Hermione Granger - Voldemort in the making
A Slytherfan terri_testing writes an essay The Wizarding World and the Otherworld, where she argues that Harry Potter books are horror, not fantasy and that Hogwarts is like the school where the Native American children were brainwashed:


Traditional fantasies were said to be escapist, but they usually end
with the protagonist more firmly established in their real world lives.

The stories that end with the characters lost to the real world are usually either tragedies or horror stories
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Which is one thing that makes JKR's Wizarding World so troubling--people seem to enter it for keeps. Harry, of course, is set up (by the author and/or by Dumbledore) to have no ties that he values to the Muggle world. But Hermione, Lily, Severus, Aberforth, Dean, the Creeveys--if any Muggleborns or Half-bloods stay on close terms with their Muggle
relatives or childhood associates, we never see it. We don’t see even Arthur Weasley the Muggle-fan with actual Muggle friends, even though he lives side-by-side with them. (And the Muggle-fan doesn’t let his children meet their cousin the—oh, the horror!—accountant.) And the two witches/wizards we do see marry out into the real world are Merope Gaunt and Eileen Prince. Need one say more?

Whereas we are shown, repeatedly, the converse: Harry delighted to be out of his relative's care, Severus and Tom eager to leave their Muggle homes behind for Hogwarts, Lily shortly before her death glad that her Muggle sister’s hideous gift is destroyed, Hermione spending more and more of her holidays with her Wizard friends rather than her parents and finally exiling her parents to Australia under a Memory Charm.... And note that our two Muggleborn heroines are rewarded by marrying into the oldest Pureblood families.
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Not so in the Potterverse. We’re never shown a successful Muggle-magical marriage; we’re never shown an adult socializing with, or missing, their Muggle family members (which acto JKR 75% or more of them have). We're never shown witches or wizards treating real world people with anything but contempt. After Harry’s second year, we see no excited Muggle family members. It would have been easy enough to insert, but Jo didn’t: no happy dentists proudly wave their grandchild off on the Hogwarts Express in the Brave New post-Voldemort World.

No Muggles need apply.

Petunia had it right: this is a world which steals children and never gives them back.

Which aligns the Potterverse more with horror than with fantasy.

*

A/N: I’m part Anishinabe—Chippewa Indian, to you—and in my possession is my grandmother’s autograph book from “Indian School” at Genoa, Nebraska, where children were sent to be taught to act white. Only one child signed the book with his non-English name, and his nickname among the other kids was “Injun.” Not that the whites with whom Gramma was being trained to assimilate actually considered her their equal, any more than Slughorn considered Hermione.

"Petunia had it right: this is a world which steals children and never gives them back" comes not from canon, but from terri_testing's own essay In Defense of the Dursleys and her fanfic The Girl and the Boy.

The essay provokes a chorus of "I agree"s and complaints about JKR's treatment of Snape:

mary_j_59 (see "Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!")

This is brilliant, Terri! And absolutely consistent. You know, my sister and I went to hear Rowling, Irving and King in NYC, and we both liked John Irving (reading from Owen Meany) best. Now the reason is clear. Rowling is actually a horror writer, like King, and I do not like horror. Still less do I like horror disguised as a children's fantasy quest. Irving, on the other hand, was writing in the great tradition of picaresque novels - a tragicomedy with a moral core.

But what I still wonder is: did (and does) Rowling know that she has actually written a dystopion/horror story? Somehow I don't think she realizes this.

condwiramurs/00sevvie

I second the 'brilliant' comment. And I highly doubt Rowling is aware of what she has actually written. She is too utterly blind to the reasons we like Severus, for example, to have any clue that she may have written something different from what her perfect picture of her work in her head is. I'm sure she thinks we're just getting it 'wrong.'

oryx_leucoryx (see Cry the Beloved Slytherins)

So if Severus Snape actually survived Nagini's bite, returned to the Muggle world and became some kind of counselor to delinquent youth or someone who runs an anti-bullying program (by working both with victims and perpetrators) he would be a hero with a rather protracted but complete journey? Starting out as the victim of neighborhood bullies (I doubt Petunia was the only one who knew that the strangely dressed kid was the Snape boy from Spinner's End) who must have dreamed that magic would solve his problems, learned that magic simply gave bullies more dangerous/'interesting' ways to hurt people, played a key role in getting rid of the biggest bully in the magical playground and came home to use non-magical ways against bullies?
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bohemian_spirit has some fics in that general direction - in her 'Light Between the Cracks' series Severus Snape of canon years was secretly married to a Muggle school teacher and while at his Muggle home watched over the neighborhood children. And in her 'Professor Grunge' Severus immigrates to the US instead of joining the Death Eaters. He studies at a wizarding university and becomes a teacher who fights bullying and uses music to assist in magical healing.

