The thing is, you see, over the course of the Harry Potter franchise the character of Hermione Granger was my ideal child, my ideal adolescent, and ultimately my ideal mature woman. I know full well that it’s a big mistake to confuse a character with the actor performing it, but I was inevitably left with a warm impression of the lady Emma.
But all that changed quickly when it became evident that, having virtually owned the biggest spotlight in the film franchise, she set out to achieve mainstream starlet immortality, first by resorting to some dubious (in my opinion) modelling, and then by taking up an activist stance and revealing what I saw as a juvenile and rather silly nature. And so I went off Emma Watson big time. Fine, you might say, Emma Watson is just an actor, she’s no concern of mine, so let the whole thing go and think no more about. And so I did, until now.
The problem for me is that I separate cause and effect in such matters. I can’t just say ‘Emma Watson brought all this criticism on herself so she deserves the brickbats. End of story.’ When I see somebody being attacked for views and behaviour which they held honestly, if a little immaturely, such an attack feels unjust and my sympathy gene is immediately aroused. Occasionally I have seen that tendency as a fault, but it’s who I am and I’m not likely to change now. I don’t even want to change. Why should I?
And so that’s why I want to have a long confabulation with Ms Watson to see whether my imperfect INFJ mind can say something to help. It isn’t going to happen, of course, but at least I managed to get a blog post out of it.
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