My friend and I were emailing about this update. I asked her for her opinion on it and whether or not she liked it. Here are her thoughts:
"Yeeah, I kind of don't. I posted this review on it yesterday (after quietly fuming for a bit):
If this had been Neville or someone, I'd be commending you on how you handled the emotion here, but as it is I was too annoyed and appalled that you were damseling and then fridging fricking Hermione while halfheartedly suggesting she put up an offscreen fight to be able to appreciate it.
I'm not easily annoyed with fridging, or character death in general. In fact, a lot of my favorite scenes in fiction involve my favorite characters dying, and I've always argued that a character of any gender dying as a vital part of the main character's arc is fine. But Hermione had a huge incomplete arc and you've just rendered the entirety of it pointless. This is Hermione, she wasn't as rational as Harry, she tried to be a hero but only made things worse, she was framed for murder and ended up in a huge debt to Harry, which she had plans to try to settle and potential for interesting emotional growth, except whoops, then she died, and nothing ever came of any of it. For shock value and unexpectedness purposes, I guess that's cool. But for storytelling purposes, it's breathtakingly unsatisfying, and the fact she was your primary female character by a mile and you just killed her off in an offscreen fight because a boy was too late to save her, her last words spent reassuring him it's not his fault, adds a bitter aftertaste of typical gendered tropes to the whole thing.
I'm hoping this isn't what it seems, one way or another, and Hermione gets to come back and do some of the stuff she should have gotten to do so that maybe at least some of the time you spent developing her wasn't just inane inconsequential filler. But if it is what it seems, I'm just emptily disappointed - too distracted sighing dejectedly at the fact I thought you were better than this to even care on an in-world level that she died.
A chapter like this shouldn't fall flat like that. Although my reasons for disliking it may be fairly meta and you could argue you're intentionally averting accepted standards of when characters cannot die, the ultimate result is just that I'm left unaffected by a chapter that should have been powerful and emotional. As an author you should care about that if nothing else.
Basically, remember when I was telling you that one of the few things that bugged me was how near the beginning Harry's interactions with Hermione where she was traditionally smart but he was rational seemed to be belittling her to glorify him? Well, the reason it didn't bug me that much was that Hermione was still interesting and seemingly getting real development and they story seemed to be giving her her own quest of self-improvement through which she could easily become his equal or better. Now she turns out to have existed purely to make Harry care about her and nothing she did mattered and she never got to be anything but Harry's less rational, less successful, less efficient, overemotional love interest foil. Argh. And we didn't even get to see her put up a proper fight! I wouldn't have minded nearly so much if, say, Harry had arrived to find Hermione had already killed or otherwise disabled the troll, with a victorious smile of contentment on her face, and died from her injuries as he watched while whispering "I did it, I'm a hero." But NOPE she put up some kind of fight and threw some explosive-looking spells but of course she was actually helpless and couldn't possibly have defeated the troll on her own so her survival completely and utterly depended on Harry making his way there in time which he didn't, oh no, look at his sadfeels while all she cares about is telling him it's not his fault instead of being livid that she didn't achieve fucking anything in her life because Harry constantly overshadowed her and now she's dying before she could figure out how to fix it.
All that made me too angry to give a damn about the plot or emotion or anything, which is a shame because otherwise I'd probably have enjoyed this update."
I emailed back, and she elaborated:
"Oh, no, my issue is not with the fact that Eliezer killed a female character for Harry's motivation. Like I said, I like character death. I like character death used to put other characters through an emotional rollercoaster. And when people complain that X is sexist because a female character got fridged, that annoys me because while the trend is an issue, there is nothing wrong or sexist with an individual instance of a character who happens to be female dying for a character who happens to be male. It actually kind of surprised me on a meta level that I was so mad - I have never been annoyed by an individual instance of fridging before.
