When I was eight years old I fell in love with Emma Watson.
I distinctly recall waiting for the first female name to flash up during the credits and inferring immediately that it must be her.
The name felt right to me: crisp, regal, a bit princessy, and a little snobby too in a way that makes a man feel reproached for being not quite good enough.
I asked my dad if he thought she was hot and he got uncomfortable.
The next day I asked a few other boys at school and they mostly agreed that Emma was Very Hot, and in subsequent months her eleven-year-old hotness served alongside Playstation and Spiderman as recess topics du jour whenever 9/11 started to grow stale.
A few years later I played some game on Newgrounds called the Jailbait Quiz wherein you have to say whether or not the girl they show you is hot and if you say yes for one that’s underage you get berated by a little cartoon policeman who says he’s going to put you in jail to get assraped with the other chomos. I think Emma was fifteen at the time and I was like twelve; in any case I was masturbating to her fairly regularly then and so felt hugely indignant about the situation.
This was around the time the fourth movie came out and had that famous scene of her walking down the stairs in the pink Yule Ball gown.
I fucking hated that scene.
…partially because I thought she was way hotter in the third film, but mostly because it seemed like grown ups were NPCishly treating it as this wow emma is developing into quite the comely young lady moment where you’re finally allowed to say publicly that she’s good-looking when I myself had been jerking my preteen cock to her for years by that point and knew for a fact from early internet depredations I wasn’t alone in that.
It also felt fake in this extra creepy Baudrillardian Truman Show way because this was also the moment in the plot where Hermione becomes socially legible as attractive, so it felt like everyone was literally just mirroring the narrative beats IRL.
Only here’s the thing: looking back I also remember before that moment feeling like being attracted to Emma marked me as sophisticated or courageous in some way, as while other boys would typically agree with me whenever I pointed it out I seldom got anything interesting when I googled “Emma Watson hot.” This was presumably exacerbated by the text itself coding attraction to Hermione in exactly this way—she’s described as beavery and gawkish in the first few books and then gets a midseries glowup from Madame Pomfrey, after which her femininity is Noticed for the first time by an older high-status foreign boy from outside the Hogwarts ecology which seems to bootstrap her desirability to Ron and other local boys in a pretty significant way.
In the book version of Goblet of Fire this moment does several things specifically because of Hermione having been an ugly duckling. First, it establishes that a man with extreme erotic optionality would choose her and so marks her pretty objectively as an underpriced asset. More importantly, it suggests that Viktor Krum actually does have a pretty sophisticated taste in women and isn’t the vapid and vaguely predatory chad Ron makes him out to be. Hermione not starting out as hot lends credibility to her narrativization about Krum ackshully being a sensitive thoughtful boy who was also the first dude ever to make her feel Beautiful, and the social conflagration that arises from that forces Ron to grow up in a lot of important ways.
Meanwhile coming from Emma Watson it felt a lot more like a chick insisting she’s dating the 6’5 financebro because he’s good at puzzles, while Ron becomes the schmuck who spent three years never making a move on the hottest girl in his class only to turn into a butthurt incel when the high-status older boy swoops in and claims her by default—only not in any way that proves said older boy has any hidden depths discernment, but because she’s Emma fucking Watson.
Emma being beautiful on Day 1 turns the whole thing into a vulgar cuckstory that strips all three characters of dignity.
But obviously that wasn’t salient to preteen Walt; I certainly thought the situation was weird, but mostly it seemed like the world was finally fucking catching up to what I’d so perspicaciously identified in that Y2K-era movie theater: that Emma Watson is hot.
A few years later she was already enough of a sex symbol that we ended up getting a candid pussy shot of her taken literally on her eighteenth birthday.
One of my regular online haunts in the late aughts was MuggleNet—probably the biggest Potter fansite at the time and one of the precious few such venues that could procure access to Jo herself.
A lot of girls on the forums there had a crush on Ron and found Emma Watson annoying because she “couldn’t act” and moved her eyebrows too much.
