Ron's talents

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 97452

Melanie wrote:
<snipped> However, the truth is in life sometimes the best gift a
person can offer the world is friendship. I think that is Ron's true gift.

Pook responded
And his sense of humor!  Harry and Hermionie don't have the one liners
that on has to offer.

Carol:
While I agree with Melanie that friendship is Ron's greatest gift
(more important, in the long run, than his skill at chess and the
talent for Quidditch which I think will show itself more fully in Book
6), I think that Pook has a good point here. Neither Hermione nor
Harry has much of a sense of humor. IIRC, neither of them has ever
initiated a joke or a pleasantry. Ron, in contrast, has had to develop
a sense of humor to deal with having the Twins as older brothers.
That's what makes Ron so much for for Harry to be with, and why he
misses him when they're feuding in GoF and he's stuck spending all his
spare time in the library because Hermione is his best, rather than
second-best, friend. Ron isn't perfect, but the spat in GoF was not
entirely his fault. He thought he was being left out and lied to, and
Harry didn't bother to set him straight by telling him what
Crouch!Moody had said about someone else putting his name in the
goblet. (I'm not attacking Harry, only saying that Ron's response was
perfectly understandable.)

If Ron has nothing to offer, it's hard to understand why Harry is
supposed to rescue his "Wheezy" and not his Hermione in the second
task in GoF. Ron, not Hermione, is "the thing Harry will miss most."
And this is *after* their disagreement, not before. There's also
Harry's shocked response to the Dead!Ron boggart in OoP: "All the air
seemed to vanish from Harry's lungs; he felt as though he were falling
through the floor; his brain turned icy cold--Ron dead, no, it
couldn't be--" (OoP Am. ed. 173)

Clearly Ron does have something to offer Harry--friendship and loyalty
and a family and fun--and those things are very, very important to Harry.

Carol, who fully expects a Weasley to die but desperately hopes it
won't be Ron