Molly-- Thoughts on a witch

[huntergreen_3]

No: HPFGUIDX 109690

HunterGreen previously:
> I can certainly see a reason why Ron or Fred or
> George might want to tell Molly off, but I don't see what on earth
> she has done to Harry.

Josh replied:
>> Molly and every other adult has, in OotP, come out not smelling so 
much of roses, in Harry's view. Everyone knew more about his own 
freakin' destiny than himself. His overprotection has led to Sirius' 
death
[snip]
Molly is over-protective, and Harry is definitely on a countdown to
explode at all this protection. Dumbledore and Molly are the two
worst instigators. Over-protection can quite deductively be seen as
the quickest way to get Harry killed... [snip] He needs to demand to 
be treated as an adult member of the Order. [snip]

It's not that she isn't nice, concerned, etc. It is that she takes it
too far and passes back into negative territory... petty, scathing,
etc. on occasion. She needs an attitude adjustment on when to back
off.<<

Josh (in a later post):
>>Harry is not going to stand for being called a child any longer, 
and things have simply gone to far for him to act fully like an adult 
in response. Self-contradictory I know, but that's the long and short 
of it.

Molly might not be the one to receive the anger. It might be the
Order as a whole. It might just be Dumbledore (lemondrop Harry?), or
it might be Snape. But the one to open their mouth first will wish
they hadn't.
[snip]
Sirius and Lupin _tried_ to
give him a whiff of info, but were constrained by Dumbledore from
telling all, of course. Molly objected on her own, and only brought
in DD as a last resort. <<

HunterGreen:
Wow, I decide to wait until after work to post my reply and about 5 
people beat me to it! I stil feel like you haven't answered my 
original question, though Josh, which was, what has Molly, 
SPECIFICALLY, done to Harry to make him tell her off?
I very much agree that the order as a whole made some very bad 
decisions when it came to Harry. 
The problem lies in the fact that they treat Harry both as a child 
and as an adult depending on what's appropriate at the moment. At the 
end of GoF he was NOT treated like a fifteen-year-old boy who had 
just gone through something terrible, he was treated like 
a 'soldier', pretty much giving a report to Dumbledore, then was told 
as little as possible before being sent back to the Dursley's for 2 
months where he was ignored and still told nothing. An adult in that 
situation would be just as frustrated as Harry was, but at least an 
adult would have the choice to just say 'the heck with all this' and 
quit, or demand an explanation. But Harry can't, because he's a 
child, but no one remembers that until he gets to Grimmauld Place. 
Suddenly the person who ALERTED everyone to the return of Voldemort 
is given no more respect than, say, Ron or Ginny. Although he was 
left to fend for himself for two months as though he were grown up, 
he's immediately a child again as soon as that's conveinent. So for 
the few weeks he's at Grimmauld Place, he's considered a run-of-the-
mill teenager, until he goes back to school that is. Again he's 
expected to fend for himself. He's cut off from letters, he can't use 
Floo Powder because the fires are being watched, and he doesn't know 
about this 'other way' the order members have of communicating, 
because he's "too young" to join the order. This would all be fine if 
he WAS Ron or Hermione or Fred or George, but he's not. So when he 
has need to contact the order what happens? Chaos. 
They expect him to make adult decisions (the adult decision in this 
case being contacting Snape, discounting the dream on his own, and 
NOT leaving school), yet they don't treat him like an adult (but NOT 
telling him what these other communications methods are, and keeping 
him in the dark about the prophecy). I think its absolutely 
ridiculous that Harry wasn't allowed to join the order. Again, he's 
the reason the order exists right now. He survived the duel with 
Voldemort, he came back and told Dumbledore everything that happened, 
and he's the one who has the mind connection with Voldemort. No one 
seems to care either. He's completely unimportant until he does 
something like save Arthur's life, or do an interview with the 
quibbler to convince more people of Voldemort's return (which was 
later posted in the daily prophet, as we know).

ANYWAY, what does all that have to do with Molly? Well, it wasn't her 
fault. We don't know if she knew about the prophecy, she may have or 
she may have only been told of its existence (Dumbledore may have 
simply briefed the order with something as simple as "there's a 
prophecy involving Harry and Voldemort that I believe Voldemort is 
interested in hearing.") In any case, it wasn't her place to tell it 
to Harry. That came down to either Dumbledore (the leader of the 
order, and the person who originally heard the prophecy), and Sirius, 
who is Harry's godfather after all. 
Its my strong belief that Sirius knew the details about the prophecy. 
I doubt he knew the exact wording, but he probably heard all about it 
from James 15 years before. (I don't see how Dumbledore could justify 
not telling James and Lily the specific details, if not the exact 
wording, and if James was so close to picking Sirius as his secret-
keeper, Sirius probably knew WHY they were going into hiding). I very 
much doubt Molly stopped him from telling *that* to Harry, and even 
if she did, they were living in the same house for about two weeks 
(and then another two weeks in December), he could have pulled Harry 
aside and told him if he really wanted to. But Sirius, for all his 
grumbling about Dumbledore, did listen to him (that is, if he did 
indeed know the prophecy).
What he did tell Harry didn't really help him at all. It would have 
been better if Molly had won and Sirius had told him nothing. All the 
talk about the 'weapon' later on nearly made Harry run away! 
Everything else they told him was just stuff he could have guessed or 
figured out on his own. And Lupin was the one who actually stopped 
Sirius from saying anything else, but Sirius gave up so easily that 
I'd guess he was about done already anyway. 

Therefore, although Harry does indeed have the right to yell and 
scream at the order, the fault lies on *Dumbledore's* shoulders, not 
on Molly's, even if she did agree with him. Like I said above, the 
only other person to be blamed for not telling Harry about the 
prophecy, is Sirius. Since Sirius has the rights/responsibilites of 
being one of Harry's parents (this right was given to him directly 
from James and Lily, just because he may be unstable in some people's 
minds or that due to certain circumstances Harry can't live with him, 
doesn't nullify this fact). Sirius could have chosen to defy 
Dumbledore and tell Harry about the prophecy (or at least what little 
he knew about it), but he, like all the other adults, believed that 
Harry was just "too young" to know (which is ridiculous considering 
that it had to do DIRECTLY with him, he had *right* to be told).