I thought they were being retarded girls and missing the point of Emma Watson, which was obviously that she’s Hot.
Both of these opinions were of course heterodox in adultworld, where the prevailing attitude was that Emma was an uncommonly gifted child actress—so much so that she became known on set as One-Take Watson.
And maybe everyone there genuinely did think she was that good.
But maybe her particular failure modes as an actress weren’t unambiguous fuckups like Rupert “Go Again” Grint repeatedly forgetting his lines and not turning in his character essay to Alfonso Cuaron so much as things an adult male authority figure is more likely to overlook in a pretty young girl he wants to keep happy and confident.
It doesn’t have to be a sinister pedo thing either; every teenage boy on the planet has had a male teacher he’s hated for letting the pretty girls in class get away with shit that would never fly from him, with loads of girls who’ve benefited from that kind of favoritism openly giggling about it among themselves. At times it’s conscious sleaze, but usually it’s just an innocent unconscious halo effect thing that in this case makes YOU the weird one for pointing it out because Obviously only pathological freaks are attracted to someone below the pussyshot age.
So is it really THAT hard to imagine Chris Columbus or Alfonso Cuaron being a bit less likely on the margins to cut and tell Emma: “again with 15% less eyebrows,” “let Rupert have the laugh,” “you’re reacting too early,” etc.?
…and is it THAT hard to imagine that eventually Go Again Grint just kind of shrugs his shoulders and leans into being the rakishly lazy fuckup while letting Emma be the precocious little thespian because them’s the roles this cinematic Stepdad Regime has already selected for them?
Consider also that the films’ screenwriter Steve Kloves literally admitted to Hermione being his favorite character and called her “charming and irresistible to write,” while famously eviscerating Ron’s character to make her cooler by giving her half his major competencies and badass lines until poor Rupert was left playing the emasculated ginger incel who primarily exists to be jealous of Harry and say he’s hungry.
But that’s not Book Ron at all, who when you look at him objectively is kind of a chad.
Yeah the Weasleys are a “poor family” because that gives Harry and Hermione moral points for befriending Ron, but canonically they’re cash-poor patricians who come from one of the oldest pureblood wizarding families, while literally all of Ron’s elder bros are high-achieving dudes, including one Head Boy ministry striver, two charismatic athletic entrepreneurs, a fucking dragon tamer, and a Gringotts curse-breaker who literally wifes up Fleur, while Ron himself is a tall and funny chess whiz both athletic enough to make the quidditch team and a capable enough natural leader to be made a prefect while also being besties with Harry Potter and repeatedly mogging Hermione socially throughout the first few books whenever she acts kind of bitchy and retarded.
There’s a reason all those chickies on MuggleNet wanted to fuck him: by midseries especially Ron is objectively high-status as shit, and in a lot of ways more masculine and competent in a mundane normalfag way than emo Harry himself who spends like half the middle books on his period being an asshole to people for no reason.
Hermione ending up with Ron is honestly pretty damn intelligible in the books.
Meanwhile in the movies he becomes the insecure and whiny comic relief while Hermione is gorgeous from the start and gets like half his cool moments. The later films were worst about this, but even in the first you had her transparently stealing his Devil’s Snare victory in cold blood, which is a moment of embodied masculine resolve and tactical intelligence under pressure that makes their later sexed complementarity foreshadowed and believable and gives you visceral proof as to why Hermione might find Ron hot. Without it their dynamic is hilariously lopsided from the start and the chemistry feels forced as shit.
And this favoritism bleeds into almost every scene—i.e. when Emma is bossy about LeviOoosah it isn’t as somatically irritating as it should be, which means Ron reads as less inherently justified in making fun of her, which makes her covering for the boys over the bathroom troll feel saintly instead of duly repentant.
