LogFAQs > #977137345

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KarmicOverkill

Harry Potter fans For anyone who remembers book 5:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Marietta Edgecombe is often viewed more sympathetically than intended. She betrays Dumbledore's Army to Umbridge and gets SNEAK written on her face in boils forever, thanks to Hermione's spell that she put on all the Army's members beforehand. However, many readers found that she didn't deserve this punishment for several reasons. First, Marietta never wanted to join them in the first place and was actually peer-pressured to do so by her friend Cho Chang. Second, her mother works at the Ministry of Magic, so Marietta could've been afraid that her participation in La Rsistance would bring harm to her mother (though she could have cut ties with them without betraying them, implying that she actually wanted to curry favor with the authorities and not just protect her mother's job). Third, Marietta (along with the rest of Dumbledore's Army) was never warned about the consequences of her betrayal: if she had known she'd be revealed at once and scarred permanently, she likely wouldn't have betrayed them. Fourth, she later had her memories of ratting out Dumbledore's Army and her involvement with them erased, so she's permanently disfigured for a crime she doesn't even remember committing.

As a biased teenager I obviously felt no sympathy for her and like Harry thought Hermione was completely in the right, but even now I still don't see how anyone could have viewed her sympathetically.

Of course I blame Cho Chang a lot more because she's the one who dragged her friend to the secret DA meetup and got her to sign up when her friend didn't even want to in the first place, and all because Cho liked Harry/wanted him to be both a replacement to Cedric and final link to Cedric, which was also a BS thing to do to Harry. But still, Marietta going to umbridge to rat out her friends, when umbridge was doing things like literally torturing students and had no qualms about using crucio. And that's not even getting into the legal stuff like getting expelled and having their wand destroyed, their only source of protection against literal death eaters. Even if she "didn't know what would happen to them" fuck that reasoning. Almost as bad as the dark knight with harvey two-face sparing ramirez.

I can't believe it's actually an entry on TVtropes side by side with Jurassic World, the most correct example of this trope. Who are these people that find mere boils too harsh? She got off easy compared to what would have happened had her betrayal been more successful.