I haven't read OotP in a while, but I watched the movie a few days ago. I was struck by how magically competent Umbridge was. The primary examples of her skill with offensive magic being how she is able to quite easily hit Parvarti's origami swan with what I believe is incendio (so, sniping a small, moving target.), her bombarda maximum demolishing the RoR's walls, (which is either quite an advanced display of power, or unremarkable, depending on what protective enchantments the room was under at the time, though given that the students wanted a safe place to practice magic, the room probably would have been designed to stop people from finding it or breaching it.) her clear familiarity with the cruciatus curse, and then finally the speed with which she was able to block the centaur's arrow.

In the Deathly Hallows she is also able to produce a corporeal patronus charm, which is apparently far beyond NEWT level magic, though obviously achievable when people are given the proper motivation to learn it.

Putting aside her clear level of academic competence with magic, points against her would be that we never see her fight in an actual duel, and the majority of the defensive magic that she performs is verbal. She also has a habit of talking her way into trouble (e.g., with the Centaurs who she deliberately antagonised despite seeming afraid of them) which would definitely work against her. I have no doubt that she would have been able to at least scare off the centaurs if Grawp hadn't grabbed her from behind though.

To me, all of this paints a picture of an exceptionally talented witch who kept her defensive skills sharp despite having a presumably difficult and time consuming desk job as a senior undersecretary, and not having seen combat as an auror, death eater or member of any other para-military group (as far as we know.)

My question to all of you is how exceptional of a witch does this make her? When the average witch or wizard can barely cast a shield charm, how far does this put her ahead of said average witch or wizard? Which death eaters or aurors would you consider her to be equivalent to in terms of combat prowess?

 

To the best of my recollection, in the books she's far less impressive and is subdued by the centaurs in short order after attacking them. Grawp had nothing to do with that and only showed up later on after the centaurs had decided against sparing Harry and Hermione.

 

Percy level I think. Broadly competent in a "best in their year" kind of way, but nothing special in the grand scheme of things.

 

I also don’t really have a great recollection of OotP the book, but points also go for her creating her black (blood) quill herself. It’s a rather ingenious piece of magic since it heals the user in addition to carving into their hand. But I agree that she isn’t any sort of exceptional. I expect that if she were part of, say, the Order, she’d be your run of the mill member when it comes to fighting ability.

 

Very fair. Attacking the centaurs first doesn't seem to be movie Umbridge's style, I guess that she's too much of a cow- smart for that.

I'm not sure that I would even go that far. I'd imagine that she was upper average in most of her subjects, but exceptional at defense against the dark arts. Sort of like an inverted Harry. I'd say that her interest in this is pretty much entirely caused by her fear of non-humans and sadism, but who knows.

If she was actively a part of the Order or the Death Eaters I think that she would be way above average, but as it is she doesn't have a reason to expect to be in a life threatening situation on a daily basis, so I'd say that as good as she currently is, she could be a lot more dangerous with the proper motivation. You're definitely right about the blood quills though, I didn't know that she had created them herself.

 

Hold on, the way I remember it Harry is upper-average at most subjects and exceptional at Defense. What exactly do you mean by "inverted Harry", then?

 

Inverted in personality, sorry. She enjoys defence for the opposite reasons.

 

Breaking open the Room of Requirement with a Bombarda is a film change. I'm pretty sure Dobby warned the DA and they were caught while they were escaping. I happen to think she's sub auror level, but about level with most other teachers. She was sent to the school knowing that the changes she would make would be unpopular, and did not initially have the power to just throw the other teachers out; I can't see the Ministry being so stupid as to send someone who scaled to student level for that kind of mission. She had to be better than at least the above average seventh years or someone would have done something about her.

 

She's at least skilled enough to make a clever, somewhat clandestine torture device

 

I had thought (from fanfic) that the blood quill was a known thing rather than an Umbridge invention, though she was able to apply the necessary enchantments. The legitimate use of a blood quill was signing magical contracts that called for it. The usual fanon depiction of Umbridge is that she is barely competent, so I guess that is an area where fanfic differs from Rowling. Hmm, interesting.

 

What fun is an incompetent villain?

 

I thought Umbridge's villainy came from the power of bureaucracy, rather than magical power. She had the ministry backing her up, and the ministry in turn was mostly controlled by Voldemort through the Death Eaters. Umbridge wouldn't have been much of a threat all by herself.

 

Umbridge is the avatar of the banality of evil. The sort of individual who serves as an obstacle in the life of every person reading it, one who is thoroughly despicable in a way that's intimately relatable. Everyone has known an Umbridge, and that's why she's more hated than Voldemort. Her incompetence is part of what elevates how pointless and unnecessary her obstructions are.

 

I think that she was hyper competent at her job, even if she went about it in a cartoonishly evil way.

She's incompetent as a dada teacher, but in terms of what she was actually sent to Hogwarts to do she was hypercompetent.

 

How is this supposed hyper-competence shown by Umbridge's actions? What do you think she was actually sent to Hogwarts to do? She failed at stopping DA from forming, she failed at stopping Dumbledore from keeping up with the order, she failed at getting the students to support the ministry over Harry and Dumbledore, she failed at silencing Harry. She only "succeeded" in torturing students, but I don't think torture was an ultimate goal of the ministry to send Umbridge. You might call the Inquisitorial Squad a success, but those students were on her side from the get go, so it didn't really do anything over giving them some of her ministry appointed power; the squad ultimately didn't succeed in much of anything.

The only reason Umbridge didn't fail any harder than she ultimately did is that she had disproportionate resources at her disposal in form of the full backing of a government against a single underage student.

 

To undermine Dumbledore's authority and to lower the over all standard of dada education at Hogwarts. Had the Ministry been right about Voldemort, it would have worked pretty well.

 

Undermining education wasn't really the goal. Fudge was afraid that Dumbledore was raising a private army from Hogwarts students, and Umbridge was supposed to stop that while silencing Harry; the end result was the spontaneous formation of a literal "Dumbledore's Army", and Harry going public big time via Skeeter.

To attribute any kind of competence to Umbridge you'd need to have a counterfactual that goes worse for the Ministry; literally anyone else doing literally nothing would have ended in a better result for Fudge than having Umbridge in Hogwarts. The Daily Prophet was doing a splendid job at discrediting Dumbledore all without Umbridge.

 

Undermining dada education definitely was one of the goals, making all students worse off if they were forced to defend themselves/start an insurrection. Removing power from the Headmaster was also a goal. She succeeded at both of these goals, but failed to successfully handle the DA afterwards.

In the DH, however, she seemed to have a handle on the whole muggleborn administration act or whatever it was called, and if the government hadn't been toppled it probably would have succeeded.

 

I thought she succeeded in both those things basically using the ministry's fist. If she had to also be competent, then a less competent version of her would have failed at those things. I have trouble imagining a point of departure AU where that happens, but I don't know the original story that well.