None of this is Emma’s fault, of course; just a perfectly natural halo effect amplified by a vicious cycle wherein all the failure modes of a child actress with very real and obvious talent are more easily metabolized as proof she’s perfect for the character: her eyebrows become expressiveness; her overenunciation elocution; her scene-stealing presence; her recursive self-consciousness precocious professionalism, and so on.
And precisely none of that was false is the thing.
But none of it could be true in a disciplined or nuanced way with a girl that beautiful.
Thus Chris Columbus favors her lines and reactions just a bit more than he should, while Kloves gives her moments that rightfully belong to Rupert just a bit more and more with each passing film, and by the time Harry’s dancing with her in that tent you’re wondering how the fuck this amazing chick doesn’t belong to the protagonist and is supposed to instead end up with that pathetic and cowardly carrot top.
By that point the girls on MuggleNet had mostly migrated away from Ron, who was now perhaps a touch more erotically popular than Neville.
One of the most interesting facets of the Potter films is that Jo herself had an unusually intimate authorial relationship with their creation.
Not at the granular script level, of course—note that for the first few movies she was still actively working on the series (this becomes important later)—but rather as a plot consultant and interpretive authority whose deeply-integrated promotional role was vitally important to legitimizing the adaptations before a prickly and pedantic fandom.
Formally she always did the good writerly thing and emphasized that the movies were their own thing; emotionally she always seemed way too fucking cozy with the whole apparatus for that line to have any somatic credibility.
And I think here it’s instructive to compare JKR to GRRM, who played perhaps an even more active role in early Game of Thrones development but also imposed a firm ontological wall between the two worlds once Dungeons and Dragons started to outrun him and began filling his beloved rapeuniverse with girl power fanfiction:
“Da show is da show and the brrks are the brrks!”
You probably read that in his voice.
It was an iconic line that stuck with people whenever fan favorites like Stannis and Barristan got arbitrarily humiliated in a retarded shabby shaggy dog story way GRRM clearly intended to make properly Shakespearean, and felt especially pertinent when that last season completely fucking shat all over his ingeniously-crafted Dany tweest by having it come utterly out of left field—a development that to some extent tainted Martin’s artistic legacy permanently and may have made the main series emotionally unsolvable for him but didn’t ruin the books for Trve ASOIAF Fans because for them the adaptation functionally ended with Season 4, with Martin’s mantra ensuring that they could continue to enjoy Stannis and Barristan knowing that even if fatso croaks before wrapping shit up the ackshual characters wouldn’t have gone out like THAT.
Ron fans didn’t really get that
…because he still ends up with Hermione, after all—which means that if you complain about him being emasculated especially at the height of Millennial girl power you just come across as regressive or pedantic.
Meanwhile Jo is involved enough in the series—constantly appearing with the kids in promotional material and offering us her glowing thoughts on the latest adaptation, which it always turns out is the Best One Yet—that they really do just feel like canon.
You read da books once or twice and enjoy them… and then watch the same movie ten fucking times as a Christmas ritual with your family until at last it feels like Hermione ackshully did just fucking body that Devil’s Snare all by her girlboss self.
And all the while JKR is to her credit unlike Martin actually finishing the last few books, with her mental model of the characters now being recursively influenced by Dan, Rupert, and Emma—and not only them, as it turns out JKR also has an unusually metatextual relationship with her Millennial fandom: she encourages fanfics and even reads a couple, participates anonymously in MuggleNet chat rooms, observes which characters random teenagers in America find smexy, and in 2005 playfully chastises MuggleNet owner Emerson Spartz for calling Harry/Hermione shippers “delusional,” before herself echoing the sentiment by referring to the “anvil-sized hints” she’d supposedly dropped throughout the series suggesting Ron/Hermione.
That comment caused a pretty huge rift in the fandom.
