Autistic Hermione Thoughts

I was thinking about Harry Potter. Then I was thinking about it more. Hence thoughts about autistic Hermione. No, she doesn't have to be read as autistic, and I'm not going to argue that she must be read that way because it's not so. I do read her that way, though (People told me I was just like Hermione for years...) And I am having thoughts.

Trigger Warnings: References to major bullying and possibly being suicidal.

Imagine Hermione speaking on time, maybe even early, but her pronunciation is off in ways that get her sent off to speech therapy anyways and she hates it because it's so hard to get her mouth to move in those ways. Once she learns, though, she hasn't got any patience for the people who didn't have to work like she did and get it wrong because they just don't care. Her classmates figure this out and use it to trigger meltdowns.

Imagine those meltdowns (and the ones caused by other bullying, and sometimes even the ones caused by plain old sensory overload) meaning that the teachers are kind of scared of her. The fact that meltdowns are one of the big times when accidental magic comes out doesn't exactly help here. They're terrified of her. So are her classmates. Not terrified enough to stop bullying her and triggering the meltdowns, though. And like Neurodivergent K pointed out, teachers punish the Behavior, but not the Antecedent to the Behavior (huge trigger warning on linked post.) This gets Hermione in a lot of trouble.

This goes on for a few years. Now it's the summer between fifth and sixth grade, and Hermione just turned eleven. Her parents are fighting with the school yet again to keep her in typical classes because they know she's smart, they know she doesn't belong in special classes (they're kind of Aspie elitist even though Hermione isn't really an Aspie, they just want to think she is. Yes, this is a source of tension, though Hermione never brings it up. She knows full well that people thinking she's Aspie is the only thing barely keeping her in the slightly less boring classes.) In the middle of that battle, a letter from Hogwarts arrives. Her parents see it first, and their initial reaction is that it's a scam to get them to pull Hermione out of school. They don't fall for it, they're convinced that the instant they respond it will trigger some sort of automatic dropping her from the regular rosters (true) and then it will fall through itself (false.) They decide not to tell Hermione, because they want to protect her from the lengths people will go to to exclude, at least for a while yet.

Then Professor McGonagall shows up at their house. This woman from the letter shows up at their house and Hermione's parents are terrified because this person trying to get out daughter out of the schools is at our house. Hermione starts out confused, since her parents didn't tell her about this latest development, then she's scared of McGonagall and angry at her parents for not telling her. Somehow McGonagall convinces them that Hogwarts is for real and that they're not just trying to yank Hermione out of school and that they didn't even know that was going on and why were they trying to do that anyways?

McGonagall is kind of confused because she's never dealt with this label “autism” before (there are autistic wizards, of course, but none of the ones coming through Hogwarts have been diagnosed before) but the magic that tracks the accepted students can't be fooled so she just goes to work figuring out how to make everything work. Hermione's hair somehow manages to become a major issue- she needs the weight of it for sensory reasons, she can't do brais (also sensory), and she hasn't figured out the motor skills for brushing it herself yet. This actually has Hermione's parents really worried. Hermione's sort of assuming there's a spell that will take care of it, and there is, but it's not one you'd usually expect a first-year to be able to do. But this is Hermione, and she gets McGonagall to at least try teaching it to her, and it turns out she can do it. Since McGonagall thinks it's a bit odd for an eleven year old to still need her parents brushing her hair, she winds up giving Hermione permission to use just that one spell outside of school even though she's underage, and she makes sure the Ministry knows. That's the spell Hermione was talking about on the train, by the way. She didn't want to say so because she's learned what happened when her classmates know.

But before we get on the train, there's more. She memorized all her books? Yes, she really is that interested, but that's not why she started. She was scared. What if they decide they don't want me at Hogwarts either after I'm there? I won't be able to go back to regular school, they won't take me, I can't screw this up. So she decides she's going to memorize all her books. It turns out to be easier than she thought because all of this is just so interesting, but that's not why she decided to do it. She'll let you think that was why, but it's not.

Now we go to Hogwarts. We already know Snape's bigoted- we know it from how he treats Muggle-borns and werewolves. He's an abusive bully too- see Neville's boggart being Snape, seriously. Now we've got a developmentally disabled Muggle-born. That's even worse. So instead of being understanding about her being autistic, he decides to take advantage of it to push all her buttons and then blame her for it. And of course, the Behavior gets punished, but not the Antecedent. That's even more true when a teacher is the Antecedent (still huge trigger warning on link.) It doesn't actually help that she's smart. If she were average, he might get sick of it, but she's top of the class and doesn't dare let anyone forget it because she's still scared they'll send her away like her primary school wanted to and she's pretty sure they can't threaten Hogwarts with a lawsuit. Maybe he doesn't get that's why she makes it so clear. He probably wouldn't care anyways.

And of course, the oh-so-famous line, “before we get killed, or worse, expelled!” An autistic student who's pretty sure there's nowhere else to go might legitimately think expelled is worse because if you're dead you at least don't need to deal with the fact that there are no more options. There are reasons so many school-age autistic people get suicidal, and the thought of being pushed out of school again (the only school where she's ever had anything resembling a friend!) could well be enough to push an autistic Hermione in that direction. Not such a funny line anymore, is it?

