Still Life with Memory Charm

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 36922

Coming in late here...I have been thinking this over, and then I 
had to chase down all the responses. I was going to ask, Does 
anybody think Neville memory charmed himself, and what do I 
discover? Finwitch thinks just that, and no one has backed her 
up. For shame!

Well, *I* think Neville charmed himself, too. It gets rid of all those 
messy questions, like a) why would the good guys do something 
so damaging and b)  wouldn't the bad guys just knock off Neville 
instead, since they, unlike Lockhart,  have enough power to do 
an AK. (Lockhart, as we've seen, can't duel his way out of a 
bathtub.)

So Neville has charmed himself, and because everybody thinks 
he's almost a Squib, it hasn't dawned on anyone that he could  
have accidentally done such a powerful piece of magic. 
Thematically, it fits with the "numbing the pain will make it worse 
when you finally feel it" philosophy which Dumbledore espouses 
in GoF, and with Fudge refusing to face up to Voldemort's return. 
Plotwise, Harry is being made to face all these traumatic 
situations, so JKR needs to show us what would happen if he 
had been sheltered instead. 

So, that takes care of whodunnit, and why. Now we come to, has 
JKR given us any clues as to what Neville's charmed memory is 
hiding? We have had all sorts of speculation about Moody,  Gran 
and the mysterious fourth man, but I think we have to account for 
the fact that Neville's main antagonist is Snape, and therefore 
the drama around Neville ought to be Snape-centric. 

Now, in the Pensieve scene, Dumbledore warns Harry off two 
subjects: talking to Neville about the condition of Neville's 
parents, and what it was that made Dumbledore decide that 
Snape had truly come back to Our Side. Could these two matters 
be related? I think they must be. Bang, you know.
	
We know that the attack on the Longbottoms comes too late to 
be The Ambush. But what if there were two ambushes? We've 
speculated that Snape, in his desperate Harrylike thirst to prove 
himself, ambushed his old pals Rosier, Wilkes, Avery and the 
Lestranges. But Avery and the Lestranges talked their way out of 
Azkaban that time. Suppose that Snape was determined to get 
them, even after Voldemort's fall. He conceives a plan, telling the 
Lestranges that the Auror, Frank Longbottom, has information 
about Voldemort's current whereabouts. The Lestranges 
suppose that Snape the double agent actually is on their side,  
having managed to fool Dumbledore into thinking otherwise, as 
any clever dark wizard could do.

So Snape sets up Frank Longbottom planning to double cross 
the Lestranges,  rescue Frank and catch the Lestranges in the 
act. But the Lestranges, acting on information from their secret 
ally, young Barty, start to suspect Snape and mislead him about 
the timetable of the planned attack. Snape arrives on the scene 
too late. The Longbottoms Sr are a gibbering mess, and poor 
Neville appears to remember nothing about the attack, but does 
keep a traumatized repressed (not charmed) memory of Snape's 
wrathful arrival. Moody blames Snape for everything going wrong, 
and furthermore he's never been happy with our Severus 
because....um, Florence is Florence Moody. Mad-eye's daughter. 
(Pippin carefully notes that this was merely a casual flirtation, 
lest Captain Tabouli, who has her eye on redoing that stateroom 
with the stalactites, expel her from the good ship LOLLIPOPs.)

Dumbledore does not want Harry comparing notes with Neville. 
He doesn't want either of them putting the pieces together and 
figuring all this out, because Neville  is Not Ready, as Harry is 
Not Ready to learn why Voldemort wanted to kill him as an infant.

How's that? ::Pippin stands back and prepares to be pelted with 
FEATHERBOAs::


PIppin