Catching Cupid's Snitch

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 35326

(Captain Tabouli, reclining peacefully in her crow's nest, hears the roar of a jetski, with cheering in its wake.  She takes out her telescope again and studies this brash newcomer carefully.  It bears the legend "Cupid's Snitch" on it in golden writing)

Hmmm.

An ingenious way of tying together Bertha Jorkins, Mrs Lestrange/Florence and the whole Sirius/Snape conundrum.  I particularly like the Florence Lestrange bit, and salute Elkins respectfully!  I like to cram as much canon and complication as possible into a backstory.

My main issues with it are character based (and therefore rather subjective).  Elkins cites the following excerpts as evidence of Sirius' "lingering hostility" towards Bertha for springing him and Florence behind the greenhouses...

"Listen, I knew Bertha Jorkins . . . She was at Hogwarts when I was,
a few years above your dad and me. And she was an idiot. Very nosy, 
but no brains, none at all. It's not a good combination."

"Maybe she's changed since I knew her, but the Bertha I knew wasn't 
forgetful at all -- quite the reverse. She was a bit dim, but she had 
an excellent memory for gossip. It used to get her into a lot of 
trouble; she never knew when to keep her mouth shut." 

You know, this just doesn't sound like Sirius-with-a-specific-personal-grudge to me.  He'd described as speaking "grimly", but it seems a situational grimness rather than a personally directed grimness.  A neutral, general assessment, rather than a long-term smouldering resentment.  He does seem to know her well, but I put this down to her notoriety rather than a personal issue.

We've *seen* Sirius with a long-term, smouldering personal grudge: towards Crouch senior.  When Harry asks him if he knows him, Sirius' face darkens, his voice grows quiet, and he becomes "as menacing as the night when Harry had first met him, when when had still believed Sirius to be a murderer".  OK, so this darkness is understandable in the circumstances, but we don't see even a trace of it with Bertha.

Then there's his feelings for Snape.  As Elkins rightly muses, the antipathy between Sirius and Snape does seem excessive and probably needs a specific explanation (mental note to self: incorporate into increasingly elaborate LOLLIPOPS backstory some time).   However, when Sirius gets onto Snape, he descends from his reasonably cynical, adult criticisms of Bertha into schoolboy insults: "slimy, oily, greasy-haired kid, he was".  That sounds like a cool, good-looking popular kid's sneers at a geeky loser if ever I heard 'em.  Note that it's Harry and Ron who grin at each other, perhaps rightly suspecting that Hermione is too mature and has too much faith in Dumbledore's judgment to enjoy sneering at Snape.  This suggests to me that the antipathy between the two really does date back to high school days, unlike his criticisms of Bertha, which seem a generalised, adult musing on her weaknesses and their risks.

In fact, I have trouble seeing Sirius as a long-term grudge-bearer driven by a crush at all.  I can see him lashing out and hexing Bertha, but he doesn't seem the brooding, scheming type to me, except when it's forced on him in Azkaban, of course.  He's impulsive, straightforward, a man of action, a do-now-think-later-if-at-all type, and was even more so as a teenager when the crush was allegedly driving him.  Premeditation is not his style. Nor is giving up his dead sexy girlfriend because his friends disapproved, methinks.  As we know, once Sirius gets an idea in his head, he acts on it and to hell with the consequences.  In the face of terrible odds and as a wanted man, he did terrible things to rescue Harry from Wormtail.  Admittedly, hanging on to his girl in the face of social disapproval isn't quite the same thing, but all the same, we know he's tenacious and acts impulsively.  If he really thought Snape was sliming around his beloved, he'd have gone straight up to him and Banished a suit of armour at his head.

As for Mrs Lestrange... take up with a Gryffindor and then break up with him because her friends disapproved?  The same Mrs Lestrange who, in her one starring appearance, sat regal and unrepentant in her chains, said "Throw us into Azkaban, we will wait! (...) We alone were faithful!  We alone tried to find him!", and swept out of the dungeon to her doom???  Naaaaah.

