I always got the impression that Hermione is exceptionally good at reading. That is, she can understand what is written in a text very clearly (which isn't as easy as it sounds). Based on canon, I can't say we see any evidence of her excellence as a researcher, i.e., someone who writes texts, as opposed to reading them. However, one can argue that a teenager, no matter how sharp, simply doesn't have the depth or coverage required to be a researcher.

But is has to be said that her grasp of Magic is far advanced then her peers, at least those that feature prominantly in the books.

 

Like Luna, her characterization has been polluted by fandom cliches, and piss-poor writing.

The two usually go hand-in-hand.

 

Cliches for Hermione? I hate are when authors water-down her traits to just being a nut-hugging, expository, nag. She is a bit deeper than that in all fairness. (I actually like Hermione so let's kill any jokes about that's all she's about in Canon.)

As for her being a genius? Not sure why people feel the need to split hairs about her intelligence. She's a clever witch whose fairly intelligent. That's about all there is. No 'she's just good learning', or 'reading only', but 'not researching' nonsense. She's bright, end of story.

I think most split hairs because they realize she is smart, but only grudgingly accept it in certain areas by cherry-picking parts of canon to justify their argument, ignoring others. Kind of a subtle character bashing? (That's probably a stretch, though.)

 

Because the stories are told from the POV of an idiot, we cannot know how Hermione stands compared to other good students. Does she have the best grades in her year? Does anyone get grades almost as good as hers with half the effort? Because of plot reasons, Hermione got a lobotomy in book 7. Thus we have never seen an older Hermione being smart. Because the insertion of a single competent character, even one weak in magic, into the canon plot would have completely ruined the story (all canon characters are holding the idiot ball at all times).

 

Proof of her intelligence? Did you read canon, or just dismiss every word out thinking they all held the idiot ball. Want proof? OotP. She made a Protean Charm. Everyone was impressed because it was seventh year magic. Seems pretty smart to me.

 

That says nothing about her intelligence. All it means is that Hermione is more than 'merely competent' at magic.

 

Exactly. Harry, after all, cast the Patronus charm during his third year, and it isn't even a part of the standard DADA curriculum because it's supposedly so difficult.

 

I'll let my previous post retort to this.

What I don't get is that most recognize her intelligence in the books, but readers won't acknowledge it because they don't want to give her full credit.

 

I fully recognize she's intelligent. From the books, I've always got the impression she is similar in intelligence to myself. However, when people go around giving her an IQ of 175, or capable of taking twelve NEWTs in fifth year, I get seriously pissed off. She is very intelligent compared to most of the population. But a genius she is not.

In response to the Protean Charm point, in real life, most of the people in my school are able to do at least one thing that is learnt in the last year of A-level. I am brilliant at maths for example. But this doesn't mean that we are genius's, it just means we are really good at something. Hermione has always been good at charms, but being exceptional at one subject hardly means that she will turn out as the next Albus Dumbledore.

It is Genius!Hermione that I can't stand. I love Intelligent!Hermione if she is like most intelligent people, and has got some things that she doesn't perform at nearly as well at then others.

 

Because Rowling tried to make her only smart character -you know since it is is self insert- while main character was an idiot.

Fuck you Rowling

 

I honestly thought Ginny was her self insert.

 

New pet-peeves: fainting.

On it's one it's just annoying, now that it has plagued 90% of the fanfictions of every fandom, sometimes I just close the window when I see it, it's that bad :/

 

What? You don't like it when people faint in fanfics?

 

As bad as blushing and writing in diaries instead of journals.

 

I can understand that. People don't faint very often in real life, and when they do it's almost always because of heat, or something mundane like standing up.

It's melodramatic, and I'm a naturalist.

 

Sweatdrops and face-faults.

 

Strictly speaking, a genius is one whose IQ is 145, or three standard deviations above the mean (100). This is one in every three hundred people, approximately, since the curve doesn't follow the standard Gaussian distribution for various reasons, but the point is that Hermione might very well be of Genius-level intelligence (likely the only one in the school, though perhaps there are one or two more if the average class size is larger than 40).

