A Fan Just Noticed That Hermione Waited 6 Years To Clapback At Ron & It's Pretty Amazing

For Potterheads around the world, dissecting the magically dense wizarding canon laid out by J.K. Rowling seems to be a favorite pastime. And of course it is: each new read of a Harry Potter novel is sure to reveal some little Easter egg, some moment of foreshadowing that you missed the last time through. Like, oh, I don’t know, the time Hermione waited six years to call Ron out? Yes. Six years. Hermione is our Queen of Pettiness and we love her for it.

In a post uploaded yesterday onto Reddit’s /r/HarryPotter boards, user jabthejesusfreak posted a photo from the image sharing platform imgur, with a brief, but perfect, caption: “Hermione waited six long years for this.”

The photo captures the moment in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the original Harry Potter series, when Harry, Ron and Hermione are mired in the Battle of Hogwarts. As they run to the Whomping Willow in search of Voldemort, the trio realizes that the devilish tree (I mean, seriously, the Whomping Willow is always causing trouble) is flailing madly. Per everything in the wizarding world, there’s a key. Well, not a literal key, but a button, a knob of sorts, on the tree’s trunk that has the ability to stop the flailing branches and essentially press “Pause.”

Here's the passage:

“I can see the place,” pants Ron. “If we just had Crookshanks again…”

“Crookshanks?” counters Hermione. “Are you a wizard, or what?”

That line, that singular line that inspires me to do 20 chef's kisses in a row, harkens all the way back to the first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. If you will recall, the first book thrust the three friends into a sort of wizarding Olympics for first year students, as they tried desperately to retrieve the Sorcerer's Stone before Voldemort. One of the more harrowing moments occurred when Ron and Harry became tangled in a thicket of Devil's Snare, a brutal, magical root which squeezes tighter the harder you fight back. It is everyone's anxiety nightmare.

Hermione, at the time only 11 years old, remembers from one of her books that Devil's Snare hates fire. But oh, moans Hermione, if only she had wood to get a blaze started:

"HAVE YOU GONE MAD?" shouts Ron, frantically. "ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?"

And even amid a literal war years and years later, fighting desperately for their lives, Hermione, the smartest witch in her class, remembered this moment when Ron snapped at her. And she clapped back. She clapped back so good, we now dedicate entire posts to her pettiness.