I would love to reference some obscure character and name him or her as my literary doppelganger, but the rather boring truth of the matter is that I am largely a reflection of Hermione Granger (…or should I say that she is a reflection of me? Isn’t it sad that I think of HP as the foundation, and me as an offshoot of it?) Why, you may ask? Boy, oh boy, this is going to be complicated.
Hermione Jean Granger… a key member of the trio of heroes, the “smartest witch of her age,” the most rational of all rationalists. But there’s far more to her (and me) as well. Like Hermione, I have always been the one who has opted to stay in in favor of finishing a homework assignment, and nearly every one of my teachers (and, to a lesser extent, my professors in college now) would have adopted me if given a chance because of my limitless enthusiasm for learning and the fact that I could’ve aced my classes blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back. I have always loved learning for the sake of learning, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been mocked for uttering sentiments similar to Hermione’s when she shrieked that she just knew she’d failed everything and then wound up being at the top of her class anyway. My high school years were filled to the brim with sarcastic comments from my fellow students asking me in pseudo-horror if I’d “only” gotten a 99% on an assignment. Yet there are flashes of rebellion in Hermione (such as when she founded the DA in Phoenix) and in those moments she seems most alive – it’s as though when she is the one defining the boundaries of what she is willing to do and risk, rather than simply living by the limits set up by others, that she really understands her capabilities beyond just being “the smart one.”
Beyond that, I know what it’s like to be the killjoy who can’t help but be relentlessly realistic. This is both one of my biggest peeves about Hermione as well as our main sort-of divergence of character. Hermione is seemingly incapable of accepting that anything outside of her narrow sphere of reality can possibly exist, which always blows me away since HELLO YOU’RE A WITCH – but even given that fact, Hermione steadfastly refuses to even contemplate the concept that the Deathly Hallows exist (one of about a billion examples of this sort of behavior). While her firm denial of such oddities is often helpful in keeping the more capricious and impractical Harry and Ron on track, it also sets them back on occasion, especially when it came to her constant arguments with Harry over the Horcruxes and Hallows.
But let’s concentrate on a few other character traits that make her and me two peas in a pod. Hermione’s greatest fear (according to her boggart) is a fear of failure – this has long been my weakness, and while blowing out my birthday candles every year, I would squeeze my eyes shut and desperately wish that I would accomplish everything I ever wanted to before I died. In recent months, this most desperate desire and fear has changed, but it doesn’t alter the fact that my panic at the thought of failure shaped the person I became.
Hermione also stands up for those who have no real voice (such as the house elfs), and she is deeply empathetic when it comes to understanding others’ situations (such as her automatic inclination to believe Griphook’s recollection of the tense history between goblins and wizards rather than favoring other wizards’ versions of it). For years I was ready to give up everything so that I could devote my life to helping those facing human rights violations, and more recently I’ve abandoned that in order to pursue advocating for and aiding animals, who literally have no voice in human society.
Lastly, Hermione and I share the (sometimes unfortunate) trait of pushing our own emotions and concerns to the background because we’re so concentrated on understanding and analyzing the other people and events going on around us. We spend so much time looking at our surroundings and attempting to comprehend every facet of them so that we’re never caught off-guard that we never really look inwards in hopes of understanding ourselves. She let seven years go by without ever confronting Ron and telling him that she was in love with him (hmm, familiar!), instead suffering through the whole Lavender debacle silently (albeit sullenly). When Ron left Hermione and Harry in Hallows, she cried for weeks but attempted to hide that fact from Harry; even after erasing her parents’ memories she only brought it up at all in order to make a point to Harry. Yet Hermione could perfectly interpret all of Cho’s actions and motivations when Harry was confused about her behavior in Phoenix, and she was the first to notice the connection between Harry and Ginny – Hermione understands other people and creatures, not herself. Same here.
There are probably a plethora of other examples that I can think of and other ways of scrutinizing Hermione’s character, but honestly my brain isn’t working too quickly today and I have a bunch of other posts to catch up on, so this is all for now. I might revise this post at some point since I’m definitely dissatisfied with it.