But again to her credit, JKR does let Book Ron win in the end. Harry gets the kiss at the end of Goblet of Fire—plausibly deniable as affectionate friendgirl behavior but erotically fascinating enough to my preteen brain that I still remember the line, “then Hermione did something she’d never done before,” and likewise recall a male classmate of mine reciting it verbatim—as well as the tent moment in Deathly Hallows, but she ultimately sees her original authorial vision through and creates real masculine dignity for Won Won the films are forced to backsolve around.
She also creates enough negative space that Kloves is able to make Harry/Hermione a vastly more credible cinematic couple, culminating in that fucking dance scene that easily has more erotic charge than anything Rupert and Emma get in the entire series.
She lets him get away with it.
She also promotes Deathly Hallows eagerly enough—with her own name on the byline as producer, no less—that kids like me who were aging out of the series by then and only read the last book once remember the dance as having also happened canonically.
And so Kloves ensures that spiritually Hermione belongs to Harry, “anvil-sized hints” notwithstanding.
…hence Emma fucking Watson herself asking JKR in a 2014 interview if Ron would ackshully make Hermione happy, at which point the grande dame decides having already made Dumbledore gay to take an enormous shit on the defining romance of her magnum opus by saying Ron/Hermione was “wish fulfilment” on her part and “clinging to the plot as I first imagined it,” opining that the two of them would likely need marriage counseling and that Harry and Hermione now seem like a better fit.
That’s a perfectly reasonable statement to anyone who’s had their Potter-Ontology recalibrated by the films—and also hilariously contrary to the Boomer Feminist liberal hetero-optimist values she’d written the series under, wherein a high-achieving woman picking the less conventionally impressive or heroic guy and sailing under her own flag instead of needing to be with the protagonist was a narratively subversive act.
But by the time she did the interview with Watson, those values were collecting dust.
Compared to Boomer and Gen X womyn Millennielles didn’t feel anywhere near the same need to prove ontological independence from men by conspicuously picking a guy not more impressive than themselves. Overt dependence was still unprestigious then compared to today, but the woman was increasingly allowed to want a powerful and impressive man if it came in the form of a narrative centrality and moral legitimacy that didn’t overtly detract from her own standing.
Thus Hermione couldn’t just nakedly hypergamize to Krum and call Ronald an incel per Zoomette sensibilities, but in the movie universe she’d ABSOLUTELY be allowed to find Harry smexier than Ron and no Millennial woman would be embarrassed by that in the same way her feminist mother might. The attitude would be “yeah I’m a badass boss bitch, of course I’d want a guy who’s actually big enough to handle me”—which in fairness book Ron still absolutely was and probably more so than Harry, but movie Ron by that point most certainly would not have been.
And so changing her tune on Harry-Hermione was implicitly kind of an internalized act of generational supplication by Jo.
She was passing the torch and letting the Millennielle girlbosses have their day.
It didn’t seem wrong to her at the time; Emma had served as such a potent role model for her cohort of girls that JKR could very reasonably infer in 2014 that this verbally adroit, propositionally consistent, earnestly romantic, perhaps a little solipsistic at times but otherwise basically goodhearted and capable generation of women were entitled to have their native read of their defining girlhood character indulged.
A few years later she’d be regretting that decision.
There are a few important things to understand about Hermione.
The first is that she’s objectively one of the best-written female characters in all of children’s literature—her flaws are real, her struggles are nuanced, her insecurities are believable, and her interiority is gorgeously complex; probably more than Harry’s.
She’s also kind of the only female character in the books who isn’t a giant meme.
Luna, Tonks, and Bellatrix are all sexy and cool but absolutely meme characters no one takes seriously. Ginny and Lily are boring flat Mary Sues. McGonagall and Molly are cool in an old lady way but no teenage girl would ever consciously want to be them.
Hermione is the only female character in the series that simultaneously has gravitas, moral dignity, narrative salience, and erotic legibility.
That’s not really the case with Rowling’s male characters, who are given a million and one ways to be cool and smexy; during peak HP Harry, Ron, Draco, Lupin, Sirius and more all had both major male constituencies who wanted to be them and oodles of teenage girls writing lewd fanfics about being raped by them. JKR even gives Snape real dignity and makes him insanely hot to a peculiar kind of woman, whereas most female authors would have flattened him into a contemptible and worthless incel.