Over time, Hermione gets more comfortable with the fact that they're not going to send her home in disgrace over all this stuff. Being friends with The Boy Who Lived probably helps here- it's a big priority to keep Harry safe, and Hermione does save Harry and Ron's skins quite a few times over the course of the books. Her first reaction when she wakes up from being Petrified is still that having missed so much class is going to get her sent home, though. That's why she stayed up as long as her body would take (brewing alertness potions herself once Madam Pomfrey wouldn't give her any more) to get caught up for the year-end exams as soon as she was awake. And then Dumbledore cancels them and all that work for nothing?! She's not great at hiding her emotions and we see her upset reaction. Once they don't send her home over the safety issue of her getting Petrified or over all the class she missed, she's actually a lot more comfortable with the fact that she's not getting sent home. She's kind of wondering what it would even take to get expelled, since the only example she's got of a person being expelled is when everyone thought he'd murdered someone. She never gets completely comfortable that she's not getting kicked out and sent home, even after she's married to Ron and has kids and is the director of... I actually forget what she was the director of sorry, but the fear is in the back of her mind, not the front. Not gone, that kind of thing never goes away any more than traumatizing stuff she dealt with in her time at Hogwarts and in the year she spent running around for Horcruxes does, but she's mostly past it. Mostly.

Alignments and Houses

I was thinking a bit about Hogwarts Houses and about Dungeons and Dragons alignments, and now I'm going through the alignments to see if there are any Houses I think they would either disproportionately wind up in or not wind up in. [In case anyone is curious, I sort Gryffindor, and I seem to be Neutral Good, leaning more Chaotic Good than Lawful Good if I really had to go one way or the other.] Before I start, let me point out that while these kinds of alignments can be a useful tool, no, they're not going to tell you everything about a person or character. Also, all 36 combinations will exist and I'm just thinking about which ones I feel would be more common. [I like to Sort my original characters and I always know what their alignments are.]

So. Lawful Good: I feel like they'd wind up in Hufflepuff fairly often, because goodness and loyalty and friendship are big Hufflepuff things. I'd be really interested to write a Lawful Good Slytherin sometime, I feel like there wouldn't be a ton of them but yeah they'd exist. Major possitive correlation with Hufflepuff, minor negative correlation with Slytherin for Lawful Good.

Now Lawful Neutral: Lots of Ravenclaw, lots of Slytherin. I feel like there would be very few Gryffindors here, since their thing is being kind of foolhardy about what they believe in, not so much being “rules are rules” and following everything to a tee.

Lawful Evil: HUGELY NOT HUFFLEPUFFS. Seriously, this is not a Hufflepuff. Feels rather Slytherin, using the law to your own not so good ends. I think a lot of these folk would wind up in Slytherin. Umbridge, for example, I think is Lawful Evil Slytherin. (Did we ever find out where she was sorted?)

Neutral Good: Very Hufflepuff, very Gryffindor. Which one depends on how you show your goodness. Between Ravenclaw and Slytherin I don't think there'd be much difference in how often they go there, and it's not so much a negative relationship as “well there's a big positive relationship with someone who's not me.”

True Neutral: “I want to know about all the things, good and bad!” Sounds rather Ravenclaw, doesn't it? There would be a decent number of Ravenclaws here. I'm not convinced there would be any House that's specifically more likely to get folks of this alignment, really. Peter Pettigrew probably goes here- doesn't seem to care as much about what's good or bad, legal or illegal, just about protecting himself. Maybe a negative correlation with Hufflepuff? Not nessesarily though, since you can be true neutral by way of not caring what effects it has on anyone else or how it relates to the law- if it's what needs to be done to be loyal to friends/family, you'll do it. I think True Neutral is... kind of neutral.

Neutral Evil: No specific correlations, I don't think. It'd depend rather heavily on traits that are outside of their alignment. The Hufflepuffs here would have wound up here because Helga really was willing to teach everyone the same, and probably hate it. But canonically, Hufflepuff had the fewest Dark Wizards and Slytherin the most, so I guess they mostly went Slytherin in the books. I think that's more because people got kind of scared of Slytherin early on (the legend about the Chamber of Secrets, anyone?) and so people with choices didn't really want to go there, hence any evil alignment that didn't have any strong directionality towards another House would wind up in Slytherin because they'd be least worried about the reputation. That's different from saying they actually go there when the Hat doesn't need to worry about making the numbers about even, which it seems like it tries to do.

Chaotic Good: They tend to be Gryffindor or Slytherin. Gryffindor for the ones who blatantly go chaotic and openly break all the rules when breaking the rules is the only way to do the right thing, Slytherin for the ones who ignore laws sneakily, rely on connections to get away with it, maybe use the system to show how messed up the system is and therefore dismantle it, that sort of thing. Chaotic Good Gryffindors get caught. A lot. Chaotic Good Slytherins are a lot better at not getting caught. Fred and George totally strike me as Chaotic Good Gryffindors.

Chaotic Neutral: The first thing coming to my head is “I'd be unstoppable if it weren't for law enforcement and gravity.” Thanks to magic, gravity isn't much of a concern, so it's anti-law now. Negative correlation with Hufflepuff, but that's about it, I think.

Chaotic Evil: No traits specific to the alignment make me think of any specific House. In the world of Harry Potter, numbers and the image Slytherin has gotten means they'll overwhelmingly get Sorted Slytherin, but in terms of just the traits that make a person Chaotic Evil? Meh, I don't think they're actually any more likely to belong in Slytherin than anywhere else.