That said, Genius-level intelligence is strongly overhyped by the media. It does confer a relative learning advantage, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if one managed to take the NEWTs during their fifth year. In real life, people who aren't geniuses skip high school and go straight to college, so compressing seven years of education into five doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.

 

Fainting after a fight, particulary, but yeah, fainting is more common than having cramp in fanfic, and it irks me.

Genius... Well, I always thought than a motivated above-average was more productive than a unmotivated 3-standard-deviations-above-100 genius so it does not bother me much when authors don't go out of their way to show Hermione as the next Hawking.

(And I hate absolutes, so sayings like smartest witch in the entire generation in the entire world in the entire universe bother me. And I just can't stomach things like reading the entire Hogwarts Library before 6th year.)

 

Testify! These days, it seems a disturbing amount of people, even here, are knocking each other down in their rush to suck Snape's dick.

He didn't join the wizarding equivalent of the Klan because he was a noble and misunderstood romantic, and he didn't treat Harry (and many other students) like worm-ridden dog shit to keep his supposed 'cover'.

I've explained this before, but no sane headmaster would have let a professor get away with the excesses in which Snape routinely indulged... unless the headmaster needed him for something else. So, in fact, Snape treating every non-Slytherin (particularly Harry) like garbage would not have been a good cover, because if the headmaster didn't need him for some other vital purpose (*cough* spying) he'd have cut him loose so fast his head would spin.

And, Voldemort is certainly smart and/or paranoid enough to realize that.

If anything, that Snape gets away with the shit he does should make him MORE suspicious to Voldemort.

Okay, first: uke:

Second: Yeah... didn't happen in the books. :|

And, if it DID, Snape would be an even more colossal douche than before, because it likely meant he was there either when Voldemort killed James and tried to kill Harry, or after James and Lily were dead but before Harry was taken... and just left him there.

Probably after shaving off all of Lily's hair so he could use it in Polyjuice. :fire

Are you a moron or a troll?

You know, the hilarious thing is that one of the few scenes of Snape as a teen shows him -wait for it... Literally Harming Flies. So much for that cliché turn of phrase. :awesome

With that opening broadside out of the way...

Snape was no angel, and we are lead to believe that he gave as good as he got. Furthermore, he didn't join a racist hate group because he was keen on playing a greasy, unfuckable, James Bond wannabe some day and thought this would get him there.

And, if anyone claims he joined for other reasons than hating the 'impure', like wanting to belong and being emo, that just makes him worse. If you knowingly join a group that promotes hate and genocide, not because you believe in their ideals (and, in fact, know they are vile and wrong), but because you think it might further your other goals, I would argue you are actually worse than the racists who are truly dumb/crazy enough to believe what they're spouting.

Besides, there were halfbloods in Slytherin during Harry's time, too, and they always seemed to present a united front to the rest of the school, regardless of lineage. The other Slytherins probably would have defended Snape, if for no other reason than to shit on a couple of Gryffindors.

Then treated their housemates like shit, in private. If anything, they likely would have helped Snape just so he couldn't make their house look bad.

Although one would be perfectly within their rights to pin the murder of James and Lily (and the attempted murder of Harry) on him since he, you know, gave the prophecy to Voldemort. He knew, when he did this, that he was committing murder by proxy, because there was no way Voldemort would let this prophesied child live.

NOTE: Snape's first thought, upon hearing the prophecy, was to run and tell the leader of a racist hate group, so that said leader could NOT be defeated by a baby. Snape willingly pointed Voldemort at an infant (possibly many, depending on how many fit the description - for all Snape knew, a thousand babies would match the criteria), and said, "This is who you need to kill, so as not to be defeated." so that Voldemort could continue, unhindered, to torture people, kill them, tear families apart, and spread his doctrine of hate.