Meanwhile did literally ANY male fan ever want to fuck Ginny?
Perhaps there’d be some transgressive age gap appeal if Bonnie Wright didn’t have a jaw like Rocky Balboa, but realistically all of the girls one might ackshully prefer to Hermione were relatively undignified meme characters, while Jo’s own self-insert comes out looking like the only chickie of her generation that’s genuinely wifely.
Not in a gauche or fanficcy way, of course—JKR is far too sophisticated a writer for that, and gives Hermione plenty of ridiculous moments like SPEW that demonstrate an almost indulgent self-awareness of her own girlish failure modes.
It’s more that whenever Hermione is Wrong it’s virtually always in a vaguely adorable way that Won Won can then correct with exasperated rakishness and give the two of them a genuinely smexy flirtationship culminating in a deeply satisfying payoff.
Fundamentally it’s a story about a hyperverbal, moralistic girl needing to be Tamed by an embodied masculine because she very distinctly identifies the dangers of becoming too incorrigible, which the books repeatedly slap her in the face with time and again.
…while functionally also rewarding that incorrigibility by never making those slaps too hard, and meanwhile giving her a boyfriend almost perfectly engineered to correct the behavior while basically leaving her moral and intellectual self-concept intact.
Rowling pulls it off in the text.
But Kloves doesn’t see Hermione as especially in need of correction at all.
He flatters Hermione—and by extension Jo, who’s recorded saying she was delighted to learn Hermione was his favorite character, having initially been worried that Ron was inherently so much more likeable that HE’D receive favoritist treatment.
So now the machinery is in place for the Cinematic Stepdad Regime to both ambiently and architecturally make Hermione Right about essentially everything, with all major exceptions to that having Adorably Wrong Hermione (e.g. “or worse—expelled!”) absorb corrective pressure in a toothless Cady Heron way that exacerbates One-Take Watson and by the end of the series makes the Hermione Gestalt functionally incorrigible.
And the Hermione Gestalt, understand, is by that point not just Emma.
It’s Emma’s beauty and glamor and sex appeal fused to Jo Rowling’s intellectual authority and moral seriousness fused to the collective aspirations of all Millennial girls who now experience the Watsonized character as an almost hypersalient role model and Millennial boys who view her as the ideal romantic partner.
It’s a truly operatic symbiosis.
Without a generationally talented child star in the role—and by that I don’t mean maximally gifted thespian à la Dakota Fanning so much as girl with a preternatural talent for converting her beauty and charisma into viscerally felt talent broadly legible as genuine in a manner recursively legitimized by the role itself as opposed to a kind of sleazy Brooke Shields thing—there’s no way Jo’s busybody beavergirl would ever achieve that level of mythic centrality in popular culture.
Without the literary depth of Hermione and earned moral gravitas of JKR enabling the recursion there’s no way Emma is allowed to turn into One-Take Watson, probably ending up instead as something analogous to Chloë Moretz—which is an objectively dignified and impressive place to be, and probably better in 2026.
Without a wider feminine ecology coming out of Mean Girls and Disney Renaissance films and primed by prestigiously and earnestly moralistic-intellectualized Bush-era liberalism to think about gay marriage and Iraq every bit as sanctimoniously as Hermione takes up Winky’s cause, there’s no way either of them gets a massive constituency of girls who see Emma’s Hermione as such a salient role model.
Without a masculine ecology of highly literary boys who expect their woman to be their mindmate and emotional companion above all else while lending them her own institutional-moral status validation and inhabiting a polarity where her procedural competence complements his narrative boldness, there’s no way the character is ever treated as anything but a cringe and masturbatory female status fantasy.
Instead these factors congeal into a genuinely formidable Hermione Gestalt.
