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From the publication of the first book, Hermione Granger has been deified as the shining star and inspiration to so many millions of weird, bookish young girls, longing to see themselves in the media they read. Throughout the series, but most especially in the early books, she is unapologetically individual and unconcerned with fixing the things that make her different, like her frizzy hair, buck teeth, and enthusiastic love for school and learning. Her status as a Muggleborn witch also serves to place her between worlds, never quite fitting the prescribed norms of either her Muggle home or the newfound world of wizards.

Accordingly, there has been a growing movement in the past few years to imagine and create representations of Hermione as not only an outsider on the basis of her quirks and imaginary marginalized identity of Muggleborn, but as also embodying identities which place her outside the social mainstream of the real world. Most notably, readings of Hermione as black have enjoyed great popularity in the past several years, with fanart and fanfic cropping up increasingly around Hermione’s experience as not only a nerdy girl and a Muggleborn, but as a black girl in England as well. These readings have become so popular in fact, that Noma Dumezweni, a black British actress, was cast as adult Hermione in the original run of the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage production.

This vision of Hermione is a rare success in writing diversity into texts where no identity category is specifically assigned. Similarly, there has been a movement to read and write Hermione as queer, but with nowhere near the success of challenging her assumed whiteness. Though queer content on Hermione certainly exists, it does not seem to have anything like the impassioned following that ships like Ginny/Luna have found. With the increase in popularity of imagining Harry Potter characters as queer for reasons beyond highly sexualized fanfic scenarios, one would think that Hermione, a long-time fan favorite, would be at the top of the list for queer headcanons.

Though JK Rowling has frequently argued that she left her characters open to interpretation, at least on the basis of race, this is not always necessarily the reality of the text. In fact, in Hermione’s case, the text is actually written to preclude the possibility of Hermione as a wlw. There is a moment in Goblet of Fire, at the beginning of the Quidditch World Cup, where the veela begin dancing, that Hermione is explicitly made immune to the charms of the Veela, her straightness made implicit within this moment. She is also distant from other female characters throughout the series, interacting with women only in the contexts of teacher and student, by way of petty revenge (as in Half-Blood Prince, where she uses Parvati’s friendship with Lavender to pass information to make Ron jealous), or invisibly in between scenes (as in her friendship with Ginny). Even her relationships with other prominent females in the series are marred by complete incompatibility of personality (Luna), or mistrust (occasionally, Mrs. Weasley).

Hermione is never given any viable possibilities for love or even friendship with another woman. Normalizing distance and iciness with other women is a problem in and of itself that has carried over into fandom, but it also serves to further isolate nerdy queer girls who identify with Hermione along with all the other nerdy girls of the world.