This was an act which Snape did NOT regret, until he found out that he had inadvertently steered Voldemort toward the ass he wanted to tap. Even then, he didn't give two shits about James's and Harry's upcoming murders.

Yeah, your Snape is a real peach. He heard that there was a possibility for the genocidal leader of a mass-murdering hate group to be vanquished, and he rushed to make sure the man would not be defeated. Does that sound like someone who isn't a bigot?

(Personally, I would feel that the friendship/love of someone who would do such things is less than worthless, and I fully believe Lily would feel this way, as well.)

By the way, I would say Snape DID hate muggles for much the reason Voldemort did. We all know Tom Riddle's background, but people seem to forget that Snape's mother was a witch who married an abusive muggle. So, Snape's not too keen on them... to the point he joined a group dedicated to the extermination of 'mudbloods' and, possibly, the murder or enslavement of muggles.

At least the Purebloods are hating on what they view as outsiders, but Snape isn't just a racist, he's also a traitor to his own kind.

And a hypocrite. But, that should have been obvious the moment he called Harry arrogant. Right from the "...bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death..." speech, it was obvious that we were being introduced to the single most arrogant man in the books, barring Voldemort (and, possibly, Dumbledore).

Well, whaddaya know: I thought I was going off topic for a while there, but it all falls under my pet peeve of people putting on blinders about Snape's wrongdoings and somehow thinking that any of the revelations in HBP and DH exonerate him.

They don't; they just make him worse, in retrospect.

That paragraph that was non-canonical guessing and bullshit even more baseless than most of the extrapolating and hypothesizing we do here?

It was a list of pet peeves. Christ, you take your Percy role-play a bit too seriously, don't you? Some might begin to think you're an officious twat in real life.


The public is free to think that's an example of the pot calling the kettle a nit-picky douche, and I'm free not to care.

Edit: You know, it's funny... I don't care for lemon suckers, nor many other lemon-flavored candies, but I do like lemon drops.

It's also funny how so many people read this and automatically go in the Age=Era direction, instead of the Age="You're clever compared to the usual self-absorbed fourteen-year-olds." direction.

:facepalm They both are, to some extent, at different ages.

You do realize that this could be taken as you replying to the post above yours, not you listing your peeves, right?

I think someone figured out that Dudley could have gotten a Playstation shipped from Japan at that time.

Granted, there wouldn't have been any English games for it, but it's the kind of extravagance that I can see Dudley demanding, and I can just as easily see Vernon obtaining it for his son.

As to why iPods and iPhones are worse: Because, firstly, one can tell that the dipshits who do this, the vast majority of the time, did not even once consider the fact that they are anachronisms. Such a concept completely escapes them.

And, that kind of ignorance often enrages people.

Secondly, they almost NEVER include these pieces of tech because of a plot point (even a throw-away line to point out how spoiled Dudley is compared to Harry's life of deprivation), they do it as a piece of jerk off wish-fulfillment because they wish they had an iPhone, for example. This is the same motivation for giving Harry all the newest game consoles, HDTVs, Blu Ray players...

They aren't writing plot, they're fantasizing about having lots of cool stuff. This is the same shit that draws mountains of criticism when Harry bones twenty different girls, or someone writes about Hermione having Lucius, Draco, Snape, Remus, and Sirius for lovers. All at the same time.

They also write iPods into their stories to insert comments about what songs Harry is listening to -songs which are ALSO anachronisms!!!- just so they can foist their taste in music off on their readers.

That, Mordecai, is why they are worse: They are not merely poorly thought out anachronisms, they are an act of ignorance on multiple levels. JKR made a goof; these fic writers do it to either wank about all the swag they wish they had, to push their taste in media off on you, or because they honestly think that everyone, Harry especially, equates material belongings with their own worth.

Every facet of it is readily recognizable as contemptibly stupid, shallow, and utterly childish.

 

Ugh. What a terrifying thought.

Bold and fixing mine. I'd give your post a thumbs up, but I'm out of thumbs.