But the real fun starts when night_train_fm decides to argue with terri_testing and says, among other things:

'Hermione exiling her parents to Australia'
She did that because she was terrified (with good reason) of the DEs coming after them: Voldemort was taking over the government, had already ordered several public mass-Muggle-killings, and anyone remotely connected to Harry was a potential target. According to Jo, Hermione reversed the spell ASAP once the threat was over. For that matter, is it ever outright stated that she didn't sit down and discuss it with them first?

That doesn't go well.



oryx_leucoryx

Hermione: So instead of letting the Death eaters destroy her parents she goes and does it herself? Nothing in the world gives one the right to overtake a person's autonomy that way, let alone one's own parents. She certainly had the option of not doing the memory modification, just arranging for her parents' passage under fake names - if they wanted to do so.

Like any realistic character, she's far from perfect.
She started out as far from perfect, but from around OOTP she became a monster and never recovered.

Hermione picked the lesser of two evils.
No she did not. The damage she did to her parents is itself a great evil. She didn't just mind-rape them over the course of an evening as the wizards did to the Robertses, she rewrote their identities. If I were in the place of her parents, then assuming the reversal worked I would have never trusted my daughter again in any way or form.
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It's not just sending Umbridge to the centaurs, which could be understood as an improvisation of the moment to save a friend, but the fact that she laughed when she saw that her actions caused the woman serious trauma. That's when Hermione became sister to Bellatrix Lestrange. I don't know about you but I would have been remorseful.
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I'd feel sorry for a mass murderer and serial rapist. Especially if s/he was traumatized by something *I* did.
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And her rise within the DMLE after the war does not encourage me to think the Ministry is going to be more just in its policies after the war, it's just going to be immoral in a different direction.

marionros (see Pimples=Rape and "Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!")

>>>Is this a 'the centaurs totally raped poor Umbridge' thing?<<<

It's:

*because she marred the face of a sixteen year old girl for the rest of her life and didn't even feel sorry for the girl or feel regretful that it was 'necesserary' (would've been a poor excuse, but a moral person would regret the awful things they 'have' to do). She felt so righteous that she totally forgot about Marietta, even though the girl walked about the school for two more years wearing thick make up and a balaclava!
Facial disfigurement is normally not a 'right' thing to do. Not caring wether you've hurt another person is a startling lack of empathy.

*because she blackmailed and kidnapped a woman, and kept her in a glass jar for a prolonged period of time. Imagine being shrunk down and locked in a glass jar and stared at by a giant Hermione Granger. That's tantamount to torture. (although Rita was lucky that Hermione didn't FORGET about her, I suppose)
Blackmailing and abduction is not normal moral behaviour. Justifying it in the name of 'the cause' or 'the greater good' only shows a startling callousness. No matter how 'mean' and 'nasty' Rita is, this doesn't justify a teenage schoolgirl to lock her into a glass jar!

*because she sent Umbridge to be gang-banged, and when the woman returns and lies cataconic in the hospital wing, Hermione and her croneys taunt the woman with the most sadistic glee I have ever read in a book. They make 'clip clop' noises, just for the pleasure of seeing Umbridge huddle in fear, and then laugh and say Umbridge is just 'trying to get attention'. Imagine if you will a pack of DE's, lead by Bellatrix, in St Mungo's. They zero in on the Longbottoms, and start to yell 'Crucio' for the fun of it, delighting in the Longbottom's confused but earnest terror.

*because she uses a startling amount of violence and deceit to express herself and to get what she wants.

*because she made the unilatiral decision of mindraping and mindwiping two human beings against their will, with the stated purpose of destroying all their memories of their only child, AND NOT SEEING ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT!!

