luckthebard:

I know this is an unpopular character interpretation, but:

Fanon!Molly is much nicer than canon!Molly was, and I really wish more fanwork, meta, and fic for him didn’t downplay the fact that he could be a dismissive and condescending asshole at times.

I never really understood people who said Molly’s charisma score didn’t match how Taliesin was playing him – in my opinion, Taliesin was very much playing a character with a 10 Charisma. He had good intentions and thought he knew best, but he wasn’t great at communicating. He was also stubborn to a fault and bad at listening to other people’s points of view. The group conversation with Nott after Caleb tried to steal the scroll is a great example of this, as is his attitude toward and general dismissiveness of Kiri.

I just think all of those flaws made Molly a really interesting character, and it’s weird to me that fandom has flattened that so much. I’m not in any way trying to say he couldn’t be nice, there are plenty of examples of that too, but his foibles tend to be left out of fan memory of the character, which then misunderstands the whole of who he was. Perhaps it is part of coping with the character’s death (choosing to highlight and remember the best of him), but I wish we could honor the complexity of the character more.