Ravenclaw

Hermione Granger should have been a Ravenclaw.

The one thing we know about her at the beginning of the story – the only thing that seems to matter from beginning to end – is how smart and well-read she is. So tell me why the all-knowing sorting hat wouldn’t have put her in Ravenclaw, where those of wit and learning will always find their kind. Tell me why she wasn’t allowed to find her kind.

She should have made friends with other Ravenclaws who shared her passion for learning, who studied and excelled alongside her, who pushed her to be her best and told her to slow down when she got in over her head – not because they found her enthusiasm to be tiresome, but because they cared about her well-being. Friends who gave as much as they took, who valued her enough to know her well, who appreciated her dry wit and recognized that “or worse, expelled” was meant to be a joke, you daft gits.

She should have spent her nights safe in bed, not sneaking around the castle in reckless pursuit of evil beyond her imaginings. She should have been safe. She should have been mentored by the strong and accomplished women at her school who recognized and fostered her young talents – not by a perennially drunk, physically overpowering sixty-year-old man who lived alone in a house by the woods, a man who was expelled from that same school under suspicion of murdering a young girl.

She should have felt comfortable telling the adults about the boy who called her slurs or the grown man who made cruel jokes at her expense. And when she did tell them, they should have bloody done something about it.

She should have had sweet first kisses with smart, kind boys who admired her and weren’t afraid to show it. She should have gone to dances with international quidditch stars visiting the school and swooned to her roommates about it later that night, a smile on her face. She should have told her girlfriends about the intellectual crush she was developing on the new teacher, who was not only beautiful but wrote extensively on topics near and dear to her heart, and they should have – would have – understood.

She should have spent her teen years worried about acne and period stains and sweaty hands and fashion trends and small fights with her friends. She should have had other women to talk to about these things. She should have been allowed to talk.

She should have had support, from both her peers and her teachers, for the advocacy work she did on behalf of the house elves. She should have been recognized for her initiative and compassion by people who understood why protecting magical creatures who were seen as “other” would have been important to her. That work should have led to an article in the paper or an internship with a nonprofit that would have jump-started her career doing work that sparked her passion.

She should have shared her experiences as a Muggle with her classmates. She should have had friends who visited her home over the holidays and gotten to know her parents and had sleepovers in her childhood bedroom. She should have had the chance to break down bigotry through relationships and exposure and the open-minded compassion that comes naturally to young people.

She should have been referred to a therapist after losing months of her life to a violent spell cast by a mass murderer. They should have drawn a connection between that trauma and her desire to find a way to literally turn back time the following year. They should have taken care of her. They should have helped her heal.

She should have been able to decide for herself if and how and when she wanted to engage in the war – war being something that is generally handled by adults, anyway. She should have had the chance to opt out of this war, this war started and fought almost entirely by boys and men, this war that wasn’t even about them. This war that was about her.

She should have had someone to talk to when she was about to erase herself from her parents’ memories and drop out of school. She should have had the chance to explore her thought process, her fears, why she felt that was the only viable option. Someone should have stopped her.

When violence came to her school, she should have been safe at home. She should have been safe.

But that never would have worked. If Hermione Granger had been a Ravenclaw, she never would have solved the logic puzzle, or discovered the snake, or used the time turner, or taught him accio, or founded the army, or packed the bag, or infiltrated the bank, or bought them time to escape, or deciphered the children’s story, or, or, or, or. The main character would have been dead at the age of eleven, and the violent bigoted sociopath would have taken over the government, wiping out entire swaths of the population in the process.

More importantly, I – and thousands of Millennial women just like me – would not have been taught what our true purpose was, to lift the heroes onto our shoulders, to drag them to the finish line. That the price of salvation would be our very lives, that we were meant to pay that price with a smile. We never would have learned our worth.