Prediction 1: Hermione will soon harrow Azkaban. Why wouldn't she? She's all but immortal, now.

Prediction 2: Time-travel and memory-charm shenanigans incoming. Evidence:

• Harry weirdly ignored the missing recognition code on LV's forged message.

• Cedric considered in Harry's plans, and his Time-Turner mentioned, then seemingly forgotten.

• Death-Eaters all dead, but no faces observed.

• Flamel asserted dead, but we didn't see it, and LV explicitly didn't kill him personally.

• Dumbledore thinks in stories, yet we're supposed to believe he's surprised when the villain reveals he's captured the hero and his equipment (Harry and the Cloak), just like villains always catch heroes and take their stuff near the end (see: Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker).

• Hermione has been asleep the whole time, neither giving nor receiving information.

Questions:

• did Harry tell Cedric to do certain things before Harry left? Did Harry tell Cedric to Obliviate Harry afterward so Harry could play his part convincingly? What did Harry most likely tell Cedric to do?

• who will do the Time-Turning, Hermione, Cedric, or Harry?

• who will be saved? Obvious candidates include Flamel, Dumbledore, Lucius Malfoy, maybe all the anonymous Death-Eaters.

• if you were Hermione and had a Time-Turner and the Stone and the Cloak and six hours to save everybody but Voldemort, Quirrell and Macnair, how would you do it? (Do you need the help of someone who can Obliviate well? Do you need partial Transfiguration?)

This seems like an exercise in scaling laws.

The odds of being a hero who save 100 lives are less 1% of the odds of being a hero who saves 1 life. So in the absence of good data about being a hero who saves 10^100 lives, we should assume that the odds are much, much less than 1/(10^100).

In other words, for certain claims, the size of the claim itself lowers the probability.

More pedestrian example: ISTR your odds of becoming a musician earning over $1 million a year are much, much less than 1% of your odds of becoming a musician who earns over $10,000 a year.

This seems a strange comment to me. After the SPHEW arc I think I have a much better understanding of the thoughts and ambitions of e.g. Padma (doesn't want to fall back into harmony with her sister and is now seeking a non-evil way to do this), Susan (voice of caution through the influence of her Aunt, non-arrogant enough to seek out Tonks help) or Tracey (Darke Lady who'll have everyone as her husband), than e.g. the characters of Dean Thomas or Seamus Finnigan or even Blaise Zabini. Possibly even Neville Longbottom.

" You have courage enough for Gryffindor, said the calm voice of the Sorting Hat in her memory, but you will do what is right in any House I give you. You will learn, you will stand by your friends, in any House you choose. So don’t be afraid, Hermione Granger, just decide where you belong..."

"Why, no," said Professor Quirrell. "I stopped trying to be a hero, and went off to do something else I found more pleasant."

"But you don't have to be a hero, Miss Granger," said Professor Quirrell. "You can stop anytime you please."

That idea... ...had occurred to her before, several times over the last two days.

People become who they are meant to be, by doing what is right, Headmaster Dumbledore had told her.

Hermione Granger, I shall be less subtle than is usual for a mysterious old wizard, and tell you outright that you cannot imagine how badly things could go if the events surrounding Harry Potter turn to ill.

The most powerful wizard in the world had told her that, when he was talking about how important it was that she not stop being Harry's friend.

Staying with Harry is not for Harry's sake, it is the right thing to do. I think you're over constraining the solution.

And I wouldn't say that the harrowing of Azkaban is the point - it's the destruction of the dementors. The continual torture provided by the dementors is what makes Azkaban an abomination.

Although wouldn't it be strange to have someone else defeat Death besides Harry? He's learned much more about death than he knew when he first cast the True Patronus, and he has the invisibility cloak.

But Hermione isn't really rational, she's just intelligent. I don't think she can perform a feat of astounding rationality in this fic, as you are suggesting. Her idea of morality is flawed and naive. If I imagine her going to Azkaban and destroying it, it would be for decidedly uninspiring reasons to me, as a rationalist.

For the literary problems:

We've already gotten the scene where Harry decides he has something else to do besides killing dementors.

Harry has expressed that he's sure Hermione could learn the True Patronus and wouldn't be able to stop herself from destroying Azkaban. She already has the secret in a note from Harry. She's been introduced to Fawkes. And she was led to her first bullies by flashes of gold and red.

He could have Harry taken to Azkaban, and Hermione break him out. That would be a bit too femi-cliched for my taste, but you never know.

