Reflection and Analysis

Harry Potter - More Molly (6/26/2024)

So, I've been stewing over the article I found online within the last day or so and have some more thoughts. (See link in the previous entry.)

First off, what I thought was a blog entry (a bit more on this in a bit) is an article in a newspaper. This school newspaper was posted online, and I came across it because I used the right keywords for a completely different character from the Harry Potter series.

Does this change any of my thoughts regarding the article? Not really, as my thoughts regarding what I brought up are still the same. For example, the article is written by a teenager who has absolutely no experience with children, commenting on how adults should or shouldn't react toward children and missing the mark by the mile.

This is and isn't a bad thing.

On the one side, I find the misconceptions on the part of the writer understandable, given their lack of experience when it comes to children. It's a learning experience, which can be a good thing. The other side? If this were a personal blog, I could simply say, "They were off by a mile on that because of their lack of experience," and that be the worst thing.

It's not, though, an entry to a personal blog.

Instead, it's an actual news article meant to analyze Molly's character, which is potentially being used as a portfolio piece by this writer, and I'm left wondering where the adult oversight for this newspaper club is and why they didn't help this writer produce a better article putting forth their points. No, I'm not actually talking about the writer of the article missing how adults should or shouldn't react towards children missing things by a mile because that, as I said, can be chalked up as resulting from the writer's lack of experience.

What are the things that bother me?

First, nobody fact-checked the article. I know this because Fabian's name is misspelled as Faubian in the same sentence. He and Gideon are said to be twins, which are actually fanon, not canon. Anybody who looks them up their info on a Harry Potter wiki (there are lots of them) can easily discover this is fanon at this point, not canon.

We've also a place where the writer says, "Instead of comforting her hurting child, Molly snaps at her to keep quiet and consequently invalidates Ginny's emotions," yet I checked the passage in the books where Molly tells Ginny, "Now be quiet," and discovered no reference to Molly snapping at Ginny. It never happened.

In another place, the writer also says in another spot, "Molly had every right to be upset; afterall, her son and his friend had stolen their illegal car and flown it cross country." In reality, there was nothing illegal about the car until Ron flew the car to Hogwarts, where Arthur built a loophole in the law. I admit that a lot of fans mistakenly believe the car was, in fact, an illegal car, as the line regarding the loophole in the law is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of moment, but this is something that can be found easily on any of the fandom wiki for Harry Potter.

There are potentially other canon errors in the article; these are simply the first ones that jump out at me. (Quick, off-topic note here in that I do want to commend the writer of the article for using the ";" correctly, as I often see this punctuation used incorrectly, adult writers included here.)

From here, let's move on to the second issue--paragraphing. The huge paragraphs are honestly why I thought at first glance this was a personal blog and not a school newspaper. The rule of thumb is every time a new idea starts a new paragraph starts. More specifically, I don't mean "main idea," as a main idea can be spread out across multiple paragraphs.

For example, let's take the paragraphs above, where I point out that the Harry Potter canon wasn't fact-checked. I could have put all three ideas into one paragraph because that is one idea. The idea that the article wasn't fact-checked when it came to canon information is definitely a singular idea, yet I broke it up into three different paragraphs because each canon element I fact-checked is also a separate idea.