And for Jo it must have felt like victory—real dignity won for that insecure girl with the beaver teeth and terrible social skills. She’d successfully colonized the nervous systems of an entire generation of women and men both, and it was partially because of Hermione that nerds became genuinely cool for much of the 2010s.
The thing is that victory was built on a kind of warp in narrative spacetime.
It was built on giving Hermione a certain set of experiences and insecurities and second-order explanations that a girl with Emma’s face simply never would have had.
It was built on letting Steve Kloves flatter her at every turn while emasculating her romantic interest in locally tolerable ways that in aggregate make you look back at your own story years later with the cinematic ontology in your nervous system and a palpable womanly ick towards poor embattled Won Won.
It was built on turning the Krum triangle into a vulgar cuckstory because nobody wants to be the one pointing out that this eleven year-old is too attractive.
It was built on going from “anvil-sized hints” in 2005 to "marriage counseling” in 2014.
It was built on letting the girl who knew how fucking badly she needed to be Tamed become not just functionally incorrigible but deservedly so.
It was built on letting One-Take Watson be right about fucking everything—on never forcing her to develop a mature theory of acting that makes her inhabit someone else’s flawed interiority and be subjected to the humiliation of outside interpretation, on letting her see the role as “giving me permission to be myself,” on letting her walk out of those films not wanting to distance herself like Dan by fucking a horse onstage or nonchalant about identification with his cuckself like Rupert but in some very thick sense ontologically connected to Jo’s self-insert in an arguably far more embodied way than Jo herself, on letting her aggressively curate her own role in Beauty and the Beast until Belle was literally just a musical Hermione, and on letting her dialogue with Jo about Hermione’s romantic choices in a way that deeply reinterprets the character.
…all of which is why it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Jo when Emma decided to cancel her ass in 2020.
The famous conflict over JKR’s gender critical ideology should be understood primarily as a Battle Of Hermiones.
Technically Daniel Radcliffe was the first to come out in criticism of her due to his longtime affiliation with The Trevor Project, but in practice it was Watson’s far more mythically potent denunciation and later comments in 2022 about “all the witches” that lent the cancellation real social force.
And to JKR’s credit, she didn’t back down even a little. She cashed in her position as a major liberal cultural figurehead under an inefficient social exchange rate to serve as probably the most important civilizational firebreak on trans mania during its high summer, and almost certainly made center-left heterodoxy on the issue materially more survivable socially at the expense of her own standing with young people.
She was Hermione-Incorrigible.
And in the opposite direction so was Emma, who immediately lost much of the intellectual prestige she’d accumulated actually playing Hermione and began reading to many of her elders as a morally fashionable dilettante who’d never seriously worked for anything in her life and was now biting the hand that fed.
Meanwhile 4chan started calling her ugly and pointing out her wrinkles.
It was also around this time that I started dating Zoomettes instead of girls my own age and began to notice that most of them didn’t like Harry Potter anywhere near as much as I’d assumed young people would eternally adore Harry Potter.
Almost all of them would have sided with Emma over Jo, but at this point both of them read primarily as out-of-touch and overly earnest middle-aged women.
Having come up in a Generalized Stepdad Regime wherein young women are reliably outperforming young men, Zoomettes never had much of a need to prove themselves to men at all. There’s no Boomer / Gen X drive to be independent, no Millennial-esque pressure to be morally righteous and propositionally consistent—just pure feminine id and the felt entitlement to renarrate the world at will and let however they happen to feel Right Now determine what’s ackshully true.
They’re allowed to hypergamize with Krum because he’s famous or rich or handsome or has a huge enormous cock—they just can’t say it’s cause he made her feel Beautiful for the first time or everyone will immediately call it grooming.
In most respects they’re a lot more honest than the Hermiones—and in most respects also a lot crueler, sadder, and more difficult to trust.
They’re also profoundly incorrigible, with any man who criticizes them registering viscerally as an incel and any woman who does so as a cheugy and jealous old hag.
