Unlike a Sister - madharmony - Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling [Archive of Our Own]
I don't even know where to begin with this one. There are so many layers to why I adore it, so let me pick one or two of the most important ones.
Firstly, one kind of HP story has the power to touch me so deeply if done well - and that is middle aged Harry (or Hermione, or Draco, or Ron) in a crisis.
In my head canon this generation will get married, invest heavily in their careers, have children, buy houses, - only to realize in their forties (at the latest) that they can’t paint over and outrun the developmental steps, that they should have worked through in their teens but didn’t have any space and capacity for.
So, inevitably, these delayed issues will creep up and bite them in their ass in middle age. They will painfully complicate their attachment to their children, spouses, everybody in their life. Marriages will be blown up, their kids will have to reject the subconsciously delegated issues of their parents in order to be able to become themselves and act as painful mirrors, therapy will become unavoidable.
And the more functional the mirage seemed during their twenties and thirties, the bigger and more devastating the inevitable blow up will be.
So here we are, this is exactly the itch “Unlike a sister” is scratching, Hermione and Harry do a spectacular job of blowing up their lifes, - and reading this was simultaneously soooooo incredibly nourishing while also a quite a bit painful.
Secondly, there is another theme dear to my heart that “Unlike a sister” addresses with so much insight and kindness.
“All human stories are migration stories, because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.” Moshin Hamid
Harry and Hermione are some kind of first generation migrants, who can never really settle in their new world. Their spouses and children are natives to this new land, and the former therefore lack the ability for real attunement, and the latter reject their migrant parents attempts to instill some of their home culture values, scruples and ideals in them, because they desperately need to fully inhabit the new world. It is hard to describe the bone deep feeling of loneliness this engenders in all first generation migrants, but this story does succeed in conveying it.
It makes so much sense, that they would inevitably drift towards each other, once the busyness of childrearing and building a life dissipates and looking at this existential loneliness becomes unavoidable.
Thirdly, because it is insanely ambitious, this story also beautifully addresses the societal implications of repressed perpetrator trauma. Fascist ideology is a societal pathology, that is transmitted transgenerationally via attachment trauma - and is incredibly hard to weed out. It tends to flare up again and again in new forms because perpetrator trauma is usually never addressed adequately, much less integrated intergenerationally.
And the kind of real systemic change Hermione is working towards, will almost always engender a massive, violent backlash. And this wonderful story brilliantly posits Hermione as a lightining rod for this kind of backlash – this is such a powerful illustration of the virulent shame defense that always accompanies repressed transgenerational perpetrator trauma.