Say what you will about Mrs Lestrange, weakness and humility are not her things.  She is proud and defiant and principled and loyal to the point where she is prepared to go to a hideous prison for life rather than back down.  Why on earth, then, would she skulk about having a clandestine relationship in the first place, and then, still more implausibly, dump him because her friends didn't like it?  Can't see it.  Can't see it at *all*.  More likely her loyalty to Slytherin would preclude such a relationship in the first place (unless fuelled by some sinister, manipulative ulterior motive), or, if his Dead Sexiness was too much to resist, she would have seduced him, cool, sultry and unashamed.  And in public, in front of the whole of Slytherin *and* Gryffindor, if necessary to prove her point.  A mere few years later, she swept unbowed into Azkaban... for such a woman, the disapproval of her friends for her boyfriend would barely register.

> Well, Florence brooded.  She dwelled.  She had that Slytherin 
tendency towards resentment, don't you know, and unlike Sirius, she 
didn't have a very close circle of friends to see her through.  She 
became...withdrawn.  Bitter.  Twisted.  She began to hold the 
Gryffindors (especially that nasty little Mudblood Lily Evans) solely 
responsible for the break-up; her mind turned to thoughts of bloody 
vengeance.  She also started pestering her classmate Severus "I Know 
More Hexes Than Old Flitwick Himself" Snape to teach her all of the 
nastiest curses he knew.<

As for LOSTLIVES (Love Of Sirius Turning Lestrange Into Voldemort's Evil Servant) I find this unlikely.  Put Crouch Junior and yes, even Snape, under enough pressure, and watch 'em cave into a quivering, begging mess and a spitting, bellowing mess respectively.  Crouch Junior and Mrs Lestrange are being confronted with the same horrible fate for the same reason in the same gathering, and look how Mrs Lestrange handles it!  She has dignity and self-control in the face of horror.

I think the only way we'd really get her scheming and twisted is if *Sirius* left *her*, and even more so if the main reason was as pitiful to her as "my friends don't like you 'cos you're a slimy Slytherin".  Think 'Dangerous Liaisons'.

> So this was the real motivation underlying the viciousness of 
Sirius prank.  While he might have told himself that "he just wasn't 
thinking," deep down inside he wanted Snape dead.  Dead, dead, dead, 
as Cindy would put it.  To save his *girl*, you see.  To save her 
from Snape's bad influence.<

(Hey... maybe it was Florence Lestrange-to-be who planted the Prank idea into Sirius' head when Snape had the temerity to get a better mark than her in Potions!).  This still doesn't sit with Sirius' character, to my mind.  He's a Take Direct Action type.  He's a Speak Without Thinking Type.  The Prank is just too indirect a way of avenging himself on Snape.  No festering by the lake cooking up a Prank for Sirius.  I think his spilling the info about the Willow is much more likely to be an unpremeditated, hotheaded comment made without thought of consequences.

In the same way that breaking into Hogwarts and heading straight for the boys' dorm on Hallowe'en was his impulsive most direct way of getting to Wormtail... forgot about the portrait, didn't he?  (was it there when he was at Hogwarts?)  What did he do then?  Tried to slash the portrait and keep on going!  He only thought of getting hold of the password later, didn't he?  Surely if he'd been more of a schemer, more of a brooder he'd've found out about the portrait and taken it into account, thinking up a plan.  Even skulking discreetly as a dog and eavesdropping on the students would have been a start.  Then, when he got in, he didn't try to quietly slip open the curtains and nab the sleeping rat, did he?  No, he slashed the curtains and dived for it!

C'mon, this is *not* a brooding, scheming, grudge-bearing  thinker we have here.  This is a take-the-most-direct-action-possible-and-learn-by-trial-and-error type.  This is a find a problem, do something about it, and then get over it type.  *Snape* is the tortured brooding type who holds grudges to the end of his days and from one generation to the next.  In my LOLLIPOPS opinion, he's a much more likely candidate for an undying, twisted crush than Sirius and Mrs Lestrange.  The only way I'd buy Mrs Lestrange as affected by unrequited love is, as I mentioned, if she is driven to avenge a mortal insult (i.e. being rejected).

>As canonical evidence for this theory, I offer the following:
>
>(1)  Florence has a first name, but no last name.  Mrs. Lestrange has 
a last name, but no first name.  Coincidence?  Oh, I think not!<

I like it.  This I'm happy to buy.  Florence Lestrange-to-be and Sirius I'll leave on the shelf, though, unless OoP provides some conclusive evidence to the contrary.