And at least for now that gives them the operative social power to impose their felt ontology on the rest of civilization basically at will—not because they themselves are imbued with massive hard power, but because we’re living in a giant Stepdad Regime in which a million Steve Kloves compete to make many millions of Nouvelle-Emmas (many of whom are very literally named Emma, presumably after the grande cheugster herself) giggle and enjoy their patronage.
I know that because I’m one of the Steves enabling them.
I enjoy the Nouvelle-Emmas because unlike the old model they let me feel like Krum—or at least the movie version of him.
…or I suppose it’s almost more of a Snamione dynamic?
idk
Point is it’s obviously not all downside, and for sure not erotically.
We’re just living in a world now where nobody especially cares that it’s levio-saaaaah.
This story as it currently exists ends in 2025—so post vibe shift, post-Trump 2.0, and around the time the liberal prestige regime is starting to feel a bit more self-reflective and interested in internal heterodoxy.
The Dems just got killed on trans athletes in women’s sports and Matt Yglesias is straightforwardly telling people they need to moderate.
That doesn’t make Rowling any more popular with the incorrigible Zoomettes who were toddlers when she was truly influential; it does make her register as somewhat less of an arbitrarily bigoted TERF hag to a lot of Millennial women who may have counter-signaled her in borglike solidarity during the black rectangle era but never really stopped seeing her as one of the defining cultural figures of their girlhood.
Watson herself is obviously one of those women.
But she’s also still Hermione.
And so she reprises One-Take Watson one last time, offering JKR a vaguely apologetic non-apology that doesn’t substantively retract any of her previous statements but expresses regret about “a conversation never being made possible,” while utterly failing to acknowledge the role she played in morally ostracizing Jo using the mythic power she’d accrued by glamorously instantiating the woman’s self-insert.
JKR responds with a venomously personal screed that says Emma’s early-won fame and wealth have made her “ignorant of how ignorant she is”—a very pedestrian kind of class reductionism perhaps to be expected of British leftists of her generation but profoundly stupid in this case both because JKR’s considerably greater wealth and fame were what let her stand up to the trans mob in the first place and because it wasn’t really generic fame and wealth that had given Emma those epistemic blinders so much as the entire fucking Hermione Gestalt.
Chloë Moretz could not have cancelled JKR.
Emma could—because JKR had for many many years including while writing the last three books borrowed the somatic power of Emma’s beauty and glamor and sex appeal to amplify her own insufferably bossy beavergirl’s social and erotic legibility.
She encouraged that beast at every turn, until the very instant she became Ron and the whole thing suddenly began to look rather less charming.
Of course she won’t forgive Emma—who could, after being publicly humiliated like that while having their own narrative selfhood stolen out from under them?
The interesting question to me is whether she even realizes that the actual person to forgive here is herself—that and how often Emma cringes these days at some of these Bushborn little cunts who were named after her.
Either way, I tend to suspect that if the two of them ever do sit down to talk it will be one of the more honest conversations either one of them has had in a long time.
A few weeks ago I watched the first trailer for the new Harry Potter show slated for release later this year, which is pretty interestingly being marketed as a more faithful adaptation of the books.
If I’m honest it mostly seemed kind of shitty and boring to me, and I didn’t have much immediate interest in watching it besides perhaps to see how hilariously racist Harry comes across as in light of Black Snape.
What I did notice though was the actress they got to play Hermione.
Now I’m certainly not suggesting that HBO was consciously thinking they needed to actively correct Emma Watson being too hot or whatever.
I think there’s a far simpler explanation: that when everyone else becomes a stepdad it’s a hell of a lot harder to erect your own solipsistic little Stepdad Regime—which perhaps is ultimately how poor embattled Won Won at last carves out a bit of dignity.
But either way?
I sure would love to be a fly on the wall when Emma first watches that Leviosa scene.
fuck yeah, it's walt