I was looking back through a few Hermione pieces that I'd written before OotP, and I realized that while they were well-made and I liked the main character she was no longer Hermione. And it upset me.
I think that this is part of what happens with the "how smart is Hermy" debates. Because in my mind over the three year summer she had stayed like me. When the first books were coming out I was always the same age as the Trio, and as a little girl I identified very strongly with Hermione. And as I grew up and JK didn't write anymore for a while I continued to think of Hermione as someone like me. But she's not.
I was one of the smart kids, and I observed a lot of Academically Talented students going about their classwork. And they usually fell into one of two types. There were the overachievers, who strained their brains over hours of homework every night, had study groups and tutors, and flipped out at less than perfect grades. Their goal in school was to come out of it with the perfect transcript, all A's despite the fact that they'd taken all the hardest classes, and to make it into the Ivy League. And then there were the ones like me: smart as a whip, but totally uninterested in grades or in practical applications, just in love with knowing. The ones who didn't study but knew really obscure and interesting things, because they pursued the things that interested them, not the things that were going to be one the test.
Hermione, IMO, definitely falls into the first category. She seems to care more about her grades or some sort of applicability than the pure knowing of things. And in that she's most definitely not like me.
I want to write Hermione as sensitive, artistic, perceptive, inspired, passionate, sensual. But as I look harder at new canon all I see is domineering, sanctimonious, superior, Gryffindor-centric. I don't believe that she really loves books anymore. I think she just uses them. And this frustrates me, because I really want to write about the Hermione in my head, but she's just not real, and I know that. I want a character with a beautiful, sexy brain who ponders the mysteries of the universe. I want someone with the mindset of a meta-girl in the Potterverse, someone whose eyes I can see through clearly. It's not Hermione. Nor, I think, is it Luna. Luna's too much, Hermione's not enough.
There doesn't seem to be a place for anyone like me in the Potterverse. Maybe that's why I'm finding it more difficult to fic there. Because those are the thoughts that I'm interested in: the passionate, the introspective, the mind that strains beyond mortal boundaries for a glimpse of inspiration, of understanding.
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