Ready for an unpopular opinion?
Although, opinion isn’t really the best word for it, since it’s actually a fact but JKR did such a great job romanticizing abusive/toxic people and relationships that very few people will like what I have to say…
Molly Weasley is a bad mother.
I know, I know…Blasphemy, right? I can practically see my follow count going down as I type this. I mean how can this woman
Be considered anything other than a proud, loving matriarch?
Well, let’s start with the really obvious one:
She can’t tell her own twins apart.
Mid way through his first year of Hogwarts, Harry Potter - The Boy Who Doesn’t Notice Shit - can tell Fred and George apart, but their own mother can’t. I know plenty of twins and their parents know who is who.
Now I know someone out there will try to defend this somehow and say that it’s not THAT BIG of a deal, but tell that to a kid whose mother doesn’t acknowledge their individuality. It’s pretty damaging. And this is actually one of Molly’s minor offenses.
She’s Incredibly judgmental and unsupportive of her children.
Fred and George were legitimately geniuses, but never does Molly utter an ounce of praise for their accomplishments. In fact, she puts them down, insisting that the joke shop and all of their inventions are a waste of time. She only ever focuses on the fact that the boys tended to get themselves into trouble. She also completely disregards them as part of the family during OotP when Ron is made a prefect and she claims that that’s “everyone in the family!” to which the twins reply “What are we? Next door neighbors?”
Nice Molly. Good Parenting. How about the fact that your kids were TOO SMART for general academics, dropped out and started their own highly successful business when every other shop in town was closing? No? Not good enough for you…alright….
Fred and George aren’t the only victims of course. She nags Bill about his hair and his earring and, most importantly, his marriage to Fleur Delacour.
Look, not all parents are going to be thrilled with who their child chooses to marry. My mom hates my soon-to-be-husband and, much like Molly Weasley, she can’t keep her irrelevant and completely unwarranted opinion to herself. And let me tell you something, it’s very hurtful to have your own mother disregard the person who makes you happy and be blatantly rude to them every time they are forced to be in the same room.
Then there’s Percy…Alright look, yes, Percy behaves like a little shit and eveyone has reason to be upset with the actions he takes against his own family but…can you blame him? Look at the chaos he’s grown up in. He was offered a very good job for someone his age and of his stature and he got a little carried away. Molly didn’t have to agree with what he was doing, but her lack of ability to show any support for her children is what drove Percy to take it as far as he did. Forcing your beliefs onto your children DOESN’T WORK. You need to let them go out and make some bad decisions. They need to see things for themselves and the more you try to hold them back from doing so, the harder they are going to try to prove you wrong and that, in my opinion, is a big part of what happened to Percy Weasley.
I could really go on and on about all the terrible ways Molly judged and refused to support her children, but I have too many other points to make so we’ll just leave it at these major ones here…
She plays favorites…Big Time.
It’s not exactly news to anyone that Molly Weasley favors her youngest child and only daughter, Ginny, over everyone else…especially Ron. It’s so bad that when the Horcrux talks to Ron in DH, it actually plays into the fact that Ron’s biggest insecurity stems from being the LEAST LOVED by his mother, who craved a daughter. Basically Molly has seven kids because she kept trying and trying for a girl and never got one. By the time Ron came around, she was fed up and she didn’t even try to hide it. Ron often feels overshadowed by all of his siblings and then by his best friend who his mother ALSO treats better than she treats him.
Until Percy’s big no-no against his family with his position at the ministry, Percy was another child who was put upon a pedestal and used to compare her other children against. The twins were constantly told to “Be More Like Percy” and that she “Never had these problems with Percy!”
It’s not only HER children who are subject to her toxic behavior….
She’s very hard on both Hermione and Harry as well, although she’s so overbearingly loving towards Harry that it’s often over looked. However, we’ll start with how she treats Hermione…
After Rita Skeeter, who is well known for being less than truthful in her articles, writes a scandalous piece on an innocent fourteen year old Hermione and basically destroying the poor girl’s first real romantic experience, Molly Weasley thinks its appropriate to basically throw her opinion on the matter in Hermione’s face by sending her a smaller chocolate egg than everyone else during easter, and by greeting her with very little enthusiasm the next time she saw her. It isn’t until Harry explains to her that he and Hermione were never involved that the grown woman warms up to her again.
I appreciate a lot of the things Molly did for Harry. She practically adopted him when he really had no one else and that’s great. I don’t want anyone to think that I believe Molly is a terrible person altogether, all I am doing with this rant - as I do with all of my rants - is make people think about these characters and see their flaws, when many readers only see the romanticized outer layer. That is what makes all of these characters SO GOOD. They are REAL. They are problematic…okay….here we go….
Molly puts her own kids and their needs aside to take care of Harry. Harry gets decent dress robes while Ron gets hideous, ratty hand me downs. Harry gets support and affection while the twins are brushed off to the side. And I understand that Harry needed that and good on Molly for stepping up…but she wasn’t good enough to her kids to warrant the amount she does for Harry.
She also acts very entitled to Harry because of all she has done for him and gets a little jealous when the idea of another parental figure is brought up. I could give an entire rant dedicated to the way Molly treats Sirius, and one day I probably will but today is not that day…it’s just….it’s very bad…
She undermines anyone else’s opinion on how to deal with Harry’s involvement in the Order. Why? Well because she’s practically his mother and so she gets to decide…
Here’s the thing though, Harry isn’t just a kid who is interested in fighting against Voldemort, he’s the center of everything that is going on and sheltering him from the facts is not going to help. Personally, I’m very against sheltering kids especially kids who are 15/16 years old and can comprehend a situation. Molly verbally attacks Sirius when she feels he is giving Harry too much information and accuses him of treating Harry as if he’s James…
He’s not treating Harry like James.
He’s treating Harry like Harry. He’s treating Harry the way that James and Lily would have wanted him to be treated. He wasn’t going to give him every last little detail, he was only going to tell him as much as he needed to know. Why? Because Sirius knows that if he skirts around the truth, Harry will make his own conclusions and that may not end very well…
it DOESN’T end well. Molly gets her way, Harry is kept in the dark about some pretty important details and all hell breaks loose in the department of mysteries.
Harry deserved to be treated like more of an adult in particular situations. He had been through too much to keep him sheltered from the truth. Molly needs to back off.
These are just examples of her being a bad mother. As I said before, her behavior towards Sirius, her manipulative involvement in the relationship between Tonks and Remus and her complete inability to handle confrontation like an adult are all things that deserve their own separate rants.
I don’t hate Molly. I really don’t. I think she has so many amazing qualities that do redeem her, but she’s far from the Perfect Mother that the fandom sees her as.
Please don’t lynch me o_o
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