>(2)  Sirius' strange omission of Mrs. Lestranges first *or* maiden
name when he lists her as a member of Snape's old gang.  (...)
It's odd, isn't it?  That Mrs. Lestrange's inclusion in the list 
should be subsumed into her husband's identity like that?  She's 
almost *glossed,* really:
>
>"The Lestranges -- they're a married couple -- they're in Azkaban."
>
>It almost sounds as if Sirius would rather not talk about her -- or 
even to *think* about her --  at all, doesn't it?  Consistent, 
surely, with how one might talk about ones Lost Love, when said Lost 
Love not only married somebody else, but also became a ravenously 
sadistic Dark Witch?<

You mean, rather like the way Snape snarls all the time about James the arrogant Quidditch star and how much Harry resembles him, yet avoids any mention of Lily?  Or the way Hagrid gives away that there's a very good reason for Snape to hate Harry and then hastily changes the subject (though everyone else is happy to attribute Snape's feelings to jealousy of James' Quidditch performance, a well-known chick impressor)??  Or the way that Lily, though Harry's mother and therefore bound to be significant in some way (as JKR has admitted), has been almost totally glossed over so far, whereas James has had quite a lot of air time???  :-D

>(3) Dumbledore's Pensieve.  Remember that the memory from which he 
>recalls Harry is the Lestranges' sentencing.  Shortly thereafter, his 
>Pensieve coughs up the memory of his interview with the young Bertha 
>Jorkins, right after the hexing incident.  He remembers asking her:
>
>"But why, Bertha, . . . why did you have to follow him in the first 
place?"
>
>The anguished tone seems rather out of keeping for a simple matter of 
a fast hex, doesn't it?  No, Dumbledore's agony there arises from his
wise suspicion that this entire Sirius Black affair is going to prove 
the last straw for the unstable young Florence, that it will be the 
>catalyst which will push her right over the edge into Darkness.

Actually, the last thing that happened in the last Pensieve scene was the screaming, sobbing Barty Junior being hauled off to Azkaban.  Could Dumbledore's sadness (akin to Dumbledore's Gleam?) in fact reflect the fact that Florence was kissing **BARTY**???  Ahaaaa!  Maybe Barty was a good, upstanding, brilliant young Slytherin who had the promise to become one of the house's most upstanding graduates until he fell into the clutches of Florence Lestrange-to-be, who preyed on him for reasons of her own (getting close to the son of the powerful wizard tipped to be the future Minister of Magic and avenging her parents against Barty Senior... see below).  Florence, being cunning and perceptive, detected Barty's key weakness... feeling neglected and intimidated by his ruthless, workaholic father.  Nothing he did was ever good enough to make his father notice him.  My, my, my, said the spider to the fly...

Barty had tried schoolwork, but top marks just weren't enough.  He'd tried Quidditch, but his father dismissed Quidditch as a fool's pastime, and one tainted by the activities of that suspicious oaf Ludo Bagman.  What was left?  *Rebellion*, of course.  When Florence caught his eye, the dead sexy older woman Florence whose parents were both known Death Eaters sentenced to Azkaban by his father, he *knew* how violently his father would disapprove.  How could he resist?

For the first few delirious weeks, Barty and Florence conducted a relationship on the sly.  Barty because despite his desire to rebel, he was secretly still too afraid of throwing away his last chance of winning his father's approval (clandestine rebellion providing defiance without risk), Florence because she had darker plans for him, which involved slowly inviegling him into Dark circles until Barty Senior had to face the ultimate punishment for his treatment of her parents: facing that horror of his son becoming a Death Eater.  However, before she'd made much headway, nosy seventh year Bertha spotted Barty sneaking off to the greenhouses after dark, and followed him, where she saw the incredibly gossip-worthy sight of the Sinister, Sexy fifth year Florence snogging MP Crouch's 13 year old son!  Corr!!!  Within an hour, the story was all over Hogwarts, and inevitably leaked to Crouch Senior, who, predictably, exploded, forbade his son from ever speaking to her again, and tried to get Florence expelled from Hogwarts.

Little did both Crouch Senior know, his actions played right into Florence's hands.  Barty Junior abandoned his last hope of ever pleasing his father and set to rebellion in earnest.  As his years at Hogwarts slipped by, he progressed from snogging Dark Ladies to torturing first years, hexing Gryffindors, and serving teachers cursed pumpkin juice.  By the time he graduated, it hardly needed the entreaties of his sexy, sinful seductress Florence (now busy seducing the hapless Mr Lestrange into the Dark Side) to send him stampeding into the ranks of the Death Eaters...

Tabouli.


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