Hermione Snape and the Divergence Point: Vol #2

Chapter 5: Conflicts of Conscience

Lockhart's Lies and a Liability!

The appointment of one Mr. Gilderoy Lockhart, 33, as Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher seemed innocuous at first, perhaps even beneficial to the students, but after a month of enduring his lessons it has become apparent that the Gilderoy Lockhart portrayed in his books is a fundamentally different person than the one teaching DADA this year.

"I'm going to fail my DADA NEWT if this keeps up!" says one anonymous student. "A whole month and he hasn't taught us a single spell! I can't even cast silently!"

This student's grievance is one shared with much of the student body. Many upper year students are concerned that they'll have lost very valuable years. Our team has spoken to students of every year and they have made their concerns known. Unless there is a 'feed my professor's fragile ego' section in the DADA OWLs or NEWTs, our fifth, sixth and seventh year students are, to put it lightly, completely fucked.

Another student claims that he once spent an entire lecture on his grooming techniques. "Seemed to think we all needed to know how he tends to his hair," says another anonymous student. Their complaints were corroborated with their classmates.

These are not new complaints by any means. As soon as the first day of classes Lockhart had felt the need to endanger his second year students by releasing malnourished, agitated Cornish pixies without so much as a spell for them to use. Luckily, no students were harmed severely, but one might have taken serious injury after being hoisted onto the candelabra. And what does the great hero, Gilderoy Lockhart, do? He left the twelve-year-old student hanging with the pixies still rampaging about. He tasked three other students, also twelve, with clearing the room and saving the victim.

"The spell he used to handle [the pixies] wasn't even real!" says another student. "He said a load of silly words and nothing happened, then he left while other students were still trying to flee the classroom!"

A student from the described class above provided us with a copy of their test to show to students and faculty alike just what Lockhart is testing us on. This is a shameless display of unfiltered narcissism and is harming students academically and physically.

The damage done by his neglect extends far beyond that of his students. While investigating this case we saw after the welfare of the pixies from the doomed second year class. "Whoever was supposed to take care of them couldn't be bothered feeding them," says an anonymous faculty member. "All crammed in that little bird cage? No wonder they'd gone mad. We've been trying to treat them, but there's no hope for some of them. Traumatised, can't be released into the wild like this. We'll have to give them to an expert for care. That tiny little cage, the pixies were covered in their own filth. No wonder some of them got sepsis..."

Three of the pixies in Lockhart's care died from their raging infections. We have included pictures of the pixies, but be warned, these images are graphic and disturbing.

Severus looked at the skeletal pixies, covered in their own filth, a younger one clinging to one of the dead ones. Disturbing was a good word, and he wondered if Hagrid knew what the student, probably Hermione if he thought about it, asking after the pixies planned. He read on.

Pixies may not be humans, nor have the mental capacity of humans, but the extent of the cruelty displayed here should not be endured by any living thing. (It was most definitely Hermione that wrote this.)

While investigating, we also found Lockhart failed to mention Mary Hannagan, deceased, in his book Break with a Banshee. The, at the time, seventy-seven-year-old witch had been hunting Irish spirits and creatures for sixty years. The experienced widow had an alarming track record, we've found after some digging, that her cases (of those we could find) had a 92% success rate, and those where she didn't either capture or kill the creature, she managed to lure it away from crowds. It is entirely possible that she simply couldn't handle the case at her age, as Lockhart suggested in his interview with Magical Cork Times, but Hannagan lost her husband while hunting the Waterford Werewolf. After seeing her husband of forty years killed in a particularly gruesome way, we find it hard to believe that Hannagan went mad after an encounter with her fiftieth banshee. Lockhart suggests the veteran hunter 'got old and sloppy', but made no comments on Hannagan's retrograde amnesia. We are unsure why she was not mentioned in his book, and any involvement in her amnesia is speculation. We have to ask, for someone so eager for the spotlight, why would he not write about besting such an impressive hunter? Does he know something?