*because she shows an amazing amount of the traits that (according to wikipedia) is associated with the personality disorder called psychopathy, to whit:
Grandiose sense of self-worth
Criminal versatility
Pathological narcissism
Pathological lying
Shallow affect
Deceitfulness/manipulativeness
Aggressive or violent tendencies, repeated physical fights or assaults on others
Lack of empathy
Lack of remorse, indifferent to or rationalizes having hurt or mistreated others
Lack of personal insight
Disregard for conventional moral right and wrong

Last time I checked, people who displayed a lack of empathy, are indifferent to or rationalize having hurt or mistreated others and have a disregard for conventional moral right or wrong, in short psychopaths, are called 'monsters'.
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Ah, it's back to the ol' "well, they ain't plaster saints" excuse. Everytime anybody points out that Harry or Hermione acts in any way immoral, this "you just want him/her to be a plaster saint" is flung out. No, we don't want plaster saints, we want normal human beings, not psychopaths. Yes, psychopaths. Psychopaths have no conscience or empathy, and I'd say Harry, Hermione, Dumbledore, the Twins, James and Sirius fit that description quite neatly.

I don't care how much Miss Hermione thinks her parents are in danger (I could even point out that Harry Potter's Girlfriend lives at Hogwarts, underneath the noses of three DE's for a whole friggin' YEAR and no harm comes to her, nor to her family, who surely must be on the DE hitlist, since Arthur even accused his son Percy of such foolishness as believing he got his promotion for being intelligent, dilligent and efficient while it was clear to him, Arthur, that Percy was just given that promotion because his family were so very close to the Famous Harry Potter and this way they could spy on him, and yet Arthur keeps working at the Ministry for the whole time Voldemort has taken over the Ministry and no harm comes to him! Gosh, and yet somehow the Grangers, muggle dentists that they are, whom Harry probably wouldn't recognise if he saw them laughing with a wild and reckless air in a photograph, are in such terrible danger that it's okay for their daughter to mindwipe them against their will, give them new identities and dump them in a foreign country without proper papers or identification!!), I don't care if Miss Granger is seriously concerned about her parents' safety, but no matter how scared or worried you are, this DOES NOT justify mindwiping another human being againt his/her will.

"Picking the lesser of two evils" is a false dichtonomy. It's not a question of either she mindwipes them or they will be tortured into cataconia. There are other - and more obvious - choices. Whatever she could've done, she SHOULD have given them a choice, because they are autonomous human beings, with the right of self-determination, and even if they had been determined to stay in Britain, after having been duly warned, this should have been THEIR choice! To say they shouldn't have this choice is to demote them to pets or children and Hermione to their Owner/Parent. And why should you even consider this? Because Hermione has magic, and is therefor a more superior human being than the Muggle Grangers? Congratulations, you have been succesfully indoctrinated into the Rowling Doctrine: All Humans Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.
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Except that Hermione did in fact carve words into Marietta's skin. But then, Marietta was a 'traitor', who told her mother of the anti-government stance her studygroup was taking, and so, apparently, 'deserved' to have 'snitch' forever on her forehead, whereas Harry insisted to a Ministry official that the Ministry was wrong and stupid and blind and that they lied, and the Ministry official punished him with carving 'I must not tell lies' in his arm, but the Ministry really was wrong and stupid and blind, and they were mean and petty towards Our Hero, so they were wrong to do so.

And then Hermione goes to work at some 'high position' at the Ministry (according to JKR) where she is going to change things in the WW... I can just picture it now. Hermione with a drawer full of bloodquills. In walks some pureblood wizard, lets say the wizard whose family make the Nimbus and Firebolt broomsticks. He has a couple of house elves working for him. They worked for the same family for generations and and happy in doing so, and the wizard doesn't want to lose them, because that would bespell desaster for his firm, and besides, he's attached to them. But Hermione says that keeping house elves is slavery and wrong, and gives him a bloodquill. He is to write 'House elve slavery is wrong', a hundred times, or until he is willing to give his elves clothes. And of course, slavery *is* wrong, so it is totally right for Hermione to use that bloodquill, right?
It is, after all, not *what* is done, be it disfigurement, torture, rape, murder, it's who is doing it. Right?