Re: A would-be great novel, ruined by the last three chapters (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

On Jul 26, 6:04 pm, Cathy Weeks <kathys...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 26, 11:08 am, josephmrami...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:





On Jul 26, 11:04 am, Cathy Weeks <kathys...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 26, 6:55 am, insomn...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Insomniac) wrote:

If you don't feel the final battle is a farce, consider this: Molly
Weasley defeated and killed Bellatrix while all other Order members
couldn't even beat her?

Actually, they weren't order members who couldn't beat her. They were
DA members, and unqualified wizards.

Members of the Order failed to defeat Bellatrix in the battle at the
Ministry of Magic.

Molly Weasley, on the other hand, is a complete badass, such that all
the men in her family were scared of her.

They were intimidated by her as the "boss" of the family with an
imposing personality, not necessarily as a powerful, highly skilled,
potentially violent witch.

She could be highly skilled. And very bright and quite clever. Just
because her duelling practice or whatever wasn't shown, doesn't mean
it didn't happen. People rise to the occasion. Would you say that
Ripley in the Alien movies couldn't have been a badass? She was a
worker, not a fighter when the first movie came out.

There's a reason the phrase
"mother-bear" is in existance. I'm curious as to why you think a
house-wife couldn't be a good dueller?

Dueling is a sophisticated skill, and as such requires a lot of high-
level practice. Would an enraged mother defending her child suddenly
become capable of playing championship tennis? An emotional surge can
provide certain primitive abilities (temporary fearlessness, increased
strength, or indifference to pain), but not learned, complex skills.

Yes, and Molly Weasley, in the 16 years since the death of the Potters
had LOTS and LOTS more time to practice that than Bellatrix did.
Bella spent, what 15 of those years in Azkaban, and was certainly not
practicing then. So how did SHE get to be such a badass? It suggests
to me that it's not *necessarily* high-level practice thing, but
perhaps something else. Being a fast thinker and having fast
reflexes, and being creative and flexible might be more important. We
have zero evidence either way that Molly did or didn't have those
abilities. And fearlessness is absolutely something she does have.

You are making a circular argument. Your claim is that because Molly
is depicted as a "badass" in the duel with Bellatrix, there must be a
good explanation for her abilities, so it's reasonable to infer that
she must have been secretly practicing for years or otherwise
developing her skills. However, the debate in this thread (at least
the one I've sort of been trying to have) is whether the depiction of
Molly as formidable in battle is plausible in the first place. You
can't demonstrate its plausibility by just assuming the badass ability
exists and then reasoning backward to a source for it.

Obviously, it's impossible to prove that Molly was *not* privately
honing her dueling skills by practicing for years, since so little of
her life is described in the novels. So if you prefer to assume that
training was going on behind the scenes, fine. I'm just saying that
there is no direct textual support for such an assumption, because
there isn't.


Molly lost both her brothers
to Voldemort's first war, and had just lost one of her sons in the
second war. It seems to me that in the intervening years, she had
been practicing for the eventuality that she will need to protect her
children.

There is no evidence or suggestion of that in the novels. All we saw
was a Molly Weasley whose anxieties for her family prevented her from
even dispatching a boggart properly.

There's a BIG difference between dispatching a relatively harmless
boggart, than being in the line of fire of one of the more powerful
witches in the world.

So because Molly failed at the easy task, she was more likely to
succeed at the difficult task? :)

Joe Ramirez

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