Was Percy! now Percy/Molly/Hermione

[serenadust]

No: HPFGUIDX 35905

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Penny & Bryce <pennylin at s...> wrote:


.  Harry at one point thinks that Percy has puffed 
> himself up in a way that reminds Harry rather forcefully of Molly.

Well, she IS his mother.  Kids often pick up mannerisms from one 
parent or the other without otherwise resembling them personality-
wise, although I do think they have some traits im common.  My 
impression of Molly leads me to believe that she was quite the 
pistol in her day and not really much like Percy.  Remember her fond 
recollection of her "nighttime stroll" with Arthur <vbg>?



Penny wrote:
 I do 
> dislike the way she interacts with her children in some ways.  
With 
> Bill, she seems fond but a bit meddlesome; with Charlie ... hmmm, 
no 
> real opinion here; with Percy, she is fond & doting to the point 
of 
> fairly obvious favoritism; with the Twins, she is definitely 
bossy, 
> interfering & unappreciative of their strengths & ambitions; with 
Ron, 
> she seems to be largely uninvolved or "absent" (she pays *far* 
more 
> attention to Harry than to Ron, and someone wrote a really nice 
analysis 
> some point back about how Molly's favoring Harry over her own son 
Ron 
> might cause problems in the Harry/Ron relationship as well as the 
> Molly/Ron relationship before all is said & done); and finally, 
with 
> Ginny, I see her as smothering & over-protective.
> 

That's funny because I really admire Molly as a mother.  I'd even go 
so far as to describe her as Uber-Mom.  With that many kids 
(particularly those twins) I'd say she does a great job of ruling 
the roost.  After all,  Arthur is sweet but quite ineffective at 
managing them and I would suspect that Molly realized early in their 
parenting career that if anyone was going to save them from utter 
chaos, it was going to have to be her.  It's pretty common in large 
families (esp. ones with several boys) for one parent or the other 
to have to take the harder line to have the family function at all.
I really don't agree that Molly favors Harry over Ron either; she 
merely has a soft spot for any obviously neglected child and I 
haven't caught so much of a whiff of Ron's resenting her attentions 
to Harry.  As for her "interfering" with the twins, well somebody 
had better interfere with them!  Can you imagine having to bring 
those two up, what with burning holes in their little brother's 
tongue, and turning his bear into a giant spider?  I don't *see* any 
evidence that her mothering has cramped their style.

The thing that strikes me about Percy is that he is so much a male 
version of Hermione.  If she hadn't been developed so much as a 
character, she would probably be his twin.  Both are heavily 
invested in overachievement and needing loads of approval and 
validation from authority figures. Both of them tend to be 
overbearing when interacting with others and both of them tend to 
be, well, humor-impaired.  JKR even states in GoF that Hermione 
usually gets along with Percy much better than the others.  Of 
course, because Hermione is one of the main characters we know so 
much more about her, but if Percy were more fully developed I think 
that we would find that there's much more to him than the "Bighead 
boy".  Let's face it, if Hermione hadn't been befriended by Ron and 
Harry, she'd be Percy in spades.  I'm really looking forward to 
learning more about Percy, but then I'm happy with any further 
Weasley character development 

Jo Serenadust,  MAJOR Weasley fan