Harry Potter and the Destruction of Character, With a Side of Political Correctness and How It Affects Today’s Blockbusters

Hermione from the Harry Potter books is a flawed character, she has lots of bushy brown hair and large front teeth, she struggles to make friends because she's seen as bossy. Film Hermione has zero flaws. She's smart, pretty, powerful and just perfect, she's a bit more violent than book Hermione, punching Draco in the third movie instead of slapping him, although I wouldn’t complain about that. She was also much less shaken from an unexpected death eater attack from the 7th film. In the book her hands were shaking, she hid under the table and accidentally cast a spell at Ron because she was nervous, where in the film she shows no sign of fear.

In prisoner of Azkaban when the trio faces Sirius Black for the first time thinking he's a mad serial killer, Ron is the one who stood up for Harry while struggling to actually standstill on his feet and said: "If you want to kill Harry, you'll have to kill us too."
In the film this line is given to Hermione and Ron is just left to blubber uselessly for the rest of the film.

There's also one scene in the book where Snape asked a question in class and Hermione answered, he said something like “That is the second time you have spoken out of turn Mrs Granger, five points from Gryffindor for being an insufferable know-it-all.” Ron stood up for her by saying "You asked us a question and she knows the answer, why ask if you don't want to be told?!" While in the movie, well, if you know you know. These changes have become so significant in the movies that it would be considered unfaithful to the characters if Hermione acted like a flawed human being instead of an object, and Ron was actually useful. 

The changes in Hermione Granger’s character from book to film represent a major problem in today’s blockbuster films. Filmmakers and studios often feel the NEED to present women as these badass flawless characters who are there to show men how it’s done, and you can tell they try so hard at doing that. They dehumanize female characters by making them perfect. An example of that is Harley Quinn in ‘birds of prey’ when she completely broke out of character and started doing backflips so effortlessly like a ninja and she and all the other female characters beat the crap out of everyone they met, with no danger on their lives whatsoever, not a single scratch on their face, no consequences. If you watch superhero flicks then you know the heroes always go through hell before actually defeating the villain, mentally or physically, and sometimes both, but not here, just for the sake of saying ‘yeah women can fight too’ at the expense of dehumanizing these female anti-heroes and portraying them as action figures, disrespecting the source material as well, in which these characters have so much depth and many complex layers, just like every male comic book character that has come to life on the big screen does. Again, feeling the need to force them as flawless people instead of just being humans, to try to prove a point that doesn’t need to be proven in a rated-r action-comedy movie about a comic book character.

In ‘Avengers Endgame’, there’s an extremely forced scene in the final battle where all the female characters stand next to each other in order to perform a certain task to defeat the main villain, and while all the male characters are being torn to the ground, they just pass through like nothing, again, feeling like action figures instead of actual people, feeling the NEED to present women as more superior, completely taking away the ‘human’ aspect of these super HUMANS before they are superheroes, and it comes off so corny. Because you can tell when some white people sit around a room and be like ‘women are gonna love this’. Of course, this is not the case with all blockbusters and comic-book movies, but it’s still so noticeable in some of them that it’s problematic. 

When ‘Minions’ creator Pierre Coffin was asked why none of his yellow little animated guys is female in the movie, he said that seeing how dumb and stupid minions are, he just couldn’t imagine them being girls, implying that girls should not be dumb or stupid, while the boys should be dumb AND stupid. I as a passionate moviegoer am annoyed by this, and wish to see female characters in a more slightly natural way, and hope to feel less like political correctness is being forced down my throat like a hard to swallow pill.