First, the twins. I like them in a I-don't-actually-have-to-deal-with-them way. If I actually knew them when I was a child, I'd have had to fight with them and either made them eat mud (literally) or they would have made me eat mud (more probable if I was stupid enough to attack them head-on -- and I really was more cunning than that as a child). They amuse me - mostly - and I have to admit that most of their antics make me laugh. Although, they make me laugh less and less as time goes by. The twins start off as mostly harmless pranksters in the series - and I laughed a lot. But as events in the series get darker, so do the twins - and my indulgence of them vanishes.
I NEVER liked the way that they got away with "teasing" Percy - but children do what their adults allow them to do. They frequently tortured Percy in front of Arthur and Molly and Arthur and Molly allowed it! Worse still, Arthur laughs when they "tease" Percy in front of him. And Molly makes things a zillion times worse with her general over-protective-ness of Percy and her frequent comparisons between Percy and the twins. In fact, the scenes with Percy and his family have always chilled me. Percy is the only member of his family to notice that something is wrong with Ginny is CoS, he shows genuine concern for Ron in the lake scene later in this book (oops! Erm...Am I allowed to reference that?), and he always strive to be exactly what his parents (specifically his mother) loudly tout to be their ideal son. In a very real sense, Percy is that kid who tries too hard to be liked, and is smushed by the other kids for being a brown-noser. As parents who supposedly love their children equally, Arthur and Molly should have rained Wrath upon them the first time they "teased" one of their siblings. But Arthur laughs at these antics - and no matter what Molly does after that, he's sent the message that "It's okay...Mummy's just a fuddy-duddy."
That family dynamic makes me want to SCREAM!
But I'll save the rest of that rant for the lake chapter....maybe. Now to focus on this rather heavy-handed, disastrous chapter.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm a wibbling 1/2 and 1/2 sort...
Date: 2005-09-11 02:54 am (UTC)I NEVER liked the way that they got away with "teasing" Percy - but children do what their adults allow them to do. They frequently tortured Percy in front of Arthur and Molly and Arthur and Molly allowed it! Worse still, Arthur laughs when they "tease" Percy in front of him. And Molly makes things a zillion times worse with her general over-protective-ness of Percy and her frequent comparisons between Percy and the twins. In fact, the scenes with Percy and his family have always chilled me. Percy is the only member of his family to notice that something is wrong with Ginny is CoS, he shows genuine concern for Ron in the lake scene later in this book (oops! Erm...Am I allowed to reference that?), and he always strive to be exactly what his parents (specifically his mother) loudly tout to be their ideal son. In a very real sense, Percy is that kid who tries too hard to be liked, and is smushed by the other kids for being a brown-noser. As parents who supposedly love their children equally, Arthur and Molly should have rained Wrath upon them the first time they "teased" one of their siblings. But Arthur laughs at these antics - and no matter what Molly does after that, he's sent the message that "It's okay...Mummy's just a fuddy-duddy."
That family dynamic makes me want to SCREAM!
But I'll save the rest of that rant for the lake chapter....maybe. Now to focus on this rather heavy-handed, disastrous chapter.