But the issue here is with the context in this particular instance. Your argument that it had to happen this way is flawed, because it assumes the story prior to the exact point of Hermione's death was fixed and out of Eliezer's hands. I don't have a problem with Eliezer killing Hermione, in itself - but if he was going to, he should have either not given her this character arc in the first place or completed the arc first in a way that gives at least some vague kind of closure. He could also have killed Neville if he wanted to - he'd just have needed to develop Harry's relationship with Neville in such a way that it would make sense as a motivator, instead of (or along with) his relationship with Hermione. And it's not as if he suddenly realized here after writing the story up to this point that he needed to kill Hermione in order for it to work out - the trigger warnings page has noted that the next chapter with a trigger warning would be called "The Bystander Effect" (he notes specifically on chapter 88 that the original title was "Bystander Apathy", clearly as a way of alerting those who have been watching out for the next triggery chapter that this is it) since August 2010. This was planned. He knew exactly how he was going to kill Hermione, and he had all the time in the world to plan out a way for it to go that wouldn't involve aborting a potentially interesting arc and making Hermione The Character Who Could Never Step Out Of Harry's Shadow And Then Died.
If you've watched Game of Thrones (or read A Song of Ice and Fire, assuming this bit is more or less the same as the show), it also shockingly kills off main characters a lot, but while it is shocking and unexpected, it is not unsatisfying like this, because the characters who are killed, while they had personalities and plans and development, didn't have arcs going much of anywhere in particular at the moment - the story wouldn't have been any better with them remaining alive than dead at that point. I feel this is very distinctly not the case for Hermione in MoR. She had interesting stuff left to do. She had been written with uncomfortable overtones (taking a canon character one of whose main qualities was being smart and repeatedly making her fail where Harry succeeds because he's more rational), but the story suggested her arc was about her discovering her own way towards not having to be in Harry's shadow anymore, which would have fixed it. By aborting the arc, all that's left is those uncomfortable overtones of glorifying Harry and belittling Hermione - a character who happens to have canonically been the intelligent one, who taught millions of girls that being smart could be pretty badass.
And now MoR's only remaining vaguely developed female character is McGonagall, who, while fun, is also repeatedly emphasized as being markedly irrational (in this very chapter, even). From a source material that did at least reasonably well with female characters, after a story that seemed to be heading towards also doing at least okay on that front, Eliezer ended up with a story about how much better a boy is than almost everybody else, where all of the rare exceptions are male and the one female character who could have held her own gets fridged before anything comes of it. As a canon-Hermione fan, I feel pretty damn slapped in the face, especially when this comes straight after chapter 87 (which also irritated me a lot by making Hermione preoccupied with her tiresome ~unrequited love~ for Harry when she's just been framed for murder and should have way better things to think about). It did not have to be this way.
And, like I said, even if he absolutely had to develop an arc and make it look like Hermione was going to get something done in her life only to have it not happen to make her death more shocking, he could still have done it without the pathetic damseling, and I might have been able to let it slide. Couldn't this have been from Hermione's point of view up until when Harry arrives at the scene? (He could still have done Harry's viewpoint, too.) Couldn't we have actually seen her attempts to fight it off (which Eliezer could at least have attempted to make somewhat awesome)? Couldn't Harry have arrived sometime before Hermione became a helpless immobile McGuffin, and seen her holding her own at least somewhat? (If chapter 90 is Hermione's fight with the troll from her point of view and it's awesome and has some kind of closure to her character, or Hermione gets brought back in some manner and gets some closure afterwards, I'll be reasonably content.)
The end result, as I also mentioned, is that I don't even find it heartwrenching, because I'm too busy being angry at the context to be immersed in the story at all anymore at that point. I couldn't even concentrate when reading the whole last bit because all I wanted to do was start to type a rant into the comment box. If I had managed to be emotionally impacted by it, I'd probably also be more inclined to forgive it for the sake of good storytelling, but exactly because the context was so maddening, I couldn't. I was more saddened by the death of Mrs. Norris than Hermione.
I posted my review on FFN, and he says he reads all reviews, so he's probably read it already, but you can post it if you want. (Probably better include my elaborations here.)"