I’m sick of how idealised she is by fans with a selective memory, so I’ll take a moment to tear into everyone’s favourite girl genius. Please forgive me.

Where to begin? For a start, she’s not really that much of a genius. Hermione is portrayed as some omniscient know-it-all who can answer every question and solve every problem, but let’s remember that the story is told through Harry’s eyes and so everything should be taken as relative. I suspect that 11-year-olds struggling with their maths homework think that classmates who find it easy must be extraordinarily gifted, but they can all develop into adults of very average intelligence.

We’re dealing with secondary-school level material here, and I suspect that Hermione only stands out because A) she’s the only one who bothers to do the set reading and B) she’s arrogant enough to put her hand up for every question, when a lot of people will have a good idea of the answer but not want to show off.

When it comes to actual questions of truth, not just easy classwork, Hermione doesn’t have the best track record. She refuses to believe that Snape can have any involvement with Voldemort, because “he’s a teacher”, just as she refuses to believe that Malfoy can have become a Death Eater. Both theories turned out to be correct.

She denies that divination has any merit and openly laughs at anyone who feels otherwise, but almost every prediction made in the books comes true, and she also mocks any belief in the Deathly Hallows. Her narrow-mindedness constantly holds the trio back, when Harry and Ron have figured out the truth very early on but she refuses to accept it.

Now, Hermione is portrayed as being rational, a rare witch of science, but her decisions here have been anything but. She doesn’t base her beliefs on evidence, but on gut feeling, and in fact blindly ignores any evidence to the contrary. Her mind is completely shut to new information, as she is arrogant enough to think that she already knows all that there is to know. It’s a highly unscientific and irrational viewpoint to have in our world, and to hold it in a world where you’ve already been shocked by the existence of magic is outright stupid.

It is seen as a comedy when Xenophilius Lovegood claims Luna describes her friend as “Not unintelligent, but painfully limited. Narrow. Closed-minded.”, but this is the most accurate description of the teenage witch that I’ve ever seen.

She’s not that smart, then, just hard working. We all know people who aren’t that naturally bright, but still get good grades simply because they revise themselves to death. Apparently alone of the main characters, Hermione does all of her homework on time and to her greatest ability, and constantly looks to improve her grades through additional reading and study. At first sight, we might praise this as her true strength: she may not be a genius, but she’s certainly a worker.

Again, though, all is not how it’s portrayed. If we actually have a think about Hermione’s work ethic, it gets more creepy than commendable. This is a girl who, at 11, claimed that getting expelled was worse than dying. This is a girl who, two years later, was shown that her greatest fear was failing a test. This is a girl who travelled through time to study more, who spends her every waking second in the library, who tries to enforce this ridiculous obsession onto other people.

She’s not just “hard-working”; she’s seriously messed up. Nobody should care that much about grades, particularly ones that aren’t even actual qualifications. Hermione never really learns to sort out her priorities, and so her work ethic is simply a result of a completely skewed mind where her own academic success comes far above spending time with her friends. She’s cold, vain and obsessed enough to believe that homework really does come before human beings, and that’s hardly something we should be applauding.

Her vanity pops up from time to time, whether making a massive scene because Harry beat her in a single subject or lying to trick Madam Pomfrey into giving her cosmetic surgery. The teenage egotist could hardly be more self-obsessed, and her skewed priorities mean that she is terrible with other people. Ron isn’t being harsh when he says “no wonder she hasn’t got any friends”, just painfully honest. Hermione starts the series being rude, dismissive and controlling of everyone she meets, and they are rightfully repulsed by her attitude.

Her time with the boys softens her a bit, but the famous example with Lavender’s rabbit shows that she still hasn’t learnt any empathy. Proving yourself right comes first, and respect for other people comes a distant eighth. It’s not just humans, either: we all remember SPEW’s forced “freeing” of house elves who didn’t want to be freed, traumatising the victims and leading to a lot of hostility between the two species. Hermione created her world’s equivalent of FEMEN, and virtually goes around ripping people’s burqa’s off to “liberate” them. Once again, she assumes that her gut opinion is right, and doesn’t bother trying to understand anything different. Reason and compassion both take an off day.

Hermione also displays prejudice against centaurs and werewolves, showing that this lack of reason and compassion is spread out to all sapient creatures, and her actions are hardly better than her beliefs. We all cheered when she punched Malfoy for saying things she didn’t like, but we’d be calling him a brute if it were the other way around. She later physically assaults Ron for kissing another girl, in a psychotic reaction to being friendzoned that rivals even the most bitter and violent “nice guy”, and then make domestic assault a habit when she attacks her boyfriend for walking out on Harry.

Hardly the behaviour of a rational scientist, or even a peaceful and well-adjusted human, but we’ve already seen that Hermione is neither. She goes beyond this casual violence, too, such as when deliberately leading Umbridge to be attacked (some say raped) by the centaurs. Just as worrying as her willingness to inflict pain or death on her teacher, though, is her arrogant attempt to manipulate the centaurs into doing her dirty work having previously spoken of them as sub-human “horses”. Add the oft-forgotten fact that she abducted and held hostage a journalist because she didn’t like what had been written, and Hermione is quite the villain.

She doesn’t use her intellect to solve disputes in a rational and level-headed way. Instead, her unbalanced and uncaring mind flips straight to violence as a knee-jerk response. That’s why I maintain that she would have made a decent antagonist, in the absence of a common enemy. She has the self-obsession and drive to improve and perfect herself (even at the expense of others) that Voldemort had, and the desire to boss and control others for their own good (even if they don’t want you to) that Grindelwald did.

Dumbledore describes Tom Riddle as a boy who has a good technical understanding of magic, but cannot truly become a great wizard because he will never truly grasp the importance of love, which you cannot read about in a book. Personally, this passage has always reminded me of Hermione. If Voldemort hadn’t existed, she might well have filled that void. If the boys hadn’t gone to save her from the troll, and henceforth introduced her to love, she could have become a second, even colder Grindelwald. She could have grown strong, with Dumbledore and Harry focusing on Riddle, and the series could have ended with her bursting into power. What a beautifully circular narrative that would have been.

In short: stop idealising this girl. She is as deeply flawed as any character in the series, and gets as much wrong as she does right. Transforming her into some sort of Mary Sue, given that she’s already Rowling’s self-admitted insert, cheapens the whole series.