Harry might be off somewhere, and Hermione will need to face the choice of going to Azkaban alone. She might face the choice believing that Harry is dead. EY has referred to Stephen Donaldson before. A "Lord Mhoram's Victory" scenario could fit nicely. (Very moving scene from Donaldson, and perfectly in line with EY's sense of life.) Along that line, maybe all the Dementors besiege Hogwarts (Harry and Dumbledore being elsewhere), slowly wearing down the defenses, and General Sunshine remembers the note from Harry, runs off to get it, and as she overcomes her fear of Dementors and resolves to fight them, she hears a great CAW! and is faced by a phoenix that transports her into the midst of the Dementors and she destroys them all.

I think the groundwork has been laid, and the plot turns aren't so difficult. Hermione as taking McGonagal's in mounting the defense of Hogwarts works for me.

If Hermione takes down Azkaban and survives, and does so without Harry seeming to take control, that would be more amazing to read than I can possibly express.

It would also reflect terribly on Hermione. She'd be an utter fool to attempt that kind of thing without using Harry's brilliance and resourcefulness. Her influence over Harry is one of her most useful powers and killing stuff ingeniously (and surviving) is pretty much Harry's specialty. It isn't hers.

It's one thing to insist on having your own team in a school battle-games. It's quite another to waste the opportunity to accept aid (and in this case even leadership) from an ally in a situation that means the life and death of yourself and others. It'd be disgustingly immature, take 'silliness' to a whole new level and be completely irrational. Unless Hermione's goal in attacking Azkaban really is more about her ego and signalling and not about the need for Azkaban to be attacked for some direct reason... and she had some reason to be completely confident that it wouldn't kill her.

No respect points for ego when it is at the expense of shut up and multiply.

Which adults do you consider major? Dumbledore, Quirrel, Snape, and McGonagall seem the definites, with Moody, Tonks, Flitwick, and Bones as second-stringers. That's 1/4 or 3/8, which is majority-male but not absurd.

I do like your second suggestion, though, even if your first is hard to reconcile with canon, and your third is hard to reconcile with MOR!Harry.

I've read through the back and forth with EY on Hermione here.

I think the criticisms of EY's treatment of Hermione's silliness share Hermione's silliness.

Hermione is all wound up with feeling not as good as Harry, with a Greater Prodigy crisis, and twists that up in gender ideology. Notice that Draco, the boy born to rule, has no problem accepting Harry's greater competence, and certainly doesn't get in a gender based tizzy over it. Who cries for Draco's unflattering portrayal?

Look at Harry, Draco, and Hermione. Who is more emotionally balanced? Who has a healthier interpersonal outlook? Who isn't going to be a Dark Lord, no matter what? Who is actually the best student? Who treats people the best?

You want to talk about silly? How about Harry's moral tizzy over sentient food. Cannibal!

Keep in mind that Hermione won the first army battle. While the other generals were busy being brilliant and ordering others about, Hermione was busy organizing her team to get the best out of them.

Yes, Hermione doesn't have the sheer power Harry does. Why does she, and apparently others, think she has to have that power or she will be less than?

As for the Mars vs. Venus discussions between Harry and Hermione, whatever Hermione's silliness, Harry's always comes off looking worse in my eyes. And on the literary side, before 87 I was starting to feel that the tone had gotten rather grim and analytical, and worried that the light human touch in the book had been cast aside for grim heroic daring do. 87 was a relief.

Quirrell remarked on how Harry was exceedingly good at killing things. I don't think that's the right measure of overall competence, whether Harry or Moody. Hermione has basic good sense and decency that all the competent killers lack.

When I project out the story arc, Harry may win the battle, but the future belongs to Hermione. Better than Dumbledore, better than Moody, better than McGonagal, better than Harry. Though having said it, I wonder if Hermione will get a phoenix visit, take down Azkaban herself, and possibly not survive. There's been some foreshadowing on that.

I'm not sure I'm quite on the same wavelength here, but what I'm seeing is that the boys are mostly proto-somethings - not just the obvious ones, like Harry being on the road to being a Light Lord or Draco gearing up to be the first reasonably-enlightened Lord Malfoy, but even relatively minor characters like Neville and Ron, you can get a pretty good idea of what kinds of people they're going to be when they grow up by looking at what they're like now and extrapolating - and the question of what kinds of people they'll be is taken seriously, too, in how things are framed and how the other characters react to things. (Harry's very first interaction with Neville, for example.) The girls don't really seem to have that same quality of being adults in training; even Hermione's heroism arc was more about her reputation and ego in the here-and-now than anything I can imagine her continuing past age 16 or so, and it takes a lot more work to imagine any of them having interesting roles as adults - it feels like it really doesn't matter whether any of them do anything more interesting than being housewives.