Super Molly-GoF dissatisfaction C.R.A.B.

[foxmoth at qnet.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 25880

	It could be a Flint that Molly says Rita's a wretched woman in an 
earlier chapter and then believes her about Hermione, but I don't think 
so, nor do I think it was done simply for comic effect. It's a 
foreshadowing of Fudge's behavior in the Parting of the Ways. *He* 
certainly has reason to know that Rita's reporting is unreliable, but 
he falls for the story about Harry. Jo is  pointing out the way in 
which most of us take what's written with far too few grains of salt, 
even after we've had experience of the way the media can distort a 
story.
	Blind spots, big and small, are a major theme of the series. After 
all, the central premise is that there's a whole magical world, 
partially hidden by charms and spells, but mostly by the fact that we 
Muggles are too cloddish to notice it.  All the characters we've seen 
have some blindness about them, even Dumbledore. Molly is not 
omniscient or all-wise. She puts a little too much trust in the written 
word, just as Fudge puts too much in *purity of blood*.
	
	I was around for the wand hoo-hah. I even came up with a far 
fetched theory to explain it, but IIRC most of our remarks were 
prefaced with a "well, it could just be a mistake but..." So I wasn't 
disappointed in Jo when that's what it turned out to be, even though I 
was a little let down to realize it wasn't a Clue after all. That 
needn't mean there aren't *any* clues in the text. I continue to 
believe that Rowling has a reason for informing us once and only once 
in each book that Snape resembles a bat. <g>
	Authors, even great ones, make mistakes and change their minds. 
I'm not enough of a C.S.  Lewis freak to hunt up errors and 
inconsistencies in his texts, but Tolkien certainly had them. He 
rewrote major portions of the Hobbit after he'd conceived the Lord of 
the Rings, and worked it into the story by saying that Bilbo simply 
hadn't put the truth in his journal. Clever, but not neccessary...would 
the Lord of the Rings  be a lesser work if Tolkien hadn't accounted for 
the differences between it and the orginal Hobbit?
	Lastly, I'd like to throw in my two sickles for C.R.A.B. It's 
about time!
Pippin